The Girl at the Lion D'Or

by Sebastian Faulks

  ‘That’s right. Children. Lots of children.’ Christine paused. ‘That class of person – sometimes I think they have too many, don’t you?’

  Hartmann shrugged, ‘Oh, I don’t know. We need the labour now, apart from anything else.’

  He picked up a magazine from the table and thumbed through it as he sipped from his brandy glass.

  Christine pursed her lips. ‘The girl – Anne – she’s good company for me, I think. It gets quite lonely out here sometimes.’

  Hartmann laughed. ‘Really, Christine. After all you’ve been saying about the peasantry and the lower classes and their idleness and their breeding habits . . .’

  ‘But they’re not all like that, Charles. I’m not a snob, you know.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘All I was saying is that sometimes it’s nice for me to talk to someone during the day. It’s all right for you with your work, but this house can be quite bleak.’

  ‘I thought you liked it.’

  ‘Oh, don’t worry, I like it. I know how much it means to you and of course I can see that it’s very nice here with the lake and everything . . . .’ She tailed off, allowing another pause to develop.

  ‘Anyway,’ she said, picking up her sewing, ‘we had a nice little talk today. I showed her some photographs from your father’s album.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I showed her some photographs from your father’s album.’

  Hartmann put down the magazine. ‘What on earth for?’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know, we were just having a chat about this and that. Then I came across the album and thought she might like to see what the house looked like in the old days.’

  ‘But why?’

  ‘You’re not angry are you?’

  ‘No, I just want to know why,’ said Hartmann, taking his feet off the fender and swinging round to face her. ‘Why did you show Anne those photographs.’

  ‘I told you. We were just having a chat,’ said Christine, toying with Hartmann’s attention now that she had finally secured it.

  He picked up his glass, trying to appear calm. It was difficult. ‘Mme Monnier and Marie – you don’t show them the photograph album, do you? You don’t spend the afternoon going through your jewellery with Marie and asking Mme Monnier to come and have a look round the cellar with you.’

  ‘Of course not, Charles. Poor old Mme Monnier! I don’t think she could even manage the stairs, let alone –’

  ‘You know what I mean.’

  ‘Not really. Are you angry with me, Charles? Just for showing your father’s pictures to a servant girl?’

  Hartmann who was trembling with an anger he couldn’t explain, said, ‘Yes, I am. You had no right to.’

  ‘But she enjoyed it. You’re the one who’s always saying I’m too dismissive of the servants and I think you’re right. She understood exactly what they were about.’

  ‘But of course.’

  ‘There was one of you in uniform, about to go off and fight.’

  ‘You showed her that?’ Hartmann stood up and walked to the window, still clutching the glass.

  ‘Yes, and there was one of those swans from the Arctic. And lots of your parents.’

  ‘Why do you have to be so cruel?’ said Hartmann.

  ‘Cruel?’

  ‘Yes. You were taunting her, weren’t you? Because she’s what you so subtly call a “servant girl”. You wanted to show her the things she couldn’t have.’

  ‘You mean the house?’

  ‘Yes, the house. And the money and the parties. And the family and – God, if you ever thought what lives some people might have lived.’

  He could hear himself becoming incoherent, and so tailed off. There was something in the way Christine had said ‘your father’s pictures’ that implied an inadequacy in him. It had touched him on an area of weakness he hadn’t known existed but which she, in some strange way, had guessed at. He felt guilty towards Christine as much as towards Anne, though for reasons which barely seemed his fault.

  Christine’s eyes were sparkling as if the sight of Hartmann’s anger thrilled her.

  ‘I’ve never seen you like this before. But really there was nothing wrong. It’s the way we’re supposed to be now. All equal, isn’t that it?’

  ‘You taunted her, Christine, you know it. You didn’t show her those photographs because you wanted a companion.’

  He had begun to shout and when Christine saw his hand tighten on the glass as if to crush it in his fist, she lost her nerve. Unable to confront him with his infidelity, she finished peevishly, ‘What does it matter? She’s just a waitress. She’s strong and young enough to get over it.’

  Hartmann banged the glass down on a table and left the room, slamming the door behind him. Christine leaned forward where she sat and held her face in her hands. She started to sob, thinking of the girl’s pretty eyes and of her own dry womb.

  That night they lay on opposite sides of the bed, separated by a long expanse of linen and blankets. Christine had gone up early, her head aching with tears, and had curled herself into a small knot of self-pity. Hartmann had walked along by the lake for an hour or so, trying to calm himself. He was glad he had left the room when he did, before he had said anything he might have regretted.

  He lay on his back, staring upwards into the darkness. He felt guilty towards Christine and for his part in her unhappiness. The reasons for it were clear enough, however, and it was a feeling which would pass. With Anne it was different. He felt for the first time he had seriously confronted the nature of his own past life, let alone that of another person. He thought once more of the small girl running into the field, and his heart ached for her. His inability to comprehend fully either the emotion itself or what implications Anne’s life might have for his understanding of greater patterns and meanings in the world made him clench the bedclothes in his fists as he screwed his eyes shut, trying to see backwards into darkness.

  He knew Anne was robust – how else would she have survived? He knew she didn’t view her own life in a sentimental or obsessive way. But a sense of his own weakness, buried for so long by the layers of acquired experience and sophistication, had been tapped at a low level by Anne’s story, and now her pain ran through him as if it were his own.

  5

  IN THE MIDDLE of the night Hartmann was awoken by what sounded like a pistol shot. He sat up in bed.

  ‘Did you hear that?’ said Christine, taking his arm.

  They listened for a few moments, but could hear only the wind coming in from the sea. Then there came a louder sound, more like a snapping oak tree than a pistol. Hartmann felt Christine’s fingers tighten on his arm.

  He craned his head forward. Both sounds seemed to have come from within the house, from the direction of the north tower.

  ‘I’d better go and see,’ he said.

  As he leaned forward to lever himself out of bed he felt Christine’s hand grip him again suddenly as a loud series of shots began to ring out, an odd staccato with no set pattern but with growing volume and spite.

  ‘Charles, I’m frightened. What is it?’

  Hartmann looked out of the window where the wind had blown back the shutter. The night clouds were charging over the woods beyond the lake. It was a typical gusty night on the headland. Then, slowly, the pattern of gun-shot sounds changed and became a single, continuous noise – a martyred groaning, as if the whole house were shifting and stirring, desperate to free himself from the elements that made it.

  Christine began to cry. ‘My God, Charles, what’s happening?’

  Hartmann sat where he was, fixed by fear and by a strange sense of guilt. The noise began to grow louder: he could feel the house begin to pulse and teem as if the earth were quaking beneath it.

  Then the rumbling stopped and the natural quiet of the night began to re-emerge, until the wind was audible again outside the window. It resumed its low howl, interrupted only by a sporadic groan, as if in afterthought, from the tower.

&nb
sp; Hartmann flung on his dressing-gown and went along the corridor in the direction of the noise. He looked in the bedrooms, turning on one light after another, illuminating the dusty jumble of possessions. There seemed to be nothing wrong. He retraced his steps and went on to the main landing in the middle of the house. Everything was in order as he descended the stairs. It was not until he was almost in the kitchen that he became aware of a smell that was both damp and powdery.

  The room itself was wrecked. Part of the floor had fallen into the cellar below, leaving a gently smoking hole. The range, a vast antique system of ovens and boilers, had been torn away from the wall and half of it now lay in the cellar too. There had been a fall of plaster from the ceiling and this clouded the darkness that the electric light, another casualty of the event, could not illuminate.

  Hartmann went outside. By the indifferent light of the moon he could see that it was only plaster which had been shaken from the ceiling of the kitchen; although the fall was heavy, the structure above looked unimpaired. The noise made by the range as it fell had made him fear that half the Manor had collapsed, but from outside, the building still looked massive and untroubled.

  He went inside and telephoned Mattlin.

  ‘It’s a terrible imposition at this time of night, but it’s possible that another part of the house could collapse and there’s something we could do to stop it.’

  He gave Christine a tisane and assured her there was nothing to worry about. There was some structural damage, he said, but nothing serious. He told the weeping maid, Marie, the same thing.

  It was starting to grow light by the time Mattlin arrived, his eyes narrow and ringed with grey. He inspected the damage in silence, focussing a powerful torch on to the kitchen ceiling. Hartmann watched him swiftly weighing up the possibilities.

  ‘Didn’t you have any warning?’ he said.

  ‘Not really. Christine mentioned that she’d heard some strange noises and there were a few cracks in the walls upstairs, but nothing more than you get in any old house. I suppose I should have paid more attention to what she said.’

  Mattlin poked around amongst the rubble on the kitchen floor. He laughed. ‘It must have been a hell of a noise!’

  ‘I thought the whole place was falling down.’

  ‘I’m just going to have a look at the back,’ said Mattlin, disappearing with his torch.

  Hartmann felt slightly irritated by Mattlin’s attitude but also relieved. Not even Mattlin would be laughing at this hour if there were something seriously wrong.

  ‘There’s the root of the problem, of course,’ said Mattlin when he reappeared, pointing at two supports which stuck up from the cellar. ‘Your builder has put those in to strengthen the cellar but he’s succeeded only in putting pressure on the rest of the structure.’

  ‘So what’s going to happen?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘But if there’s pressure on the whole house –’

  ‘It can take it. That’s why it was just the floor that fell in. These outer walls are very strong. They deflected the upward pressure. And that’s why part of the ceiling collapsed.’

  ‘And nothing else is going to happen?’

  ‘I shouldn’t think so. I’ll get a structural engineer to come and have a look later today. But I shouldn’t worry if I were you. It’s just going to be a messy job to clear up. If you’d had an architect to supervise the builder it would never have happened in the first place.’

  ‘I’d no idea he’d done anything so drastic. He said there was nothing structural to do and that he would just put in a couple of supports to give extra stability to the roof of the cellar.’

  ‘Yes, but there are ways and ways of doing these things. For a start they need to go in straight, not at any old angle like these.’ Mattlin smiled. ‘But don’t worry. Nothing else is going to happen. It’s just a mess, that’s all.’

  Christine appeared in the doorway of the kitchen in her nightdress and Hartmann noticed Mattlin’s eyes instinctively run up and down her distraught figure.

  ‘Nothing to worry about, Christine,’ said Mattlin. ‘Messy and noisy, but nothing serious.’

  Hartmann wondered if there had been a woman in Mattlin’s bed when he had telephoned. He certainly seemed anxious to be off.

  ‘I’ll get this man Conturier to come and have a look later,’ he said as he moved towards his car.

  Hartmann shook hands and watched him disappear. Christine returned to bed, her brief bout of tears having given way to what Hartmann viewed as a more healthy response of vigorous criticism of the standards of the average labourer.

  Before going up to join her, he looked once more at the rubble in the kitchen and into the gaping cellar below.

  At lunch-time the next day Christine received a telephone call from Marie-Thérèse who was in the state of nervous excitement which meant she had bad news to tell. It concerned Roussel, the builder. Little Jacqueline, the postman’s daughter, had gone round that morning to deliver a parcel and discovered his house locked up. There was a note on the door addressed to the local doctor, to whom Roussel owed money. It appeared he had absconded, taking his wife and children with him, and leaving no indication of where he had gone. He had left in the middle of the night and no one had heard a sound. Marie-Thérèse said this showed he must have been planning it for weeks.

  ‘What time did he leave?’ said Christine.

  ‘I don’t know exactly, but in the middle of the night.’

  ‘So he couldn’t have heard about our house then?’

  ‘What about it, dear?’

  It was a good morning for Marie-Thérèse.

  There was no shortage of conversation that night in the bar at the Lion d’Or, though there was a considerable lack of information. It was first understood that the whole of Hartmann’s house had collapsed and that there were at least three dead. A man whose sister knew the maid was able to assure them that there had been no fatalities. It was, however, not unnaturally assumed that Roussel had absconded because of what had happened at the Manor.

  Anne, who was behind the bar, listened as various opinions were put forward.

  One theory was that Roussel had disappeared to escape the shame of having syphilis. ‘It’s everywhere, you know,’ said the fisherman who introduced the idea. ‘The country’s riddled with it.’

  At about ten o’clock Mattlin’s curly head appeared around the door, and he joined the noisy discussion.

  ‘It’s really quite simple,’ he said. ‘The answer is money.’

  ‘Money?’

  ‘When the police look through his books they’ll see that Roussel had gone broke. It’s impossible for people like him to make a living these days – especially with this Government in power.’

  ‘How do you know this about Roussel?’ asked the fisherman, disappointed to hear his own theory supplanted by a more mundane explanation.

  ‘I’m an architect. I deal with builders and surveyors. We know each other’s business – informally, of course. If I’m to recommend a builder for a job I have to know what sort of shape he’s in. We all know about each other.’

  ‘And Roussel, he was in a mess, was he? I always thought he seemed a smart one, with his business cards and whatnot,’

  ‘It doesn’t matter how smart you are if you don’t get paid,’ said Mattlin. ‘And if you’ve got a sick child, like Roussel had, as well as all those other hungry mouths – well, you can imagine.’

  There was more muttering and shaking of heads around the bar as people tried to resurrect their own more lurid theories for Roussel’s disappearance. But Mattlin was persuasive. ‘Take the job he was working on at the end, at the Hartmanns’ house.’

  ‘The place that’s fallen down?’

  ‘That’s right,’ said Mattlin. ‘There he was, working for months with a complicated schedule of payments, forced to buy all the materials in advance. And Hartmann never paid him for them.’

  ‘What, even when they were going into his house?
’

  ‘That’s right. And he’d only paid him for a quarter of the work though Roussel had almost finished.’

  ‘It’s a bad business.’

  ‘How do you know about all this?’ said the fisherman.

  ‘I’ve been called in as a consultant.’

  ‘That’s a bad thing, if it’s true, M. Mattlin. A man should pay what he owes. Especially a well-off man like M. Hartmann.’

  ‘He’s always been like that,’ said Mattlin, ordering another drink. ‘It’s the Jewish blood, you know.’

  Anne passed him a glass and took the coin he proffered.

  ‘I didn’t know he was one of them,’ said Collin, the local butcher. ‘Old Mme Hartmann, we used to deliver to her for twenty years or more and I never knew.’

  ‘It’s on the other side,’ said Mattlin. ‘The father’s.’

  ‘Well,’ said Collin, ‘I remember she used to order up all sorts of pork and that for him, and I thought these Jews didn’t eat pig.’

  ‘Just because he didn’t practise doesn’t mean it wasn’t in the blood,’ said Mattlin.

  ‘Jew or no Jew,’ said the fisherman, ‘it’s a bad show when a man doesn’t pay his debts. And now look what’s happened.’

  Mattlin lit a cigarette and pulled a loose shred of tobacco from his lower lip. ‘You mustn’t blame Hartmann alone,’ he said. ‘Roussel’s business was in trouble before he started the work at the Manor.’

  Anne had not seen Hartmann for five days, and the sound of his name brought him closer in her mind. She was sure he was unhappy. Whatever the truth about the damage to the Manor, she knew how much he loved the house and how upset he would be. She sensed a further sadness and struggle in him, something greater and more abstract than his worry about the building. When she pictured him now she saw him in the guise of a boy, as in the photograph of him about to go to war, with the protective layers of manhood stripped away. Since she had first seen him at the tennis court she had imagined his boyhood and sometimes sensed its influence in his adult actions, but she had been too awed by him and too frightened of saying the wrong thing to let this more vulnerable side of him figure much in her picture. Since she had come to know him better, however, and since she had also seen photographs of his youth, the earlier period of his life seemed more real to her. Her love for him held some degree of understanding in addition to dependence.