Free Trespass by Rose Tremain Page B

her out cold under pegged washing or on the feathery floor of the chicken coop.
    Audrun tried to sweeten her thoughts by remembering the wonderful cures for ailments old Madame Molezon, Raoul’s mother, used to brew up in her dark kitchen: young blackberry shoots, dried and stewed and mixed with honey, for sore throats; sage tea for nausea; borage tea for shock. But then Audrun couldn’t help remembering, too, that certain ailments had no cure. Nothing from the kitchen of Madame Molezon, nothing on the earth had been able to save Bernadette. In her last days, she’d told Audrun that her cancer was like a magnanerie of silkworms and her body was a mulberry tree. Nothing on the earth could deter the worms from ingesting the leaves, right down to their last little bit of green.
    And that was when everything changed – when that last little bit of green was gone.
    At the age of fifteen, Audrun was taken out of school and sent to work in a factory making underwear in Ruasse. Her father and her brother stayed home, worked on the vines, the onion beds, the fruit tree terraces and the vegetables. They cared for the animals and then slaughtered them. But Audrun was told she was no good on the land and would never be any good; her duty was to earn money. So she caught a bus at seven every morning, six days a week, and the bus dumped her outside the underwear factory on the outskirts of Ruasse and she spent all day hunched over a sewing machine, making girdles and suspender belts and brassieres. In her memory, all of these oddly shaped garments were pale pink, the approximate colour of her own flesh, the bits of it the sun had never found.
    Her father ordered her to bring samples of her work home. Serge and Aramon fondled these pink samples and sniffed them and stretched the elasticised girdles this way and that and pulled on the elasticised suspenders like you’d pull on a cow’s teat, and laughed and sighed and shifted in their chairs. Then, Audrun was told to put the samples on, to show them off, to pretend she was a fashion model in a magazine. When she refused, Serge tugged her towards him. He touched her breasts, which, at fifteen, were already large. He whispered that she needed a brassiere for these beautiful breasts, didn’t she, and he would buy her one if she would just show off the girdle . . .
    She pulled away from him. She saw Aramon, doubled up in the corner, scarlet-faced with embarrassment and thrill, laughing his hyena’s laugh.
    She ran out of the house and walked to the cemetery where Bernadette’s body lay in its stone catafalque, piled in on top of her parents-in-law, and that was when Audrun began to feel it for the first time in her life, the stretching of everything round her into skeins of un-meaning . . . the breeze like beating wings, the sunlight slippery on the gravestones, like melted butter, the cypress trees like buildings about to fall. She cried out, but there was nobody to hear her. She clutched at the earth and felt it crumbling in her hands, like bread.
    Audrun rocked in her chair, remembering: that was the first time.
    Raoul Molezon arrived every morning for four successive days. He brought his apprentice, Xavier, to help him. They filled the crack with cement, covered it with new render, repointed the brickwork round the windows. Then they did something extraordinary: they painted the render bright ochre yellow.
    In the cool shadow of early morning, it looked primrose-pale; in the evening sunlight, it blazed out like a waterfall of marigolds. It no longer resembled the Mas Lunel.
    Audrun spent hours standing in her potager , leaning on a fork or a hoe, staring in amazement at this yellow apparition. She watched Xavier loading the abandoned TV into Raoul’s pickup and shovelling away the sand. She watched Aramon plant a forsythia bush near the front door. She noticed that the dogs were quiet, as though drugged by the fumes from the paint.
    She saw the estate agents come back – the