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Claire

Claire opens the latch of the gate with a click. Ralph, her beloved Alsatian, takes up position on the raised wall which surrounds the vegetable patch. She carries a bucket containing her worn kitchen knife - the blade thin and deadly sharp, the handle wrapped in twine. She enters and places the bucket on the ground beside her with a clatter, just beside the small water tank built to catch rain water. After she has skimmed any dead leaf debris from the face of the water, she takes the knife and the bucket and walks between the rows of vegetables to the far perimeter of the patch. There she deposits the knife on the ground and stoops over the cabbages. She mutters to herself as she collects any grubs that have accumulated over night. She tears off the yellowed leaves and places them in the bucket. Then she moves on to the winter lettuce. The leaves are too tough to eat, she thinks to herself, tough and acidic. I don’t know why I bother to grow them. No one eats them. Like all the marrows I produce every summer. No one wants them either, they just make more compost.

   Since she has been away the leaves of the tomato plants - a fine crop which had gone on until November - have finally withered and blackened on the stems. She must dig them out and prepare the ground for next year. She will order the rich manure from Jean Pierre, the mayor of Escuillens. That should have been done before but with all her health worries, culminating in the surgery to remove her gall bladder; she never got around to it. This is the first year since she became a widow in 1986 that she is not on top of the demands of the patch. And the 30 pots of chrysanthemums still on the tombs in the cemetery? She must find the strength to carry them all back and bury them in the ground in their pots to be ready for All Soul’s Day next year. Perhaps she should wait for Christian to come from Toulouse at the weekend, that’s if he’s not on duty. She wields the knife to dead-head the dahlias along the side wall.

   She pauses and stretches. What if Marcel should suddenly die and there is a funeral? It wouldn’t look too good if the chrysanthemums were still in the cemetery at the end of December.

   She has worked her way back to the gate and the bucket is full. She places the knife on the rim of the water tank. I mustn’t forget to take it home today, she cautions herself as she empties the bucket of garden waste on to the compost patch in the corner. She fills the bucket with water from the tank and retraces her steps, slowly this time as she is worried as to whether she is jeopardising her recovery by carrying such a weight so soon after her operation. But she is impatient to be well. ‘I will be fit as a flea in no time,’ she tells herself. ‘I can watch the seasons again in my garden’.

   Ralph, on the wall, senses that the resumed daily routine is drawing to a close. He stands up and stretches and barks a gentle woof to attract her attention. She comes towards him - her constant companion - with a spring in her step and after she has retrieved the knife to place in her bucket, she passes through the gate, carefully securing the latch.

 *         *         *

Marcel

   ‘You must go and see Marcel’, said Claire. ‘Il est déprimé.’

   ‘What’s wrong with him?’

   ‘He can’t eat. He is all alone in the house.’

   ‘What about his girlfriend - that large woman from Ariège? I thought she was looking after him.’

   ‘She was, but he refused to stay in her house. She was spoiling him. Elle le gâtait. Every thing was done for him - his chair all arranged with the cushions, special soups every day. Like a prince. But he didn’t like it. Said he wanted to die at home. He told his niece to make sure she put the good linen on the bed, in case he died suddenly. So now he is there all by himself. His family came to have Christmas with him but his sister lives in Mirepoix and his nephew and niece have to go back to work now the holidays are over. I saw him yesterday. He came down the stairs to see me. He was weak as a kitten. He needed a log - une buche - for the fire. He can’t eat and is living on two Maggi cubes and a handful of vermi celli in a glass of hot water. I offered to peel him some persimmon from the tree in his garden.

   ‘Take them all,’ he said, ‘I won’t be needing them.’

   ‘I must say they are delicious this year. I’ll bring you some over.’ She forgets about Marcel in her enthusiasm for the strange fruit - the orange kaqui fruit which hang on the bare trees in winter.

   ‘Oh God, Claire,’ I say, ‘what can we do when he has rejected his girlfriend and his entire family? We hardly know Marcel. I only spoke to him when he came to tend his parents’ grave in the early morning. Just a bonjour monsieur and the usual politesses. We can hardly barge into his house now he is dying and cheer him up.’

   ‘Yes it would cheer him up. He likes you being here in the presbytère. He always asks what you are doing.’

   ‘Well,’ said my husband, ‘I could always go and talk to him. Tell him how people remembered all the good things he did as mayor. How he put the new roof on the church. That sort of thing.

   ‘No, you can’t say that,’ said Claire. ‘Tell him there is hope. He has to go to the hospital next week for more chimio. He told me he wouldn’t be going. That chimio kills the spirit. It was the same with my husband. The first time you are ok. The second time just about, but then it’s despair.’

   ‘Come on Claire. Lots of people live with cancer and chemo. We’ll go and see him soon. When we think of what to say.’

   I think of this conversation with Claire as we stand at the back of the church five days later because Marcel did not wait for any further visits we or others might make and now he lies in his pine coffin on two trestles. His family found him after his sister became anxious when he did not answer the phone. The family came in a hurry and searched for him everywhere - outside in the fields and far away.

   Early in the morning on that day of my conversation with Claire he had descended the stairs from his bedroom. He had found the strength to remove a door in the wall he had made himself and which masked the existence of a well in the corner of the room. A well he had sealed off after the death of his neighbour and friend Robert. Robert had always insisted that water was sweetest from that well and filled a jug to take home to drink whenever he came visiting. The family did not notice the door of the well was ajar until after the police came. Then he was discovered in the well. He had found the strength to keep his face down in the shallow sweet water.

   ‘Oh tonton,’ his niece addresses the place where Marcel’s concealed head would be lying at the head of the coffin. ‘You could not wait to reap the harvest of your life. You left us and did not want to share another reunion. You did not want to hear any more about our lives. You did not wait for Robert’s anniversary so we could go together to the tomb. Your suffering removed you from us. We understand. But we miss you and we are so sorry that we couldn’t prevent you from taking your own life. Rest in peace tonton. We won’t forget you.’