Girl at the Lion D'Or (31 page)

At about eleven he turned off the lights downstairs and went up to bed. He fastened the shutters tight, shivering in the cold blast that drove in between the insubstantial flaps of wood. He climbed into the wide expanse of unwarmed bedclothes and closed his eyes in the darkness. He thought of the dawn at Merlaut when he sat beneath the apple tree before returning to find Anne’s arm childishly reach out to him. When briefly he had been able to step aside from the sensuous delight of the evening’s events his thoughts had turned to the book of essays, by Montaigne, that he had seen in Anne’s rooms. At Merlaut he knew he had gone against one of Montaigne’s precepts: I desist. Now by banishing Anne was he following more closely the philosopher’s advice? He was desisting in a way; but too brutally and far too late.

After an hour or so he got out of bed and took his dressing-gown from the chair. The floorboards on the landing creaked comfortably beneath his bare feet, and as he descended the stairs he felt the risen banister smooth against his palm. Running his fingers through his hair in some automatic vanity he crossed the cold marble floor of the hall to the piano, on top of which he found a box of cigarettes and some matches. He began to smoke as he walked about the silent house, leaving a thin grey trail behind him. In the dining-room he found his feet lifted by the sprung parquet floor, and he thought of how his father used to sit at the head of the table on one of his rare visits home and of the cowed anxious looks his mother used to give him as she supervised the dinner.

He pulled back the shutters and sat in the window seat gazing out towards the lake. He placed the flat of his right hand against his forehead and leaned his elbow on the window sill. Twice, when Christine had been away, he had slept with Anne. In the course of the night he had been woken by her restlessness and had wondered if the past would ever leave her, even when she slept.

He had loved her then, he was certain, when he had put out his arm to still her troubled movements and willed a sense of peace into her heart. What strange connections in his mind had then corroded that pure feeling?

The energy that had driven him when he had first made love to her at Merlaut had been diverted. Instead of gusting, as it should have done, fitfully and playfully in his dealing with her, it had precipitated a long inward storm of compassion. His obsessed identification with her plight had prevented him from seeing her as someone opposite, discrete, and satisfactorily herself.

It was not through cruelty that he had turned her away, he thought now, as he tried to forgive himself for what he had done, but through an excess of sympathy. The dark-eyed waitress he had longed for when she first stood beside him in the attic of his house, the lover whose name had erased the memory of all others when he whispered it in her ear – Anne, whose every action towards him had been illuminated by the gentlest trust and hope, had gone from his mind. In the slow rage of his imagination, he had subsumed her.

These thoughts were not all clear in Hartmann’s mind. Often he saw only a man’s hand slip itself around the butt of a revolver. He began to feel rage towards Anne’s father. He too could have desisted. What consequences he had unleashed; what chain of despair and loneliness that would contaminate the lives of so many people for decades yet to come.

When Anne had come that day to the Manor and he had stroked her hair, he had felt as though the pain passed through his hand, as though he were a medium of some greater evil. When she had said, ‘This is worse than anything I have ever known,’ all his frantic imaginings had been confirmed; they were the words he had most dreaded to hear.

Hartmann clasped his hands tight on the window-ledge as he looked out into the darkness. He felt angry, and this anger was better than the aimless anguish he had felt before, but it depended on his being able to hold in his mind the picture of the murder and on his being sure that the consequences followed so surely on the events.

At other moments he felt that every action in the world was alone and complete in itself without reference to others, and then he was filled with a sorrow he could not bear.

Anne did not awake till noon the next day. She washed and changed her clothes and began to pack her suitcases, placing in them the picture of the Parisian roofs, the coffee pot, the doll, and throwing her clothes on top. The first train she could take was at three o’clock, and this would give her time to prepare for the journey. She wrote letters to Mlle Calmette, to Pierre and to her friend Mathilde, promising the last two she would write again from Paris. She had just enough money from her wages and from what she had earned by sewing for Mlle Calmette to pay for lodgings for a day or two in Paris until she could find a job.

She tried to put the episode with Mattlin out of her mind. It troubled her that she had done the same thing with him as with Hartmann; that the most joyous thing to her could also be the most regrettable. Her sense of repulsion, however, was not as great as her sadness. Because she had no respect for Mattlin she determined not to waste her thoughts on him.

She bumped the heavy cases down the scrubbed stairs and out into the courtyard, then looked back for a moment at the window of her sitting-room, where she had sat and watched the sun on the old walls below. ‘Goodbye, Zozo,’ she called out to the empty space as she moved towards the street.

She hoped she would see no one she knew as she made her way along the back streets towards the station. Luckily it was cold, and such people as were out had their chins buried in their coats and their gaze on the pavements in front of them. Down a diagonal road Anne saw the sweep of the Place de la Victoire and she remembered that she had promised the Patron to look at the war memorial and think about the men who had died. She glanced towards the station, where she could see the clock: twenty to three. She dragged her cases down into the square and went over to the obelisk with its large stone slab whose inscription bore witness to the town’s unwilling sacrifice. What was it the Patron had said? That they would be only names for her? And so they were – sixty or so, with initials, some bizarre but mostly local, homely names with two or three sets of people with the same surname. She wondered what their families must have thought. She tried to put a face and a laugh to some of them, to imagine what they had been like to those who knew them, but it was impossible. At least their names remained; against the gore and squalor of their deaths there was this tiny counterweight of balance.

She bought her ticket and sat down in the station waiting-room. She had not been able to bring the gramophone with her because it was too much to carry; she might send for it later. Or perhaps, she thought, as she began unconsciously to rub the swollen palm of her right hand against the rough waistband of her skirt, she might not.

Hartmann sat at the desk of his study. He had told Christine at lunchtime that Anne would not be returning, and she had tactfully concealed her elation beneath some neutral talk about replacing her.

Hartmann knew what Anne was doing. He knew that she would move swiftly to escape and start again, just as she had done before. He knew how hard she would be fighting in her mind. She was saying to herself that it had not been so very wonderful in any case; that most of her time had been taken up in frustration and waiting. He could feel the energy of her mental processes and wished that she would drain him of his resources and use them too. He willed her to succeed, sitting with his hands folded staring straight ahead in his reverie.

He recalled the time he had first watched her in the bar at the hotel and how she used to swing her long black-stockinged leg backwards and forwards as her shoe grazed the floor in time to an imaginary dance beat. And then the flush of colour in her cheeks, and those long-lashed eyes that had begun their slow undermining of his self-control. He remembered how he had wondered what her life might be like; and then how, some time after that at Merlaut, he had stroked her hair as she lay in her troubled sleep and how he had tried to bring calm to her through the gentle touch of his fingers. Then he thought of the explosion of a revolver shot, echoing in a shocked silence underground, and the cry of a small girl running alone into a field.

He looked out of the window, across the lake, with his head in his hands. In his mind he saw a girl, sitting in a railway carriage with two heavy suitcases on the rack opposite her. He saw her hair, her face, her eyes and all her movements. He believed that now his long effort of imagination was over, and he knew truthfully what she was feeling, and so, when he lowered his hands from his face, he found at last that tears were streaming from his eyes.

10

A
NNE WATCHED FROM
the window as the train chugged through the pallid countryside towards Paris, blowing clouds of smoke into the November afternoon. She thought of the landscape of her childhood and the wooded slopes around the house where she was born. They seemed as alien to her now as these anonymous fields through which she passed. Since she felt she belonged to no part of it, she could make no sense of this material world, whether it was in the shape of natural phenomena, like woods and rivers, or in the guise of man-made things like houses, furniture and glass. Without the greeting of personal affection or association they were no more than collections of arbitrarily linked atoms that wriggled and chased each other into shapes that men had named. Although Anne didn’t phrase her thoughts in such words, she felt her separation from the world. The fact that many of the patterns formed by random matter seemed quite beautiful made no difference; try as she might, she could dredge no meaning from the fertile hedgerows, no comfort from the pointless loveliness of the swelling woods and hills.

She pictured her arrival in Paris. It would be crucial to find work, since she had only enough money to last for three or four days. If Delphine still worked in the old café near the Gare Montparnasse then perhaps she would be able to help.

Anne still had no doubt that somehow she would find either the resilience or the release from feeling and pain that would be necessary for her to endure what was going through her mind. After all, she had had to confront the loss of everything she most valued once before, and in a far more hurtful way than this. There was no reason why this time she should not succeed again. If the pain became intolerable then presumably her body would allow her to lose consciousness.

She began to cry. There was no one else in the carriage to see the tears that dripped on to the front of her dress or to hear the sobbing that soon accompanied them. After a time she lay down on the floor of the compartment, the better to clasp herself in comfort. Then all thoughts of how she might survive were lost, because she had no time for anything other than trying to breathe. The sounds of her sobbing eventually frightened her, so she hoisted herself back on to the seat. Now perhaps time would start to help, she thought. But time only brought the train juddering exactly on schedule into the Gare Montparnasse: the required number of hours and minutes had passed. Anne took her cases from the rack and went out into the street. She walked to the house in which she had once had a room, and left the heavy cases in the hall.

Free from their weight at last, she began to walk round the streets, not knowing where she went. After an hour or so she found a small hotel in the Pigalle district run by a man with a yellowish skin and a thin moustache. He showed her a room with greasy curtains and a narrow bed for which he asked what seemed to her an appalling price. Too tired to argue, she paid it and lay down dazed on the bed.

That night she had no dreams at all, though she was troubled by a series of waking images. The landscape of her youth took on a greater significance than it can really have had; and against it appeared half-remembered buildings, places of authority and fear that seem to link and merge. Dead people lived, and there was a chance of having her life over again, making this time different choices; there was an odd certainty that just out of reach existed a way of explaining all these inconsistencies – the ache of love gone and opportunities missed, the contradictory landscapes and disconnected places.

The next morning Anne thought for the first time that she knew where this place was to be found.

First she went to seek Delphine, but the café proprietor said she had vanished some weeks ago leaving no address. Anne nodded and stepped out again into the street, knowing that now she was quite alone.

For three days she walked round Paris, sleeping two nights in a park after her money had run out. In every bar she saw a telephone and she thought of the instrument standing on the hall table in the Manor. Hartmann had shouted at her to go away; he wouldn’t want to hear from her now.

He had never told her the address of his flat, but she knew it was in the seventh arrondissement near where the rue de Sèvres met the rue de Babylone. She walked towards it from the river.

Now she was tired and her body was weak through lack of food. When defeat first creeps into the mind it is not at all unwelcome. There is a strange pleasure in giving up, and although Anne instinctively resisted it she was aware of its sweetness, just as a runner is not really ashamed but pleased when he hangs his head and rests.

She trailed her hand along the sides of the big grey building, marvelling at their inconsequence. This she scarcely minded; but more difficult for her to bear was the fact that she could see in human beings nothing more than she saw in the physical world. There was no reason and no trust in them. If houses were wild atoms tamed by man, then people themselves were just unbiddable, skin and flesh and hair-gatherings of random matter. And yet there had once seemed a reason and a meaning, when she had played with her father in the fields, and once again when she had stood on the floor of the granary in Merlaut looking into Hartmann’s wise and comforting eyes.

In the rue de Babylone she gazed up at a large grey block with wrought iron balconies and wondered if that was where he had lived, if it was there within the mirrored walls that the suppers after the opera had been taken with laughing and drinking. She looked away back to the pavement and realised that she no longer cared.