Girl at the Lion D'Or (18 page)

Already taut with delight, Anne thought she might snap. He pulled out a heavy package from under the sofa and gestured to her to open it. She pulled away the paper to discover a gramophone, not unlike the one she had had to sell before she left Paris.

She couldn’t find any words, and, seeing this, Hartmann spoke for her. ‘I bought some records. I don’t know if they’re what you like. I asked the woman in the shop for dance music and she gave me half a dozen.’

He handed her the parcel and watched the emotions passing over her face. Still she couldn’t speak, and Hartmann found himself moved by her response. He had intended the present merely as a light-hearted gesture, or so he told himself.

‘I’ll take the plates into the kitchen while you look at the records,’ he said. In the connecting darkness between the rooms, he caught his foot and almost dropped what he was carrying. He heard Anne’s laughter.

By the time he returned she had composed herself again.

‘Can we dance?’ she said.

‘Now?’

‘Why not?’

‘What, in here?’

‘No, no, out on the terrace.’

‘But it’s dark and I can’t dance.’

‘Come on.’

Anne took a lamp and hung it from a hook on the back wall of the granary. Then she carried the gramophone and wound it up. As she looked down into the darkness of the valley she saw two moths blunder into the lamp. She remembered her hands, and wondered what Hartmannn would say if he noticed their rawness. But it was too late: she had already put on the first record.

‘We won’t disturb people?’ said Hartmann, from the threshold of the bedroom.

‘Come on, you know there’s no one near. And it’s not very loud anyway.’

‘But I can’t da –’

She took his hand, and pulled him on to the terrace. Hartmann was as good as his word: he stumbled over the rough paving of the terrace, but Anne seemed always to keep out of harm’s way and to guide him onwards. She played the records again and again until Hartmann begged to be released. At last she agreed, and they carried the gramophone, the lamp and the records back through to the main room.

Hartmann poured himself some more wine and stood with his back to the fireplace. The sleeves of his thinly striped shirt were rolled up; he pulled at his tie to loosen it and ran his hand back through his hair. His face had its usual gravity, given by the weight of the head and the dark evenness of the features, offset by a liveliness in his eyes that always had at their centre a point of light, however deep they seemed sunk. It expanded when, as now, he smiled.

It was cool in the room and Anne took her shawl from the back of a chair. She said, ‘I haven’t said “thank you” for the present yet. It’s wonderful.’

‘I hoped you’d like it.’

‘Last night, you know, last night I had this terrible dream. And it was all your fault.’

‘My fault?’

‘Yes, you were horrible in it.’

‘What did I do?’

‘You shouted at me.’

Hartmann laughed. ‘I’m sorry. I can’t think what came over me.’

‘It wasn’t funny at the time.’

Hartmann looked at her curiously.

‘But it doesn’t matter,’ she said.

‘No. I don’t think so. What matters is whether you’ve enjoyed yourself.’

‘Enjoyed myself? Oh.’ She seemed to lose her breath. ‘It’s been the happiest day of my life.’

Again he found himself caught off balance by the intensity of her response. She took a step towards him. It was dark in the room; the one lamp shone on the floor between them. She moved into the light so she was only a pace away from him.

‘I love you.’

‘I know,’ he said, ‘I know.’ He gathered her in his arms, so that her face was pressed against his chest, where her tears wetted his shirt front. He stroked her hair and felt the outline of her skull beneath it. He thought of the coils of her brain beneath his hand, teeming and looping; he wondered what was thought and what was feeling, what was soul and what was cell – and all the other imponderable things to which he would never find an answer. She clung to him with all her force as if she might draw from him something of herself, some essence which she could keep and take away with her. He could feel her breasts against him and the beating of her heart, and knew he must disentangle himself from her touch before it was too late. He pushed her away, trusting himself only to keep one hand on her shoulder.

With the other he lifted up her face. Over the bridge of her nose and the top of her cheekbones were a dozen freckles, which seemed to him to have the colour and density of those in an opening lily.

Seeing them, he lost control at last. He meant only to kiss away the wetness on her cheeks but the surge of desire was so strong he felt himself beginning to tear at her clothes. He seized the corner of the blouse she had chosen with such care and pulled it from her shoulders.

She murmured, half in remonstration, half in pleasure as she stroked his hair. ‘I love you,’ she said again, as if the words would dignify the clumsy action of his hands.

Hartmann felt the material of some softer undergarment rip beneath his fingers and saw her breasts, patterned with freckles like those on her nose, fall forward, and he lowered his head to them. He felt his hair combed up between her caressing fingers. He sensed in her touch a certain passivity, almost a remoteness, which he welcomed because it foretold submission.

He guided her backwards to the sofa against the wall, his lips not leaving hers. He tried to protect her from his weight as he moved on top. His hands ran up her legs, pushing the tight black skirt upwards, and his eyes, through a panic of urgency, saw her thighs and the dark, stretched fabric at the top of her stocking and the white inner thigh above, before his fingers met softer, fine material. He wrenched his arms free from his shirt and could hear the collar tear away from its stud. He pushed and lifted at the frustrating tangle of her clothes until he saw a soft column of fine hair, like a puff of smoke or a feather, and when he touched her there, she gasped.

‘The light, the light, please turn out . . .’

He felt a moment of desperation as if what he most wanted might be denied him at the last instant and then, after a brief resistance, there was a relief, a sensation of having come home, somewhere from which he should never have been away. Her fingers were harsh on his back where the shirt had torn sideways, and as his chest bore down on her he inhaled the hot blast of his own breath as his face and tongue moved over her upper body. He was aware of the muscles convulsing in his back and the effort that dampened the tips of his hair against his neck. Very quickly he squeezed her with all the strength of his embrace and gasped in her ear as his body arched and emptied itself in her.

Later in the night he made love to her more calmly, taking slow pleasure in her submitted privacy, feeling the softness of her skin and inhaling the smell of her hair and her neck. Enough light came through the window for him to see the distant pleasure in her eyes.

When he heard her deeply asleep, Hartmann slipped away from the bed, pulled on his clothes, and went outside, down to the apple tree. He sat there, sated, guilty and amazed, until the grudging dawn made each different green of the valley distinct. Then he returned to the terrace and looked through at Anne’s motionless form beneath the blanket. He moved quietly in beside her and felt her arm sleepily reach out to him.

The next thing of which he was aware was the sound of Armand clearing his throat theatrically in the storeroom. He had brought some fresh milk and was moving about the room with noisy tact. Hartmann pulled on his dressing-gown and went to say good morning. Armand told him he was required to be up at the lodge by ten o’clock, when the shooting party would leave. He showed Hartmann how to make coffee in the antiquated copper pot and went wheezing back up through the woods. Anne emerged from the bedroom in a long white dressing-gown. Her face was pale from sleep; it contrasted with the darkness of her eyes and of the hair that fell on to the just-visible whiteness of her shoulders. Hartmann put the bread and some jam on the table and poured out some coffee. Anne lowered her eyes, took a large cup and drank in silence. She seemed taken by a heavy stillness, a quality emphasised by her pallor and her soundless movements. Hartmann had feared she would be embarrassed, but she seemed, on the contrary, relieved; she acted as though a burden had been taken from her. He was impressed by her calm and was himself infected by it. He watched her intently, and when she rose to go back to the bedroom his eyes followed her to the door.

When Hartmann went to join the men to go shooting, Anne decided to go for a walk on her own. He looked at her for a moment, to see if she was hiding some emotion, but could see none and so went up the hill to the car.

Anne walked through an adjoining field and discovered a path that seemed to loop round through some distant woods. By now the sun had risen sufficiently high to take the chill off the morning and to shine through the tangle of branches above her as she walked. From time to time the path came out into a clearing, and once she came upon a small cottage with geese enclosed in a wire pen. A little further on she sat for a while on a bank and surveyed the sinking fields below. The countryside was similar to that in which she had spent her childhood, until it had been interrupted. She thought back to the house she had lived in and to her parents; to her own self-absorbed innocence. Would Hartmann understand if she told him what had happened? Or would he react like the people in the local town when they discovered? Did she dare to gamble his love on his reaction?

She walked on through the morning and heard a rare outburst of birdsong from the trees: not everything, then, had been shot. Be brave, Anne, she heard Louvet drunkenly saying to her; courage is the only thing that counts. If she did not tell Hartmann, then he would not truly know her and could not therefore come to love her as she loved him. But then again, it seemed mad to risk losing such feeling as he might have for her merely for some perverse idea of honesty.

Anne could hear the distant sound of a gun being fired as the heat of the sun began to grow. It was a day in which everything around her seemed to be in harmony; it was impossible to imagine that the hedgerows and the fields and the woods and streams and isolated cottages were in any other than their appointed place. Only she, a human, with her illusion of free will, couldn’t find her true position in it all.

If only the consequences of a deed ended with the grief it caused, she thought, then one could bear up until it passed. But there are some actions which dislocate the arranged order so badly that their effects are never finished, but go on and on through the years, breaking out from the lives they originally affected and contaminating all who come in touch with them. Evil, she thought; perhaps that is what evil does.

By midday, however, when she reached the lodge, her spirits had lifted; and by the time she had gone with one of the maids to the spot where the others were converging for lunch they were buoyant. The men returned from shooting in their shirt sleeves, carrying their broken-barrelled shotguns and discussing the morning’s bag – not a large one, it seemed, since only Marcel was a practised shot. Some of the guests would be returning to dinner at the farm, but those with further to go, like Hartmann and Anne, would leave that afternoon. This did not spoil lunch for Anne, since she viewed the journey back with Hartmann as something to be enjoyed even more than the picnic in the sun. She looked at him as he lay on a rug, partly shaded beneath a tree, talking to Isabelle. One or two strands of hair on the back of his neck were damp with sweat, and she could see a slight patterning of it on the back of his shirt.

They returned in Hartmann’s car to the granary to pack their bags. Anne looked around her and tried to score into her memory as many details of the place as she could. The worn rug, the bed, the roughly constructed terrace, the apple tree at the foot of the garden – all now seemed fixed in her mind with immutable precision; but she knew how details could gradually be lost from such pictures until even the outlines became faint.

The convoy of cars rumbled down from Merlaut and out on to the road. Back at the farm there were farewells to be said and Anne was made to promise that she would return. Isabelle shook hands, and Anne thanked her for what she said was the best weekend imaginable, wishing there was a way of indicating that for once there was sincerity in the polite phrases which were all she could muster. Hartmann managed to disentangle himself from the other guests, and at last they were on their way, the car creeping over the stony drive until they met the road.

They talked about the weekend and what they had thought about the other guests.

‘I don’t think I’m made for life in the country,’ said Hartmann. ‘My shooting was terrible, and these comfortable shoes – they’re agonising. I’d rather wear the ones I wore in Paris.’

After they had been driving for about two hours the wheels abruptly stopped turning. The engine made a loud clanking sound and there came a smell of burning metal. Hartmann steered the car to the edge of the road and stopped.

‘What’s the matter?’

‘I haven’t the faintest idea. We’ll have to find a garage.’

‘But we’re miles from anywhere.’ Anne failed to sound disappointed.

‘Yes, I was aware of that, Anne. Why are you laughing?’

‘I wasn’t.’

‘It looked like it to me. Look, there you go.’

‘Well, so are you.’

‘No, I’m not. We might be here for days.’

Three hours later they had arranged with a local farmer to have the car towed to a garage. The proprietor said it was a difficult job and it wouldn’t be ready until eleven o’clock the following day. With some difficulty they persuaded him to drive them to the nearest town, an isolated place with a solitary hotel.

The manager was able to offer them a room, the last for fifty kilometres or more, he assured them.