The Belting Inheritance (14 page)

As he told this story, smoking several Gaulloises and pausing every so often to get a phrase straight, his manner became almost confidential. When he had finished, he said, “That’s all? You don’t want to try – ”

“No.” Elaine took off her spectacles. Without them she looked five years younger and very appealing, and it was obvious that Durcet thought so too.

“Lots of other things in Paris to see. Shows. You like to write about them?”

“I don’t think so,” I said. I was rather humiliated by the way in which Elaine had taken over from me.

“A place Jean used to go.” He took a card from his pocket and put it into the pocket of Elaine’s raincoat. As he did so his hand touched her thigh. “If you change your mind, baby.” He rose with the smoothness of a snake, raised a hand to us and was gone.

I was prepared to visit another café, preferably the Deux Magots, sit watching people go by and discuss the implications of what we had discovered, but Elaine would have none of it. She insisted that we must go at once to the Hôtel Oeil d’Or, and of course she was perfectly right, it was what we had come for, but now that I was in Paris I was inclined to think that this evening we ought to enjoy ourselves and that tomorrow would be time enough to take up the chase, if one could call it that. But I didn’t like even to suggest such backsliding thoughts to Elaine and I simply stood looking about me, sniffing the Parisian air, while Elaine studied the map. Then we dived again into the Métro. Just before we did so she tapped the cases standing in front of us and said, “Don’t forget we need somewhere to stay for the night before we go out on the town.” Something in the way she said it made me remember the touch of Durcet’s hand upon her thigh. Should I even dare to make so bold a gesture?

Down into the Métro again, then, and a longer journey, which involved a change at Montparnasse and a walk through an interminable series of tunnels. This was the rush hour and we were jammed into a jolting, swaying train, crammed with men and women whose clothes, I could not help noticing, were very much shabbier than they would have been in a London underground train. Those damned cases were the cause of more trouble. One enormously fat man in a ragged pullover expressed what was obviously a strong objection to their presence in the carriage, half a dozen others chimed in, and the cases were furiously patted and prodded. Elaine, of course, was not silent. She seemed to be maintaining our perfect right to occupy space with the suitcases, “
espace
” cropped up continually in the flow of words, and it seemed to me that in the end the discussion shifted away from the question of the cases altogether, on to some sort of argument about Germany and bombs. Like a battle cruiser overwhelming each enemy destroyer in turn by the weight of gun power, Elaine silenced the opposition. One by one they either gave up the argument or got out at stations on the way. The train emptied a good deal, we got seats, and at last only the fat man in the ragged pullover, sitting opposite us and firing occasional shots across the carriage, was left of our opponents. When at last we got out he gathered strength for one last fusillade, in which I caught the words “
cochon
” and “
la vache.
” Elaine did not reply, and as we got out of the carriage I saw him settle back and close his eyes, happy no doubt at having the last word. Outside the station I said, “What was all that about?”

“They said we shouldn’t have brought in the cases.”

“Yes, but what was all that stuff about Germany?”

“It was the way the Germans behaved during the war, they said. I told them not to be such fools, we’d been their allies. Then they said we’d bombed them. Idiots.” There were bright spots on her cheeks. “You weren’t much help, for all your Wainwright education.”

“French isn’t my strong subject,” I said with dignity.

“What is?”

I was carrying both the cases and now I dumped them on the pavement. “I wanted to find a hotel straight away, or at least check these bloody things in at the station. It’s not my fault we’re landed with them, and we’re not going to be landed any longer.” Some masterful gesture was needed, and luckily at this moment I caught sight of a cab, hailed it, and told the man to take us to the Hôtel Oeil d’Or.

Inside the cab she said, “I didn’t mean – it’s all right for you, you don’t have to worry about money, but I’ve come over here to try and find out about my uncle, not to gawp at Paris.”

“I don’t know why you think I’m rich. I’ve used up my allowance to come here.”

“And won’t there be more where that came from?” I had no answer to this. “I don’t know why you took a taxi, we’re not going to have any too much money.”

“We’re getting rid of these cases. We’re staying at the Oeil d’Or.”

“Supposing it’s expensive?”

“Do you think that’s likely, after the other place?”

The Hôtel Oeil d’Or, however, did not at all resemble the Hôtel les deux Pigeons. The rue Mallarmé was shabby but quiet. The hotel was shabby too, but bright and clean. It had also, mercifully, a receptionist who spoke good English. Rooms with breakfast were a hundred francs a night each, not much more than fifteen shillings. They were small but clean, and they had wash-basins. Both rooms had views across neighbouring roofs. I raised my eyebrows at Elaine, and she nodded. The two cases were deposited at last – as I put them down I wondered why I had become so exasperated about them, for they were not very heavy – and we went down to sign the register. I said to the receptionist, “We were recommended to come here by a friend of mine. His name is Stiver.”

He repeated it, and I repeated it back to him. He shook his head.

“But he stayed here.” A thought occurred to me. “It may have been before you came.”

He was a small man with a large nose, a wide mouth, and thin hair plastered down and carefully combed to hide the bald patches. He almost visibly swelled at my words. “Monsieur, I am the proprietor. My name is Pasquin.”

I was disconcerted. Elaine said, “That’s odd, Monsieur Pasquin, because our friend mentioned you. He came over to England for a few days and now he’s back in Paris. We’d been hoping to find him here.” Pasquin was shaking his head. Elaine suggested that I should describe our friend, and as I did so Pasquin began to smile. His smile became a broad beam of pleasure. I broke off. “You know him?”

“Of course, but why do you call him Stiver? It is Monsieur Blackney. Come along. I show you.” He took us into a small sitting-room and began to look through the drawers of a battered desk, muttering to himself as he did so. He was looking through photographs, and at last found the one he wanted. I picked it up. The photograph showed two men standing outside the hotel. One of them was Pasquin, and the other was the man who had called himself David Wainwright.

I looked up to see Monsieur Pasquin unlocking with a key a small corner cupboard. He produced from it three small glasses and a bottle of Armagnac, poured tots carefully into each of the glasses, and ceremoniously handed them to us. We raised them and drank. The brandy ran down inside me like a pleasant river – no, hardly a river, a vein – of fire. Suddenly Pasquin’s wide smile was changed to a frown. He had a mobile, changeable face. “But why am I drinking? He owes me money, Percy.”

“Percy. Did he call himself that?” Elaine said. Something stirred in my memory and then faded.

“I thought he was a friend,” Pasquin said solemnly, and then corrected himself. “I still think of him as a friend, he is my friend.”

“You don’t know where he might be now?”

“If he were in Paris he would come to see his friend Pierre Pasquin. Or would he come?” Pasquin shrugged, a man who had been much and often deceived. He needed no invitation to talk and we sat in his little sitting-room drinking Armagnac and listening to a story which, while it told us more about David, didn’t make very much sense.

Blackney had come to the Hôtel Oeil d’Or some fifteen months earlier, had taken a room for a fortnight, and had stayed on. Pasquin had been in the Resistance, admired the English, and got on well with Blackney from the start. As the little man talked and told us something of his own history, it seemed to me that the visiting Englishman fulfilled some romantic dreams of his own. When the war ended he and his wife had bought the hotel and he had settled down to the routine of peacetime life. They had no children and Madame Pasquin, whom we met a little later, was a large rock-like woman with legs like tree trunks and the arms of a miner. She was, Pasquin conveyed to us, an earthbound practical creature, concerned with the price of vegetables and meat, the iniquities of the maids, the problem of making a living. Blackney must have represented for the little man the dream life that he had hoped might await him at the end of the war. He was unmarried, he had no permanent job, he worked sometimes teaching English to French families, in the summer as a courier for travel firms showing visitors around Paris, occasionally for a short time as a night watchman at some big store. He was often hard up but he was free, or at least that was the way it seemed to Pierre Pasquin. I asked whether they had talked much about the past.

“About the war a little, yes, not very much. Percy was a flyer, in a bomber.” He brooded. “He had many missions over Germany, then he was shot down and the Germans caught him.”

This fitted in with David. “And then?”

“I do not know. They sent him to a camp. He did not like to talk about that. There were marks on his body, I saw them once. It was not a thing to talk about. Percy was gay, you understand, he did not talk of such things. Then sometimes he was sad.” He hesitated.

“We know he took drugs,” I said.

He shook his head. “That was bad, very bad. I spoke to him often, but no good. He said to me he liked them, had to have them. Once he said, ‘I am dead, Pierre, and this brings me to life again’.”

“He never talked at all about his family in England?”

He shook his head. The recital seemed to have made him gloomy. He was in the act of pouring more Armagnac when the door opened and a woman immediately recognisable as Madame Pasquin appeared. She addressed her husband at length, in a manner plainly uncomplimentary and connected with the Armagnac. When he offered to pour her a glass she brushed away the suggestion with one sweep of her brawny arm. He introduced us in a resigned manner. “English. Friends of Percy Blackney. They are staying here.”

She began to upbraid him again. He stopped her. In a way he was absurd, yet there was something dignified about him. “Please speak in English.”

His wife looked from him to us with an expression on her slab-like face that was evidently not friendly. She managed to summon four words of English and then turned on her heel, banging the door furiously behind her. The words were,
“
I ’ope they pay.
”

Pasquin handed us the glasses of Armagnac. His hand trembled a little. Elaine said, with what was for her surprising gentleness, “Did he owe you much money?”

“Money, what does it matter? We were friends. He told me that he would be rich, he would pay me back.”

“When did he say that? Just before he was leaving you?”

“Before? Oh, yes, before. When he had the lessons.”

“Lessons? What sort of lessons?”

But this proved hard to establish, partly because Pasquin was himself not quite sure, partly because of the language problem. They were lessons “
en comportement
,” that was the nearest we could get to it, and Blackney had seemed to regard them rather as a joke. It seemed that we were approaching the heart of the matter, but who had given Blackney these lessons in comportment or deportment, where were they conducted? Pasquin didn’t know. In his time at the Hôtel Oeil d’Or Blackney had had very few visitors, and there seemed to be nobody that we knew among them. Women? No, there had been no women, and the little man did not seem inclined to elaborate upon this point. I described Ulfheim, but Pasquin had not seen him. Could he remember any visitors at all? There had been a young man named Maurice Fallon who had come often at one time, and it seemed that Pasquin had not approved of him. It was during the period of the lessons, which had lasted for several weeks, that Blackney had talked about getting a lot of money, and Pasquin had been pleased for his friend. And then in April Blackney had disappeared. One morning he was there, he did not return all day, and when late in the evening Madame Pasquin had gone up to his room to see if he was ill, she found the room stripped of his few belongings. He had evidently packed the things in his suitcase and then walked out. He had left owing a bill, and perhaps he had borrowed money from the little man as well. Pasquin did not say.

We were still asking questions when an angry bellow could be heard. “Pierre. Pierre.” Pasquin looked at us, went to the cupboard and locked it carefully, and picked up the glasses. “You will excuse me. That is Madame Pasquin.”

We excused him. When we were all out of the sitting-room he disappeared down stairs that obviously led to the kitchen. Elaine put a hand on my arm. “Look in the register. It might tell us something, where he came from perhaps.”

The register, a big red book, was on the desk, and Elaine looked at it while I kept watch. I heard her turning the pages, and then there was an exclamation. She was laughing. She pointed to an entry. I read: “P Blakeney.” His nationality was given as British, the place of residence was left blank. The writing was straggly, very much like what I remembered of the letter Lady W had shown me. I could not understand why Elaine was laughing.

“Don’t you see? It’s not Blackney, it’s Blakeney. And his name’s Percy. Percy Blakeney, the Scarlet Pimpernel. A joke.”

It seemed to me that there was something wrong about that, although I could not be sure what it was. Later I sat on the bed in her room, and we talked about what we had learned. Elaine ticked off points on her fingers. She stood against the window in the fading light, and her neat delicate profile reminded me of a figure in one of the wall tapestries in my bedroom, a young girl who held in her hand some kind of jug, and gravely faced her equally youthful lover. It was the first time I had thought about her, or about any girl, in that way. There was nothing obviously sexual in the thought, but I was conscious that I should like to hold and kiss her.