The Critic

IV

The rain had not yet reached Lascombes, but as she drove up the winding track towards the farm, Nicole could see the clouds gathering on the distant horizon. The wind breathed through the hills in gasps and sighs, gathering in eddies where mountain streams cut through rock as old as time, shaking leaves from trees and lifting them up to carry them off on its wayward path.

Everything seemed so normal. The tractor stood in the yard, a chainsaw lying beside the wooden trestle where her father cut the logs. The dogs came running to greet her as they always did, oblivious to the death in their midst, recognising the pitch of the old Renault 4L that her father had bought for her at the car market. As she got out of it, the wind whipped about her face, and the dogs danced, barking, about her legs. She barely noticed them. She looked towards the stoop, where they had sat so often on warm summer evenings, her mother reading to her from the books she borrowed each week from the library van that came to the road’s end. And as the door of the house opened, she found it hard to believe that it would not be her mother who stepped out to greet her. Harder still to accept that it never would.

Her father stood in the doorway looking at her. Still with his old flat cap pushed back on his head, dungarees torn and stained from his labours on the farm, big boots caked with mud and shit. He looked miserable, desolate. Diminished somehow.

Tears sprang to her eyes again, and she ran across the yard and up the steps to throw herself into his arms. They stood for a long time holding each other, holding onto every memory they’d ever had of the woman they both loved, in case they might slip away just as she had. When, finally, she looked up into his face, she saw no tears in his eyes. Men like her father did not cry. They just bled inside and suffered in silence.

The sejour was dark, the remnants of oak logs smouldering in the cheminee, the smell of stale cooking hanging in still air. Her aunt took her in her arms and kissed her. She, too, was dry-eyed, but Nicole could see in them that there had been tears. There was a limit to how much crying you could do.

It was with an awful sense of dread that Nicole pushed open the door to her mother’s bedroom to see her laid out on the bed, candles burning on bedside tables at either side of her pillow. Their flames threw flickering shadows on the bloodless skin of her mother’s face, the only warmth in the blue-white chill of death. But the lines etched around her eyes and mouth by months of pain had gone. She looked at peace now, a strange serenity about her.

The air was filled with the scent of burning wax and something medicinal, like disinfectant in a hospital. Her mother’s hands were folded together in her lap. Nicole approached the bed to take one of them in hers. She was shocked by how cold it was. Shocked, too, by how little like her mother this dead person was: all animation and personality removed, life and laughter long departed. Leaving only the vessel that had borne them. Not really her mother at all.

She closed her eyes and thought again about kneeling in the abbey the previous night, praying for a quick and painless departure. She could not help wondering, irrationally, as she had through all the long drive from Gaillac, if she was somehow responsible for her mother’s death.

They walked in silence together up to the old abandoned farmhouse, past the piles of logs heaped up along the track, canvas covers whipping and billowing in the wind. Cloud had obliterated the sun. They could see the rain now, sweeping across the distant hills like a fog. Lightning flashed across the horizon, and they heard the far-off rumble of thunder. They stopped to watch for a moment, knowing that it was only a matter of minutes before the rain would reach them.

Her father scratched his head with fingers that were black from harvesting walnuts. ‘Can’t do it on my own,’ he said.

Nicole turned her face up to look at him, puzzled.

‘Do what, Papa?’

‘Run the farm. With Marie gone…I can’t do it on my own.’

Nicole sighed. Her mother had done so much on the farm, as well as keeping house, cooking for them, doing the laundries. Her father was right. There was no way he could do it all himself. ‘Can’t you get help?’

He shook his head and avoided her eye. ‘Can’t afford it.’ He was silent for a long time. Perhaps it was only the first spots of rain blowing in their faces that precipitated his final confession. ‘See, it was always a struggle, Nicole. Putting you through university. Paying your digs in Toulouse.’ He turned big, sad, guilty eyes to meet his daughter’s. ‘Can’t do it and pay someone to help. You’ll need to come home. Take your mother’s place.’