Girl at the Lion D'Or (12 page)

Anne went back into the bedroom and tore open the letter on the dressing-table. ‘Dear Anne,’ she read, ‘I have rented these rooms for you because I thought you might like them better than your attic at the Lion d’Or, and I am sure you will have no problems with voyeurs. You don’t have to take them if you don’t want to. I won’t be hurt if you prefer to stay at the hotel, nor does taking them confer any obligation on you. Mlle Calmette is an old friend of our family (her sister worked once as my father’s secretary) and our financial arrangement is easy-going – by which I mean you shouldn’t feel uneasy about any expense you might think I’m incurring. It’s not much and, in any case, it is money I would like her to have.

‘I hope you’ll like it here. I suppose it will mean getting up ten minutes earlier each morning to get to work on time but perhaps it’s worth it. I have to go to dinner in town tonight and I will look in around eleven to see that you’re settled. If this is inconvenient, you must telephone me at the Manor early this evening. I will make sure I answer the telephone. My wife doesn’t know of this arrangement and if she did she might draw the wrong conclusions. I’m sure you understand.’

Hartmann arrived shortly before midnight, full of apologies. ‘It was impossible to get away earlier, it would have been rude. I left just as soon as I could. And now you’ll be tired in the morning, while I can lie in bed till eight o’clock. I wouldn’t have come at all, but then I thought you might wait up and that would be even worse.’

He was wearing a dark suit and a formal white collar. His eyes seemed sunk a little deeper than usual into his face – an illusion produced by a shadow of fatigue beneath them. In the shaded light that hung from the centre of the small sittingroom his face seemed all contours and hollows, defined by the sharp expression of apology that had replaced his more customary one of just-suppressed humour.

‘My dear Monsieur, that you should apologise when, when . . .’ Anne threw her arm wide to indicate the room.

‘Do you like it?’

‘Like it. Oh, my God, it’s wonderful, wonderful.’

Hartmann saw her eyes brim with tears and the look of worry left his face. He turned away for a moment. ‘It was a dreadful dinner,’ he said. ‘From the moment we sat down my heart sank. It became a test of endurance. The old woman who brought the food in took an age between each course and then, when we’d finished, our hostess insisted that we listen while one of the other guests played the piano.’

‘But wasn’t that nice?’

‘I’m afraid not. I’m no musician, but even my ears were offended.’

Anne smiled. ‘I’ve bought some brandy. I thought perhaps you might like some. I’m afraid it’s not very good, but it was all I – all they had in the local shop.’

She handed him a glass from the cupboard and filled it. ‘It’s fine,’ said Hartmann as the liquid seared his throat. ‘But won’t you have any?’

‘I don’t know, I hadn’t thought about it. I don’t normally drink brandy.’

‘Go on.’

‘Well, I can’t see why not.’ She poured herself some and sipped at it suspiciously. It made her eyes water.

‘Here’s to your new home,’ said Hartmann, raising his glass.

Anne smiled and raised hers. ‘To you, monsieur.’

‘You’d better not tell anyone at the hotel about this arrangement. If they want to know how you can manage to live in your own rooms you’d better tell them that an aunt left you some money in her will or something like that. It’s not that there’s anything wrong in the arrangement, it’s just that in a small town people talk. If they knew I paid for you to be here they’d jump to only one conclusion. So you must tell no one.’

Anne turned her head. ‘Very well, monsieur.’ She felt uneasy, as though she really were his mistress. In the excitement of the afternoon she hadn’t thought properly about these things; now she felt the sense of panic returning.

‘What’s the matter, Anne?’

She looked up and smiled, though without much spirit. ‘Nothing, monsieur, nothing. It’s wonderful, these rooms, this little courtyard . . . But I don’t like the feeling of secrecy. I don’t like to be furtive. I’ve kept too many secrets in my life. I would like things to be more open.’

‘I know. It’s not a perfect arrangement for you. But that’s not your fault and it’s not mine. It’s the fault of small-town society where people have nothing better to do than gossip and lie about each other.’

Anne looked down.

‘There’s nothing you or I can do to change that. You simply have to try to make the choices that will make you happiest in the circumstances. If you’d feel better back at the Lion d’Or, then I quite understand. Please believe me, I won’t be offended. It’s your choice.’

‘Oh no! I
adore
these rooms. It’s the prettiest, most perfect little apartment, I’ve ever seen. I know I’ll be happy here. I just . . . it’s silly, but I just wish things were more straightforward sometimes.’

Hartmann’s voice rumbled on soothingly. He had a way of making things seem quite clear and reasonable, Anne thought; so much so that he could talk away the most unsettling doubts – talk away, perhaps even the horrors that visited her in the night.

She raised her face to him and he noticed that her eyes were fierce with pleading and determination. ‘Monsieur, you must not betray me.’

Hartmann was aware from the hard edge of her voice that she was asking him for something fundamental to her happiness. He also knew, without admitting it to himself, that the more reasonably he put the case for Anne’s staying in the rooms he had rented for her, the more he stressed the possible drawbacks, the more he said it was her own free choice, the more likely she was to do what he wanted.

‘You can trust me, Anne,’ he said. ‘I give you my word.’

It was a meaningless promise because it was so vague, but Anne believed in it. Hartmann hardly knew himself what he was saying, apart from assuring Anne that his regard for her was sincere. He looked over to where she stood by the table in the middle of the room, her face half in shadow from the hanging light above. He felt the same onrushing of desire that had made him throw the books towards the rafters of the attic; and mixed with this he felt for the first time a sense of identification with her and with her vulnerability.

Anne at the moment found that her doubts were soothed, as she looked at him sitting at ease in her armchair, in her apartment. With his fastidious gentleness, his niceness of feeling and yet, too, that self-control and confidence in all his dealings – with these qualities she could not be doing wrong, whatever she did. She smiled at him again.

Hartmann stood up, ‘I mustn’t keep you, now that you’ve got to get up even earlier in the mornings.’

‘It’s only ten minutes. You don’t have to go.’

‘I must. But I’ll come and visit you again if you like. One day next week, perhaps.’

‘Oh yes, please. I’ll make you dinner. I can take an evening off. What would you like?’

‘Anything you can do easily. A stew or coq au vin or something like that. I don’t mind at all.’ He didn’t want her to spend too much money.

‘Could you come on Sunday?’

‘All right. I’ll bring some wine, so don’t bother about that.’

5

I
T WAS HIGH
summer and the sun shone full on to the small courtyard overlooked by Anne’s sitting-room. On her first Sunday morning there she sat in the window-seat barefoot with her arms around her legs, her hands clasped together in front of her, and looked down. There were, as usual, two cats asleep. One, called Zozo by Mlle Calmette, was lying on the half-roof that jutted out over the inner porch by the door to the street. Anne could quite clearly see his grey flanks inflating as he dreamed another impossible dream of his daring. He was a fantasist of a ridiculous nature who, Anne thought, had not been destined for domestic cathood. He would prowl through the patchy grass at the edges of the courtyard in pursuit of a sparrow that was pecking at the gravel, concentrating fiercely on his long, skating steps, seemingly under the impression that the handfuls of intermittent weed gave him the protection of a lush savannah. The bird would always see him coming but continue to peck until it was ready to go. Before Zozo had even reached the stage of preparing himself to spring, the sparrow would be off with a faint, derisive chirp to continue feeding at its leisure elsewhere in the courtyard. After two or three such failed attempts, the cat would leap up on to the high inner wall and patrol the perimeter of the courtyard with a strutting air to recover his dignity. This would last either until he grew tired and curled up to sleep, or until someone came in from the street, when he would hurry round the wall and adopt a waiting position, coiled in as close a resemblance to a spring as he was ever likely to manage. On Anne’s first day she had screamed in terror when what felt like a heavy hand, with the fingers slowly spreading, had landed on her shoulder as she walked to her front door. Zozo leaped off and threw himself in her path, lying on his back and waiting for her to stroke him. In this odd dog-like position he demanded the attention of all those who crossed his domain. What strange feline fantasy he was living out as he sailed through the night air to land on her shoulder Anne could never guess, but she had felt guilty at her scream, which must have alarmed the cat, and ever since, like all the other residents, she crossed the courtyard with her eyes turned warily skyward.

Anne turned her gaze back to the sitting-room. What decoration there was had been effected in a style which pleased her, with thick fabrics and solid furniture, the impression homely but not cluttered. It was the first time in her life she had lived alone, and she loved the feeling of pulling the door shut behind her at night and knowing she couldn’t be disturbed. She liked the feel of the plain china plates in her hand, of the rough sheets on her face and the alternating wood and rug on her bare feet in the morning; not because there was anything unusual about them, but because they were hers alone.

She pushed back the window and heard the sound of church bells close at hand. She had intended to go that morning, since church was a good place to meet people, and when one was alone one had to risk such irreligious thoughts. Now she couldn’t be bothered, but sat gazing out instead on the sun-struck cobbles where the second cat, an awful, brindled creature, was dozing. This cat had no name as far as she knew and was not owned by anyone nearby. Its face was gouged and partly bare from a life of fighting over fishheads, and its mangy fur grew in irregular clumps along its spine. However, it exercised sleeping rights over the courtyard without fear of contradiction, least of all from Zozo who, at the sight of the other, would absent himself on urgent business, bustling off over the rooftops, dislodging stray tiles in his hurry to be elsewhere.

Anne had no work to do that Sunday, and in the evening Hartmann was coming for supper. ‘Just something simple’ had been his instruction; but she also remembered his mentioning coq au vin, and she wanted to please him. He probably had no idea of the difficulty such a dish caused; it needed long, slow cooking in an oven, and all she had was a single ring of uncontrollable temperature. She had made some soup late the previous night and had bought two kinds of cheese so that, if the chicken went wrong, they would not go hungry.

Meanwhile the day seemed to spread before her like a flat, tree-lined road, winding into sunshine beneath a sky of hammered and immutable blue. She rested her cheek against her knee, gazed down at the sun-filled courtyard and heard the steady clanging of the church bell beyond.

Mme Bouin had not been pleased when Anne told her she would no longer be living at the Lion d’Or.

‘I’ve never heard anything like it in my life,’ she said.

‘I suppose it is unusual, isn’t it? I just –’

‘Unusual! It’s unheard of. I don’t think Monsieur the Patron is going to like it if his staff are not on hand when they may be needed.’

‘But I won’t be late for work, I promise. It’s only ten minutes’ walk.’

‘It is the principle, mademoiselle. People will talk. They will want to know where this money comes from. It is not good, not good at all.’

‘It was a piece of luck. I’ve told you.’ Anne couldn’t bring herself to tell a lie in quite the way Hartmann had suggested. ‘A friend has organised it. There was some money in the family. An agreement. They were friends with Mlle Calmette. I can have no money myself by this arrangement, but this plan was worked out so I would get some advantages.’

Mme Bouin looked hard at her before taking up her knitting. Her hands were hidden beneath the desk, so from where Anne stood it seemed as though the metallic clicking was coming from the energetic movement of Mme Bouin’s finger joints. ‘The Calmette family was never any good anyway,’ said the old woman at last. ‘The grandmother was in prison, you know.’

‘What for?’

‘Adultery.’

‘But that must have been ages ago! You can’t go to prison for something like that nowadays.’

‘If you call two generations an age. There’s bad blood in the family, the same weakness from one generation to the next. Her sister was the same.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘She used to work at old M. Hartmann’s house. “Secretary”, they called it.’

‘What are you saying?’

‘He was old, but he was a wicked man. An atheist and proud of it, too. Even in his eighties he would have women go out there to clean or do other work for him, but everyone knew what it was for.’

‘Perhaps he was lonely.’

‘That Calmette woman, the sister. She knew what it was all about. And this isn’t going to look good at all, your lodging there, not good at all.’

Anne was perturbed at the news of Hartmann’s father. Perhaps it was well known that going to work at the Manor was merely a pretext for something else. Perhaps everyone in Janvilliers was already laughing at her and saying how Hartmann had a way with him, just like his old father. On the other hand, she had decided to trust him; she had to trust someone in her life. And it could be that Mme Bouin herself had tangled with this woman, Mlle Calmette’s sister; perhaps when they were younger . . . but no, she found it impossible to imagine Mme Bouin battling for a man’s affection. Presumably there must have been a M. Bouin, too. What can
he
have been like? she wondered. She saw him as short and plump with a round bald head, a silver watch-chain and a gruff, aggressive manner which he would have cultivated to keep his wife at bay.