‘Why, Betty, of course. She doesn’t speak a word of French. Whenever she needs to ask a question or to buy anything for me in a shop, you must go with her and speak for her. And tell her what the answer means, as well.’
‘You needn’t worry, Betty,’ Matthew said reassuringly, accepting his responsibilities. ‘I’ll see you’re all right.’
‘Thank you, Master Matthew.’ Margaret and Mr Renfrew were both finding it difficult to keep a straight face, but Betty’s relief sounded genuine: already the sound of French voices on the steamer had made her uneasy.
The itinerary had been planned by William ostensibly to improve Matthew’s education. Claudine had presumably returned to her father’s farm in the valley of the Dordogne. In order to break the journey, Margaret and her companions were to spend some days in Paris on the way, lingering to admire its works of art.
To Margaret’s great surprise, Matthew - who had probably never been inside an art gallery before - did not need to be bribed or bullied into fulfilling his father’s requirements. The crowded galleries of the Palais du Louvre reduced him to an awed silence. He showed little interest in landscape painting, and none at all in still life, but any representation of the human face seemed to fascinate him. Mr Renfrew, improving the occasion as was his duty, embarked upon a lecture on Renaissance art, but Margaret shook her head to silence him. The gesture was unnecessary, for Matthew was not listening. All his concentration was on the pictures in front of him. It was an unexpected enthusiasm for an eleven-year-old boy. Watching him, Margaret was reminded of her father. In just this way had John Junius Lorimer been able to cut himself off from the outside world as he cradled a jade carving in his hand and stroked it with a thick finger.
The excuse for making the long journey south had been that Matthew should be shown the prehistoric cave paintings at Sarlat and Les Eyzies. When the plan was made, William had merely been looking for the most acceptable cultural destination in the neighbourhood of Claudine’s village. He had had no reason to expect that his son would have the slightest interest in the paintings. Yet it seemed possible to Margaret that Matthew might after all turn the excuse into a worthwhile experience. Already he had asked to be given a sketchpad. The pencils which came with it dissatisfied him, for he had noticed already that the painters he now admired used light and shade, not hard lines, to achieve their effects. Margaret hoped that he would find the prehistoric outlines of mammoths and reindeer more satisfactory to copy.
They arrived at Sarlat late in the evening, tired after so much travelling, and were driven straight to their hotel. From the window of her room there, Margaret looked out at the narrow street. Old houses, solidly built in stone and surmounted by pepperpot roofs of grey slate, crowded together on either side of its steep cobbled inclines. Everything within sight appeared to be at least two hundred years old, including the huge four-poster bed in which she was to sleep. In fact she did not sleep well, worried about the interview with Claudine the next day.
In spite of Mr Renfrew’s anxiety she went alone, hiring for transport something between a cart and a carriage, drawn by a single horse. The driver was a silent man, who brushed aside the name of the farm she mentioned - asking instead which family lived in it - and then did not speak again. It gave Margaret the opportunity to collect her thoughts and practise in silence the questions she would need to ask.
Her mission was delicate and demanded some subtlety. It would have been difficult even in English, but in French! Like Matthew, she had learned the language from books, and although she had been an apt pupil in the schoolroom, twelve years had passed since then. Claudine had understood little English, so not much help could be expected from that quarter. In every situation which she had so far encountered in France, Margaret had been able to formulate a simple, direct question or statement. But this was going to be neither simple nor direct.
The driver clicked with his tongue, and the horse came to a standstill. The man who appeared at the boundary of his small vineyard at the sound of strangers looked at Margaret in a curious way, but answered her questions civilly enough. Claudine was his sister, he told her. She was married and lived on another farm not far away. With one of her questions already answered, Margaret waited while the new destination was communicated to the driver, who spat to one side in a gesture of acknowledgement.
Instead of turning back to the road they continued along the same rough track, jolting downwards between wooded cliffs. The sheer sides were pierced with the openings of caves, and Margaret allowed herself to wonder whether Matthew was at this moment enjoying his own expedition with Mr Renfrew to an underground cavern. Then the driver spat again, and she successfully translated this as meaning that they had arrived.
Jumping down to the ground, she looked at the solid stone farmhouse which lay in a hollow in front of her. Its living quarters occupied a single storey, but this was raised from the ground to allow animals to shelter underneath. Cowsheds and a barn stood at right angles to the farmhouse, so that the yard was enclosed on three sides.
The approach was not a welcoming one. Cow dung lay thick in the yard, and its sharp smell carried a long way on such a hot day. A group of mud-caked pigs nosed amongst it, slurping down the kitchen waste which must have been recently flung out of the nearest door. Flies circled by the hundred, but their buzzing was drowned by the barking of dogs. The noisiest and the most vicious in appearance of these was on a long chain which slid up and down a wire, enabling him to guard a considerable area, but his two companions, unconfined, seemed equally unfriendly. Margaret stood still for a moment, hoping that the hubbub would bring a member of the family out to her.
Her hope was quickly realized. A new noise was added to the general confusion, as a dozen or more grey geese came running out of the barn, protesting angrily at their eviction. Behind them - the cause of their haste - a young boy banged with a stick on an old tin bucket and shouted shrill directions about the way they should go.
Margaret stared at the boy. Even in the slums of London she had rarely seen any filthier urchin. His legs rivalled the pigs for muddiness: he seemed not to notice the muck in which he trod. He had grown too tall for his trousers, which were torn as high as his knees. Margaret noted all this, but immediately ignored it, for her eyes were riveted on his head.
At first sight it seemed that he had been in some ludicrous manner thatched with straw. Certainly there was plenty of straw mixed with his hair, as though he had recently been burrowing in the barn. But the hair itself was straw-coloured. Many small boys had fair hair, Margaret knew - although not so many in this part of France. But she could think of only one grown man who had preserved precisely this shade of yellowness.
Another of her questions had been answered before it was asked. She had found Ralph’s son.
4
Seekers after truth can be divided into two categories: those who hope to find proof of what they already believe, and those who would prefer to discover that no such proof exists. The sight of the Lorimer features, dirty but still distinctive in the unlikely setting of a French farmyard, ought not to have surprised Margaret. Had she not been expecting to find just such a boy? Yet subconsciously she must have been hoping that Claudine had deceived the family, had earned herself a dowry by a lie. Nothing else would explain why the expected meeting came as such an unwelcome surprise.
The boy had seen her now. He gave one last clang with his stick and the geese scurried away with an attempt at high-headed dignity. Then he stood in front of the visitor, waiting for her to speak.
Ralph’s long nose and face were recognizable, as well as the hair, but the cheekbones were higher and wider, narrowing his eyes. In her careful French, Margaret asked him his name.
‘Jean-Claude, Madame.’
‘Is your mother here, Jean-Claude?’
He shouted for her. The dogs, which had reduced their welcome to an occasional menacing growl, began to bark again. A woman came out of the kitchen door and stood at the top of the s
tone steps, wiping her hands on the apron tied round her waist.
Claudine had grown fat, and was not very much cleaner than her son, but her smile as she recognized Margaret was as warm as ever. During her brief reign as nursery governess she had never behaved like a servant and now, mistress of her own house, she greeted her visitor without deference. Jean-Claude was chivvied away with a series of shrill instructions to remember his duties with the geese. Then she turned again to Margaret.
‘You will understand, Mademoiselle,’ she said, speaking her native language more slowly for the benefit of a foreigner, ‘that he believes himself to be the son of my husband.’
The words were a caution. A surprise as well. But one which was likely to suit the Lorimer plans. Margaret assured Claudine that she had no intention of saying anything which would disturb the life of the family, and was at once rewarded by an invitation into the kitchen.
Three other children playing on the floor there were shooed away, swept out by a flapping of their mother’s skirts as though they were geese or pigs which had strayed into the wrong part of the farm.
‘So!’ Claudine poured two cups of coffee from a pan which stood on the hob and motioned Margaret to sit on one of the wooden chairs. ‘It is a great pleasure to see you again, Mam’selle. I hope that all your family are in good health. Your father, for example. He was very generous to me. I remember him in my prayers every day.’
‘My father is dead,’ said Margaret.
‘I am sorry,’ said Claudine. ‘Is that the reason for your visit?’
She lowered her voice out of respect as she spoke, but Margaret noticed that her eyes had brightened at the news. What they expressed was not precisely greed; rather a natural acceptance of the possibility that a rich man would wish to remember all his grandsons in his will.
‘Before he died, my father lost all his money,’ Margaret told her. ‘The bank …’ she searched for the right word and failed to find it. ‘All his business was in ruins. There was nothing left.’ Noticing that her appearance was under scrutiny, she added - almost as though she needed to excuse herself - ‘I have to work for my living now.’
Claudine shrugged her shoulders, not allowing herself to be depressed by disappointment in a possibility which had occurred to her only a few seconds earlier. ‘You have my sympathy, Mam’selle,’ she murmured.
‘Tell me your own news, Claudine,’ said Margaret. ‘How long have you been married?’
‘As soon as I returned to my family. It was necessary for me to find a husband at once so that my baby should be born in wedlock.’ The word she used was unfamiliar but its sense was clear enough, and startling.
‘But - I understood …’ Margaret stopped to consider. Had Claudine not realized that the ceremony which Ralph had arranged was one of marriage? If that were the case, was it wise to speak of it now? Claudine, cheerful again, was shrewd enough to follow her visitor’s train of thought.
‘Your brother told you, perhaps, that he had married me,’ she said. ‘I was very happy when that happened; because I could say to my father that my child would not be a bastard. But the priest spoke to my mother and told her that in the eyes of Holy Church what had happened was no marriage at all.’
Margaret found it difficult not to laugh. Ralph, a schoolboy at the time, could be excused for not realizing that Claudine must be Roman Catholic. It was more surprising that the point had not occurred to William. His own smug Anglicanism must have blinded him to the implications.
‘The priest said I should send for Monsieur Ralph so that a second ceremony could be performed,’ Claudine continued. ‘But how could I ask such a thing? It was brave of him to escape from his father for the first time. He would not be allowed to come to France, and I had promised that I would never return to England. Besides …’ she looked down at her apron, laughing to herself, ‘if he had come and the priest had married us, I should have been tied for the rest of my life to a man I could never see again. In England, I was frightened. But here at home I decided that was not the way a woman should live.’
Margaret said nothing, but sipped the bitter coffee.
‘It was easier to look for a husband in my own village,’ Claudine continued. ‘In the country it is not the same as in Bristol. Here, a man does not marry a girl until he is sure that she will bear children. True, he prefers his sons to be his own, but your father’s dowry was generous. With it, Guillaume was able to buy this farm. We breed Périgord geese - to make the pâté de foie gras, you understand -and we enjoy a good living. I am content.’
‘So you don’t think of Monsieur Ralph as your husband?’
‘He is not my husband,’ said Claudine emphatically. ‘The priest explained to me most carefully that the words in England meant nothing. And from the moment Jean-Claude was born, Guillaume has been his father. If your brother has sent you here as a messenger, because he wants his son, the answer is that he has no son. Will you tell him that? I ask for your promise.’
To Margaret, translating the French word by word in her head, the request came as a demand. It was reasonable, she supposed. If Claudine had suffered at the hands of the Lorimer family once, it would hardly come as a recompense now to split up her own family and challenge the validity of her marriage. Margaret’s first reaction to her discovery had been that Jean-Claude should be rescued from poverty and offered whatever comforts the Lorimers were still able to afford. But Claudine’s anxious expression showed her how selfish such a thought had been. Here in France the boy was part of a loving family, a secure community. The Lorimers had nothing comparable to offer.
And there was no real choice. Jean-Claude’s mother had taken a decision, and it must be respected. Margaret looked into Claudine’s eyes and Claudine stared steadily back. Margaret nodded her head slightly. It was the nod with which John Junius had been accustomed to signify his acceptance of a situation as the prelude to dismissing it from his thoughts. The two women shook hands, both happy that the matter was settled. As she left, Margaret paused to take a last look at the urchin chasing geese. For a Lorimer, he did not seem very successful in his profession.
For the rest of the stay in Sarlat, she joined Matthew on his expeditions to the paintings and carvings which had been made in the prehistoric days when this area, it seemed, was the cultural centre of Europe. She had intended, once she had investigated the situation at her first meeting with Claudine, to take Matthew to the farm for a reunion with his one-time governess. But now she realized that if she was to keep her promise, her two young nephews must not be allowed to meet. Matthew’s introduction to the art of portraiture in the Paris galleries had led him in the following days to scrutinize faces and study features. It was by no means inconceivable that he might notice the resemblance between the boy on the farm and his uncle Ralph. Fortunately, no one had ever mentioned to Matthew the true reason for the journey to France.
Back in England Margaret reported her discovery to William, who rubbed his hands in satisfaction.
Then we need worry no more about it,’ he said. ‘Ralph can be told that he is a free man.’
That is not exactly the case. The marriage may not have been a valid one for Claudine, but surely Ralph is bound by it.’
‘Nonsense,’ said William briskly. ‘Ralph was too young. Without his father’s consent, whatever ceremony he went through was merely a form of words.’
‘If that was the case, it was hardly necessary for me to go to France, was it?’ It did not occur to Margaret to doubt her brother’s word, but she was annoyed by the implication that her journey had been for nothing.
‘We have to think of Ralph’s moral position, not merely his legal one,’ William pointed out. ‘Without the news you have discovered, we could never have persuaded him that he could honourably abandon Claudine. He was married in his own eyes and in the eyes of his Church, if not of Claudine’s, and we know that his religious feelings are strong. A man of less firm principles would have forgotten the whole affair long ago. I will tell
him to forget it now. The interests of all three of them lie together. Claudine and her son wish to hear no more of Ralph, and Ralph wishes to hear no more of Claudine. Leave it to me to speak to him. For your part, if you have an unmarried friend whom he might find pleasant company, please feel at liberty to invite her to visit you at Brinsley House. Sophie too will put her mind to the subject. Ralph’s furlough is not a long one, and he has made his wishes clear enough.’
Margaret realized, as she accepted her congé, that there was a good deal to be said for decisive action in such a situation. Even so she was unprepared for William’s method of handling it. Less than an hour after their conversation, Ralph came striding across the upper lawn to join her as she leant against the parapet on her favourite part of the terrace.
‘William tells me that your travels in France took you near to the place where Claudine’s parents lived,’ he said. ‘I was grieved to hear of her death last year.’
Margaret stared at him without trusting herself to speak. She was horrified that William should have put such a lie into her mouth - but now that it had been told and believed, would it be wise to contradict the falsehood?
‘And did William also tell you about the child?’ she asked.
‘That there never was a baby. Yes. It was foolish of me to believe the story. William has been trying to console me with the assurance that many young men are deceived in such a way, and I suppose it is true.’ He had shown a genuine grief when speaking of Claudine’s death, but now he smiled shyly. When he spoke again, it might have seemed to anyone but Margaret that he was changing the subject. ‘We have wasted too much time talking about my foolishness. Tell me more about your own plans. Now that you are coming to live in Bristol, what does Miss Morton intend to do? Will she stay on in the lodgings which you shared in London?’
‘That was her intention when I left, but I suspect that she will soon be driven out of London by her own high standards. She has specialized in questions of public health and hygiene, and the capital is intractably large and dirty. While I was there we had a pleasant way of life together. But I think she will now be looking for a post in some smaller place, where projects can be set afoot not just for the running of a hospital but for the improved health of a whole community. Since she has a few days’ holiday due, I am about to invite her to visit me here for a week. Perhaps she will find something in Bristol, suited to her talents. You will be able to talk to her yourself about her ideas.’
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