He wasn’t sure how well he liked Cray. The man was brusque, and had a short attention span that seemed to preclude conversation. He spilled things down the front of his clothes. But just when these characteristics would get irritating, Cray would return his attention to what they were saying, astonish with some insight, turn out to have been paying attention all along. When he talked about film he was impressive. Perhaps he was a genius. Tim could not tell.
He had begun in earnest to work on his film. The clipping box stood on his writing desk. He wore a preoccupied air, and made many, many phone calls to England and California.
Getting to know Cray, he found himself in a unique position to report on the doings of this reclusive and intriguing figure, but prevented by their growing friendship from violating the privileges of the intimacy. Meantime Cees was also urging him to stand by to handle any transactions with the thief, and this gave him a sense of double dealing, which was kind of irrational in that Cray and Cees both wanted in the end to catch the thief and save the Driad manuscript. Cees was right in imagining that intimacy with Cray would be enough inducement for Tim to hang around—that it was interesting to be in a position of privilege vis-à-vis this almost legendary figure. Cray must have assumed the same thing, that his very self made Tim’s serving him worthwhile to Tim. He was used to being served. He also gave Tim a new assignment.
“Could we find out what happened to the fucking boiseries? Could you do that? ”
Tim said he’d try.
“Do you have anything else to do?”
This startled and somewhat wounded Tim. Did he? Sure. What? Well ... There were a lot of things he should be doing.
“I read some of your stuff,” Cray said. “I had them get it for me. Where do you stand—with Reliance or with Concern? Aren’t there some natural contradictions there? ”
“I can usually see both sides,” Tim said. “It’s a kind of a curse.”
When several days had passed, they still had heard no more from the thief/caller. Once when the phone rang, it was Clara’s mother. Serge shook his head at Delia, signalling he didn’t want to talk to her, Delia should. “Why hello Mrs. Holly, it’s Delia Sadler? From down the road? I’m here visiting um Clara, she isn’t here now.” Delia looked at Serge for instruction.
They speculated that the millennium. manuscripts, and specifically the Morgan Library document the thief wanted to sell Cray, the Driad Apocalypse, were somehow connected to Delia’s absent friend Gabriel. Was that too large a leap? Not really, they thought. The man’s elusive surfacings, lying low even when he’d been cleared of the flea market murder, and now his possible association with millennium cults via his girlfriend in Oregon, seemed to suggest it more strongly than before. Tim thought he might talk to Delia about this possibility, but he had no need to bring it up, for the thing clarified itself.
On Friday, the day Cray hoped to have Clara’s release, Cray and Delia and Tim were assembled in the family room. It had become like a war room, with three telephones. When one of them rang, Cray nodded to Delia, who was closest to it, to answer. (Often he had Senhora Alvares answer, or a workman primed to maintain that the caller had a wrong number.)
A look of joy and recognition spread over her face before she had said a word. Tim and Cray tuned in. How could someone be calling Delia? But of course she had given out the number to hundreds of her various relatives and friends, with whom she stayed in practically minute-to-minute contact.
“Gabe, it’s me!” she cried. “This is so weird! How did you know I was here?” Tim heard her say this and drew nearer. One could imagine bafflement, even expletives on the other end of the line. Cray, who was reading in the corner, heard also and lifted his head. Gabriel, the mysterious young man whom Anne-Sophie had seen dragged off by the flics. The depth of Delia’s enthusiasm for this young man as yet unknown to them was abundantly clear.
Then she was volubly telling the caller all that had happened to her, and she spent long moments listening, presumably to what had happened to him in the two weeks or so since they had parted. Gabriel the missing.
“Are you all right? Where are you? I had to leave the hotel, it wasn’t safe,” they heard her explain. On her face a reassured expression that life would now go on as she had known it, her friend was extant, the telephone was working, all was normality and hope.
She looked up at Cray. “Can my friend stay here? Just until we can get his passport and stuff out of the hotel and some plane tickets?”
Cray looked at Tim. Perhaps he had the same intimation that Gabriel was also the manuscript thief, for how, indeed, had this Gabriel known that Delia was here? And how had he got the phone number, which was liste rouge but known to the manuscript thief?
“Certainly,” said Cray. “He would be most welcome. Tell him to come here.” She told him, and nodded, beaming, at Cray. Gabriel was apparently accepting the invitation.
“Can you give him the directions?” she asked, handing Cray the phone. “Hello,” Cray said, a note of joviality in his voice Tim had not heard before. “We are more than glad to have you here!” He described the buses from Versailles, the walk from the village, precautions about the dogs. Cray was pleased by the dogs. He was always sending some luckless delivery man off the path to find himself surrounded by snarling Rottweilers, and made to submit to an inquisition by the maître-chien, a Belgian, booted like an SS officer.
“A relief for you, Delia,” he said, putting down the phone. “Your friend is safe, the two of you can leave France as soon as you make arrangements, and meantime a safe haven here.”
“This is so nice of you,” said Delia fervently. “Oh God, what a relief.”
But even Delia’s rapture over Gabriel’s surfacing did not seem to rupture her new bond with Cray, for shortly thereafter he took her into the other room, pointedly excluding Tim.
30
Out on Bail
It took a week to return the shaken and furious Clara to her home on bail. A juge d‘instruction was assembling evidence for her eventual trial, promised for just before Christmas. Cray came for her with one of the lawyers, in the Land Rover—as he might have come to pick her up from the station after a shopping trip, she remarked bitterly when she walked out, shaking her hair and blinking in the bright autumn day, humbled, dirty, enraged. The forces of French justice arrayed themselves stiffly in the prison courtyard to watch her go. Cray sensed her anger.
“You wanted a limousine, you wanted some ceremony.” Cray laughed. “I should have realized.”
“No, no.” But she was inwardly angry with her husband that it had taken so long, and he with her because he had not been able to be more effective, though he had done everything he could. It was rumored that the American ambassador had complained on her behalf at the Quai d‘Orsay.
“Jean Beaumarché told me so himself,” said Christophe Oliver, the French lawyer with Biggs, Rigby, Denby, Fox.
In the days following Clara’s release, Tim became aware that the air at the château had continued to change and sour. Was it the drooling Rottweilers and the jackbooted keeper, introducing a note of danger to the comings and goings? Was it the note of energized involvement on the part of Cray, who now restlessly strode from room to room in the manner of a fevered sick person, or stepped outside to test the vigilance of the dogs, like one of those gothic lords of manors in the Victorian novels Anne-Sophie read? Was it the sense of irritation, even rage, emanating from the composed and ladylike Clara?
Thinking of herself as a calm person, Clara didn’t recognize rage when she felt it, not at first. When Serge, with the lawyer Chris Oliver, came to fetch her at the prison, part of her was glad to see them, reassuringly reanimated with indignation at her plight, setting things in motion, pulling strings. It was irrational, she knew, to blame Serge for this, though blame welled up in her, with barnacles of other faults and disappointments stuck to it. Lars. Other things.
Yes, part of her knew it wasn’t Serge’s fault. She even more than he op
posed hunting, and she was glad to be a martyr—up to a point—in such a virtuous cause. But when she thought of how Serge had not gone to prison, of how he had not rescued her until days and days had gone by, of how with devious foresight he had made her the owner of the house, of how he had sent Lars away, of how all her views were trampled and subsumed by his bulk, his money, his inactivity, the lethargy of artistic despair that enveloped her life too like a poisonous miasma, then a kind of despairing fury rose, the more powerful because she knew she had no recourse and would just have to endure it.
The first time Tim saw her after her release, she was standing in the courtyard when he drove in. She smiled in her heartbreakingly sunny way and took his hand when he got out of the car, as if to protect him from the dogs. She did look thinner to his eye, “drawn,” whatever that meant, with a tinge of a shadow under her eyes—all this serving only to increase her beauty by lending it a doomed and fugitive quality.
“Welcome, Tim. You’ve been so great with Serge,” she said, as though Cray were a demanding invalid she regretted having had to be absent from. They went inside. Another lawyer, Bradley Dunne, also from Biggs, Rigby, Denby, Fox, was there, following her around, maybe trying to assess the injury she had suffered, for some eventual claim.
How did you throw off the horror of all those days and nights in prison? Tim asked her this. Of course he wanted to hear about the prison, everybody did, and she had told her story, it seemed, numberless times in the twenty-four hours since her release. Her account already had acquired a certain practiced quality, all about the watery cross-sections of bony fish, the lack of coffee, and how chicory water was all she had had for seven days.
“Did you know about the coffee withdrawal headache?” she asked. “The most horrible headache, nothing works to help it. It sets in on the second day. After that you’re content to lie on your bunk, the pain is so awful. I suppose it lightens eventually, but the first thing I did when I got out was have a cup of coffee.”
“I can’t believe they can do this to an innocent person,” Tim heard himself say, though of course he could believe it.
“And surely the innocent must suffer more keenly than the guilty. For the guilty there must be a measure of compensation—you get a chance at atonement,” she agreed, smiling.
But it was not only Clara’s days in prison, it seemed, that lent the air of strangeness and irritation he was picking up on. She had got out to find that, in the week she was gone, Cray had become fascinated with Delia. Among his calls to California had been one to Woly, asking Monday Brothers to fund the sojourn of Delia in France for a few more weeks, to help with deep background for his movie. Since without a passport she had had little option but to stay, and since she clearly intended to wait for her friend to surface, it was not clear to Tim why he needed to pay her besides.
“Her little bones—delicious. Little twisted hip, don’t you find it ... ?” Cray chuckled. Tim didn’t quite know what he meant. That he found Delia sexy? Or something weirder, that he had a sadistic wish to crush her damaged little bones? Or was it that to admire the imperfect was a sort of criticism of Clara’s perfection? Or was it just that in Clara’s absence he had focused on the other docile female to hand?
“She is a member of a cult, did you know that?” he said. “Or rather, a consortium of cults. It’s very Oregonian, she tells me. The consorted cults of Oregon run the antique mall where she and her friend have a shop. She knows people who are into the millennium thing, Mormon polygamists, superpatriots, the black-helicopter people, nothing surprises her. I feel like she has been sent to me.”
“It’s the Far West,” Tim agreed. Though he had never been to the Far West, this was well known to be where the Y2K people and such were concentrated. But he had thought more Idaho, Montana, and could not imagine the sane little middle-class Delia in an attitude of fervent worship or cult membership. “What kind of cult, anyway? ”
“She says she’s not religious but that she agrees with many of the ideas of many of the people she knows. Ask her about them.”
When Delia came in, Cray would draw her away to the dining room to eat their sandwiches, excluding both his wife and Tim. Since this left him alone with Clara, Tim didn’t mind. His infatuation with Ciara—he did not put a more serious name to it—welcomed any conversation, any accidental brush of hands, any confidence from her that might seem to privilege his friendship. Of course he knew that Anne-Sophie was becoming aware of this distraction that had begun to eat at his heart—he found himself adopting the fulsome language that seemed the only language for this sort of thing: his heart was being eaten—but he couldn’t very well reassure Anne-Sophie, couldn’t say, “My crush on Clara isn’t serious, you know,” without dignifying Anne-Sophie’s suspicions and making them worse.
In the days that followed, the mysterious Gabriel still didn’t appear. Delia could be seen staring out windows and jumping when the phone rang—as did both Cray and Clara, for their own reasons, to do, Tim imagined, with the legal problems hanging over Clara. Sometimes Cray amused himself by teasing Delia.
“This is foie gras, Delia. Do you know how they make it? How they put this big cone down the duck’s throat and then pour grain in, all the creature can hold, force-feeding it endlessly so that its liver swells up huge—and that’s this, what you’re eating!”
“Ugh,” predictably. Then, “You think I’m a total hick, but in fact I know about foie gras. I suppose you’re just saying all this so you can eat mine.”
Though he knew he should have better things to do, like researching the sale of the boiseries, or organizing his books, or writing about something, Tim was getting to be a regular of the Cray household to the point that he now felt comfortable sitting in the kitchen, where Cray tended to sit and read, or in the little breakfast room adjoining the family room, a small space painted yellow and decorated with silhouettes in narrow black frames, where the newspapers stacked up and a radio was sometimes on. In the kitchen, the warm Aga cooker was increasingly attractive in the chilly mornings—the château was not easy to heat. From the kitchen, tall windows opened out onto a garden landscape of cement urns and plants silvered by the several frosts so far. A defunct fountain collected brown leaves in its basin. Senhora Alvares now thought of Tim as a factotum of Cray’s (rather than as, say, the admirer of madame), and greeted him with that mixture of deference and familiarity reserved by underservants for upper servants. On the payroll, Tim supposed he was Cray’s man at this point. He hung around because the alternatives were worse—moving his books to the new bookshelves, for example. But they had heard nothing further from the manuscript thief.
Tim had been in touch about all matters concerning Gabriel with Cees in Amsterdam, beginning when they moved Delia to the Crays‘. He knew Cees was interested in the Gabriel affair, but Cees had not said whether he thought it was connected to the Driad Apocalypse. Tim had discussed with Cees the possibility that Gabriel and the manuscript might be connected, and Cees had now told him that two other potential buyers on the list had also been contacted by telephone, by someone promising them the manuscript. Was it by Gabriel or someone else altogether? The other buyers, like Cray, had been told to cooperate with the thief and signal their willingness to buy his merchandise, but so far the thief had not made a second pass at any of the potential buyers he had lined up.
Tim wasn’t the only person hanging around. He, after all, had a reason, the manuscript mystery. Antoine de Persand found very slim excuses to appear twice when Tim happened to be there. He and Delia watched the dynamic—the beautiful woman, the handsome man, their compulsive glances. Surely Cray must have noticed too the impression the pair gave of being in the grip of some invisible spell. But it appeared he did not.
Tim heard Clara in the hall one morning just after he had got there and was putting his coat in the closet by the breakfast room. He went on into the kitchen, where Cray sat reading and Senhora Alvares was making coffee.
“Will you have ... ? We were
just about to ...” Clara was stammering.
“No. Thank you—merci, yes, s‘il vous plaît.” Antoine de Persand advanced a few steps into the kitchen. Then Clara, apparently deciding on a fancier environment, led him to the breakfast room that adjoined the kitchen. For a second the others hesitated, but Senhora Alvares took the whole tray of cups in there, so they followed: Tim, Cray, Delia. Clara had positioned herself at the foot of the breakfast-room table like the lady of the château and was bent over the cups. Persand was just sitting down, nearest her.
Looking up from pouring, she saw Cray appear. “You have met my husband,” she said to Persand. Persand stood and shook Cray’s hand, then Tim‘s, then Delia’s.
“So what is the respected mayor planning next?” Cray asked.
Persand hesitated. “I thought I should come and tell you. Are you sure of your surface here? I think he intends to challenge the legal status of some of your hectares, and perhaps make a right-of-way issue.”
Serge said, “Sit down, monsieur. Could you explain?”
There was the passing of cups, the ritual of sugar, conducted by Clara, who had retreated into an appearance of maidenly shyness, eyes trained on the coffee pot. In her mind was the humiliating moment when despite her principles she had made a pass—face it, it was a pass—at this man and been refused. Not something she could ever have imagined in her life. Hubris, hubris. But neither could she have imagined being in prison. Her heart pounded, her hand—it was ridiculous—shook when she glanced up to see Monsieur de Persand sitting at her table.
“You are familiar with the Loi Verdeille?” Persand went on.
“Of course. A law of astonishing fascism—”
Cray had explained to Delia that this law provided that the owner of a property of fewer than twenty hectares could not prevent hunters from hunting on his private property. Cray could not comprehend such a violation of private property rights in a free, democratic nation. When he had vowed to take it to the European court in Strasbourg, he had been told that others, similarly indignant, already had. But the court had not yet pronounced, and meantime it was a law of France that the small proprietor could not keep hunters out, though a large landowner could.
Le Mariage Page 18
