Girl at the Lion D'Or

Contents

‘
The Girl At The Lion D’Or’s
opening sequence in a small French railway station is so minutely, meticulously and vividly described it is as if the place were being viewed through a slowly tracking camera. The beginning points to the whole. It is a book which reads like French and at times his characters even speak as if they had been translated – not quite perfectly – from the French. The novel is not only a topographical achievement, refracting life through the eye of a middle-aged, middle-class Frenchman caught in adultery’s torments. It has a greater concern – with Anne and the way that the end of her love affair is only one more devastation in a life already laid to waste. Abandonment, Faulks says persuasively in the novel, using a psychiatrist’s phrase, is the one true originator and motor of grief. And Anne, who has been greatly abandoned in life, suffers one more abandonment. . . . Faulks suggests that while there are limits to what a country can collectively endure in terms of suffering, “there is no limit to the endurance of individuals. And it never ceases to amaze me.” And at the end of this enthralling novel you gather the sense that Anne will indeed come through. A form of transcendence is exhilaratingly celebrated.’

‘In mid-Thirties France, seeking asylum from her past, a penniless orphan turns up as a waitress at a tatty hotel by the sea. Befriended by the local landowner, the girl entrusts him with the highly charged scandal that in the Great War left her parentless. Her longing to be loved seduces him into tackling his own problems – trauma at Verdun, decrepit estate, childless wife – with a courage matching hers. They redeem each other’s past. But has their love a future? To convey their fraught affair in an era stiff with threat, Faulks bravely deploys not only the charms of romantic fiction, but also a crisper response to politics, landscape – and character. His icy concierge, bootboy with acne and lout of a chef are jewels. With his second novel Faulks has deepened into a soft-hearted analyst of both the differences between people and their raw humanity. This is a sentimental novel of rare intelligence and passion.’

The Girl At The Lion D’Or
is not only a rare achievement, a supremely accomplished piece of work, but, it seems to me, a glorious justification of the traditional novel. It reminds one that novelists don’t have to try to be clever. Instead, they have to look at life with respect and imagination, draw from it, and arrange their material in aesthetically satisfying shape. Here in this marvellous evocation of a particular society at a particular time, Sebastian Faulks has done just that. He has also reaffirmed the importance of character in the novel; his Anne and Hartmann are as real, as moving and convincing as Anna Karenina and Vronsky or Colette’s Chéri and Léa. It is a novel to cherish and delight in.’

‘Sebastian Faulks loves the cinema of Renoir and Carne and Bresson.
The Girl At The Lion D’Or
is a journey through time to pre-war France, the diary of a waitress at a provincial hotel. Her love affair with a married Jewish lawyer and political arranger allows the author to treat major themes of conscience and guilt, of anti-Semitism and the collapse of national morale . . . She believes what her guardian has told her, that courage is all – and she is enduring. She also comes to believe what her lover believes, that evil is continual rejection through death or desertion. This moving and profound novel is perfectly constructed, and admirable in its configurations of place and period.’

This eBook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

Epub ISBN: 9781407065526

Version 1.0

FOR MY MOTHER AND FATHER

PART ONE

1

I
N THOSE DAYS
the station in Janvilliers had an arched glass roof over the southbound platform as if in imitation of the big domes at St Lazare. When it rained, the impact of the water set up a nervy rattle as the glass echoed and shook against the fancy restraint of its iron framework. There was a more modest rumble emitted by the covered footbridge, while from the gutters there came an awful martyred gurgling as they sought out broken panes and unmended masonry down which to spit the water that was choking them. The thin sound of the locomotive’s wheeze as it braced itself for its final three stops up the coast was thus barely audible to the two people who alighted from the train that damp but not untypical Monday night.

One was the driver, who was following the custom of years by climbing down from his cab, hat pulled over his ears, and racing to the side-door of the station buffet where his glass of brandy would be waiting for him. There was no time for conversation – just a quick gulp and he was gone, as usual, scuttling back up the platform, hoisting himself aboard with a word to the fireman and a reinvigorated haul on the levers as the engine hissed and the train set off to arrive, as usual, a minute and a half late at its next stop.

The other was a slight, dark-haired girl with two heavy suitcases, frowning into the rain and trying not to feel frightened. She stood in the doorway of the ticket hall, hoping someone would have been sent to fetch her. ‘Be brave, little Anne, be brave,’ old Louvet, her guardian, would have said to her if he had been sober, or there, or – for all Anne knew – alive. After a time she did see the long bending approach of headlights, but the car circled the fountains in the middle of the square and disappeared in a spray of water.

Louvet, who thought himself a philosopher, had a theory that all unhappiness was a version of the same feeling. As Anne felt a tremor of abandonment, gazing over the rainy square, she pictured him explaining to her: ‘When the good Lord made this world from the infinite number of possibilities open to him and selected – from another limitless pool – the kind of misery that his creatures should be subject to, he selected only one model. The moment of bereavement. Death, desertion, betrayal – all the same thing. The child sent from its parents, the widow, the lover abandoned – they all feel the same emotion which, in its most extreme form, finds expression in a cry.’ Practice had given an almost religious eloquence to Louvet’s blasphemous conclusion: ‘One cannot, my dear Anne, escape the conviction that the good Lord was, if not unimaginative, then at least rather simple.’

Anne, who was not a philosopher, saw a dripping form, male by the look of it and wrapped in a cape, approach her from the darkness. His voice was rough and grudging. ‘Are you the waitress? For the Hotel du Lion d’Or?’ His face now appeared in what light spilled over from the yellow lamp in the ticket hall. He was a youth of about nineteen with thick black eyebrows and dark curls stuck against his forehead under a leather cap. He had an extinguished cigarette between his teeth and his cheeks were traumatised by spots.

‘Yes, that’s right. Who are you?’

‘I work there. My name’s Roland. I’ve got the van. The boss said to come and pick you up. It’s over here.’

He led the way, shambling in a mixture of embarrassment and in an attempt to keep dry by wrapping his cape around him, which caused his knees to come too close together. Anne followed, struggling to keep up under the handicap of the heavy suitcases. Roland took her round the back of the station yard and gestured to a small van. He unlashed the canvas from the open back and gestured to her to throw in her suitcases. With considerable swearing and violence towards the tinny machine, he succeeded in making it creep, then jerk, then rush across the darkened square as he fought to locate the gears. Nervous at what might be waiting for her, Anne began to talk.