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  The entire property was surrounded by tall trees that kept it hidden from view. She tried to see her cottage from the grounds, but it turned out not to be possible without venturing deep into the forest. She was about to do that when she heard Gilou's voice.

  “I must go,” he said. He was at the top of the steps, wearing his cowboy hat now. He looked heroic until he handed her a pair of rubber boots and a shovel. “This will keep you busy until I get back.”

  “What about the paperwork?” she asked. “I don't know if I'm even allowed to work yet.”

  “I'm the mayor,” he called, getting into his 4x4. “I'll fix it.”

  “These boots won't fit!” she called after him.

  “Then wear your pretty shoes,” he said. “It's not my problem.”

  “You want me to muck out the horses?”

  “Yes.”

  “Into the compost?”

  “Yes.”

  “But you also want me to move the compost.”

  “So move it.”

  “Where?”

  “Wherever you think is best.”

  And he was gone.

  She threw the shovel to the ground and the boots too. She called him in idiot.

  That all felt good.

  She strode towards the house and climbed the steps to have a peek inside while he was gone, curious as to whether the house was as simple on the inside as it was on the outside, but before she got across the threshold Patrick was there growling up at her furiously. He yelped once. Twice.

  “Okay, okay,” she said. “I'll muck out the horses. But you owe me.”

  Chapter 4

  Over the next two weeks, she learnt very little about her employer, except that he really was the mayor and that he really was every bit as obnoxious as she had initially thought him the first couple of times that they had met.

  On the hottest day of the year so far, he offered her a drink of lemonade. Until then, she'd had to bring a bottle from home, because he forbade her to walk five minutes down the drive to get one. Though he offered her a drink, he made her drink it outside, because her boots were dirty.

  “I could slip them off,” she suggested. “They don't even fit properly, remember?”

  “No time,” he said and went through to the back of the house where she was not permitted to follow.

  For the first few days she had been determined to see inside and had looked in the windows whenever he was out. Once she had even stepped over Patrick, despite his hysterical protests, to examine Gilou's nondescript, utilitarian front room. Like hers, it was a living space and dining area in one. Although she only had a glance, she saw that everything seemed to have a reason for being in its place. She saw cookware and dining utensils, a stove and pans, an old, oak kitchen table and three wooden chairs. There were coat hooks with a variety of jackets. Boots. Firewood. There were no paintings or magazines. No television. No visible radio. There was no sign of anything that might have given him pleasure, as if he existed simply to exist.

  She'd felt sorry for him that day, until he returned home in a foul mood and yelled at her to take the dog for a long walk, the longer the better, because he wanted them both out of his sight.

  “Who are you talking to?” she asked.

  “Now,” he said.

  She had no desire to enter his house after that. The animals were more fun to be around than him. Gitane always came over when she arrived, even after days of shooing her away and hissing at her. Eventually, Charlotte succumbed to stroking Gitane's nose, even when nobody was there to see her do it. The same day, Gilou the second had stopped ignoring her, though his mood remained sullen. Another week and a half had passed before she had worked up the nerve to stroke him too.

  “You pretend not to like this,” Charlotte observed, “but you're loving it. You are.”

  Gilou the second responded by following her across the clearing, leaving his shelter under the oak tree for once.

  “Great,” Gilou said from the porch. “Now you can really get in there with the shovel.”

  The chickens were all laying, producing over a box and a half of eggs every morning. Gilou never collected the eggs and so Charlotte did so on a daily basis, except for Mondays of course, and she left them on the step in a basket, cleaning them when necessary using wire wool and topping up the hay in the nesting boxes as Gilou showed her. At first, the stench of almost a dozen hens in a sweaty wooden box had been stifling, but by changing the wood chip flooring regularly – twice as often as Gilou had suggested – it became not only bearable chore, but a pleasurable task.

  “They you are ladies,” she became accustomed to saying. “Good as new.”

  In their way, the animals, even the chickens, responded to her, unlike Gilou, who remained guarded around her. The moment he caught himself smiling, he terminated the conversation in the manner of someone clicking his fingers.

  “Don't get used to it,” she thought angrily to herself one afternoon. “I'm not going to be doing this forever.” Like a child, she couldn't help adding: “And then you'll be sorry.”

  Indeed, though she spent each Saturday afternoon relaxing on the swinging chair in her garden, she spent every Saturday morning at the Pole Emploi, searching for other jobs for which she might apply. She took down the details of several employers, including a care home, a print shop and another based on her new found confidence in providing manual assistance. She didn't expect a reference from Gilou and had no intention of asking him.

  One morning, when she thought that she had the hang of working at La Gaillarde, she arrived to find Gilou hauling a large, perforated cardboard box out of the 4x4.

  “You're late,” he said. “Help me with this.”

  She took the box from his hands and he seemed surprised. Her arms were slender, but she was stronger than he expected, even after weeks of demanding work outdoors.

  “Where do you want it?” she said, smiling a grin of triumph. She used the circular holes in the box to improve her grip.

  “I wouldn't put your fingers in those holes if I was you,” Gilou said. “It might bite you.”

  Charlotte screamed and let the box fall. The top burst open and an enormous, black cockerel charged across the garden.

  Gilou sighed and shook his head in dismay.

  “I want you to introduce yourself properly,” he said. “Then I want you to introduce him to the girls.”

  The cockerel was heading straight to the chickens' enclosure. They darted about furiously and some of them hid underneath the henhouse, which she would have thought impossible if she hadn't seen it.

  “Those poor hens,” she said.

  “They need a man,” said Gilou. “You'll see.”

  “Where will he sleep?” Charlotte asked, grimacing.

  “With them,” Gilou said.

  “Don't listen to him,” Charlotte said to the cowering hens. “You're beautiful just as you are.”

  The black cockerel had fine feathers on its feet and an incredible spray of red and white feathers for its tail.

  “You're beautiful too,” Charlotte admitted, “but don't let it go to your head. Without these ladies, you're nothing. Hear me?”

  It spent the next hour running around the enclosure, chasing the hens and ultimately pinning them one by one, nipping painfully at the backs of their necks and sitting on top of them. A few seconds later it would jump off, triumphant, and the poor chicken would ruffle its feathers.

  When the cockerel attempted to do this within three feet of her, she picked up a broom.

  “Don't you dare,” Gilou yelled from the house. “This is nature. Don't interfere with nature.”

  “This isn't nature,” Charlotte said. “It's porn.”

  “Shh.”

  He went back inside.

  She swung the broom and the cockerel scrambled for the other side of the enclosure.

  “Try biting me like that,” she said, “and I'll break your wings.”

  It cowered in the shadow of the henhouse.<
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  Despite her misgivings, however, the cockerel did seem to integrate with the hens over a course of days. The hens would follow him around, despite her protests to the contrary.

  “As I said,” Gilou told her. “This is nature. For men to be dominant. And for women to do as they're told.”

  “But chickens have very small brains,” Charlotte said. “And if you consider the size of that cockerel, you'll see that there's not enough oxygen getting to its tiny, tiny head.”

  “... I don't understand you,” he said.

  “That's what I'm talking about.”

  He chose not to respond, which she thought demonstrated remarkable self-restraint, but she also realised that it meant he would pay her back for that later by adding a new job to her rota or demanding that she do it backwards or with her eyes closed or some other such nonsense.

  “Back to work then,” she said, first to break up a conversation for the first time in their working relationship.

  “Absolutely,” Gilou said, as if he had been about to say the same thing. “Allez. Back to work.”

  She picked up the shovel and let herself into the horses' enclosure, speaking in hushed tones to the mare, nodding briefly to Gilou the second. She positioned her bucket and set to work. Her arms ached and her back was sore, but her body knew what it was doing now. It wasn't long before she forgot about the pain in her biceps and the small of her back. She used her legs to take the strain where possible and twisted her hips, using all of her body to lift each shovel load. She dumped manure into the bucket by tipping the shovel with a minute flick of the wrist. She worked slowly, but efficiently. Like this, she'd be able to go on all day, all week.

  Feeling a discomfort that was mental rather than physical, she turned and found that Gilou was watching her from the step. She was wearing jeans and a t-shirt and the over-size boots he had loaned her, worn over three pairs of socks to keep them from slipping off. She wiped her forehead with the back of a red and yellow work glove and then blew the curls out of her eyes. Baked in the sun, T-shirt sticking to her back, she thought that she must have looked a terrible sight.

  Undaunted by Gilou, she returned to work, lifting the heavy bucket, carrying it over to one of three large compost bins and raising it high so she could dump the contents inside.

  She was aware of every part of her body: her long fingers on the rim of the black bucket, the muscles of her back pulled taut as she stretched up, the shape of her thighs in tight jeans.

  When she turned around, he was gone.

  The next day, she arrived for work in gear that was a little more modest, not least of all, because it was raining and she covered her garments in a pea-coloured raincoat that she had discovered in the cottage.

  “What are you doing?” he asked after about twenty minutes.

  “Just because it's raining,” she said, “doesn't mean that the place doesn't need looking after.”

  He stared at her long and hard and she thought if he told her she was an idiot now after all she had done for him, she'd tell him where to stick his job. Maybe even show him. Instead, he said:

  “Come inside.”

  She'd been expecting to be ignored or sent home.

  “Please,” he said. “You're getting wet.”

  “I never get sick,” she said. “I have a good immune system.”

  “Charlotte. Please.”

  She climbed the stairs and brushed past him to go inside.

  “My boots,” she said.

  “Don't worry,” he said and went over to the kitchen. In the meantime, she removed her boots and raincoat, hanging the latter on the available coat hook near the door. When Gilou turned, he seemed disappointed to find that she was wearing a jumper and baggy jeans.

  He handed Charlotte a coffee.

  “I don't know how you take it,” he said. “There is sugar on the table.”

  “I mustn’t,” she said.

  “Don't deny yourself,” he said. “You've worked hard. You need to replace some energy”

  It was the first time he'd acknowledged her work.

  “Milk?” she asked.

  “In coffee? Really?”

  “Forget it,” she said, and then added politely: “It's a beautiful room.” She couldn't help emphasising the word 'room', wondering when she might be invited to see the rest of the house. “How long have you lived here?” she said.

  “Three years,” he said. Again, that air of sadness. He kept looking at the soaking wet raincoat on the hook.

  Charlotte knew that she would have to keep the tone light or he'd close up on her again and she'd be back out in the rain. Before she could say more, however, he went on.

  “I built it over a period of a year and it was finished in the spring. The weather was as it is now.”

  “You built this room?” Charlotte said.

  “This house,” he corrected and sipped his coffee.

  Charlotte had come from London, where houses and skyscrapers were built by men in hard hats and cranes swung beams all over the place. Two weeks after work started it looked like nothing and then, almost instantly, it was finished. Houses were thrown up by teams of ant-like workers and their machines. They weren't built by … well … Gilou.

  She looked at the solid beams running across the ceiling and those over the windows. It had electricity and running water and everything. The kitchen, in fact, was beautiful. Though it was part of the dining room, it was spacious. It was tidy, because everything had its place. He'd obviously thought ahead and he'd seen to that.

  She was pleased that he had built something beautiful, but was sad to think of him living here all alone.

  “What are you thinking?” he said.

  His eyes were fixed on hers. He often seemed to be analysing her, but was as yet unable to read her. She liked that.

  “You're unhappy,” Charlotte said.

  “Sometimes I feel grumpy. Yes. Doesn't everyone?”

  “I didn't say grumpy. I said unhappy.”

  He shrugged.

  “Can I see upstairs?” she asked.

  “Yes,” he said, “but all in good time. We should get to know each other some more first. At least finish your coffee.”

  “I didn't mean it like that,” she scowled.

  “Now who's being grumpy,” he said.

  In the silence that followed she imagined him leading her upstairs and showing her the room in which he slept, ushering her inside, closing the door.

  “Why did she leave?” Charlotte asked, aware that she was pushing him into an area that was painful, but he had started it the afternoon he'd given her a lift up the hill.

  “Who?” he said.

  “I don't believe that you've always lived her alone,” Charlotte said. “Why did she leave?”

  He took a deep breath before answering, suggesting that the words, while going round and round inside his head, had rarely issued from his mouth before.

  “Everybody does,” he said finally.

  “Why didn't you go with her?”

  “Why should I?” he said.

  He slammed the conversation shut on her fingers. She realised that she had strayed way too far into personal territory, but it had been too interesting to stop, even if that meant that he now gave himself license to be a pig to her for the rest of the month.

  “When you love a thing, you have to set it free,” he said.

  “If it comes back, it's yours,” she finished. “And if it doesn't ...”

  “Exactly. So now you know why I am such a bastard.”

  “I'm sure this is only one of many reasons,” she said.

  They laughed uneasily and the ensuing pause between them was full of meaning. Like him, however, it was neither entirely decipherable nor entirely comfortable. She felt the urge to take his hands in hers and tell him that he needn't be alone, that everything would be okay. He may have picked up on this, because he chose that moment to refill his coffee.

  “You want more?” he asked.

  �
�I'm not sure I can handle more right now,” she said.

  “I meant coffee,” he said.

  “So did I,” she said.

  He folded his arms and looked out of the window where it was raining harder than before. Most of the chickens were in their house, but two had escaped and were hiding with the cockerel under Gitane.