White Lies. Dexter Petley

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

      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.

      Five of the auges were too heavy to lift, even with four of us. So as Yannick backed his van round the yard and burnt his clutch, we levered each auge out with these eight-foot iron bars we’d found in the cider barn. Then with planks and rollers we’d heave and drag them into the van till it sagged in the mud. It was nearly dark when we finished. We sat at the table for a coup, a home-brew winter warmer. Everything Yannick saw, he asked how much, saying he’d just opened a brocante in the old primary school at Ste-Honorine. Ste-Honorine was a one-horse-trough village seven kilometres east with a tractor mechanic, a church and a boulangerie. There were mud houses where old women still slopped out, and a stray dog running across the road with a chicken in its mouth.

      We’d seen his brocante, L’Atelier de Merlin. He’d hung two old chairs from the brackets of his upstairs windowbox and draped a hand-painted banner across the road. It looked like the place had shut down years back, but he was just waiting for his enterprise loan to come through. Even his van was rented. I wanted to let him in the barns but Joy didn’t. Gilles kept asking Joy where she was from, why didn’t she smoke, when was she going to have children. Yannick wanted to know if Scotland was a good place to find camelote. Him and Gilles were going there next month. I didn’t believe a word of it. We got two hundred quid for the auges though.

      On the day of the break-in I was supposed to stay out from midday till bedtime. I did a sausage and chips at Leclerc in Argentan followed by a weekly shop which I managed to spin out till 4 p.m. The shopping was an emotional gamble. Just three weeks before, me and Joy had gone Christmas shopping there. It had been so cold that day the condensation drips inside the Land Rover froze into rivets of ice. Joy’s hands were blue inside her mittens and I felt sick. When we’d got home Joy said: what are we going to do? We