by James Wilson
It was skilfully painted, and you could see why a child would like it: the atmosphere of mysterious calm was so alluring that you longed to feel the mossy ground under your feet, and the glance of the sun on your cheek as you moved from shade to light. But to an adult eye, it was almost too sweet – the tree-trunks soft and indistinct, the bluebells like flecks of coloured sugar on a cake. You could smell their faint hyacinth scent, all right – but not the musty humus of the earth, and the sour whiff of rabbit droppings.
‘I asked Mary once why she loved it so much,’ said Françoise Revel. She had got up, and was standing next to me now. ‘She said it was like looking out of a window. One day, she thought, she would come in and find it open. And then she would be able to climb through it, and disappear into the wood.’
‘I can understand that.’
Her headache seemed to have evaporated entirely. ‘And here’s another one,’ she said, grabbing my arm excitedly and turning me round, so that we were facing a large gilt-framed canvas on the opposite wall. ‘Some people like this even better.’
She jostled me towards it. It showed a small fair-haired girl in a blue dress watching gold-fish in a weedy pond, while a woman holding a parasol – presumably the child’s mother – looked on smiling. It was defter than The Bluebell Wood – and the effect was sicklier, too. Stare at those pinks and golds and creams and blues for more than a few seconds, and you felt as if you had eaten a surfeit of bonbons.
‘M. Durand-Ruel said it reminded him of Renoir.’
‘Yes, there’s a strong resemblance.’
‘You have taste, Mr. Roper. You appreciate beauty.’ She was moving me on again, this time towards the tallboy. ‘But beauty is out of fashion now, of course. People don’t want it. Or rather they are told they shouldn’t want it. They should want this instead.’
She pulled open one of the drawers, and carefully eased out a sheet of paper. It was covered in a web of of sanguine pencil strokes that at first sight looked like the random scrawling of a demented child. Only when she had laid it out on the table did I realize that it was a portrait – though a portrait utterly unlike any other I had ever seen, with the ears and eyes and nose and mouth jumbled together in a single plane, as if the head had been flattened like a cardboard box, allowing you to see all the sides simultaneously. What made it odder still was that – despite the brutal rearrangement of the features – I instantly recognized the sitter as Françoise Revel herself.
‘Did you do this?’ I said.
‘You think I am mad? Or a savage?’
‘No, but –’
‘No, the culprit is M. X. You do not know him yet, but you will. In a year or two he will be rich and famous, you may be certain of it. The critics and the dealers will see to that.’ She lifted nine or ten more sheets from the drawer, and neatly spread them out. ‘And I shall be rich too. That is my one consolation. They won’t take my work, but they’ll buy my poor mutilated face.’
Only a couple of the images were as distorted as the first one she had shown me. The rest seemed to date from an earlier phase of the artist’s development – or from earlier phases, rather, because they were not of a piece, but ranged from an almost naturalistic bust to a nude in which the features were still in their true position, but the cheeks had been pared into sharp triangles, and the limbs and breasts had lost the particularity of flesh, and metamorphosed into an abstract pattern of geometric forms.
‘Here,’ she said, moving so near that I could feel the warm pressure of her shoulder against my arm. ‘This is how I will be remembered. Do you think that is just?’
She turned and gazed directly up at my face with a slight frown. I couldn’t tell exactly what she was looking for – whether desire, or approval, or admiration – but I was certain she would not find it there. I had nothing but counterfeit currency to offer, and anything I was weak enough to give her would only leave her feeling hungrier in the end.
‘Well, thank you,’ I said, backing away. ‘I’m really glad to have seen those. And what you told me about Mary Stone was very helpful.’
I hurried to the door, half-expecting to hear her running after me. But when I turned, she was still standing where I had left her, head bowed, clamping her temples with her thumb and fingers.
‘By the way,’ I said, ‘you wouldn’t happen to have Mme. Bournisien’s address, would you?’
She looked up, with the baffled expression of a dog that finds itself banished from the warmth of the house and tied up outside. She said nothing, but as we gazed at one another her eyes started to flood with tears.
If I hesitated, I knew I should relent.
‘Well, thank you again, then,’ I said. ‘Goodbye.’
When I reached the hall, I found the maid hovering by the door.
‘Please go in,’ I said. ‘Your mistress isn’t well.’
The girl shook her head sadly. ‘No, I know.’
Then I let myself out, and made my escape.
*
This encounter left me feeling oddly shaken, so – although it was still broad daylight when I emerged once more into Rue Pervenche, and I knew I should have more than enough time, if I wanted, to walk back to the hotel before dinner – I decided to distract myself by taking the new Métropolitain instead. I paid my fifty centimes for a first-class ticket at the Bastille station, then briefly reverted to excited schoolboy-hood as the train appeared by some invisible force. Less than ten minutes later I found myself at Lancry, being swept up to the surface on a great well-spring of humanity that finally deposited me on the street directly opposite the Rue Casque d’Or.
I crossed towards it, pausing in the middle of the road to avoid a cab. Rather than hurrying past, however, the driver slowed suddenly, as if to let me go in front of him. I raised a hand in thanks, and went on – half-running, so as not to delay him any more than was necessary. But when I reached the other side, I was conscious that I had still not heard the horse starting off again.
Curious, I looked back. The cab had not moved, and there was a blurred face peering out of the window at me. I narrowed my eyes, trying to see it more clearly; but it promptly receded into the darkness, and the curtain fell back across the glass. The next moment, the driver cracked his whip, and the horse jolted into action.
A coincidence, I told myself: someone who thought he knew you, and then realized he didn’t.
But still, as I entered the hotel, I could not shake off a faint feeling of unease.
XI
I had no idea how to get to Cabourg, but the next morning the obliging man at the desk showed me where it was on a map, and then – magicking an Indicateur Chaix des chemins de fer from his drawer – looked up the times of trains from the Gare St. Lazare for me. I discreetly gave him another franc when I paid, and by eleven o’clock was installed in a first-class carriage, watching the grimy western suburbs of Paris drift by.
As banlieue gave way to country, and the oppressive noise of the train began to dissipate itself across the flat fields, I took out my notebook and started to write down everything I could remember of my conversation with Françoise Revel. I had been working only a couple of minutes when I felt that odd, tingling pressure on the skin that tells you you are being watched.
I looked up. As I did so, the man sitting opposite ducked abruptly behind his newspaper. I continued writing. Almost immediately the same thing happened again. I was quicker this time, and just managed to catch two dark eyes under heavy black eyebrows and a pale flash of forehead before they disappeared behind Le Figaro.
It was impossible to know how close the resemblance was without seeing the rest of him, of course, but from that one brief glimpse he might have been Mary Wilson’s brother.
And I suddenly found myself thinking, for the first time that morning, of the incident of the cab outside Lancry station. Perhaps I had been wrong to dismiss it so lightly. If – as was quite conceivable – her parents had somehow got wind of my search, was it not more than likely that they would try
to stop me? After all, they had clearly gone to considerable lengths already to conceal their identity, and must have imagined they had been entirely successful. To hear that someone was now trying to uncover it again would be unsettling, at the very least. And might be something considerably worse, if Mr. Cooper had been right, and the reputation of a great family had been at stake. Or, even more alarmingly, the national interest.
How do great families protect their reputations? How does a country defend its national interest?
I told myself that I had broken no law, and that – if I could not trust the French authorities – there was bound to be a British consul at Cabourg who would give me protection. But what if the British government itself were behind the conspiracy? Or, worse still, the British and the French were in it together?
It was not warm, but by the time we drew into Lisieux, I was drenched with sweat.
And then, just as we were about to pull out again, the man opposite me suddenly looked out of the window, and – realizing where we were – leapt up, and hurried from the train without so much as another glance at me.
At a stroke, the convoluted labyrinth into which I had been winding myself for the past hour or more unravelled.
It took me a few minutes to re-adjust myself to the reality of a world in which no one was pursuing me, or wanted me dead – or even, in all probability, knew what I was doing, or would be the least bit interested if he did. When I finally had, I felt as limp as a glove-puppet that has lost its animating hand. I promptly fell asleep, and dozed the rest of the way.
*
Since the start of the summer season was still two or three months away, I imagined it would be easy enough to find a room for the night at Cabourg, but I was wrong. The first three hotels I tried were all full, and I was finally forced to take the last available bed in a small auberge half a mile or so from the front, overlooking the market. The patronne – a bulging, grey-haired woman in an ill-fitting black widow’s dress that made her look like a lumpy cushion – insisted I should pay her in advance. As I was doing so, I asked why the town was so packed with people.
‘Because it’s Saturday, monsieur.’ Her breath was like a blast from a garlic-fuelled oven. ‘And on Saturdays, the Parisians come.’
‘Even at this time of year?’
‘At every time of year.’ She jutted her lip, and gave a disdainful shrug that said: They’re mad, but what can we do? And at least they bring us money.
I left my bags in my room, and walked down a street of half-built houses towards the sea, thinking that a saunter along the promenade would blow the stink of the woman from my nostrils and the clamminess of the journey from my skin. The water was grey and sullen-looking, dulled by a covering of high cloud and licked by a cold north-easterly that broke the surface into long foamy wrinkles and sent them racing to the shore. The sand was almost deserted, but here and there a few brave souls pitted themselves against the weather, the women laughing as they clutched their hats and tried to control their wayward skirts, the men huddled inside their coats, their pale faces slapped red by the wind.
I pulled up my collar, and ventured on to the beach myself. After fifty paces or so, I turned and looked back towards the town. It was dominated by the Grand Hôtel, an imposing mock-château with a towering mansard roof and a gracious façade that seemed to promise you – for a night, or a week, or as long as you could afford – the chance to live as an ancien régime aristocrat. It was flanked on one side by the casino, and on the other by a row of apartment buildings.
Beyond them, strung out at regular intervals along the coast, a procession of huge turreted houses, as massive and forbidding as mediaeval fortifications, loured forbiddingly at the English Channel. From Françoise Revel’s description, there was a fair chance that one of them might belong to Mme. Bournisien’s good Catholic family. Perhaps, indeed, the woman herself was even now looking down at me from an upstairs window …
The thought of it gave me a flurry of excitement. But it was frustrating, too: she was almost certainly somewhere within the range of my vision, but I had no idea how to identify the exact spot. I felt like a blindfold child at a party, vainly trying to pin the tail on the donkey.
Cabourg was reassuringly small, at least: I guessed it would take me no more than a couple of days to visit every house in the place, asking if Mme. Bournisien lived there. But that, I knew, was not the way to find her. She was clearly someone who valued the proprieties, and if I wanted her help, I must show I respected them, too. If I flustered or embarrassed her, she would probably simply shut the door in my face.
I made my way back past the Grand Hôtel towards the town. Immediately behind the casino was a small garden, with six or seven little roads radiating from it like the ribs of an open fan. After hesitating a moment, I took the central one, a kind of narrow high street lined with shops. That, I thought, would be the most obvious place to start: the good Catholic family must eat.
I tried a baker first, then a butcher, then a pâtissier. None of them had heard of Mme. Bournisien. Then, near the end of the street, I spotted a couple of well-dressed women coming out of a large grocer’s. As I approached it, I saw written in the window, in prominent gold letters: livraisons.
I went inside, and asked the young man at the counter whether he knew someone called Mme. Bournisien.
He frowned, then shook his head. ‘No, monsieur, I don’t think so.’
‘She’s the housekeeper in a large house here. I thought perhaps you might deliver to them?’
‘It’s possible.’ He took down his order-book. ‘What is the name of the family?’
‘I don’t know, I’m afraid.’
‘Then I’m sorry, I can’t help you.’
I thanked him, and turned to leave. As I reached the door, I heard footsteps behind me, and felt a hand on my elbow.
‘Monsieur?’
I looked round, and found a small man squinting up at me. He was wearing a darned woollen jacket and a red kerchief discoloured with grease and sweat. He had taken off his cap and wound it into a rough tube, which he ran up and down his thigh like a rolling-pin.
‘You are looking for …?’
‘Mme. Bournisien.’
‘Ah, ah.’ He screwed up his eyes and squinted past me, rubbing his cheek and the side of his neck with his free hand.
‘Why?’ I said. ‘Do you know where I can find her?’
He made an odd noise, like the mewling of a small animal. He squeezed his mouth into a fish-pout, then let it go again and began gnawing his upper lip. He seemed incapable of stillness: his facial muscles were in constant motion, and when they could not produce enough twitches and contortions on their own, his hands joined in the scrummage, prodding and tugging and pinching his features into a kind of living gargoyle.
‘This requires some consideration,’ he said finally, stroking the side of his strawberry nose with his thumb.
‘You think you can help me?’
He shrugged his eyebrows. ‘Well, it’s an interesting problem. But’ – pointing at his temple – ‘in principle, I don’t believe it should be beyond the power of a couple of fellows like us to resolve it satisfactorily. All it requires is time. And the application of reason. In a congenial atmosphere.’
He held out his fingers and wiggled them suggestively.
‘May I buy you a drink?’ I said.
He smiled, as if I had successfully passed some esoteric initiation, by demonstrating a sublime intellectual subtlety that matched his own.
Without another word, he crossed the road, and led me into a side-street. Half-way down was a small bar tabac. He lingered for a moment, then plunged down the handle and opened the door.
I followed him inside, and was instantly hit by a pungent smell of coffee and aniseed and French tobacco. Four or five men, reduced almost to silhouettes by the smoke, were sitting at tables, talking or reading newspapers. My companion smiled and murmured bonjour. The response was decidedly chilly: no more than a couple of
barely perceptible nods.
We found a place in the corner, and sat down. A thick-necked, square-shouldered fellow came out from behind the bar and wiped the table with a tea-cloth. His mouth was half hidden by a heavy moustache that stirred like a curtain when he spoke.
‘Monsieur?’ He said it to me – but his eyes, I noticed, were on the other man. It was hard to read their expression: not surprise, exactly, but a kind of grudging wonderment.
‘A coffee, please,’ I said. My companion ran his tongue over his lips, then – trembling slightly, and blinking his teary eyes – ordered an eau-de-vie.
‘So,’ he said, as the patron left. ‘What do you know about this Mme. Bournisien?’
‘She’s a housekeeper. Her employers have a large house here, near the sea. With a staff of eight, and six children. Or they had, at least, a year or so ago.’
He nodded. ‘We must use deduction,’ he said. He closed his eyes and started counting on his fingers, muttering under his breath. ‘Problem,’ he said at length, opening his eyes again and laughing. ‘Come on, children. Take out your pencils and exercise books. There are thirty large houses near the sea, but twenty-one of them have fewer than eight servants. We are left, therefore, with nine. House A has eight servants, but we do not know the number of children. House B, by contrast –’
He stopped as the patron reappeared with our drinks. He drained his at a gulp, then held the glass up with a shaking hand. The patron gave me a quizzical look. I nodded.
‘Very well,’ he said, with a shrug. ‘I’ll bring the bottle.’ He thought I was allowing myself to be made a fool of, it was clear – and, indeed, I thought so myself. But for the cost of a couple of glasses of brandy I might learn something – and I could not immediately think of any other course of action more likely to be productive.
‘House B, by contrast, has nine servants, although one of them may have been taken on in the last twelve months. Ergo, at the time in question, it is possible that it fitted your description. Why are you not writing this down? We cannot hope to solve the problem if we do not have the facts in front of us.’