Free Trespass by Rose Tremain Page A

their way past the pile of sand and the rusty, urine-stained TV. They turned to look back at the view on the south side, which included her bungalow and her vegetable plot, criss-crossed with baling twine hung with rags to scare away the birds, and her washing line, draped with Aramon’s tattered laundry. The hounds in their pen barked themselves crazy at the scent of them. They drove away.
    Raoul Molezon, the stonemason, arrived.
    Audrun rushed out with coffee for Raoul and asked: ‘Is it true, about the four hundred and fifty thousand?’
    ‘I’ve no idea, Andrun,’ said Raoul. ‘I’m just here to fix the crack.’
    She told him the crack would travel right through the house and split it from top to bottom, because where the two arms of the Mas Lunel had been, now there was only air. She said: ‘The earth calls to the stone walls, Raoul. You’re a mason, I know you understand this. Unless they’re buttressed, like they used to be, the earth will call to them. I’m sure my mother knew it.’
    Raoul nodded. He was always gentle with Audrun. Had been gentle with her all his life. ‘You may be right,’ he said. ‘But what can I do?’
    Raoul swallowed the last dregs of the coffee and returned the bowl. He wiped his mouth with an old scarlet handkerchief and began setting up his ladders and wedging them with shovelfuls of sand. In his pickup were bags of cement. So Audrun now saw what Aramon was doing: employing Raoul to patch up the crack with mortar and then to plaster a coat of grey render over the new mortar veins, so that when the purchasers came, they’d never imagine a fissure in the wall – never dream of any such thing. She held the empty coffee bowl close to her and said: ‘I’m telling you, Raoul, you’ve got to tie that wall with an iron bolt . . .’
    He was halfway up his ladder, nimble and neat and unafraid of falling, even at the age of sixty-six. Long ago, Audrun could have fallen in love with Raoul Molezon, if Bernadette had lived, if her whole life had been different. She stared at his brown legs, in dusty shorts. She used to think, watching Raoul, you might love a man just for his legs, for the joy of stroking them, as you might stroke the sweet neck of a goat. But that was before love for any man had become impossible . . . forever impossible . . .
    She watched Raoul put on his spectacles, which hung from a chain round his neck, and peer at the fissure in the wall. He put his hand into the fissure. Now he would know how deep it went.
    ‘See?’ she called up to him. ‘It goes right through, eh Raoul?’
    He said nothing. His face was close to the wall now, half swivelled round, as though listening to the heartbeat of the house. Then, the door banged open and Aramon came charging out like a terrier, his face flushed with anger and wine.
    ‘You let him be, Audrun!’ he yelled. ‘You leave Raoul alone!’
    He tried to swat her away with the flat of his hand, as he would swat a fly.
    She recoiled from him, as she always did. He knew he could frighten her the moment he touched her. She turned and walked away. Almost ran.
    She held tight onto the coffee bowl in case she needed a weapon, in case Aramon followed her. She imagined how she would jab the bowl into his face, like covering a spider with a cup.
    But he didn’t follow and Audrun reached her door – that flimsy thing that had no weight and solidity in it, her pathetic front door. She went inside and closed and locked it, but knowing that the lock, too, was insubstantial, a little nub of weak metal. These things were never meant to be like this. Doors were supposed to have solidity and strength. They were supposed to keep out everything and everyone who could do you harm. And yet they never had.
    She sat in her chair. Somewhere in the distance, she could hear the voices of Aramon and Raoul Molezon, carried to her on the wind that was blowing from the north, the wind that sometimes blew into the skull of Bernadette and laid