Sam poked a particularly large louse. "Grey badgers, we used to call 'em. Remember?"
She looked to see if he was joking.
"Didn't we?" he asked uncertainly.
"Grey badgers," she said, "were those dried peas we ate on mid-Lent Sunday. I'll never be able to eat them again now—thank you very much."
"No, that was Carling peas."
"In Manchester, when we moved there. But in Leeds they were always called grey badgers."
"Take your word for it." He shook his head and sighed. "How soon we forget."
"Speak for yourself," she said. "To me it's like yesterday still."
After breakfast it was a quick run down through Avranches to the coast. The view as they came down out of the hills, with the plains of Brittany beyond, was the most splendid they had yet seen. In the centre, rising out of its vast desert of sand, with the sea sparkling miles beyond, giving dramatic point to the whole, was the fairy-castle abbey of Mont St. Michel. They were so keen to reach it that they drove through Avranches without stopping. Beyond, driving through dunes of salt scrub and tamarisk, they seemed to have come to a world a thousand miles from the green and granite uplands near Vire.
And then they were out onto the sand, as smooth as a table and as firm as the driveway at Thorpe.
"It's like a castle in a legend," she said excitedly, looking at the intricate ranks of turrets, ramparts, battlements, and spires that crowned the little island.
"It's like a toy," he said. "You feel you could just pluck it up like a toy."
"Good thing the tide is out."
The inn was as clean and as pleasant as the one at Vire had been "not good." They had a light lunch of meat loaf, cold herring salad, and blancmange, washed down with cider and a sort of apple brandy from the Calvados hills they had driven through yesterday. It was stronger than it tasted, and Nora felt a little lightheaded as they walked up the twisting cobbled street to the abbey.
Inside it was not nearly as impressive as it had promised to be from a distance. Its fifty years of service as a political and criminal prison had not dealt kindly with the building. Most of the great chambers had been cut up into floors and workshops for the five hundred common-law prisoners who now worked there as weavers, hatters, and bootmakers. Nora and Sam, and their guide, were constantly having to press against walls and into doorways as files of soldiers and rank-smelling convicts were marched by. The Salle des Chevaliers, with its massive pillars and soaring groined vaults, was entirely filled with looms. The clack of the shuttles, the beating of the heddles, the clatter of the sheds, and the choking, lint-laden air—it was all too strongly reminiscent for Nora and Sam of their days of poverty in the mills at Stockport. The wonderful romanesque church, the crowning of the island, was a cockroach-infested eating hall for the prisoners. Rancid fat, slopped gruel, and rotting scraps lay everywhere. Earlier in the century the nave had been a two-floor straw-hat factory, but that had burned out eleven years ago. The whole upper part was still black with soot.
Outside, on the terrace created by the demolition in 1780 of the last three bays of the nave, the guide pointed to the ruins of the Women's Prison; formerly a hostelry, built in the twelfth century, it had collapsed in 1817. He gave a revoltingly vivid account of the event—the only occasion on which he came alive during their whole tour. "The view of Tombelaine and the Channel Islands," he said, turning to the sea and relapsing into his professional torpor, "is especially magnificent."
But he was right. The smooth sands and the warm salt breeze beckoned them irresistibly.
"Oh, Sam," Nora said, "let's walk to the edge of the sea. When is high water?" She turned to the guide. "High tide? La marée haute?"
He pulled out a watch. "Now," he said. "Half an hour ago. It's falling again."
"But it's miles away. Does it not surround this island?"
The man smiled and pointed to the ghost of a half-moon in the eastern sky. "Only at full moon and new moon," he said.
"What superstitious nonsense!" Nora sneered when they were walking out over the sands, northward from the Mount.
"It's not superstition," Sam told her. And he explained the whole business of neap tides and spring tides.
The sea was going out faster than they could walk so that, when they were a mile from the island, the waters, which had been only two or at most three miles away and plainly visible, had moved almost out of sight. They turned then and began to stroll back.
Almost at once, one of those hot sand winds that seem to blow up out of nowhere began. And with nothing to halt it, it blew with malevolent force. They made a detour to put the island between them and the wind but had to withdraw when they came upon the brown, stinking rivulets that drained the abbey and the surrounding houses, choked with fish offal and street sweepings.
Nora had a good long sleep before their late dinner and almost immediately went back to bed.
"Tomorrow," she told Sam as he kissed her good night, "you'll meet Mr. and Mrs. Cornelius."
Before she went to sleep, she thought of the Corneliuses, leaving the most thriving tavern in the whole of south London and taking a little country place in Normandy, and then of Sam, so contented with his lot and station. And of dear Rodie, happy to take her little pocket money in return for an easily kept bargain and, during the week to be sure, un peu de tolérance. Why, she wondered, was she not like them? Had she always been different? The only folk who could tell her had long since gone.
Chapter 16
Nora and her brother made an early start after breakfast, stopping at Avranches only to see if any mail had been sent on and to leave forwarding instructions to Coutances.
"We'll go through Granville," she told the coachman. "Not up through Gavray."
When they were moving again she explained to Sam: "Granville's where he wants to start a bathing beach if he can. We'll have a look at it."
The road took them back through sandy hills and out onto dry flats scrub whose only feature was the occasional tamarisk tree. A few miles northward though, the shore began to rise; and by the time they reached the little coastal village of Granville, they were at the top of fifty-foot cliffs down which broad pathways had been hewn to the sands and rocks below.
She thought it the drabbest place she had ever seen, so drab its air was almost menacing. Every window was either shuttered or had its curtains drawn. The beach was pockmarked with footprints; at its centre was a large, shimmering patch where the sand was still wet, though the tide was well down.
"They've been busy down there," Sam said.
"It looks like quicksand. You'd think it swallowed the whole village."
They did not stop but pressed on for Coutances, arriving in the early afternoon. They would have been there sooner, she explained to Sarah, if they had not been held up on a bad, narrow stretch of the road by a coach travelling much slower than it had any need to.
"The French can be inconsiderate that way," Sarah conceded.
The inn was very gaily decorated with flowers in all the public rooms and corridors. In the dining room stood a large pyramid of things like doughnuts, held together by a cataract of honey and whipped cream. Sarah showed them through the place with an air of suppressed amusement, like one withholding a happy secret.
"You haven't gone to all this trouble just for us I hope," Nora said.
"In a way." Sarah smiled. "You see, Tom and I are to be married today."
Shocked, Nora turned upon her. "Married?"
Sarah laughed. "You will see. I hope he won't be too long now. His aunt and uncle are already here."
She was very excited, like someone who had spent a long time preparing a magnificent treat for a party of children and was now seeing it unfold, exactly as planned.
Nora's room overlooked the cobbled yard at the back of the inn, so she must have been one of the first to see the coach pull through the arched entrance from the street. It was the coach that had delayed them on the road from Granville. The look upon the driver's fa
ce, a solemnity curiously mingled with terror, warned her that something awful was about to unfold in this house.
A maid ran out from the kitchen, intent on opening the carriage door. The driver came suddenly to life, leaped nimbly down, and stayed her hand.
He said something to her.
She put a fist up to her mouth. She seemed to he trying to cram it between her teeth. Then she turned and ran back into the kitchen. Her wild call. "M'sieu Gaston! M'sieu Gaston!" sounded in the passages beneath Nora's feet.
A man, presumably Monsieur Gaston, strode quickly across the yard and held a brief, low-voiced conference with the driver. Before they finished, Sarah came out as if to join them. She stopped when she saw the look upon their faces. Behind her, unseen by anyone save Nora, the servant girl mutely stood, hopelessly clutching at the air as if she could thereby draw Sarah back.
Or perhaps it was a more cosmic gesture than that. Perhaps, in the way that affects us all at such terrible moments, she sought to roll back time itself. Certainly Nora, watching this momentarily frozen group and remembering what she had seen at Granville and upon the way here, had never more urgently wished that time could be so unravelled.
Without pausing to put on her bonnet and gloves, she went swiftly down to the courtyard.
The carriage door was open. Sarah was nowhere in sight. The two men stood nervously where she had last seen them. The girl clutched one of the wooden pillars that supported the overhanging upper floor, sobbing.
Nora went straight to the men.
"Monsieur Cornelius?" she asked, as if her questioning tone might itself sustain a hope that had already died.
Until then she had not known that noyé was the French word for "drowned." From that day she never forgot it; and she never heard it spoken nor saw it in print without remembering the monstrous finality with which Gaston spoke it then. She looked at his eyes. They fell. So did the coachman's. So did hers. What possible comfort could they offer one another?
There was a small noise, not quite a sob, from inside the coach. Nora pushed her head gingerly into its darkness, seeing nothing at first. Then she spied Sarah sitting, calmly rigid, on the forward seat. On the rear seat, also rigid, lay the drowned body of Tom Cornelius.
Nora would not have got into the coach had Gaston not gripped her arm to help her up; her response was then automatic.
"My dear?" she said. "Oh, my dear!"
She did not know whether to call her Sarah or Mrs. Cornelius.
Sarah made no move. She seemed even to have stopped breathing. Nora stood uncertainly just inside the door. In the light that fell over her shoulder, she saw a dull gleam in the paler dab that marked the position, but no feature, of Tom's face; in horror she realized that one of his eyes was open. Without thought she leaned forward to close it. Sarah still made no move, no sound.
But the eye had been open so long it had dried. The lid merely rolled down upon itself without breaking the adhesion of its margin.
By the most grisly contrast his skin felt damp, even slimy, to her ungloved touch. She swiftly withdrew her hand; the dull, dry eye gazed up again, clouded. Blind.
For some obscure reason this failure to achieve any purpose, either to comfort Sarah or to set Tom properly to rest, left her feeling defiled. There was a sudden, almost overwhelming urge to hit Tom Cornelius, as a kind of punishment. Afterward, she explained it to herself as a memory of a newspaper report in which a bystander was said to have slapped a dead man back to life. At the time she was overpowered by the sudden and savage intensity of the impulse, and she took the easy—the only—way out by bursting into tears.
She wanted to collapse onto her knees but was too pregnant for that. Instead, she leaned awkwardly over the seat on which Tom lay half-stretched, her head buried in the upholstery, sobbing stupidly. The sudden access of light, as she moved out of the door frame, at last galvanized Sarah into movement.
"There!" she said, her voice wavering, her arms settling on Nora's neck, bearing her back to the opposite seat. "There now!" Her grip was firm, almost painful.
That, and the ludicrous reversal of their expected roles, calmed Nora quite suddenly. She snorted a single half-laugh as she said, "I came to console you!"
As she spoke she felt the first twinge of labour. God send it's a false alarm, she prayed.
Sarah stood. The wavering voice was barely recognizable as hers. "There is much to do now," she said. "Please help me. All you can."
She thrust past Nora, almost fell from the coach, and ran across the yard, slamming the kitchen door behind her.
Nora let the silence return before she too rose and stepped carefully outside. Gaston, who appeared to be the senior among the inn servants, looked to her for instructions.
"Please arrange for Mr. Cornelius's body to be carried indoors and to be properly prepared for burial. Is there an English doctor nearby?"
"Oui, Madame. Dr. Grimble, very near."
"Please send for him too."
She found Sam waiting for her just beyond the kitchen door. His face told her he had heard. "Eay, love!" he said and took her hands.
"We've much to do, Sam." She echoed Sarah's words. In every corner, flowers danced discordantly. "Have you seen this uncle and aunt that Sarah mentioned?"
Sam nodded and tilted his head toward the stairs. "They are awful!" he said. "Or she is."
It was the unheeding, all-or-nothing judgement of a servant; but it was accurate. They must have come down by the front stairs, for Nora found them in the dining room, the room with the doughnut pile. She let the uncle, a Monsieur Corneille, introduce himself and his wife.
Anyone who had known Cornelius would have known the uncle at once; he was the same man thirty years on—with the same smile and the same observant eye, never still. His English was poor, yet he communicated all he needed.
Madame Corneille was very much younger, not yet thirty. Nora found her brassy and unfeminine. She was eating one of the doughnuts.
They had both heard of Tom's death. Monsieur Corneille, though he could hardly have known Cornelius well, was obviously distressed. But with his wife the emotion went no deeper than the rouge on her cheeks. Her eyes traversed the room like cannon swivels, assessing and valuing everything within range.
Nora had time for no more than the conventional expressions of grief and condolence before the maid returned with the English doctor. Grimble was a small man, very fat and so short of breath he came down the passage like a train huffing and puffing its way through a tunnel. Nora went out to him at once.
They met at the foot of the stair, two figures from a geometry book, she a rhomboid, he a sphere.
"Need me too, eh?" he asked, looking at the advanced state of her pregnancy.
"Not so far," she said.
Gaston appeared and took him, wheezing even harder, up the stairs to the room where Cornelius's body had been laid. Nora followed, not wanting to go back and face the Corneilles. She waited in the passage, wondering where Sarah had gone.
After an eternity Dr. Grimble reappeared. He merely nodded, as if to confirm in some formal way what was too obvious to put into actual words.
"Inquests?" Nora asked. "What about that sort of thing?"
"No need," the doctor said. "He didn't drown, that's certain."
"But…"
"Oh, they pulled him out of the water all right, but there's none of it in his lungs. He was certainly dead when he went into, or fell into, the water."
"You're not suggesting foul play?"
"By no means. An apoplexy, in my view. Of the heart or of the head."
"A stroke?"
"A stroke." He looked over her shoulder and translated, "Une attaque massive de paralysie," for the benefit of the Corneilles, who were coming up the stairs. He then expanded on the explanation for their benefit.
While he was thus distracted, Nora drew Gaston to the far end of the corridor. The move, she saw, did not escape Madame Corneille's notice. She took Gaston into her room, leaving the
door open.
"Now tell me about this 'marriage' business," she said. "Were they not actually married?"
"In England, yes. But Monsieur Cornelius 'e is not sure it work in France." Gaston shrugged. "'E is joke, of course. 'E is fun for everybody."
"It wasn't to be a real wedding then."
"But yes, of course. Even with Monsieur le Maire, the 'mayor' of the ville you say. But for Monsieur Cornelius all is fun. Fun for all and all for fun, 'e say."
"But there's no question they were already married?"
The Rich Are with You Always Page 18
