Girl at the Lion D'Or (25 page)

Anne turned her head so that she was looking up at him.

‘Don’t frown so much,’ she said, running her forefinger down the furrowed skin between his eyes.

When Hartmannn left her rooms that night Anne discovered the cat sitting in the courtyard. After she had heard the street door close, she took the animal upstairs in her arms and lay down on the bed. ‘What am I going to do, Zozo?’ she said. ‘What am I going to do?’

4

T
HE ONSET OF
autumn brought even fewer visitors than usual to the Lion d’Or. Mme Bouin marched along the corridors with her bunch of keys to check that the bolsters were neatly in place on the beds, that the old linen sheets were clean and newly starched, and that the shutters were properly secured against the westerly winds that rattled them. Thus the rooms hibernated in a state of unused readiness through the winter months, while draughts began to sigh in the passageways.

Anne was briefly entrusted with Mme Bouin’s key and despatched to the linen store to fetch further blankets for the half dozen rooms that were being used. There was a pungent smell of mice and mothballs in the warm wooden darkness of the cupboard. She pulled out a handful of bed-covers and found that the slats on which they were rested were loose; two or three of them fell to the ground. One of them, she noticed as she put it back, was cracked. She held up the blankets in the light of the corridor to see which were the most suitable for use. Most were threadbare and dull, but still usable. One, however, bore the imprint of what appeared to be a large boot. Anne replaced it in the linen store, wondering what visitor had been standing on his bed in his shoes. She went to the bathroom next door to wash off some of the old dust and dirt that had stuck to her as she groped in the darkness of the cupboard. She hadn’t used the bath with its brown encrusted stain for months now, she thought, as she remembered her first night in the hotel when she had risked Mme Bouin’s anger by doing so.

She carried the blankets back along the corridor, humming a tune to herself. She left them at the top of the stairs and went down to return the key to Mme Bouin.

The old woman looked up from the ledger in which she was writing and took the key. ‘How is Mlle Calmette?’ she said.

‘Very well, thank you, madame. I don’t see her very often, but sometimes I go and have a cup of chocolate with her.’

‘And do you like your lodgings?’

‘Yes, thank you, madame.’

‘Better than your room here, I dare say.’

‘I liked my room here, too, madame. It was cosy, being up there on my own. I know most people would have had to share.’

Mme Bouin set down her steel-nibbed pen on the glass rest. ‘I’m not sure you’d be quite so pleased with yourself if you knew what people were saying about you.’

Anne felt herself blushing. ‘What? What things?’

Behind the thick lenses of the spectacles the old woman’s eyes came as close as Anne had ever seen to smiling. ‘I’m sure you don’t need to have it spelled out.’

‘But madame, I don’t know what you mean. I’ve done nothing wrong.’

‘I warned you when you took the rooms in the first place, didn’t I? I told you it wouldn’t look good. Now naturally I did everything I could to keep the good name of the hotel. But people will talk.’

‘But what do they
say
?’

‘Please don’t be pert with me, mademoiselle.’

Anne had learned that there was little to be gained from arguing with Mme Bouin. In any case she had no wish to hear her fears confirmed. She looked down at her feet.

‘Is there anything else, madame?’

‘Not at the moment.’

Anne went to the kitchen and found Roland sitting at the table reading a magazine and running a finger over the pocked and greasy skin of his forehead.

‘What are you reading?’ she said.

‘The Young Patriots’ magazine.’

‘Aren’t they the people who support the Germans?’

‘Don’t be stupid. They just think we shouldn’t fight them. They’ve got the right ideas. Better than this bunch of Communists we’ve got in power.’

‘But they tried to overthrow the Republic, these people of yours. Those riots in Paris . . . I was there.’

‘Good thing, too. The Republic’s done nothing for people like me. Now it’s a Jew as Prime Minister.’

‘Why shouldn’t we have a Jew?’

Roland laughed. ‘Everyone knows about Jews. They’re not reliable. It’s just money with them.’

‘Get your nose out of that and do some work!’ shouted Bruno, coming in from the back yard. ‘Come on, you pus-ridden little wretch. What are you reading? Smut, I expect. That’s all you think about isn’t it?’ He caught Roland a glancing blow on the head with the flat of his hand.

‘No, it isn’t, it’s –’

‘Go and unload the van. Now. And you, girl, go and help him. We’ve got a special menu tonight. A gastronomic menu.’

‘Oh God,’ said Roland.

‘Quick!’ Anne laughed, and grabbed his arm to pull him out of the way of Bruno’s swinging boot as together they ran into the back yard.

She had grown to like Roland, for all his surly manner. He made her laugh when he imitated Bruno behind his back, and he was truly afraid of Mme Bouin. He had fixed the seat on his bicycle for Anne to ride and had lent it to her several times. There were other little grudging acts of kindness he had performed, and once a small bunch of flowers had arrived for her unaccountably in the kitchen. Roland’s snort of disdain when it was suggested he might know where they came from was not wholly convincing.

Roland for his part felt excluded from what mattered to him most. He feared that accidents of birth and nature meant that he would never make love to a girl like Anne and he felt constantly resentful of those whom pure luck, untouched by merit, had singled out to have such pleasures. He looked at the awful old women in Janvilliers and supposed that one day he would be married to a hag like that. Someone must have married them, he thought; someone must at one point have said yes even to the old crows in widow’s black. He had an awful feeling that the someone had been a version of himself. Perhaps the passage of time would take away the physical pain of frustrated lust that moved like a slow mist through his waking hours.

He looked at some of the men who brought attractive wives to the hotel and wondered what it must be like to have an object of such desire at your disposal. When the men went home they could sate themselves each night. What was more, their indulgence of their longing was sanctioned by society, which called their wives ‘Madame’, and even by the Church!

When Roland read accounts of young men gathering in small provincial towns and running riot in the name of patriotism and the old France he didn’t feel that something sacred, the Republic, was under threat. He thought it sounded a better way of spending the evening than cleaning boots at the Hotel du Lion d’Or. Protecting some ideal was the privilege of those who profited from it, he thought, but for people like him whose wages had been reduced by previous governments, there was nothing to lose in responding to the rallying call of old soldiers and young men with whom he felt a vital sympathy.

He felt no fear when people talked of another war against the Germans because he felt no part of what his country had become. Until such a day, he watched Anne closely, dredging the depths of his memory to recall what he had seen on those precious evenings looking through the bathroom wall. He also spent time practising his imitation of Bruno, because he saw she liked it.

The next day Roussel made his first appearance at the Manor for a fortnight. Hartmann walked out to meet him in the driveway.

‘Have you been ill?’ Hartmann asked, as Roussel leant his bicycle against the side of the house.

‘No, M. Hartmann. In the best of health, thank you,’ said Roussel unconvincingly. ‘My little girl, she’s been bad, mind you. We’ve taken her to see the doctor.’

‘Ah yes, the doctor. Everyone goes to see the doctor nowadays, don’t they? And was he any help?’

‘He’s given her some medicine. She seems a little better.’

‘Good. Now what about this work? I’ve been down into the cellar today, and it seems to me you’re still a long way from being finished.’

‘Oh no, not that far.’

Hartmann looked carefully at Roussel. He might have called the doctor for his daughter, but clearly it was he who needed help. He looked pale and vacant, yet also curiously relieved, as if he had taken some decision which was going to free him from responsibility.

Roussel began to wander over towards the lake, as if he were in a daze. He stopped and looked out across it, then put his hand on top of his head where the hair had thinned out.

‘Oh yes, M. Hartmann.’ He spoke more quietly than usual.

‘We’ll be finished one day.’

‘But you know I’ve paid you all the money, don’t you?’

‘Oh yes. Oh yes. I know that.’

Roussel’s face, which was expressionless at first, broke into a thin smile as he felt Hartmann’s eyes on him.

‘It seems to me you’re never going to finish,’ said Hartmann.

‘It’s all right, we’ll finish.’

‘Are you really sure? Don’t just say that to please me.’

‘We’ll stay.’ Roussel’s voice was now almost a whisper.

‘Did you have to move any beams or joists down there?’

‘We just put some supports in where there was a load-bearing wall. It should make it stronger. There’s not much to do now. Just the floor and the wine racks.’

Roussel began to walk along towards the woods. ‘It’s a nice house, isn’t it?’ he said.

‘Yes, I suppose it is,’ said Hartmann walking beside him.

Roussel held out his hand. ‘I think I’ll go now, monsieur.’

Hartmann felt the passive hand in his and Roussel smiled at him. ‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘I just wanted to say that. Thank you.’

Hartmann watched curiously as Roussel climbed on to his bicycle and pedalled with difficulty up the potholed drive. From the top of the drive, where it met the road, he heard the thin ringing of a bell.

The following Wednesday afternoon Anne was working in the kitchen. Christine was sitting next door in her small morning-room, embroidering with snappish movements of her fingers. She had said nothing to her husband, though she found the strain of silence increasing. The rasp of the broom from next door played on her nerves. She thought of the girl’s hands that held it, and how they must have run through her husband’s hair; how her fingers would have run down his back. Christine couldn’t imagine how the woman had the cheek to come to the Manor and wash and scrub as if nothing had happened. It seemed an impertinence of a grotesque order. Hartmann, she noted, had gone off for the day to see a client; presumably he no longer had any need of their stolen moments together in his study or wherever it had been – not now they were lovers.

The rough-bristled broom rasped again over the stone-flagged kitchen.

Christine didn’t know how to approach the servant girl without losing her own dignity. She vigorously disapproved of the new licence granted to workers by the Government, and hated the thought of meeting such people from the big towns on their holidays, but her own family was not of such grandeur that she was able to show to servants that sense of natural contempt and casual sympathy which she had noted in some of the aristocratic people she had met.

When Anne passed the door on her way to scrub the hall floor, Christine called out to her.

‘Yes, madame?’ said Anne, stopping in the doorway.

‘Come in here for a moment, would you? Put those things down outside.’

Anne left the pail of water and brushes by the door and wiped her hands on her apron before trying to tidy her hair and push back the long strands that had escaped from their combs on either side. She walked a little way into the room.

Christine had no idea what she was going to say. ‘It’s getting cold, isn’t it?’ she began, looking out of the window, where the sky was already colourless.

‘Yes, madame.’

‘I think it’s going to be a hard winter. It gets very cold here, you know.’

‘Yes, madame, I arrived here in February. I remember it was cold then.’

‘Is it cold in the hotel? In your room?’

‘I – no, it wasn’t too bad. They’d left a lot of blankets on the bed.’

‘So you’ll be all right, now that the winter’s coming on?’

‘I think so.’

Christine admired the way the girl had moved away from her question without actually lying, merely by transposing it to the past. She seemed practised at evasion.

She put it to her more directly. ‘Do you still have the same room as when you arrived?’

Anne felt a slow blush rising in her neck. Her heart began to judder and pound at the entrance to her throat. Christine saw her discomfort and noted without pleasure that even this seemed to make her prettier, more vital and more varied in her looks than she herself could ever be.

‘No madame. I’ve moved. I have a room near the station.’

‘
Do
you now?’ said Christine. The plummeting sense of disappointment as the rumour proved to be true gave her the calmness she needed to appear detached. ‘That’s an unusual arrangement, isn’t it? To have the staff not living on the premises?’

‘Monsieur the Patron is very . . . understanding.’

‘And how do you afford it? Surely my husband can’t be paying you so much for what you do that you can afford to rent accommodation?’

Anne couldn’t believe what she was hearing. From an afternoon of casual loneliness she had been thrown into something worse than she could have imagined. ‘Your husband, madame?’ she managed to say.

‘Yes.’

‘For what I do?’

‘We’re not in the habit of hiring servants and not paying them.’

‘I see, I see, of course.’ Anne fought to recover from her misunderstanding. ‘But surely, madame, it is you who authorises the payments to the servants? And you must know that –’