Trespass by Rose Tremain Read Free Book Online Page A

wings of the Mas Lunel. It had been grand, a true Cévenol mas, with space for everything and everyone, with all the machinery kept out of the rain and all the animals sheltered in winter and, above this the magnaneries, the attics where, season by season, the silkworms were hatched and where they ate their vast quantities of mulberry leaves and spun their cocoons and were sent down to the last filature at Ruasse to be boiled alive as the precious silk was unwound onto bobbins.
    Audrun could just remember the old magnaneries at the mas, the smell of them, and the chill in the air as you climbed the steps towards the well-ventilated rooms, and the sound of the thirty thousand worms chomping on leaves, like the sound of hail on the roof.
    ‘It was terrible work,’ Bernadette had told her. ‘Terrible, terrible work. You had to collect bunches and bunches of mulberry leaves every single day. And if it had been raining and the leaves were wet, you knew a lot of the worms were going to die, because the damp gave them some intestinal infection. But there was nothing you could do. Every morning, you just had to pick out the dead ones and carry on. And the stink up there, of the dead worms and all the horrible excretions, was vile. I used to gag, sometimes. I hated every minute of that work.’
    Yet, she’d done it without complaining. Still hanging on the wall of Audrun’s small sitting room was a photograph of Bernadette with, on her lap, a basket full of silk cocoons and on her face not a trace of anguish or disgust, but only the smile of a tired and beautiful harvester, her labour complete. The picture was faded and brown, but the white of the silk cocoons still had about it an obstinate kind of light.
    All the silk in France came from the Far East now. What once had been a flourishing trade, and had kept thousands of Cévenol families alive, had died in the 1950s. When Serge sold the stones of the Mas Lunel, he’d already known that it was finished. The wooden hatching trays were chopped up and thrown on the fire. The last filature at Ruasse was demolished. And though Bernadette had been terrified by the violent way Serge tore down the two wings of the U-shaped Mas Lunel, she’d sighed with relief once the magnaneries were burned and gone. She told Audrun: ‘When that ended, I slept easier in my soul.’
    Aramon slept in the bed where Bernadette had died. On the very mattress. In sheets that had once belonged to her.
    Audrun hated going into this room that stank of his encroachment on their mother’s memory. Because her brother had never loved Bernadette, not as Audrun had loved her. All her life, his wild behaviour had plagued and punished Bernadette and when she died he just looked blankly at her corpse, chewing on something that might have been tobacco or gum or even a mulberry leaf, because this was the way he was, like a silkworm, with his jaw grinding on something day and night, and in his eyes a vacancy.
    Reluctantly, Audrun had agreed to help him tidy the house and try to find the things he’d lost.
    While he killed the bantams he’d promised her, she began searching among all the clutter and garbage for his spectacles and his identity papers. She put his dirty laundry into two pillowcases, to take down to her bungalow, to wash in her machine and dry on the line in the sun and wind. She could find nothing clean to put on the bed, so she left it as it was, with just the old blankets and the eiderdown airing under the open window. Let him scratch all night. She didn’t care.
    She doused a rag with vinegar and cleaned the windows. She swept and washed the wooden floor and took the rug into the garden and hurled it over and over against an old mulberry tree. As she slammed the rug against the tree trunk she heard the dogs begin howling in their pound, so she decided to go up there, to see if Aramon was taking care of them or letting them starve to death.
    It was then, as she looked up at the house on her way to the