Trespass by Rose Tremain

land. I’m selling everything.’
    Audrun stared at her hands, like root vegetables in the sink-water. Had she heard what she thought she’d heard?
    ‘Yes,’ said Aramon, as if reading her question. ‘I’ve had enough. So I’ve got onto it right away – before someone changes my mind for me. Estate agents came out from Ruasse. I expect you saw them when you were squinting through your curtains! Mother and daughter. Daughter wearing high-heeled shoes, stupid bitch. But they were interested. Very interested indeed. The market’s dipped a bit from what it was, but they say I can still get a good price, pardi , a mountain of money. Live in clover for the rest of my days.’
    Live in clover. Aramon?
    In such a scented, green and blameless thing?
    ‘Yes,’ he said again. ‘Sell to foreigners, that’s what the agents told me. Swiss. Belgians. Dutch. English. Plenty of them have still got money to burn, despite recession. And they like these old places. They tart them up with swimming pools, and God knows what else. Use them as holiday homes . . .’
    Audrun dried her hands on a torn dishcloth. She turned to Aramon and said: ‘It’s not yours to sell, Aramon. It belonged to our parents, and our grandparents . . .’
    ‘It is mine to sell. You had your sainted wood and your bit of land for your bungalow and your vegetables. I had the house. I can do what I like with it.’
    Audrun folded the torn cloth. She said calmly: ‘How much do you think you’re going to get for it?’
    She saw him look startled, almost afraid. Then he picked up a used match and with its charred end, wrote a number on his palm, then brought his palm – cupped, as though to hold a bantam chick – close to Audrun’s face and she saw what was written there: €450,000.
    Audrun took her medication and lay down for the night.
    She dreamed about the strangers who would install themselves in the Mas Lunel while, some way off, Aramon basked in his clover field.
    The strangers attacked the house with a peculiar ferocity, as though they didn’t want this house, but some other house of their own imaginings.
    They rearranged the land. A lake appeared. The colour of the lake-water was pink, as though it had been mixed with blood. They spoke some other language, which might have been Dutch. Their children rampaged around the yard, where Bernadette had sat in the sunshine, shelling peas. In the night, they cavorted, naked and screaming, in the blood-tainted lake and played rock music. The noise they made bounced and echoed from valley to silent valley.

On the evening before he left for France, Anthony dined with his old friends, Lloyd and Benita Palmer, in their house in Holland Park.
    Lloyd was a semi-retired investment banker who, over the years, had bought hundreds of thousands of pounds’ worth of furniture from Anthony. Benita was an interior decorator who’d created the rooms where this furniture sat. Her preferred palette of colours ranged from straw to cream to coral. In her downstairs lavatory, decorated in apricot toile de jouy , stood an 18th-century snakewood and mahogany vitrine (‘The brass galleried top over a flower-painted frieze, the base with two snakewood inlaid doors and parcel gilt festoon apron’) worth at least £16,000. In the beige and cream and gold dining room, where they now sat, hung a pair of oil paintings by Barend van der Meer (‘Fine example, still life of plums and grapes with vine leaves arranged on a glass dish, 1659’ and ‘Fine example, still life of pomegranates with African grey parrot, 1659’) worth a conservative £17,000 each. The George III silver wine coasters (‘The sides pierced with scrolling foliage with waved gadroon rim’), that had come to rest in front of Lloyd’s place at the table, Anthony had picked up in a sale in Worcester for £300 the pair and sold on to Lloyd for £1,000 each.
    Though Anthony had often teased Lloyd Palmer that he was one of the ‘rich bastard masters of the