Charlotte Gray (32 page)

At the end of the landing there was an enclosed area from which different corridors opened, presumably into the tower, and a narrow, plain staircase up which Levade led the way. At the top were servants' or perhaps children's rooms, with low ceilings beneath the eaves but views over the grounds towards a lake. The best of these had a threadbare rug, a boat bed made up beneath a grey silk cover, and, on the wall behind the bed, a faded toile with Watteau-like figures in the colour of antique rose.

"It's beautiful." Charlotte was more stirred than she could reasonably explain by this plain room.

"May I have this one?"

"If this is what you like. Do you have any luggage?"

"I have a suitcase, but it's with your son. He said he'd bring it later if everything worked out."

"I see. There's another thing I should mention." Levade was standing in the doorway; he was lean and not particularly tall, but his figure almost filled the narrow frame.

"Nothing you see or hear must be repeated. I live a quiet life, but I have certain small habits which I don't want discussed in the bars of Lavaurette. Do you understand?"

"Yes. Of course."

"If you should ever find me distracted or unresponsive, you must ignore it." Charlotte nodded. She felt self-conscious as Levade's eyes ran up and down her figure in its homespun clothes; she had the sensation of having been appraised. Levade's long face softened a little; it was not a smile, but it had some affirmation in it, some acknowledgement of her as a separate being.

"Will you call me at six, when you've made dinner? You'll find food in the kitchen."

Everything Charlotte saw at the Domaine confirmed her conviction that she was right to stay. She had the peace of mind that came when a difficult decision appeared to be vindicated, and with that a practical energy. It was from this house that she would find Gregory.

In the afternoon Julien went to the Domaine to fetch Mlle Cariteau's bicycle in a van he had borrowed from Gastinel, the butcher. Dominique could use one of the old family bicycles in the barn, he explained, but Sylvie Cariteau needed hers for her daily business.

Julien enjoyed it when Dominique opened the door of his father's house. They had come far enough as friends that it was right for him to offer his cheek to her to kiss, and when she offered hers in return he allowed his lips to linger for a second while he inhaled the faint smell of lily of the valley on her skin. The social contradiction also pleased him: he was intimate with Dominique and with Levade, yet she called Levade "Monsieur' and was employed by him. What his father made of Dominique he could not imagine.

He thought Levade would like her and presumed he would at once divine that she was not what she claimed to be. Julien himself was excited by the thought of the English girl Scottish girl, he corrected himself whose true identity lay like an unplumbed reef below the shallow waters of this Dominique. As he came to know her and to care for her, he was aware that he did not come to know her at all: his growing friendship was with someone who did not exist and was therefore not subject to the limits and cautions of normal relationships. Why was this so exciting? It was Levade who had told Julien in outrage about the plan to convert the monastery into a hotel. At the beginning of his exile at the Domaine in 1937, he had frequently gone there to pray. When the order had made the decision to sell, he had mentioned it to Julien as a sad development, not as a possible source of income. Levade was distressed, or appeared to be, when Julien's company submitted plans for the conversion. Later, he told Julien it was better that he should do it than that it should fall into the hands of a barbarian; and at least it meant he would see something of his son. To begin with this was not the case, as Julien was able to do most of the work from Paris; then the practice was seized by the Government because its senior partner, a man called Well, was a Jew. The development company who took over the contract wanted to retain Julien as architect, and he, already uneasy at the supine collaboration of many Parisians, felt it was a good moment to leave the capital and come down to the site. Levade was delighted by the move and encouraged him to settle in Lavaurette.

At Julien's suggestion, Charlotte went to visit Andre and Jacob at the Cariteaus' house on the way back. Julien thought that in the absence of their mother they would appreciate seeing a young woman, and Charlotte was delighted to go, feeling that here was a positive act of resistance.

Sylvie's handsome, smiling face appeared at the back door. It was half-day at the post office and she was looking after the boys while her mother was out. She called up the stairs for Andre and Jacob, and there was the sound of eager feet before they came tumbling into the room.

Jacob was still at an age when fatigue registered itself as tears, when swift storms burst in clear skies, but Andre was at the delicate moment when life was ceasing to be a sequence of unrelated sensations and was on the point of becoming something that formed a continuous and more or less coherent whole. He was fascinated by knights in armour, soldiers, heroes of the Middle Ages, Greeks, Romans and stories from the Bible. Julien had been able to acquire secondhand books by post from a dealer in Clermont-Ferrand, but while he was waiting for a new consignment he told Charlotte she would have to rely on her memory or make up new stories of her own.

The two small boys sat with her on an old sofa on the kitchen.

Charlotte felt a little nervous. It had been a long time since she won the junior Academy prize in classical studies. What had been the name of Icarus's father, who had made the wings? She recalled Persephone being carried off by Diss, but how had she finally escaped? The Trojan War she remembered clearly for the most part; in any event, she could easily extemporise battles in which her favourite heroes (Hector, Aias; Achilles was too self-indulgent) defeated others after the intervention of a sponsoring goddess. The return of Odysseus she could spin out over several visits.

Andre sat with his chin cupped in his hands, staring up at Charlotte with unblinking eyes. His concentration appeared to be tireless, and he would occasionally interrupt or rebuke Charlotte for having skimped some detail of the characters' previous lives; he wanted to have the complete picture, and there were certain details the motive power of Agamemnon's ships, the wax of Icarus's wings that were crucial to his satisfaction.

Jacob listened to part of the story, but was more easily distracted; he would light on some comic detail and repeat it several times or walk round the room acting out some private game it had suggested.

This was something of a relief to Charlotte, who did not discourage Jacob from wandering off in mid-story.

Mlle Cariteau moved efficiently about the kitchen, taking crockery to the stone sink, sweeping the floor, occasionally lilting the lid of the giant stockpot and shaking her head in disappointment at the thin and meatless aroma she released. Still, her good humour seemed imperturbable.

Jacob eventually asked the question Charlotte feared, about his parents, and she had to stop the story she was telling to Andre.

"I don't know for sure when you'll see them again. I'm afraid I can't say." Although it was Jacob who had asked, it was Andre's intelligent, reproachful eyes that Charlotte feared.

"Where arc they?" said Jacob in his unformed voice.

"I don't exactly know. I believe they may be in Paris. You must try not to worry. One thing we can be absolutely sure of: they'll come home just as soon as they can. I know they wouldn't waste a minute.

So you just have to remember that as soon as they can, they'll be on the train home."

"But why have they gone away?"

"It's a difficult time. There's a war. People have to go to different places in a war, to places they don't always want to be."

"Why did they go to Paris?"

"I don't know. I expect they had no choice. Sometimes you just have to do things when you're a grown-up." Jacob had clearly forgotten about the gendarme's visit to his parents' house.

"And when will we see them?" Jacob was more tenacious than usual.

"I don't know. I can't pretend that I do know. But I hope it'll be soon. We all hope so and every day we hope so more. We never, never stop hoping."

Although only Jacob conducted the cross-examination, Charlotte felt throughout the pressure of Andre's fixed and disbelieving eyes.

Sylvie Cariteau leaned across the sofa to pick up the book she had left on the floor. As she did so. Charlotte caught the scent of her clean skin, efficiently scrubbed in wartime as in any other, and saw the waistband of her modest skirt, stretched tight by her solid, mannish figure. When she stood up and turned back towards the table Charlotte also noticed that where the skirt met her plain and tightly tucked-in blouse a strip of her underpants had been caught and was clearly visible across the width of her back. They were of coral satin, embroidered with lace in which was woven the frivolous patterns of daisies and forget-me-nots. Charlotte wondered if Sylvie just liked flowers or whether they were evidence of some private, hopeful fantasy, cherished for twenty years in emasculated Lavaurette.

"Come again, Madame," said Sylvie Cariteau when Charlotte was leaving.

"They've enjoyed it, haven't you, boys?"

"Yes, yes, come again, come again."

That evening Charlotte had to make dinner for Levade. A stranger in the kitchen, she spent several minutes opening and closing cupboard doors. Whoever had once owned the Domaine had acquired enough plates and glasses to entertain a hundred people, but it was not until she explored a back annexe that Charlotte found anything that could be eaten. It was a little after six by the time she went in search of Levade to tell him that his dinner was ready. He had told her he worked upstairs but had not said in which room, so she knocked at every door in turn without eliciting an answer until Levade's voice, sounding dim and abstracted, answered her call, and she heard him cross the room. She waited till he opened the door, hoping to catch a glimpse of his studio, but he moved quickly through the opening, leaving her time to see only a huge bed before he turned the key in the lock.

He went silently ahead of her to the dining room, where she had laid a place for him at the head of the table. He muttered grace, then poured wine into a crystal glass and drank quickly while Charlotte went back into the kitchen to bring the food. He tucked a white napkin into his collar, as though anxious to protect his paintbespattered shirt, and leaned back in his chair as Charlotte placed some fatty terrine in front of him. The bread she had found was as dusty as everyone else's but he tore off a large piece with enthusiasm. He made no comment on the pate or on the main course, a piece of chicken she had found beneath a wire-mesh cover and reheated with a sauce improvised from what was in the larder. She had found a peach on a tree in the orchard for his dessert, and this, too, he ate without speaking.

"I'm afraid there's no coffee," she said, when she cleared his plate.

"It doesn't matter. I'm going out for a walk now. I'll be back in about an hour." Now that she was standing close to him. Charlotte could see that he was not as old as she had thought: the white hair was misleading, and his skin, though lined, was not shrivelled or shrunk.

"Was the dinner all right?"

"What?" He turned as he was leaving the room.

"Yes. Thank you. Have some yourself."

It was not exactly the gracious invitation to lay an extra place in future that she had half expected, but it was something. She didn't particularly care whether this man liked her cooking or not; she just wanted to remain in his house. She was eating what was left of the chicken in the kitchen when she heard a voice calling out in the hall. She hurried over the springy floor of the dining room and found that Julien was paying his second visit of the day.

"Ah, Dominique. Exactly the person I wanted to see. Here's your suitcase. Has my father gone out?"

"Yes. He went for a walk."

They sat at the end of the cleared dining table, where Julien poured them both a glass of wine and lit a cigarette. Charlotte "watched his humorous face begin to settle as he organised what he was going to say.

He was wearing a pale blue open-necked shirt and a shabby tweed jacket; he looked more like a week-end painter than a professional architect who had just come from his office.

"Do you like it here at the Domaine?"

"Yes, I do. It's a beautiful house. Rather mysterious, don't you think?"

"Extremely. I wouldn't want to be here on my own in the winter."

"Your father doesn't mind, though."

"No. He has ways of keeping himself occupied in the long winter nights."

"He told me he's not a painter any more, that he just puts oil on canvas. He sounded rather sad."

Julien laughed.

"Yes. He used to paint wonderful pictures. He can't get used to the fact that it's finished. He ought to feel lucky, he ought to be happy that of all the people who tried to paint he was one of the few who managed to produce something worthwhile, who got inside himself and made it all connect. But he doesn't see it like that. He thinks he's under a curse, that something is being withheld from him by some cruel, arbitrary power."

"I suppose most people are reluctant to concede that luck has anything to do with their successes."

"Yes. Particularly when luck isn't the principal element, when ability and effort are the most important things." Julien smiled.

"Which room have you taken?"

"It's a little one on the second floor with a pretty toile behind the bed. It's charming."