Girl at the Lion D'Or (4 page)

In a dream of sympathy and excitement, she stared at him. She was convinced with a certainty that was both delightful and frustrating that she already knew him; that she knew him in fact better than these friends of his did, and that any slow acquaintance they might go through would be a waste of time because she had already seen into the heart of him. He stood up again and threw the ball back across the net, pantomiming exhaustion to Mattlin and indicating that it was he who should have run for the ball.

The game ended. Anne stood up as the players made their way to the gate in the corner of the court and round under the overhanging branches to her bench. Mattlin shook hands but seemed uncomfortable as he formally introduced the brothers, Jacques and Jean-Philippe Gilbert, and his partner, Charles Hartmann. Anne remembered the name from Mattlin’s tale of Hartmann’s meanness.

Jacques, the portlier of the two brothers, said, ‘What a welcome addition to the poor old Lion d’Or. We must all come and see you.’

Hartmann and the other brother, Jean-Philippe, murmured polite agreement.

‘Did you enjoy watching the game?’ said Jacques.

‘Yes, thank you. But you seemed to go on for such a long time.’

‘These brothers will never give up,’ said Hartmann. ‘They never know when they’re beaten.’

‘But, mademoiselle, I expect you play yourself,’ said Jacques. ‘You must join in.’

‘No, I’m afraid not,’ said Anne, blushing. ‘We never saw a tennis court where we lived. It’s very expensive, isn’t it?’

Jacques tried to press her, but it was clearly pointless.

Mattlin threw his sweater over his shoulders and glanced at his watch. ‘Can you give me a lift back?’ he said to Hartmann.

In a rush Anne said, ‘But I could come along and pick up the balls. Or watch.’

She was aware of the four men looking at her – Mattlin with some embarrassment, Hartmann and Jean-Philippe with blank politeness. Then Hartmann said, ‘That would be delightful. André or I will let you know when we’re next going to play. We can make it coincide with your afternoon off.’

‘Come on,’ said Mattlin, still apparently restive. ‘I’ve got to get back.’

‘Why don’t we all go and have tea somewhere?’ said Jacques, looking towards Anne.

Anne smiled. ‘All right. Thank you.’ And Jacques took the opportunity of putting an apparently paternal hand on her arm to guide her through the dense undergrowth out on to the sandy paths and ordered flowerbeds of the main part of the garden.

Here Mattlin and Hartmann said goodbye, Mattlin adding to Anne, ‘I’ll call in later, probably.’ The two men walked off, sweaters over their shoulders, rackets swinging by their sides as they made their way to where Hartmann’s old black tourer was parked.

When they were out of earshot, Hartmann said, ‘Was that the girl you were talking about the other day?’

‘Yes. Don’t you think she’s charming?’

Hartmann shrugged.

‘Well, I certainly think so.’

‘What are you going to do about it?’

‘Lay siege. She’ll come round before long.’

‘The Mattlin charm. Persistence.’

‘It has a good record.’

Hartmann opened the gate from the park and stood back to let Mattlin pass.

4

I
T WAS A
pleasant day with only a whisper of wind coming off the headland when Hartmann stood in front of his house and explained to Roussel what he wanted done. He made large, suggestive movements with his hands, but found that Roussel kept asking awkward technical questions.

The Manor was an isolated house, some five kilometres from Janvilliers, surrounded by acres of woodland. In his last ten years Hartmann’s father had quarrelled with most of his staff and had sacked both groundsman and gardener. The appearance of wildness had increased. The house was dominated by two towers with conical grey slate roofs. The rectangular section which joined them formed the main part of the Manor, though at its junction with the towers it extended backwards, away from them, as well as forwards, into them.

‘Now have you got that?’ said Hartmann.

‘Ye-es. I think so.’

‘I can’t think why there wasn’t a cellar built in the first place.’

‘Yes, it’s unusual in a house like this, Monsieur.’

Hartmann senior had had a hole driven sideways into the bank at the rear of the house and had stored his wine in the resulting damp burrow whose roof was held up by shaky-looking planks. One day it had caved in when a storm caused a displacement of the earth in the woods behind it. Later, when the rain had eased, the bottles were dug out like the victims of a mining disaster. The rain had washed off or defaced many of the labels so that dinner at the Manor often had an air of suspense; to his irritation the old man frequently found he had treated his guests to a rare burgundy he had been meaning to save.

The house was built from pale stone, and the windows and shutters were painted grey. In the middle of the long slate roof was a triangular protuberance, also slate-covered, into which was let a brick-surrounded dormer window. This had been boarded up with wood and now looked rather like the door half-way up a barn through which bales are loaded. On either side of it reared two thin rectangular chimneys in what appeared to be an unwise defiance of gravity. Some of the building was covered with a dense creeper, spangled green and red, which helped to counteract the bleakness of the pale stone and the house’s isolated position on the headland. Theoretically it was sheltered from the sea winds by the finger of land that stuck out and by the dense pine forests on the far side of the lake it overlooked. In fact, on bad days the wind seemed to accelerate off the bend of the land and funnel itself through the woods before sucking and tearing at the shutters and shaking the windows in their frames.

‘You think you’ll be able to manage a cellar, then?’

‘Oh, I think so, M. Hartmann. I’ll let you have an estimate.’

‘That’s wonderful. My father would have been pleased to think of someone bringing the old place back to life. We’ll have a party when you’ve finished. We could have it out here in front of the house, and people could go swimming in the lake.’

Hartmann saw in his mind a covered walkway, hung with candles, leading from the house to a marquee with tables at the water’s edge. He would have all his own wine installed in the new cellar and begin to do something with the upstairs rooms as well. Perhaps they could have another party at the end of the year when all the redecoration would be complete. It would be better than Paris, better than Montparnasse or the Opera.

‘I could begin on Thursday,’ Roussel was saying.

‘Yes, yes.’

‘Here, monsieur, take one of our cards. We’re the first people in the town to have them.’

He pressed into Hartmann’s palm an outsize card with a poorly printed drawing of a house with scaffolding. Hartmann looked at it and then at Roussel’s eager face.

For reasons he could not explain, he felt a disabling surge of pity for Roussel. He looked at the small, dark-haired builder weighing up his job and felt for a moment as though he had lost his own identity in that of the other man. It was not a conscious act of sympathy, but an involuntary and unpleasant loss of control. Nevertheless, the feeling was so strong that he felt he could have cried.

‘Why on earth are you sitting there like that?’ said Hartmann’s wife Christine when she came downstairs ten minutes later with a bunch of dried flowers in her hands.

‘I was just thinking.’

‘What about?’

‘A strange thing happened. I was standing out there with Roussel, the builder, talking about the house, when a peculiar feeling came over me. I felt this desperate sense of pity for him.’

‘Why?’

‘I’ve no idea. I’ve no reason to think he’s in trouble. It just came from nowhere.’

‘Charles, you are ridiculous. Is he going to do the job or not?’

‘Oh yes. There’s no problem about that.’

‘Well, you’ve got no reason to feel sorry for him. Marie-Thérèse said he was very good with the work he did for them and not all that expensive either. Even so, this is going to be quite a big job, and I don’t suppose this M. Roussel will undercharge for it.’

‘No, I don’t suppose he will. It wasn’t anything specific, this feeling, you understand. Just a general . . .’ Hartmann trailed off, with a gesture of his hand.

They crossed the hall to the small morning-room at the foot of the northern tower where Christine rang the bell for the maid. She was a small woman with fair wavy hair cut in the fashion of the times, parted and held by combs. There was a heaviness about her that was unbecoming; her features seemed to have been moulded roughly, leaving her lips full and set in a permanent pout. To her admirers, they were her most attractive feature; others thought them simply a part of her generally unrefined appearance. Her eyes were blue and knowing.

‘So, Charles, soon you’ll have all your father’s beloved wine stored up beneath your feet. A little Aladdin’s cave for you to wander round.’

‘Yes, there should be quite a choice. All those strange wines from Alsace and Austria he collected when he was old. I’m told his house in Vienna has crates of Italian wine too.’

‘Italian! I couldn’t drink
Italian
wine. Sometimes, Charles, I wonder about your taste. And your father’s.’ She stood up and made as if to leave the room. ‘I’m going to carry on with my work. We’re having lunch promptly because I’ve given Marie the afternoon off.’

‘I shan’t stray far.’

I wonder, thought Christine, as she strode across the hall; I wonder. She watched her husband with a caution that bordered on jealousy and was aware that slow changes were taking place in him. Her hope was that by not making too much of them she could turn them to her advantage. He seemed to have reached a new threshold in his life and she wanted to be on the right side of any door that might be closing. Hartmann’s ease of manner and attention to social form had at first appeared to her merely the polished exterior of a man who had spent much of his life in polite society. Patiently she waited for them to evaporate and for the man inside to be revealed to her. She knew him to be passionate and thought his punctiliousness therefore only a mask; but it was one that he had never lowered.

As well as a ready sense of the absurd, he seemed to have a reserve of anger inside him which he hardly ever turned on the world, almost, it sometimes seemed, out of politeness. Although he was quite willing to offer his opinions on any topic, he would never test his feelings on anyone except himself, and this perplexed Christine.

They had married when she discovered herself to be pregnant, but she had miscarried and, as a result, was unable to have children. Hartmann was adamant that it made no difference and that he loved her for herself alone; Christine, however, sometimes feared that he stayed with her only from an innate sense of duty.

I shan’t stray far, she repeated to herself as she went out into the garden with her secateurs.

5

T
HE NEXT MORNING
Roussel began building a cellar beneath the Manor. He had discovered a trap-door in the kitchen which led down some steps into what had once been used as a store for wood and coal. His plan was to enlarge the area, install stone steps and an electric light and line the walls with bottle racks. He assured Hartmann that this would involve no major structural alteration to the house and could be finished in less than a month.

What it did involve was a large amount of dust. Roussel’s workforce consisted of a very fat man in blue overalls and a youth in a beret with a bad cough. The fat man was of the opinion that the whole project was a mistake. Although he had two pickaxes and a number of spades and sledgehammers, which he carried nonchalantly under one arm, he spent much of his time smoking maize-coloured cigarettes and issuing doleful orders to the young man, such as: ‘You might as well give it a try, son.’ The youth would then wheezily aim his pickaxe at a partition in the store beneath the kitchen, causing puffs of old and evil-smelling dust to rise up on to the kitchen floor above. Roussel himself exercised a nervous supervision, occasionally removing his jacket to help, but more often taking the chance to bicycle back to town to pick up some vital tool that had been left behind.

Christine made no effort to hide her distaste for the workmen, whom she regarded as idle, dirty and inefficient. She had had to set up a temporary kitchen in the small scullery at the foot of the south tower where she had had a small cooker installed. It was not quite the same as the big range in the proper kitchen, she pointed out, and Hartmann must expect a decline in the standard of his meals. The maid Marie, meanwhile, showed an alarming disregard for the properties of escaped gas, frequently leaving the taps open for hours on end, so that even Hartmann, who had taken refuge from the sounds of Roussel’s workmen in the attic, would occasionally look up from his papers and sniff suspiciously.

While Hartmann took to the attic, Christine sewed, read, embroidered and knitted, muttering to anyone who could hear, usually Marie, about the wretchedness of the peasantry. Roussel bicycled ineffectually round and round the house, trying to decide where best to place his sign – a large coloured board with the words ‘Roussel Engineering’. He finally selected the top of the driveway where it joined the road into town.

Hartmann soon discovered he was unable to concentrate on work and so decided to sort through the three tin trunks of papers he had brought with him from his flat in Paris. He enlisted the help of the fat workman in carrying them up to the attic where he took a hammer and prised the nails from the boards that blocked the window, so the light fell on to the great empty space. He thought it unlikely that he would be needing many of the papers that were in the trunks; the attic was as far as most of them would go.

The most curious of the papers he came across was an ornithological notebook, begun when he was thirteen and the family had been living briefly in the countryside outside Vienna. He suspected himself of having copied it from a textbook, but the style was childish and full of mis-spellings and there were convincingly vivid journal entries. It seemed scarcely credible that the city man he thought himself to be could once have known all this country lore. Then he came to a trunk which contained letters, postcards and photographs that for varying reasons he had been unable to throw away. He took out one of the bundles of letters and began to read. They all seemed to be from women. There was one postcard from a male friend in Monte Carlo, but it was a rarity. More typical was a note from Françoise, a girl he had taken to dinner when she was hoping to find work in a lawyer’s office in Paris. It was a pretty card with flowers that thanked him for the dinner and hoped to see him very soon.