Peter Carey - The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith

In a moment Oliver Odettes would put down his shovel and walk under the veranda to fetch Jesse Lorraine’s chair. He would place his chair in the middle of the snow. This would not be the first time this had happened.

‘Incredible,’ Rene Lorraine said, as her husband leaned his shovel against the privet hedge. ‘Ssst.’ As if it were all new, as if it were not like this every Christmas, always exactly the same, starting on Christmas Eve when Jacqui’s father would borrow a refrigerated truck and then, with a loaf of bread, a blood sausage, and two bottles of roteuse sitting in a cardboard box on the seat between them, drive with Oliver Odettes to the peak of Mount Cootreksea, 10,000 feet and 200 miles from the palm trees of Chemin Rouge, and there they would spend two hours sipping wine, admiring the light, and shovelling snow into the truck.

They always left at eleven o’clock at night and they always turned the corner of the street at exactly eight in the morning. Then they would open the wire chain gates and back the refrigerated van up the twin concrete tracks and — with all the neighbourhood children crowding the street — shovel the snow over the pocket-handkerchief size lawn at the front of Jacqui’s house.

The two friends had done it so often — from the year Jacqui was three — and they took (perhaps excessive) pride in knowing exactly how much snow it took to cover the grass, right down to the ‘glace’, those last six shovelfuls of snow which Oliver Odettes would fastidiously heap along the privet hedge while Jacqui’s father went to fetch his books.

Rene Lorraine did not like Oliver Odettes, whom she referred to, in her daughter’s hearing, as a riveter and a chochotte. Oliver Odettes wore very short shorts and fur-lined boots, always the same pair, for the snow. Every year it was the same. Rene would stand with her tanned arms folded across her breasts and an expression, always the same expression, a mixture of incredulity and outrage, on her broad handsome face, and watch the science teacher tiptoe across the white lawn, as ugly as a drag queen. Each time she shook her head as if she would have nothing to do with so ridiculous a spectacle, and each time she played her part: she pushed the play button on the tape player and turned up the volume so that the kids back on the other side of the hedge could hear the sleigh bells.

When the sleigh bell introduction had played for thirty seconds, she stood and pushed the ‘stop’ button.

Then her elderly, shambling, increasingly bear-like husband — he was seventy-six the year Jacqui turned nine — would shuffle out from his tiny ‘library’ beneath the veranda steps and sit on the ridiculously small chrome and vinyl chair which Oliver Odettes had placed in the middle of the lawn; and each year the corrugations on Rene’s forehead would deepen and complicate a little more.

Each year Jesse Lorraine would sit on the chair and acknowledge his wife and daughter and the neighbours. He would push his freshly opened bottle of roteuse down into the already melting snow, tuck the tartan rug around his shining shapely brown legs, and open the first of the books in his lap.

Then in an educated voice that did not belong in that street full of liver-brick bungalows, back-yard hen houses, and wheel-less Peugeots quietly rusting underneath the bougainvillaea, a voice which the tense woman on the veranda had fallen in love with, he would read the neighbours stories about snow, different ones each year.

The year Jacqui was nine, Jesse Lorraine sat in the middle of his sixty-four square feet of snow and, wetting his dry throat with a little roteuse, began in the middle of Chapter 43 of Tess of the d’Urbervilles: ‘There had not been such a winter for years. It came on in stealthy and measured glides, like the moves of a chess-player.’

‘Schhoot,’ Rene said. ‘Phhhhh.’

Then he read Anna Karenina on her train, about to meet Count Vronsky. (‘With delight she filled her lungs with deep breaths of snowy, frosty air …’) And he read how — this time Charlotte Brontë — ‘I had closed my shutter, laid a mat to the door to prevent the snow blowing in under it.’

He sat on his wooden chair, his tartan rug around his legs, his woollen beanie pulled down over his lion’s mane of grey hair, his beetling brows pressing down upon his light blue eyes, and the neighbours listened to him. They were not religious people. They did not miss God in their lives, but they were Eficans, and their history had given them another kind of nagging loss which the cold white snow temporarily eased.

The snow eased nothing for Rene. It made it worse, each year worse than the year before — the effort, the expense, the very fact that it melted, was useless, helped nothing. By the time Jacqui was nine years old, her mother’s impatient foot-tapping on the veranda had turned into an angry tattoo. It was unbearable.

The mythology of the family said Jacqui was already like her mother. She had the same honey-coloured skin, the dark brown eyes, the neat arched brow, the strong straight hair that sprang up from the crown, the small well-shaped mouth, the raging chemicals which made the little girl prone to insomnia from the age of six. That was as may be, but on Christmas Day she decided she would be like her father. She looked like her mother, but she would be like the big man, the bear with his tobacco smell — not a man, she never wanted to be a man — but not fearful or mean or angry or small-minded.

Jesse was a handsome man with fine grey hair, broad-shouldered, a little stooped, but with the intense, undamaged blue eyes of a child, which incorrectly suggested a life of moderation. He listened to everyone. When you spoke to him he turned those clear eyes on you and you knew he liked you. He liked everyone. He had had many wives, and many children. He had eaten fabulous meals at great restaurants. He had photographs of himself, a young good-looking man in a red shirt standing on a road in China, in a blizzard in Voorstand, in a restaurant in Paris, on the wharf in Marseille where his great-great-grandfather, a tin-tin who had previously imagined himself a fortunate man, had been forcibly shipped to that country which Louis XIV called Neufasie.

Perhaps these photographs had once been interesting to Rene, but the first time Jacqui saw them they were already taboo — Jesse produced the old manila envelope when Rene was at the supermarket. He had photographs of houses he had once owned, interiors, exteriors, one with a famous actor holding a tennis racket in a funny pose.

What had happened to the money?

Jacqui never asked. Jesse never said.

By the time her mother had fallen for him, he was living in a one-bedroom cook-sit in Goat Marshes and they were both working in the kitchen of the Restaurant Quatorze. Jesse had been the one person in that chaotic kitchen who had the guts to stand up to the patapoof who owned it. He had been the troublemaker and she had fallen for him, and when he asked her to ‘appear in the Gazette ’ she said yes although he was already sixty-five. He was handsome, gracious, and he let her finish her sentences.

Two months after the wedding the Restaurant Quatorze closed down. There was a recession, and the only work Rene could find was peeling prawns at a cannery at the port. As for Jesse — no one wanted him, not anywhere. He had a doctorate from the Sorbonne but he was unemployable. And although his bride never thought this was his fault she was, just the same, irritated by his lack of guilt.

‘What do you want me to do?’ he said. ‘I will enjoy my life. I have always enjoyed my life.’

And he did. While she peeled prawns at the port, he read Liberation on the veranda. He made it wrong for her to resent this: what did she want him to do? Rub ashes in his hair?