The Girl at the Lion D'Or

by Sebastian Faulks

  ‘Go to him, go to him! I don’t care. That man – the dentist – he’s a liar. He was rude to me, then he lied about it.’

  ‘Calm yourself, mademoiselle.’

  ‘I’m sorry, madame, but it isn’t fair.’

  Before Mme Bouin could reply Anne ran from the stairs, down the corridor and back into the kitchen. Bruno stuck out a pudgy arm and grasped her wrist as she went through. She paused for a moment, wanting to tell him what had happened, but found the feeling of indignation so strong that she couldn’t speak. She tore herself from Bruno’s grasp and ran across the courtyard, out into the narrow street by the side of the hotel. She thought of the thwarted desire of her life, which was to be loved, and sadness mingled with the speechless anger to press her throat in a grief that was a version – old Louvet would no doubt have contended – of the same and only emotion: abandonment. She leaned against the wall of the hotel, feeling the damp, grizzled stone against her cheek. The trapped air seethed in her lungs until at last it found expression in a cry that almost bent her in half.

  It was heard by a tall man, water dripping from his hat and on to his new rue de Rivoli boots, who was about to enter the bar. With one foot on the step he saw her shape from the corner of his eyes. He moved towards her.

  ‘Anne?’ His voice held a deep certainty beneath its note of puzzled enquiry. ‘Anne, is that you?’

  She looked up and peeled her hands away from her face.

  ‘Oh God,’ she said, and threw herself against his chest, almost knocking him backwards.

  He put his arms around her and wondered what sadness could have provoked that awful sound.

  PART TWO

  1

  AS ANNE TOLD him the story of the evening, she could feel Hartmann’s body grow tense with indignation. He appeared to be on the point of rushing off into action, but even in her distress she knew better than to let him go. As she laid her head on his shoulder and clung to his waist, she seemed to feel the force of his anger strengthen her.

  ‘All right,’ said Hartmann. ‘Listen. I will telephone this wretched dentist and put the fear of God into him. I will then ring the Patron and explain what’s happening before the old woman gets to him. I’ll have to go to another telephone, though. I can’t do it from the bar.’

  ‘Can I come with you? I don’t want to go back to my room. It’s so lonely.’ Anne was surprised at what she heard herself saying.

  ‘Yes, come on.’ Hartmann disengaged himself from her embrace but pulled her arm as they hurried through the rain to where his car was parked. Anne watched from the passenger seat as he negotiated the narrow back streets before joining the Boulevard.

  ‘We’ll go to the Café Gare. The telephone’s quite secluded there.’

  ‘But, monsieur, is it safe to ring Monsieur the Patron, do you think? Mme Bouin always says he’s so busy and it might do me more harm than good if he thought someone was – you know, speaking up for me.’

  ‘Leave it to me.’ Hartmann seemed to have a faint smile on his face.

  He sat her down at a table in the café with some brandy and went to the telephone which was in a passageway leading to the lavatories. Anne could hear Hartmann’s voice raised in anger; then the doors swung shut as someone passed through and she could no longer make out the words. The doors opened again and she heard what sounded like threats of violence. She thought back to what she had told Hartmann; perhaps in her sobbing she had exaggerated. Through the glass swing door she saw him ring off and then make another call. This one lasted a little longer but was conducted more quietly.

  Hartmann returned and sat down opposite her and beckoned the waiter over. ‘It’ll be all right. He’s going to telephone the Patron and withdraw his complaint – and he’s going to apologise to you. I told the Patron he’d be losing a client, but he didn’t seem to mind. He understands the situation.’

  ‘Do you know the man in the restaurant? The dentist?’

  ‘Yes, I let him take a tooth out once. Not a pleasant experience. I was glad of the chance to give him a piece of my mind.’

  ‘It’s very kind of you.’

  ‘Nonsense. People like him mustn’t be allowed to get away with these things.’

  ‘If it wasn’t for you I’d probably be packing my suitcase now.’

  ‘Would you have minded that?’

  ‘Not really. It’s very difficult for me there. I like Pierre, the head waiter, and Bruno, and even Roland, but the work’s very hard. And I think . . . they pick on me a bit.’

  ‘Who does?’

  ‘Mme Bouin, you know, the – the manageress. And Bruno, though I don’t really mind. He’s funny in his way.’

  ‘Why don’t you complain to the Patron?’

  ‘Because he’d sack me. If you’re in a junior position, you can’t make a fuss or people think you’re getting above yourself.’

  ‘And do they think that already?’

  ‘Mme Bouin does. She told me so.’

  Hartmann lit a cigarette and rested his chin on his fist as he lowered his head and looked at her. ‘I suppose you do rather ask for it.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘It’s something about you. You don’t conform to their ideas of what a junior waitress should be like. It’s not that you’re haughty or impolite, it’s just that you seem too self-possessed. You don’t seem to understand how simple most girls in your position are. They may be very charming, but they’re simple. You’re never going to be like that, however hard you try.’

  Anne pulled the comb from her hair as she looked down at the table and pushed it back and forth two or three times before resettling it. When she looked up again Hartmann’s eyes were still fixed on her, his expression one of quizzical gentleness, as if he expected her to explain herself. Anne, however, was quite practised at changing the subject when it suited her, and said rather abruptly, ‘Another thing I don’t like about the hotel is that almost every time I have a bath I feel that someone’s watching me.’

  ‘What?’ Hartmann laughed, incredulously. It was not the response she had wanted.

  ‘Yes,’ she said, feeling herself colour a little. ‘There’s a noise from high up on the wall and, although I can’t actually see anything, I’m sure someone’s looking at me. I can feel their eyes.’

  ‘Who is it, do you think?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Perhaps it’s the Patron himself.’

  ‘Oh, really!’

  ‘No, I don’t suppose so. He’s too busy. On the other hand, he is a widower. His wife was a beautiful woman. Perhaps he misses her.’

  ‘Monsieur –’

  ‘I’m sorry. I was being facetious. It’s probably that boy who looks like a medieval villain with the fringe and those angry boils.’

  ‘Roland? I don’t think he’d be interested. He’s too young.’

  ‘I don’t think so.’

  Hartmann ordered two more drinks, overriding Anne’s objection. Slowly the brandy trickled down inside her and soothed the feeling of injustice she had felt as she leaned against the hotel wall. She was aware that her eyes must be swollen, but there was little she could do about it. If she went to look at herself in the mirror, it might only destroy what little self-confidence she felt.

  He said, ‘You’re a resilient girl, aren’t you?’

  ‘I was lucky to run into someone who took my part.’

  ‘It wasn’t only luck, was it? If you hadn’t offered to come and work for me, I wouldn’t have known who you were. If I’d just recognised you from the hotel, I would have thought it was none of my business.’

  Anne shrugged and said nothing. The delicacy of her situation was beginning to embarrass her. There was nothing scandalous, of course, in having a glass of brandy with a married man, but she imagined everyone in the room could guess that it meant much more than that to her. Now that the tears had gone, it was difficult to find a level on which to communicate with him. He seemed to talk to her exactly as he talked to Mattlin or to anyone else, bu
t her response was complicated by the nervous emotion she felt and by her fear of saying something stupid.

  ‘What are you going to do now?’ he said.

  ‘I don’t know. I haven’t anywhere else to go, so I suppose I’ll have to go back. Mme Bouin isn’t going to be pleased, you know. She’ll make me suffer for this.’

  ‘Perhaps if you stay there for a little while you can find a better job somewhere else in the town.’

  ‘What, in another hotel?’

  ‘You don’t have to be a waitress, surely. You must have other skills.’

  ‘Not really. I can sew a little, and draw. But I left school too young to learn much there.’

  Hartmann, who had obviously not often put his mind to the employment prospects of young women, frowned. ‘Perhaps you could go somewhere as a receptionist, or a manageress. To a doctor’s, perhaps.’

  Anne found herself laughing. ‘Monsieur, do I seem to you a typical doctor’s receptionist?’

  Hartmann smiled and ran his big hand back through his hair. ‘No, I suppose not. Never mind. By the time you come on Wednesday, I’ll have thought of something. You are coming on Wednesday, aren’t you?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Good. Now I’ll drive you back to the hotel.’

  He took his hat and ushered her out into the street. The engine fired into life and the short journey was over, it seemed to Anne, almost before it had begun. Hartmann pulled up at the end of the street at the side of the Lion d’Or. ‘Are you sure you’ll be all right?’ he said, as Anne moved to get out of the car.

  ‘Yes, I’ll be fine. Thank you very much.’

  ‘I’ll see you on Wednesday.’

  ‘Yes. Wednesday.’

  Anne watched the black car reverse and stop, then pull away, the headlights catching strings of rain in their beam. She stood at the side entrance of the hotel until it was out of sight.

  2

  THE DENTIST’S APOLOGY was not a thing of any grace. After breakfast duty in the dining-room, Anne was summoned to Mme Bouin’s niche and there told that the matter of the previous night would not be referred to again.

  ‘Monsieur the Patron has decided to keep you on the staff. No doubt, like the rest of us, he greatly regrets what took place, but he is a generous man as well as an extremely busy one and he will take no further action.’

  She warned Anne that any further lapses would not be viewed so tolerantly. ‘And before you go, mademoiselle, there is one further thing. If it had not been for the intervention of certain persons you would now be waiting at the station with your suitcase packed. What’s done is done, but it is not permitted for the staff of this hotel to fraternise with the clients. Is that understood?’

  ‘Yes, thank you, madame.’

  ‘You will now return to the kitchen where I have given the chef instructions on your duties for the day.’

  ‘Thank you, madame.’

  In the kitchen Bruno was sitting at the big wooden table, dipping some bread into a bowl of coffee.

  ‘Floors,’ he said. ‘Then the vegetables. And then if there’s time before lunch, the windows.’

  ‘But that’s Roland’s job.’

  ‘Shut up, woman. And don’t come whining to me this morning. My head’s made of wood.’

  ‘I see.’ It seemed the dentist’s half-bottle of wine was not all the alcohol Bruno had consumed. ‘Did you drink a lot?’

  Bruno grunted and waved a fat wrist at Anne, who laughed.

  ‘Why do you do it, Bruno? You know it only makes you feel ill.’

  ‘Don’t ask me questions, you wretched girl, or I shall put you over my knee and spank you. Good and hard. I think that’s what you need – you and your Parisian manners.’

  ‘All right, not another word, I promise. Two bottles, was it?’

  ‘Good and hard, I tell you. I’d have that tight skirt off your bottom and your knickers down and –’

  ‘Bruno! You’re still drunk! I’m going, I’m going.’

  She went quickly to the store cupboard by the back door where the mops and pails were kept. It was boring work and the constant jar of the wooden handle on the palm of her hand began to irritate the dormant eczema. This morning, however, she didn’t mind. She opened the back door and let through a thin breeze which was clear and cool after the previous night’s rain. She felt protected. It was as if Hartmann’s intervention had not only saved her job but had also insulated her from some of the tedium involved in performing it.

  That night Christine Hartmann went to bed with a book she had taken from among the many that lay strewn around the Manor. From an early age she had developed the art of being alone and generally preferred her own company to anyone else’s. She read books at enormous speed and judged them entirely on their ability to remove her from her material surroundings. In almost all the unhappiest days of her life she had been able to escape from her own inner world by living temporarily in someone else’s, and on the two or three occasions that she had been too upset to concentrate she had been desolate.

  Her husband had said he would be up late preparing some papers. He seemed to work late with increasing frequency these days. Christine registered the change but said nothing.

  Hartmann sat at the desk in his study and stared blankly ahead of him, his pen abandoned on the papers.

  All his life he had felt the implacable nagging of desire. The feeling was more of a frustration than a pleasure, because the relief was only ever momentary. Sometimes, in fact, the length of time between the relief and the first intimations of the next frustration seemed so brief as hardly to constitute an interuption in the continuous longing. He had been affected by a mood of frivolity that had been widespread in people of his class after the war. The sustained feeling of euphoria – even if it was shadowed by a suspicion that such a climate couldn’t last long – coincided with the period of his own greatest youthful vigour. After the sight of the wall of dead men in the mud, of severed limbs, of blown muscle and sinew; after the stench of decomposing flesh and field latrines, the landscape of blackened trees and gaping shell-holes; after the constant sense of fear and of life valued only by the day, and then the return to decimated villages, there had seemed no reason for self-restraint. The free embrace of womanhood, the touch and scent of femininity, were tokens of the peace.

  For Hartmann and his friends in Paris there was serious work to be done in offices and banks and galleries, but there was also a parallel life of passion and sexual encounter. Hartmann and Mattlin, though they barely knew each other, were alike in one respect, that they each spent many hours wondering how to stave off the battering of desire. For Mattlin the solution lay in numbers: by increasing the aggregate of women he slept with he felt he could eliminate the potential sources of frustration. For Hartmann the answer always seemed to lie in the next encounter. He did not accumulate in the same way as Mattlin but saw each lover as potentially definitive. The next woman, he was sure, would prove so complete, so satisfying, that she would at last extinguish the tormenting itch that made it hard to concentrate for so much of the working day. Mattlin valued the difference in each woman he made love to because, by isolating each new trait, he hoped to inoculate himself against the frustration it might otherwise have caused; Hartmann found in individual differences only varying and sometimes tantalising degrees of incompleteness.

  The insoluble nature of his dilemma had been one of the factors that had reconciled Hartmann to marrying Christine. He knew he would never find a woman to end all desire, but there was much in his relationship with Christine, leaving aside the problem of her pregnancy, which disposed him to think they might be happy. There had been various outcomes and problems in his dealings with women, but the presence of sexual desire was something he had always taken as axiomatic. Yet now, with Christine, it had gone. Where once this feeling had been the most dependable presence in his life, now there was nothing.

  Hartmann got up from the desk and turned out the lights. He went through to the hall, pulled
the bolt across the front door and climbed the stairs to bed. Christine was still awake and smiled to him as he came in. He stood barefoot on the boards and gazed out across the lake to the swell of the woods on the other side. He was conscious of deferring an action, and knew that Christine would be aware of it too. When he climbed into bed he saw that she was naked – a sight which on countless previous occasions had caused a simple response in him. When he looked at her now, he felt something not unlike compassion. He saw her legs and arms, her heavy breasts and her face, eager and friendly, and he thought of all the difficulties of her life and of the way she had overcome them.

  It occurred to him that really this was the normal way to view a naked woman. It was the way one would look upon a mother or a sister, or a work of art: with affection, with understanding, with an appreciation, even, of their elegance, but not through the filter of desire. It seemed that the way in which he had previously seen women was false. Here was this aggregation of flesh and skin and hair, not repulsive, but merely human, like his own body. No doubt its owner could view it with detachment, wishing it were different in some respects, but also with kindliness and respect. Why, then, shouldn’t he also see it in this way? Was this not the most civilised approach? It was not absence of sexual desire that was strange, he thought; on the contrary, the strangeness was in the leap of imagination and sustained belief, against all the evidence, that allowed men to see women through a veil of make-believe allure.

  Christine wanted him to make love to her, and he felt baffled by his disinclination. It was as though he had cut himself and not bled, or opened his eyes and not seen. In his mind he thought of all the other women he knew, and in this mood he viewed them all in the same way. None was arousing. It didn’t occur to him to think of Anne or of what he had felt so strongly in the attic only a few days earlier.