There wasn’t a sound except for the occasional cry of a bird. It was Saturday but no one was out shooting, perhaps out of respect for their neighbour. In these instances, you are neighbours even if you live several kilometres from the house that’s been struck by death.
At that time of year it is as oppressively wet in the Dordogne as it can be hot in July, but it keeps on raining until you think you will never see the sun again, that the cold season is the only one that really matters and that night will go on falling earlier and earlier every day. To make things worse, the images of the funeral vigil I’d just been to kept springing up in my mind.
A pile of chopped wood by the side of the road reminded me of the circumstances of Gaston’s death. He’d gone to find a particular piece of wood in a part of the forest that belonged to his family. He needed a long, sturdy beam because he’d got it into his head that he was going to restore the roof of one of the barns and, as wood was expensive, he’d naturally decided to go and cut down one of his own oaks. The Caminades didn’t speak much, and he hadn’t explained in detail his plan of action for the day. He’d left at dawn and still hadn’t come home when night began to fall. Still nothing the following morning. They’d looked for him everywhere before calling the police. Eventually, he’d been found crushed under the oak tree, lifeless.
Rumours and speculation had begun to spread, slowly at first in the hamlet, then in the nearby village and on into the towns of Thiviers and Nontron, in the cafés, because that’s where gossip reaches a fever pitch on the subjects of sex and death. Shruggings of shoulders and raisings of eyebrows, grumblings and spreadings of hands had served as a eulogy for this peasant’s son, a communist and an atheist who hadn’t wanted a priest and who’d asked specifically for ‘no flowers or wreaths’ at his funeral. The tittle-tattle, the doubts and the suspicions had been encouraged by the fact that this wasn’t the first Caminade son to meet a violent death.
The eldest son, Louis, had disappeared ten or fifteen years earlier. He’d got drunk with a friend who’d driven him all the way to Angoulême, apparently for a party. A local peasant had seen them from his tractor as they got into a Renault 4, but he hadn’t seen who was driving. Two days later a bloated body found floating in its underpants on a lake near Nontron was identified as Louis. He was assumed to have left the party blind drunk, to have gone for a swim, and to have drowned. Louis’s friend was never found, neither was the Renault 4, and no one was even sure that they’d gone to Angoulême. After the news had been published in Sud-Ouest, that detail had somehow attached itself to the account – along with a number of others – in the commentaries inspired by pastis, calva and white wine in various cafés, or by pineau in the dark kitchens of people’s homes all over the Dordogne.
I decided not to think about it: the cries of the biblical mourner keeping her vigil over her son’s body, and the crushing gloominess of the cold and wet as the day drew to a precocious close, were more than enough to fuel my imagination. I preferred to think back to the history books about the French peasantry in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that I had read at Cambridge a few years earlier, and to the French novels that had prompted me to come and live in this part of the world.
The woodland path to La Berthonie comes into a clearing on a slope and then carries on down towards another path which leads to a farm glorying in the name of Pisse-Chèvre – goat’s piss. The local inhabitants pronounce it ‘piche-chèvre’. I’ve always found it amusing. The house, which lies in the ‘dell’ – another expression used by the natives of La Berthonie, is particularly cold and dark. For the last thirty years it’s been lived in by an elderly English alcoholic who breeds sheep and has a terrible reputation amongst the locals, especially in the village. He’s accused of all sorts of things, of erecting a barrier across the public footpath that passes in front of his house, of firing at some hunters stalking a stag, of setting fire to the fields in summer. On that occasion, the firemen had to be called out ...what a saga. He sobered up at the police station before being sent home to his wife and daughter. A woman of thirty-something who never left the farmhouse in the dell. I’d never spoken to them myself, I’d seen them from a distance when out walking in the woods or on my runs when I was still playing rugby in Thiviers.
Just as I was thinking about this family – English like me, and they’d found it very difficult settling here – I caught sight of her a few hundred metres away, on the slope in the middle of the clearing, the woman who was known locally as The Englishman from Pisse-Chèvre’s daughter. No one knew their name or, if they did, they never used it.
She was wearing a stained old Barbour, and her golden red hair was blowing in the wind. She couldn’t possibly have seen me because she was staring straight ahead of her, standing perfectly still with her hands in her pockets, and I’d seen her in profile. After a few moments’ hesitation, my first instinct was to call out to her, to wave and go over and exchange a few meaningless words which would have been quite normal if we’d both lived in a village in Sussex, but the rumours about them nevertheless created some sort of wall between this family and the outside world, as did their own silence, the voluntary imprisonment in which they lived. Something about the immobility of this tall, excessively thin figure standing in the middle of the clearing, stopped me at the last minute. Then I heard a hoarse cry which was swallowed up in the trees, a cry of anger pronounced shyly, without assurance. She still hadn’t moved, only her hair sketched some movement on her silhouette. Then I followed her gaze and saw, a little further away, her father, a hairy bearded old man in filthy coveralls, lurching about in a drunken stupor. Egged on by far from honourable curiosity, I moved several paces to one side, the better to watch the scene. The Englishman tripped, fell in the mud, swore as he picked himself up, then shook his fist towards a billy-goat that watched him from its enclosure with an air of mild astonishment. He threatened to kill the animal, to slit its throat, he hurled insults at it, probably without realising that his daughter was witnessing this behaviour. In his state he wouldn’t have noticed me either, but it was unlikely that he would mind what the neighbours thought of him. A great pile of red plastic containers had been heaped up as high as the Malebranches’ muck heap against the stone wall of the house. They had once been full of Bergerac at five francs a litre, a wine very popular with the local English community who bought it in the market in Thiviers or Brantôme. He headed unsteadily for these plastic containers, picked one up and threw it at the billy-goat, although he didn’t manage to hit the animal. Then he slipped again and let out a reverberating ‘fuck’.