House of the Hanged (13 page)

Klaus was taken aback, unaware that Tom had even read the book. ‘Where did you get it?' he asked.

‘My book dealer in Paris.'

‘He must be good at his job . . . to find one.' Klaus's wry and self-effacing smile was typical of him.

‘Oh, he is. He also read it before sending it, and you now have a big fan in Paris.'

‘You see,' said Ilse to her brother. ‘It's not just me.'

For some strange reason she had chosen to plait her long blonde hair and coil it in two snails shells over her ears – an unfortunate coiffure which blunted her beauty, although it hadn't dampened Barnaby's blatant interest in her.

‘Unfortunately,' said Klaus, ‘no critics agree with you.'

‘Oh, you don't want to worry about them,' Barnaby piped up. ‘The ones on my newspaper can barely read. I mean, they even gave Tom's last book a favourable review.'

Tom acknowledged the insult with a little nod.

Venetia stabbed out her cigarette in the ashtray, her face alight with mischief. ‘I would say neutral rather than favourable.'

‘I take it back,' conceded Barnaby. ‘Maybe they
do
know their stuff.'

Ilse dimpled in sympathetic effrontery. ‘Is this how you treat your host in England?'

‘No, this is how we treat him in France,' said Leonard. ‘We're far tougher on him back home.'

‘You must forgive us,' explained Venetia. ‘You see, we're still a little insulted that Tom chose to reject us in favour of a life down here.' As often with Venetia's jokes, there was a tang of truth about it.

‘But
we
, on the other hand, are honoured,' declared Benoît. ‘
N'est-ce pas, cherie?
' he added, turning to his wife.

‘Yes, we are honoured,' parroted Chantal, gripping Tom's forearm in a display of tender solidarity.

Her English wasn't quite up to her husband's, which was impeccable, and not only because his work as a notary brought him into contact with foreign clients. Despite his solid bourgeois air, there was nothing ponderous about Benoît's mind. He was a shrewd man in the liberal tradition, as well as being the most voracious reader Tom had ever met.

‘Really?' puzzled Barnaby. ‘I'd always been led to believe you French didn't have much time for the English. Please don't tell me Tom's the one exception – I'm not sure I could stomach it.'

‘Oh no, we have other English friends.'

The bit between his teeth, Barnaby insisted on knowing what the French truly thought of the English. ‘And don't go pulling your punches. We can take it.'

Benoît, sly dog that he was, suggested that Tom was probably better placed to answer the question, having a foot firmly in both camps. Strangely, for all their many discussions over the years, it wasn't a subject they'd ever broached.

‘Well,' Tom began, ‘you have to remember that France was civilized from the south, and that England was civilized from the north of France. And then you have to remember that Benoît and Chantal are southern French through and through.'

Benoît gave an appreciative chuckle.

‘It's not true!' protested Chantal. ‘He's teasing us.'

‘Oh, I see,' said Barnaby. ‘While they're prancing around with poets and philosophers we're still daubing ourselves with woad?'

‘Something like that,' said Tom.

‘Sorry, remind me – just how many thousands of years ago was this?'

‘Come now, Barnaby,' scolded Leonard. ‘I thought you said we could take it?'

‘Exactly,' Venetia concurred with her husband. ‘Why ask for wine if it's water you want? Let's hear Tom out.'

They had a rule that there were no forbidden subjects at dinner, and Tom told it as he saw it: that the French looked on England as a gloomy, inhospitable land populated by strange and rather dull-witted people lacking in imagination, who through a happy mix of good fortune and determination had grown prodigiously wealthy yet remained almost entirely unversed in the culinary and amatory arts.

‘My God,' said Walter, ‘I hate to think what they make of Americans.'

‘Pretty much the same, I'm afraid,' Tom replied, glancing over at Benoît. ‘Wouldn't you say?'

Benoît held up his hands in a gesture of conciliation. ‘These are just stupid prejudices for stupid people. I'm sure you have the same for us French.'

‘Very few,' said Barnaby. ‘Although I once met a rear-admiral who said he much preferred crossing the Atlantic on a French ship because if anything happened there was none of that “women and children first” nonsense. Does that count?' he asked innocently.

Yevgeny was convinced that French antagonism towards Russians owed less to historical enmity than to a simple question of money. The 1917 collapse of the Russian Imperial Bond Issues had wiped out the savings of countless ordinary Frenchmen.

‘They are always telling me this as if it is my fault and they expect me to write a cheque.'

It was at this point that Fanya announced suddenly, and maybe a little drunkenly, that a French friend of hers in Paris had once offered a definition of all foreigners as ‘
des types qui ne savent pas baiser
'. The person in question was, apparently, a woman of considerable sexual experience, and the English figured at the bottom of her long list.

‘Maybe we should change the subject,' suggested Venetia. ‘There are young ears at the table.'

Lucy slewed round to her. ‘Oh, for goodness' sake, Mother, I'm at university not a nunnery.'

‘More's the pity.'

‘My dear Venetia, not if there's half a grain of truth in some of the stories I've heard of convent life,' said Barnaby, to much amusement.

Venetia had always had a soft spot for Barnaby, and was quite happy to be disarmed by him, although she revenged herself beautifully.

‘I apologize, Fanya, please continue – tell us why your friend rates Englishmen as such terrible lovers.'

‘She says they are too quick.'

‘Oh, is that all? No mention of whips?'

In the uncertain silence that followed a few pairs of eyes flicked involuntarily towards Leonard. Tom leapt to his defence.

‘Venetia's being wicked. What she means is the French have got it into their heads that flogging is a feature of English lovemaking.' Out of the corner of his eye he saw Ilse translating for her brother's benefit. ‘I know a bookshop in the Palais Royal where the window display is entirely given over to titles like
Lord and Lady Lash
and
Miss Floggy
.'

‘What a load of old rot!' protested Barnaby. And then, without missing a beat: ‘Where did you say this book-shop was?'

They were still laughing when Paulette appeared with the food. As usual, she lingered just long enough to wave aside the tributes to her latest culinary triumph, before hurrying off home to a late supper with her family.

The conversation fragmented over the lobster pilaf as people paired off with their neighbours, but it continued to ripple merrily around the table, punctuated by laughter and assisted by several bottles of a tingling white wine from Anjou. The seating plan was perfect. In fact, everything was perfect – the lambent light of the candles, the soft ruckle of the palm leaves, the bats spinning their invisible webs overhead, the balsamic night-scent of the pines carried on a breeze just strong enough to cool the skin – and yet Tom struggled to engage with any of it, a stranger at his own feast, almost an impostor, only there because he had somehow managed to cheat his destiny less than twenty-four hours previously. This one thought lodged itself in his head, poisoning the evening for him.

He sought refuge in the duties falling to him now that Paulette was gone, insisting that everyone else stay put while he cleared the plates and went in search of the next course.

He was tossing the green salad in the kitchen when Lucy appeared noiselessly at his shoulder, startling him.

‘What's wrong, Tom?'

‘What makes you think anything's wrong?'

‘Well, for one, the fact that you've just answered a question with a question.'

‘Nothing's wrong.'

She looked unconvinced but didn't pursue it. ‘Give me something to do.'

‘You can grab the cheeses from the larder.'

He was cutting bread when she returned with the rough wooden platter which Paulette had already loaded with an array of cheeses.

‘Why isn't she here?' Lucy asked.

‘Who?'

‘Yvette or Sophie or whatever she's called – the mystery lady of Hyères.'

‘Hélène.'

‘Hélène. And does she have a face to launch a thousand ships?'

‘A good few hundred maybe.'

Lucy smiled. ‘So, tell me . . . Tall or short? Fat or thin? Dark or fair?'

‘She's not quite as tall as you, not quite as thin as you, and not quite as dark as you.'

‘God, I hate her already. When can I meet her and scratch her eyes out?'

‘You have nothing to be jealous of. One day men will sack cities for you too.'

‘Don't think you can deflect me with flattery. Tell me about her. Why won't you share her with us?'

‘She's very private. She's also in Greece.'

This wasn't quite true; Hélène had returned from her travels a few days ago.

‘With one of her other admirers?' Lucy probed.

‘Possibly. I don't know.'

‘You didn't think to ask?'

He hesitated before replying. ‘She lost eight years to a violent and controlling husband.' It made her sound like a victim, and that's the last thing Hélène was. ‘She's learning to live again, enjoying her freedom.'

‘I think I get the picture – a footloose divorcée, like Norma Shearer in that film.'

‘More of a merry widow. Her husband had the good manners to die rich and well before his time.'

‘Are there children?'

‘No.'

‘Will there ever be?'

‘If you're fishing for her age, she's twenty-nine.'

‘What's cradle-snatcher in French?'

He laughed. ‘I'm not sure. But
petite effrontée
means “insolent little girl”.'

Lucy gave a sharp, theatrical intake of breath.

They were standing across from each other at the big pine table in the middle of the kitchen, the one Paulette kept scrubbed as white as paper.

‘So, are we done?' he asked. ‘Is the interrogation over?'

‘Not quite. How did you meet her?'

‘Through Benoît and Chantal.'

A subtle piece of match-making, he explained, which had taken place on neutral ground at a party thrown by Charles and Marie-Laure de Noailles at their extraordinary modernist villa high on the hill above Hyères. There had been something wild and reckless in the air that night, stirred up by Salvador Dalí and his coterie of fawning acolytes. A fair number of the women present had looked more like men, dressed in suits and sturdy shoes. Fortunately, Hélène hadn't been one of them.

He described to Lucy his first glimpse of her, carminelipped and raven-haired, playing miniature golf in the twilit garden below the cuboid concrete house, putter in one hand, slender flute of champagne in the other. She had been wearing a long bias-cut evening gown with an open V-back descending to a large bow which sat invitingly at the base of her spine, clamouring to be undone. She was, she had confessed to him later that evening, exactly the sort of person who the Spanish prankster and his disciples were looking to shake out of their bourgeois stupor, and together they had smirked and sneered at the studied eccentricity of the occasion, its forced bacchanalian air.

He didn't tell Lucy that they had then left the party early, strolling down the hill to Hélène's house in the old town, where they had stripped each other bare in her living room and made love on the Aubusson rug beside the grand piano. Nor did he detail the two days and two nights he had spent holed up in Hélène's bedroom, hardly moving from the huge four-poster hung with citron brocade; or how, on Sunday evening, when he had climbed back up the steep incline to recover his car from the driveway of Villa de Noailles, he had fully expected Dalí to pop out from behind a bush, jeering and laughing triumphantly at him like some deranged, moustachioed satyr.

‘Satisfied?' he asked.

‘For now,' replied Lucy. ‘I'm holding back a couple of questions to prolong your agony.'

‘I don't mind talking about her with you.'

‘Yes you do.'

She was gone before he could reply, turning on her heel and leaving with the platter.

Tom had decanted three bottles of 1920 Cheval Blanc to go with the cheese. Faithful to tradition, whenever they drank one of the wines from the fine cellar which had come with the house a toast was raised to Monsieur Montalivet.

‘Who is Monsieur Montalivet?' asked Klaus.

‘The poor fool who built this sorry pile,' replied Barnaby.

Tom was more helpful, explaining that Montalivet was the Parisian banker who had bought the land, erected the villa and laid out its gardens. On losing everything in the financial crash of 1929 he had done the ignoble thing and hanged himself from a banister riser in the entrance hall, leaving a wife and three children to tough it out on their own.

Barnaby turned to Ilse. ‘There's a theory that he didn't really commit suicide but was done in by irate creditors.'

‘Like most of Barnaby's theories, there's not one shred of evidence to back it up,' Venetia clarified.

‘Call it intuition,' said Barnaby.

‘I prefer to call it journalism,' retorted Venetia.

Ilse bristled. ‘I am also a journalist.'

‘I know, my dear, and it's a pleasure to meet a real one.'

‘I surrender,' said Barnaby, crossing his wrists in front of him. ‘Lash my hands with rope.'

‘Never speak of rope in the house of the hanged.'