This Night’s Foul Work

XXXVIII

FRANCINE DIDN’T LIKE OLD THINGS. THEY WERE DIRTY AND RICKETY. SHE really felt happy only in the immaculate universe of the pharmacy where she did the cleaning and laundry and stacked the shelves. But she didn’t like returning to the old family home, which was dirt-encrusted and tumbledown. When he was alive, Honoré Bidault wouldn’t let anyone touch it, but now what difference could it make? For the last two years, Francine had been planning her move away, far from the old farmhouse, to a brand-new flat in town. And she would leave everything here – the crocks, the battered saucepans, the big old wardrobes – everything.

Half past eight in the evening was the best moment of the day. Francine had finished the dishes, closed the plastic rubbish bag firmly and taken it out to the doorstep. Dustbins attracted any number of insects – best not to keep them inside the house at night. She checked the kitchen, always with the fear that she might find a mouse or some disgusting insect, a caterpillar or spider – the house was crawling with nasty creatures like this that kept making their way in and out when you weren’t looking, and there was no way of getting rid of them because of the fields outside, the attic up above and the cellar down below. The only bunker which she had succeeded in protecting from these intruders was her bedroom. She had spent months blocking the chimney, cementing up all the cracks in the walls and the gaps under the windows and round the doors, and had put her bed up on bricks. She preferred to leave the room unaired rather than let anything get in while she was asleep. But there was nothing she could do about the woodworms which were eating their way through the ancient beams overhead all night. Every evening, Francine watched the little holes over her bed, fearing to see the head of a worm poking out. She didn’t know what the horrid creatures looked like – earthworms? centipedes? earwigs? But every morning she had to brush away in disgust the little piles of sawdust that had fallen on her bedspread.

Francine poured some hot coffee into a large cup, added a lump of sugar and two capfuls of rum. The best moment of the day. Then she carried the cup into the bedroom, with the little bottle of rum, ready to watch two films one after the other. Her collection of eight hundred and twelve tapes, all labelled and in order, was stacked in the other room, her father’s bedroom, and sooner or later the damp would start to damage them. She had decided to leave the farm the day a woodwork expert had come to inspect the house, five months after her father’s death. In the cross-beams he had detected seven holes made by death-watch beetles. Seven. Huge holes you could put your little finger into. ‘If you listen hard, you can hear them munching away,’ the man had said with a laugh.

It ought to be treated, the expert had said. But as soon as she had seen the size of the beetle holes, Francine had made up her mind. She would move out. She sometimes wondered, with horror, what a death-watch beetle looked like. Like a big worm, or a beetle with a drill in its head?

At one in the morning, Francine looked up at the woodworm holes and checked, thanks to the marks she had made, that they had not moved too much further across the beam. She put out the light, hoping not to hear the snuffling of the hedgehog outside. It was a horrid sound, almost like a human being snorting away in the night. She lay on her stomach, pulling the blankets over her head, just leaving a little space to breathe through. ‘Francine, you’re thirty-five years old and you still act like a child,’ the priest had said. Well, so what? In another two months, she wouldn’t have to see this house, or the priest in her village of Otton, ever again. She wouldn’t spend another summer here. It was even worse in summer, with the big moths that came in – goodness knew how – banging their huge floppy bodies against the blinds and lampshades. And then there were bluebottles, hornets, horseflies, field mice and harvest-mites. People said that harvest mite larvae dug little holes in your skin and laid eggs in them. Yuk.

In order to get to sleep, Francine went through the countdown to her removal day, the first of June. She had been told over and over that she was getting a bad deal, exchanging this enormous eighteenth-century farmhouse for a two-room balcony flat in Evreux. But as far as she was concerned, it was the best deal she’d made in her life. In two months’ time she’d be safe with her eight hundred and twelve films in a clean white apartment, just along the street from the pharmacy. She’d be sitting on a nice new blue cushion on a floor covered with shiny lino, in front of her TV set, with her coffee and her rum, and without the least little woodworm to bother her. Only two months to go. She’d sleep in a high bunk bed, away from the wall, with a varnished ladder to climb into it. There would be pastel-coloured sheets, which would stay clean without flies coming and leaving spots on them. Acting like a child or not, she’d be happy at last. Francine snuggled under the bedclothes and put her fingers in her ears. She didn’t want to hear the hedgehog.