Girl at the Lion D'Or (6 page)

‘Oh, anything. She likes Chopin. And Brahms, I think. And sometimes I try to make her listen to Mozart, but she hates that.’

‘She doesn’t like . . . well, dance music?’

‘You mean jazz?’

‘That sort of thing . . .’

‘Christine? Oh, I wouldn’t imagine so. Too raucous for her, I think. But is that what you like? Jazz?’

‘Yes, I adore it. I’ve got some records upstairs in my room. It’s silly, isn’t it? I sold the gramophone but I couldn’t bear to part with my records. And now they just sit in my drawer.’

Anne laughed, then looked down to the glasses in her hands as a small silence came between them. Hartmann watched as her hair fell forward over her cheek.

‘Cheerio, then, M. Hartmann.’ It was Roussel from the door of the bar. ‘I must be going now. Got to make an early start tomorrow. Important job, don’t you know?’ He laughed.

‘Oh, I’ve just remembered,’ said Hartmann. ‘Before you go. My wife wanted me to find out if you knew of anyone who would come in and do some extra cleaning for us. Just one day a week while the work’s going on.’

‘Yes, I understand, M. Hartmann. I’ll have a think about it. I can’t think of anyone at the moment, but I’ll let you know, shall I? Perhaps little Jacqueline, you know, the postman’s daughter, she might be interested.’

‘Yes, as long as she’s strong enough. Poor old Mme Monnier isn’t up to much more than dusting the ornaments these days.’

‘You’ll be wanting a sturdy woman, then. A young one. Always plenty of those in a town like Janvilliers.’ Roussel laughed. ‘Good night, gentlemen.’

Anne moved out from behind the bar, clearing plates from the tables and taking further orders for coffee and more drinks. There were always centimes left in the saucers on the bar when people had paid for their drinks, and sometimes whole francs left on the tables for her. It was a rule that at closing time all such tips were pooled; half the total went straight to the hotel’s petty cash box, and of what remained Pierre and Bruno were entitled to a quarter each, while the rest was shared out between the barman and the waiters. ‘Monsieur the Patron is very strict on this point,’ Mme Bouin assured the truculent Roland, when he had once questioned the system. Diners who thought they were doing Anne a favour by leaving a larger tip than normal thus found their generosity registered only by the marbled ledger of Mme Bouin.

Anne, however, was not thinking about centimes as she leaned across the tables to gather up the dirty plates. An idea had occurred to her; but before she could begin to form a plan the street door opened again, this time revealing the stocky figure of Jean-Philippe, the quieter of the Gilbert brothers. Hartmann bought more drinks and at once he and Jean-Philippe fell into agitated conversation with Mattlin.

Like Roussel earlier in the evening, like most men in bars and cafés up and down France that night, they were concerned by news that two days earlier the German army had reoccupied the Rhineland, a zone demilitarised by treaty at the end of the war. All three had at some time been in the army, Jean-Philippe from the first battle of the Marne until the Armistice, during which time he had twice been wounded. Although they talked robustly, each man knew with a low certainty that such supreme effort of resistance could never be made again, and they looked to their political leaders to ensure that it should not be necessary. In this they were constantly let down and their sacrifice, as they saw it, betrayed.

‘But I suppose Mandel is at least aware of the threat,’ said Mattlin.

‘I agree,’ said Jean-Philippe, who was the most passionate of the three. ‘He is aware of the threat, but there is nothing he can do about it. Sarraut will do nothing. Did you hear him on the wireless last night? He will
insist
on doing nothing – that’s why he was chosen in the first place.’

‘And because he was not Laval,’ said Hartmann.

It was not as if the three of them were arguing, Anne thought, as she passed by; it was more that each wanted to make the same point more loudly than the others.

‘But Flandin,’ said Jean-Philippe, ‘at least he’s an anglophile.’

‘The best thing you can say for Flandin,’ said Hartmann as he drained his glass, ‘is that he’s an extremely tall man.’

Anne left them talking until a few minutes before closing time. It would have been better for her to wait until another day to propose her scheme, but by then it might have been too late.

When she saw Jean-Philippe put his hand on Mattlin’s shoulder the better to emphasise a point, thus momentarily excluding Hartmann from the circle at the bar, she moved over with her tin tray full of empty beer glasses, touched the sleeve of Hartmann’s jacket and murmured, ‘Monsieur . . .’

He turned and looked down to where she stood.

‘Monsieur,’ she began again, her voice very soft because she was frightened and she didn’t want the others to hear, ‘I overheard you say you wanted someone to come and do some work in your house while the builders are there. I could come and do it for you if you liked.’ She lifted her gaze from the floor and looked into Hartmann’s face.

He was surprised by the pleading he saw in her brown eyes. ‘What a kind offer, mademoiselle. I didn’t think I would find someone so soon. But how would you manage it?’

‘I have Wednesday afternoon off every week.’

Hartmann knew this because she had said so at the tennis court, but he wanted to give himself time to think. What would Christine say when she saw this girl? She was expecting a sturdy peasant, brought up to carry milk churns and chicken feed, well-muscled from baling straw. She would be suspicious when she saw this slender young woman with her tight black skirt and the hair escaping from the scarlet ribbon. Yet he wanted to help her. Something in him stirred; perhaps, he thought, it was a flicker of the same feeling he had felt so unaccountably for Roussel that day when they were gazing at the Manor.

‘It’s very hard work, mademoiselle. We have a maid already to help my wife. What we wanted was someone to do the heaviest cleaning. I’m not sure you’d like it.’

‘I’m sure I could manage,’ said Anne, whose hands gripped the edge of the tray. If he didn’t decide quickly, Mattlin would butt in and ask what they were talking about, or the barman would shout at her with another order.

‘Wouldn’t you be tired after all your work at the hotel? Surely you need your afternoon off?’

‘Oh no, monsieur, I’m not tired. It’s all right, it’s not that hard, the work I do here. And I need a little extra money, for my father, you see.’ She looked at him again. ‘Please let me do it.’

‘All right. Come next Wednesday at two, and we’ll discuss it with my wife.’

‘Thank you, monsieur.’

She rounded the bar as calmly as she could, though inside she felt the bump and swell of elation.

When the barman asked everyone to leave, Mattlin and Jean-Philippe paused to interrupt their anxious questioning of the Government only to say goodnight to Anne. It was easy for them, she thought; their lives were both more elevated and more placid than hers.

Hartmann stopped gesticulating with the others and turned to smile at her. She thought there was a trace of uncertainty in his expression; he almost missed his step in the doorway as he turned. When he disappeared into the darkness she felt the momentary vertigo of desertion.

Up in her room beneath the rafters, Anne felt the anxiety of separation gradually replaced by the pleasures of anticipation.

Later, when she went downstairs to the bathroom, it was with such a lightness of tread that her feet seemed barely to touch the boards.

The sound was loud enough, however, to be heard by one whose ear for such things was sharper even than that of Mme Bouin. And so it was, a few minutes later, as Anne lay in the steaming quietness, that a tense face pressed itself against an open space high in the opposite wall. She would probably not have noticed had Roland demolished the entire partition in his frenzy, such was her preoccupation with her thoughts. For Roland, the urge that drove him to his uncomfortable and dangerous balancing act on top of thin wooden slats and mothballed curtains was so strong that he would willingly have taken apart each tile and brick in the Hotel du Lion d’Or for the sake of half a minute alone there. To his surprise, there was a sound from the bath: the new maid appeared to be singing to herself.

Despite her elation, Anne’s sleep that night was again disturbed. When she awoke from her dream, she lay for some time having an imaginary conversation with Hartmann in which she explained to him the thoughts that troubled her. If all your life you endure the consequences of a single deed, then you cannot imagine life before it; it is almost as if the consequences precede the action. The deed itself meanwhile becomes harder to imagine as some isolated event which, by some easy twist of human will, might not have happened at all. It becomes the subject of faint memory, conjecture, insufficient detail.

All this was very hard to explain, however, and in her mind Anne saw Hartmann merely smile his well-mannered smile and tell her not to worry. When at last she fell asleep again she dreamed that she had known him as a child and had enlisted his help to stop her life from changing.

6

A
NNE AWOKE THE
next day with what looked like tiny blisters on the palms of her hands. Her fingers were swollen and coloured white in blotches; they throbbed and itched intensely. She went down to the bathroom and held them under the tap. At first the water was cold, but gradually it grew warmer and finally reached a temperature at which it became too hot for the skin to bear. She kept her hands there for a moment longer until a shudder went through her body, causing her neck and spine to tingle. Although this eased the itching for a time it was not enough, and she had to take her towel and scrape her hands on its rough pile until all the little blisters of the palms were raw and the white blotches bleeding.

Then she ran a basin of cold water and plunged both hands into it. By the time she returned to the bedroom the itching had gone, but there was a good deal of healing to be done. She took a blue glass jar from the chest of drawers and dipped her fingers into the whitish greasy ointment it contained. It had been given to her by a doctor in Paris, and although it never seemed to do much good at least it stopped the wounds from cracking as they dried out.

She had been half expecting an attack of eczema ever since she had been at the Lion d’Or. The man who had given her the ointment said it would come on if she was nervous or unhappy; she maintained it was caused by certain things she touched, like raw potatoes. He had merely shrugged, and said it was not impossible. Her life over the past two or three weeks could have supported either theory, and Anne was convinced that she had not been helped by the excessive amount of washing up Mme Bouin gave her to do in cold water with stinging powder. She dressed gingerly, to avoid transferring ointment to her clothes, and wondered if the condition of her hands might now give her some respite.

She was not very hopeful, but after breakfast went away to search out Mme Bouin in her nook beneath the hotel stairs.

‘Madame . . .’

‘What is it?’

‘Madame, I have this problem. My hands are very sore. I think perhaps it may be the powder for the pans. Or the potatoes, possibly.’

She held out her hands for inspection, the bleeding palms upward. The old woman lowered her face over them and peered; the widening of her left eye was magnified by the thickness of her spectacle lens. ‘I hope,’ she said, returning to an upright position, ‘that you haven’t been touching any food with those.’

‘No, I don’t think so. It only happened this morning and all I’ve touched was the crockery.’

‘I see.’

‘I’m not supposed to touch food anyway. It isn’t my job to –’

‘I am perfectly aware what your job is, mademoiselle. The first part of your job is to do what you are told by me and the second part is to do what is required of you by the head waiter and the chef, in that order.’

‘Yes, madame.’

‘Clearly we cannot have you waiting at a table with hands in that condition. It might put the clients off their food.’

‘But madame, I like waiting. I like meeting people.’

‘I am not interested in your social aspirations. You will have to do cleaning work only for the time being.’

‘I’m sorry, madame, I didn’t mean –’

‘That’s all. I will give the chef instructions about what your duties are to be.’

‘Thank you, madame.’

Anne knew she must be sounding too proud for a waitress, but there was something false in her relation with the old woman that irritated her. Why shouldn’t she talk to clients? What was a client but someone who had paid to eat? Hadn’t she herself been a client in restaurants too? She searched out Pierre, who was going through the stocks in the cellar, checking the bottles in their racks against a long inventory he held clipped to a board.

‘You’re looking nice this morning,’ he said, holding up a bottle of wine under the light and running a duster over it.

She showed him her hands and told him what Mme Bouin had said. He swore with genteel violence.

‘You understand, don’t you, Pierre? I don’t want to be any different from anyone else. I like taking the plates and things through, and I thought I was doing it all right.’

‘Of course I understand. I’ll see if I can do something about it. Now you just sit and talk to me for a bit while I do this.’

‘Would you let me serve in the bar tonight? I know Mme Bouin says I’m not to wait at a table, but it would be all right in the bar, wouldn’t it?’

Pierre put down the bottle and glanced at her briefly before taking another one from the rack. She could see his face clearly now. ‘Anyone in particular you hoped to see?’

‘No. Why?’ Anne looked down at her feet.

‘Who was the man you were talking to for such a long time last night? I thought he must be ordering a banquet, but then it turned out he didn’t even want another drink!’