“Only you,” I said accusingly “could eat at a time like this.”
“ Oh, that’s not fair,” from Michelle. “He hardly knows Philippe.”
“It’s not that I’m insensitive,” Tom said, biting on his bread and smiling gratefully at Michelle. “It’s that I’m hungry. Now” – he finished his food and wiped his hands on his napkin – “we are clear there is nothing more we can do. I suggest we all have a good night’s sleep and start again at dawn. You will be at the house if anything happens, Clare, and we shall all be nearby.”
“But ...” I began.
Tom held tip his hand. “There are no buts, Clare, if you will forgive me. There is absolutely nothing more we can do, and to lose sleep will not help Philippe. If he is not found by tomorrow, his father must decide what action to take. Have you thought,” he said, dropping his voice, “that he may have been kidnapped.”
“Kidnapped!” Jeanne cried, holding her face in terror. “Mon Dieu! I shall pray all night.”
“There may be a note. It is a possibility. This is a large house and anyone could easily get in or out. You say a number of sinister things have been happening ... well.”
Tom was right, of course, but I wanted him to stay.
“If you were here,” I said, “maybe it would be better. I mean, to be on hand.”
“There is plenty of space,” Jeanne said eagerly. Jeanne wanted him too.
“Then I’ll stay,” said Tom. “As long as I don’t compromise Clare. You must make sure we’re not even on the same floor.”
There was a stupid grin on his face which made me cross.
“If you’re going to be childish about this you might as well go back,” I said, furious that he was making us feel so helplessly feminine and foolish. “I just feel that to have a strong man about the place might be a good thing. If you can’t stay, Nicolas Bourdin might.”
“He’s at sea,” Michelle said shortly. “I think you should stay, Tom. You can sleep in Laurent’s bed. He won’t mind, and it will save fuss at this time of night.”
Tom glanced gratefully at Michelle. “You have a very level head, my dear. Thank God for you.”
It was such a typical Tom-like thing to say, chauvinistic and patronising. This little woman was being level headed, as opposed to all the other little women, like me, who were not so reasonable.
“Oh, Christ!” I said. “For heaven’s sake, go back to the Rue du Chateau, and I mean it. I’m going to bed. Come, Jeanne, we can look after ourselves.”
Tom gaped at me, but I was too exhausted, too worried, and too angry with Tom, myself, and everyone else to care.
“I could stay,” he began.
“No, go home. Take Michelle home first. We’ll see you all in the morning.”
With that, I swept out of the room, their voices echoing after me. Tom would be saying how difficult Clare was and they would all be agreeing, presumably.
Once inside my room, I leaned against the door without putting on the light. I’d left my curtains open; the moon was not full, but there was enough light for me to discern the outline of the furniture once I’d grown used to the darkened room. I closed my eyes and tried to evoke her presence.
“Rose, Rose, where are you?” I whispered, my body taut with anticipation.
But there was nothing, no little stir of air, no incipient presence.
Rose wasn’t there.
CHAPTER 15
Half-dreams came from half-sleeping. I’d wake up and sit upright, listening, but the sounds only told me the tide was coming in and then the steady chug of the boats returning with the catch. I drifted off to sleep again, but the voices in my dreams offered no help, no reassurance.
Then, something called me insistently. Rose!
I propped myself on my elbows, wide awake and alert. I had heard a voice, a very clear voice calling my name. “Yes, Rose, yes?” I breathed into the night. Yet it wasn’t night. It was almost dawn.
I was positive I’d heard a voice. I put on my gown and opened the door.
“Claaaarrreee ...” I heard it again, as though from a long way off. It was a child’s voice! Philippe!
I rushed along the corridor, but it was quiet and dark. The sound seemed to have come from above. I went up to the next floor, quickly opened all the doors – the children’s playroom, the schoolroom, Laurent’s room (Tom wasn’t there!). I opened the door to the turret and tiptoed up until I stood outside Jeanne’s room. Silence. Should I call her? I knocked on the door. Silence.
“Jeanne, Jeanne!”
She fumbled with the catches; the door opened a slit.
“Clare! What is it?”
“Someone called my name. I’m sure it was Philippe. Listen!”
“Claaaarrrrrrre ...Jeannnnnnnne ...”
“It’s you, too. Oh, Jeanne, it’s Philippe!”
“It’s outside,” she said, and we both rushed to the window, flinging it open wide.
“Philippe!”
“I’m here. I’m here.”
“He’s on the roof,” Jeanne breathed. “Oh, merciful God!”
“Philippe!” I shouted. “Where are you?”
“I’m over your head, on the roof. I tried to get down, but I’m stuck. If you come onto the balcony – oh, help me.”
“How do we get to the balcony? The roof balcony?” I asked urgently.
“The room above this. There is a window.”
“Come on.”
We rushed up the next flight of stairs and opened the door into an empty room roughly the size of Jeanne’s. The balcony with its delicate balustrade was before us, empty, and opposite the twin turret with an open window.
“He was in the other turret. He must have got out.”
“Philippe, we are here but we can’t see you.”
“I got over the balcony. I’m stuck on the roof below.”
“Mother of Christ,” breathed Jeanne.
“Why did we let Tom go?” I wondered, climbing out of the window onto the flat surface and crossing to the balustrade. And there, straddled across the sloping roof, which was part of the earlier medieval structure, was Philippe. Like Fabrice in the tree that other day, he seemed unable to go forward or backwards.
I hadn’t the slightest idea how to get to him.
“Stay there, Philippe. Don’t move. We’ll get a ladder.”
There was a movement beside me and Jeanne stood gazing down at Philippe, her hands to her face.
“Oh, mon Dieu,” she sighed, and at that instant Philippe looked up at her and, losing his grip, fell down the sloping roof and plunged to the ground below.
Time seemed to have stopped. I flew downstairs, out to the terrace, and down the steps to the garden, leaving Jeanne a long way behind. Philippe was lying on the ground, but incredibly, marvellously he was alive and conscious. He raised his head as I ran up to him.
“Oh, Philippe, Philippe ...” I knew one must be careful with someone who’d fallen, but still I touched his head and his face.
“Are you all right?”
“I can’t move my leg.”
I looked and it was tucked grotesquely under him. “I think it’s broken, but if that’s all, Philippe, it’s a miracle; but you mustn’t move. Stay there. I’ll call Michelle.”
Now Jeanne ran towards us, her hands still clutching her face.
“Oh, my God. He’s all right? He breathes?”
“I think he’s broken his leg; but don’t move him. Oh, Jeanne, it’s a miracle! Did you ever see such a fall? From a roof, three floors up?”
In the dawn light I saw her face, and the look on it took my breath away. It was exultant; and, as I looked she raised her eyes to the sky, which was now flushed with the pink of morning. Suddenly I remembered how Joan of Arc had fallen sixty or seventy feet to the ground from the top of the tower in Beaurevoir, where she had been imprisoned. She’d been found completely without injury. Then Jeanne looked into my eyes, and I knew she knew what I was thinking.
When I got ba
ck from phoning Michelle, Jeanne was sitting on the ground, Philippe’s head in her lap, talking gently to him.
“Is he all right?”
“Perfectly. He is quite rational and nothing hurts, not even the leg, probably because it is broken. He’s telling me that he felt something holding him up as he fell, and I was telling him the story of Jeanne d’Arc, my namesake, and how she fell from the tower at Beaurevoir, and how God saved her.”
“And she told me that as she saw me fall she said a quick prayer to St Joan, so it is a miracle,” Philippe finished, his little voice puffed with pride.
I felt my eyes welling with tears. “It’s very remarkable,” I said. “Ah, here is Michelle.”
Michelle pronounced him unhurt except for a broken leg, and he was moved inside to the couch in the salon. I think she was more amazed than either of us and couldn’t stop measuring with her eyes the distance between the top of the roof and the ground.
“Of course, a child’s body is very much more elastic than ours, the bones aren’t as brittle. But I can’t explain it. How did he come to be there?”
In the confusion, none of us had thought to ask, and we all now stared at Philippe.
“Yes, how did you get on the roof? We were frantic.”
“I got locked in the room in the back turret.”
“But Philippe, what were you doing in the room in the back turret?”
Philippe hung his head. I could see he was afraid that here his heroism would end.
“I didn’t feel like doing my French verbs. I’d heard Madame Barbou talking about the tower and how it had been closed because the house was too big. I’d never seen inside it; the door was always locked. But this morning as I was eating my apple in the kitchen and Madame Barbou was talking to Pierre the gardener about the turret I noticed that the door was open, and I shut it so everyone would think it was still locked.
“I was on my way upstairs last night when I remembered the tower and thought I must see inside it. I don’t know why. I waited until Madame Barbou went into the larder for something and then I shot past her up the stairs of the turret.”
His eyes were gleaming and I could sense the thrill of his adventure. I took his hand and pressed it.
“The turret was very disappointing. It was just like the front turret where Jeanne’s room is, and I’ve seen that lots of times. But when I came down and tried to get out, the door into the kitchen was locked. I was too scared to make a noise and thought I would get out when everyone was in bed.”
“But Philippe, you must have known how frightened we would all be.”
Philippe looked uncomfortable. It was too easy, of course, to see how it had all happened. The child doing something he shouldn’t; the door accidentally locked; his fear of being found out; his total unawareness of the effect it would have on the rest of the house. Did he really think everyone would just go to sleep and hope for the best?”
Well, in a sense he’d been right. We had gone to sleep, and then he’d tried to get out over the balcony and down the roof. My eyes closed as I pictured him there again, straddled across the roof, and then another picture came into my mind. Philippe had been perfectly all right until Jeanne had come and stood beside me; he’d been panicky but not desperate. After Jeanne had come he’d looked at her and suddenly lost his grip and fallen, just like Fabrice, I thought.
The evil eye. I stared at Jeanne sitting in the chair opposite Philippe, looking so pale, so anxious about him. Yes, it was genuine, I was sure and, if Tom was right, and she did have some kind of psychotic disorder, did she perhaps not know what she was doing?
Before we knew it, it was morning. The children came tumbling downstairs, released Goofy from his shed in the back garden where he spent the night, and fell on their brother. In no time Fabrice was in tears at having missed all the fun, but Noelle, my dear little sensitive Noelle, was shaken and cried for a different reason. Then Madame Barbou came, and the elder Bourdin and the policeman and finally Tom, who looked as though he’d fallen straight out of bed into his clothes.
“My hero,” I said sarcastically when I saw him.
“How the hell did I know. Was I just supposed to stay the night even though you were so bloody rude?”
“I thought you were a psychologist,” I said, “and that you would understand the delicate mechanism of the female psyche.”
“Like hell I do,” Tom said. “That is exactly what I don’t understand.”
Michelle was watching us with what I took to be amusement.
“You two,” she said, “one would think you were still in love.”
“In love!” Tom and I spoke together.
The tremendous scorn and indignation in our voices didn’t seem to reassure her otherwise, because she went on smiling as she prepared Philippe for the ambulance which would take him to Abbeville for X-rays, further tests and to have his leg set.
The rest of the morning was chaotic. The ambulance came and went, taking Philippe and Michelle with it. The children were sent up to the classroom with Jeanne, work being considered the best thing to take their minds off the accident. Lisa went away to do whatever it was she had to do, and by about twelve Tom and I were on our own, sipping coffee served by Madame Barbou. She looked harassed.
“You have too much to do, Madame.”
“I have, Madame. Thank God my daughter Agnes, the one with the large family, is coming to help me from tomorrow on, and she will do the cleaning.”
“Oh, that’s good. Thank you.” I took the coffee and sipped it. “Madame Barbou, was the back turret not searched yesterday?”
“I don’t know, Madame. I don’t think so. That door is always locked. Monsieur never opened that turret after the restoration. He said the house was big enough.”
“And the door from the kitchen is always locked?”
“Oh, bien sur, Madame. I have never known it to be open.
“It’s never cleaned?”
“No. I was saying only that morning to Pierre that he should go up one day and make sure there are no rats.”
“But he didn’t go up yesterday?”
“I am sure not, Madame. It is his half-day off.”
“Then why was the door open?”
“The door was open?”
“It must have been when you were talking to Pierre that Philippe was in the kitchen eating an apple?”
Madame Barbou thought for a long moment, finally agreeing with me. “I think it was, Madame, yes.”
“He saw the door open and shut it so that he could go up later without anyone knowing.”
“The monkey!”
“But who opened it?”
“I never saw it open, Madame.”
I looked at Tom. “Yet another mystery.”
“It is very strange,” Tom agreed, drinking his coffee. “But it isn’t sinister, is it?” I thought I saw the trace of a smile on his lips.
“That isn’t sinister, but how about this?’ And I gave him a full account of the fall and Jeanne’s curious behaviour. “She looked as though she was seeing a vision. She seemed to be staring up to the heavens and saying ‘thank you’.”
“But first you think she made him fall? I don’t get it, Clare.”
“I can’t say what made him fall, except that it happened just as she appeared and stood beside me. He seemed to catch her eye and then, wham!”
“But your appearance might have unsettled him, too.”
“Yes. What worries me more right now is how he ever got up there –the open door.”
Just then we were interrupted by the telephone. It was Laurent. It appeared he’d stopped overnight somewhere and had only now received our message from the concierge. I was pleased I could tell him all was well; he sounded overwrought and anxious.
“I have had further bad news,” he said.
“What?”
“It can wait until I see you. I won’t be here long, just a few days. Is that husband of yours with you?”
“Yes, he came early
because of Philippe.”
“Philippe needs a good smack. I’m thinking of taking all the children back to Paris so I can keep my eyes on them. Something very funny is going on, Clare.”
“We think so, too.”
“We?”
“Tom and I.”
“I think I’ve lost you, Clare. It’s the conjugal ‘we’ already.”
“Don’t be silly, Laurent. Hurry back. We’ll see you soon. That is, the family and I.”
Laurent laughed and rang off.
When I returned to the salon, Michelle was there with Philippe, who looked very happy and important, with his leg in plaster. Michelle was drinking coffee and talking animatedly to Tom. Tom liked intelligent women, and he was responding, smiling back at her and telling her to slow down because his French was not so good as mine.
“Ah,” she greeted me. “Philippe has no broken bones other than a nasty fracture of the femur, no internal injuries, and is quite fit. The hospital staff were amazed.”
“You were very quick.”
“They took us immediately. I knew the doctor and it was over in an hour. He must rest for two or three days but may attend lessons.”
Philippe’s face fell.
“And pay particular attention to your French verbs,” I said as severely as I could. “Your papa will soon be back.”
“That was Laurent?” Tom asked.
“Yes. He’ll be back in a few days.”
“Then you’ll have to find somewhere else to go. You don’t want to be compromised”
“I shall go back to my house,” I said spiritedly, “and you can move into a hotel. And Tom, I’m here to write a book, and for the rest of today and all of tomorrow I’m going to do nothing but work.”
“What a good idea. Michelle, may I escort you home on my way back? No doubt we shall have a few hours before the alarm rings on the next emergency.”
Michelle’s eyes shone as she looked at Tom. He took her arm and helped her to her feet. Blast Tom, I thought; he was actually flirting with the girl before my very eyes. And she had a nerve, too. I felt irrationally annoyed.
“But Philippe!” Michelle turned. “Who will look after him?”
“Don’t worry,” I said sweetly. “I’ll go and find Lisa this instant, and then I’m going to immerse myself in my work. Have fun, you two.”
Rose, Rose Where Are You? Page 16