White Lies. Dexter Petley

we had to shout to hear ourselves above the roar of the diesel engine.

      —I need some time to myself, she’d shouted back. I have to go away, to be alone.

      

      I spent the rest of the weekend in a dumb panic. She’d ask me to wait outside while she made phone calls, and once there I began to map out my future alone. I occupied myself with the twenty-year-old hay-bales, dragging them out the barns and up the back garden, cutting the hemp string, the bales springing open like accordions into cakes. I mulched the vegetable beds, one square hay cake at a time, but they were too compact so I pulled them all apart and scattered them loose and thick. Then Joy banged on the window and I stood there as she handed me a cup of tea. She made small talk and offered me a home-made biscuit like she was the widow of the place, old Madame Macé, and I was the silent, respectful gardener.

      —I’ll only be gone a week, she said, coming outside and standing on the well cover. The dark green box hedge behind her, the sound of a man we’d never seen calling his dog.

      —You’re not coming back, I said, I know you’re not coming back.

      —I’m your friend, she said, but the hug was all jacket and mittens, her body already gone. I don’t have anything to give you right now …

      I didn’t dare ask what she meant. I didn’t even ask who she’d phoned or where she was going. I stretched every minute till it snapped and blanked out the whole of the coming week. She said she’d booked a ticket on the Eurostar shuttle, and she asked me if I’d drive her to the station Monday morning, like she was a guest who wanted to get the train to Paris.

      This was the first time she’d left anyone, perhaps the first time she’d ever lied, so she hadn’t known that all deserters say: I just need time to think, it’s not you, I’m your friend, don’t worry. I’d done it before almost word for word, amazed at how easy it was to get away with. It was no different now, only I was the shocked one, willing to agree to anything, but not wanting to know what I’d done wrong. When I get back we’ll talk, she said. I remained grateful for every kind word, but we knew there’d be no talk.

      She was my executioner, quick, tidy, purposeful, letting me spend my last hours outside where, by Sunday, I was just hanging about, gripping on to corner-stones or gutterpipe, crying against the seized-up baler rusting down by the mare. I’d kick its solid rubber wheels, homing on their details to alleviate the distress. I noticed they’d come off a British Army gun carriage made in Birmingham in 1942. I tried to concentrate on the effects of this war and forget Joy, but I couldn’t eat and she had to sit on my lap to help me drink the tea. So I felt like a war veteran too, trembling on a stick on a last visit to France, to this farm where the battle took place in the German retreat. We were surrounded by souvenirs of that battle and the occupation. A German Officer’s pocket inkwell Joy had found just by putting her hand under the cider press. Track-wheels off Panzer tanks stuck upright in the garden for periwinkles to climb. US Army jerrycans, 1943, on the Land Rover roof rack. A German-French dictionary, Berlin 1941. Hitler Pfennigs and machinegun bullets lying unused in their hundreds on the floor in rotten layers of grain and in the recesses of every barn wall. There were live shells still on a window ledge and the aluminium box we’d scuffed out from under the chicken house with the words US Army Bomb Mechanism on it. Water canteens and leather webbing and big brass shell cases with greasy rags tied over the top which old Farmer Macé had used as rust-proof paint pots. And the mound of heavy leather army horse tack from the beginning of the war.

      Our conversation evaded concrete futures. Joy listed the small things I could get on with while she was away. I swallowed the lies like they were pep pills. If I strayed into emotive areas she’d say don’t, so I didn’t. I shut off my mind so the imaginary time between her leaving and her coming back would cease to exist beyond that domestic span of going up the field to check on the goats or gathering wood for the night.

      On Sunday morning Joy wove a band of lavender for my fishing hat then asked me to stay outside till she banged on the window with a mug of tea. I went chopping wood, smashing up old oak planks, so worm-eaten they were half powder. Monsieur Aunay’s grandson came by on the Mobylette to check on some beasts in the top field. I’d only ever seen him at apple gathering, in the back of the cart with the whole family. Now he looked like he was on a rite of passage, his first solo task. He’d borrowed his grandpère’s Mobylette and white crash helmet and he wore a new pair of blue overalls. He checked the bœuf and pushed the Mobylette homeward down the muddy track. I swung the axe a few more times but there he was, standing beside me, holding out a piece of paper. Fund-raising to renovate the salle des fêtes at Landigou, ten francs a scratch card. I bought one, he stood there as I scratched it. Vous avez perdu.

      On Monday morning I could see Joy was holding her breath, crossing her fingers, suppressing that rising triumph of getting away, or the terror in case the Land Rover wouldn’t start or the train was cancelled. I played my part to perfection too, and if she noticed maybe she was grateful. For me it was not an act of love but contrition, letting her believe she wasn’t lying, that she was just taking time out from a lifelong commitment and in the process helping herself over a period of self-doubt.

      There wasn’t time, and it wasn’t Joy sitting there now. In this woman’s haste to get away from me, the future image of herself had slipped its lead and pulled ahead, choking and laughing. Just simple but significant changes, like she didn’t drink coffee that morning. It makes me manic, she said, like it’d been a lifelong tendency and she was talking to an acquaintance years hence.

      As we got in the Land Rover she said to the geese: bye you lot and I knew my last chance had gone. It was the farewell I never got.

      Monday was market day in Briouze. We followed our neighbours’ tractors with their orange beacons flashing in the mist, the breath of lumbering beasts billowing through the slats of vacheres towed by mud-lagged Land Cruisers and crapped-on Renault vans. It was the perfect time to turn her back on the place.

      We stood on the railway platform away from the smokers. She acted like we were strangers, stepping on a train to be a single girl travelling alone in France, with no winter clothes in her rucksack. I didn’t know she’d packed the silk shirts and cotton socks, the brown dress and safari shorts. Or that she’d be back in Africa before I could sleep again.

      The train came in like a row of linked tombs. I tried to say something but my mouth was cold, I couldn’t feel my lips and my jaw locked shut.

      —Buck-up, she said.

      She gave me her cheek as I went to kiss her mouth, and I caught her smell for a keepsake. By the end of the week it would disappear from her clothes and the bed as the mould and damp remains of Le Haut Bois took over.

      She’d once called me ‘the unlucky explorer’ from some poem it doesn’t matter who wrote:

       And all my endeavours are unlucky explorers

       come back, abandoning the expedition;

       the specimens, the lilies of ambition

       still spring in their climate, still unpicked;

       but time, time is all I lacked

       to find them, as the great collectors before me.

       TWO

      I’d read about Joy The Gold-Panning Missionary long before I met her. A flowery article beside an inky newsprint photo in Viva, a Nairobi women’s magazine which Zanna showed me.

      Zanna was twenty years older than me. We met in London at a Somali literacy gig in Whitechapel. She was thin, with blue tracing-paper skin, dressed in black with a beehive sitting on her head. She kept her money down her bra in a leather pouch and put belladonna drops in her eyes to make them blue. She said her husband Austen lived in Kenya.

      She