Girl at the Lion D'Or (17 page)

After a green salad came a tray of cheeses which made her think of Bruno and his taste for the goat’s cheeses of the Vaucluse; but the dining-room of the Hotel du Lion d’Or had ceased to exist for her. All the world seemed concentrated in this small wooden lodge in the hills, in the mingled sound of speech and laughter. She looked down into her refilled glass of wine and her eyes seemed to penetrate the bright reflecting liquid into the atoms that made it.

Before the coffee the old woman had one more surprise: an enormous open flan with a yellowish egg filling. For this she brought fresh plates, and Isabelle would take no denials from the guests as she sliced it into equal pieces. Oscar was once more Anne’s private beneficiary.

After lunch they set off to see the dog perform. Hartmann walked with Etienne, who was sweating as the sun bore down on them. He glanced back towards the three women.

‘My God, Charles, you’ve done all right there,’ he said.

‘All right?’

‘Don’t be coy, you old badger. How’s it going?’

‘To tell you the truth, Etienne, it’s not going at all.’

‘Too young, eh? Too religious? You’ll soon talk her out of that.’

‘I’m a married man now.’

‘Don’t talk nonsense. What did you bring her down here for? I tell you, if you don’t want to sleep in the granary tonight there’s others who’d like to use it.’

‘It’s difficult, Etienne. I can’t explain.’

‘Listen, Charles. For well over five years I saw you capering about in Paris. I
know
you. Now either you’ve lost your touch or the girl’s stringing you along in the hope of bigger presents than you’ve so far given her. You
have
given her presents, haven’t you?’

‘In a manner of speaking, I –’

‘Well, there you are. Girls with her looks can extract a good price.’

‘She’s not like that. She’s very innocent.’

‘She
looks
innocent, I admit, but you know what women are like.’

‘Do I?’

‘Stop pulling my leg, Charles. Are you in love with her or something?’

‘I don’t think so, no. I don’t know her well enough to be.’

‘Well, if it’s not that, what is it? You do want her, I take it.’

‘Yes, you could say that.’ Hartmann laughed. ‘Listen, Etienne, I want that girl more than anything I’ve ever wanted in my life.’

‘So what on earth is stopping you?’

‘I don’t
know!
’

They tramped up the hill towards a coppice of oaks, where the search for truffles was due to take place.

‘I suppose,’ said Hartmann, offering his handkerchief to Etienne so he could wipe his brow, ‘I suppose it’s some sort of instinct. A certain kind of delicacy.’

‘Scruples?’

‘Something like that.’

‘Well, I can imagine that to you, Hartmann, such feelings must seem extraordinary.’

‘Thank you.’

Etienne gave him back the handkerchief. ‘Perhaps you’re growing up at last,’ he puffed as they reached the top of the hill.

‘Is this where we see the champion dog at work?’

‘Yes. Just over there. Where the earth is scorched. That’s how you can tell that there are truffles. It’s an interaction between the oak and the soil.’

‘You and Marcel should write a book about all this.’

‘Be quiet, Hartmann. How could I expect a city dweller like you to understand the beauties of our country life?’

The dog-handler arrived with Oscar and a smaller, grey-muzzled bitch she said was his mother. While the guests stood round in a clearing she handed the lead of the second dog to Etienne and herself took charge of Oscar. She gave a continuous series of calls to encourage him in his search and told Etienne what to do with the mother. Oscar rambled over the dry ground, sniffing here and there, before sitting down and turning to look at his handler with a long accusing stare. The mother, who was called Gyp, had a faster working style, keeping her muzzle well down among the twigs and scorched earth and suddenly digging fiercely with her front legs. Etienne pulled up what looked like a clump of earth, about the size of a conker, and displayed it in triumph to his guests, who nodded and murmured appreciatively. Gyp pulled him back to work with a tug on the lead, and was soon scrabbling at the surface of the earth again with her paws. ‘What a beauty,’ said Etienne, as he again held up the result.

‘You look at Oscar now,’ said Marcel. ‘He takes his time, it’s true, but when he gets the scent there’s no holding him.’

Anne looked at Oscar, and he looked back at her. His handler made some more encouraging noises and pulled him over to a different tree, against which he lifted his leg.

‘In this competition they buried six truffles deep in the ground in an area of twenty-five metres,’ said Marcel, ‘and Oscar, he got all but one of them in record time.’

As Oscar sniffed around the bottom of the dampened tree his mother unearthed another truffle and Etienne gave charge of her to one of his guests. The dog seemed barely to notice the change of handler but continued on her workmanlike course.

‘I don’t know about you, but I find myself slightly disappointed in Oscar’s performance,’ said Hartmann to Anne, while Marcel continued his eulogy of the dog. ‘I wonder if perhaps he may have over-indulged at lunch time.’

‘Oh, I expect he’s just getting warmed up,’ said Anne. ‘It was a big lunch, wasn’t it?’

‘I wonder,’ said Hartmann, ‘whether Oscar should have sampled
all
the courses.’

‘All the courses?’ said Anne. ‘I only saw her feed him some chicken.’

‘And the terrine, and the omelette and the –’

‘Oh my God,’ said Anne, ‘did you see? Did everyone else?’

‘I don’t think so.’

Despite Marcel’s increasingly irritated urging, Oscar had moved from a sitting to a lying position and closed both eyes. He was only roused from his torpor by the arrival of an old man with a pig. The memory of his lunch seemed to leave him, and the sight of the pig fired his limbs with all the animation Marcel had predicted in his truffle-hunting. He had to be restrained by two men as he leapt and snarled at the fat pink intruder.

‘The pig and the dog,’ said Marcel, who had a developed sense of the obvious, ‘together they make a bad household.’

The box was finally filled with the labours of the grey-muzzled bitch, and whatever could be rescued from the jaws of the pig.

‘Branches too heavy, not enough light and air for the truffle,’ muttered Marcel, ‘and that wretched pig. Dying out, the pig, you know. Once everyone’s got cars you won’t see them used any more. Too nasty to transport.’

After the truffle hunt they went off to their separate resting places. Hartmann drove down a narrow track that forked away from the road behind the lodge. The car juddered as its axles took the strain of the uneven ground. Finally the road petered out into a glade of pine-shaded grass and they stopped beneath a tree. In front of them was a path through the woods that dropped steeply out of sight. Hartmann took the suitcases and walked ahead as Anne looked round about her, up through the overhanging branches. Although such dense countryside was quite familiar to her from her childhood, she looked at it in wonder. Hartmann, who must have been more at home in the long carved boulevards and tangled sidestreets of Paris, remarked only that it would have been difficult getting carts full of grain up and down such a steep and narrow path: perhaps that was why they had turned the building into sleeping quarters. The path at last issued into a flagged yard on to which backed a small stone granary.

The inside was simple. The original floor ran throughout the building, though it had mats on it in the sitting-room, which had had a fireplace installed, and in the bedroom from which double doors opened out on to a recently and roughly built terrace. This gave a view down over a patch of grass to a fence with an apple tree, and thence into a valley that stretched as far as the eye could see. They could look down its whole length, seeing both flanks steeply converge in their hectic fertility, with bushes and trees tumbling and milling together into the valley floor.

Hartmann made a bed for himself on the sofa in the main room, despite Anne’s protestations that she should sleep there, then went to investigate what was held in the small storeroom that acted also as a kitchen. Armand had done what was strictly necessary to prepare the place, but not much more. There were lamps and candles under the table and a crate of wine. Hartmann left the granary and went back up the hill to the car. There was something in it with which he intended to surprise Anne later.

Anne unpacked her clothes and washed in the tub in the corner of the bedroom. She looked over to where the evening sun was coming in through the open doors, flashing rectangles over the floor and up to the edge of the wooden bedstead, and she felt her final misgivings leave her under the pressure of an intense and rising delight.

Hartmann secreted his package beneath the sofa and went to wash and change while Anne unwrapped the parcels of food that Armand had left. She had chosen to wear not her smartest dress, because it didn’t seem appropriate, but a skirt she liked that was dark and tight around the hips, yet of a cool material, with a white blouse. To this she added her favourite red earrings. Hartmann came in to join her in the musty storeroom and started as she turned to greet him, caught unawares by her radiance.

They took two chairs on to the terrace and watched the sun begin to sink at the end of the valley. There was not a house or a human or an animal in sight.

‘No birds,’ said Hartmann, pouring some wine. ‘I suppose they’ve shot them all.’

Anne smiled and said nothing, looking down into the valley ahead.

‘I wonder what’s happening at the Lion d’Or,’ he said.

‘I wonder too. But I don’t care.’

‘I expect Mattlin’s just looked in for his evening drink. He’ll be asking where you’ve got to.’

‘Do you like Mattlin?’ said Anne.

‘Yes, up to a point. Why?’

‘He’s not very nice about you. The things he said, when he asked me to go with him for a drink one evening. And other things I’ve heard him tell M. Roussel in the bar.’

‘What things?’

‘I don’t think I should repeat them. I’m sure they’re not true.’

‘Go on. I’d like to hear.’

‘He said you used to walk round to his apartment in Paris to use his telephone because you were too mean to use your own.’

‘I never went to Mattlin’s apartment, let alone used his telephone. I don’t even know what street it was in!’

‘But I thought you were his best friend.’

‘Hardly. I knew him, but I seldom saw him.’

‘But don’t you mind if someone says all these things about you?’

‘Yes, of course I mind. I was outraged when I first found that Mattlin was making up stories about me, but there’s nothing I can do to stop him. Whenever you tax him with it he just denies it. I think he tells lies about other people too.’

‘And is it true that he arranged for you to act in this big case – something to do with marsh reclamation?’

‘Of
course
it’s not true. How could it be? Mattlin doesn’t know anybody involved, and even if he did he’d be in no position to influence the choice of lawyers.’

Anne drank some more wine. She was relieved to hear what Hartmann said, though she didn’t understand his attitude. In his place she would have punched Mattlin on the nose.

‘Why do you think he does it?’ she said.

‘I don’t know. I used to think it might be jealousy, but I can’t believe that any more. He has as much money as I do, he has as good a life – better, he would say. His career is just as good as mine.’

‘Perhaps it makes him feel more important.’

‘Perhaps.’

‘It doesn’t matter,’ said Anne. Nothing mattered to her, except that she should be exactly where she was. To make her peace of mind yet more complete, she nerved herself to put a question she had meant to ask for some time. ‘When I was in Isabelle’s bedroom she showed me a photograph of her son. It made me wonder if you and your wife had . . . had ever thought about . . .’

‘About children?’ Hartmann turned to look at her. ‘It’s impossible. Christine was pregnant, but she miscarried. Now she can’t have children.’

Anne said, ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t know.’

‘That’s all right. It’s quite a normal question. You weren’t to know the answer would be . . . sad.’

Neither of them spoke for a time. Anne was thinking how strange their marriage must be, with both of them knowing that there could be no children. Hartmann, who had long been resigned to the idea, felt no embarrassment at Anne’s question and knew he could trust her to tell no one else. His peace of mind was troubled only by her physical proximity. The silence deepened, and he began to feel in it an uneasy power, like the force that had made him stride away from her when they stood side by side in the attic at the Manor. Anne thought the quietness was like a stream that washed away the barriers between them. But the density of it gradually lessened; Hartmann poured some more wine, and caught her eye. She smiled back at him, then lowered her eyes.

‘I suppose we’d better go and have dinner,’ she said.

He nodded and went to light the lamps in the main room. He fiddled with matches and wicks until the lamps flared into life and lit up the rough walls. Anne apologised for the dinner, even as she brought it through. There were smoked sausages, heated in stock, and potatoes with mayonnaise. She had found some red beans already cooked, and had made a salad. There were some gherkins and mustard on a shelf, and Armand had provided a loaf of rough bread large enough to last a week. Hartmann opened another bottle of wine and they began to eat.

‘It was very good,’ said Hartmann when they had finished. ‘I think it was the best dinner I’ve ever had.’

She laughed.

He said, ‘I’ve got a present for you, Anne.’