As is often the case with a married couple, it’s either the one or the other who is dominant. A strand of ancient Egyptian beads was held out from that long, skinny neck, those little bits of history fiddled with as if nothing. Worn in a tight ponytail, that woman’s hair had been stabbed by an antique silver barrette, which flashed in the afternoon sun. Carnelian and agate signets of spice traders had been made into bracelets, others into rings. A bitch draped in antiquity. Nefertiti? I remember thinking. The hawklike nose, pinched face, hard dark narrow eyes, pencilled-in eyebrows, mascara, rouge, and lipstick, made me wonder what she was after. Little boys or little girls, for her eyes kept returning to my children. Am I being too harsh? A Royalist if ever there was one, a Fascist anyway, and bitter enemy of the Third Republic.
Those two were friends and associates of my husband, and mustn’t business always be combined with pleasure, especially at a time of war? They were very influential, and paid servants of that same Republic.
The rest were young—friends of Janine’s. Michèle Chevalier was the baby and absolutely exquisite. Twenty years of age? Ah, no, eighteen I think. Deep brown eyes that were so serious at times, shoulder-length wavy light brown hair in which there were reddish tints. A manner of delicately tracing the tip of a forefinger under the soft, warm curve of her chin when in thought. This I found touching. Superb breasts, lovely kissing lips, an absolutely unbelievable figure—I was to see it later. Naked, you understand.
A musician, a violinist and a good one, too, or so Janine had told me. A student, of course, but when would my Jules try to seduce her? Nini’s dark flashing eyes kept flicking to Michèle who sat some distance from her on the opposite side of the tables. Had overtures already been made?
Vuitton also had an interest in Michèle, that wife of his encouraging this. She would touch the girl’s hand and say something while looking to her husband for agreement. He would then study Michèle and gravely nod or delicately knuckle his thin grey moustache then give a tight little smile or say something profound to which his wife would respond. From the room up here, he looked to be about sixty-five, she on the tired side of fifty and trying hard to hide it, and I became afraid for Michèle, something that would only increase as time went on.
Henri-Philippe Beauclair was a tall, thin, and bespectacled Socialist. He had asked me to show him the house and when confronted by the embarrassment of a marriage bed he had known was being betrayed, had confessed that though he liked restoring paintings at the Louvre, and was worried about his job, as a chemist he was probably of far more use making explosives.
Michèle had a passing interest in him; he would die for her.
And Dmitry Alexandrov, what of him? A White Russian from that quartier, he had about him the air of a closet Communist. Nini had picked him up in a bar and had felt sorry for him, but shouldn’t have. Not with that one. Dmitry probably knew every Russian waiter, chef, and plongeur in Paris, and what they didn’t steal for themselves from the kitchens, some of them would have stolen for him.
He was twenty-six, short, with the broad shoulders, strong arms, and hands typical of the Russian peasant. A stocky ox with slicked down, flaxen hair, he had invested in a barber for the weekend, had made certain the haircut would last, but was it butter he had used, or the brilliantine of someone he’d met on the street?
The faded, grey-blue eyes were seldom still, he taking in everything and giving little away. As a student of electrical engineering, the French army should have had him by now, for Paris and all the major centres had been systematically drained of tradesmen by the military. Had he ignored his call-up papers?
He looked as if eating a last meal, as if searching for a way out, the eyes widely spaced about a cart driver’s nose and hooded beneath the strong, bland forehead with its thick, fair eyebrows.
Marcel wasn’t particularly fond of him—overripe cheese on a plate of meringues—and was still in that faded blue smock he always wore, the red handkerchief knotted about that swarthy neck, the black beret looking like the drooping pancake of an angry albatross.
Yes, Marcel Clairmont was being his usual self, smoking his filthy cigarettes, coughing, hawking up wads of phlegm to be chewed, swallowed, or spat to one side, gesticulating like a fisherman, regaling any who would listen with his stories, his lies, his laughter and politics, the paintings he hadn’t sold but was going to. Merde! Some men …
Janine looked so lovely, fresh and gay. No housework, no meals to get. No children to care for or to keep you awake at night when they’re sick or there’s thunder and lightning or the distant sound of approaching guns.
‘Lily, what is it? What’s wrong?’
Simone had been watching me from the doorway for some time and I, in my bitterness, hadn’t even realized she’d left the table. Jean-Guy and Marie-Christine were with her, haunted eyes surveying their mother.
‘Nothing. I’m just worried about this war. I’ll be down in a minute.’
‘It’s Jules, isn’t it? Jules and Janine.’
I nodded. I couldn’t look at her. Even then I wasn’t worried about Jules and the Vuittons. I should have been!
‘Jean-Guy, take Marie and go downstairs to your father,’ said Simone. ‘Let me talk to your mother, just for a little.’
She kissed them both and watched as they walked to the head of the stairs until I felt myself being taken and firmly held. Simone was taller than me, with thick, wiry, dark black hair that fell to her shoulders and was worn back off her brow and teased out at the sides. Her eyes were strikingly grey, the face a smooth, if delicate oval, the slender nose turned up a little and always shiny.
‘So what can I do to help?’ she asked. ‘Smack Jules’s face or Nini’s?’
We kissed on the cheeks. She dried my eyes and somehow got me calmed down, but for a long, long time she simply held me, then we talked, just the two of us as we always did, and finally I told her what I’d done.
The wine cellar was dank, low-ceilinged, and filled with rows of dusty bottles whose sleep had been left undisturbed except for the spiders. Simone knew of the cave, of course, but even so, was aghast at the bottles of Château Lafite, Château Latour, Château Mouton … ‘Bon Dieu, de bon Dieu de merde, don’t you two ever touch these?’ she asked.
‘Not since Jules’s father died. Now the bottles just wait, and we spend our money drinking other stuff.’
‘But why?’
I shrugged. ‘He has a thing about his father—the family name. The old man was a collector, a connoisseur in the true sense of the word, even if I didn’t think much him or he of me. Jules knows he can’t afford to follow in his footsteps, so at least he has preserved the collection.’
Our shadows moved over the rows of bottles to the walls beyond. At the very back of the cellar, there was a room where some empty barrels, pipettes, a press, and other wine-making things were stored. From there, a door and a stone staircase led outside to the garden, and when I opened this, shaded sunlight entered.
Gingerly, I lifted the cloth. My friend caught her breath. ‘Lily … Ah, mon Dieu, it’s so beautiful.’
It was. ‘In my anger, in my jealousy, yet have I done this. Sometimes fate brings out the best in us.’
I’d made a sculpture in wax, in the style of Rodin, a perfect likeness of Janine posing nude before that drawing class. Even her expression was there.
Slowly, I turned the wheel on which I’d sculpted the piece. It was as if Nini’s soul had been bared: the trace of mockery on her lips, the hint of debauchery in her eyes, the taunt. My little sister.
The depths of the wax had suggestions of blue, and at first Simone thought this had been accidental, but then she realized with a start, that it wasn’t so. Like the organs of the dead, the blue showed through the translucency of the wax.
‘What will you do with it?’ she asked.
‘Show it to him, of course, but only after I’ve escaped to England with the children.’
‘And for now?’
I knew she would hate to see m
e go, but upstairs in Jean-Guy’s room, I’d realized that I absolutely had to leave. ‘For now, I’ll do nothing. I’ll let them have their weekend, for it will be good, will it not, to see my husband playing with his mistress and thinking he’s putting one over on me?’
At Dr. Laurier’s earnest knock, I open the door to hear her saying, ‘Lily … your name is Lily de St-Germain. That firm in London has said they’ll reply in the morning. I think we should wait until they do.’
‘I can’t. I have to go back. My sister …’
‘Was she also killed?’
‘In a hail of bullets. I saw her smashed to pieces. She died, and they wouldn’t let me go to her.’
‘Is that why you were crying? I could hear you from down the corridor.’
‘Yes … yes, that’s why. For her, for Simone, for all of us.’
‘The night’s too long to be alone, Lily, the room too dark. Let me stay with you. Talk to me. Please try. You’ll feel so much better. Someone has to listen. That’s what you really want. Pick up the story wherever you left off. Let the memories come.’
* * *
The memories … that weekend … I was sitting in front of the fire when my sister came up behind me. ‘You’re being too quiet tonight. Don’t you want to join us?’ she asked.
I shook my head. ‘I’m tired. It’s the children, Nini. They take the stuffing out of me sometimes.’ I forced a smile, then drew the shawl more closely about my shoulders.
‘Want another vermouth?’
‘I think I need it. Has Simone taken Jean-Guy up to bed? Check for me, will you? He’ll procrastinate, and you know how she is with him.’
Janine gave my cheek an affectionate touch. ‘You do look tired. Has André spoken to you yet?’
‘Of what?’ I asked, sitting up in alarm.
‘About the tonic he wants you to take. He says you look as though you need iron.’
‘Ah, merde! Am I to be dissected like one of his patients? I’m quite all right. André does not have children.’
‘You’re angry with me.’
I turned away. ‘Of course not. Why should I be?’
Neither of us said a thing. Janine didn’t move but kept her hand on the back of my chair. I wished we could have a little tête-à-tête like old times, but that could never be. Not now. ‘Nini, what will we do with them tomorrow? Sit around all day worrying about the war? Let’s take them to Pincevent, to the sand pits, and then, why then to the millpond.’
I had said it like a person pleading for her life. Somehow Janine found the courage to look at me and touch my cheek again. ‘You really are worried. What is it? Why don’t you tell me?’
Did she really want the truth? ‘It’s nothing. It’s just a feeling I have about this war. Me, I want the weekend to be like it used to be for the two of us.’
‘Then I would like that, too. Yes, I would.’
The breath of her perfume lingered with the lightness of her touch, and as I turned to watch her leave the room, Janine caught sight of me in one of the mirrors that flanked the doorway, and for an instant saw the depth of my desperation.
Then she was gone from the room, her bright skirt swaying in such a businesslike way, and I returned to my gazing into the fire. Pincevent, why had I suggested we go there? It was down in the valley of the Seine, on the river flats just at the bend above where the Seine and the Loing were joined. Thousands and thousands of years ago, it had been a ford in the ancestral Seine, the migratory route of reindeer herds at the close of the last Ice Age. Nomads had hunted them and worked the nearby cliffs of chalk for flint. Now dredges mined the sands creating craters and mountains as if the place had been a battleground, which it had, after a fashion, for the river would have run red with blood and the slaughter would have been terrible.
I could hear the shrillness of our childhood shouts as we had hunted imaginary reindeer much to the delight of our father. I could hear the quiet exclamations as we found, in some discarded ball of clay, the imprint of a long dead leaf, the hard spear point or scraper of Magdalenian man. How beautifully those people had made their stone tools, how clever of them to have done such things. The relics of later ages had been there, too, all churned up by the dredges, and our father, showing as much delight as ourselves, had introduced us to each period of history. Bronze daggers, bits of iron or tile, some coins from late Gallic times, others from the Romans who had conquered them. So much, and in the warmth of a summer’s sun, my sister, having eluded us, sitting proudly atop the highest mountain of sand with delight in her lovely eyes and a great big grin.
There’s a time for tears and a time when one has shed far too many. Dmitry Alexandrov found me all alone by the fireplace and, for a moment, I think he was struck by the way I must have looked like someone out of the past. The suit I wore was of light beige velvet, the needlepoint of a darker shade of brown. Very Russian, very tsarist, worn that evening, but not because of him.
The lace blouse was ruffled, and at the throat, pinning a silk kerchief, was a bit of antique silver. How in keeping I was with that drawing room, with the sumptuousness of it. The furnishings were nearly all from the mid-eighteenth century, some still covered with the original Beauvais tapestry.
Before the soot-blackened grey marble of the fireplace there was a pair of superb gilded bronzes, one of a running stag, the chase, the other of a griffin. Above the mantelpiece, there was an ornate antique clock he couldn’t quite place. Meissen … it might be. If so, a small fortune at any one of several dealers in Paris.
Even at a time of war, such things would have had value.
‘Madame, your apéritif. Janine has asked me to tell you that Jean-Guy has successfully been put to bed. She’s now up there with him.’
‘And Simone?’ I asked, anxiously drying my eyes.
Alexandrov drew in a breath, for the poignant look I’d given must have reminded him of Katerina or of Alyosha, someone out of Dostoevsky at any rate. ‘Madame de Verville’s in the kitchen. Your husband’s with her.’ You need have no fears on that score.
I took the vermouth and swallowed a sip to steady my nerves. As it went down, my eyes began to water again, and I realized that he had deliberately added cognac. What was it with him? He looked not at me but into me, stripping away everything but the truth.
‘What is it you do in electrical engineering?’ I asked.
He let the hardness of my voice pass. ‘The generation and transmission of electrical power. The electrification of the railways, which will surely come on a much more extensive scale once this war is over and won.’
But won by whom? I wondered. ‘The wireless?’ I asked. ‘Have you knowledge of that?’
His eyes gave nothing away. ‘Of course, but it’s more a hobby than anything else.’
Was it? ‘Could you fix one? Mine has too much interference, too much of the …’
‘Static?’
‘Yes.’
‘Please.’ He indicated that I should show him the way. As I got up, I handed him the glass and he tossed off the rest. ‘That’s only to make sure it won’t be spilt on your lovely carpets.’
How thoughtful of him. The price … The weekend would cost us a fortune we didn’t have. Still, there was the wireless.
‘Does the aerial run up to the roof?’ he asked. ‘The forest, the hills …’
Had he looked the place over even then? ‘No. I’ve strung ten metres around the outside of one of the windows in the library. Until recently, I was getting London very clearly. It’s a loose connection. A wire, I think, that runs between the tubes. When I tap the console, the static increases.’
‘Have you any solder—a bit of scrap silver perhaps? Something with which to fix it more securely?’
Dmitry mended the set using an edge of the brooch I was wearing and the heat from the poker of the kitchen stove. The brooch had been one of those from the jewel box, and Jules hadn’t even noticed my wearing it.
An uncomfortable silence settled over the dining room t
able, a pause, and then the muted sounds of hesitant cutlery, the accidental ringing of crystal on china as a wineglass was hurriedly set down.
I waited for Jules to answer. When he didn’t, when he gave Janine, who was sitting on his right, a little more wine, I said, ‘The taxes, my husband. Why haven’t they been paid?’
The wine bottle paused. Michèle Chevalier blanched and swallowed with difficulty. Dmitry Alexandrov, who was sitting opposite her beside Marcel, went on eating as if nothing untoward had happened. Henri-Philippe Beauclair, alarmed for sure, hesitantly fingered the tablecloth.
The Vuittons waited with bated breath. This was news, scandal, embarrassment, the hour of decision too, no doubt.
‘Well?’ I demanded harshly.
‘Well what?’ Jules lowered the wine bottle and set it carefully on the table among the tall-stemmed, air-twist glasses and the golden Meissonier candlesticks.
‘You know very well.’
‘This is neither the time nor the place to discuss such matters.’
I put my knife and fork down. ‘When else is there time? We’re never alone for a moment. Pardon, please, Simone, André, Henri-Philippe, Michèle … I didn’t mean to imply that you are not welcome and gladly, but the taxes haven’t been paid and something must be done about them.’
‘They’ll be paid next week.’
‘How? You’ve nothing in the bank but a few thousand francs. They’ve written about a loan you took out some time ago. I know, my husband. I opened the letter.’
For a wife to have done such a thing in France at that time or any other was to commit a sin far worse than adultery, but Jules simply looked at me and, for the first time that weekend, a sadness came into his eyes, and I realized he understood the matter only too well.
The candlelight flickered and threw shadows on the walls where bluebirds and doves—all sorts of birds—sang silently from the exquisite prison of their flowering cherry trees. From the belle-époque chandeliers came the sparkle of diamonds among their many-faceted crystals.
‘I’ll have to sell something, I suppose,’ he said at last.
He looked so handsome. Even then I had to confess that given but the slightest opportunity I would have forgiven him.
Hunting Ground Page 5