Rupert Thomson - The Insult

The next day, after the ceremony, the Poppels held a party at their farm. While I was there, one of the men came up to me. He stuck his thumbs in his belt and gave me a slanting look.

‘How come you’re against the marriage?’

It cost me a great effort to be polite, but it was someone’s wedding day and besides, I weighed it up and I decided that, in the end, politeness would be more insulting.

‘I’m not against it.’ I smiled. ‘Who said I was against it?’

‘I heard something.’

‘Rumours,’ I said.

‘What about the yellow leaves?’ He altered the angle of his head. ‘What was all that about?’

‘In our family they mean something special.’

‘That so?’

‘Didn’t he tell you?’

‘No,’ the Poppel man said, ‘he didn’t tell us.’ One of his brothers or cousins had joined him, wearing a brown suit and chewing on a blade of grass.

‘Well, ask him,’ I said.

‘So you’re not against the marriage?’

I sighed. ‘No.’

‘You fancy a dance?’ said the man in the suit.

‘No,’ I said. ‘Excuse me.’

I walked across the yard to where a boy was pouring home-made beer and I asked him for a glass of it. I could feel their eyes on me, like snails. I was glad I’d sent the leaves — especially as they were yellow, and yellow meant what it did …

I looked across at the two men. I nodded, raised my glass.

Then I drank.

It was a Friday afternoon and I’d been working at the inn for almost exactly a year. I was sitting on the front porch, taking a short break before I started to prepare the evening meal. The warm weather had lasted longer than usual, and the trees were only now beginning to lose their foliage. My father wiped the sweat off his forehead as he walked up the road towards me, his trousers fluttering and flapping round his ankles. He looked like a man who was standing still in a high wind. I rose slowly to my feet. I’d been wondering when he would come.

He stood at the bottom of the steps. ‘Axel took the truck at half-past seven this morning and I haven’t seen him since.’

‘Where was he going? The market?’ There was a market every Friday morning in a town a few kilometres to the north.

‘Yes. But it’s three o’clock now.’

‘Maybe he’s driving around. You know how that wife of his likes to drive around.’

My father shook his head. ‘I told him to be back at midday. There was something he had to help me with.’

I felt my heart begin to churn. ‘You think he broke down?’

My father turned and stared into the trees on the other side of the road, one hand twitching against his leg as if his brain was in that hand and it was thinking.

‘Get Karl,’ he said.

Karl had the use of an old four-seater that belonged to Eva’s parents. The two men climbed in the front, with Karl behind the wheel. I sat in the back. First we drove out to the Poppels’ place. The mother was in the yard, feeding her chickens. She stood below us, one arm circling a bowl of corn meal, the veins and tendons showing through her transparent skin.

‘I ain’t seen nobody all day.’

Karl spun the car round, ran it fast across the ruts and potholes, back on to the road, the springs complaining loudly all the way.

‘I told you we should’ve fixed the truck,’ he muttered.

My father just stared out through the windscreen. I noticed how his shoulders curved under his jacket.

I thought of the time I’d met Axel in the village. I was buying candles for the restaurant. Eva said candles would create atmosphere. That’s what people want, she told me. Atmosphere. It must have been early spring because I could remember what my first words were.

‘I hear the baby’s born.’

‘Yeah.’ He scuffed his boots on the floor. ‘It’s a boy.’

‘I heard that, too.’ I paid Minkels for the candles and moved towards the door. ‘What are you naming it?’

‘Michael. I call him Mazey.’ He grinned quickly.

‘Mazey?’

‘I don’t know why. That’s what I call him, though. It just feels right.’

I nodded. ‘You got a place of your own yet?’

‘We’re getting one.’ He told me there was a small homestead out towards the lake. It didn’t have any water, but he knew where they could dig a well. There was some land that came with it. He might try farming. Sheep, most likely.

I was staring at him, thinking of how I used to lay my head against his shoulder, thinking of the sweet, split-wood smell of him as morning sunlight spilled over the ridge, when suddenly I realised that I was still angry. It was like some huge sea-creature surfacing. It startled me. I’d forgotten it was there.

‘It couldn’t have gone on, you know,’ he said.

‘What?’

‘You and me.’ He had dropped his voice down low. ‘We couldn’t have gone on like that.’

‘You don’t have to whisper,’ I said. ‘Minkels is deaf, remember? He won’t hear a thing.’

‘Edie —’

‘I hope the property works out.’ I laughed my father’s laugh, one hollow sound and then nothing, because I already knew what I was going to do. I didn’t know how yet, but I knew what.

I walked out of the shop. I heard the bell jangle above the door as he came after me. I turned to face him. His hair seemed to have darkened at the roots. He stood there.

‘Don’t you remember what I told you in the field?’ I said.

He shook his head, but not because he didn’t remember. He looked out into the street. It was a still, grey day. There was nothing to look at. He shook his head again. Then, with his face lowered, and a smile on it, he turned and walked away. Just for a moment the street was not dust and a stray dog and two parked cars, but grass, the coarse grass of the field, and a path was visible, but only to us, and the stream was at the end of it, over a stile and through a copse, and I was following him down …

‘Which way would he have gone?’ Karl said.

I glanced out of the window. We were at a fork in the road. The town where the market was held lay directly ahead of us, but so did the lake. If we turned left, we had to double back along a road that circled the shore. If we turned right, the road climbed up on to the hills that bordered the lake on its south-east side. My father was looking one way then the other, trying to gauge which was the more likely.

‘We’d better try them both,’ he said eventually.

Karl had been staring at him, waiting for an answer. Now he faced the windscreen again and muttered something that I didn’t hear.

‘Left’s quicker,’ I said, ‘if he was in a hurry.’

It was a road with no markings, scarcely wide enough for two cars. On the right and way below, the lake. You could only see bits of it between the trees, smooth as something planed, though I’d seen it in a gale once, with slabs of water lifting clear and flying through the air like houses in a tornado. Some days it was blue, others it was black. That afternoon it was green — the deep, dark green of marrow skin. To the left the ground climbed steeply through beeches that had been there for two hundred years. We drove slowly, heads turning from one side to the other, but we didn’t see the truck. We rounded the south-western corner of the lake, and the trees thinned and the ground levelled out. We stopped at a crossroads.

‘So much for that,’ Karl said. ‘Now what?’

My father said we should drive on into the town.

By the time we reached the market square, it was almost deserted. Traders were packing the last of their goods into the backs of vans. Nobody knew anything. We tried the bars. There was one man who remembered a young couple with a baby. It was because of the baby, he said; his first was due in a month’s time. He thought he’d seen them leave in a dark-red truck.