Night Without Stars (8 page)

Bénat said: “ If your friend has been a lawyer he'll know that isn't difficult. It's always a matter of deciding at the outset which of two litigants is the bigger rogue.”

“Or has the more money,” I suggested, in the same tone.

“But never I suppose,” John said, “taking into account the merits of the case.”

“Absolutely fatal,” agreed the Frenchman. “ It's entirely a matter for the fudge, who of course decides solely on the legal technicalities.…”

We chatted amiably for a few minutes, and then he left. I could tell they thought him pretty important, and when he moved away John said:

“Don't be deceived by his flippant way of talking. He's a big shot around here. Everybody knows Bénat.”

We went on into the Baccarat room, where John lost three thousand francs and I won a hundred and fifty. Not an auspicious evening.

Twice more to the Café Gambetta in Villefranche.

The first time everything was fine. Mère Roget still kept her distance—she was very much the martinet in her own home—but the others welcomed me practically as one of themselves. Among the friendliest were Roquefort the fisherman and a man called Scipion. Scipion had fought with the Free French in the invasion of Normandy and had lived two years in England, so that made us virtually blood brothers. He fancied himself as a military strategist, and I could hear him moving wine bottles and ashtrays about to illustrate his points. He'd got a duodenal ulcer, and all the fight went out of his voice when he told me about that Roquefort was a specialist in butterflies, and spent nearly all his spare time watching them or catching them. It was a queer hobby for a fisherman, and they pulled his leg about it, but he was in deadly earnest; and someone said his collection was worth a hundred thousand francs.

Alix seemed to get something out of seeing me welcome among her friends and relations, otherwise I shouldn't have gone again. I knew the strength of family ties in France. The more I saw of them all, the more I felt that the Delaisse family was at the back of the Alix-Pierre arrangement. Right at the start I'd thought Alix's feelings for Pierre weren't really quite as warm as she tried to make them. Our own friendship couldn't have gone on if they had been.

Altogether I seemed to be working my way out on a limb, and no decent way of retreat. If a marriage on the grounds of convenience had been fixed up between her and Pierre Grognard—not so much to blot out Jacques's memory as to perpetuate it—my showing up on the scene could only complicate life for everyone. To the Delaisses I was an obstruction and a pitiable nuisance, to Alix I was an unsettling influence plucking at her affections when they were better buried, to Pierre I was an object of bitter jealousy just because I was unsettling Alix that way. The only reasonable thing really was to cut the entanglement right out and go back to England.

But so long as there was a chance of going on as we were, I hadn't the courage to do the operation for myself.

The third visit to Villefranche was quite different from the other two.

It was Alix's idea as usual. We'd walked out from Nice about two miles, and suddenly she said why not go on to Villefranche, have a drink there and get the last bus back. I said all right, if she felt like that. The place was busier than usual, it being a Sunday, and as we turned into the Rue St Agel there was the sound of singing from the bistro on the opposite corner. At the Café Gambetta someone was playing a concertina. The rusty music and the babel of voices met us as we went in.

“Go on into the inner room,” Alix said. “ I'II tell Mère Roget we've come.”

I went in, pushing through the jingling bead curtains, and Gaston, who happened to be there, stumped across and led me to an empty table. Now from the first Gaston had been one of the friendliest. Last week he'd stood for ten minutes leaning on an empty chair telling me how he lost his leg; a customer had had to bang on a table three times before Gaston would move. To-night I could hardly drag a word out of him. It was “yes, m'sieu,” “no, m'sieu”; and “but certainly.” As soon as he could he hobbled away.

The inner room was much quieter than the outer one tonight—in fact there were only four people in the room: Uncle Henri Delaisse, a fellow called Dramont, another called Jean Roux, and a new man addressed as Rastel. None of them spoke to me, but I soon picked out each voice for myself. I wondered what the devil was wrong. They'd all been talking freely a minute before I walked in.

The boy Maurice came in, and I ordered the usual coup de blanc and lit a cigarette and waited for Alix. After a minute or two the conversation loosened up, but it was self-conscious stuff, about a cycle race that was going to begin in a couple of days.

Then the concertina stopped in the outer bar, and I suddenly realised that there was someone else in this room.

It's surprisingly hard to cheat a blind man. He comes to hear and identify the slightest sounds, for no one ever stays quite still. He almost always knows when someone is near him and what they are doing.

But this was the stillest sitter I'd come across. He could hardly have moved a muscle, and certainly wasn't moving now; it was only because the concertina had given out for a minute that I heard his breathing, which was quiet enough but with a just detectable and distinctive tick-tick sound at the back of the nose.

At first I thought of saying something but decided against it. If somebody didn't want to be sociable it was really not my affair.

Gaston came limping across from the kitchen. “ Mère Roget has some special wine to offer you, m'sieu, and would like you to come into the kitchen to take it.”

“Very well.” The inner room wasn't for me to-night.

As I got to the kitchen door someone came out and stood on one side to let me pass. I thanked him, but he didn't speak, so I couldn't be sure that it was Armand Delaisse.

Things were a bit distant in the kitchen too, and we left fairly early. On the way home Alix, for the only time ever, talked too much. She was bright and lively, but the brightness didn't ring true, and there was a jarring note somewhere.

In the end I said: “ Look, Alix, dear, you don't
need
to be the life and soul of the party. In fact there's no party, and I'd rather have you in your depressed mood than—this way.”

She stopped. “This way?” she said. “I don't know what you mean by ‘this way.' ”

“Oh … faintly over-anxious to convince yourself that you don't care a damn for anybody.”

She was silent a bit, faintly whistling through pursed lips. “ Why should I have to convince myself of what I know to be the truth?”

“Why indeed? If it is the truth.”

We walked along some way. She gave a little irritable flick at her skirt. “I don't think you understand me as well as you think you do.”

“I don't think I understand you at all.”

“You find me—unreasonable?”

“Rarely, if ever.”

“… If so I wonder you trouble to come out with me.”

I said: “ You know why I come out with you. That's not at issue.… If to-night for some reason you'd like to find something to quarrel about, go right ahead, but don't expect me to help you.”

“I think you're helping me very well.”

I thought it out “ Yes, I suppose I am.”

We both laughed, but it was still half-hearted. She said: “ When you are angry the shell comes back—but much thicker. Truly aloof then.”

“Very far from it, believe me. More than ever painfully involved.”

“And when I'm angry …” She sighed. “Oh, I don't know. I think the world is rather a mess, don't you?”

“Let's forget it.”

“Yes, let's forget it.”

We changed the subject then, and there were no more sparks; but there was something different about her all the rest of the evening.

We'd arranged to meet on the Monday, but she rang up making an excuse. We put it off till the following Monday, and I think she would have got out of that if it hadn't been a long-promised date to go to Monte Carlo. I wondered how we should meet, if the mood of Sunday night would carry over the eight days between. But when we met there was no sign of it at all. She was a bit subdued but at her nicest—and that was saying something.

We went by train in the afternoon—one of those diesel trains with the driver in a raised cabin in the roof. When we halted at Villefranche she said:

“Giles, I think I must stop meeting you.”

I'd been expecting it, but it was a jolt all the same.

“Think so?”

“It isn't fair to you.”

“I'll look out for that.”

“No. It's not fair to any of us. I have told Pierre that I'm not seeing you any more. If he finds out there will be trouble.”

“Don't you want to go on seeing me?”

“Should I have lied to Pierre if I hadn't? But it can't go on for ever. There must be a break, Giles. Perhaps in a—”

She stopped.

“What were you going to say?”

“Nothing. It's for the best that we should give this up.”

“I suppose nobody's suggested that you should give Pierre up instead?”

“I have had feelings that way.”

“Then …” I swallowed. “If you can say that …”

The diesel engine started with that sound like the tired battery of a motor car, and we moved slowly out of the station.

I felt happy and miserable together. I said: “Listen, Alix.”

“Yes?”

“I'm no use to you. I can't expect any woman … But at least there's no compulsion to throw yourself away. Pierre doesn't make the grade. There are other men in the world—plenty of them. Don't sacrifice yourself just to please your first husband's friends—”

“Why do you say that?”

“It's pretty plain, isn't it? You don't really love the man. The marriage is tied up with the Delaisse family: they look on Pierre as an old comrade of Jacques, a rich man, a comfortable and seemly match for little Alix.

She said after a minute: “ Well, aren't those all good reasons?” It was as if by saying over their arguments I'd strengthened their case instead of my own.

“No, they aren't if the man is a man like Pierre.”

“What's wrong with him?”

I shrugged. Facing it, what was there? A mild personal antipathy. “You loved Jacques Delaisse, you say?”

“I still do.”

“Then don't spoil his memory by taking a man you don't care for.”

“That can't spoil his memory.”

I said, suddenly angry: “ You told me the other night I didn't understand you as well as I thought. Well, I tell you again: I don't understand you at all. I'm crazy about you—you know that—but I don't understand. You've got me completely beaten.”

She didn't say anything. There was no anger in her to-day. The train stopped at another station, but I didn't know which it was and didn't care.

I said: “ Surely there's someone of your own family to advise you? You're not really one of the Delaisse family.”

“I'm proud to belong to it.”

“Aren't there any of your own blood alive?”

“I've told you, I have a brother in Dakar. There is no one else. I am a Delaisse.”

Off again, gathering speed with a deepening dynamo hum, the sound pressing back upon itself as we drilled into the mouth of a long tunnel.

“You mustn't be crazy about me, Giles,” she said in a softer tone.

“At least you can't stop that.”

“No.… Perhaps I don't want to stop it. But I hate to think of hurting you.”

“I'll take care of that too.”

“I am sorry I had to tell you this now. It will spoil our day.”

“… Whatever else, I'd like to finish up this business between you and Pierre.”

“Let's not talk about it any more. It is something I have—made up my mind to. You can't alter it, dear Giles. None of us can alter the past”

“We can change our
view
of the past—according to circumstances. If we don't it may push the present out of shape.”

“Oh, well … we shall see. Forget it now. Let's try to be happy as we have been other days.”

We tried to be happy. When darkness fell we were sitting on a seat in the garden of the Casino. It was the warmest evening there had been for some time, and the smell of mimosa was everywhere.

Alix was sitting with her legs curled under her. She said: “ I don't think to-day has been as good as the others. Let's go home.”

“So this is really good-bye?”

“… It must be.”

After a bit she said: “ What shall you do?”

“I may have to go back to England, anyhow.”

“… Perhaps that will be for the best”

“Like hell it will be for the best.”

“Go back home and forget me.”

“Should I swim the Channel on the way?”

“I know. I know. It won't be easy. Perhaps you are not the only one.”

‘I'm the only one without the remedy in my own hands.”

There was silence for a bit “When shall you go home?” she said.

“Pretty soon.”

“And some day you might come back?”

“Unlikely. A burnt child, you know.”

She touched my arm. “I don't know if I've done more harm or good by interfering in your life. If it's harm, then I'm sorry.”

I put my hand over hers. “What's a broken heart among friends?”

“No, I don't want you to joke. Tell me.”

“I don't feel like joking. Believe me. All I can tell you is that I don't want it to end like this.”

She said after a minute: “Let's go and eat.” But she made no move.

I said: “Oh, of course it's been worth it. Every time. You owe me nothing, my dear. It was good while it lasted.”

“… More than good.”