The Girl at the Lion D'Or

by Sebastian Faulks

  While Hartmann took to the attic, Christine sewed, read, embroidered and knitted, muttering to anyone who could hear, usually Marie, about the wretchedness of the peasantry. Roussel bicycled ineffectually round and round the house, trying to decide where best to place his sign – a large coloured board with the words ‘Roussel Engineering’. He finally selected the top of the driveway where it joined the road into town.

  Hartmann soon discovered he was unable to concentrate on work and so decided to sort through the three tin trunks of papers he had brought with him from his flat in Paris. He enlisted the help of the fat workman in carrying them up to the attic where he took a hammer and prised the nails from the boards that blocked the window, so the light fell on to the great empty space. He thought it unlikely that he would be needing many of the papers that were in the trunks; the attic was as far as most of them would go.

  The most curious of the papers he came across was an ornithological notebook, begun when he was thirteen and the family had been living briefly in the countryside outside Vienna. He suspected himself of having copied it from a textbook, but the style was childish and full of mis-spellings and there were convincingly vivid journal entries. It seemed scarcely credible that the city man he thought himself to be could once have known all this country lore. Then he came to a trunk which contained letters, postcards and photographs that for varying reasons he had been unable to throw away. He took out one of the bundles of letters and began to read. They all seemed to be from women. There was one postcard from a male friend in Monte Carlo, but it was a rarity. More typical was a note from Françoise, a girl he had taken to dinner when she was hoping to find work in a lawyer’s office in Paris. It was a pretty card with flowers that thanked him for the dinner and hoped to see him very soon.

  There was a fragile determination in the word ‘very’ he had not noticed at the time.

  Each letter or card he pulled from its envelope seemed similarly to rebuke him. He wondered how he could have failed to see what they were really saying. Admittedly, their terms were restrained, but that only made their delicacy and his unfeeling response seem more bleakly contrasted.

  It had been an unreal world in Paris after the war. There seemed to be a conspiracy among those who had fought to forget what they had endured, perhaps because it was too large for them to understand. Hartmann had gone to the front at the beginning of 1917, having previously been too young to serve. What he saw there was not on the giant scale of Verdun the previous year, but its elements were the same – the ceaseless noise, the trenches built up from useless limbs as well as from sandbags, the sleeping and the eating with the week-long dead. Back in Paris no one spoke of these things. Hartmann often watched veterans of all four years to see if they would talk when the subject was raised, but they merely brushed it aside.

  In the fretful joy of peace they had thought about nothing. Looking now at the letters, cards and written mementoes of the time, Hartmann felt no connection with them. He had obviously not paused to consider the thoughts or feelings of those who wrote to him. Perhaps, he thought, his heart had not merely been hardened for the necessary duration of the war but universally brutalised, his imagination cauterised and closed.

  He didn’t have long to ponder these things before he heard Christine’s voice calling him down to lunch.

  ‘Roussel has been on to me again today asking for more money,’ she said as she ladled out the soup.

  ‘I think he’s due some more now,’ said Hartmann.

  ‘You know perfectly well he’s supposed to have completed the first stage of the work before he gets any more. You already agreed to give him far more in advance than he should have had.’

  To curtail a spiritless argument, Hartmann said, ‘Take the money from my desk this afternoon. Perhaps it’ll encourage him.’

  Christine waited till Marie had cleared the soup plates and brought the main course before saying, ‘And another thing. I need some more domestic help. Marie’s rushed off her feet with all this extra mess the workmen make.’

  ‘We still have Mme Monnier, don’t we?’

  ‘Yes, of course we do. But we need someone younger who can do all the rough work.’

  ‘Of course you can have some more help if you need it. I’ll ask Roussel if he knows of anyone.’

  ‘Thank you, my dear.’ Christine wiped the corners of her mouth on her napkin. ‘One day a week would be fine.’

  After lunch they went for a walk by the lake, over the dyke and out on to the beach beyond. Hartmann was still a stranger in the countryside. He couldn’t get used to the long, dense silence that was broken only by the sound of some wild animal in a way that was far more disturbing than the continuous rumble of city life in Paris or Rome. Nevertheless, he was beginning to feel at home in the rough tweed jacket he had bought in the town, even if it would take time for his boots to lose their rue de Rivoli gloss.

  Looking back through the woods, he could just see the Manor with its bold towers and he felt a vigorous affection for it. He turned to Christine.

  ‘I came across a strange thing this morning when I was going through my papers,’ he said. ‘A bird-watching notebook. I don’t even remember being interested in birds.’

  ‘I adore birds,’ said Christine. ‘That’s why I like this house. I hear some wonderful songs and cries from across in the forest. And sometimes I’ve seen them when it’s getting dark – the wild duck that come in from behind the trees. Do you remember your father said that one winter some swans which had flown in all the way from the Arctic came to nest here?’

  ‘Yes, I do remember. He was very excited. They had some special name, but I’ve forgotten what it was.’

  ‘Arctic swans is what he called them.’

  ‘Yes, that’s right. But they were the real thing – whatever the real thing is actually called. I know, because he had an expert down from Paris to authenticate them.’

  They walked on for a while until Hartmann said, ‘I thought I might go into town tonight. Would you like to come?’

  ‘No, thank you.’

  ‘Mattlin’s asked me if I want to go to one of the cinemas with him. Then we may go on somewhere afterwards.’

  ‘With Mattlin?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I don’t know how you can bear it.’

  ‘Oh, he’s all right. And I’ve known him for a long time.’

  ‘You know you’ve got nothing whatever in common with him.’

  ‘I wouldn’t say that,’ said Hartmann, as he bent to pick up a stick, which he threw in a high looping arc over the lake.

  That night Anne was on duty in the bar with Pierre, the head waiter. He was the only person at the hotel who seemed to have some sense of detachment from his surroundings. While Mme Bouin appeared to think only of enforcing discipline and Roland of how to avoid it, Pierre went about his work with a slow, self-sufficient smile and careful movements. When he trod the narrow corridor between the dining-room and the bar, the gathered air seemed barely disturbed by his passage. Between the agitation of Bruno’s kitchen and the varying demands of the clients, Pierre spread tranquillity; without him, Anne thought, it was hard to see how the hotel would have reached even the meagre level of service it offered. Pierre had thinning hair and sunken eyes with specks of black pigment beneath them. Although his manner was one of resignation he also enjoyed making small, polite jokes and he had taken a liking to Anne because she laughed at them.

  Hartmann pushed open the door from the street at about ten o’clock and took a place at the table towards the back of the bar. He had forgotten about his meeting with Anne at the tennis court and for a moment could not remember where he had seen her before. He watched her leaning against the bar, her dark hair tied carelessly back, swinging her foot in its flat black shoe slowly back and forth as she waited for the next order. He made a rapid and almost unconscious inventory of her physical features, ticking off each one as his eyes moved casually up and down. Only then did he begin to wonder what she m
ight be thinking and whether this menial job could be interesting; probably not, to judge from her distracted figure and her partly shaded face with its air of suppressed vitality. He tried to imagine what such a girl might aspire to, apart from a worthy marriage, and in what aspects of life she took her pleasure. Unlike the involuntary spasm of sympathy he had felt for Roussel, this deliberate attempt to imagine the life of another left him with no firm impression or shared feeling; he remained uncertain, though not uninterested.

  Finally he caught her eye and she, at once recognising him, found herself blushing. She turned to the barman and made earnest conversation with him. Of course, thought Hartman: the girl at the tennis court.

  Anne gathered up some empty plates from a table near the bar and scraped off the uneaten food. Bruno’s dish of the day was a kidney stew in a vigorous mustard sauce. It was of the same family as the previous day’s lunchtime speciality in the main restaurant, though the powerful juice went some way to concealing the closeness of the relationship. Many of the locals were taking it manfully with the help of baskets of bread and frequent pitchers of soothing red wine that Anne had brought to their tables.

  In the glass she watched her colour return to normal before she swivelled round to face the main room again. She moved between the tables with a measured neutrality. She was wearing her waitress’s black dress and her waitress’s smile through which, Hartmann thought as he watched, little bubbles of the private girl kept breaking. He found it easier now that he saw her at work to imagine what she might be thinking. The aura some people carry with them can deter others from approaching, but the uniform of a servant is so clearly artificial that it invites speculation.

  At last he signalled to her from his table. She flattened the skirt over her hips and moved across the room, between the tables, holding a small round tray to give her hands some work to do.

  ‘We met the other day at the tennis court,’ he said as she reached his table.

  ‘Yes, I remember, monsieur.’

  He asked her about the hotel and if she was happy there. He thought that since they had been introduced away from her place of work it was polite – or permissible – for him to talk to her on a level of social equality. But as he continued his questions, Anne looked down, confused by his apparent interest. She didn’t know if the gentleness of his manner was prompted by politeness or whether he really cared about her. Hartmann glanced up at her averted face, the dark hair pulled back by a piece of ribbon. He thought she seemed a forthright girl who would be well able to look after herself. This view was confirmed when, after a pause, she looked up brightly and said, ‘Haven’t you just moved into a new home?’

  ‘That’s right. How did you know?’

  ‘I overheard two people talking about it at the bar. I suppose I shouldn’t have listened, but I couldn’t help it. People don’t lower their voices when I’m there. It sounds a wonderful house.’

  Her eyes were big with enthusiasm. Hartmann smiled. ‘I’m afraid it needs a lot of work.’

  ‘And have you got that builder, Monsieur Roussel, coming to help?’

  ‘You seem to know as much about it as I do! Yes, my wife was told by her cousin that he was the best man for the job, so we’ve hired him.’

  ‘Your . . . your wife recommended him?’

  ‘My wife’s cousin, to be precise.’

  Anne didn’t care about his precision. She felt as though she had been caught by a sudden blow behind the knees. All her life she had been cursed with a face on which her thoughts were boldly printed, and she knew that Hartmann must now be reading them.

  A wife . . . It had never crossed her mind in the heat of her silly fantasy by the tennis court. She was annoyed at her own stupidity and shamed by the way Hartmann rode her discomfort, lobbing her harmless questions and then talking of his house in a gentle, neutral way when all the time he must be thinking what a fool she was.

  A loud call came from the barman.

  ‘Excuse me,’ said Anne.

  ‘Of course.’

  Surely he couldn’t leave it at that? Perhaps he would speak to her again before he left.

  ‘Anne!’ The call was louder than before.

  ‘I must go.’

  ‘Yes, I think you must.’

  She turned quickly. The two notes in his voice – one of concern, one of gentle irony – combined in a perfect yet noncommittal civility.

  Pierre, the head waiter, slid up to her as she loaded her tray with glasses of beer. He held her elbow for a moment and spoke softly.

  ‘It would be better, my dear, if you were not to spend such a long time at each table.’ He lowered his head and raised his eyebrows. By his standards this was a rebuke. ‘Especially,’ he added, ‘when the gentleman still has a full glass.’

  He had gone before she could think of a reply.

  Anne was polishing glasses when the door from the street opened and Mattlin’s curly head was revealed from beneath his trilby. Hartmann went to join him at the bar and, as she ferried drinks to and from the tables, she heard only parts of their conversation. It concerned Mattlin’s reason for leaving his job in Paris and returning to live in Janvilliers. He seemed evasive.

  Anne was installed again behind the bar when the jaunty figure of Roussel came in and made his way over to join them.

  ‘My benefactors!’ he said. ‘Let me buy you a drink.’

  ‘Benefactors?’ said Hartmann.

  ‘Anyone who gives me work these days is a benefactor. I appreciate it, gentlemen.’

  ‘Has Mattlin given you work too?’

  Roussel looked puzzled. ‘But I thought –’

  Mattlin interrupted. ‘Have a drink.’

  ‘Ah, I see,’ said Roussel, tapping the side of his nose. ‘Shan’t say another word. Not the done thing, eh?’

  ‘Quite.’

  Hartmann looked quizzically at both men, wondering what they meant. He knew Mattlin well enough to be aware that his versions of events were, to put it kindly, individual, and his curiosity was therefore aroused. Both men, however, seemed to want the conversation closed and Hartmann thought it would seem churlish to press them. Mattlin quickly raised the topic of the German intrusion into the Rhineland, a subject of which the newspapers were full.

  ‘They have broken their promise!’ Roussel exclaimed. ‘Did all our men die for nothing at Verdun?’

  Mattlin fuelled his indignation with deft promptings and Hartmann turned once more to the bar.

  Anne, meanwhile, had had some moments to regain her composure. All she really wanted now was to limit her embarrassment by doing her job unobtrusively and not making a fool of herself again. But a more powerful desire impelled her to engage Hartmann once more in conversation, forcing her to adopt a brittle enthusiasm and an insouciance she didn’t feel.

  As Mattlin and Roussel moved further down the bar, she said to Hartmann, ‘Is the work going well on your house?’

  ‘I think so. It’s hard to tell. The men make a lot of noise and dust, so I suppose they must be doing something down there.’

  ‘And how does Madame your wife enjoy it?’ said Anne, this time confronting the name early in the proceedings.

  ‘She’s driven half mad by it, I’m afraid. She doesn’t like mess and noise. But she’s very long-suffering, and she keeps them on their toes. I think.’ He looked suddenly guilty. ‘I don’t know. I’ve not been very good about it, I’ve left it all to her. I play records on the gramophone to try to distract her.’

  ‘Do you? I used to have a gramophone, but I had to leave it in Paris when I came down here. I love music, don’t you? And dancing.’

  ‘I can hardly dance at all, I’m afraid. But I like music.’

  ‘And what do you play for her?’

  ‘Oh, anything. She likes Chopin. And Brahms, I think. And sometimes I try to make her listen to Mozart, but she hates that.’

  ‘She doesn’t like . . . well, dance music?’

  ‘You mean jazz?’

  ‘That sort
of thing . . .’

  ‘Christine? Oh, I wouldn’t imagine so. Too raucous for her, I think. But is that what you like? Jazz?’

  ‘Yes, I adore it. I’ve got some records upstairs in my room. It’s silly, isn’t it? I sold the gramophone but I couldn’t bear to part with my records. And now they just sit in my drawer.’

  Anne laughed, then looked down to the glasses in her hands as a small silence came between them. Hartmann watched as her hair fell forward over her cheek.

  ‘Cheerio, then, M. Hartmann.’ It was Roussel from the door of the bar. ‘I must be going now. Got to make an early start tomorrow. Important job, don’t you know?’ He laughed.

  ‘Oh, I’ve just remembered,’ said Hartmann. ‘Before you go. My wife wanted me to find out if you knew of anyone who would come in and do some extra cleaning for us. Just one day a week while the work’s going on.’

  ‘Yes, I understand, M. Hartmann. I’ll have a think about it. I can’t think of anyone at the moment, but I’ll let you know, shall I? Perhaps little Jacqueline, you know, the postman’s daughter, she might be interested.’

  ‘Yes, as long as she’s strong enough. Poor old Mme Monnier isn’t up to much more than dusting the ornaments these days.’

  ‘You’ll be wanting a sturdy woman, then. A young one. Always plenty of those in a town like Janvilliers.’ Roussel laughed. ‘Good night, gentlemen.’

  Anne moved out from behind the bar, clearing plates from the tables and taking further orders for coffee and more drinks. There were always centimes left in the saucers on the bar when people had paid for their drinks, and sometimes whole francs left on the tables for her. It was a rule that at closing time all such tips were pooled; half the total went straight to the hotel’s petty cash box, and of what remained Pierre and Bruno were entitled to a quarter each, while the rest was shared out between the barman and the waiters. ‘Monsieur the Patron is very strict on this point,’ Mme Bouin assured the truculent Roland, when he had once questioned the system. Diners who thought they were doing Anne a favour by leaving a larger tip than normal thus found their generosity registered only by the marbled ledger of Mme Bouin.