The Splendour Falls (16 page)

My own five-franc piece tumbled with a noisy clatter into the saucer and Martine looked round, blinking in the sunlight. She couldn’t have seen me clearly, there in my shadowed corner, but still she asked: ‘Something is wrong?’

Beneath the saint’s accusing eyes I slipped the coin into my pocket, and shook my head. ‘No, nothing’s wrong.’ Satisfied, Martine turned away again to talk to Neil, and I clenched my trembling hand into a fist.
Nothing’s wrong
, I repeated, silently. I only wished I could believe it.

It was nearly dark when I left my room and went to look for Paul. I found him sitting alone in the bar, his shoulder to the wall of windows fronting on the square.
Ulysses
lay open on the low table at his knees, the spread pages pinned beneath a heavy glass ashtray.

He looked so peaceful, sitting there, that I hated to disturb him, but there was no help for it. My aunt’s telephone had been engaged all afternoon, and when I’d rung my father I’d been greeted by his answering machine. Which left only Paul. I wouldn’t have felt comfortable discussing my problems with anyone else, but Paul already seemed an old friend. As I entered the bar he surfaced from his book and sent me a welcoming smile. ‘You’ve got good timing,’ he said. ‘I was just about to put this down and have a drink.’

‘What page are you on now?’

‘Five hundred and forty-six.’

‘And how many pages are there?’

‘Nearly eight hundred,’ he admitted, repositioning the ashtray to hold his place while he stretched his cramped shoulders. ‘I’m doomed.’

‘You could always skip some bits, you know. You’d hardly miss a passage or two, surely, in a book that size.’

‘But that would be cheating,’ said Paul, as I sat down on the sofa opposite him. ‘Besides, I don’t do anything half way. Once I start something, I have to see it through – it’s just the way I am. I hate leaving anything unfinished.’

‘Is it really such a difficult book?’

‘Not difficult, no.’ He frowned, thinking. ‘No, complex would be a better word, I think. There are lots of layers in Joyce’s prose, and you can’t go too fast or you miss things. For instance,’ he said, turning the book towards me with his finger on the open page, ‘what would you say that means, exactly?’

I read the passage twice and shook my head. ‘I haven’t the faintest idea.’

‘Neither do I. But I know I’ll work it out eventually. That’s how you have to read this book, you see. You wade through a few sentences, then stop and think about them, then wade through a few more.’

‘Well, you’re a better man than I am, Gunga Din.’

‘Pardon?’

‘You’ve far more patience than I’ll ever have,’ I explained.

‘Simon wouldn’t call it patience,’ he said, with a shrug. ‘He’d just call it another one of my annoyingly obsessive personality traits. He says I’m a typical physicist, that I always have to force everything to make sense.’

‘And do you?’

‘Sure.’ He grinned at my question, unashamed. ‘Because everything does make sense, when you look at it from the right angle. All you have to do is find out what that angle is, for whatever it is you want to understand, and bang, the universe becomes a rational place.’

‘Does it really?’ I remained unconvinced, sagging back against the seat cushions as I brushed the hair back from my forehead. There was a pink geranium growing in a planter outside the window, behind Paul’s shoulder, and I frowned at it without really seeing it. ‘Well, I’ve tried every angle I can think of, and I still don’t know what to think.’

‘About what?’

Dragging my gaze from the window, I dug into my pocket and held out my hand, palm upwards. ‘This.’

Paul frowned. Leaning forward, he took the little coin and raised it to catch the slanting light from the overhead fixture. ‘What is it?’

‘It’s a King John coin.’

‘Really? Where on earth did you get this?’

I was ashamed to say I’d stolen it from a donation plate, so instead I told a half truth. ‘I found it, up at the Chapelle Sainte Radegonde.’

‘Wow.’ He turned it slowly, studying the ancient image. ‘I can’t imagine many people would have one of these.’

‘My cousin has one.’

He caught on quickly did young Paul. His upward glance held total comprehension. ‘But your cousin isn’t supposed to be here yet.’

‘I know.’

‘So.’ He handed the coin back to me, watching my face with careful eyes that were older than his age. ‘So you think that this is his, then? That he’s been and gone already?’

‘I don’t know what to think. I rang up the other hotels and they’ve never heard of him. I checked round the hospitals, but he hasn’t been admitted. From all accounts, he hasn’t been within ten miles of Chinon. Not recently, at any rate.’

‘Did you try the tourist office? They keep the keys, you know, for the Chapelle of Sainte Radegonde.’

I nodded. ‘They said no one had asked to see the chapelle for at least a month.’ Christian had a key, of course, but if Christian had met Harry he’d have mentioned it to me, surely. My cousin and I were alike enough to be brother and sister, one could hardly miss the resemblance. And while Neil had apparently managed to scale the walls somehow, I doubted whether Harry could have done the same. Harry, for all his energy, was no athlete. ‘It’s this coin, you see,’ I said to Paul, ‘this bloody coin, that bothers me.’ I rolled it pensively between my fingers. ‘His good luck piece, he called it – to help him with the book he was writing. He’d never have left it behind.’

‘Maybe he dropped it without knowing.’

I shook my head. ‘No, not where I found it. Someone would have had to place it there deliberately. Besides, he couldn’t have dropped it loose like this. He carried it round in a plastic case, the kind collectors use.’

‘He’d have dropped the whole thing, you mean.’

‘Yes. Of course, the obvious answer is that this isn’t Harry’s coin at all, that it belongs to someone else. But still,
it’s solid silver, and terribly old, and you’d have to be mad to put it in … well, to put it where I found it.’

Paul was silent for a minute. Shaking a cigarette loose from his nearly empty packet he lit it with a thoughtful frown. ‘If you’re really worried, you could call the police.’

‘And tell them what? That I’ve found a coin that may or may not be my cousin’s?’ I smiled, knowingly. ‘They’d send me packing for wasting their valuable time.’

‘So you don’t want to bother the police,’ Paul summarised. ‘OK. There must be some other way of finding out whether he’s been here.’

‘Well, I can’t think of any.’

‘You said he was coming here to do some research.’

‘Yes.’

‘And where would he go to do that?’

I shrugged, a little helplessly. ‘I don’t know, really. The library, perhaps, or the château … no, wait,’ I broke off suddenly, remembering. ‘He did say he was meeting someone. Some man who’d read one of Harry’s articles and was offering some useful information about tunnels.’

‘You’re sure it was a man?’

I thought back, closing my eyes as I replayed the
week-old
conversation in my head. ‘Yes, positive.’

‘Remember his name?’

‘No.’ I opened my eyes again, faintly frustrated. ‘No, I don’t. I think he only said the first name.’

‘Is he French or English?’

‘French,’ I said with certainty. ‘He wrote his letter in French, I do remember that, only Harry said the fellow must know English because the article – the article about
Queen Isabelle’s treasure – had been published in an English journal.’

‘Right,’ said Paul. ‘So we’re looking for a local history nut who knows the tunnels pretty well and reads British history journals.’ He smiled at me above the burning cigarette. ‘Sounds like a case for Sherlock Holmes.’

‘Impossible, you mean.’

He grinned. ‘I mean it’s something I could probably look into for you. I don’t think there’d be too many guys in Chinon fitting that description, and the few who do must hang around the library. It’s just down the street, here,’ he nodded out the window. ‘I can drop in tomorrow, if you like, and ask around. And if you want to take another look around the chapelle to see if your cousin left anything else there, I’m sure I could sweet-talk Christian into lending me the keys.’

‘Would you?’

‘Sure. Sweet-talking is one of my specialities.’ He smiled, blowing smoke. ‘I have to do a lot of it with my brother.’

I smiled back. ‘Where is Simon, by the way?’

‘Don’t know. He took off after lunch, treasure-hunting, and I haven’t seen him since. After last night’s ghost story, he’s been unstoppable, you know – two Isabelles, two hidden treasures, twice the chance of finding something.’

‘Look on the bright side,’ I told him. ‘At least he won’t be quite so eager to leave Chinon, now. You’ll get to stay a few more days.’

‘Longer than that,’ he reminded me, sagely. ‘Don’t you remember? The Echo told Simon he’d never get me to leave.’ Leaning back, he stretched his arms above his head.
‘Listen, do you want a drink or something? Coffee?’

I looked round the deserted room. ‘Is the bar open, then?’

‘Oh, sure. Thierry’s in the back room, doing paperwork.’

‘Paperwork?’ It seemed an odd thing for the bartender to be doing, and Paul smiled at my reaction.

‘Yeah. I think the receptionist, Gabrielle, is helping him.’

‘Oh, I see.’ I smiled back, as comprehension dawned.

‘I’m supposed to whistle if I want anything.’

He had to whistle twice, in fact, before we heard a stirring from the room behind the bar, and a slightly muffled voice said: ‘Ho-kay, just a moment.’

Across from me, Paul struck a match to light another cigarette, his eyes faintly apologetic. ‘Chain-smoking, I know. My mother would have a fit. But I have to enjoy it while I can, before Simon gets back.’

I bit my lip, thinking. ‘Paul …’

‘Yes?’

‘You won’t tell anybody, will you, about my cousin’s coin?’ If he’d asked ‘why not?’ I would have had a devil of a time explaining. One couldn’t very well explain a feeling. And that was all it was – a feeling, an irrational suspicion that things were not quite what they seemed to be among my fellow guests. I’d felt it that first night at dinner, and again last night, here in the bar – that sense of something darker running underneath the surface, some troubled current that I couldn’t understand. It reminded me of the time, years ago now, when my father had taken us to London to see a play, only he’d read the tickets wrong and we arrived just as the second interval was ending. I’d sat through the final
act in absolute confusion, with the motivating plot-lines of the characters long since laid out and set in motion, so that while I felt their conflict and the atmosphere of tension, I had no idea what was going on.

But whatever the cause of the atmosphere of tension here at the Hotel de France, it didn’t seem to have touched Paul Lazarus. ‘Of course I won’t tell anyone,’ he said. ‘Not if you don’t want me to.’

‘Not even Simon?’

‘Not even Simon.’

‘Thanks,’ I told him. ‘You’re an angel.’

Smiling, he balanced his cigarette on the edge of the ashtray and leaned back in his seat, arms folded complacently across his chest. ‘I do my best.’

‘Aha!’ Simon, coming round the bar door, skewered Paul with a smugly triumphant look. ‘I knew I’d catch you at it sooner or later, I just knew it!’

I couldn’t resist. I reached innocently across for the lit cigarette and raised it to my own lips, inhaling with perfect nonchalance. ‘Catch him at what?’ I asked Simon.

His face fell, and even Paul looked faintly shocked, but I managed to hold the innocent expression long enough to convince Simon.

‘Nothing,’ he said. He glanced uncertainly at Paul. ‘I only thought …’

He wasn’t allowed to finish telling us what he thought. Behind him in the entrance hall the front door blew open and shut and I braced myself as the Whitakers came into the bar, shattering what little remained of the companionable peace that had settled between Paul and myself.

‘Why, Emily!’ Garland raised her eyebrows in a calculated arc and widened her eyes. ‘I didn’t know you smoked.’

I didn’t, actually. I had given it up three years ago, as part of my more responsible approach to life, and I was somewhat relieved to find it tasted awful, but I sent Garland an almost cheerful shrug. ‘Well, we all have to have one vice, don’t we? That’s what my father says.’

‘Only one vice? Darling, how
boring
!’ She sank gracefully onto the soft chair nearest the door and gave a tiny,
self-satisfied
sigh. ‘I won’t be able to get up again, now,’ she pronounced. ‘We must have walked a hundred miles.’

‘Just over the river and back, actually,’ Jim Whitaker put in, as he joined us by the window, ‘but my wife’s not used to walking. And those shoes don’t help.’

Garland lifted one delicately arched foot, the better to examine her tight Italian pumps. ‘I know. I really
must
invest in a pair of sensible shoes like yours, Emily,’ she said, sending me a smile designed to soften the cutting compliment. ‘You English always wear such practical clothes.’

Paul’s eyes laughed at me as he positioned the ashtray nearer me, closing his unfinished book and pushing it aside. He looked at Simon, curious. ‘And where did you take off to, this afternoon?’

‘Oh, nowhere in particular,’ Simon answered, swinging his lanky frame into the chair beside me. He whistled a snatch of something through his teeth and looked around. ‘Where’s Thierry, by the way? Isn’t he working?’

‘He’s in the back, doing paperwork.’ The lie came easily
in Paul’s unhurried voice. ‘He knows we’re here, though. He’ll be out in a minute or two.’

‘Thank God,’ said Garland. ‘I could certainly use a drink after all that marching around. I prefer places we can drive the car to, you know. What about you, Emily?’

‘Oh, I don’t mind walking.’ I smiled politely, folding what was left of the cigarette into the ashtray with exquisite care. ‘I rather enjoy it, actually.’

Garland smiled. ‘Like Neil. Honestly, he makes me tired just watching him. Up and down those stairs all day, and he never even breathes hard. It’s disgusting. Jim used to be fit like that, didn’t you darling? When I first met you. The Army,’ she sighed, ‘does wonderful things to a man’s body. Oh,
there
you are, Thierry, we were beginning to think you’d disappeared.’

Thierry looked rather flushed, and more than a little pleased with himself. Garland mistook his cheerful distraction for an inability to understand.

‘We … thought … you’d … disappeared,’ she repeated, in a louder voice.