Beyond the Green Hills (24 page)

‘There he is. There he is.’

She turned to find a young man and a much
younger girl hurrying towards her. Conker spotted them too, jumped down and greeted them with ecstatic barks. Then he ran back to Clare and barked at her too.

‘Thank you so much, Mademoiselle. I hope he’s not been a nuisance. He gave us the slip,’ said the young man apologetically, as he put Conker back on his lead.

‘No, he’s lovely. I like dogs.’

‘Do you have one?’ the girl asked.

‘No, I work in Paris and travel a lot. When I was very little my grandfather had a spaniel just like Conker, but he was pure black. He used to lick my nose as well.’

The girl sat down beside Clare, introduced herself as Madeline and asked her what it was like living in Paris. To her surprise, Clare found she was grateful for the interruption. She’d looked forward to having time to think, but now she had it, it seemed only sad thoughts were coming upon her, when she ought to be so very happy.

The young man would be about eighteen or nineteen, she thought, the same age as William. Sturdy, slightly square, and very good-humoured, he was only a little taller than his sister, who’d just informed Clare that she was twelve and two months old.

Clare laughed when he said his name was Robert.

‘There are so
many Roberts in my life,’ she responded, without thinking. ‘My grandfather was Robert and my
boss is
Robert.’

She was about to add, ‘You remind me of him,’ but
it seemed such a strange thing to say she stopped herself in time.

‘Robert is very clever,’ said Madeline proudly. ‘He’s always winning prizes at school. Last year he won the medal for mathematics. Father says he doesn’t know where he gets it from, because Mother is hopeless at sums.’

‘You don’t look at all like each other,’ Clare said, smiling, as she looked from one to the other.

There was something so open and easy about the two young people. Robert was the quieter of the two. He was not so much shy as thoughtful. He was clearly quite used to Madeline doing most of the talking.

‘I shall soon be taller than Robert,’ said Madeline, teasingly. ‘But he’s a nice brother. I’m so glad Mummy escaped with him. She ran away when the Germans came. His own father was killed fighting them.’

‘Do you remember him at all, Robert?’

‘No, I was only weeks old when my mother came south. I don’t even remember not having a father.’

‘Our father is a custodian at the Bishop’s Palace. Have you been there?’

‘No, I haven’t.’

‘Would you like us to take you there? Robert knows everything about it. He’ll tell you all the history. I always get the dates mixed up and forget the names of the Popes,’ she said cheerfully. ‘Wouldn’t that be a good idea, Robert?’

Robert smiled and nodded and got to his feet. He’d been kneeling down stroking Conker, who
was lying luxuriously on his back with his paws up.

They set off with Robert and Conker leading the way. She watched his sturdy figure moving ahead of her while Madeline continued to chatter happily by her side. There was no doubt about it. He did look like Robert, particularly from the back, but then, she considered, so did thousands of other French boys. It was a type, possibly one she would recognise if she knew Brittany. Many women had escaped the German advance from the north and east. There was no reason to think that Robert and Madeline’s mother might have known Robert Lafarge’s wife. Nevertheless, she would find out exactly where she had come from, just in case it might be of some use to the second Robert in her life.

Next day, Wednesday, they finished their meetings in time to catch the afternoon express to Paris. Robert was pleased. He’d done his duty with his sister, who had been as unpleasant as he expected, and he’d completed arrangements with the Avignon group, who had been much more progressive than he’d expected. He was tired out.

While he fell asleep behind the financial pages, Clare sat staring out of the window, absorbing the sunlit countryside as it sped past, parched and dusty, after a hot summer. The sun still blazed down out of a clear blue sky, reminding her of the fields of sunflowers she’d seen earlier in the year, near Orange.

She’d always been fascinated by sunflowers. At school, they’d once planted the large seeds in two-pound
jam pots, placed between the glass of the jar and wet sand insulated by blotting paper. Quite quickly they had sprouted both roots and shoots. When they’d finished their experiment, drawn sketches in their biology exercise books, labelled the parts and planted the seedlings outdoors, they’d grown to almost two feet high. Here, in the south, the sunflowers she’d seen towered above her head, their huge faces fringed with bright yellow petals, their massed seeds home to dozens of harvesting insects.

Here, the countryside was exotic. Full of colour, passionate, like a Van Gogh painting. Fields of lavender like purple lakes, fields of stubble bleached white by the sun. The brilliant flash of the Rhône, caught in glimpses. Houses and factories in brick or plaster reflected the light, pinks and blues and dazzling white, or remained quietly shabby, even their peeling paint and fading tones glowing warmly.

The rhythm of the train was soothing, the comfortable carriage empty but for themselves. She leaned back, her guide to Toulouse and its environs open on her knee. There was so much of it, this huge country, and she’d been lucky to see so much in such a short time. But she could not say she knew it. Could anyone say they ‘knew a country’? You could know a piece perhaps. A village, a small town, a locality. The way she knew The Grange, Armagh, the streets and roads round Queen’s.

She thought of Charlie Running, his wall covered with bits cut from maps, sketches he’d made. That
was a way of knowing a piece of a country. But it was only one way. There were others. You could say Robert knew France in terms of its financial institutions. The problems he tried to solve were particularly French. No doubt his counterpart in London or Milan would face very different problems.

She paused, laughed at herself. Between the effects of lunch and the heat, she was far too sleepy to solve any problem, particularly one she wasn’t sure she could identify in the first place.

By the time they arrived, late in the evening, Paris was cooler. It was even cooler in her own apartment when she stepped into the dim room, the curtains and blinds meticulously closed by Madame to keep out the sun. She dropped her suitcase, drew them back, opened the windows, propped open her kitchen door to catch the slight breeze from the courtyard. Only moments later, the expected knock came.

‘Here you are, mam’selle, your lovely green dress, the blue costume and your breakfast,’ said Madame, handing over the garments on hangers from the dry cleaners. ‘You will see a small packet and your post with your bread and croissants,’ she explained, pointing a bony finger into the plastic carrier bag. ‘It made it easier to carry.’

‘Thank you very much, Madame.’

‘You look so tired, mam’selle. It is the heat. I will not come in. Tell me tomorrow evening what you need for your return from Toulouse.’

Clare hung up her dry-cleaning, put the bread in
the bin, the small packet and the post on the low table by her chair in the window.

With a sigh of relief she stepped into her bedroom and peeled off her clothes. She felt as if she’d been wearing them for a week. She hung her costume over a chair and made for the shower.

‘Oh, that
is
better,’ she said aloud, pulling on a dressing gown and tramping barefoot back into her sitting room.

She picked up the packet, small but sturdily wrapped. It had been registered, and signed for by Madame. On the back, the slightly torn custom’s declaration said ‘Recipient’s own prop.’

‘I could do with a prop, this evening,’ she said, smiling to herself, as she struggled with the heavy brown parcel tape.

Inside, she found a small red velvet box like the one in Harry’s safe and a stiff sheet of embossed paper, badly creased by having been folded round it. She opened the letter, smoothed it out and peered at the short paragraphs in the fading light.

‘So she’s dead. Poor woman,’ Clare said, tears trickling unheeded down her face. ‘That’s why I could get no reply when I phoned June. She must have been in hospital, or already dead. I should just have gone up to Wiley’s. Someone there would have told me.’

She picked up the box. Yet again, for one strange, disturbing moment she’d thought it was the box containing her engagement ring.

‘How silly of me,’ she said as she opened it.

The brooch inside was small, just a single stone, set in a filigree of gold wire. Even in the dusk, it caught light from the quay outside to glow with a green fire. Could it really be an emerald?

She tried to read the letter through again, but the light had gone. She drew the curtains, put on a lamp, scanned the paragraphs. But no amount of reading was going to answer the questions that sprang into her mind.

Was the admirer who had pursued the Missus from Paris to Deauville the man she should have married? Or had she given him up to marry the Senator? Why had she kept the brooch all these years, when they’d been so short of money?

‘I’ll never know now,’ she said quietly, wiping her eyes. ‘I just know I must get to bed. It’s a full day tomorrow and Toulouse on Friday.’

Not even the thought of seeing Christian had the power to cheer her as she hid the brooch carefully among her clothes and climbed wearily into bed.

‘M
esdames, Messieurs. Attention, s’il vous plaît.’ Clare obediently paid attention. The early evening flight to Toulouse had been delayed for technical reasons.

Sitting by a window, drinking Perrier water, she watched other aircraft come and go, wondered what the phrase ‘technical reasons’ might actually mean. Perhaps a wheel had fallen off, or an altitude meter had started recording while the aircraft was still on the ground. On the other hand, it could be something quite different. The in-flight drinks hadn’t arrived, perhaps, or the pilot was delayed in a traffic jam, or the documentation for a box to be placed in the hold had disappeared.

She smiled to herself, thinking of the tactful reasons the bank used to turn down a request for finance. Courtesy was always an objective. The area of concern might be referred to, but only in general terms. Unless one was going as far as to offer an assessment of the problem, it was policy to use a phrase like ‘not in the best interests of the bank’. It was only another variation of ‘technical reasons’.

The delay lasted about an hour, but the flight itself was unexceptional, only the landing rather unpleasant
as they lost height through thick cloud, the tail end of one of the thunderstorms generated by the heat of the last week.

She spotted Christian before he saw her, surrounded as she was by the dark suits and striding figures of returning businessmen. He was scanning the dark stream intensely, his tanned face staring and expressionless. The moment he saw her, he smiled, that warm expansive smile that had so captivated her.

‘My poor little one, you must be so tired. Was it a bumpy flight?’

He slipped an arm round her, kissed her cheek and drew her towards the baggage area.

‘Which ones are yours?’

‘Just that one,’ she said, laughing. ‘With the Athens sticker. The wretched thing wouldn’t peel off,’ she said easily, glad to have arrived and found him waiting for her.

She noticed a tightening in his face as he left her to retrieve the case. He hurried back to her and shepherded her towards his car.

‘New car, Christian?’

‘No,’ he said absently, as he reversed at speed and then headed for the exit. ‘This is the one I always use here. I keep the Renault in Paris.’

He drove fast through the suburbs of Toulouse, and even faster when the city had been left behind.

‘Your flight was late,’ he said flatly. ‘You will want time to change before dinner. Travelling on a Friday night is always more tiring,’ he added, with a glance towards her.

‘What do you usually wear on a Friday night?’ she asked lightly.

She thought longingly of a pair of trousers and a cool over-shirt.

‘Oh, just a suit. I don’t bother with a dinner jacket, though my father always does. I expect you’ve brought a short evening dress. Easier to pack,’ he said brightly, without taking his eyes off the road.

The road was twisty and wet from the thunderstorm, though the sky had cleared and there was freshness in the air. She concentrated on the countryside to distract herself from the speed of the drive. Perhaps it was the flight, but she almost felt slightly car sick.

‘Not far now,’ he said, reducing speed marginally on even narrower roads. ‘My parents moved out of the château some years go. They found a more comfortable house about five miles away, between Pescadoire and Puy l’Eveque. It was built by an American recluse in the nineties, a strange mixture of styles, but there are no draughts. My mother says she’s too old for a draughty château,’ he said, flashing her a warm smile.

‘And you live with them?’

‘No, of course not. I have a small suite in the château. I’ll take you there tomorrow.’

He swung off the road on to a broad gravelled drive lined on one side with poplars, on the other with flowering shrubs. The shrubs gave way to a broad lawn, remarkably green compared with the dried-out look of the countryside, which the rain had done nothing to modify.

‘Good,’ he said, looking at his watch, as he came
round to open her door. ‘Just eight o’clock. We have drinks on the terrace at eight thirty and dine at nine. Come down as soon after eight thirty as you can manage. Gabrielle will take you to your room.’

The house was large. Three storeys. Pink, with shutters, like many houses she’d seen in the south. But, unlike them, it had a porch with Grecian columns painted white and a wide fan of shallow steps leading up to the front door.

The hall was even more extraordinary. It reminded her of baronial halls in films like
The
Adventures
of
Robin
Hood.
There were beautiful oriental carpets on the polished wood floor, suits of armour, heraldic shields, and a number of flags, so faded with age they were almost transparent.

‘This way, mam’selle, if you please,’ said Gabrielle, taking her suitcase from Christian and heading for the stairs.

‘Don’t be late,’ he said, smiling warmly, as he disappeared.

‘If there is anything you need, mam’selle, will you please ring,’ she said, throwing open a bedroom door and indicating a heavy gold rope by the fireplace. ‘Your bathroom is through here,’ she went on, opening a heavy panelled door into a room almost as large as the one in which they stood.

‘Thank you, Gabrielle.’

Gabrielle bobbed a curtsy and Clare managed to keep a straight face until she’d closed the door gently behind her.

‘Whee …’ she said, as she dropped down on a sofa placed across the end of the four-poster bed. ‘You
nearly put your foot in it, Clare dear.’

She opened her case quickly, took out her make-up and dressing gown and shook out the new plum velvet cocktail dress she nearly hadn’t brought. She wasn’t even sure she liked it, now she saw it lying on the bed, waiting to be worn. But Louise said it looked good when it arrived from the couturier’s yesterday. She’d put it in just to be on the safe side, in case Toulouse might think itself quite as smart as Paris, if Christian wanted to take her out to dine.

The room was gloomy now as the light faded, despite its two large, high windows overlooking the garden. Another beautifully green lawn with paths and pergolas covered with roses, leading to other areas defined by box hedges. She had such a desire to run out of the house, down one of those paths and let the freshness of the evening envelop her. She sighed and smiled as she felt her shoulders give a passable imitation of a classic Gallic shrug.

‘Come on, Clare. You haven’t got time. Just do a Louise.’

She parked her suitcase in the bottom of a huge wardrobe, where a summer dress and her light trousers already hung in solitary splendour, and two pairs of shoes occupied a small corner of a shoe rack with enough capacity for a football team, and examined herself critically in the long mirror. She sighed. She had broken a golden rule. Never wear a new dress for the first time when about to go out. The dress was nicer than she thought: she liked the soft fall of the fabric and the fit was impeccable, but
the deep V-neck needed a necklace.

She scolded herself. Marie-Claude had taught her to use costume jewellery as she used scarves and belts and she’d built up quite a collection of brooches for her costumes and earrings for her evening dresses. But no necklaces. It was not a matter of expense. She just hadn’t seen the need until now.

She wondered if the brooch from her blue suit might offset the bareness of the neckline. The blue was deep enough to wear with the plum, yes, but its setting in white metal was quite wrong against the soft fabric. The richness of the dress needed gold.

‘Ah …’ she breathed, as an idea came to her.

She went to a drawer where she had unpacked her underwear and took out the small red jewel box. She’d only brought it because she’d promised Madame never to leave real jewellery in her apartment and she hadn’t had time to do anything else with it.

‘Oh, what luck,’ she said aloud, as she tried it out at different points on the draped shoulders and fitted bodice. ‘It looks good wherever I put it.’

She turned off the battery of spotlights around the dressing table and stood for a moment in the darkened room. Everything was silent. No friendly household noises came to her, no smells of food, no tramp of feet
.
The house had a dead feel
about it. The hall itself looked like a museum, but her bedroom was more like a stage set for a costume drama, waiting for the cast to bring it to life
.
Little Gabrielle, in her black dress and starched white
apron, merely added to the illusion, a Miss Muffet cap perched on her dark curls, like the one she’d worn herself at Drumsollen.

Strange that the place should so remind her of Drumsollen, given a different country, the great difference in the style of furnishing. Perhaps it would all become clear to her, after dining with the inhabitants.

She walked slowly downstairs, half expecting the baronial hall to be lit by flickering torches, but it was not. Concealed spotlights played on key exhibits and threw long, menacing shadows up the high walls and across the timber-beamed roof. She paused at the foot of the staircase. At last, there were signs of life. The chink of glasses and the higher notes of a woman’s voice. It was exactly eight thirty. She walked towards them.

‘Clare you have been quick
.
Well
done,’ said Christian approvingly, as he arced his arm around her without touching her, drawing her into the conservatory, which gave on to a lamp-lit terrace.

Christian’s father rose at once. A little taller and somewhat older than Emile, he had broader shoulders and bushy eyebrows, but little of Emile’s gentle hesitancy. He was wearing evening dress with the flèche of the Legion of Honour in one lapel.

He waited, patiently enough, while Christian introduced Clare to his mother, a tall, aristocratic woman with iron-grey hair and papery skin on which her rouge sat unhappily, despite its skilful application.

‘How do you do, Miss Hamilton, I’m sure we may call you Clare,’ she began, in English, extending her hand limply, her fingers cold.

‘How do you do,’ Clare replied, wondering which English habits of speech Madame Moreau would expect. ‘Yes, of course, you may,’ she added easily.

‘I regret my English always was poor, completely non-existent now,’ said Monsieur Moreau abruptly, in French.

Clare smiled at him as she shook his hand. ‘But that’s much better than having an unfortunate accent. So my boss says. He learnt his English from the Americans after the war and refuses to speak it at all,’ Clare replied, in French.

He grunted, and sat down again looking relieved.

‘Christian, Clare has nothing to drink. What are you thinking of?’ Madame Moreau demanded, reverting to French, her tone sharper, less rounded than when she spoke English.

But at that very moment Christian appeared from behind Clare’s chair carrying a glass of white wine.

‘Thank you,’ she said politely, as he handed her the glass without looking at her.

Clare had a sudden desire to giggle. She spoke to herself severely. If she felt like giggling now, how on earth would she feel if she drank wine on an empty stomach? She’d broken another of Louise’s golden rules. Always eat something before you go out, in case the meal is late. While Louise drank milk, Clare usually had cream crackers or plain biscuits, but that was one more thing she’d forgotten to pack. She really wasn’t scoring very well tonight, and the
evening was only just beginning.

She took a very small sip of her wine and waited.

Madame Moreau turned towards her with a slight inclination of the head, speaking now in French.

‘You must think us very old-fashioned, Clare, with our silly old flags and trophies. Charles is the keeper of the family history and it does go a long way back,’ she said, stroking the grey silk of her full-length gown.

‘But family history is so interesting,’ Clare replied. ‘I think I saw the device of Henry of Navarre in the entrance hall, but perhaps I was mistaken.’

‘Oh no, not at all,’ Madame replied, her eyes opening a little wider. ‘Henri Quatre was a very important figure in our family history. Without his protection we Huguenots would not have survived. I’m sure you are familiar with his efforts on our behalf and what happened when the Edict of Nantes was finally revoked.’

‘Yes, indeed. A very dark episode in French history, though one which my own country has benefited from.’

‘It has?’

‘Yes, very much so. While England and the Netherlands seem to have welcomed the silk workers and goldsmiths, we in the north of Ireland had the benefit of Louis Crommelin. He and other Huguenots transformed the existing textile industry and gave us our famous linen industry.’

‘And your family, are
they also Huguenot, as we are
here?’ she went on, with a slightly more than courteous interest.

‘Most of the families I know well seem to have Huguenot links,’ Clare replied, thinking of all the aunts and uncles who worked in the mills round about Banbridge. ‘But they also have strong ties with the Calvinists in Scotland,’ she added, now that the drift of Madame’s questioning was quite clear to her.

‘How very interesting, my dear,’ she said warmly. ‘You must ask my husband to take you on a tour of our treasures. But not until you have had some supper. We are neglecting our duty while we enjoy your company,’ she said, standing up and sweeping out of the room, just as a distant clock struck nine and a young man appeared to announce that dinner was served.

Clare was grateful when the first course turned out to be a comforting soup. Madame, it was clear, did not permit conversation with the servants present, so it was not until they departed and Clare was feeling distinctly more like herself, that Charles Moreau addressed her.

‘Christian says your plane was delayed. Were there thunderstorms further north?’

‘Yes, I think there were, but the main delay was in Paris. Technical reasons, they said. Coming in to land in Toulouse was nasty. I think we flew through the edge of the thunderstorm moving away south.’

Moreau nodded.

‘But there was no rain on the drive back?’ he asked, turning to Christian, who had not said a word since the meal began.