Wildfire Quest

by Jane Arbor

  His glance held hers. ‘And no doubt keep oranges in it on your dining-room buffet?’ he quipped lightly as Ninon, hiding a little yawn behind her fingers, suggested that if he had quite finished buying tourist trinkets, they should make a move.

  They were on their way to the main Place when a tinny music, probably common to the whole world, coming from a side street, brought Raoul to a halt.

  ‘A roundabout ! This you must sample,’ he ruled as, a hand under each girl’s elbow, he guided the party to a small square where a tawdry merry-go-round of blank-eyed wooden animals, their saddles worn, their supporting barley-sugar brass poles bright with the friction of hundreds of hands, circled and jigged and mechanically creaked to a halt at the end of each franc’s worth of passenger-ride. As always, the music was free, thrown in as bonus. It ground on and on.

  The animals were a host of Ark diversity and pairings—two horses abreast, two zebras, the black of their stripes badly scuffed; rather improbably, two fishes and a couple of eagles, a bland-faced cow paired with an equally bland sheep, a shape that was vaguely tigerish and a dozen or so others. Raoul scrutinised them critically as they slid past, announced, ‘That under-privileged lion is the boy for me,’ and went to the ticket-booth, the others dawdling behind him.

  The swarthy type behind the grille put a question in dialect which Ninon cut in to answer.

  ‘Not for me. Count me out,’ she said sharply, adding to Raoul, ‘You can’t possibly want to patronise this ramshackle outfit? Come along—we are going to be late on the Place!’

  He did not move. ‘All in good time. These good folk are as much in need of custom as anyone else selling their services to mugs like me,’ he said.

  ‘Then give the fellow a good pourboire; he’ll settle for that.’

  Raoul’s brows went up. ‘Offer a tip for no services rendered? You should know the Basque pride better than that, ma mie,’ he rebuked her lightly. ‘As likely as not, he’d throw it in my face!’

  ‘These aren’t true Basques or true anything. They are simply wandering gipsies from over the border!’ Ninon retorted.

  Raoul shrugged as if he gave in. ‘All right, then. Say instead, if you like, that I want value for my money.’ He looked across at Arnold. ‘A ticket for a mount for you, my friend?’ he asked.

  Arnold laughed and shook his head. ‘I’m too old for such antics, I’m afraid.’

  Raoul looked at Maryan. ‘You?’

  She hesitated for only a moment. Then, ‘Please,’ she said, if only for the sake of variance from Ninon.

  Raoul turned back to the grille. ‘Two then,’ he said, and to another question from the man, ‘One, I think. I notice that Monsieur King of the Forest’s fashioners gave him a very broad back. And not entirely without intention, I daresay?’

  The gipsy’s reply to that was such a meaning nod and wink in Maryan’s direction that it wasn’t difficult to guess that Raoul’s ‘One,’ meant he had elected for one mount, not two. But as they waited for the lion to come round and stop for them, he told her so, adding ‘Cosier on all counts, I thought. For instance, you might have had Madame Lioness, side by side with Monsieur. But how could we conduct any social chat with one of us going up, while the other was going down, I asked myself? No—’

  Maryan laughed a little headily as he helped her on to the lion’s back and mounted side-saddle behind her, one arm lightly round her waist, the other hand just above hers, clasping the brass pole.

  They giggled and swung their legs. Raoul made pseudo-polite conversation—‘Do you come here often, mademoiselle?’; ‘May I have the supper-dance?’; ‘The band is a good one, is it not?’—and Maryan, taking her cue, replied demurely in kind. The whole thing was so fairytale, so out-of-the-world absurd, that there was no embarrassment to it—only, for her, the memory that she and Raoul had clowned in the same way once before. It hadn’t lasted then, and it wouldn’t now. But while they could behave so foolishly, the experience was very sweet.

  The machinery slowed and halted. Raoul’s hand slipped from her waist and they alighted, to find the other two had gone on without them—at Ninon’s suggestion, Maryan felt pretty sure, though she didn’t say so to Raoul.

  Before they reached the main square they were drawn into the dancing chain of a farandoule, done at a dizzy gallop along the streets before, on the square itself, it turned into a version of Sir Roger de Coverley and then to the headlong speed of a tarantella called an Arin Arin in which most of the amateurs gave best to the professionals, and dropped out to draw breath and order drinks.

  The highlight dance of the evening was the Mascarade, a wholly professional affair in centuries-old traditional costume and symbolism.

  There was the bell-bedecked jester, the leaping ‘carry-cat’, the young squire in his high red bonnet on a hobby-horse, a Lord, a Lady, a pigman, a banner-bearer and opposing teams of Reds and Blacks who staged a mock battle, then made peace in a stylized gavotte as a preliminary to the climax of the danse du verre, in which all the characters took part, cavorting and twisting intricately around and over a filled wineglass, never touched nor upset.

  And then, hard upon the frenzy of the Mascarade came the speciality of St. Jean de Luz—its great papier-mache Bull, laying about itself in bovine rage, its fiery nostrils emitting showers of sparks—the signal for the competition of bursting balloons in its face, for screams and pretended hysterics and for the girls to cling to the nearest boys in pseudo-terror.

  The antics of the Bull virtually brought the night’s carnival to a close. For the tireless there would be more dancing and more eating and drinking and roistering. But the crowds began to thin; people were going home. For the return journey the Peyrolle foursome changed partners, Ninon electing to share the back seat with Arnold, for some reason she did not disclose. Out of pique with Raoul over the roundabout incident? Maryan wondered. Who was to know?

  They dropped Arnold first at the Lion d’Or, then both Ninon and her car at La Domaine. Raoul would walk Maryan down to the Pavilion before picking up his own car to drive back to Bayonne.

  It was Maryan who first noticed the log carport was empty, but her start of surprise caused Raoul to look that way too.

  ‘Why, where’s the Renault? Where is Lois?’ he demanded, staring.

  They both glanced at the dark little house, then at each other. Maryan began, ‘I don’t—’ then checked, remembering. ‘That is—well—’ She broke off again.

  ‘Well, what?’ Raoul demanded. ‘If you knew she would be out, why don’t you say so? But for pity’s sake’—his gesture was exasperated—‘it’s the small hours! Where can she be?’

  Maryan began again, ‘Until now? I don’t know, but—’

  ‘But you know something! What?’

  She told him, blaming herself too late for having kept from him Arnold’s probable sighting of Lois at St. Jean de Luz. He listened, frowning, daunting her with his incredulous comment, ‘And the two of you agreed not to tell me. You must want to keep secrets for secrets’ sake! However, if it was Lois your boy-friend saw, why hasn’t she come home? Where is she now?’

  It was no time for querying ‘boy-friend’ as a description of Arnold. Instead, ‘She could be behind still. You drove fast,’ Maryan reminded Raoul.

  ‘Necessary, with the mist coming off the marais as it was, this end of the road,’ he snapped. ‘If she is still travelling in that—’ He broke off. ‘I’ll have to track back and hope to meet her. As for you—the next time you want to play mysteries, just choose a more reasonable time—daylight for preference, do you mind?’

  Maryan said, ‘I’m sorry. I suppose I had some idea of keeping Lois’s confidence—’

  ‘From me? Why?’ Not waiting for an answer to that, he turned on his heel. ‘Come!’

  ‘You want me to go with you?’

  He glanced back at the Pavilion. ‘Of course. You don’t expect me to send you in there at this hour, to be there alone?’

  ‘But that’s nonsense! What could p
ossibly happen to me, alone?’

  He shrugged. ‘Little enough, probably, but I’m not risking what might.’

  ‘As if anything would! I’m not a child. Besides, before I came, didn’t Lois spend every night alone here?’

  ‘Not for a single hour by my choice. Solely by hers.’

  ‘Though I thought—?’ But again this was no moment for discussing with him the circumstances of his parting company with Lois, so Maryan returned with him to his parked car.

  The mist had thickened since they had travelled the road earlier and Raoul drove slowly, on guard against Lois’s, or any other car, looming suddenly out of the fog.

  Once he remarked, ‘A weather quirk of the region, this’—meaning the mist—‘Given a few hot days that are humid as well, we get it as an almost certain aftermath before the humidity lessens.’ And then, a propos of nothing either he or Maryan had said,

  ‘You are stiff with criticism, aren’t you?’ he challenged her.

  ‘I? No—!’ she denied, not taking his meaning.

  ‘You are. I sense your very bones grating at my refusal to leave you alone in the Pavilion, when I appear complacent about Lois’s being the same.’

  ‘You said you had no choice in persuading her otherwise.’

  ‘But you don’t believe me? It hadn’t occurred to you that there could be another version of the breakup of our menage, other than hers? And don’t say she hasn’t given you one, for then I shan’t believe you. I know you’ll have heard all about how I wanted to hand Maman into the cold care of professional nurses and how, after her death, I heartlessly abandoned La Domaine in order to follow my own debauched ways. Only too eager to shake the family dust from my profligate feet, according to both actions and more. But with motives which seemed good at the time. Still do, in fact, whenever I take them out and look at them. As now,’ he added after another pause.

  ‘For my benefit? You don’t have to,’ Maryan assured him.

  He threw a swift, derisive glance her way. ‘Even the prisoner at the bar expects the judge to listen to his case!’

  ‘I am not judging you!’

  ‘Worse still—you are preparing to chant, “It is no business of mine”—unfairly opting out. And so, by your leave, Your Honour’—he pulled an imaginary forelock—‘I’m putting in a plea, of, say, “Desperate ills call for desperate remedies—” How’s that?’

  ‘Meaning?’

  ‘That, for instance, since we could afford the best of nursing for Maman, I saw nothing but good in the idea of relieving Lois of some of the years-long drudgery of it. I failed there—up against the rock of Lois’s will, I realised she was a Leduc too ... But when Maman was dead and Lois and I were left to our menage a deux, then she was making of the household affairs the same millstone for her neck as she had made of poor Maman. As I have told you, she had dropped everything she had valued for the sake of her martyrdom; then she exchanged one prison for another, and when, in despair for her, I closed the second, she elected to choose a third for herself—the Pavilion, in short.’

  Touched, Maryan thought that out. ‘You deliberately vacated the house in order, as you thought, to force Lois back into her own world—of her music and so on? To set her free?’

  He nodded. ‘But it didn’t work. Leduc against Leduc, and nobody wins.’

  ‘Couldn’t she appreciate that you were doing it for her, and why?’

  He shook his head. ‘Not to be expected of Lois, and at the stage of deadlock we had reached, all motives are too suspect for reasoned argument. In effect, I won by asserting my right to close the house; she won by asserting hers to make a new hermitage of the Pavilion, and has done so with bitter persistence ever since. Which is where we came in—whatever my concern for her, until you came along, I had to tolerate her being alone there. I had no choice.’

  Maryan said, ‘Yes, I understand. I’m sorry.’ And though she wondered if he fully appreciated the extent of his aggravation of Lois’s sense of injury by his installing Ninon in La Domaine, she said nothing. For that really was none of her business—as he might justifiably point out.

  After a silence he spoke again. ‘This solo jaunt to the frairie—if Lois did make it, do you see it as a possible break-through or not?’

  Maryan hesitated. ‘I don’t know. She was so very scornful when we asked her to join the party. But coming on top of something else—’

  ‘On top of what else?’

  ‘Well, yesterday—’

  She described the guitar music and tentative singing on which she and Arnold had eavesdropped. Raoul said, ‘Indicating that she has had a change of heart, you think?’ but then, before Maryan could reply, he was slowing the car and nodding towards the dim nimbus of some stationary lights close in to the road verge ahead. ‘Our quarry, perhaps?’ he added.

  It was. Evidently daunted by the fog, Lois must have drawn up, prepared to sit it out. With her arms crossed on the steering wheel and her head resting on them, she was asleep, but woke with a start, first glancing at and touching something on the seat beside her, before she seemed aware that the sound which had waked her was the scrabble of Raoul’s fingers on the closed window.

  She wound it down and peered out, shading her eyes from the ray of the torch he turned on her.

  From her seat in his car Maryan heard her ask irritably, ‘What is it? What’s the matter?’

  Raoul said, ‘A good question. One that I might ask you.’

  ‘To which the answer would be—Nothing. I’ve been out and I’m on my way home.’

  ‘Lateish, aren’t you? If you meant to be out when I returned Maryan to an empty house, couldn’t you have told me so?’

  ‘How was I to know the fog would come down to this extent? Next question—Where have I been? Answer—To the same place as you, my friend.’

  ‘To St. Jean de Luz on your own? Why?’

  ‘On a whim. That is allowed me? Anything else you want to know?’

  ‘Only whether you need me to give you a lead for the rest of your way home?’ Maryan had to admire his restraint with Lois’s truculence.

  ‘Since you are here, you may as well,’ Lois said ungraciously.

  Another glance at the passenger seat caused Raoul to direct his torch that way too, and to put a question which Maryan could not hear. But when he had come back to the car, turned it and ensured that Lois was following, he said in wry bewilderment, ‘Well, Madame admits to having gone to the fair, and what do you suppose she bought for herself and is bringing home?’

  ‘I can’t think. What?’ Maryan asked.

  ‘A kitten, no less.’

  ‘A kitten?’

  Raoul nodded gravely. ‘Trice two francs from a pet-stall, basket thrown in for an extra franc. Sitting there on a bit of flannel, yelling its head off for its mother or for milk or both. When I said, “What on earth——? What do you want that for?” Lois said, being difficult as only she knows how, “I didn’t want it, I needed it”—as if there were a difference. Is there?’

  Maryan thought for a moment. ‘For her—I think there could be,’ she said slowly, and was grateful that he wanted to listen while she started to explain.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  It was typical of Lois that in the days which followed, she made no attempt to enlarge on her cryptic remark to Raoul. It was as if she wanted it supposed that, the kitten having been thrust upon her, she meant to do her duty by it and no more. So the newcomer was given a bed, regular meals, at Maryan’s suggestion some toys, and a necessary name—Le Maquereau—for its regular pattern of mackerel stripes.

  But she hadn’t been forced to buy it, and the fact of her admission to Raoul that she ‘needed it’, encouraged Maryan to hope that, having recognized her lack of something for her empty heart to love and her empty hands to care for, Lois had had will enough at last to do something about it. For the moment, two francs’-worth of kitten was the answer. She might scorn to show love for it yet. But as Maryan thought she had made Raoul understand as they had dr
iven back through the fog, Lois following, the unnecessary purchase could be another hopeful pointer, of which Lois’s secret guitar practice might have been the first, and her decision to go to the fete the second. And though Raoul had questioned a shade cynically,

  ‘Choosing to track back the hard way, isn’t she, when a word to her friends, a new hair-do, a clothes-buying spree and a bit of common tolerance might achieve better results faster?’ Maryan hadn’t agreed.

  ‘But don’t you think that is Lois all over? She has to do things the hard way—and alone. It’s the only way she knows,’ she had said gropingly, and had glowed a little at Raoul’s brief, unexpected touch upon her hand and his wry, “Out of the mouths of babes ... eh? Well, you’d better be right. Meanwhile, you’ve got to live with the animal—I haven’t!’ which had changed the subject.

  Neither that night nor later did Lois offer Maryan any explanation of her solo jaunt to St. Jean de Luz. But as Maryan was to hear from Arnold Maddern, she grudgingly made him her confidant when they met by chance in the village one morning, and he had invited her to join him for a drink.

  According to Arnold, he had expected her to refuse. Instead she had accepted and, remembering that, at the luncheon table, his cue for drawing her out on her own subject had been all assumed ignorance, he had used the same tactics—and Lois had talked!

  At first she had been diffident, then authoritative on her own subject—the musical and song traditions of the region. Yes indeed, she had told him, she had been an acknowledged virtuoso, in constant demand for recordings and solo performances. But though not so for many years now, owing to family commitments that she had made her sole duty, lately she had begun to question whether or not she had been wise to drop it all so completely. In consequence she had decided upon impulse to sample this year’s fete at St. Jean de Luz, comparing it with others in which she had taken part. And in answer to Arnold’s question—Yes, she still had some of her old recordings and would be glad for him and Maryan to hear them, if he were interested.