Girl At the Lion d'Or

by Sebastian Faulks

  ‘In two weeks’ time, monsieur? I can go in two weekends’ time?’

  ‘Yes. You can go in two weekends’ time. If it’s that important to you.’

  Anne wanted to kiss the Patron on the cheek, but restrained herself by thinking that only a few minutes ago she had thought him the most daunting man in the world. He took up a pair of spectacles from the desk and looked at her.

  ‘You can go, young woman, you can go. Enjoy it for me, too. Do one thing in return. When next you pass the memorial in the Place de la Victoire, stop and look at the list of names. Try to imagine that they’re not just letters chipped into rock but that each one has a face, a laugh, a look. My life might just as well have ended with them, too. But yours is possible because of them. It won’t happen again. You can be sure of that.’

  ‘I’ll look, monsieur, I promise.’

  Anne left with shining eyes and, quite forgetting herself, went down by the front stairs to start her evening’s work. The Patron stared for a few moments through the door she had inadvertently left open and wondered if she had quite grasped his point. Presumably it was for people such as her to have their freedom that so many millions of men had died; there could be no other conceivable reason, he thought.

  7

  CHRISTINE HARTMANN SAID nothing. That, she sometimes thought, would be her epitaph. ‘Here lies Christine Hartmann, who said nothing: 1902–19 . . .’? 1972, perhaps. It would be a long time to keep quiet. It might also be unwise, when there was so much she noticed that could be harmful if not checked in time.

  Sometimes at night she would hear from somewhere in the depths of the house a sound like a gun-shot. Then the silence of the night returned, so dense that for a moment she could hear nothing; until there would come the choking call of a wild bird that had strayed alone into the small hours of the morning, and then the low murmur of her husband’s breath.

  Tensed and flat, she lay waiting, but the sound seldom came more than once a night. Of course there were other creaks and groans: the wooden stairs would ease themselves out against the flanking wall with a mellow timber sigh, or snap with splintery temper in the contraction of the cold. There was often a remote, irregular banging from the door to the scullery in the south tower which the maid, Marie, after washing the dinner dishes, unfailingly forgot to close before going to bed. The shutters in the attic could occasionally be heard grating slowly on their thick rusted hinges, and down the long corridors of the first floor the worn planks rumbled and squeaked in a capricious but not discomforting way. At times like these Christine imagined the whole body of the house and all its contents to be shifting in its sleep, the immobile outer walls and towers not quite able to hold in equal stillness all the disparate inner parts. It was hardly surprising, when one considered the different portions of the earth and living world that had been plundered to fill the place: unrelated oxides fused to make glass and flattened into windows framed by felled and sliced trees; marble quarried and carved into decorative mantelpieces on which sat lamps compounded of different or unwilling metals; powdery plaster fixed by water in a brittle firmness unnatural to both. It was only to be expected that a little restlessness be shown at night – an aching of elemental parts which stretched to find their former selves. In this way, Christine thought, the house was like a human brain stilled by a temporary sleep which allowed the brash constituents of its personality the indulgence of a brief and limited self-expression, like a dream.

  The gun-shot, then, was an intruder. It bore no relation to what the rest of the house was doing. As she went about the rooms in the morning, opening the shutters, Christine wondered what it was. There were no bullet-marks in the window-frames, no signs of violence, though many of the rooms had jagged cracks along the walls, and sometimes in the ceilings. There was a rough grey dust on some of the bedroom floors, she noticed, which didn’t look the same as the soft and colourless fluff that gathered along the shelves, most of which, she had somewhere read, was the result of the human skin’s frantic self-renewal.

  When Christine mentioned the sounds she heard at night to Hartmann, he told her that all old houses made such noises, and when she pointed to half a dozen cracks along the landing and in the bedrooms he said they had always been there and that plaster shrank and had to be repainted. There was time enough, he said, to fix it.

  There were other matters more pressing than the odd stray fall of dust, about which Christine also said nothing. She noticed a change in Hartmann’s behaviour and in his response to her, but she merely watched and waited. The outward forcefulness of her character was balanced by a sense of delicacy and Catholic shyness which restrained her. In matters of the flesh she felt guilty towards Hartmann and always feared the loss of his attentions. She also thought it tactically best to say nothing. She knew the workings of Hartmann’s mind and knew too that, left alone, he was likely to be entangled by his conscience, while if she gave him a chance to talk to her he might sweep her worries aside with his reasonableness.

  In particular, she was distressed that he found it necessary to go to Paris for a long weekend to discuss some complicated business matter. Why did he have to make two trips, one now and one at a later, still unspecified date? Why had he not offered to take her with him on either occasion? And why did he seem so elated by the prospect of the trip when only a short while ago he had said he had no desire at all to return to the city?

  She had packed his suitcase and he had told her he would be back on Monday night. She stood in the doorway of the house and waved him goodbye. He had said he would drive to the nearest big town to catch a train, since the small branch-line was so unreliable. Christine nodded in silence. She watched as he threw his suitcase in the boot and nosed the old black tourer round the edge of the house and up the bumpy drive through the pine trees.

  Hartmann had initially felt some misgivings about telling Christine he was going to Paris, but his guilt didn’t last for long. He felt he had already passed a point from which he could not turn back – with the hiring of the rooms, the flowers, the wine, the letter back to Etienne confirming the weekend. The complaints of his conscience were soothed by two reflections as he drove into town under a greying sky: first, the feeling he had for Anne was entirely of a positive and kindly sort; and second, he intended only to give her the opportunity of a break from the drudgery of work.

  Anne was waiting for him. It was a short walk from her lodgings near the church, up past the reservoir and out on to the main road. She had gone with her head bowed, nevertheless, and her face concealed by a headscarf. She was worried that she wouldn’t have the right clothes for the weekend: her smartest dress looked tawdry when she held it to the light, and perhaps in any case the other women would be wearing long dresses and jewellery. Hartmann had promised her the stay was quite informal, but she was uneasy.

  At last she heard the sound of a car slowing down as it crossed the bridge out of town, and of its wheels turning the gravel on the roadside. There was a short blast on the horn and Anne looked round to see Hartmann gesturing from behind the wheel. She grabbed her case and ran over to him.

  For some reason it had never occurred to her that they would travel by car. Where she had imagined herself sitting elegantly in the corner of a train compartment she now found the wind rushing back through her carefully brushed hair and lashing it about her face. She watched him as he drove, his face composed and humorous as he told her what he expected to happen at the weekend. Anne found herself almost unable to speak, so great was her excitement. Hartmann seemed not to mind, and, seeing this, she began to laugh at his descriptions of his friend and the sort of house he thought it would be. The tree-lined roads and small towns through which they passed were nothing extraordinary in themselves, but to Anne they seemed lit by an inner radiance, so that even the torpid peasants in the fields and sullen bourgeois in the shops were like figures from a painting or a film.

  They stopped briefly for lunch in a café, but Hartmann was concerned that they should not b
e late. He was also worried about his car, which had never been reliable and which, he said, few garages seemed able to mend.

  They drove on through thickening countryside until they reached a small village where Hartmann stopped and consulted his instructions. Five minutes later they pulled up outside a large farmhouse surrounded by stone outbuildings.

  ‘Remember, don’t be nervous,’ said Hartmann as he took her case from the boot. ‘I’ll make sure everything goes all right.’ He smiled at her. ‘And you’d better stop calling me “monsieur”.’

  Anne nodded mutely and followed him to the front door. It was opened by a man of about forty with florid cheeks and what seemed to Anne almost comically countrified clothes of wool and leather, with tweed breeches and a yellow waistcoat.

  ‘My dear Charles! How are you?’ Etienne Beauvais shook his friend’s hand and then embraced him. ‘You’ve arrived at just the right time.’

  ‘May I introduce –’

  ‘Of course, of course, you must be Anne. Delighted, my dear. Charles has told me so much about you. Please come in. You’re the last here,’ he added, leading them over the flagged hall. ‘We’re all gathered in the morning-room. Now throw your cases down there and Armand will take them to your rooms. Perhaps you’d like a wash, though, after your journey? Mademoiselle?’

  ‘I don’t think I –’

  ‘A good idea,’ said Hartmann. ‘We’ll join you in a minute.’

  Etienne rang a bell and a small man in an apron arrived to show them upstairs.

  ‘Don’t be long now,’ said Etienne. ‘We’re having a terrific time down there and the others are dying to meet you.’

  His words had the opposite of their intended effect on Anne, who thought she would like to spend as much time as possible in the seclusion of her room. Armand led the way up the stairs, apparently struggling under the weight of the bags, even though Anne knew for certain that hers wasn’t heavy. He paused for breath at the top before theatrically bracing himself for the final haul down the corridor.

  ‘Your room, mademoiselle,’ he said, elbowing open a door and putting down the case. ‘This way, monsieur.’

  Anne’s room had low beams, small windows and a large brass bed on which she sat, breathing deeply and trying hard to tell herself not to worry. As far as the other guests and even her host were concerned, it didn’t matter: as long as she was polite, then she didn’t mind if she made some social error. The difficulty was with Hartmann. She began to unpack, hoping her one good dress would have survived the journey.

  There was a knock at the door. ‘Come in,’ she said uncertainly.

  It was Hartmann. ‘Don’t look so frightened!’ He laughed. ‘You can leave the unpacking. They’ll send a maid to do it later.’

  ‘All right,’ said Anne, as if this were the most normal thing to her. ‘But don’t I have to change my dress for dinner?’

  ‘No. I’m not changing. You saw what Etienne was wearing.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Anne, feeling, to her shame, a smile twitch at the corner of her lips.

  ‘Well then! It’s not exactly the opera, is it? Comic opera, perhaps . . .’

  Anne laughed a little.

  ‘Now listen, Anne.’ Hartmann took a step closer. ‘You’re going to enjoy this. There’s nothing that can go wrong. Etienne’s a very nice man. I’ve told him who you are and how I know you. He won’t embarrass you, I promise. If the other people are stuffy or difficult, just be polite and smile and give nothing away. You’re here because you’ve been invited and have every right to be here. Is that understood?’

  Anne nodded.

  ‘There’s nothing to be frightened of. We’re here to enjoy it. Now then, have some of this.’ He took a hip flask from his pocket and offered it to her.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘Rum.’

  She drank a little and gave it back to him.

  ‘All right?’ he said.

  ‘Yes, thank you, monsieur.’

  ‘Not “monsieur”.’

  ‘All right.’

  ‘All right, what?’

  ‘All right . . .’

  ‘All right, what?’

  ‘All right, Charles,’ she whispered.

  No sooner had she stepped inside the morning-room than Anne found her arm taken by Etienne. A drink was placed in her hand and she was seated by a large fireplace and introduced to Etienne’s wife, Isabelle, a dark, austere-looking woman whose handshake crunched Anne’s fingers, strong as they were from working. Then came Isabelle’s brother, Marcel, the man whose ownership of land had brought Etienne down from Paris. He was less countrified in his dress than his brother-in-law and rather more composed, though quite friendly in his greeting. He introduced her to Mireille, a woman whose low-cut black dress revealed metallic rows of jewellery on an unusually bony chest. She offered Anne her hand without smiling, and Anne, who thought she looked like some sort of countess, murmured ‘Madame’ as she looked towards the floor. She felt the other woman’s eyes pass momentarily over her own dress and hair, which she had tied back in the bedroom but which she could already feel beginning to escape, a long strand stroking the nape of her neck when the air from the open window caught it. She felt again the inadequacy of her clothing, but forced herself to raise her eyes. She thought she saw a flicker of amusement in the Countess’s face.

  Etienne seemed to have accounted for every minute of the forthcoming weekend. Anne noticed that his brother-in-law viewed him with a benign patience as Etienne explained the vagaries of the local climate and how this had affected the production of truffles and the nesting habits of the local game birds. It seemed that there was to be an expedition on the following day in which all twelve of those present would take part. The night would be spent at a place called Merlaut, which obviously had great important for Etienne. ‘It’s an enchanted place, my dear Charles,’ he said. ‘You wait till you see it.’

  Although the atmosphere was not as formal as Anne had feared, the party had been carefully chosen, and Isabelle moved assiduously from group to group to make sure all was well. Anne noticed that no one asked about her job or how she knew Hartmann. She presumed that they had all discussed her before she came downstairs, or even earlier. Perhaps that was why they were all having such a ‘terrific’ time in the morning-room, according to Etienne, when she and Hartmannn had arrived: what a scream, the Countess would have said, to think of Charles bringing down his little mistress from the local bistro . . .

  She glanced over to where Hartmann stood by the window talking to Etienne’s brother-in-law. His head was slightly on one side as he listened to what Marcel was saying, yet his body was relaxed and he had even raised one foot to the wooden window-seat as a man might do in his own house. She looked longingly across at him, seeing in a movement of his hand and rush of laughter the vestigial enthusiasm of his imagined boyhood which had so charmed her by the tennis court. How was it possible, she wondered, to be awed by someone and yet to feel protective towards him too?

  Some of the guests were tired from long journeys – one couple had come from Paris – and this increased their sense of relaxation when they saw that Etienne had taken charge and there was nothing more for them to think about. The men drank freely, as if they were anxious to forget where they had come from; and, as they drank, their talk became exuberant and began to include more and more people at a time, until one of them would speak to the entire room.

  As they rose to go into dinner, Anne told herself again the words that had been scored into the years of her childhood: be brave, little Anne, be brave . . . her guardian Louvet’s purplish face loomed up in front of her and his philosophical finger wagged: ‘Courage is the only weapon, it is the only thing that counts.’

  At dinner she found herself between the man from Paris and Marcel. They drank different wines with every course, and Etienne loudly encouraged her to drink more freely, himself setting an impressive example. Hartmann and the man from Paris appeared to be teasing Etienne, who was answering bac
k robustly. Anne wasn’t sure if they all knew each other already or whether they had simply lighted on a jovial bond that was common to all men. There was talk of Bouvard and Pécuchet, who, she knew, were characters in a book. Since she hadn’t read it, however, she couldn’t see why the application of the names to Etienne was making the men laugh.

  After dinner Isabelle said she was fed up with the sound of male voices and invited Anne upstairs where she had something she wanted to show her. Anne obeyed dutifully and the Countess followed them. Although it was a traditional farmhouse, it had been lavishly decorated inside, and Isabelle’s bedroom, where she now led them, had beautiful striped drapes and little sofas and chairs of the most delicate and expensive-looking kind. Anne found herself invited to sit at Isabelle’s dressing-table. She took a comb from her bag and began to pull it through her hair, even though, as far as she could see from the mirror, it would make very little difference.

  ‘Allow me, my dear,’ said the Countess, stepping forward and taking the comb from Anne’s hand. ‘Such pretty hair,’ she said, as she combed it. ‘A beautiful colour.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘But why do you tie it back like this? Why don’t you use a slide? You must have this one of mine. Here.’ She untied Anne’s hair then combed it back into position before slipping a thick jewelled comb in one side.

  ‘But won’t you want it yourself?’ said Anne, who felt uncomfortable at having this stranger organise her appearance for her.

  ‘No, no. Not this evening, my dear. Do have it. It gives you such an air of . . . distinction.’

  Anne retired, confused, from the dressing-table, and pretended to be looking at the pictures on the wall. Isabelle evidently had nothing in particular to show her; she had just wanted a break from the men.