by Tim Roux
I raise my eyebrows.
(Really? For me?).
The Earl goes cloudy serious, leaning close to me to share an earnest confidence. “There are two rules at the gaming table: pay your debts and never accuse anyone of cheating unless you can prove it.” He makes an emphatic gesture with a nod of his head.
I laugh. “I thought you were going to say ‘no women’.”
“Oh, good God, no, there is nothing wrong with having women at the gaming table. It adds considerably to the fun, in fact. They not only look prettier than the men, they bluff better too. God built cunning into a woman’s soul. Most of the best card players I know are women. I am careful to place very small bets when they are about. My ancestors would never forgive me if I lost all our castles through misplaced bets. One of my ancestors nearly did that two hundred and fifty years ago, but he challenged the other man to an honour duel, killed him, and somehow all the debts disappeared. I think he learnt that trick from the kings of France. If he hadn’t been so ruthless, I would probably have been brought up on some God-forsaken Gloucester housing estate and be selling doughnuts naked on the beach right now.”
“I think you may be a bit old for that, Constance,” the Countess reminds him.
“True, true. You see, Paul, in my head I am as young as you are. Have you ever sold doughnuts naked on a beach?”
“Not even after the heaviest of nights out,” I reply.
“I think you should,” the Earl opines. “Would you take a bet?”
“It is possible.”
“The bet has nothing to do with selling doughnuts naked on the beach, you’ll be glad to hear. It is to do with our postman, a most unpleasant so-and-so who bears us a constant grudge.”
“For what?”
“For being British and for having a long driveway with an electronic gate at the bottom that is sometimes closed. We have managed to trap him five or six times in the last thirty years, and he hasn’t forgiven us. He marks a high proportion of our mail ‘return to sender – address not known’, as if anyone could miss a château in a small rural village.”
“So what is the bet?”
“Well, it is more a quest than a bet. About five years ago, someone sent me a parcel that I never received and that was never returned. To be honest, it isn’t even all that important. It is a small trinket, but it has become a battle of wills between myself and the troll from La Poste. It is hidden there somewhere, and someone is going to find it for me. So far seventeen valiant volunteers have tried and all seventeen have failed, so the offer is this: I’ll give you the €2,500 or whatever you will need to get yourself a new tooth if you recover my parcel.”
“It is very tempting.”
“Don’t be tempted, dive in.”
“It sounds incredibly difficult.”
“It sounds absurdly easy until you understand French bureaucracy. To an Englishman it is a question of marching in, flashing a sword, and demanding to see the chef, but that has been tried seventeen times and it hasn’t worked yet. We need a new approach. What do you say?”
“And what is the downside?”
“There is no downside. You recover my parcel and I will pay your dentistry bills. It may seem nothing to you, but to me, after five years, it is a labour of Hercules. Is it a deal?”
“It could be. I’ll think about it.”
“And the strange thing about those four I sent packing is that nobody owns up to having invited them. No wonder they didn’t know how to behave.” He places his hand on my arm. “You have been doing a fine service to this family and to the local community. Keep it up! It’s not for much longer.”
And he is right. Fiona will not be fertile for more than two or three days, and then I will be discarded with the rest of the trash.
Better make the most of it.
* * *
“So father has confided in you his quest of quests – the vanquishing of the revolutionary honour of M. le facteur?”
“He made it sound heroic.”
“I wouldn’t be surprised if it weren’t to the death.”
“What is in the parcel?”
Fiona sighs. “Nobody knows. Father keeps it an unfathomable secret. It will probably turn out to be a bar of soap.”
“Does he often come up with these quests?”
“He tried a couple on John, but he wasn’t playing ball. It all leads back to my grandfather who volunteered to fight under-age at the back end of the First World War. He got it into his head that a life was not complete until you had faced death a thousand times, which of course he did. So he decided to give Father these absurd challenges – to dive to the bottom of seas way beyond safe pressure limits; to climb the Eiger; to go into space; to burp into the Queen’s face at one of her garden parties. Apparently they were endless, and Father complied with most of them. Some were impossible. So now, after his death, Father mocks his father by giving my boyfriends, and anyone else who happens to be around, comic but definitely difficult tasks. It means that he likes you.”
“And seventeen others.”
“No, I think he disliked most of them intensely. He didn’t trust their motives, not towards me but towards him. I think he guessed that they were after his money. So he gave them the postal service task to get rid of them.”
“Either way, it looks like my chances are nil.”
“No, Paul. If he gave the task to you it was because he thought you could do it.”
“Well, I’ll give it a try. By the way, Fiona, we have still got to convince your father to persuade the police to search for Alice’s grave near Montauban.”
“I’ll have a word with him, I promise. I’ll talk to him later today. We may well be lucky with Father as he is psychic too.”
“You really think so?”
“I really think so.”
“Next question: what happens when you have stopped ovulating?”
“It’s then a question of waiting and seeing. I pray like mad that I’ll feel wretchedly sick in the morning.”
“I meant what happens between us?”
Fiona pulls a face and covers the back of my hand with her palm.
“I hope that we will remain good friends.”
“That is all?”
“Yes, that was the deal. I pay you £1 million to make me pregnant. You cannot make me pregnant after I have stopped being fertile, until the next time, If you want to try again. You are most welcome to come and stay in the Cotswolds. Peter and John will be delighted to have you.”
“But as of three days time or so it is all over between us.”
Fiona frowns. “I cannot justify fucking you, Paul, when there is nothing left to fuck you about except pleasure. That would not be fair on John. And I hate to keep repeating this – I am paying you.”
I flinch. “I am sure that you know as well as I do that I will never hold you to your deal. The £1 million is all yours, or perhaps our child’s.”
“Phew!”
“Phew?”
Fiona holds both my hands this time, perhaps to restrain me.
“I never did have the £1 million,” she confesses.
“And John?”
“I never had it for him either. Are you disappointed?”
“I told you I didn’t care. I am not here for the money. I am not a prostitute or a stud.”
“That’s a lot of money you have given away today - £1 million, ten thousand so far.”
“Oh well, if I find your father’s parcel, I can perhaps claw some of it back.”
Fiona looks into my eyes. “And I shall always miss you, Paul.”
“I shan’t forget you either, Fiona. How could I?”
“Yes, Paul, but I mean it. I shall miss you, and beyond two days’ time there is not a thing I can do about it.”
* * *
The circus is going on as ever outside. New people have arrived – Maggie and Reginald, apparently – old friends who live near the Affligem Hall in the Cotswolds. Millie and Chris have just left to pick up a yacht in St
. Tropez for a week’s sailing around the Med. A party has gone down to the beach somewhere, laden with champagne, fruit and water. Another lot are driving into the hills to find a new walk. Steph and Abe are shopping in Montpellier for their daughter Lizzy at Sauramps. Fiona is asleep in her bedroom after another gruelling insemination session with me. I cannot imagine that I have any fiable substance left to offer.
I like the Château in this state, when it is fully booked by a crowd of people who have gone somewhere else. It has the air of being well-used but in temporary respite, breathing peaceably.
I am doing a tour of the rooms to get a real feel for the place. I have only been through specific areas before. If the doors are shut, I don’t go in, but mostly they are ajar so I can bend my head around the openings to see if they are occupied.
I started with John and Peter’s bedroom at the top of our tower. It is immaculately tidy, everything positioned as if by a valet employing a set-square and ruler. They seem to have quite different tastes. There is a bottle of fizzy water on one side of the double bed and of plain water on the other. They each have their own pile of books. One pile is of celebrity biographies, the other, bizarrely, of Mills & Boon criminal fiction. In the bathroom, one uses Signal, the other Barbie toothpaste, with a manual toothbrush and an electric one to apply them. The bath itself has shampoo bottles, conditioner, apricot kernel scrub, skin lotions, shaving lotions, soaps lined all along the wall. There is an electric razor and several wet ones too.
I returned down the stairs and looked in on Fiona, sleeping with her back to me, loosely covered by a sheet. I stroked her bare back, ruefully contemplating the fact that it will soon no longer be mine. It was a surprisingly doomy feeling. I still haven’t decided what I think of Fiona. I have never been into older women, and she must be around thirty, yet I have more than enjoyed our Mrs. Robinson experience. I have always known that it would end, so I have never committed emotionally. Still, I don’t want to be simply discarded at the end of it, escorted past the gates, thrust beyond her family’s field of vision. There is no question that I like her. She is warm, and fun, and still beautiful, and we blend well together, but she is an exotic creature who remains way beyond my reach. In fact, she is in some ways more unattainable than Alice – a living spectre from a different social world that is visible in ours, but lies essentially beyond it. She can do what she likes, but she has chosen to bend down and do it with me. I am but a passing player in her family’s party theatre, yet the Earl has deigned to actually conduct a conversation with me today as somebody who is tangentially significant to him. I have never had the least desire to suck up to the English upper classes, but I have to say that in this case it feels good, it feels an achievement to have penetrated their outer circle, and to be on speaking terms with members of the inner one. I don’t want to lose that success. That is probably what really matters to me.
When Fiona says that she will miss me, they are just words she feels she has to say to the potential father of her child (or is that the father of her potential child?). She is flirting with an idea. Who knows, maybe she will miss me. I am certain that she is lonely in her self-sacrifice. And I will miss her in that I have never had a relationship as easy as this one, maybe because there was never going to be an end result beyond the contract being performed and filed away. We were not going to fall in love; we were not going to be friends. We were not going to keep in touch; we were going to conduct a brief, carnal holiday romance and pack our bags at the end of it with maybe a flutter of regret, one tear in the eye, then back to reality.
That is all that Fiona’s “I shall miss you” meant. It is what all teenagers say during a holiday fling, before they take the piccies home and show them off to their friends with sighs of “Ooh, he was gorgeous”. Fiona must be reliving old fantasies. I certainly cannot imagine her doing anything impetuous at the airport like clinging onto me screaming ‘Stay, Paul, stay. Don’t leave me. I need you. I will leave John and Peter, and turn my back on my family, all to come and live with your mum, dad and brother in your modest house in Tervuren’. Simply rehearsing the idea in my mind discloses how ridiculous it is. It would be like squeezing a cat into a hamster cage – it might enjoy the exploration but it would never appreciate the life.
My room. A few things sitting on the bed. Nobody sleeping there (Mike must have noticed).
Mike’s room. Well on the way to dissolution. Still requires a couple of days more to become wreckage. Ghost standing in the corner. “Bonjour, Madame.” She seems tranquil enough. I wonder why she is here but I cannot be bothered to ask. My mind is trailing speculations around my relationship with Fiona behind it.
Two doors shut opposite each other.
Door ajar. Not sure whose room it is, but a couple of children are sleeping on the floor, so it must be either William and Jennifer’s or Romaine and Adam’s. Family scene. Lots of family consumables, including tubes of sun lotion next to sun lotion sprays, hair brushes, children’s beds not made, story books, beakers, shoes everywhere, a lingering smell of stale breath and sweated sheets.
Steph and Abe’s room, I would guess. Another mattress on the floor for Lizzy. This one is much tidier. Lizzy’s bed is made.
Where do Fiona’s parents sleep - in the other tower? I doubt it. I assume that people of importance do not sleep in towers. There must be another level. Actually, come to think of it, looking at the house from outside, there is. So there will be another couple of bedrooms in the second tower, and perhaps a whole suite of private rooms, equal to six bedrooms and a couple of bathrooms on this floor, for the exclusive and private use of the Earl and Countess. Let’s have a look.
Well, I would if I could find a way up there. I have tried the tower but that leads to the tower bedrooms, as I suspected. There must be a hidden staircase somewhere because there is nothing off the main staircase. That stops on this floor. Is there an executive lift hidden somewhere?
In this part of the house, there is a huge concentration of entities floating around like dust particles in the sunlight.
As luck would have it, I am just descending the main stairs when I cross the Countess floating elegantly upwards.
“Hello, Paul,” she greets me. “Having a lazy afternoon?”
“I am trying to solve a puzzle, actually.”
“What sort of puzzle?”
“From the outside of the house there are three floors to the Château, but I can only discover two of them. There must be a way up to the second floor somewhere.”
The Countess smiles benignly. “Those are our rooms.”
I decide to risk the question. “But how do you get there?”
“Follow me and I will show you.”
She leads me back up the stairs and opens a door on the landing that I took to be a cupboard. Hidden behind the door is another flight of stairs.
“Come and have a peep,” the Countess invites me.
The stairs are quite narrow with creaky old wood.
We emerge onto the second landing.
“The house must have been converted around the time of the French revolution,” the Countess informs me. “I would assume that the door we have just come through would have been even more disguised in those days, although I cannot imagine that the ruse would have fooled anyone. After all, the workers who carried out the alterations were probably local. In fact, I happen to know that it didn’t work because the occupants were all executed – the Marquis de Reynauld, la Marquise and their two daughters, Louise and Marie-Anne. I often think of them as I climb these stairs, hidden like Anne Frank in their attic. It was a barbarous time. Think of the waste. I sometimes fancy I see them hanging around. Constance, who claims to be psychic, says he does see them.”
He is right. I can see them now, all standing together, with their heads back on. How does that work? Alice doesn’t have strangulation marks either. It’s as if they revert to the way they looked before whatever trick of fate killed them.
M. le Marquis bows to me. I bow
back surreptitiously. The Countess notices me doing it out of the corner of her ever-watchful eye.
“So you are psychic too, are you, Paul?” the Countess inquires.
“I try to keep it quiet.”
“Unnerves people, I suppose. You are sufficiently unnerving in your demeanour as it is. Whom can you see?”
I go over to them.
“M. le Marquis, I am Paul Lambert. This is the Countess of Affligem, although you will already know that.”
“You can speak in English,” the Marquis replies.
“You speak English?”
“We have been inundated by English over the last thirty years. How would we not? May I have the honour of presenting my wife, the Marquise de Reynaud and my two daughters, Anne-Marie (not Marie-Anne) and Louise.”
I bow to each in turn. The Countess looks on in fascinated amusement.
The Marquis smiles. “It has been an honour to meet you, however we do not wish to detain you,” with which statement he bows again and they all turn and process down the corridor and out of sight.
“What are they saying?” the Countess asks eagerly.
“They have just taken their leave,” I reply.
“Oh what a pity. I was formulating some questions to ask them. Another time, perhaps. Do you think that there is a way we could fix an appointment with you as an interpreter? I would guess that your French is better than Constance’s.”
“They speak English.”
“They do? How very modern of them.”
I point down the corridor. “They went down there. I could try to track them down and ask them for a meeting, if you like. However, I think we have been formally dismissed and I am not sure they would welcome more contact with us immediately.”
“Oh well, if we happen to bump into them, you can ask them.”
So I get a formal tour of the Earl and Countess’ private rooms – a huge state sitting-room, a regular-sized lounging room with evidence of much reading activity, a stocked kitchen, two bathrooms, three more bedrooms, and the master bedroom. I keep my senses trained, but I do not detect the presence of the Marquis and his family again.
