Maud started to close the door. ‘There is no one here by that name. Good day.’
The old woman was too quick for her, and put her hand round the doorframe. Maud could only close it now by slamming it on her fingers, and she did not have the courage to do that.
‘Morel, then! That’s what they call themselves.’ She was very close now, but if Maud stepped back she was afraid the woman would push her way into the flat. She felt her heart thudding in her chest.
‘They are not at home. Perhaps if you left your card.’
‘Ha!’ The woman reached into her bag, continuing to block the door with her shoulder, and pulled out a piece of card which she flung straight at Maud’s face. Maud flinched away, covering her eyes, and it fell at her feet. The woman pushed the door fully open and loomed hideous as a witch towards her. Maud felt panic tightening on her throat. ‘There. Do you think he’ll call? Do you think he will visit me at my hotel? After all the letters and telegrams from me and nothing, nothing from him in six months?’ She took a step forward again and stared about the apartment, at the flowers on the hall-table, the gleaming floors, the calm polished comfort of it all. ‘Where is he? Where is he now? Tell me, or I shall smash up your pretty home – and don’t think you can stop me. I will have what is owed.’
‘Monsieur Morel is at his club – The Travellers in the Champs Elysées. If you have any business with him, go there.’ Maud’s voice was high, protesting. The woman smiled, seeing Maud afraid, and her own voice became soft and wheedling. She looked up at the girl through her thin pale lashes with lizard eyes.
‘What of the bitch who used to hold my hand and call me Granny? Where’s she? Where has she hidden my diamonds? Did she eat them? Did he? I will have what I am owed.’ Maud could not help herself; she glanced towards Sylvie’s door and the old woman saw it. She began to glide towards the door with her wrinkled hand outstretched. Maud tried to make herself step forward, but failed.
There was a shout on the stairs and the concierge appeared with her husband lumbering up behind her. The old woman left the door to Sylvie’s room to face them.
‘There’s the old monster!’ the concierge said, her thin chest heaving with indignation and red spots showing on her cheeks. ‘Sorry, miss, but she got by me. Now will you leave the ladies in peace, or will Georges here have to pick you up and carry you?’ She put a hand on the old woman’s shoulder and was shaken off.
‘Paid in advance, has he, dear? Paid with a bit extra for you to keep an eye out? Count your silver before he leaves. That’s all.’
The concierge’s husband hunched his shoulders. ‘What are you thinking of, Granny, coming round and disturbing people? What sort of house do you think this is? Come on, out of here, you old baggage.’
The woman looked back at the door to Sylvie’s room. Maud wondered if she was thinking of making a dash for it, forcing the door open and attacking the girl. Maud could see it in front of her: the horror of the struggle, the vase smashed, Sylvie’s screams and the howls of the madwoman.
Georges took a small step forward and the old woman looked back at him and growled. ‘All the same to me!’ she said, sniffing and pulling her coat around her. ‘I’ll be off to the club then, now I know where to ferret him out. And I’ll sing my songs there.’ She turned on Maud then, her eyes small and angry. ‘And you, you silly tart, if you’ve got a shred of decency left, you should put your coat on and clear off out of it right now.’
Maud said nothing, unable to speak or act in her own defence or to save Sylvie.
‘Enough of that! Time to go,’ Georges said, his voice rising, and the woman let herself be jostled away. Maud found she could move again and followed them on to the landing to see them go. The old woman kept turning to look at her as they went down the stairs, muttering to herself. In the hallway below, she burst out again: ‘I shall have you, Christian Gravot! I shall have you in this world or the next, you monster!’
Maud turned back into the flat. The door to Sylvie’s room was still closed; for a moment she considered knocking, but to what purpose? The card that the woman had thrown at her was still lying on the floor. Maud bent down to pick it up. It was a visiting card. Madame Prideux, 4, Place Saint-Pierre, Luxeuil-les-Bains. She carried it back into her room and stared at it while her heart slowed to its usual beat. The old lady had not seemed the type to have a visiting card. Perhaps she had found it on the street.
Maud sat in her usual seat by the window and took out her sketchbook, tucking the card between the back pages. She thought about what she had said to Tanya about being brave, about taking care of herself, and felt ashamed. She then pulled the pencil free of the book’s spine. She had thought she was going to draw that hard angry face with the threadbare fox fur and its dead glass eyes staring up from under the woman’s pointed chin, but instead she found herself drawing her father.
When Maud’s mother was alive her father had been a ghost in her life, a brooding presence slouched in an armchair with the whisky bottle at his side, staring into the fire while her mother sewed or read to them. Maud thought her mother had been beautiful, though she had never been photographed and Maud’s memories of her face were hazy and ill-defined. When she died, quietly and quickly when her illness could no longer be concealed, Maud and her father were strangers. She realised then how much of the work of Creely & Sons, the auctioneers business her father had inherited, her mother had been doing. As long as Maud could remember, when she came down for breakfast her mother was already at the table working at long columns of figures in black account books or writing letters with neat scratches of her fountain pen. Later in the mornings Maud would accompany her mother as she made her calls around the town, playing with the black and white cat at the grocer’s while her mother placed her order for the boy to bring round in the afternoon, or sitting on a sofa quietly while her mother talked to her friends in their dark living rooms full of heavy furniture and loudly ticking clocks. She was told that she was a good child and given paper to draw on, then her mother’s friends would tell her how clever she was. She revelled in being a good child, a quiet child, an obedient child, rewarded with praise and her mother’s love. It never occurred to her she could be anything else.
She had no hope of taking her mother’s place. She was far too young and had not been trained to it. A month after her mother’s funeral she began to see the home she knew becoming neglected. Two maids left in quick succession and her father spent days now as well as his evenings in his armchair with the bottle at his elbow. She went for a fortnight without a bath and only realised it when she overheard the butcher’s wife saying she needed to be washed. She became deeply ashamed and hid away from the town as much as she could. She was no longer a good child to be admired so she stayed at home, only occasionally going to the back of the grocer’s to meet her old friend the cat. The grocer’s wife would bring out biscuits and milk and look at her with troubled eyes.
Maud’s father started coming home less, and when he did he stank of tobacco and beer. The latest maid never looked at her and fed her on bread and butter and the occasional herring. Maud wanted very much to sit in those rooms with the ticking clocks again with her hair brushed and be told she was a good girl. One night she put on the cleanest pinafore she owned and waited for her father to come home. He looked surprised when he saw her sitting on the stair. She stood up and went to stand in front of him and asked if they might have their old maid back because she needed to be bathed and did not want any more bread for her supper. He bent towards her, his breath wheezing in and out of his lungs as if he’d been running, and his face red. His nose was covered with little broken veins but the skin around his eyes was oddly white. He watched her for what seemed an age, then he pulled back his arm and slapped her hard across the face. It knocked her to the ground. She heard him go into the parlour and slam the door behind him. A week later she was struck because she cried over the sold art books. Another time because he heard her complaining to the maid about her food agai
n.
Someone must have seen the bruises. The grocer’s wife probably. Maud’s elder brother James arrived two days after the last bruising. He had qualified as a solicitor the year before and was freshly established as a junior partner in a firm in Darlington. She saw him walking up the road from the station in his high white collar and brown waistcoat and did not recognise him until he turned up their garden path. He was nine years her senior and as much a stranger as her father. Doors opened and closed downstairs, and before long Maud could hear her father’s voice buckled with rage. A few minutes later, James came into her room and told her to pack her things. She was to go to school in Darlington.
She still had to come home during the holidays. Before her first full year had passed, her father had married the barmaid from the local pub. She at least dealt better with his drunken rages than Maud had done, happy to strike back when he raised his hand. She had a child and made her husband work, rationing his drink and screaming at him to support his children. Maud remained in her own room sketching and reading. Her step-mother tried to be kind to her, but Maud shrank from her loud laugh and her teasing. Her step-mother thereafter confined her efforts to her husband and child, though Maud was not struck again and was grateful.
For all her step-mother’s efforts there was very little of the business left when her father died. He fell one day in the shop when Maud was at home for the Christmas holidays, and the first she knew of it was the jangle of the bell on the ambulance. He died three days later in hospital, and though her step-mother asked if she wished to go, Maud did not visit. She did not go back to school in Darlington but remained in Alnwick under her step-mother’s care. After years of having little to do with each other, they developed a wary sort of mutual affection. Her father’s will split his estate equally between his wife and surviving children, though other than the building itself, that amounted to only a few pounds. It was a shabby place, and her step-mother could find no one interested in taking it on.
Three months after the funeral, her step-mother left, saying only that she had met a drover from Newcastle she liked the look of and would be on her way. It seemed to Maud that she was miserable to leave her son, Albert, but James and Ida were married by that time and offered to bring him up as their own. Maud watched the woman decide, and having decided she acted. She took three pounds out of the savings account in her and Maud’s name and said they were welcome to keep whatever the building fetched, she’d rather be shot of it. James invited Maud to join them in Darlington. She refused and for a month lived alone in the family home. Then came the fire, her share of the insurance money and Paris. She left many things in Alnwick, but more than anything she wanted to leave her father dead among the ashes. Now he appeared on the page in front of her in profile with his chin lifted.
The time unrolled and Maud was surprised when a far lighter knock came at the front door: it was the waiter from the corner café bringing them their supper. M. Morel arrived as he was bowing his way back out of the apartment.
CHAPTER 10
It was not until after they had finished eating that Maud mentioned the strange old woman who had visited, and apologised for giving the address of the club.
‘I’m afraid she rather frightened me. I hope she didn’t give any trouble.’
‘Oh, it was you who sent her, was it? That was kind, I must say.’ Morel pushed his plate away from him. Maud started to apologise, but he stopped her and said more seriously. ‘Poor lady, no, you did quite right to give her the address. Though I am afraid I was not there when she called and she caused quite a row. The porters saw her off the premises and threatened her with the police. By the time I got back there, she was gone. I came here this evening to warn the concierge to keep an eye out for her. I hope she has decided to go home. Perhaps I should send a telegraph to her son and say she has been up to mischief before she does any worse.’
‘Who was it, Christian? Maud, you didn’t say anyone had called.’ Sylvie had as usual eaten very little, just picking at her food.
‘You were resting, Sylvie.’ How deep must her dreams be, Maud thought, not to have heard that.
‘It was poor Madame Prideux,’ Morel said. His voice was solemn, like a clerk of the court reading a charge. He scraped at the lace tablecloth with his fingernail. Maud noticed how neatly trimmed and polished they were.
‘Madame Prideux? Here in Paris?’ Sylvie half-sat up, then dropped again into her chair and turned her head away. ‘What an awful bore. I hate her. You must take the proper precautions, Christian. I have only just begun to explore, and now I fear I will see that foul crone round every corner. It could ruin everything. Did it cause a problem at the club? Did she tell the porters where she was staying?’
Morel looked across the table at her, his nails still making a little scratching noise on the lines of the cloth. ‘They understood the lady was a little mad. Yes, she told them where she was staying, and you are right. I shall deal with it in the morning.’
Sylvie shook her head, all at once more animated and more present than she was normally at this time in the evening. Maud had not realised her dream-like state could be set aside so easily. ‘No, I shan’t be able to sleep. You had better go now.’
He sighed. ‘If it will make you happy, Sylvie.’
‘It is what should be done,’ Sylvie replied simply. ‘But first perhaps you should explain to Maud who she is.’
Morel folded his hands in front of him on the tablecloth. ‘You spoke to her, Miss Heighton. What did she say to you?’
Maud felt deeply embarrassed. She could think of nothing but her own cowardice when the woman was reaching for Sylvie’s door. The amount of money that Morel was paying her above her bed and board would entitle him to expect her to make some effort to protect his sister, but she had done nothing of use. She had let the old woman into the apartment, given up Morel’s club at once when a lie would have served just as well, and then stood there without speech or action until the concierge arrived. ‘She said many things. But you have no need to explain yourself to me. None at all.’
‘She said we stole from her, I imagine. I can assure you she is a confused old woman and we did no such thing,’ he said.
‘Naturally, I did not for one moment believe it. The lady was obviously quite mad.’
‘We are grateful for your confidence, Miss Heighton. You see, Sylvie, ladies of sense like Miss Heighton are aware that she is nothing more than a mad old woman to be pitied. We need say no more about it.’
Sylvie shook her head again. ‘I think you had better tell her the whole story, Christian. The siege and the diamonds. Then she can understand why Madame Prideux is as mad as she is and not think me a coward for wishing to avoid her.’
Sylvie got up from the table and fetched her cigarette-case from the side-table. ‘Let him tell you, Maud. Or I shall worry you will think him a fiend. I am sure she told you we are man and wife.’ She settled back down, lit a cigarette and dropped the case on the table. Maud still found the sight of women smoking rather shocking and flinched. ‘See, Christian? Maud is blushing. She did say so.’ The enamel stripes on the case were of subtly different blues. French ultramarine, brilliant ultramarine, new blue.
‘Perhaps you can tell her the story as you see fit, Sylvie, after I have left.’ Morel’s voice was a little clipped.
‘Oh no, Christian. You tell it so much better than I do.’ She tapped the ash off her cigarette and sat back in her chair watching him.
Maud put her hands together on her lap. ‘If you do not wish to tell the story, sir, I am sure I do not wish to hear it.’
‘Unfortunately, Miss Heighton, Sylvie wishes the story told and wants you to hear – and we must in all things be ruled by her.’ He took a cigarette himself and leaned forward so Sylvie could light it, cupping her hand to protect the flame from an imaginary breeze. Maud said nothing. Morel filled his glass. The apartment was particularly silent this evening. The slight creak in the chair, the rub of cloth on cloth as Morel settl
ed himself was quite audible. ‘Miss Heighton, do you know anything of the Siege of Paris? And the terrible week that followed the break-up of the Paris Commune?’
‘A little.’ The electric lamps around the room shed a dull orange glow about them; the smooth curves of the furniture seemed to shift a little in the light, like the vines of a forest floor caught in the act of growth. She recalled a hot summer’s afternoon and her teacher reading from Lessons of History. In 1870 the Prussian army had defeated the French and for a year laid siege to the capital. The poor suffered the worst of it, but in the end even the rich who had not escaped in time were eating rats. Napoleon III fled and the new government made terms, but the militias formed for the defence of the city wanted something more for their sacrifices than the new government were offering. Suddenly France was at war with herself. For a little while the Paris Commune made its laws and decrees before the new French government sent in troops from Versailles and slaughtered them.
‘Madame Prideux was born and has lived most of her life in our home town,’ Morel said, ‘but she was in Paris in 1871 with her husband and her young child – a boy of about four years of age. Her husband was a diamond polisher who worked on Rue de la Paix. It was possible if he was skilled and lucky that they could have had a respectable, even a comfortable life – but seeing those diamonds every day made him greedy. It became harder and harder for him to work with such priceless rarities and then take home only a few francs for his wife and child. The chaos in Paris seemed too good an opportunity to miss, and with the help of his friend who worked in the same establishment, he managed to steal half-a-dozen good-quality stones. He needed only to pay off his accomplice and meet his family before returning to his native soil with the means to buy a good-sized farm. His accomplice was a man named Christian Gravot.’
Morel drank slowly from his glass and Maud noticed him seeking out Sylvie’s gaze. She smiled brightly at him and blew out a long thin stream of smoke from between her pale lips.
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