White Lies

—Here, all of it. We are not taking any of it. It is all here.

—The cheque, the man in the green cord jacket said. The chit. Where is this?

He turned to me:

—Did you have any outside money?

We were both searched. Why was I so silent? There was no chit. Only my photographs which they handed round, then gave back. In my half-delirium I thought: why couldn’t they see they were of him? Why couldn’t they see I’d stolen his face.

—This man, my companion was saying. He didn’t know. He is nothing to do with it.

They looked at me.

—That’s right, I said, pointing to the man in the green cord jacket. Ask this man.

He said: this is true.

A policeman took me aside.

—I’m sick, I said. It was all I could say but it worked.

—You go now. If you come to the police station this man will change his story and blame everything on you. That officer likes your pen.

I gave him my metal Parker ballpoint and wondered, what would Joy think of me now?

FIVE (#ulink_94c720b5-c7b2-5e0a-931f-50ad5f04ee0f)

Until we found Le Haut Bois, me and Joy were living on the campsite at Putanges. It was the summer of 1994 when Normandy was green with rain and convoys of old British Army trucks and American jeeps that had come over for the D-Day fiftieth anniversary. Solemn old men in berets, anciens combattants spattered in medals, saluted at war memorials lined with bombshells painted grey. Shy Welsh boys dressed like soldiers in fatigues stood outside cafes in La Ferté Macé plucking up the courage to go in and order a beer. The occupied French waved as we drove by, just coincidence that our old green hardtop was army surplus. We soon demobbed, but something between the exaggerated welcome, the false wartime solidarity and the distorted mission of our lives kept us there and we outstayed our welcome.

The bocage was like a parody of its own past because every commune was a lost world. We drove in and out of eras which had vanished without trace in Britain. The past sat there like undrained land. We saw farmyards unchanged for four hundred years slipping into ruin, the creepers taking over, the discarded implements and machinery left where the horse dropped dead or the steam bailer clapped out. In corners of these yards, opposite the old farmhouses, were the new pavillons, those beige rendered, fixed-price bungalow kits the old couples had always dreamed of since the war. The farm sat like the rubbish now, strewn in the yard and on the land, waiting for ruination.

The campsite was a one star municipal but by July it was like an overspill from the ZUP and HLMs, the council flats of Falaise and Argentan. Family caravans linked with orange awnings, the TVs on all day, the men still going to work in the Moulinex factory. In the evening they’d be in their tattoos and yellow shorts, bonnets up on smoky Simcas, revving up while their fat wives tipped bags of crisps into bowls and fetched sticky bottles from striped orange kitchenettes. Their dogs pissed up everyone’s wheels and their cats were kept on bungee leads skewered to the ground.

We were pitched under an old beech tree twenty yards from the river Orne for seven francs a day. It seemed like the right place for Joy to forget Africa, at least till she decided where she wanted to go next. She’d sit outside under the beech tree reading while I went perch fishing in the gorge below the dam at Rabodanges. In the evenings we’d boil our tinned ratatouille on the petrol stove and eat goat’s cheese with cider from the farmer’s barrel. Then we’d stroll slowly round the village, almost door to door, like we were counting the stones on the walls, smelling the omelettes and the onion soup. We talked to cats and little girls and nodded to stubby farmers tumbling out the Bar des Sport. We lingered with our beer at the Pot d’Etain where the patron had a handlebar moustache as big as a ferret and all his cycling trophies were in a row behind the bar.

One evening we were in the Grande Rue, a narrow curving street with tiny stone houses built round boulders big as the rooms inside. The backs plunged two storeys down to gardens which ran alongside the river. We could see them from the campsite, like an escarpment, or cave dwelling. One of the houses was a small dark office with the round, gold sign of a notaire hanging like a monocle from the wall. In the window there were faded colour photocopies of old farmyards, corps des fermes, hovels and ruins, all from a time-warp. Nobody wanted them and the pictures had faded out until you could hardly see the prices. They read like old money, two, three, four thousand pounds. No toilet, no water, no telephone. No comfort, it said. But there were bread ovens, oak beams, cider presses, rabbit hutches and kitchen gardens, cellars, attics, wells, springs, cider-apple trees, pear orchards, bee hives, stables, pig-houses and smokeries.

We toured other villages looking for these parttime notaires’ études, one dusty window, the gold paint peeling off the hanging sign. We found more faded ruins and half the houses in these villages had an A Vendre sign nailed on the front door like a wreath for the dead. We peered through crusted windows into kitchens with stone sinks, post office calendars for 1968, black and yellow linoleum, straw chairs with half the legs gnawed off by woodworm. There was always a neighbour fussing over potted fuchsias round the step, sweeping our footprints away behind us, hanging the wet floor-cloth from a nail. Old women in housecoats and cardigans came out to tell us they didn’t know the price, or if they did they said four million old francs.

We bought survey maps and drove all day after cheap houses. We found them along dusty brown lanes which crossed courtyards and wound between barns and cider orchards and pasture. Hamlets where every house was made of mud and lay empty, the grey net curtains like dead eyes, dried up flies caught along their edges.

At some point we should’ve asked ourselves what we were doing, who we were, what we expected to become by slipping into skin shed by dead peasants. Until, one evening we drove out to Le Haut Bois, looking for the fermette à rénover we’d seen advertised in a window, with outbuildings, 4,964 square metres of land, pasture with pear trees, 85,000 francs. We saw a bicycle leaning against a statue of Our Lady in the hedgerow, a little man in blue overalls slashing the grass along the verge, flattening the buttercups and cowslips. Joy said we were looking for the place that was for sale. He scratched his head and looked at the nearest hovel sticking from the brambles and vines. That’s for sale, he said, and so is that, and that. Half of the commune was for sale. Everyone was dead.

—Do you want to buy a house?

—Yes, we said.

The first time we’d admitted it.

—You’re going to live here? he said.

—We do live here, Joy said.

By August we were lodging in the Grande Rue with Widow Cardonel while hesitating over signing the promise to buy Le Haut Bois. Madame Cardonel was so old her skin hung like a curtain. She dressed in black and put all her remaining strength into polishing cold metal, ringing out dishclothes and pouncing on infractions of the rules.

Our room was upstairs and faced the river. We had the big brass Cardonel marriage bed but she’d locked every drawer and cupboard, taken the candles from the Virgin’s votary and told us not to run any taps. She lived downstairs, sleeping in the front room. She rose at six, took a nap in the afternoon and went to bed at 9.30 like clockwork.

She called me le monsieur. My job from the outset was the fetching of water from the river in different coloured buckets. Blue for the washing-up, red for cooking, white for personal. Drinking water came from the supermarket. She allowed us one bath a week in the same water. One morning I eased the tap on in the upstairs bathroom to brush my teeth, but Madame Cardonel was banging on the ceiling with her cane before I’d even wet my toothbrush.

A nurse came once a week to give her a bath. I’d fetch one bucket and hoist it onto the bottled gas to warm, not boil. The nurse sponged her down in a galvanised trough in Madame’s bedroom. Joy asked her why she didn’t use eau de ville. The river is water, she said.

We cooked for ourselves, but Madame laid three places in the kitchen on the plastic tablecloth with its scenes of pots and pans. She’d use her hand like a snow plough on the table, chasing all the breadcrumbs into her palm when she’d finished her meal, licking up the crumbs till they were gone. And, when the milk was finished, she’d cut the box with scissors and scrape the milk dew off the insides into her cup. At night she never put the lights on, shuffling about with a little square bike torch she kept in a housecoat pocket.

Joy did the talking in French. I was still picking up words, like banknotes in the wind. I didn’t know which to start on, chasing one too long and letting the whole sentence blow away. This meant that Madame Cardonel stopped looking at me when she spoke. She’d tell Joy that the monsieur hadn’t fetched the water yet, or could the monsieur change the gas bottle. If she did address me she never waited till I processed what she’d said, she just snapped: comprend pas, hein, comprend pas l’monsieur. Every evening she nagged down a tumbler of apéritif maison and said: that’s another the Boche won’t get.

Sometimes the phone rang. It was rigged to the old bell from out the fire station so she could hear it. If we were in she’d say a man was coming at half-past five and we should wait in our room. It was business, she said. We’d listen to muffled voices coming up the stairwell through the closed kitchen door. Madame Cardonel chuffing down the steps out back with her keys, the unjailing of the cave door, locks, chain, padlocks. Five hundred bottles of Calvados the Germans didn’t get. Some of it was seventy years old in the bottle. She put the 350 francs she got for each bottle in a biscuit tin under her marriage girdles in the armoire.

According to her, every farm we looked at as a potential home was never any good. Each time she’d say the man’s mother was a collabo, she’d ‘knitted with the Germans’, and after Liberation the patriots went round the farms and shaved the hair off women like her. So when we told her we’d finally decided to buy Juliette Macé’s old place at Le Haut Bois she shook her head and said: huh, Aunay, he won’t want you there.

Monsieur Aunay came into the yard the day me and Joy moved into Le Haut Bois. It was September and the mud felt like putty and smelled like school clods off football boots. We arrived to find a pall of smoke in our neighbour Prodhomme’s field and his 15-year-old boy backing a hay trailer up to our front door for a second load. Prodhomme just waded into the house and slumped anything he could carry for the fire, its black swirling smoke and orange flames, all Madame Macé’s rag and bone sheething through the apple trees. We stopped them ransacking more, and Joy told them we’d bought the buildings and their contents. They were ashamed, that’s all. Prodhomme had waited twenty years to get in there and clear up. Wiping out the traces of generations of Lecoeur, Legrange and Macé with a ketchup of diesel and a few broken matches.

We began to clear the rubbish from the house ourselves, wearing masks against the dust and smell, and new blue boiler suits we’d bought from Bricomarché. Suddenly Monsieur Aunay was standing there, red checked shirt, blue work trousers, the back of his hands raked with bramble scratches. We thought he’d come to welcome us. Joy said bonjour monsieur very properly, even rolling her r’s and getting half the roll stuck in her throat. He ignored her and looked at me, said something I didn’t understand, but mentioned Madame Macé. I smiled stupidly and tried mustering the vocabulary to offer him a drink of cider from the old crusty bottle cooling in the rain butt. Then Joy’s grin changed shape and she rolled her eyes.

—What did ’e say? I said.

—It doesn’t matter, she said.

He spoke to her now, asked if she spoke French.

—Yes, she said.

He repeated what he’d said and walked off, put his white crash helmet on and went up the lane on his old Solex.

—Well? I said.

—He said we weren’t respecting the memory of Madame Macé.

SIX (#ulink_e2756861-2ae7-53f9-8c87-2380f2835b6d)

Joy had been gone ten days when the police parked down on the lane below Le Haut Bois and walked up, tacking through the mud in shiny shoes. Gendarmes, Brigade de Briouze, it said on their van. It was 10 a.m. The taller one had tiny feet and carried the crime case. I made them coffee, just the warmed-up sips I’d poured back into the pot over the previous days. The room temperature was four degrees, the stove unlit. The case was opened and the pandore put on the latex gloves and powdered two glasses for fingerprints.

I’d fixed up the break-in myself, through Yannick Thiboult, a brocanteur, a junk wheeler who still owed us ten thousand francs. He’d turned up in his van one afternoon in our first winter at Le Haut Bois, one of those days when the landscape is like wet newspaper and the mud follows you indoors. Yannick was nosing, like anyone who came down our lane. Me and Joy were hacking plaster off the ceiling, gutting the grand séjour to expose the beams, when we heard the van. Days could pass and all we’d hear was a moped whingeing through the mist, the postman’s yellow van at midday, a school bus, the toot of the bread van once a week. There were tractors, and the Paris-New York Concorde hitting the sound barrier at five minutes to five. So when we heard anything in the lane we’d stop, listen, and hold our breath like it would crash or it was an animal sniffing us out.

Yannick was standing in the yard hitching his trousers up. He looked like a kid pushed into something he didn’t want to do. He saw the English number plate on our vehicle and started looking at the barn roofs and the treetops. He called behind him: eh, Gilles … Gilles came round the side, lighting a stub on his lip, flick-knife on the belt of his black leather trousers, matching black hair larded flat over a face like a grindstone.

Joy still did all the talking, but I was beginning to pick up a word here and there. They were looking for les auges, old granite troughs. Yannick must’ve noticed we had barns full of camelote. He was standing by one auge which had sunk to its rims on the edge of what might once have been a garden. Gilles was already trying to lever it out with his spinning-wheel fingers. Yannick offered us a hundred francs. Joy was a tough dealer. She’d stand her ground, pull her sleeves down, hook a thumb through the hole and talk with her hands like she was a French widow weighing melons. We had six auges, so Yannick knew we must have six of everything else. Le Haut Bois was like a museum.

He said his client was a Parisien, a mine d’or but an asshole. She would pay a thousand francs cash for the big auges, five hundred for the small ones, then stick them in her garden and set them up with supermarket geraniums. Joy said moitié-moitié, fifty-fifty. All this time I was wondering what the pendant round Yannick’s neck was, jigging on a chain. It looked like a big bearded face made of gold-painted tin, the top off a jelly mould. Gilles was brushing greenery off his trouser leg. He wasn’t dressed for agricultural tackle collecting. He was a towner, probably from Flers, but Yannick was dressed from a bin bag left at the clothes recycling bin, grey joggings with knees like camel humps and a green acrylic jumper with pulled threads.