‘I can’t complain,’ he said. ‘I’ve made my pile.’
‘I hear,’ I said, ‘that you have a partner now to carry on the business.’
My voice sounded intense in my own ears, but of course Maryk did not notice.
‘My partner …’ he echoed vaguely, as if searching for the meaning of the word. Then suddenly, with a grin he found it. ‘Ah-ha, yes, my partner! Well, I’ve taught him everything I know, you see. So now he can make the money.’
‘That’s good,’ I said.
‘And he’s selling our stuff like hot cakes … I could say, like something else! But I won’t offend your ears, Monsieur –’ The reedy voice collapsed again in weak chuckles. Senile tears poured from his child’s eyes. I felt glad he could still produce even this travesty of his old manner.
‘What is your partner called?’ I asked.
‘Who?’ Maryk seemed suddenly lost again.
‘Your partner – the one who’s making all this money for you.’
‘Oh, him … You know him, do you?’
‘No,’ I said carefully. ‘I don’t know him. But I should like to. Please will you tell me some more about him?’
‘Wonderfully gifted young man … Mind you, I’ve taught him all I know. And now he’s working for both of us.’
‘That’s good. I’m pleased for you … What did you say his name was?’
But Maryk had dropped into a mutter again. I studied the wrinkled, sun-dried old face, the sagging mouth, and thought that, on the other side of Europe, on the far side of his life, there had been someone called Anya, who had come when he called.
‘Very dear!’ he shouted suddenly.
‘What?’ He had made me jump.
‘This place. Very dear. Kept in the lap of luxury, I am, as you see. Everything I want. So it’s just as well, isn’t it, that that partner of mine is making a fortune for us?’
I tried to steer him back to the topic of carved wood and pictures but, like an old gramophone sticking in one groove of the record, he would not be shifted.
‘He seems to be destitute. It’s the State that is paying for him here, or that’s what I understand. I suppose the matter will be settled one way or another when he dies. If he does leave anything, the State will have a claim on it in payment for his time here. That’s the system, you see.’
I had sought out the sister-in-charge in her office, where Saint Somebody presided, with moon-faced resignation, over filing cabinets. Sister spoke placidly enough; the financing of the hospital was not her affair anyway. I sensed some constraint there all the same, perhaps something she wanted to ask me. After a pause, she did.
‘Are you by any chance related to him?’
‘No. Just an old friend. I happened to be passing through the area.’
She sighed. ‘I thought you weren’t family. The poor soul doesn’t seem to have anyone at all of his own.’
‘Yes, I think that is the case. He used to say that, in fact, long ago. When he was in possession of all his wits, I mean.’
‘You’re the first visitor he’s had in I don’t know how long.’
‘What about this partner he talks about?’ I felt my heartbeat increase with a life of its own, as I thought Now I’ll hear, now – I hurried on:
‘I mean, surely he visits him?’
Sister looked surprised and then faintly sceptical.
‘Well I’ve never seen him. Between you and me, I used to think he might not exist at all. These old people do invent stories, you see, to cheer themselves up. But there’s a lay sister here – she’s off sick today, or you could have spoken to her – who says the partner does exist and that maybe he’s – you know – conned the poor old man out of what he had left.’
‘I’ve been wondering that myself.’
‘Mind you,’ she went on hastily, ‘I don’t know just what reason Sister Bérénice has for thinking that. She sometimes exaggerates things herself. To be honest, I don’t know quite what to think … And anyway,’ she added more cheerfully, ‘it isn’t really my business. It’s my job to look after them while they’re here. We make them as comfortable as we can.’
‘I can see you do.’ She seemed diffident, a little defensive perhaps, not knowing who I was or if I might be anyone of importance. I wanted to encourage her. But I still had not got what I needed.
‘Doesn’t anyone else on the staff know more about Monsieur Maryk’s affairs?’ I asked at last. ‘After all – a country area like this: people usually know all about each other.’
Sister wasn’t sure. Of course a number of people had told her he’d been an artist, his work was known in the district. but, ‘as to money matters, people know things because they hear about them through family connections, you see, but what with Monsieur Maryk being on his own, and an outsider too … Someone told me he was of gipsy stock?’
‘I don’t think so.’
‘Well that’s what I heard.’
‘But he’s been in the area – oh, since just after the war. Half a lifetime.’ For me, in the past, the Creuse had been such a place of welcome and acceptance: I had never, till now, fully realized the exclusive insularity of French rural society. ‘Surely,’ I persisted, ‘there must be someone else here from his village? Someone who knew how he was living just before he came into hospital?’
Sister did not think so. His village, it happened, was one of the most remote in the hospital’s catchment area: ‘It’s twenty-five kilometres from here, you see. Not really the same bit of country.’
‘Yes, I realize that.’
‘You know where he was living then?’ She sounded faintly reproachful, as if I had been wasting her time.
‘Oh yes. It was there that I was told he was in here.’
‘Then why not go and make enquiries there?’
‘Yes Sister, perhaps I will,’ I said submissively.
She clearly wanted me to go away and stop bothering her, so I did. I was already leaving the room, with her behind me, when she said: ‘If you find his partner that’s supposed to be so rich,’ – she suddenly sounded anxious and scornful again – ‘you might come back and tell me.’
I said that I would.
‘I’d like to meet him,’ she said.
Maryk’s barn might be twenty-five kilometres from the hospital, but it was only about eight, cross-country, from the mill-house. It was further by road. However I had already decided, some time before, that that Sunday morning I would travel there on foot, by the field paths and trackways that had been Maryk’s own favourite routes. In an isolated spot a parked car, even an anonymous hired car, can be a conspicuous object.
I believed that, so far, I had been extremely inconspicuous. Neither to the Mayor of Maryk’s village nor to the hospital sister had I identified myself. I had not been up to the village near the mill-house at all, and I thought that no one who had ever known me was aware of my presence there. In the empty house, which was yet not empty to me, of course, but full in every part of the life it had previously sheltered, I had kept the shutters drawn.
It was cold, the night before that morning. I woke several times, under the quilt on the kitchen divan where I was sleeping, and each time the temperature seemed to me to have dropped further. It was not yet dawn, and the alarm I had set had not yet gone off, when my febrile dreams frayed into persistent wakefulness and I knew I would sleep no more. I got up, and relit the stove.
The kitchen was only just getting comfortably warm when I left, but outside a bright morning had come: the first morning of winter, the first of the rest of my life. The dew of the previous evening had turned to hoar frost; each blade of grass, each twig, was sugared white. The late-blooming flowers in the beds by the wall were frosted too. I knew from other mornings, other years in my old life, that though this decoration would melt away as the sun rose, it would have finished off the chrysanthemum flowers: later in the day their extravagant heads would loll and blacken. But the small marigolds were hardier; they usually survived the first fr
osts.
At first the ruts in the track seemed to jar my legs inside my heavy boots, but when I had been going ten minutes or so I had warmed up and swung along more easily. I wore my own padded jacket and Jacquou’s ancient, peaked hunting cap and his game bag. I also carried his shotgun, the one with the silver chasing on the breech. Early on a fine Sunday morning in the autumn, a hunter is the most ordinary and unremarkable figure in the French landscape.
I was not the only one about. Although I saw no others, I heard sporadic shots in the distance as I passed by the woods. Birds called sharp warnings to each other, wheeling in flocks across the stubble fields, and once I disturbed a partridge that ran in panic down a long green alley before me. My breath steamed in the bright air. Later, as the sun rode higher, and I followed it, I became almost too warm; sweat trickled between my shoulder blades. Except in the shadows, the hoar frost had melted away, leaving the autumn leaves wet and brilliant.
My walk seemed to go quickly, the eight kilometres vanishing without effort, as in multiple dreams I had had of it in the preceding weeks. Under my boots it went, hills and descents, stony tracts and muddy ones, grass and bracken and heather, through gates and under wires – and yet I have the impression that I remember every yard of it. I had checked the route carefully the night before on the detailed maps that had lived since ever in a table drawer, and two of the maps were now in the game bag I carried. But they were out of date. At one point I had to retrace my steps where I found a marked track impenetrably blocked by saplings and brambles, and make a wide detour round several fields. And in another place, where I distinctly remembered once picnicking by a narrow, rocky stream, a chain of trout pools now spread themselves under the sky, as if not years but decades had passed, and I was Rip Van Winkle returning. I had to by-pass them through a farmyard with a hysterically barking dog. And all the time the sun lay ahead of me on the tops of the trees, a golden coin, dazzling me and drawing me on.
Then, when my walk was almost done, and I calculated that I was nearing the wooded back of the hill on which Maryk’s barn stood, I came to another stream and a ford. The wooden footbridge had been half-demolished by a fallen tree, so I waded where the carts and tractors were meant to cross, holding the gun well clear. The water went over my boots, soaking my socks and feet inside, but I was going so fast by this time, as in my dreams, and was so elated at being nearly there, that I hardly cared. I just tramped on in my squelching boots, and a song that had been at the back of my head ever since I had set out broke through to the front of my mind. I began to sing it under my breath in a dirge, since I cannot sing in tune though Simone could and Marigold had perfect pitch … It was one of her guitar ballads:
‘… It was mirk, mirk night, there was nae starlight
And they waded through red blude to the knee;
For a’ the blude that’s shed on earth
Rins through the springs of that countrie …’
Thomas the Rhymer, travelling for seven years through a faery land that is also hell, accompanied by the queen of that place.
So, out of hell or faeryland, out of dreams and fantasy and into the day, I came at a great pace, up the wooded rise, through the thinning trees and shafts of sun and shadow, nearer and nearer to the barn till at last I saw it. I stopped, still in the woods’ shadow, to get my breath. And also to make one or two final adjustments. Then I walked slowly round to the front.
Cleaner and tidier than it used to be. In the past, there had been bits of Maryk’s rubbish and scrap-iron lying about, for he was a dedicated scavenger of anything that might come in useful, and also gruesome piles of bones under the nettles, as if the place were a fox’s lair. And when Maryk was at home the door had regularly stood open, to let in the light. This morning, it was shut. But two windows had been made in the long wall that faced the open country; their shutters were open. A new chimney at one end had replaced Maryk’s old iron stove pipe; as I watched, smoke drifted from it into the morning air. The dirt track up the hill had been smoothed and gravelled, and by its side was a newly painted notice:
Daffyd Huws – Artiste Peintre.
I stood looking at that notice for quite a long time. I almost felt as if, in spite of all my conviction and purpose, all my rehearsing fantasies, until that moment I had not entirely believed in it. But it also seemed like something known for years, as if everything had long been decided, and this morning was only the final enactment of a long-foregone conclusion.
It appears odd to me now that at no time that morning, or in the preceding days, did I ask myself if he would actually be at home. He might well have been away: the local Mayor had said he came and went. The signs of life in the house might simply have indicated the presence of another person, perhaps one of the ‘female acolytes’ of whom Paul had spoken.
But I did not think these things as I walked towards the door, and nor did they turn out to be so. I pulled a wrought-iron object that set up a rustic jangling within, then retreated a few paces. After a pause, he opened the door himself.
Fattish. In a track-suit and espadrilles as if he had just got up. Balding. A small dark beard, trimmed. A middle-aged man whom I might have passed in a street without another glance. And yet, as I looked directly at him, he was clearly and unmistakably Evan Brown. Most people do not change essentially over the years, or only do so in predictable and transparent ways, as school reunions testify.
‘David Hughes?’ I said, making the name neither French nor Welsh but firmly English.
‘That’s me,’ he said, English too, in mild surprise. ‘Who are you?’ His face was ill-tempered, but he spoke pleasantly as if I might be a prospective customer. The morning sun was in his eyes, he could not see me clearly. He came out, raising a hand against the light.
During my whole journey, I had been carrying the shotgun over my arm, broken at the breech in the approved manner. Now I swung it round, clicked it into place and shifted the safety catch. The sound alerted him.
‘Who are you?’ he said sharply, a different tone, dodging into a position where he could see me clearly. ‘What do you want – ?’
I too moved, into the space between him and his own front door. I also told him my name. But even as I spoke I saw that he had recognized me. I have not changed very much either, less than he had.
His face became fixed, and I saw again the ugly lines I had seen long ago when I had threatened him with the police, when he had told me ‘I’ll get even with you, you bastard.’
Now that phrase had become mine. No filmic rhetoric, but the literal truth.
‘What the hell do you want?’ he said. He was frightened now.
I raised Jacquou’s gun. We were only about three yards apart.
I have sometimes asked myself since that morning what I would have done if he had remained calm. Just suppose he had said, in his most genial tone: ‘Tom, put that down a minute and let’s talk.’ Or suppose he had come forward, hand advanced, to shake mine. Or, as Jacquou had once imagined, had gone down on his knees before me … Even then, at the very last moment, I think my Plan might have been deflected, my fantasy remained inanimate.
But he did not do these things. Instead, like the guilty man Jacquou had been sent to shoot in the river meadow by the mill-house, he turned and ran, ran away from me down the slope, floundering flat-footed in his espadrilles as he went. And so I went after him and shot him in the back at point blank range. And then reloaded and shot again. And left him where he fell, his lungs filling with blood, blood trickling from his back and his neck, beneath his lying signboard.
I don’t remember much of the walk back except that, though I hastened, I felt very tired and shivered constantly. I wondered if my wet boots had chilled me so much that I was turning feverish. The bright morning had dimmed: clouds had come up.
I was deeply glad when I came over the brow of the last hill, trudging on newly ploughed soil, and saw the mill-house below, and wisps of smoke from the stove I had lit hours before still rising from the chim
ney. But I suppose it was then that I began to realize I was not as hidden there as I had thought. Just as I had noted the smoke from the barn chimney as a sign of occupation, so someone in the last few days might have seen mine.
But my idea of the mill-house as a refuge was so strong that it overcame any prudent thoughts I might have had about making a quick departure. I was exhausted now, and easily persuaded myself that it would be an act of greater folly to set out to drive across half France in such a state. Better, surely, to have a wash and something to eat and leave only when I felt rested? For in any case what urgency could there be? Even if Evan had been found already, nothing there, I believed, pointed in my direction. Not yet. And perhaps not ever.
Of course I was mistaken. Absorbed in my own purpose, I had no idea how many people in that apparently empty countryside had noted my presence. Afterwards, I was to learn that as early as Thursday the baker, passing with his van, had told the Mayor of our own village that someone seemed to be in the mill-house with the shutters drawn and he hoped it wasn’t an intruder – gipsy or such. The Mayor, a much more energetic functionary than his colleague in Maryk’s village, had got into his car the following day and driven down to have a look himself. I must have been visiting the hospital at the time, but he saw the padlock was off the outhouse door and the track-marks of my car, and decided that the visitor was as likely to be someone with a right to be there. Later, I was apparently spotted driving back, which settled the matter.
Still, there would have been nothing at all to link me with the killing five miles away – had I not put in an appearance in that village also. Naturally, when Evan was discovered dead, the old man from the modern bungalow was one of the first to be called to the scene, and even he was eager to tell the police what he could. This must have included information about my visit on Friday, my questions to him about Evan, and a description of myself and the car.
Give Them All My Love Page 26