Girl at the Lion D'Or (27 page)

‘I’d better go and see,’ he said.

As he leaned forward to lever himself out of bed he felt Christine’s hand grip him again suddenly as a loud series of shots began to ring out, an odd staccato with no set pattern but with growing volume and spite.

‘Charles, I’m frightened. What is it?’

Hartmann looked out of the window where the wind had blown back the shutter. The night clouds were charging over the woods beyond the lake. It was a typical gusty night on the headland. Then, slowly, the pattern of gun-shot sounds changed and became a single, continuous noise – a martyred groaning, as if the whole house were shifting and stirring, desperate to free himself from the elements that made it.

Christine began to cry. ‘My God, Charles, what’s happening?’

Hartmann sat where he was, fixed by fear and by a strange sense of guilt. The noise began to grow louder: he could feel the house begin to pulse and teem as if the earth were quaking beneath it.

Then the rumbling stopped and the natural quiet of the night began to re-emerge, until the wind was audible again outside the window. It resumed its low howl, interrupted only by a sporadic groan, as if in afterthought, from the tower.

Hartmann flung on his dressing-gown and went along the corridor in the direction of the noise. He looked in the bedrooms, turning on one light after another, illuminating the dusty jumble of possessions. There seemed to be nothing wrong. He retraced his steps and went on to the main landing in the middle of the house. Everything was in order as he descended the stairs. It was not until he was almost in the kitchen that he became aware of a smell that was both damp and powdery.

The room itself was wrecked. Part of the floor had fallen into the cellar below, leaving a gently smoking hole. The range, a vast antique system of ovens and boilers, had been torn away from the wall and half of it now lay in the cellar too. There had been a fall of plaster from the ceiling and this clouded the darkness that the electric light, another casualty of the event, could not illuminate.

Hartmann went outside. By the indifferent light of the moon he could see that it was only plaster which had been shaken from the ceiling of the kitchen; although the fall was heavy, the structure above looked unimpaired. The noise made by the range as it fell had made him fear that half the Manor had collapsed, but from outside, the building still looked massive and untroubled.

He went inside and telephoned Mattlin.

‘It’s a terrible imposition at this time of night, but it’s possible that another part of the house could collapse and there’s something we could do to stop it.’

He gave Christine a tisane and assured her there was nothing to worry about. There was some structural damage, he said, but nothing serious. He told the weeping maid, Marie, the same thing.

It was starting to grow light by the time Mattlin arrived, his eyes narrow and ringed with grey. He inspected the damage in silence, focussing a powerful torch on to the kitchen ceiling. Hartmann watched him swiftly weighing up the possibilities.

‘Didn’t you have any warning?’ he said.

‘Not really. Christine mentioned that she’d heard some strange noises and there were a few cracks in the walls upstairs, but nothing more than you get in any old house. I suppose I should have paid more attention to what she said.’

Mattlin poked around amongst the rubble on the kitchen floor. He laughed. ‘It must have been a hell of a noise!’

‘I thought the whole place was falling down.’

‘I’m just going to have a look at the back,’ said Mattlin, disappearing with his torch.

Hartmann felt slightly irritated by Mattlin’s attitude but also relieved. Not even Mattlin would be laughing at this hour if there were something seriously wrong.

‘There’s the root of the problem, of course,’ said Mattlin when he reappeared, pointing at two supports which stuck up from the cellar. ‘Your builder has put those in to strengthen the cellar but he’s succeeded only in putting pressure on the rest of the structure.’

‘So what’s going to happen?’

‘Nothing.’

‘But if there’s pressure on the whole house –’

‘It can take it. That’s why it was just the floor that fell in. These outer walls are very strong. They deflected the upward pressure. And that’s why part of the ceiling collapsed.’

‘And nothing else is going to happen?’

‘I shouldn’t think so. I’ll get a structural engineer to come and have a look later today. But I shouldn’t worry if I were you. It’s just going to be a messy job to clear up. If you’d had an architect to supervise the builder it would never have happened in the first place.’

‘I’d no idea he’d done anything so drastic. He said there was nothing structural to do and that he would just put in a couple of supports to give extra stability to the roof of the cellar.’

‘Yes, but there are ways and ways of doing these things. For a start they need to go in straight, not at any old angle like these.’ Mattlin smiled. ‘But don’t worry. Nothing else is going to happen. It’s just a mess, that’s all.’

Christine appeared in the doorway of the kitchen in her nightdress and Hartmann noticed Mattlin’s eyes instinctively run up and down her distraught figure.

‘Nothing to worry about, Christine,’ said Mattlin. ‘Messy and noisy, but nothing serious.’

Hartmann wondered if there had been a woman in Mattlin’s bed when he had telephoned. He certainly seemed anxious to be off.

‘I’ll get this man Conturier to come and have a look later,’ he said as he moved towards his car.

Hartmann shook hands and watched him disappear. Christine returned to bed, her brief bout of tears having given way to what Hartmann viewed as a more healthy response of vigorous criticism of the standards of the average labourer.

Before going up to join her, he looked once more at the rubble in the kitchen and into the gaping cellar below.

At lunch-time the next day Christine received a telephone call from Marie-Thérèse who was in the state of nervous excitement which meant she had bad news to tell. It concerned Roussel, the builder. Little Jacqueline, the postman’s daughter, had gone round that morning to deliver a parcel and discovered his house locked up. There was a note on the door addressed to the local doctor, to whom Roussel owed money. It appeared he had absconded, taking his wife and children with him, and leaving no indication of where he had gone. He had left in the middle of the night and no one had heard a sound. Marie-Thérèse said this showed he must have been planning it for weeks.

‘What time did he leave?’ said Christine.

‘I don’t know exactly, but in the middle of the night.’

‘So he couldn’t have heard about our house then?’

‘What about it, dear?’

It was a good morning for Marie-Thérèse.

There was no shortage of conversation that night in the bar at the Lion d’Or, though there was a considerable lack of information. It was first understood that the whole of Hartmann’s house had collapsed and that there were at least three dead. A man whose sister knew the maid was able to assure them that there had been no fatalities. It was, however, not unnaturally assumed that Roussel had absconded because of what had happened at the Manor.

Anne, who was behind the bar, listened as various opinions were put forward.

One theory was that Roussel had disappeared to escape the shame of having syphilis. ‘It’s everywhere, you know,’ said the fisherman who introduced the idea. ‘The country’s riddled with it.’

At about ten o’clock Mattlin’s curly head appeared around the door, and he joined the noisy discussion.

‘It’s really quite simple,’ he said. ‘The answer is money.’

‘Money?’

‘When the police look through his books they’ll see that Roussel had gone broke. It’s impossible for people like him to make a living these days – especially with this Government in power.’

‘How do you know this about Roussel?’ asked the fisherman, disappointed to hear his own theory supplanted by a more mundane explanation.

‘I’m an architect. I deal with builders and surveyors. We know each other’s business – informally, of course. If I’m to recommend a builder for a job I have to know what sort of shape he’s in. We all know about each other.’

‘And Roussel, he was in a mess, was he? I always thought he seemed a smart one, with his business cards and whatnot,’

‘It doesn’t matter how smart you are if you don’t get paid,’ said Mattlin. ‘And if you’ve got a sick child, like Roussel had, as well as all those other hungry mouths – well, you can imagine.’

There was more muttering and shaking of heads around the bar as people tried to resurrect their own more lurid theories for Roussel’s disappearance. But Mattlin was persuasive. ‘Take the job he was working on at the end, at the Hartmanns’ house.’

‘The place that’s fallen down?’

‘That’s right,’ said Mattlin. ‘There he was, working for months with a complicated schedule of payments, forced to buy all the materials in advance. And Hartmann never paid him for them.’

‘What, even when they were going into his house?’

‘That’s right. And he’d only paid him for a quarter of the work though Roussel had almost finished.’

‘It’s a bad business.’

‘How do you know about all this?’ said the fisherman.

‘I’ve been called in as a consultant.’

‘That’s a bad thing, if it’s true, M. Mattlin. A man should pay what he owes. Especially a well-off man like M. Hartmann.’

‘He’s always been like that,’ said Mattlin, ordering another drink. ‘It’s the Jewish blood, you know.’

Anne passed him a glass and took the coin he proffered.

‘I didn’t know he was one of them,’ said Collin, the local butcher. ‘Old Mme Hartmann, we used to deliver to her for twenty years or more and I never knew.’

‘It’s on the other side,’ said Mattlin. ‘The father’s.’

‘Well,’ said Collin, ‘I remember she used to order up all sorts of pork and that for him, and I thought these Jews didn’t eat pig.’

‘Just because he didn’t practise doesn’t mean it wasn’t in the blood,’ said Mattlin.

‘Jew or no Jew,’ said the fisherman, ‘it’s a bad show when a man doesn’t pay his debts. And now look what’s happened.’

Mattlin lit a cigarette and pulled a loose shred of tobacco from his lower lip. ‘You mustn’t blame Hartmann alone,’ he said. ‘Roussel’s business was in trouble before he started the work at the Manor.’

Anne had not seen Hartmann for five days, and the sound of his name brought him closer in her mind. She was sure he was unhappy. Whatever the truth about the damage to the Manor, she knew how much he loved the house and how upset he would be. She sensed a further sadness and struggle in him, something greater and more abstract than his worry about the building. When she pictured him now she saw him in the guise of a boy, as in the photograph of him about to go to war, with the protective layers of manhood stripped away. Since she had first seen him at the tennis court she had imagined his boyhood and sometimes sensed its influence in his adult actions, but she had been too awed by him and too frightened of saying the wrong thing to let this more vulnerable side of him figure much in her picture. Since she had come to know him better, however, and since she had also seen photographs of his youth, the earlier period of his life seemed more real to her. Her love for him held some degree of understanding in addition to dependence.

Her shift behind the bar finished at eleven o’clock, and she prepared to walk back to her rooms in the rain. She recognised as she walked up the rue des Ecoles that her sense of Hartmann’s needing her was in part a projection of her own wish to be with him. She battled with the feeling almost as far as the church, then could bear it no longer. She ran back down the glistening streets to the hotel and down the narrow alley to the side to the courtyard behind the kitchen. She let herself in and went to the small room off the scullery where she discovered Roland playing cards with a friend.

‘Roland, I must borrow your bicycle,’ she panted. ‘Please. It’s terribly important.’

‘At this time of night? In this weather? You must be barmy.’ Roland turned back to his cards.

‘Please, Roland. It’s desperately important. I’ll do anything in return.’

‘Anything?’ Roland looked up, a slow smile spreading across his face.

‘Anything.’

‘What about doing all these boots for the morning, then?’ he said, pointing to a pile in the corner.

‘All right,’ said Anne.

Roland seemed taken aback. ‘And I’ll want a kiss.’

‘All right.’

He grabbed her round the waist and pressed his face against hers. She let him kiss her hard on the lips then pushed him away. He wiped his mouth.

‘Where is it?’ she said.

‘Round the back. Against the wall in the corner.’

‘Thank you. I’ll do the boots when I get back.’

Roland smirked and took up his cards again while Anne ran out into the night.

There were no lights on the bicycle and once she was out of town it was hard to see where she was going, as the rain drove into her face. She knew that what she was doing was foolish, but she barely noticed the juddering of the seat or the rain seeping in through her clothes. By pedalling hard, she was just able to control her fear. She began to breathe heavily as she rode faster and faster among the pine trees whose long dripping branches stretched downward over the road in damp theatrical despair.

At last she found herself at the end of the drive and swung the bicycle down it. Only then did she pause to think that Hartmann might have gone to bed, or that he might be with Christine. She muttered hasty prayers that he should be alone as she flung the bicycle into the bushes by the side of the drive and went cautiously forward on foot.

There was a narrow moon over the woods on the other side of the lake, and by its light she could see the clouds spitting and surging round it. She crept up to the corner of the south tower, her hand flat against the stone wall, then looked round to the front of the house where she could just make out the lamp swinging by the glass-panelled door. She trembled and took a step or two backwards. It was impossible, ridiculous, she told herself. But her nerve was strong, and she inched forward again round the corner of the house.