‘Close enough for me to know that he would never have presided over such a court. He wasn’t strong enough; I’d always protected him, but I couldn’t have averted this.’ He was still panting a little as he walked, but as if it was the anguish that was exhausting him, not the mountain path.
Marius said nothing, but looked up the rocky hill. On its promontory lay the ruins of a small church. His father had once climbed up there with him when he was a child and together they had watched the twilight gather round the valley, deep shadows lengthening on the rocks until all was dark and the tiny lights of St Esprit gleamed up at them like fire-flies. It was one of the few times when they were alone together – one of the few times he had not resented his father’s presence. He could remember sounds, the banging of doors, the revving of a car engine, a dog barking. Yet all these were like the mutterings from some alien planet, light years away from their rocky, ecclesiastical eyrie. His earliest memories of his father were his remoteness, his preoccupation as he walked around the formal gardens of Letoric, admonishing and advising. Of course they had kissed, but the kisses always seemed cold and distanced – little ice-drops expelled from his father’s dry lips. Yet he knew his father loved him, but in a locked-in way. He was never able to reach into Marius’ life, or to have any understanding of him.
His mother on the other hand continuously produced all kinds of surprises, some good, some not so good – like tennis with the overtly competitive Feynols or chess with the ever-vigilant Hortense Descartes, though fortunately she gradually began to avoid the company of Hélène and Gaby Leger. But the good things – picnics and outings, holidays (usually taken without his father), cinema and theatre – were memorable and always worthy of the anticipation, unlike so many other aspects of life. The driving force in his mother was the only aspect of her that Marius found threatening; he was conscious of being swept along, not so much in her wake, but in front of her, with his mother a giant bellows behind him. When he was a child, Marius allowed himself to be pumped ahead, protecting himself with books and daydreams. But as puberty brought a miserable self-consciousness, Marius became prickly, suspecting insults, accepting an imagined inferiority. By this stage he was regularly seeing Jean-Pierre, their clandestine meetings reminding him of the unwillingly realised days of his mother’s work in the Maquis. He and Jean-Pierre went to considerable pains not to be seen, and they met in obscure parts of the pine woods or in a barn. As a result, he grew withdrawn and afraid and in the holidays he roamed restlessly around Letoric, dwarfed by his inhibitions, observed by Jean-Pierre, flaring up at times, resisting proffered and fabricated friendship until he went to university. Schooldays in Lyon had been different, for here Marius had made friendships that he would never bring home. Close, passionate, formed with either sex but never with a sexual result. It had been only Jean-Pierre whom he had gone to over the years, but Jean-Pierre had seemed – a non-person? Someone of no consequence? Someone who did not exist in his life? None of the descriptions were quite right. He turned to Alain, suddenly needing to reach up out of the deadly maw of the past. They had walked on, almost up to the ruined church, and he had not been aware of it. They had climbed in companionable silence, but in the back of his mind Marius was all too well aware that, like his father, Alain was something of a stranger.
‘Gabriel wants me to go back to Lyon.’
‘I can see why.’
‘Professional jealousy?’
‘I wouldn’t put it as strongly as that.’ Until now he hadn’t considered the possibility.
‘But he’ll want to question you.’
‘Maybe he thinks he can do it better in Lyon.’
‘Perhaps you should go,’ said Alain gently. ‘Your friend …’
Last winter when Monique had visited Letoric with him Alain had come over to dine with them. Marius had been grateful for his presence. Somehow both his parents had seemed livelier, less depressing while he was there.
‘Monique? It will be good to see her.’
But would it? Suddenly Marius had the desperate desire to stay at Letoric to see it all through. They walked on in companionable silence.
During his university days at the Sorbonne and later at the Lyon law school Marius emerged from the confines of his childhood and adolescence. He made friends, enjoyed sex with women and headed vigorously towards a successful law degree. He consumed music and painting and literature with a raw, insatiable appetite. It was as if he had truly come alive for the first time. Then he met Natasha. She was partly Russian, and he became as obsessed with her as he had been with Jean-Pierre. She also was studying law, but unlike Marius’ other friends she took it all rather lightly, with only the vaguest idea of the future, apparently regarding law school as a haven. She seemed to want to fail, to retake, to stay on longer. Marius found out why. Natasha’s father had been having an affair, and just before she entered the law school her mother had committed suicide. Natasha’s world was shattered. She had been devoted to her mother and greatly admired her mother’s Russian passion – the passion that made her go on consuming aspirin until she was certain that any attempt to save her life with a stomach pump would be quite useless.
Once she had confided in him, they grew even closer, and for a year Marius was ecstatically happy. He forgot his background, evaded the night-time allure of what Jean-Pierre had to offer. Life with Natasha was complete. They hardly ever saw anyone else and depended on each other totally. She was – or had become – a strange mixture of vulnerability, sudden enthusiasms – and abject fear. To be her protector provided Marius with the greatest emotional fulfilment.
Then, one evening, they arranged to meet at a restaurant near the river-bank. She had wanted to buy some books at a small bookshop nearby and Marius had a late tutorial. It was February and the darkness at nine was bitter black. She didn’t arrive. Marius searched for her everywhere – and then went to the police. A day later Natasha was washed up on a beach a mile or so down the Rhône. At first his numbed mind had leapt to suicide – like her mother. But the police told him she had been raped and battered to death. They told him not to see her but he insisted, and as Marius stared down at the bloated suet whiteness of her body and the misshapen thing that had once been her head, something broke inside him. That summer he left law school and joined the Lyon Police Department. They were keen to have a recruit of his calibre and, after a graduate training course, he filtered round various departments until, much later, he joined Interpol. Over the intervening years he mourned for Natasha, and the grief intensified rather than lessened as time passed. He became the shell of a personality; ten years elapsed before he felt he was becoming human again. And during that time, off and on, he had returned to the sexual comfort of Jean-Pierre. Not that this had blunted his pain, but gradually it was as if he had absorbed Natasha in some shallow pit inside him. She was a part of him. And in his career he was avenging her. Promoted to Detective Chief Inspector, Marius was good. He had a high success rate, and his investigations were always methodical, sometimes visionary. At Letoric, his mother – and no doubt his father – were very proud of him. But still it was only his mother’s attention he craved and he managed to squeeze in time with her at Letoric. Not much, but enough to reassure him that she had the same driving force as before. She had joined a women’s club in St Esprit and had become immersed in trying to keep up the Letoric gardens on her own. She hated gardeners – only wanted her own sense of creation and order. At the same time she was growing closer to his father and the two, now in their seventies, were becoming dependent on each other. Then his father retired. Six months later Wolfgang Kummel went on trial in Lyon and the persecution began. At first his mother was vigorously supportive. Then she had the stroke.
‘Shall we stop at the church?’ asked Alain.
‘It’s where I used to sit with Father.’
‘Then perhaps –’
‘No. I’d like to.’
Alain hesitated and then sat down. Marius settled down beside him. T
he lights winked back.
‘I liked Monique,’ he said, ‘but didn’t really get a chance to talk to her properly.’
‘It was a good evening. I was grateful to you.’
‘Will you bring her down again?’
‘Yes – yes, of course I will.’
‘Did you meet on a case?’
Marius laughed. It felt as if he had not done so in years. ‘No. I met her at dinner with some mutual friends. An inspector in Lyon. She is a friend of his wife’s. A conventional introduction.’
‘And she’s a historian?’
‘At the university in Lyon.’
‘Has she been married?’
‘Yes. She’s divorced,’ said Marius briefly. He was surprised at Alain’s curiosity. He had always seemed so detached. In his childhood Marius had always thought of him as rather glamorous – a Frenchman from a bygone age, with a love of wine and cheese, of the classic life, of belching grandly without covering his mouth. A wealthy lawyer of the old school with a dead wife whom Marius could hardly remember – and a sophisticated daughter whom he had been frightened of and was now vaguely curious to see. But she rarely came home and Marius had wondered if there was an estrangement.
‘Why was it necessary for you to protect my father?’ asked Marius suddenly, the thought surfacing, ready to be aired and discussed. It was curiosity, he supposed, rather than anything else.
‘He lacked confidence.’ Alain spoke slowly. ‘We’d been friends and neighbours for a very long time. We’d seen much trouble together – and discussed it on our walks. He was a good man. Not a collaborator. I would never believe that. After Klaus Barbie we French have become obsessed with the problem – what is collaboration?’ He paused. Alain was looking down at the field where they had been shot, the texture of which was rapidly disappearing into the night. ‘Marshal Pétain was our symbol of collaboration, but what people don’t realise is that it was a French proposal that Germany and France should be equal partners in government, not a German demand. Of course Hitler entirely rejected the idea …’ He turned to look at Marius. ‘Your father would have nothing to do with the Movement – particularly as your mother had everything to do with it. He knew he would endanger it; as an eminent judge he would be too much in the public eye. And this question of him working with the Nazis, well, he was also working for the French government, so you can’t call that collaboration. As for presiding over a kangaroo court, he would never even have contemplated it. Still you know all this …’ His voice trailed away.
‘On that day – when the young people were taken out into that field and shot – did you talk it over with him?’
‘We were really horrified. It was absolutely appalling. Both Henri and I felt so powerless. We registered the strongest possible objection to the local commandant. But of course – it was out of our hands.’ He paused, watching Marius closely. ‘I could have told you all this – at any time since you arrived from Lyon, or at any time before that. Why are you asking me now?’ Marius said nothing and Alain continued. ‘Is it because you were afraid to ask? That I might have something to tell you?’
‘I was going to start asking questions. But I procrastinated too much.’
‘Your father wanted to clear his name.’ There was a trace of impatience in Alain’s tone.
‘Yes – but I couldn’t face finding him guilty,’ said Marius. ‘Do you blame me?’ he asked with sudden anguish.
‘No – I might well have done the same thing. If you love them then there’s a resistance to digging deep. The pain of feeling other people’s hatred.’ Alain shivered and stood up. ‘It’s growing cold up here. Shall we walk back?’
Again they walked in the silence Marius would closely associate with that evening. The pungent scents of the mountainside suffused him as they edged down and he thought of Monique, suddenly needing her desperately. It would be good to take their advice and go to Lyon. She would be sympathetic, attentive, yet give him space. She would be perfect. Little stones rattled under his feet and a rabbit scampered across a dry gully below them.
Their second meeting had been at an antique book fair. Marius had wanted some of the Letoric books revalued, not with a view to selling but to reinsuring. He had taken a couple of early editions of Victor Hugo to the Lyon sale to consult one of the experts.
Monique had been there on a similar errand: an aunt was about to sell part of her library and, being infirm, had entrusted her niece with the task. They had met again at one of the stands, and while their books were being valued, had found each other attractive. She was tall, willowy, a few years younger than he with a long oval face that elegantly – and eloquently – displayed the driest of dry humour. An historian, she specialised in the First World War and had already written a couple of books on the Somme and Flanders fields. Now with her fellowship at Lyon, she was only meant to give a few lectures. The main purpose of her appointment was to allow her to concentrate on a paper she was writing about Ypres. She had a childless marriage behind her; her ex-husband was a professor at the Sorbonne. It had been an amicable divorce, born out of weariness.
That night they had dinner. The next night they had dinner. And the third night they had dinner and went to bed. She was very good in bed – demanding much but receiving it rapturously. Their physical love bloomed, but they had a friendship too that grew in strength until Marius found it hard to travel. They understood each other in a mature way, thankful they had met now. Earlier or later would not have done. Now they were centred on each other and nothing very much on the outside mattered. They had known each other for almost a year now, and still Marius knew little of her husband, or her past life, and she knew little of his parents – or even much about the accusations that hovered in the suspicious air of St Esprit or the more political circles in Lyon. Neither of them had had a core to their lives, and now that they had one both were mutually fascinated by it. ‘Something to come inside for,’ she had once told him and Marius felt that Monique had expressed that core with perfection. Both mentally and physically, what they had between them was definitely ‘something to come inside for’.
‘I enjoyed our promenade.’
‘So did I. I won’t accompany you back.’
‘No. There will be Mother to see to.’
‘I shall visit her tomorrow.’
‘That’s good of you.’ Marius took the old man’s hand. It was dry and cool and strong. ‘I know she’ll have to go somewhere,’ he added sadly.
‘What about a live-in nurse?’
‘Is that really practical? And it’s bound to be hugely expensive. I’ve been thinking about getting them to sell for some time.’
‘Are you still convinced that’s right?’ Alain sounded almost querulous.
‘Father won’t leave enough to restore the place. And you can’t invite a nurse to live in a ruin.’
‘It’s not as bad as that.’
‘It soon will be.’
‘Marius …’ They were walking across the field now, the old man limping slightly. ‘Suppose we pooled resources?’
‘What?’
‘It’s a shame to let her die in an institution.’
Marius was considerably startled. ‘Yes, but what resources? I don’t have any capital.’
‘I have a lot,’ said Alain quietly. ‘Why don’t you let me get the house back to what it was?’
‘It would cost a fortune. And why should you?’
‘For your mother. And when she dies, it will be a mutual investment and we can sell it on the open market.’ He chuckled. ‘We’ll work out some kind of split. Of course Solange could outlive me. But then it will be an investment for Gaby. And yourself.’
Marius didn’t know what to say. He reached out and took the old man’s hand again.
‘I would have done this while Henri was alive,’ said Alain. ‘But he wouldn’t let me.’
‘Why not?’
‘Perhaps he thought it would incriminate me in some way. I told you – he was a good man. And you
have to remember how strong our mutual chains of loyalty were, and how much he depended on my life-long support.’
‘You are very generous.’
‘Will you allow me?’
‘Can I think it over?’
‘Of course.’
They parted in the soft, fragrant moonlight and went back their separate ways. Marius turned to watch his dark receding shape. His limp was more pronounced now and suddenly he looked rather vulnerable.
Marius turned the idea over in his mind but all he could see was his father’s face. The thought of the Château Letoric suddenly rising like a phoenix, clad in sandblasted masonry and overlooking pristine lawn and clear water, did not occur to him as a reality. Dissolution and decay seemed much more likely. A pang of guilt nudged Marius; what was he doing climbing hills with Alain when he should have been at home nursing his mother? Instead he had left the task to a slut. And not one with a heart of gold. His step quickened as Marius hurried towards the scarred overgrown pillars that marked the beginning of the stony track that had once been the gracious sweep of a drive up to Letoric. A shadow detached itself from the crumbling plaster. Jean-Pierre Claude.
6
‘Marius?’
‘What the hell do you want?’
‘A talk.’
‘This isn’t the time.’
‘You used to have a lot of time for me.’
‘Yes.’
‘A lot of time.’ Jean-Pierre’s voice was slurred.
Would there be a scene, wondered Marius. Suddenly he felt weary to the bone.
‘Go home and sober up.’
‘I wanted to let you know I was sorry. About your father.’ There was an animal smell to him that Marius had always found alluring. If only he was drunk too, he thought wildly. When had he last gone to him? A year ago? And now the desire was there again. Slowly kindling. By the light of a cloud-strewn moon he could see Jean-Pierre was wearing a T-shirt and tight jeans, emphasising his gone-to-seed voluptuous figure. Marius looked down to his crotch. It was massive. He looked up and the sky seemed one swirling mass of night-flying vapour.
Murder is a Long Time Coming Page 7
