Girl at the Lion D'Or (29 page)

She laughed; he showed no sign of displeasure.

Carefully he opened the box. Inside was a pair of oval gold cuff-links joined with narrow chains.

‘But Anne . . . this is ridiculous. These are beautiful. You can’t – you shouldn’t . . .’ She laughed again. ‘How on earth did you manage it?’

‘Never mind about that. Do you like them?’

‘Of course I do. They’re the nicest pair I’ve ever had, but I just hate to think how –’

‘Please don’t worry about that. Put them on if you want. I wasn’t sure what shape you liked,’ she added, which was untrue, since she had taken careful note of all the cuff-links he had worn over the past month.

Hartmann fitted them to his sleeves as Anne watched excitetly. She had saved the money she had made working at the Hartmanns’ and also borrowed some from Pierre. She had done some sewing for Mlle Calmette, who took in a small amount of work to augment her income, and although it had meant sitting up late into the night it all seemed worth it now as she saw Hartmann pull back his jacket sleeve and insert the links with his long, articulated fingers, twisting his wrists so that the flat palm of his hand became visible as he fitted them into place.

Anne couldn’t quite understand his response. He seemed pleased, as she had hoped, but also troubled. She had told him not to worry about the expense, yet, unusually for him, he looked embarrassed. There must be some other reason, though she couldn’t think what it might be. When he took her in his arms he squeezed her so tightly it felt as if he were struggling with some feeling in himself and were using the physical exertion to control it. Then she felt his hand lift up her chin, and when he looked into her face his body relaxed. He smiled and kissed her gently.

Four days after the visit of the surveyor, Hartmann rose early to read some papers. He asked Marie to make some tea and take it up to Christine in bed. It was seven o’clock and barely light outside, with a sleety drizzle coming in off the lake. As he looked through the glass panels of the front door a boy on a bicycle appeared and shoved a newspaper through the letter-box. Hartmann picked it up, tucked it under his arm and made off through the dining-room towards his study. As he did so, his eye was caught by three letters: SAL. He stopped and opened the newspaper to find the headline: ‘Salengro Found Dead.’

The opening paragraphs were written, or rewritten, in the style favoured by editors seeking to impart a sense of urgency.

Since their argument over whether Christine should have shown the photographs to Anne, relations between Hartmann and Christine had been tense, but Christine felt that her long period of waiting was nearly over. It had taken courage to control her natural urge to confront Hartmann with his infidelity, but she was glad she had managed it, because she sensed that the struggle in him was reaching a climax. It was beginning to turn out just as she hoped: Hartmann was growing entangled in the coils of his own conscience, without any prompting from her.

Just before lunch Antoine telephoned from Paris to say that Salengro’s death was being hailed by the right-wing press in Paris as a confession of guilt. They had kept a flame of hatred burning for Salengro since he had signed the government decree outlawing the fascist leagues in June, and now they felt they had their revenge.

When Hartmann told Christine of his conversation with Antoine, she said, ‘You mustn’t take it so personally, Charles. These things happen.’

‘Apparently.’

Marie brought in some artichokes and a vinaigrette. Christine began to talk about Roussel and how badly he had let them down. While she spoke, she watched Hartmann closely. In all the time she had known him she had never seen him so listless. She kept up her chatter, but all the time with one eye on him. She waited till Marie had brought in the main course before she moved into the vacuum left by Hartmann’s lack of spirit.

‘Why were you so angry with me the other day, Charles, when I told you I’d shown those photographs to the girl – to Anne? Perhaps it was a little indiscreet, but I wouldn’t have thought it mattered that much.’

‘No. Perhaps it doesn’t. I felt you’d taken advantage of her position to taunt her, but maybe I’m wrong.’

There was silence except for the sound of their cutlery on the china and the remote ticking of the grandfather clock in the hall.

Christine braced herself. ‘Charles, there isn’t anything going on between you and that girl, is there?’

Hartmann stopped with a glass of wine half way to his lips, his eyes suddenly alive again. ‘Going on?’

‘Yes, it’s just that . . .’ To her mortification and surprise Christine found herself blushing. ‘I heard rumours . . . I don’t know how to say it . . .’

‘Well, don’t say it,’ said Hartmann. ‘Don’t even allow yourself to think it.’

He looked down at the table and tore off a piece of bread, not noticing for a moment that Christine had begun to cry, the tears running over her round cheeks. Then he stood up and walked round the table to where she sat. He put an arm around her shoulders.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I haven’t been myself lately. So much has been happening . . . And I haven’t been kind to you, Christine, I know that, and I’m ashamed.’

Christine took the hand that rested on her shoulder and stroked the long fingers.

‘I have no excuses,’ he said. ‘I’ve neglected you and you’ve been very patient. Just give me a little more time. Just a week or two –’

‘Two weeks?’

‘All right, a week. Just seven days to get my thoughts straight.’

‘Oh, Charles, I can’t. Do you know what this uncertainty means to me?’

‘I’m sorry, Christine. Sorrier than you can imagine. But just this tiny bit longer. Just seven days and everything will be fine, everything will be as it always has been. Can you wait that long?’

Christine nodded, biting her lip. It was unsatisfactory and left her anguish quite unaltered, but she sensed that her best chance still lay in waiting. Hartmann’s sense of duty could then be relied on to force the issue to its conclusion; he was not the sort of man to ask for more time or try to escape from his commitment.

He left the room, and Christine, against all her normal practice, poured herself a glass of wine. Hartmann’s eloquence had stopped him from having to make a confession, it was true, but she was glad he had said nothing that would have been hard for her to live with afterwards. She might yet emerge triumphant if she could find the courage necessary to keep her resolve stuck fast for just a few more days.

The damp bracken flattened out beneath Hartmann’s feet as he strode through the woods. He scrambled down the brick wall of the dyke and out to the beach beyond, where the sea had retreated out of sight. In the pines on the headland a slow wind was gathering.

Hartmann felt his head throb and flare with different emotions, none of them his own making. It was as if his mind had been opened up to other people and he had no way of shutting off their feelings as they pulsated in the empty space of his brain. He thought of the box full of letters he had come across in the attic and of the desires he had failed to read in them. He thought of Roussel, and the premonition he had felt, but failed to understand, as they stood surveying the Manor together. He thought of the slow anguish of Christine in the face of his impotence and the rumours that had reached her. Most of all he thought of Anne, and here his imagination stalled. He felt the passion of her love for him and he felt her anguish so surely that he thought it was his own.

He had taken apart his feeling for her bit by bit and told himself that he could see no wrong in it. He wanted only to be kind to her, to let her enjoy herself away from the drudgery of the hotel; there was nothing evil or base in his motive. Even when he admitted that he was only trying to justify his physical longing for her in neutral terms, still he could see no harm in it. There was something wrong, he had persuaded himself, in a society that could think of such generous feelings as unacceptable. Equally, he thought, something was limited in his own understanding of the world when he could not find the grounds of argument on which to explain away the paradox of his good intention and the guilt he felt about it. He blamed his narrow intellect, his cramped imagination, and reassured himself that sooner or later these and other complications would be unravelled.

He kicked his feet in the sand. Above him a sea-gull squawked and bent slowly on the wind.

There was only his feeling for Anne with which he could comfort himself. There was no atom in him which did not wish for her happiness and release. But all this fine feeling was of no use when confronted by the simple paradox of her dilemma: she could not be properly loved until she had disclosed the full story of her life; but by choosing him, at that moment in his own life, as the recipient of her trust, she had set in motion a slow but inevitable rejection. Its pattern would duplicate in her the effects of that first abandonment which had so far shaped her existence, and thus ensure that evil would be triumphant, repeating itself as naturally as if by breeding.

Hartmann stopped walking and for a moment was able to shut off the thoughts that chased each other across his head. For a moment he could see things clearly, in perspective, and he felt calmer; but no sooner had he repossessed himself than a switch seemed to be thrown and he became once more charged with emotion which seemed to belong to other people but which he experienced as his own.

7

T
HE WEATHER LIFTED
a little, and by the following Wednesday when Anne again prepared herself for her weekly visit to the Manor the air had a dense chill and the clouds were high and static in a set grey sky.

At the hotel one of the chambermaids was off sick, and Anne had spent an hour cleaning bedrooms before returning to her normal kitchen routine. She had discovered a spare set of false teeth in the room used by the bullet-headed Marseillais, possessor of the explosive early-morning cough which caused the dust to tumble in the passageways.

‘Your afternoon off, isn’t it?’ said Pierre, as the cutlery and glasses changed position soundlessly beneath the flutter of his hand. ‘God bless M. Blum and his forty-hour week!’

Pierre was unable to pursue his remarks, but smiled at Anne as she was called to the kitchen by Bruno, who fixed her with his good eye and ordered her to begin work on preparing the potatoes.

‘My God, what weather,’ Bruno said, taking a large knife from the dangerous display on the wall and handing it to her. ‘Who would want to live in this lifeless town?’

Anne began to work. ‘Never mind,’ went on Bruno, taking up his newspaper again from the table. ‘We’ll all be dead before long. If the Germans don’t get us, we’ll kill each other. Civil war, that’s what it says here.’ He pointed at an item in the paper.

Anne had grown to like the people at the Lion d’Or. She ignored most of Bruno’s direst statements, and he didn’t seem to mind. Pierre was always kind to her, and she had even come to see the good side of Roland. Because her life had been so dependent on it, the kindness of people she was thrown together with was important.

The kindness of Hartmann was something of a different order, something which in her mind approached the miraculous. It still seemed wonderful to her that a man of his age and standing should have taken her side so passionately. He had understood what she felt more completely than anyone she had known. She didn’t believe that he used her, or lied to her so that he could make love to her; she thought that his defence of her was more important to him than his physical love of her. Sometimes she saw his eyes look troubled when she told him some episode of her childhood. He looked as though two emotions were conflicting in him. She thought the battle was between his indignation and his recognition that he was powerless to change the past.

She found her own confidence growing. The misgivings and the shyness she had felt when he had first made love to her were less acute. She wished that he would visit her more often than once or twice a week. When she took off her clothes and she saw his eyes on her she no longer rushed to hide; what had once seemed almost paternal in his embrace had shifted imperceptibly into being something desirable. It was not just that he took the world momentarily away; in their closer moments his dependability seemed almost to banish the past.

Just after two o’clock she arrived at the Manor. She leaned her bicycle against the side of the house and went in through the scullery door. It was the maid’s afternoon off, and Christine had deliberately absented herself, going to stay with her cousin Marie-Thérèse for two or three days. Anne took the cleaning things from their normal place and began to work. After half an hour or so the front door opened and Hartmann came into the hall, throwing his coat over one of the battered chairs that stood beside the piano.

Anne looked up from her work. ‘Good afternoon, monsieur.’

‘It’s all right. My wife’s away.’

He took her by the hand into the dining-room.

‘The cuff-links,’ he said, and lifted his hand.

‘Yes. They look nice. What have you been doing?’