The Guardian of Lies Read online

  ‘What is it you want?’

  ‘I need your help.’

  ‘I agreed to see you today because your family is going through a bad time at the moment, as we all know. Your father is a respected member of our community and I wish to offer him my sympathy.’

  ‘Why tell me? Why not tell him?’

  The mayor flashed me an elegant shrug. ‘Aristide Caussade and I have not always seen eye to eye.’ He reached for a cigarette from the silver casket on the desk and offered me one. I shook my head. He lit his own, and I wondered why he’d felt the need to gain himself some time. ‘The loss of land to the United States Air Force, the violent death of your bull, the sad state of your brother, your own injury – these must have hit your father hard. I am pleased to see you have returned home to pull your weight in the family.’

  ‘Pull my weight?’

  ‘Yes. Instead of deserting them.’

  He had no right. No right to say that. I felt a flush of anger rise to my cheeks. Even if it was true, it was not his business to voice such a comment.

  ‘Now, Eloïse,’ he said soothingly, ‘tell me what it is you want.’

  Oh, he was good. I felt my feet slipping, as if he had pulled away the polished floorboards beneath my seat, and I conjured up a memory of him down in the dirt in front of my horse Cosette after she had barged him to the ground when I was fifteen. Cosette never tolerated anyone shouting at me, even if I was in the wrong. That moment of fear had bleached the skin around his eyes as white as paper. I remembered that.

  He regarded me now through a flimsy veil of cigarette smoke and I wondered if he remembered it too.

  ‘Will you explain, please, Monsieur le Maire, what is going on in this town? What makes the people of Serriac turn into a bunch of murderers, instead of a peaceful community that discusses problems over a civilised glass of wine?’

  ‘Murderers?’ He gave a snort of dismissal. ‘That’s too strong.’

  ‘They murdered Goliath.’

  ‘Now, Eloïse, be careful of your tongue.’

  I studied his pale blue eyes, committing each detail of their colour and shape to memory, so that I would know in future when he was lying.

  ‘So what are they, if not murderers?’

  He exhaled a skein of smoke and his eyes narrowed. Was it the smoke? Or was a lie coming?

  ‘Most likely it was a foolish group of two or three drunken youths at night trying to prove how macho they are.’ He gestured with his hands, as if he would smack one of the youths’ cheeks, but it was done with amusement. ‘Taking on the biggest and best bull in the whole of the Camargue. I can imagine them driving out in the darkness to . . . No’ – he smiled – ‘probably on bicycles, eager to become men.’

  A lie then.

  I sat forward. ‘If a group of drunken youths had approached Goliath in a field in the dark, he would have trampled them to the ground and gored them to death.’

  He considered my words. ‘You are of course right, Eloïse. I had not looked at it like that.’

  ‘So who was it?’

  ‘The men in this town are angry that your father has sold a large tract of his land to the American military.’

  Sold?

  The word went off like a grenade in my head. I had not realised. The sale was already settled. Why had Papa not said?

  ‘But the men of Serriac,’ Durand continued, ‘would not take the law into their own hands, I assure you.’

  ‘Who would?’

  He smiled patiently. ‘That is for Captain Roussel to find out.’

  ‘Monsieur, we all know that factions within Maurice Thorez’s Communist Party are causing trouble for Prime Minister Laniel up and down the country over the nuclear arms issue. The presence of nuclear weapons in the Camargue is going to stir up a huge swell of anger. Do you have in your possession the names of any Communist agitators in Serriac?’

  ‘Your brother is the person you should be asking that question.’

  ‘What? André?’

  ‘No. Your younger brother, Isaac. The one in Marseille.’

  Smooth as silk. He poured hot oil in my ear, smooth as silk. I shot to my feet. I had to get out of there.

  ‘I have taken up enough of your time, monsieur.’

  But he was ahead of me. He strode across his grand room and reached for the ornate brass handle, but paused. ‘How is your brother?’ he asked me. ‘How is André?’

  There was something in the way he said it, in the deliberate lightness of his words. I had the odd feeling that this – this question – was why I was here. This was the reason I had been allowed into his inner sanctum.

  ‘André is not well,’ I told him flatly. No need for more.

  ‘I hear that his legs are bad.’

  I said nothing.

  ‘And severe pain in the head, they say,’ he added.

  ‘Who are they?’

  ‘Just the town gossips.’

  ‘Old men warming their wine in the sun.’

  ‘Is your brother able to walk better now?’

  He was taking too much interest. I put out a hand to open the door and he smiled courteously. ‘Will you tell him something from me, Eloïse? Tell André that as Mayor of Serriac I send him my best wishes for a total recovery very soon. Before the accident we used to see him regularly in the town’s bars, most weekends. We miss him.’

  I took three quick breaths. ‘I will pass on your message, Monsieur le Maire.’

  My fingers uncurled from the fist they had formed, I opened the door and walked out. It took an effort of will not to run into the blinding sunlight that drenched the street outside, as far away from Charles Durand as I could get.

  In the town’s bars. Most weekends.

  While living in Paris? Someone was lying to my face. Was it Charles Durand?

  Or André?

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Serriac is a town that does not believe in change. In the four years I’d been gone, it had scarcely blinked. I knew this town like I knew each creamy strand in my Cosette’s mane. I knew the glow of Serriac’s peach-tinged pantiles and its ancient olive shutters shedding flakes like sunburned skin. I had roamed each street and alleyway. Learned its hidden corners and its hairpin bends, climbed over its twisted stone steps and its Roman archway. I knew this town.

  I walked through it now in the placid heat, and I was greeted as if I’d never left by women who were shelling peas or washing babies on the doorstep with gentle hands, and by men fixing unidentifiable pieces of machinery. I stopped, exchanged words and smiles. Time and again the same question arose: How is your brother André?

  Captain Léon Roussel was right. They know I am the daughter of Aristide Caussade. That is why no one referred to the American air base, though as I walked, a flight of three bomber aircraft passed overhead. No one referred to the massacre of Goliath either and that scared me. As if they thought it a subject too dangerous to mention, as if the stench of our champion bull’s blood clung to my skirts. Even the town’s idle dogs chose to hole up in the cool patches of shade rather than sniff at my ankles or growl at my approach.

  I made my way to Thiery’s Bar down Rue des Lavandières where years ago the washerwomen performed their work under the municipal water pumps in the town square. The patron, Monsieur Thiery, paraded in his trademark purple apron, laughed and kissed only one of my cheeks, the good one. I ordered coffee and a glass of iced water, and I sat outside under the lacy branches of a plane tree, observing the small square with its smooth cobbles and its two cafés facing each other, like bulls in a stand-off. Nothing much stirred. I made a mental note of the few cars that were parked around the edges of the square. It was safer that way. So that I would know if one followed me home.

  Time passed. Shadows started to shrink as the sun climbed higher in a naked blue sky and I waited to see who would come. I sipped my water and picked over the bones of my meeting with Serriac’s mayor. Why would he protect those who committed the crime against my father? He might be standi
ng with those in the town who were opposed to the air base expansion, but as mayor he should not be condoning violent behaviour in any form. Still ringing in my head like a church bell on Sunday was his comment: In the town’s bars. Most weekends. Followed by the cosy, We miss him.

  André never said a word to me in Paris about any trips home. Not a word. Why keep it from me? Why, André? Why? Didn’t you trust me? Even then. Trust. The word spiked in my mind and wouldn’t go away. The more it sounded in my head, the louder rang the lies.

  A shadow spilled on to my table. I had heard no footsteps and I looked up quickly, one hand shading my eyes to see who had come to poke a stick in my cage.

  ‘Bonjour, Eloïse. Enjoying Serriac again?’

  ‘Good morning to you, Léon.’ I smiled up at him. He looked bigger than yesterday, as though Serriac broadened his shoulders; his uniform looked darker, his grey eyes less friendly here in town. Something about his polite smile made me feel an outsider.

  ‘Any progress?’ I asked.

  ‘We are questioning people.’ So noncommittal.

  ‘You’ll let me know if you discover something?’

  ‘Of course.’

  He was patient. The way he’d been with me when we were children, and I was grateful. I wanted to invite him to join me for coffee but he had on his policeman’s face that said he was busy doing whatever it was that policemen did in this quiet law-abiding town.

  ‘Who are the people you’re questioning?’

  ‘Eloïse, I can’t tell you that.’

  ‘Are they local? People I know?’

  Léon laughed and the warmth of it melted the edges of the cool politeness. ‘You were never one to give up, were you, Eloïse?’

  I stood up, face to face. ‘No,’ I said softly.

  ‘Leave this to me. Please don’t get involved. Whoever killed your bull has demonstrated the kind of violence they are capable of and I don’t want you,’ he lightly took hold of my wrist, ‘caught up in the middle of it.’

  ‘Violence works both ways,’ I said.

  He gave me a hard stare, a professional police stare, but a memory suddenly cartwheeled into my head of Léon Roussel skinny-dipping at twilight in one of the lagoons in the marshes, his naked buttocks as pink as the flamingos in the light of the setting sun. He must have been around twelve or thirteen years old at the time, lean as a hunting hound and unaware of the seven-year-old wide eyes watching him from among the reeds. I couldn’t help but laugh now, surprising him. He took a pace back, but I followed him.

  ‘Léon, why didn’t you tell me yesterday that André used to come down to Serriac at weekends before the crash?’

  Even now, that word – crash – cut like glass on my tongue. He frowned. ‘I thought you knew.’

  ‘You know I didn’t know.’

  I nodded a polite farewell and walked away across the warm sunlit square.

  I am no fool, Léon. Remember that.

  *

  ‘Where are the Americans?’

  I was holding a delicate unicorn on the palm of my hand. I’d been hugged, kissed, my scar fussed over, inspected and I’d been kissed once more. I didn’t realise how much I’d missed Marianne until I saw her again. My friend, Marianne Durand, daughter of Monsieur le Maire. She was large where he was lean, she wore floating flamboyant dresses while his suits were tailored and tasteful. That Marianne.

  She was a gifted glass-maker and ran a small but fancy business from a shop in Rue des Dindes where she sold her own superb animal designs. I could have watched her all day long working her alchemy, wielding her shears and hairpin jacks. Snipping and tweaking on the steel marver. In a matter of minutes she could turn a lumpen cone of fiery glass into something exquisite that lived and breathed, with a whisker here, a tail there, a raised hoof pawing at the air.

  Marianne and I had laughed and cried our way through our childhood together, and when the sunlight flickered through the magical glass creature I was holding, turning it into a rainbow in my hand, I had to ask myself why on earth I’d left in the first place.

  ‘The Americans?’ I asked again. ‘Where are they?’

  Marianne looped her arm through mine. ‘They travel in gaggles,’ she laughed. ‘Like geese.’

  *

  They are different. American men. I sat in Gasparin’s Bar and observed them the way I would a sea lion in my living room and listened to the strange noises they made. There was a casualness to the way they sat and stood, an expansiveness that was in sharp contrast to the Frenchmen hunched over their Gauloises, nursing their glasses of wine.

  American airmen spread their legs and puffed out their chests. They laughed as if it were a competition and drifted from one crowded table to another, slapping shoulders, always touching one another the way children do. Using up our French air as if they owned it. Yet there was something about these healthy young men from the wide-open spaces of the prairies, something guileless, yet beguiling. Their smiles made me smile. As I sat at a table with Marianne watching the airmen in their shirtsleeves drinking their beer and smoking their Lucky Strikes or dealing a hand of cards, I tried to work out why they seemed so much freer. Easier in their skins. Happier to be alive. The French locals appeared so serious, so eager to discuss and dispute with solemn faces.

  Is that what I looked like? As if the war had drained all the fun out of me? Out of France?

  Maybe so.

  A street-player was squeezing out a shaky rendition of ‘La Vie en Rose’ on his accordion while his bright-eyed little gosse dodged between tables, rattling a tin to collect a few francs. I saw more than one of the men in uniform toss in a handful of coins. Americans were generous, it seemed, or perhaps just liked kids. Either way, it was nice to see.

  ‘So this is where they come to hang out in town,’ I said to Marianne after we had ordered our wine. It was the kind of bar I liked, no frills or fancy flounces. It hadn’t yet thought of trying to be modern. Just comfortable rough-plastered walls, the whitewash of the ceiling tinged amber by decades of nicotine, round scrubbed pine tables, and rows of dusty wine bottles lined up behind the counter that any bar in Marseille would envy. It was no wonder the Americans congregated here.

  ‘Is there ever any trouble with the locals?’ I asked.

  ‘Mon Dieu, of course, there are always fights over girls.’ She laughed and waved to one of the Americans she knew and he loped over, his friend in tow. They pulled up chairs and offered cigarettes. Both looked as if they’d stepped right off a farm, all straw and freckles, but I’d got it wrong.

  ‘Eloïse, this is Mickey.’

  ‘Hello, Mickey.’

  ‘He’s a mechanic from Chicago, and this handsome fellow here is Calvin. He was one of those tough lumberjacks out West before he joined up.’ She smiled, flicked her dazzlingly sleek blonde hair at him and accepted a light for her Lucky Strike. She raised an eyebrow speculatively at me and at Mickey. Mickey shifted his chair closer to mine and I saw his gaze linger on my scar.

  ‘Hello, Eloïse.’

  I didn’t look away. I didn’t shrug a dark wing of my hair over it. I hadn’t dated anyone since the crash and I feared that the hard defensive ridge of scar tissue might not just be on the outside, but on the inside as well. I drank my glass of smoky red wine, while I listened to Mickey in his crisp khaki uniform telling me about the skyscrapers that literally scraped the sky in Chicago. And then I leaned my elbows on the little table, my chin cupped in my hand, my breasts pushing against my black dress.

  ‘Tell me, Mickey from Chicago, do you ever hold dances on that American air base of yours?’

  His eyes lit up as if I’d put a match to them and his smile was wide enough to swallow Serriac whole. ‘There’s one on Saturday night.’

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Someone was messing with my car. A man with a pale shirt and dark hat. I could only see his back because he was bent over my 2CV’s windscreen and I shouted out. Broke into a run.

  ‘You!’

  A horse-dra
wn cart piled high with crates of chickens, their yellow beaks panting in the afternoon heat, nudged its way between me and the corner where my car was parked. By the time it had trundled past, the man was gone. I scanned the car and spotted nothing amiss, but a piece of folded paper was tucked under the wiper-blade. I snatched it up.

  I flicked it open. Three lines, handwritten, printed in capital letters.

  YOU WANT ME TO KILL YOU?

  LIKE GOLIATH. ALONE. IN THE DARK.

  GO BACK TO PARIS. NOW.

  Quickly, I spun on the spot where I stood and inspected every inch of the town square, but too late, far too late. There was no pale shirt nor dark hat on view in the doorway of the pharmacy, closed for the afternoon behind a metal grille. Nor behind the pockmarked limestone columns of the tiny concert hall. Nor tucked away among the scarlets and lavenders of the flower stall where the pigeons were chasing each other in the shade.

  The note-leaver had vanished. I felt utterly out of my depth and my instinct was to flee. Not to Paris. To flee home to Mas Caussade like a whipped dog with my tail between my legs, to search out André and lay it all in his lap for him to make right, the way I used to as a child. But I was no longer a child, I was a grown woman.

  Should I report it to the police? No, no, going to the police was not an option. Too dangerous, because it would mean explaining why I might be in danger and that would involve André in it. How could I consider for even one fleeting moment adding to the weight of pain my brother carried each day, the pain I’d created?

  As I unlocked the car and climbed inside, a fat blowfly stumbled inside with me and began to batter itself insanely against the windscreen. It was how I felt, battering myself against something invisible. I knew I couldn’t tell André about the note. I started the engine, took one final look around the square, and drove away with my guilt firmly settled on the back seat.

  *

  On the drive home, I focused more on the grimy rectangle of the rear-view mirror than I did on the bleached road in front of me. It was mid-afternoon, still hot and humid, the sun leaching the moisture out of me and making me squint.