Wildfire Quest

by Jane Arbor

  But before this promising thread could be followed up, a chance encounter with Ninon was to leave Maryan with more than a pinprick of annoyance.

  On the same morning—that of Arnold’s spadework with Lois, she was in Bayonne, where Arnold was to join her for an afternoon’s lecture on Basque costume at the museum, when Ninon joined her at a pavement table just as she had ordered a citron presse. Ninon touched the empty chair of the two at the table. ‘May I?’ she invited herself, and murmured, ‘How very kind’—when Maryan recalled her waiter and insisted on adding Ninon’s choice of iced coffee to her own order.

  Declining Ninon’s offer of a lift back to Peyrolle by car, she explained that she was expecting to meet Arnold Maddern. In return Ninon mentioned she had been to see her advocate on business and, as she took her glass of coffee from the waiter, added casually, ‘Oddly enough, while I was there, your name came up.’

  ‘My name?’ Maryan echoed. ‘How?’

  Ninon laughed on a low, rich note. ‘Don’t look so startled! In no criminal association, I assure you! Merely social—As it happened, I had to wait briefly for Maitre Manet to keep our appointment and I was chatting with his son, young Guy Manet. We were discussing my housewarming party—you may remember you met him there—and in the course of our gossip about my guests, he mentioned you, saying he understood you had made a romantic conquest of a friend of his. Now what was the boy’s name?’ Ninon laid a finger to her lips, then brightened. ‘But of course you’d know, wouldn’t you? Naturally! The name of any one of several scalps to her belt—what girl wouldn’t?’

  Maryan frowned. For one thing, she doubted that Ninon had really forgotten a name mentioned so lately, and for another, she hotly resented Guy Manet’s suggestion that the only acquaintance they had in common was any more to her than just that—an acquaintance.

  She began, ‘If he meant a Monsieur Tissot—’

  Ninon broke in, ‘That’s it—Georges Tissot.’

  ‘But that’s absurd! I hardly know him—!’

  Ninon shook her head in gentle disbelief. ‘Oh, come! That’s not at all what I understood from Guy—and which of course he would have had from this Georges!’

  ‘Then either Guy Manet was mistaken in what he heard, or Georges Tissot misled him. I happen to have met Georges Tissot just twice—or you could say, three times.’

  Ninon surveyed the cloudless sky. ‘Make up your mind, cherie. No one is taking you to task!’

  ‘Three, then, strictly. Once in the office of another advocate, Maitre Druot, where he is the clerk and where I had had occasion to consult Maitre Druot; once outside that office, when he offered to act as my guide to the city, and again, the time in the ramparts gardens when he was walking with Guy Manet and he came over to speak to me. And that’s all—in total, perhaps ten minutes, no more,’ Maryan said firmly.

  ‘Oh well, someone’s mistake. Or possibly just the boy’s pride talking,’ Ninon said carelessly, and then more alertly,

  ‘You’ve had need to consult a lawyer since you’ve been in France? No serious trouble for you, I hope? If so, perhaps one could— ? Or Raoul, who has a lot of influence, might be able to help?’

  Maryan shook her head. ‘Thank you, but it was nothing really. Just a matter that Maitre Druot’s advice to me solved,’ she said.

  Ninon agreed, ‘Yes, one hears of him that he is a good man of business to have. And so, your affairs with him completed, you can afford to brush off the hopes of his poor little clerk. Especially with this other beau you have claiming your favours—your imported English Professor, for whom, I gather, you are the very meaning of his day?’

  At that Maryan laughed aloud her scorn. ‘Arnold Maddern—and me? Why, he’s simply my chief; he’s here to check on the work I’m doing for him, to help me and make suggestions and to see the region for himself. The “meaning of his day”? Really, Madame Barbe, that’s even more absurd of him than that Georges Tissot!’

  ‘Is it? But that was mere hearsay from young Manet, whereas this other I had from your friend himself.’

  ‘I don’t believe it! He is a senior colleague, that’s all. I like him and respect him, as I think he likes me. But I’m quite sure nothing he could say about me could have led you to think there was anything more between us. Anyway, when had he the opportunity?’ Maryan queried.

  ‘At St. Jean de Luz. If you remember, you elected to indulge Raoul’s whim to patronize those germ-ridden roundabouts, leaving your Professor and me to wait for you. He obviously wanted to talk about you, so I let him. And I assure you he left me in very little doubt for his feelings for you in a romantic way.’

  ‘And I assure you, you must have been mistaken,’ Maryan maintained.

  Ninon shrugged. ‘Perhaps. I don’t think so. If I were, then I have lost my instinct for the things a man leaves unsaid as well as for those he does say in appreciation of a girl. And though of course you can’t prove me right or wrong until he declares himself to you, if you are interested and do want him, at least you have l’affaire Tissot to use in your campaign, haven’t you?’

  ‘Madame, really! I have told you—there is no “Tissot affair”,’ Maryan protested in exasperation.

  ‘My dear, you are very naive.’ Ninon’s smile was silky. ‘Of course there need be nothing to it—in fact. You can still use it as a card in any play you may want to make for your Professor. I shouldn’t have to teach you a woman’s legitimate tricks, though perhaps—’ she paused. ‘Well—and you mustn’t take offence at this—perhaps you shouldn’t use Raoul’s friendly interest in you in quite the same way. Nor, conversely, flaunt your other conquests, in order to further any hopes you may have of him.’ She paused again. ‘You understand me, I daresay?’ she added.

  Maryan did, only too well. She said, ‘You’ve suggested much the same before, if I remember. At our first meeting, in fact. But what makes you think I feel any more for Raoul than the friendship you say he has for me?’

  ‘Well, he has charm, you admit? And this time I am rather going by the evidence of the night we returned from St. Jean de Luz, when, I think, you may have forced your company on him when he went in search of Lois—’

  ‘Forced myself on him?’

  ‘I’m sorry. Perhaps you only made it difficult for him not to take you?’

  ‘I did nothing of the sort,’ Maryan denied. ‘It was Raoul who refused to leave me alone in the Pavilion. And if he—’

  ‘He could have delivered you back to the house and begged my hospitality for you until he had got back with Lois. But if that’s the way it was, I’m glad. For it would have been a little—indiscreet, if you had insisted on going with him—in the small hours, for whatever indefinite time the search might have taken—’ Ninon broke off to raise limpid eyes to Maryan’s. ‘I do seem to jump to some hasty conclusions, but you’ll appreciate my concern for you, I daresay?’ she added.

  Maryan ignored the appeal of that and though she had time for another drink and her thirst needed it, she felt it might choke her. She rose, pointedly looking at her watch. ‘I must go,’ she said. ‘I have this appointment. You’ll excuse me?’

  ‘Of course—the devoted Professor! But I am forgiven for my plain speaking?’ Ninon pleaded.

  Deliberately obtuse, Maryan said, ‘About what? I’m afraid we’re totally at cross purposes; not talking about the same thing at all.’

  Ninon’s smile thinned a little. ‘Aren’t we? What a pity!’ she said, her mild tone no real disguise for the hint of threat which she conveyed with the words.

  The next time they met in company Ninon would probably be all casual friendship and enquiry and bonhomie as usual, and for good manners’ sake Maryan would have to reply in kind. But today, on the issue of her relationship with Raoul, she was in no doubt of Ninon’s deliberate intention to cut her down to size.

  (Though as if Raoul hadn’t done that already to dire purpose where she was concerned ! ‘You kiss like a schoolgirl... mignonne.’) Inwardly cringing, as she went to a meet
ing with Arnold which Ninon had also contrived to smear, Maryan was thankful that at least Raoul’s code had kept that humiliating episode to himself. For if he had shared it with Ninon and they had laughed about it together, what on earth had Ninon to fear?

  Or could it be that, knowing Raoul for what he was, she was none too sure of her own possession of his attention, and so—precaution taken for precaution’s sake—she thought she had to be wary even of a girl whom he admitted to have sponsored mainly for his own ends; Ninon on guard, in fact, against an enemy who wasn’t there at all?

  It was to take several days of normal encounter before Maryan was fully at ease again with Arnold.

  For whatever Ninon’s intention—whether to flatter her, or to embarrass her, or simply to make an opening for that waspish warning about Raoul—at least she succeeded in alerting Maryan to an irksome speculation about Arnold’s feelings for her, and until his unchanged manner convinced her that either Ninon had studiedly misread whatever he had said about her, or that Ninon’s boasted ‘instinct’ was badly at fault, she was conscious of watching for overtones of meaning to almost every look or word he exchanged with her.

  It was absurd even to wonder, she knew. The pattern between herself and Arnold had been set and accepted long ago. But while that Ninon-induced wariness lasted, she was grateful for Lois’s unexpected willingness to make a third in their company; equally glad that Arnold seemed to want it so. In fact, for the remainder of his stay in Peyrolle, they went about or met at the inn or at the Pavilion as a threesome more often than not. Surprisingly, Lois offered her Renault as transport, and they all packed into it for daylong jaunts to neighbouring villages and gipsy camps and even to silent country graveyards whose worn tombstones had their own timeless story to tell.

  Lois, when she chose, had the makings of the perfect guide to her own ground of folk-culture and though she was still liable to withdraw, denying that she had anything of value to contribute, under Arnold’s tactful handling she would slowly but almost visibly relax, reminding Maryan poignantly of some wild thing, turned vicious under pressure, at last venturing out from cover and answering to trust.

  There was, for instance, her response to Arnold’s deploring of the fact that a great deal of the Basque and Landais literature he would like explored was in mediaeval French which neither he nor Maryan understood.

  ‘Middle French? The Langue d’Oc of the region? I can read it tolerably well,’ Lois volunteered.

  ‘You can? You could help Maryan with those daunting manuscripts we were looking at yesterday?’ Arnold asked.

  ‘If she cares to listen and if she’ll have patience with my mistakes,’ Lois shrugged, throwing off a rather rare skill as if it were an ability to follow a cookery recipe or to read the telephone-book. And again there was the evening when, having kept her promise to Arnold to let him and Maryan hear her old recordings, she suddenly switched off the record player and produced her guitar.

  Head bent in concentration, she played first—haunting, sometimes discordant melodies, some of which she had recorded, some which were new to the other two. Then she sang, her voice harsh or poignant as the words demanded, and then switched to the action-rhymes of children’s singing-games, one of which, ‘Giroflee, Girofla,’ Maryan acclaimed with delight.

  ‘ “Wallflower, Wallflower”—we have that in England too,’ she told Lois. ‘Do you think there are many more that we share?’

  ‘Well, this perhaps? Or this?’ Lois offered, experimenting with a few bars of one and then another, seeming willing to prolong the recital for as long as she had an audience. And though she ended it abruptly, abandoning her guitar suddenly as if it had outstayed its welcome, in answer to Arnold’s ‘You’ll play again for us? Next time for tape perhaps? Before I have to leave?’ she agreed gravely, ‘Perhaps,’ giving the word almost, if not quite, the promise of ‘Yes.’

  Arnold had already stayed longer than Maryan had expected, postponing his leaving for his next assignment in the Rhineland in order, at Lois’s suggestion, to attend a felibree in Perigueux. A felibree, as Maryan knew, was a combined folk-festival and a meeting of writers interested in keeping the old dialects alive. Perigueux, some two hundred kilometres north of Peyrolle, meant an all-day expedition, and Maryan took it for granted they would make it a threesome as usual. But she had not reckoned with Raoul, whom she met in the village the previous day. Raoul, it seemed, had other plans for her, and tomorrow was positively the only day he would consider for carrying them out.

  ‘Tomorrow,’ he announced over the inevitable drink at one of the Lion d’Or’s pavement tables, ‘I am showing you Feu-Follet, as I promised, and taking you all over the rest of the timberlands. On foot. Bring a picnic meal and see that the food rises above the couple of stale croissants and clammy Camembert which is probably all that Lois’s larder can produce. I’ll see to the wine—Ninon’s is the only woman’s palate I’d trust. Wear your stoutest shoes; some of the going will be rough; and I’ll call for you at ten in the morning.’

  Maryan glowed inwardly that he had remembered. But tomorrow? She shook her head regretfully. ‘That sounds delightful, but I’m afraid I can’t come tomorrow,’ she said.

  ‘Indeed? Why not?’

  She told him why not—to no visible effect. He said merely, ‘But I have planned it for tomorrow; it is the day which suits me.’

  ‘Though unfortunately it doesn’t suit me,’ Maryan pointed out.

  He surveyed her over the rim of his glass. ‘You—or your taskmaster—which?’

  ‘Me—since I’m expected to go to Perigueux. And if by my taskmaster, you mean Arnold—’

  ‘Who else?’ Raoul cut in blandly. ‘To judge by the way he has kept your nose down to the trail of folk-culture since he arrived. What a good thing you enjoy your work!’

  ‘Which I do, and which happens to be a good reason why I am going to Perigueux.’

  ‘But you are always at work. Haven’t you earned just one day of holiday by now?’

  ‘Not really. It’s the work I came here to do, and in a way it’s all a kind of holiday.’

  ‘Such a sense of duty! However, it’s either a job, or it’s a holiday. You should make up your mind, mignonne. You can’t have it both ways,’ Raoul retorted with an air of propounding a truth which had never been voiced before.

  Exasperated, Maryan protested, ‘I don’t want it both ways. I’m only trying to explain why—though thank you for asking me—I’m having to say No to you.’

  ‘On the contrary you are not saying No to me.’

  Maryan bit her lip. ‘I am. I must.’

  He tilted that disarming glance at her. ‘But you don’t want to? A tramp over the Domaine attracts you? Anyway, what kind of discipline do you expect from your earnest Professor? That he may beat you perhaps?’

  ‘Of course not. Don’t be absurd. It’s simply that, as he has a right to want me to go to Perigueux, I shall go. In any case, when I’ve accepted an obligation of that sort, I don’t wantonly let people down.’

  Raoul nodded mock-approval. ‘A highly moral attitude—the rock-fast promise that binds. But supposing that, this time, you have been absolved by your respected chief, and you may say Yes to me with his blessing?’

  Maryan stared. ‘You mean—you’ve already been in touch with Arnold, and he has given me leave of absence for tomorrow?’

  ‘By telephone this morning.’

  ‘Then why on earth didn’t you tell me so at once, instead of forcing all this argument with me about it?’

  ‘I wasn’t arguing. I was stating plain facts. Namely—’

  ‘You were still making me argue. Why, when all the time—?’ She broke off as a thought struck her. ‘Or was it, I wonder, an exercise in your vaunted family motto—“We seek the unattainable”—and the rest? You knew I was free to accept, but as I didn’t, you had to—’

  ‘Appear to wreak my cunning will upon you?’ he teased.

  ‘I was going to say—Amuse yourself by using me as
a kind of—of Aunt Sally for shooting down; showing off; claiming you could make me agree by sheer mastery, when in fact, none of your brute tactics were necessary!’

  As she rose he stood with her and paid the waiter the chits for their drinks. His grin was impudent. ‘Meaning that, moral obligation to Perigueux or no, you were going to let me have my way in the end?’ he queried.

  Too late she saw the trap she had laid for herself.

  ‘Nothing of the sort! ‘ she declared hotly. ‘I—’

  His forefinger flicked lightly at the point of her chin. ‘You protest too much, mignonne. I was right—you were going to give in gracefully! Meanwhile, with Aunt Sally still intact and the Leduc honour satisfied, remember—no Camembert and none of yesterday’s pastries at your peril. Ten o’clock, as I said. Expect me—’

  Leaving her standing, he went to his parked car, jumped the door as usual, and drove away.

  Although Arnold and Lois were to leave early for Perigueux, Maryan was up before Lois, preparing a picnic meal to Raoul’s orders and to what she hoped might be his taste. She hadn’t much relished confirming with Arnold her leave of absence, but he had been surprisingly agreeable about it, and Lois for once had refrained from her usual sour questioning of Raoul’s motives.

  That—wondering why he had thought he had to keep an idle promise, and why he had been so insistent that she should accept—was left to Maryan. But if she asked him she guessed she might invite some flip reply about furthering her education—and that would hurt. Speculation—not knowing for certain that he was only doing his duty by her—was infinitely preferable. She settled, almost pleasurably, for speculation.

  When he came for her he added a bottle of wine to the picnic satchel, took it over from her, and they set out. There was a shimmer of heat over the marshes, lending to their distance a quality of mirage from which the imagination could conjure almost anything—seas, moving figures, even the outlines of buildings where in fact there were none—only thickets of bamboo, and reeds, and creeping marram grass and the occasional startled leap of a marsh animal—a vole or a water-rat.