The Splendour Falls (4 page)

‘Emily Braden.’ I briefly clasped the ring-encrusted hand, feeling somewhat dizzy after that introductory speech. Jim Whitaker shook my hand firmly and sat down beside his wife, facing the window to the street. His solid, almost stoic figure made an intriguing contrast to his wife’s gushing mannerisms. They were both in their mid-forties, I decided, although Garland fancied herself younger.

‘The boys have picked you up, I see,’ she said to me. ‘You have to be careful with these two, you know. They look harmless, but they’re really
not
. Oh, Paul,’ she shifted in her seat, ‘
do
you think you could be a dear and make that Thierry understand that the heater in our room is
just too hot for us? I tried to explain it to him, but I don’t think he knew what I was saying and his English is really
so
awful …’

It hadn’t sounded awful to me, but then the French did have a mischievous tendency not to speak well when it suited them. I’d watched many a Parisian waiter play the game with unsuspecting tourists, particularly tourists who were difficult to deal with. Garland Whitaker, I thought, might just qualify for that distinction.

Her husband, on the other hand, appeared to be a different sort of person entirely. He had kind eyes. ‘Thierry speaks English perfectly well,’ Jim Whitaker informed his wife in a calm voice. ‘If you’d stop talking to him like he was a two-year-old with a hearing problem, you’d find that out.’

Garland Whitaker ignored the rebuke and smiled brightly at all of us. ‘Jim’s mother was French, you know. Or so he says.’ She cast a teasing eye upon her husband. ‘I never met your parents, darling, so I have to take your word. But really,’ she told Paul, ‘Jim can only speak a little French, and you get along so well with Thierry, I’m
sure
you’d have no problem …’

‘I’ll see what I can do,’ Paul promised.

‘Oh, wonderful. Now, listen,’ she continued, leaning forward in her seat, ‘while everyone’s here … I’m thinking we should all take Christian out to dinner tonight. You know, a sort of going away party.’

Paul looked surprised. ‘Christian’s going away?’

Neil Grantham smiled, and answered, ‘Not exactly. He’s moving out of the hotel, though, into a house.’

‘The house
her
husband used to live in.’ Garland flashed a gossip’s eyes. ‘Can you believe it? Apparently she owns it, though she hasn’t lived in it herself for ages. She let
him
use it, instead.’

I didn’t know who ‘him’ was – ‘her’ husband, obviously, but that hardly helped. Still, I didn’t think it polite to ask.

‘I suppose it will be nice for Christian, having a whole house to himself,’ Garland went on. ‘Mind you, I wouldn’t want to live where somebody had
died
… can you imagine how awful? And in a sense it’s kind of tasteless, don’t you think, for Martine to even offer? Out with the old, in with the new. I mean, her husband isn’t even buried …’

‘Ex-husband,’ Simon cut her off abruptly. ‘He was Martine’s ex-husband.’

Paul finally looked across and noticed I was all at sea. ‘A woman that we know,’ he told me, quietly. ‘Her ex-husband killed himself night before last, by accident. He tripped and fell down the stairs.’

‘Not down the stairs,’ Simon made the correction in authoritative tones. ‘Over the bannister. Broke his neck.’

‘Ah,’ I said.

Garland Whitaker smiled slyly. ‘Maybe it wasn’t an accident. Maybe Christian did it, just to make sure …’ She broke off suddenly and twisted round in her seat as the hotel’s front door slammed. ‘Why Christian, darling, we’d almost given up on you! Come on in and join the gang.’

I had the distinct impression that the man hovering in the open doorway would have preferred to face a firing squad.

He appeared to be around my own age – a lanky,
soft-eyed
man with rough blonde hair that looked as if he’d cut it himself with a pair of garden shears and a beard that seemed more the result of simply forgetting to shave than of any concerted effort to grow one. His clothes, too, were rather rumpled and oddly matched, his denim jeans stained with small splotches of bright colour.

‘I must go and change my clothes,’ he excused himself self-consciously. His voice was quiet, edged with a German accent that kept it from being soft. ‘I have missed the bus connection back from Saumur, and it has made me late.’

‘You will join us for dinner, though?’ Garland Whitaker pressed him, then turned her smile on all of us. ‘We are going for dinner, aren’t we? To give Christian a proper send-off?’

It wasn’t so much an invitation as a stage direction, I thought. The man named Christian wavered a moment longer in the doorway, then gave in like the rest of us.

‘Of course,’ he said politely, and faded into the hallway. The heavy clump of his shoes on the stairs had a faintly defeatist sound.

Simon slouched back in his seat, scowling blackly, and opened his mouth to say something. I didn’t actually see Paul’s elbow move, but I did see Simon jump a little in his seat, and whatever he had meant to say he kept it to himself. Garland Whitaker, triumphant, turned her attention back to the rest of us, and started talking about some day trip she and her husband had taken, or were planning to take … I’ll admit I didn’t really listen.

She just went on talking anyway, red curls bobbing with the motions of her head, that honeyed Southern voice
giving way to grating trills of laughter. Like Simon, I was not impressed. I felt the frown forming on my own face, and could have used Paul’s elbow in my own ribs to remind me of my manners. Instead, some instinct made me glance upwards, at the face of the man sitting beside me.

The look Neil Grantham slanted back at me was privately amused.

But he wasn’t smiling, and he didn’t say anything to me. So there really was no reason why I should have looked away as quickly as I did, face flaming, like some prudish Victorian spinster. Or why I should have felt, all of a sudden, a ridiculous urge to run.

The restaurant was packed to the rafters with the Friday night supper crowd, but I didn’t mind waiting for a table. It was a cosy sort of restaurant – small and warm, filled with glorious smells and furnished with a tasteful eye for detail. Besides, I thought, one had to like the name:
Le Coeur de Lion
. In honour of Richard the Lionheart, I presumed. Plantagenets again. Harry, when he stayed in Chinon, probably ate here every night.

While the seven of us waited, packed like sardines by the door, I introduced myself to the shy young German. His name was Christian Rand, he told me, above a firm but fleeting handshake.

‘Christian’s an artist,’ said Simon, who had dressed up a bit for dinner, topping his T-shirt with a thick black jumper and smoothing back his hair into a sailor’s pigtail. ‘He’s not a tourist, not like us. He’s lived in Chinon
for … how long, Christian? Five years?’

‘Six.’

‘Really?’ I looked at Christian Rand with interest. ‘At the Hotel de France?’ I’d read of all those great composers, poets, writers, who had lived in hotel rooms, of course, but I’d never actually met someone who …

‘No.’ He shook his tousled head and smiled. ‘For these past two months only. I had until July a small house, not too far from Chinon, but my neighbours they were not so good. And so my friends the Chamonds said that I could stay at their hotel while I am looking for another house.’

It was the longest speech I’d heard him make, and the effort appeared to leave him exhausted.

‘And now you’ve found one,’ Garland piped up, her tone bright.

‘Yes.’ Christian looked down silently. He wasn’t as slow as he looked, I thought. He knew quite well that Garland Whitaker was dying to draw him into conversation, to learn as much as she could about his dealings with this Martine woman, whoever she was. But Christian Rand was not prepared to play.

The waiter finally managed to find us a table tucked well away from the other patrons, where we wouldn’t disturb the quieter, more reticent French at their evening meal.

Garland Whitaker perused the menu with an expression of vague distrust. ‘Maybe a pizza,’ she decided. ‘Though they’re not
real
pizzas here, you know. Not like we get back home. Jim ordered a pizza here a couple of nights ago and when it came to the table it had an
egg
in the middle of it. Can you imagine? A runny egg. I tell you, I nearly
died
…’

‘Sounds kind of good, actually,’ Simon mused, leaning forward. ‘Which one was that, Jim?’

Garland was mortified. ‘Oh, Simon,
don’t
. If there’s anything I can’t stand, it’s the sight of a runny egg.’ She looked away, missing Simon’s smirk, and turned enquiring eyes on Christian Rand. ‘You’ll be moving into your new house tomorrow, I take it?’

‘Yes.’

Garland turned to Neil and smiled sweetly. ‘Then I guess you’ll be our only artist left in residence, darling.’

I’d been trying, since we left the hotel, not to notice Neil at all. For reasons I chose not to explore, I found it easier to talk to Simon or to Paul – or even to the taciturn Christian – than to meet those quietly intense dark eyes. But I couldn’t keep it up for ever, especially not since he’d taken the chair directly opposite mine. I glanced up, in time to see him shrug off Garland’s comment with a small, indulgent smile. ‘I’m hardly in Christian’s league.’

‘Nonsense,’ Simon said. ‘You had Paul reciting poetry today, in the stairwell.’

Neil’s eyebrows lifted. ‘Poetry?’

‘Yeah. In French, of course, so I didn’t understand it. What was it you said, Paul?’

Paul lifted his head, looking faintly embarrassed, and shrugged. ‘Just a quotation I remembered. Not poetry. Just something George Sand wrote in her diary about Liszt.’

‘What was it?’ I asked him, curious myself now. He sent me such a look as Caesar must have given Brutus, and repeated the quotation out loud. It was a lovely phrase, almost lyrical in its sentiment, and it told me rather more about the boy
Paul Lazarus than it did about Neil’s violin playing.

‘Are you going to share it with the rest of us?’ Garland Whitaker prompted, a trifle impatiently.

It was only when I looked up, into Neil Grantham’s blank expectant face, that I suddenly realised Paul and I must be the only ones who understood the French language on that level.

‘Sorry,’ I apologised. ‘It means: “My griefs are etherealised, and my instincts are …”’ I faltered, and looked to Paul. ‘How would you translate that last word?’

‘Exalted?’

‘That’s it.’ I nodded. ‘“My instincts are exalted.”’

‘How pretty.’ Garland eased back in her chair, satisfied.

‘Indeed.’ Neil looked sideways at Paul. ‘Thank you.’

Paul shrugged again. ‘It’s what I felt, that’s all.’

‘Well, it’s no small praise, that, for a musician. I can’t say as I’ve ever etherealised anybody’s grief before.’

‘Do you practise every day?’ I asked Neil.

‘Every day. Not as much as I ought to, of course, but as much as I’m able.’

‘Neil’s not really on vacation,’ put in Garland. ‘He’s recuperating. He broke his hand.’

‘Tell her how,’ Simon dared him.

Neil grinned. ‘Stupidity. I let myself get dragged into a fist fight, in some bar in Munich.’ He held his left hand up to show me. It was a nice hand, square and long-fingered, neatly kept. ‘It’s getting better, but I can’t do all my fingering properly yet. So my employers kindly gave me some time off. On the condition,’ he added, ‘that I don’t enjoy myself too much.’

‘And is this your first trip to Chinon?’ I asked him.

He shook his head. ‘No. This would be my eighth visit, I think – maybe even my ninth. It’s an addiction, really, Chinon is. You’ll understand, if you stay long enough.’

Beside me, Simon nodded. ‘Monsieur Chamond says once you’ve been to Chinon, you’re hooked for life. He says you’ll keep on coming back.’

‘He sounds like a wise man,’ I said. ‘I haven’t met him yet.’

‘I’m sure you’ll meet them eventually,’ Jim Whitaker assured me. ‘They’re nice people, both of them.’

‘
They
speak English,’ Garland said. ‘Not like that nephew of theirs. Honestly, you’d think with all the tourists they get around here, more people would take the time to learn English. It’s so
frustrating
, trying to communicate.’

At the far end of the table, Paul smiled gently. ‘I’m sure the French feel the same way,’ he said, ‘when they visit America.’

Our waiter seemed to understand us well enough. He took Paul’s order first, then Neil’s, then waited while Garland tried to choose a wine and Simon tried to learn which pizza had the egg on it. I settled on a galette for myself – a buckwheat crêpe filled with cheese and mushrooms – washed down with a half bottle of sweet cider.

The food, when it arrived, was excellent, and yet the meal itself was slightly off. I tried, and failed, to put my finger on the cause. The atmosphere around our table was, at its surface, entirely normal for a group of people who’d just met on holiday – a little forced, perhaps, but normal. And yet, I thought, there was a tension here … a tension
spun from more than my awareness of the man across the table. One couldn’t shake away the sense that something deeper flowed beneath the smiles and salt-passing, some darker conflict hinted at but never quite revealed. It made me feel excluded.

I ate my meal in silence, for the most part, and let the others talk. In time the conversation dwindled to a kind of battle between Simon and Garland Whitaker, both of whom seemed fully capable of carrying the standard
single-handed
. Garland proved the more experienced combatant, and more often than not her voice came out on top.

She had remarkable stamina, I had to admit. The table conversation had exhausted several topics, and still she showed no sign of wearing down. Her husband, though, I noticed, had stopped listening. He went on eating quietly, his gaze occasionally focusing with mild interest on someone or something at another table – a laughing child, an old man eating alone, a frilly woman slipping titbits to a poodle underneath her chair … But he’d tuned his wife’s voice out completely. It was, I assumed, a defence mechanism he’d acquired over the years.

Garland chattered on about the château that they’d visited that morning. ‘We stay in one place,’ she said to me, ‘and take our day trips out from there. So much easier than jumping from place to place, don’t you think? And I can actually unpack my clothes, which is a blessing. This time we’re doing all the Loire châteaux. We always like to have a theme for our vacations, don’t we, Jim? Always. We did the D-day beaches on our honeymoon.’

‘How romantic,’ muttered Simon. He tore a piece of
bread in half to mop up what remained of his runny egg, and looked towards Jim Whitaker. ‘Were you in the Army, during the war?’

It was the first real smile I’d seen from the American. He looked rather nice, when he smiled. ‘I’m not that old, son,’ he said. ‘I wasn’t even born until after the war ended.’

‘Oh,’ said Simon. ‘Sorry.’

Garland laughed her tinkling laugh. ‘Your father fought in France, though, didn’t he?’ she asked her husband. ‘That’s how he met your mother.’

‘Yes.’

‘And Jim was in the Army, Simon, when I married him. We lived in Germany for two whole years.’ She shuddered. ‘God, that awful little apartment, darling, do you remember it? But then I guess it was just fine, for Germans.’

Christian flicked a brief look down the table, but made no comment. It was Neil who asked the Whitakers just where in Germany they’d lived, and nodded when they told him. ‘I do know it,’ he said, smiling. ‘There’s a wonderful music festival not far from there, every June. Lovely place.’

‘I hated it,’ said Garland with a shrug. ‘The people were so unfriendly. Nazis, probably, most of them.’

Her husband pushed his empty plate away and smiled at her with patience. ‘Now come on, honey, you know they weren’t.’

‘Darling, it’s
true
. Don’t you remember all those little holes someone kept digging, all over town? Mrs Jurgen’s dog fell into one, and the police got suspicious? Well,
that
was Nazis, the police proved it.’ To the rest of us she explained: ‘There’d been money hidden there, or something,
at the end of the war, and these people were coming back to find it thirty years later. Incredible. And then there was the time …’

She was still going, like a wind-up doll on overload, when we finally paid the bill and rose and wound our way through the labyrinth of tables to the front door.

It was heavenly to breathe the outside air. The restaurant fronted on the long and narrow Place du Général de Gaulle, and against the dark green trees the streetlamps glowed a softly spreading yellow. Further up the square the fountain gurgled merrily, and I saw the sign of the Hotel de France illuminated through the shifting leaves.

Christian apparently saw it too. He mumbled some faint words of thanks for dinner, and wandered off towards the beckoning lights. A moment later Neil Grantham followed suit. He had a long unhurried stride, and watching him I felt again that strange unbidden twinge of interest. I pushed it back, and tried to hold my thoughts to what was going on around me.

Simon and Garland had switched from Nazis now to neo-Nazis, and the rising tide of tension in Europe. ‘It’s all the immigration,’ Garland was saying. She tossed her auburn head. ‘It’s the same everywhere, I think, all these foreigners moving in and taking over. It’s like the Jews all over again, isn’t it? I mean, you can’t
condone
what the Nazis did, don’t get me wrong, but you can almost understand it. These immigrants can get so uppity …’

It was an ugly thing to say. I stared at her, and Jim burst out: ‘God, Garland,
honestly
…!’ and then to my delight Simon recovered from his own stunned silence with
a vengeance and began to give her proper hell. In the midst of all this Paul turned placidly to me and smiled. ‘Feel like taking a walk?’ he asked.

‘Sure.’

I don’t think anybody even noticed us leaving. Paul turned towards the river, away from the hotel, and I ambled along beside him, content to let him set the pace.

We walked past a statue that I recognised from my travel brochures – a seated figure of the great humanist Rabelais, once a traveller and a lover of life, now confined to one small patch of garden at the end of the Place du Général de Gaulle. Bathed by floodlights, the seated scholar seemed immense, brooding in gloomy silence as the river murmured on behind him.

Paul sauntered across the road and round the far side of the statue, where a narrow breach in the river wall revealed a long fall of sloping stone stairs that vanished into the dark water below. On the seventh stair down, he sat and waited for me.

‘I lied,’ he confessed, with a sheepish smile. ‘I didn’t really feel like a walk. I felt like a cigarette.’ He shook one loose and offered the pack to me, but I declined, watching his face in the brief flare of the match.

‘I didn’t know you smoked,’ I said.

‘Only when Simon’s not around. He’s got opinions on all kinds of things, and smoking’s one of them. I try to avoid arguments when I can. In case you hadn’t noticed.’ He grinned suddenly, and I knew that he was thinking not of his brother but of Garland Whitaker, and the little scene we’d just escaped from.

I envied him his self-control, and told him so. ‘I’m afraid she makes me lose my temper.’

‘Bad luck to lose your temper on the Sabbath – that’s what my mother always tells me.’

‘I’m safe, then. It’s only Friday.’.

‘After sundown on Friday.’ He smiled. ‘My Sabbath.’

It took me a moment to digest that. ‘You’re Jewish?’

He shrugged, still smiling. ‘With a name like Lazarus I’d better be.’

To be truthful, I hadn’t noticed his surname at all. But then, I fancied myself a different sort of person than Garland Whitaker. I thought again of what she’d said, of how she’d said it … ‘She really is a hateful woman.’

‘No she isn’t. Not really. She just gets a little bit much sometimes, that’s all.’ His eyes touched mine briefly, warmly, then drifted away again, out across the wide expanse of river to the shadowed line of trees that rimmed the opposite shore. ‘She doesn’t mean anything by it. It’s simple ignorance with her, not spite.’