Marina Kemp - Nightingale

‘Henri’s bath routine,’ he imagined Brigitte saying to Laure in the kitchen below, as she so often did among their friends; ‘Henri’s e-lab-o-rate bath routine.’ She tended to give special emphasis to words over three syllables long. ‘There are families without water in India and Africa and here is our Henri, using enough water each day to fill an aquarium !’

But she also took pride, he knew, in his appearance. When they married, both straight out of school, no one could believe that Handsome Henri – the village’s nomenclature, of course, not his own – had chosen Brigitte Arnoult. Plain Brigitte, big Brigitte, dumb Brigitte. Because that was the other thing: Henri was first in the class, always had been. ‘A way with words and a head for numbers,’ his mother had always said, a regular refrain in the Brochon household as he grew up.

Their courtship and engagement had unfolded quickly. As he leant back in the bath he closed his eyes, imagined his younger self, tall and handsome with his hair combed tidily back, knocking on the Arnoults’ door every evening. Every day was the same: he would bow to enter the house through its diminutive doorframe and greet Brigitte’s parents, sit down and find his bride-to-be sitting nervously in the gloom. He couldn’t imagine now what it was they had found to talk about, sitting each evening in her parents’ warm salon , drinking milk from her father’s cows. Her parents were mistrustful; it was as if he were playing some sly trick.

His own mother had been the first to voice in his presence the question on everyone’s lips: ‘Henri, for God’s sake, why Brigitte?’ He hadn’t felt cross, or slighted; he had understood her consternation. It’s not as if he somehow saw beauty in Brigitte’s scant charms – how could he? When he spoke to the girl her face and neck came out in livid purplish patches, she could not meet his eye. He had not failed to notice the great width of her feet, nor the fair but not insubstantial whiskers around the corners of her lips. But there were things about Brigitte that appealed to him that he couldn’t explain to his mother, who was so tidily and precisely her opposite.

At eighteen, he chose Brigitte because he liked the silence and reverence she reserved for him, she who was otherwise the loudest and most domineering of girls. He liked her simple way of speaking, her literal reading of everything, her lack of coquetry.

With Brigitte he had sensed refuge, a life left unscrutinised and undisclosed. And hearing her flat, loud voice now rise and fall below the din of the pipes and the water, he had to acknowledge that he had that. In spite of the small-minded prurience with which she had grown to view the rest of the world, despite her endlessly repetitive chiding, he still lived in a home devoid of judgment or enquiry.

He heard one of Laure’s whinnying laughs and turned the tap on more fully to drown it out. He leant back against the tub, his legs bent at their extreme right angle in the bath that was too small. He closed his eyes again and rubbed his hands over them, down his cheeks to his mouth; he could taste his salt. Letting his mind drift away from Brigitte, away from Laure, he ran his hands slowly down his body.

Brigitte cracked an egg into a bowl and tilted it to show Laure. ‘Do you see the colour of that yolk?’

‘There’s nothing like your eggs, I always say that.’

‘That is the yellowest yolk you can find.’

‘You’ve considered selling your eggs properly, haven’t you? You’d put the Bernards right out of pocket.’

‘We’ve got enough on our plate with the dairy and the sheep, we just don’t have the scale. Not that you’re wrong, of course. You know I’m not one to brag, Laure, but they really do make the very best omelettes. You can tell from an omelette alone how fresh your eggs are.’ She continued to crack a further three. ‘The secret to a really excellent quiche lorraine is whisking the eggs as long as you can. Whisk them to hell and gone.’

Laure nodded and Brigitte started to whisk with a force she liked to think was almost alarming. ‘So Jérôme’s latest girl was in the shop again today,’ Laure said, ‘buying Lanvier’s usuals. A baguette and a loaf aux céréales to help things get going downstairs …’ She poked her stomach.

‘Laure, you’re disgusting,’ chided Brigitte, though she loved a good bowel joke as much as the next woman. ‘I’m surprised she hasn’t been chased away yet, to be perfectly honest.’

‘Well apparently not. Though I wouldn’t be surprised if she didn’t last much longer. She doesn’t look like she’s cut out for the job.’

‘Don’t I know it.’ Brigitte wiped her hands on her apron and settled her bottom on the edge of a stool. Her ankles ached; she rolled them from side to side. ‘She needs a good meal and a stint on the farm. That would sort her out in no time at all.’

‘Perhaps I’ll throw in a few brioches with her next order – she could do with the extra butter.’

‘Do that, then send her my way. I’ll show her how we work over here. There’s no room for airs and graces when you’re having to clear out Vanille’s latest blockage.’

Vanille, their eldest cow, had to be ‘rectally excavated’ – as Henri put it – on a regular basis.

‘Forget Vanille’s blockages – you’d frighten her away with your egg-whisking alone, Brigitte.’

‘You bet I would,’ Brigitte cried, brandishing the whisk as if to hit Laure with it. She felt a little egg run down her forearm, and wiped it on her stomach.

‘I heard she received a visit from our local mystic.’

Brigitte looked up. ‘Not Lacourse?’

‘None other.’

‘I told you how that woman used to turn her eyes at Henri?’

‘I could never forget it,’ said Laure, who had been there at the time of that great scandal, some fifteen years ago. Nothing had actually happened, but Brigitte had never forgotten Suki’s repeated visits to the farm, the stubbed cigarette ends she found in a little pile outside the house, the swish of exotic colours and jangling of metal in her kitchen, and the woman’s wretched laugh, false as anything.

‘Well let’s hope she doesn’t get Jérôme’s nurse under her wing.’

She poured cream and milk into the bowl.

‘Look at that cream,’ said Laure.

‘Mind you, his nurse won’t have time for new friendships. Jérôme’s getting worse and worse. He can’t move himself any more.’

‘And still no sign of his boys?’

‘None. They were in touch to give me the bare details of this replacement when the last nurse couldn’t hack it any more, and that’s the last I’ve heard from them. Not that I’m surprised. I did tell them a few months back now that he wasn’t doing too well and they’d be well advised to come and see him at some point, but they weren’t having any of it. They were rather rude, if I’m honest. Told me to get on with my job, and that I was the gardienne and not their therapist.’

‘I remember. Shockingly rude.’

‘I said to Jean-Christophe on the phone – you remember, the youngest – I said, “He is your father, you know,” and he told me it was none of my business and that, as I say, I wasn’t his therapist.’ She let the whisk rest for a moment and wiped her forehead. ‘And he’s a lawyer! All that education, and still so rude.’

‘Well, I’m not surprised really – I suppose he takes after Jérôme. They’ve always thought they’re too good for Saint-Sulpice.’

‘Oh, they were such wild boys, don’t you remember?’

‘How could I not!’ said Laure.

‘Still, it’s dreadfully sad. Their father at death’s door and they won’t even come and see him.’