The voices
raised outside the house drew me to the window, and looking along the
road I watched as the party approached.
"Oui !
Il est mort! Il est mort!" he shouted in frustration at the two
women who walked some distance behind him. It seemed in answer to
something earlier said.
With this
the tall elderly man with the shock of grey hair and suntanned face
strode in a manner belying his 82 years. His lean figure passed as he
continued his determined stride towards a house around the corner but
out of sight.
Behind
side by side walked his wife and his sister, quietly talking. His
wife walked falteringly with the aid of a stick slower than he did,
as usual she wore a brown felt hat and her woven wool jacket. She
needed to stop frequently ostensibly to look at something nearby that
had caught her eye but her sister-in-law, silent, continued almost
shambling alone in a world of her own, a world that had, not long
before been turned upside down.
The sister
wore her white hair cut in a manly fashion often seen on a spinster
her age; her trousers dark blue, her open cardigan a lighter shade of
blue over a white blouse and her white socks leaving a tiny gap for
flesh to show between the trouser bottoms and her black shoes. She
had lived nearby in the empty house to which her brother now strode.
Several
weeks before her other brother, the one with whom she had lived, had
been taken away to hospital having been ill for some months and who I
had often seen walking very timidly, being slowly led by the visiting
physiotherapist to exercise his wasting muscles. And a couple of
weeks just past he had died. His funeral over and his remains buried
everyone that had attended had eventually turned away and left the
surviving brother and sister to return to normal life.
But what
was normal life now?
Surviving
brother and wife went home and sister went to empty house. Before his
death she had thought he would return and fill the house with his
voiced demands as they lived like man and wife. He drove the car. He
went to work in his French blue workman overalls. She did the
shopping. She did the washing and she did the cooking and he did the
eating. Now he was not there. Now there was no one to make the
morning café for. Now there was no one to demand a bowl in which to
dip his bread.
Decades
before when they were young, their parents made demands. One brother
had travelled and married and started the next generation, but the
parents worried that their daughter would not marry quite so easily.
What was their fear? They made the brother promise that he would not
leave her. He must wait until she was married off before he could do
the same. She never married as they knew she would not.
They
shared the house and at least they shared some of the chores. But out
he went to drink at the café on the corner. And when he had drunk
that is how he would return home. Sometimes when the café closed and
Madame la Patronne had fallen asleep with
her old dog upon her sofa in the cellar, he would back his car out of
it's little garage and not so softly on the clutch he would shoot
off, down the road to another bar that would give him a little Bière
33 or a small glass of anis, and eventually without mishap he would
return. Presumably to eat the dinner that his sister had cooked for
him.
Decades
passed. They lived together much like a married couple. And gradually
he became ill.
He rarely
walked to his brother's house. He rarely got the lawn mower out and
cut the grass. That would be done by the lean brother down the road,
who would walk energetically past in his brown rubber boots, his blue
work jacket pushing a Rotavator, or carrying a basket of salad, a
bucket of potatoes fresh from the garden, a bunch of haricot verts.
And while he was there lean brother would cut the grass. Felt hatted
wife would walk to visit, and look at me and smile and say,
“Bonjour.”
When the
house needed painting lean brother would walk purposefully past with
a ladder on his shoulder ready to shin up and do the necessary work.
And the
years passed.
Now the
grieving sister is on her own. She lives like a widow. She feels like
a widow. She walks slowly past, on her own, nothing to return for. No
one to go home to. And everyone says her brother has died. No one
sees the loss inside. The ones she now needs most have no concept of
her loss, because they too have lost a brother.
He's heard
it all before. He does not understand how his sister feels. He does
not understand her sense of emptiness.
Oui! Il
est mort! Il est MORT!
But she
has lost so much more, and no one understands she is grieving as a
widow would.
Now
several months have passed; it is spring but winter is clinging on
and she walks slowly lost in her thoughts past my house between the
house of lean brother and felt hatted sister-in-law, and her own,
empty. She is in no hurry and now seems, as I watch her pass, a
shadow of the woman she must have been.
