Trespass by Rose Tremain Read Free Book Online

small orchard and, beyond this, towards fields of apricot trees and vines. It had a white tiled floor and a sleigh bed and a rickety wrought-iron side table. The beams were painted magenta.
    For Anthony, Veronica emptied the walnut armoire of the winter clutter she and Kitty kept there, put white cotton sheets on the bed, vacuumed away the cobwebs, oiled the shutters, shined up the bathroom. Then she stood staring critically at her efforts. She saw the rooms as Anthony would see them: too plain and unadorned, too shabby, with a stupid colour ruining the beams. But there was nothing to be done about it. And at least the view from the window was good.
    Anthony hated flying. He thought budget airliners should be shot out of the sky. He said he would take the train to Avignon and collect a hire car.
    He insisted he would bring them Earl Grey tea and Marmite, even though Veronica told him they didn’t need these things. He said he was ‘unbelievably grateful’. He said he was sure the air of the south would make everything clear to him.
    Clear to him in what way? Kitty wondered, but didn’t ask. Because Anthony Verey had always struck her as a man for whom everything was already clear, already decided, judged, categorised and appropriately filed and labelled. What more, in a life as apparently selfish as his, was there left to understand?

Audrun made her way slowly and carefully up to the old house, vigilant every step, alert to all that was there, to all that might be there . . .
    You could never predict what Aramon was going to do. One day, he’d chucked out his old television and bought a new one, wide as a wardrobe. Last winter, he’d taken delivery of a pile of sand but never said – never even seemed to know – what the sand was for. Already, weeds had sown themselves in its shifting and collapsing mass; the sand pile and the ruined old television sat side by side on the grass and the snow fell on them in January and the warm breezes blew on them in this new springtime, and Aramon just walked on by them. Sometimes, Audrun noticed, the dogs did their business in the sand pile, cocked their legs against the television. So the screen was yellowish now, a stripy yellow that occasionally took light from the sunshine, as though some old broadcaster were trying to get his faltering signal through.
    When Audrun was a child, the Mas Lunel had been a U-shaped house. Now, all that was left of it was the back section of the U. The roofs of the two wings, where once the cattle had been housed and grain stored and silkworms reared, had been damaged in the storms of 1950 and the father, Serge, had said: ‘Good. Now we can get to work on them.’
    Bernadette had told Audrun that she’d thought that ‘getting to work’ on them meant rebuilding them, filling the cracks in the walls, attending to the damp, relaying the brick floors, replacing doors and windows. But no, Serge had begun to dismantle both edifices. He tore off the clay tiles and stacked them up in his cart and drove the cart down the old, pitted road to Ruasse and sold them to a builder’s merchant by the river. Then he hacked his way through the grey mortar that covered the walls of the two wings of the Mas Lunel and began gouging out the stones. He proudly told his neighbours, the Vialas and the Molezons, that stones were his ‘inheritance’ and now – in this post-war time when nobody had anything left to sell – he was going to make his fortune out of this, out of selling stones.
    Selling stones.
    Bernadette had pleaded with Serge: ‘Don’t destroy the house, pardi ! Don’t leave us with nothing.’
    ‘I’m not leaving us with nothing,’ he said. ‘You women don’t understand how the world works. I’m making us rich.’
    But they never became rich. Not that anybody could tell. Unless Serge kept the money somewhere else: in an old fertiliser sack? In a hole in the ground?
    On the ground, still, were the ghostly outlines of the former east and west