Free Trespass by Rose Tremain

subconsciously thought for a long time that it would be good to live near V, near the one person for whom he still felt genuine affection? Because, with V, he could become the younger brother again, yield up some of that oppressive responsibility for his own well-being that he was finding harder and harder to sustain.
    At Les Glaniques, Veronica and Kitty waited in silence. From the hall, they could hear the familiar tick of the grandfather clock. It was as though, Kitty thought, they were waiting for something momentous, something dangerous and potentially catastrophic, like a NASA launch.
    She looked at her friend, sitting in her favourite chair by the brightly burning fire, and she had the sudden and terrible thought that their lives together might never be the same from this moment on. And the awfulness of this – even if it were just a possibility and not a certainty – impelled Kitty to get up and kneel down by Veronica and lay her head on Veronica’s knees covered by her newly washed denim skirt.
    ‘What?’ said Veronica. ‘What, Kitty?’
    She couldn’t blurt out her worry. It was too irrational and emotional. But she needed comfort. What she wanted was for Veronica to stroke her hair, to say something affectionate and normal. But she could feel the tension in Veronica’s body: a tremble in her right leg, an absence of stillness all through her.
    ‘Tell me what the matter is,’ Veronica said again.
    ‘Nothing,’ said Kitty. ‘Stroke my hair, darling, will you?’
    Kitty’s short hair, dusted with grey, was curly in a thick and tangled way. Veronica laid a hand gently on Kitty’s head and picked up this strand and that and held these strands between her fingers. Then she said: ‘Actually, your hair is quite difficult to stroke.’
    The buzzer at the automated gate sounded at that moment and Veronica had to lift Kitty away from her so that she could get up and go to the gate release. ‘He’s here,’ she said unnecessarily.
    Kitty saw the car headlights well up out of the night. Then she heard Veronica’s voice at the door, bright and emphatic, as it might have sounded for the long-looked-for plumber or stonemason. And his voice: the Chelsea drawl, the way posh people spoke long ago when Kitty was a skinny girl, helping to make beds and prepare breakfasts in the Cromer guest house . . .
    Veronica led him into the sitting room, led him by the hand, the adored younger brother still, the charmed and charming boy, Anthony. He was pale from his indoor life, his skin flaky. He approached Kitty with a smile that narrowed his eyes, creased his cheeks in these days of his seventh decade, but which, Kitty guessed, could still seduce when he wanted it to.
    He kissed her lightly, with only a trace of fastidious disdain. He smelled of the train, of things marooned in stale air, and Kitty had the peculiar thought that he needed hosing down with salt water, needed abrasion, ice, grains of sand, to bring the blood back to his skin, to make the world real to him again.
    He stood by the fire and admired the new rugs and cushions they’d bought in Uzès. Veronica poured champagne, handed round her home-made tapenade. He said he was glad to be there. He said: ‘What I love hearing is the silence.’

Four hundred and fifty thousand euros.
    This sum of money preyed on Audrun’s mind. Had she really seen such a shockingly large figure written on Aramon’s palm? Or was it just floating there, a thread of numbers unconnected to anything, in the confused grey mass that was her brain?
    She asked him again: ‘How much did they say you could get for the house?’
    But he wouldn’t tell her this time. He gobbed up some shreds of tobacco and spat them out as he said: ‘The mas is mine. That’s all I know. Every euro of this is mine.’
    From her window, moving the net curtains by half a centimetre, Audrun watched people arriving to look at the house. She saw them stand and stare up at the crack in the wall. They picked