The Splendour Falls (20 page)

I smiled. ‘No?’ If Neil Grantham had a flaw, I certainly hadn’t been able to find it.

‘No.’ Lucie shook her head. ‘He has a space, a little space, between his teeth, right here.’ She bared her own front teeth and pointed to the spot. ‘He says it is to whistle with.’

‘Ah.’ Fortunately, I was spared the need for further comment. We had come nearly to the bottom of the ramp now and Lucie tugged at my sleeve, her voice dropping to a solemn whisper. ‘François says it is not good to scare the ducks.’

I took the hunk of bread she gave me and began to throw out crumbs in my best non-threatening manner. It was rather like dropping a chip in Trafalgar Square. From everywhere, it seemed, the ducks came flapping. A small Armada of them massed in the shallows of the river while others tumbled over one another on the cobblestones, adding their full-throated pleas to the general mayhem. They fluttered, they splashed, they begged and demanded and, like the pigeons of Trafalgar Square, they didn’t show the slightest fear of people. How had Neil put it, exactly? No proper sense of danger …

‘… and this one, this is Jacques,’ said Lucie, pointing out her favourite birds among the bunch, ‘and that one with the funny legs I call Ar-ree.’

The bird in question did have funny legs, quite long and skinny, together with a rumpled and dishevelled look that reminded me instantly of my cousin. Something unseen broke the surface of the water beside us and sent a spreading wash of ripples out, unstoppable and oddly sinister.

The gawky duck stared at me and I tossed a crumb towards it. ‘Why Ar-ree?’ I asked, casually.

‘It’s an English name,’ she told me, with a proud upward glance. ‘My Uncle Didier, he has an English friend … well, he’s dead now, of course, but his friend is called Ar-ree. Last week he came to feed the ducks with me, and he said this duck looked just like him.’

I tore the bread between my fingers, with a jerking motion. ‘Harry?’ I checked. ‘Was his name Harry, Lucie?’

‘Yes, Ar-ree. It’s such a funny name. Are many people in England called this?’

‘Quite a few.’ I frowned, thinking hard. Her Uncle Didier, she’d said. I put the names together in my mind – Didier Muret and Harry. Didier and Harry,
here
. ‘Was it last Wednesday that he came to feed the ducks with you?’

She nodded. ‘François had a headache last week, so he couldn’t walk with me. But after lunch my Uncle Didier said he could take me out, instead. He’s dead now,’ she said again, quite matter-of-fact. ‘He’s not as nice as François. François always lets me stay here a long time, and then we have an ice cream. But Uncle Didier had his friend to talk to last week, and he didn’t let me give the ducks all my bread. He was in a hurry, he said.’

A duck flapped against my foot and I took an absent step sideways, flinging down another scattering of crumbs. My bread was very nearly finished. ‘Your uncle’s friend, did he look anything like me?’

‘Yes, very English,’ she said, squinting up at me to check. ‘But his nose was not so straight.’

‘I see. What else do you remember about him?’

‘He was very funny, and he likes to feed the ducks, like me.
And
he can make his ears wiggle.’ Which obviously raised him above the level of the common man, in her opinion. I looked down at the scruffy little duck with the long ungainly legs, and tossed him my last breadcrumb.

He really did remind me of my cousin, that duck. And if Lucie had her story right, then Harry had been here, in Chinon … Harry had been
here
.

I wasn’t given time to ponder this new piece of information. Lucie grabbed me by the hand and pulled me back up the ramp to where François and Neil waited,
chatting like old friends. Neil laughed at something François said, and turned to look at me. ‘Still standing, are you, after that attack? We couldn’t see the two of you for feathers, from up here.’

Lucie looked up at him, her brown eyes curious. ‘Monsieur Neil,’ she asked, in careful English, ‘do your ears move?’

‘I beg your pardon?’

The tone of his voice penetrated my troubled fog of thought, and I smiled in spite of myself. ‘I think she’s asking if you can wiggle your ears.’

‘Oh. Of course I can.’ He crouched to Lucie’s level, and demonstrated. I leaned against the low wall, next to François. I wanted to ask him about Didier Muret, but I couldn’t summon up the courage, so I tried to slide into the questions sideways.

‘She is,’ I said in French, ‘a lovely child.’

‘Yes. I’m very fond of Lucie.’

‘She talked to me a bit about her uncle. She seems to be taking his death well, for one so young.’

I felt the brush of his eyes and he lifted his shoulders. ‘Didier Muret,’ he told me, cryptically, ‘was not the sort of man one mourns. And anyway, she didn’t know him well.’

‘Was he a historian?’ I kept the question lightly curious. For after all, I thought, we only had Victor Belliveau’s word …

‘A historian?’ He turned that time, to look at me directly. ‘No, Mademoiselle, he was a clerk – a lawyer’s clerk – when he worked at all.’

‘Oh. I must have got it wrong, then.’ The doubting
flooded back, and what had seemed so certain moments earlier now hovered in the realm of the improbable. Why would an unemployed lawyer’s clerk, who reportedly read no English, be interested in a British article on Isabelle of Angoulême, I wondered? It simply made no sense.

François looked back at Neil and Lucie, his weary eyes softening. ‘She is just like her father sometimes, very charming. And she doesn’t take no for an answer.’

The child was giggling at the moment, a delighted and infectious sound. ‘Again,’ she commanded, and Neil sighed in mock despair.

‘They’ll fall off, you know, and then you’ll be sorry.’

But he wiggled his ears again, anyway, and was rewarded with another fit of giggles from his appreciative audience. It was a difficult sound to resist. So it was odd that François’s smile faded, the lines on his face deepening as though something had pained him.

Concerned, I touched his arm. ‘Are you all right?’

I saw the shiver, hastily suppressed, and fancied for a moment that his gaze seemed faintly questing on my face, but when he spoke he looked himself again.

‘Yes, I am fine, Mademoiselle. I am an old man, that is all. Sometimes I see the ghosts.’

I didn’t go straight back to the hotel. Instead I turned along a narrow street and went in search of the smaller square where Martine Muret kept her gallery.

It wasn’t difficult to find. A few acacias grew here as well, draped over cobbled stone, well pitted and grown dark with age. The sun shone warmly, cheerfully, upon the clustering of leaning shops and houses, reflected in the gleaming glass front of the little gallery.

Even without Christian’s paintings hanging in the window, I believe I would have known the place belonged to Martine. It looked like her, somehow – so smart and neat and elegant, with everything in perfect order. But Christian’s oils clinched the matter. They stood out from the other paintings easily, the bolder brush strokes and exquisite play of light and shadow lending them a warm, romantic feel. Stepping closer, I peered with interest at the softly swirled
self-portrait Paul had mentioned. Christian, I thought, had a master’s touch. He’d shown himself no quarter, tracing every jutting outline of his sharply contoured face, the pale eyes gently sombre and the golden hair uncombed.

He’d breathed similar life into his landscapes. I saw the walls of Château Chinon shiver under storm clouds, and the idle spreading peace of fields flecked liberally with grazing cows, but my favourite of his paintings was the one that showed the river.

He had painted it at sunset, not far from the steps where Paul often sat. The steps themselves were plainly there, beneath the looming silhouette of Rabelais, and on the placid water three ducks drifted round a weathered punt, moored close against the sloping wall, while further off the gleaming arches of the bridge stretched like a golden thread from shore to shore. The only thing missing from that picture, I thought, was Paul himself, sitting halfway down the steps with his back to the traffic above, reading
Ulysses
and smoking an illicit cigarette.

It wasn’t often that a painting so transported me, and when Martine herself came out onto the doorstep to greet me, she had to speak twice before I heard her.

‘It is a lovely painting, that one, is it not?’ She smiled, understanding.

‘Very lovely.’ I bit my lip. ‘Is it very expensive?’

‘Not so expensive as his others. It is a smaller canvas, and there are no cows in it. Tourists,’ she informed me, ‘like the cows, and so the cows have higher prices than the river. But if you like, I have a price list.’

I came inside and waited while she went to fetch the list.
The gallery’s interior was bright and white and spotless, meant to show off every sculpture, sketch and painting to advantage. Martine had a clever eye for art, I thought. I didn’t see a single work that I would not have wanted to own myself. Still, I fancied most of it was well outside my price range, and when Martine finally found the list and ran her finger down it, I braced myself for the inevitable. Not that it mattered, I consoled myself. I hadn’t come to buy a painting, anyway. I’d only come to ask Martine some subtle questions about her ex-husband, Didier Muret.

‘Painting number 88,’ she said at last. ‘Yes, here it is.’ The sum she quoted was almost twice what I earned in a month.

I heard a quiet footstep on the polished floor behind me. ‘Perhaps Christian will reduce his prices, for a friend.’ A man’s voice, but the accent was distinctly French, not German. I hadn’t seen Armand Valcourt come in. Martine had, though; she didn’t bat an eyelid as she shook her head, a smile softening her sigh.

‘Christian,’ she said, ‘would give them all away, I think, these paintings. He has too generous a nature. Always I must watch him and remind him painters, too, must eat.’

I glanced round at Armand, and said good morning. ‘I saw your daughter earlier, by the river.’

‘Yes.’ He smiled. ‘This is her morning with François. The ducks, I think, and then the ice cream … such a simple way to happiness. She likes her Wednesdays, my Lucie.’

His eyes were quite unhurried as they roamed the quiet gallery, and he didn’t seem in any rush to move. So much, I thought, for my chance of a private chat with Martine. I
tried to hide my disappointment by asking him how old his daughter was, exactly.

‘Lucie? She has nearly seven years.’

‘And already she has genius,’ said her slightly biased aunt. ‘She can tell you every step of how the wine is made, that little one.’

‘She is a Valcourt,’ Armand said, as if that explained everything. ‘It will be hers one day, the
Clos des Cloches
, and so I pass traditions down, as I learned from my father.’

Martine smiled. ‘But she is half her mother’s child, remember. She likes the vine but also likes the art. Perhaps one day she will begin the home for artists that Brigitte so often talked about.’

‘God help us.’ Armand shuddered. ‘The artist by himself, he can be interesting. A few of them at dinner, when they are not fighting, that also can be interesting. But a house of artists,’ his eyes rolled heavenward at the thought. ‘They would drive me mad.’

‘You will forgive my brother-in-law,’ Martine said, her dark eyes teasing. ‘He likes only the art on his wine labels.’

Armand looked offended. ‘That is not true. I like this painting very much.’ He nodded at a watercolour hung behind the cash register, a sweeping vista of a vineyard with a mellow-walled château nestled in the distance. ‘This shows great talent.’

‘This shows grapes.’ Martine’s voice was dry. ‘But no matter. I’m sorry, Armand, was there something that you needed?’

‘No, not really.’

‘Oh.’ Surprise flashed momentarily across her lovely
fragile face, from which I gathered that Armand Valcourt didn’t often visit the gallery without a reason.

‘No, I was just passing, and I thought I would come and see what you have done. Lucie says there are sculptures, somewhere, that are new.’

Martine considered; shook her head. ‘Not new ones, no. I do not think …’

‘Ah, well. You know Lucie, she sometimes gets her story wrong.’ He didn’t seem concerned. Hands in his pockets, he leaned closer to me, his breath feathering my neck as he studied a smaller pen-and-ink drawing on the counter. ‘And this is also nice, Martine. It is by Christian, yes?’

She looked, and nodded. ‘Yes.’

‘It looks like Victor’s place.’ He reached to pick the drawing up, his arm brushing casually against my shoulder. ‘Yes, so it is. I wonder sometimes what Victor does with himself, these days. Do you ever hear from him?’

Martine shook her head. ‘Christian sees him, now and then. They have a drink and talk.’ She smiled at me, in vague apology. ‘This is a friend of ours we speak of, an old friend.’

Victor Belliveau, I nearly said. Of course, they all would know each other from the days when Brigitte Valcourt had held her magnificent parties up at the
Clos des Cloches
. A poet would have been included on the guest list, I decided, alongside musical Neil and clever Christian. I longed to ask Martine about those parties, just as I longed to ask her if her former husband ever talked of history, or of Englishmen named Harry. But even as I tried to summon up the nerve, a telephone rang shrilly in the gallery’s back room, and
Martine excused herself to answer it, her heels clicking on the hard tile floor as she walked away.

Armand shifted at my shoulder, looking down at me. After a moment’s silence, he cleared his throat and spoke. ‘I have a confession.’

‘Oh, yes?’ I glanced up.

‘I have not much interest in art. And sculpture bores me.’ He moved around to lean against the counter, facing me, and raised one hand in an automatic gesture before remembering he shouldn’t smoke here. The hand went back inside his pocket. ‘When I said that I was passing, that was true. But I only stopped because I saw you here.’ He grinned. ‘It is no easy matter, in a town this size, to find someone.’

Harry always said I had a talent for deducing the obvious, and I displayed it now. ‘You were looking for me?’

He shrugged. ‘I thought, if you had not made plans already, you might let me buy you lunch.’

‘Lunch.’ I repeated the word rather stupidly, and he brought his smiling eyes back to mine.

‘Yes. Most days my lunch hours are reserved for Lucie. My work, it keeps me very busy, so I try to keep this hour for her, our private time. You understand?’ Convinced I did, he carried on. ‘But on Wednesdays, François takes Lucie for half the day, and they eat lunch together, so I am left with no one.’

No one? On the contrary, I thought, the women must be queuing up.

‘You don’t believe me?’ His eyes were warm behind the coal-black lashes. ‘It is true. I am a rich man, Mademoiselle,
but the price one pays for influence is isolation.’

It was a blatant attempt to play upon my sympathies, and while it didn’t work, I must confess I couldn’t see the harm in having lunch. Besides, I thought, Armand Valcourt had also known Didier Muret. Perhaps I could ask him the questions I had meant to ask Martine.

‘All right, then,’ I said, on impulse, ‘I’d be happy to have lunch with you.’

‘Good.’ He flashed a smile briefly, raised his eyes, then dropped them to his watch. ‘Good, then I shall pick you up at your hotel at noon, if you like?’

My own watch read nine forty-five. ‘All right.’

‘Good,’ he said again, pushing away from the counter. ‘In that case I will leave you for the moment, to enjoy the paintings. I have business still to do before we eat. You will excuse me?’ His smile was very charming, but it wasn’t serious. It didn’t mean anything.

He showed the same smile to the rumpled young man who bumped shoulders with him in the doorway. ‘Morning,’ Simon said cheerfully, as Armand slipped past him into the shaded street. Whistling an aimless happy tune, Simon stepped into the gallery and stopped short at the sight of me. ‘
There
you are!’ From his tone, one would have thought I was some errant schoolgirl, late for lessons. ‘Paul’s been looking everywhere for you, you know. You missed breakfast.’

‘Yes, well—’

‘He’s back at the hotel now, waiting for you to turn up.’

Martine emerged from the back room, having dealt with her telephone caller. Her dark eyes, dancing, travelled from
Simon’s face to mine. ‘You are much in demand, I think, this morning. All these men come looking for you.’

Simon, bless his heart, said: ‘I’m looking for Christian, actually. Thought you might know where he is.’

She arched a curious eyebrow. ‘Christian?’

‘Yeah. I wanted to borrow … something.’

‘If he is not at home …’

‘He isn’t.’

‘Then you might try in the next street,’ she advised him, ‘around this corner. He talked last night about making a drawing there.’

Simon, to my surprise, showed no desire to hang about chatting to Martine. Thanking her, he turned to me. ‘You should probably come with me,’ he decided, ‘so we don’t lose you again.’

There was little point in staying, I thought glumly, as heavy footsteps sounded on the front step and an elderly couple entered the gallery, calling out a greeting to Martine. She saw us graciously to the door, her eyes faintly puzzled as they met mine over our handshake. ‘Was there something else, Mademoiselle, that you were wanting to ask?’

‘No.’ The lie fell heavy as a lump of lead.

‘It’s only that …’ She stopped, and shook her head, and the bemused expression cleared. ‘No matter, it is nothing. Enjoy your day, the both of you.’

The day, I found, had swiftly changed its character. The sun now hung, suppressed, behind a screen of dull grey cloud, and the air smelled faintly of motor oil and coming rain.

Simon took the lead and I followed him, head down and
deep in thought. So deep in thought, in fact, that at the next corner I nearly ploughed straight into Christian Rand without seeing him. Not that it would have mattered to Christian – he probably wouldn’t have noticed. The young artist was lost in contemplation of a different kind, staring with half-seeing eyes at the bakery across the road.

Neil Grantham was something of a recurring theme this morning. He was standing next to Christian now, head back and hands on hips, his calm gaze focused on the same building. I looked, saw nothing too remarkable, and offered my apologies to Christian for so nearly tripping over him.

At first I thought he hadn’t heard, but then the roughly cropped blonde head dipped forward slightly, in a silent nod of acknowledgement.

‘Working, eh?’ asked Simon, and again the artist nodded, not moving his eyes.

‘I must tear down this building,’ he said, slowly, ‘it spoils my composition. But how … how …?’

I shot Neil a quizzical glance.

‘He doesn’t mean it,’ he assured me. ‘He does it all in his head, you see – pulls things down, or lumps them closer together, to make a better picture. Artists can do that sort of thing.’

‘Oh.’ I hadn’t really taken Christian literally, if only because knocking down a building required a physical energy that seemed quite beyond him, somehow – but it always helped to have a proper explanation.

Neil smiled, understanding. ‘I only know because my brother paints, and he tears things down all the time. He’s
very much like Christian, actually, my brother is, though his paintings aren’t nearly as good.’

‘You’ve a talented family, then.’

He shrugged. ‘It comes from my mother, I suppose. She used to sketch, and teach piano.’

‘So what did your father do?’ Simon asked drily. ‘What was he, a writer? Actor? Opera singer?’

‘He worked for British Rail.’ The boyish grin was like a flash of light.

I looked away and checked my watch again. ‘I’d best find Paul,’ I said. ‘Excuse me.’

I left the three men standing like a mismatched group of statuary in the middle of the street, with Simon chattering on to Christian about borrowing a shovel and bucket. Rather like a child going to play at the seashore, I thought with a smile. Well, perhaps he’d find his treasure, after all. No harm in trying.

The hotel bar was closed until the lunch hour, but I found Paul sitting in there anyway, reading in the semi-darkness. He put
Ulysses
down when I came in, and stretched, his expression relieved. ‘Well, it’s about time. I was starting to get worried.’