Trespass by Rose Tremain Read Free Book Online Page B

dog pound, that Audrun noticed the crack in the wall. It was an immense, dark fissure in the stone. It ran down from under the eaves, like a fork of lightning, skirting a window frame and narrowing as it sped on towards the door.
    Audrun stopped and stared. How long had the crack been there?
    She felt time begin its peculiar pull between past things and present awareness. Had she looked a hundred times at this lightning strike in the front wall of the Mas Lunel and never seen it – until now? The howling of the dogs grew in urgency. The still-dusty rug in Audrun’s arms felt as heavy as a corpse. She walked slowly on.
    She remembered sitting with the men who built her bungalow, sitting on the stony earth among the recently delivered slabs of plasterboard while the Camembert the builders were eating for lunch ripened in the sun, and hearing them say that, all over the Cévennes, cracks were appearing in the walls of old stone houses. The taller the house, the deeper ran the cracks.
    And nobody knew why, said the men. These dwellings had been built to withstand time. But they were not withstanding it. Time, it seemed, destroyed everything at a faster pace now, at a pace no one had ever envisaged.
    ‘Do you think that the Mas Lunel could fall down?’ she’d asked the builders. And they’d all turned and stared up at the big hunk of a house, solid as a caserne , tucked in underneath its wooded hill. ‘Not that one,’ they said, shaking their heads. ‘That one should see us all through.’
    Audrun had said nothing. She’d just watched the men spreading the oily Camembert on their baguettes and putting the hunks of bread and cheese into their mouths. But, privately, she believed they were wrong. She believed that, if you built a house in a U-shape and then, as Serge had done, tore down the buttressing arms of the U, you left something that was vulnerable. Whatever was incomplete – a cherry tree leaking sap from a torn branch, a well that had lost its cover – was at the mercy of nature.
    In the human world, only love was adept at completion.
    Audrun went into the dog pen and the hounds clamoured round her. Bred to hunt wild boar, wiry and fearless, they chafed and whimpered in their pent-up life, spent their existence with their noses pressed against the wire.
    Aramon still belonged to a hunting syndicate and liked to boast about the boar he’d killed in the past, but he seldom went on the hunts any more, knowing he was too unsteady to manage a shotgun correctly. He seemed to prefer sitting and drinking and staring at the jumpy, violent life on his new TV, where younger people, people with greater agility, tortured and killed and were tortured and killed in their turn. And his dogs were all but forgotten, abandoned to monotony and winter cold, fed chestnuts like the pigs, fed swill and bones. Today, even their water trough was dry. As Audrun filled it up, anger with Aramon made her rib-cage ache, set a vein twitching in her neck. One day, she told herself, all this would be put to rights. One day.
    In the kitchen, scouring his blackened pans, scraping grease off the stove, Audrun said: ‘You know there’s a fissure in the front wall, Aramon?’
    He’d come in with the two dead bantams and thrown them down on the table. Now, he was fumbling with his spectacles, found by Audrun under his pillow, the wire arms bent out of shape by the weight of his head.
    ‘I’ve seen that,’ he said. ‘It’s nothing.’
    Audrun said he should ask Raoul Molezon, the stonemason, to look at it, but Aramon said no, he’d looked at it himself and it was a crack in the mortar, that was all, nothing to start sweating about. Then he tugged his bent spectacles onto his nose and searched for his cigarettes and lit one and coughed and spat onto the stone floor and said: ‘I’ve had enough, anyway. It’s driving me mad, this big shit-hole. It’s pulling me down, ruining my health. So I’ve decided. I’m selling the house. And the