Consolation

by James Wilson

  Feeling more stupid with every moment, I slipped my fountain pen and notebook from my coat.

  ‘That’s better. House A, you recall –’

  ‘Yes, I remember. Eight servants. Unknown number of children.’

  ‘Good. Good.’

  We continued in this vein as he drank a second and then a third brandy, all the while adding more and more extravagant details: House D was home to a pair of parrots; House E was reputedly haunted by the ghost of a man with one eye; House F boasted the most insatiable dog in Christendom, so notorious for his exploits that a group of local ladies, outraged at seeing their spaniels and whippets produce litter after litter of mongrels, had petitioned the mayor to order it to be castrated.

  We had still only reached House G when I heard the door of the bar open, and someone walking in from the street. He took three or four steps, then abruptly stopped, as if something had caught his attention. In the same moment, the whole room suddenly fell silent. The back of my neck prickled: I could not help imagining that the something must be the sight of the man in the red kerchief fleecing yet another unsuspecting victim, and that – seeing the newcomer watching it – the rest of the clientèle had decided to enjoy the spectacle, too.

  ‘In House G,’ said my companion, ‘we have the most curious plant that was ever seen in France.’

  He paused, and reached for the brandy bottle. The sight of his tremulous fingers closing on it yet again finally made me snap. I snatched it away from him and plugged the open neck with my thumb.

  ‘Do you or do you not know Mme. Bournisien?’ I said.

  He jerked back, with a you-don’t-have-to-talk-to-me-like-that look on his face.

  ‘We are proceeding,’ he said, with a wheedling smile, ‘one step at a time, towards –’

  ‘Of course you know her, don’t you, Renaud?’ said a voice behind me. Startled, I twisted round, and saw a looming black figure that seemed to be half man and half woman. Then I blinked, and realized that what I had taken to be a dress was a soutane.

  ‘Ah, father,’ said the man in the kerchief, half getting up and bobbing his head. ‘We were just eliminating certain other possibilities.’

  The priest smiled, pursing his lips into a sceptical moue. He was no more than thirty, impressively tall, with a florid complexion and the crude, unformed features of a young bird. With surprising lightness he moved behind my companion’s chair and laid his fingertips on the man’s shoulders.

  ‘What possibilities?’ The backs of his large hands, I noticed, were covered with a thick mat of curly black hairs.

  ‘This gentleman wanted to know where she lived. And I could not quite remember.’

  ‘Ah.’ He nodded, breathing out softly through his nose. He was still smiling, but his eyes had the blank defeated look you see in a mother worn down by an incorrigible child. ‘And do you remember now?’

  ‘Yes, father. Chez Dubucq.’

  ‘Chez Dubucq, monsieur,’ repeated the priest, looking at me. ‘On the Promenade des Français.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘Only don’t tell her you had it from me.’ He seized a chair from a neighbouring table, spun it round on one leg and sat down next to me. ‘I am a disgrace to the Church, you see,’ he said, with a laugh. ‘I consort with tax collectors and drunkards.’

  I had no desire to add to the little man’s humiliation by watching him squirm, so I quickly paid for our drinks, and hurried out into the street. When I glanced back through the window, he had his hand over his mouth, and was pressing the thumb and forefinger so deep into his eyes that he seemed in danger of gouging them out altogether.

  *

  It did not take me long to find where the Dubucqs lived: the first person I asked directed me to an enormous house overlooking the beach, no more than a few hundred yards from the casino. Like its neighbours, it was a mad jumble of canopies and balconies and jutting windows, with – as if even a square inch of uncluttered space were an affront to the architect – snake-skin patterns of red and white brick festooning the few patches of bare wall.

  Feeling like the lost child in a fairy-tale approaching the ogre’s castle, I climbed the steps and rang the bell. Almost immediately, a house-maid opened the door.

  ‘Good evening, monsieur.’

  ‘Good evening. Is Mme. Bournisien in?’

  Her eyelid flickered, as if she had a tic. ‘I’ll go and see, sir. What is your name?’

  ‘Corley Roper.’

  She tried to repeat it, but couldn’t.

  ‘I’ll just say an English gentleman,’ she said, laughing at her own ineptness. ‘Please come in.’

  She ushered me into a cavernous hall lined with hunting trophies, then vanished through a baize-covered door at the back. I found myself standing under a pair of antlers as big as the branches of a small tree, and staring uncomfortably into the maledictory glass eyes of a stuffed boar’s head. After a couple of minutes I heard the sigh of the baize door again, and turned to find a woman striding towards me. She was perhaps fifty-five, but still trim and erect, and moved with an almost girlish nimbleness. She wore a neat black dress, with a bunch of keys and a watch hanging from the belt. Her thick silver hair was wound behind her head in a tight whorl.

  ‘Monsieur?’

  ‘Mme. Bournisien?’

  She nodded. She seemed neither friendly nor unfriendly, but only coolly enquiring, as if the fixed rhythm of her daily routine had developed an unexpected irregularity, and she was curious as to the cause.

  ‘Please forgive my intruding on you,’ I said.

  She gave a twitch of the head. ‘How can I help you?’

  I introduced myself. We shook hands. I said:

  ‘I should like to ask you some questions. About a former charge of yours, Mary Stone.’

  She breathed in deeply, half-closing her eyes. Then she nodded and said:

  ‘Ah, Mary, yes. What has happened to her? Is she dead?’

  ‘No, no. But she is troubled.’

  She nodded again, unsurprised – giving me the odd sense that, alone of all the people I had met, she immediately understood the reason for my quest without my having to explain it to her.

  ‘I’m sorry to hear that,’ she said quietly. ‘But that is the price we pay, isn’t it? When we do as her mother did.’

  My pulse quickened. ‘Why, do you know who her mother is?’

  She half-shut her eyes again, and shook her head. ‘No. I knew only the sin. Not the sinner.’

  ‘Who actually employed you to look after her, then?’

  ‘A man … A man … I forget the name …’

  ‘Cooper?’

  She nodded. ‘Cooper, yes, that was it.’

  ‘Did you ever meet him?’

  ‘No. But it was he who paid us.’ She glanced at her watch. ‘Look, Mr. Roper, I would be happy to tell you what little I know. But now, I’m afraid, I have to supervise the family’s dinner.’

  ‘Oh, of course, I’m sorry –’

  ‘But I have tomorrow afternoon off. If you would care to meet me at three o’clock, in front of the Grand Hôtel …?’

  ‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘I would, very much.’

  XII

  I went down the steps feeling half a stone lighter than I had going up them – which was strange, considering that I had learned nothing of any significance, and had only the slenderest reason to hope that my interview the next day would yield anything more valuable. But at least I had found Mme. Bournisien, and she had turned out to be neither Françoise Revel’s heartless functionary, nor the scolding Pharisee the priest had led me to expect. Or perhaps she was both those things, but had chosen to show a different face to me. That she had grasped the reason for my quest, at any rate, and was broadly sympathetic to it, I was almost certain – and I found that curiously reassuring.

  To lift my spirits still further, the weather was starting to improve. The wind had dropped, and the gauze of high cloud had retreated to the horizon, turning the sky a brilliant po
wder blue and allowing the low evening sun to flood the sea with light. The incoming tide had swallowed up two-thirds of the beach, and what remained was now thronged with people. Knowing there was nothing more I could usefully do that day, I picked my way between them and started walking eastward along the ribbon of wet sand at the edge of the water, with no particular aim except to enjoy the smell of salt and seaweed and the half desolate, half thrilling sensation of being poised between the world of familiar things on one side and the inhuman vastness of the sea on the other.

  I was almost past the Grand Hôtel when I was suddenly struck, yet again, with the feeling that someone was watching me. I stopped, and looked around. The crowd seemed denser than ever: immediately next to me, a group of fashionably dressed women sauntered by, twirling their umbrellas, and followed by a chattering train of small girls in frocks and boys in sailor-suits, while further afield three or four hardy young men in striped bathing costumes were daring each other to be first into the water. None of them showed the least interest in me.

  Stop being so fanciful, I told myself. Remember the man on the train this morning. But as I was turning back, I was dazzled by a needle of light so brilliant that it hurt my eyes. I looked in the direction it had come from, and saw a woman on a balcony on the third floor of the Grand Hôtel peering at me – or so it seemed – through a pair of field-glasses. She must have realized that I had noticed her, because the next second she lowered the binoculars, and hurried inside.

  I counted: four windows from the end. I started towards the hotel, then almost at once stopped again. It was scarcely conceivable that the staff there would help me to identify the room, or tell me who was staying in it – and even if they did, it was almost certain the name would mean nothing to me. In the very process of asking, moreover, I should only be exposing myself to greater danger.

  As I went on, all the questions that I thought I had set to rest at Lisieux station suddenly erupted again, sending wilder and wilder ideas galloping through my head. What if the man that morning had been following me, and had got off the train to wire the time of my arrival to his accomplice in Cabourg? Or perhaps Mme. Bournisien was in league with my pursuers, and had arranged our rendezvous the next day in accordance with their instructions? She had specified the Grand Hôtel, after all …

  ‘Mr. Roper?’

  I spun round, to find a young woman half-running to catch me up. The exertion had made her flushed and breathless, but she still had energy enough to give me a tentative smile.

  I knew I had seen her before, but, in that first instant, I could not for the life of me have said where. I was conscious, though, that the sight of her provoked a paradoxical mix of emotions: pleasure, and astonishment, and exasperation, and something very close to despair.

  ‘Don’t you remember me?’ she asked.

  No Englishwoman ever spoke quite like that. No Frenchwoman, either …

  I had it.

  ‘Miss Dangerfield!’

  Her face relaxed. ‘That’s right.’

  ‘Was that you on the balcony just now? With the field-glasses?’

  She nodded.

  ‘What are you … why are you …?’

  ‘I just … No, I won’t pretend. I followed you here.’

  I tried to speak, but my tongue seemed paralysed, and I was reduced to mutely shaking my head.

  ‘I know,’ she said. ‘It was the strangest thing in the world to do. I’m as surprised by it as you are.’ She held out her hand and marched a couple of fingers. ‘Shall we walk?’

  ‘All right.’

  ‘I saw you in Paris,’ she said, as we started along the beach. ‘Or at least, I was pretty sure it was you. Last night.’

  ‘Ah, the cab!’

  She nodded again. ‘I was on my way to meet someone, and couldn’t stop. But I went to the Casque d’Or this morning, and asked for Mr. Corley Roper. And the man at the desk said Mr. Roper had just left. Which was annoying – but at least it meant I was right, and it had actually been you that I’d seen. So I asked him if he knew where you’d gone, and he told me Cabourg. And I thought, well, it’s the week-end, and I could just as well spend it at the seaside as in Paris. Do you mind if I take your arm?’

  ‘I beg your pardon?’

  ‘All the ladies are holding the gentlemen’s arms.’

  ‘Ah.’ I took her arm, and drew it through mine. ‘But I don’t think it’s obligatory.’

  ‘No. But still, I don’t like people to guess I’m a foreigner.’

  ‘They can’t really help it, can they? It must be pretty obvious the moment you open your mouth.’

  ‘Before then, I mean,’ she said, dropping her voice. ‘Most of them’ – jerking her head at the crowd milling past us – ‘will never hear a word I say. And I’d prefer them, when they look at me, to think I know how to behave. The French have a wonderful gift for making you feel … making you feel …’

  ‘Gauche?’

  ‘Yes.’ She hesitated a moment, then laughed and went on: ‘Yes, that’s it, isn’t it? We even have to use a French word for it.’

  I laughed too – then stopped abruptly when it occurred to me just how utterly absurd this was: to be walking along arm in arm and exchanging pleasantries with a woman I had met only once before, and whom, until five minutes ago, I had assumed to be hundreds – if not thousands – of miles away.

  ‘At least at the Grand they speak English,’ she said. ‘So I don’t have to watch them smirking as I mangle their language.’

  ‘How did you get a room there?’ I asked. ‘When I tried, they told me they were full.’

  ‘I telegraphed them before I left Paris.’

  ‘Very prudent of you,’ I said. ‘I imagined I should find the place deserted, and the desperate hoteliers competing to get my custom.’

  ‘And so they should be, if they only knew who you were.’

  I smiled and shook my head. ‘You greatly over-estimate my reputation, I’m afraid.’

  ‘Is it –? Dare I –?’ she began. She looked up at me to see if I could complete the question for myself. When it became clear that I couldn’t, she went on:

  ‘I was wondering if perhaps you had come here to write?’

  ‘Ah.’ I smiled. ‘No, no, I haven’t, I’m afraid.’

  ‘That’s a pity.’

  I felt a surge of anger, which dissipated the instant I glanced down and saw her expression. The skin around her eyes was stretched tight and she was biting her lower lip, like a hurt child trying to stop herself crying.

  ‘I’m sorry to disappoint you,’ I said.

  She shook her head.

  ‘I did try to explain –’

  She nodded. ‘I know. And I’ve no right to keep on … to keep on …’ She broke off, as if she suddenly found herself teetering on the edge of a precipice.

  ‘Badgering me?’

  She grimaced. ‘That is what I was going to say, yes.’

  ‘Better than frog-marching me, I suppose.’

  She laughed. ‘Yes, I guess so.’

  We walked on in silence. I could not help being struck by the change in her since our last conversation. Obviously, she had not entirely lost her self-assurance – if she had, she would not have been here now – but it was clear that over the past few weeks it had taken something of a battering. Before, she had had the hard rosebud perfection of someone whose will has never been seriously thwarted, and who takes it for granted that she will inevitably get her way; now the petals seemed to have half-opened, and been nibbled by slugs and nipped by their first frost. Her behaviour was no longer all of a piece: confidence kept being capsized by diffidence, and diffidence slipping into melancholy.

  ‘It would have been a consolation, that’s all,’ she said at length.

  ‘What?’

  ‘To know that you were working on a story.’

  ‘Well, that’s very flattering. But …’ I hesitated, then plucked up my courage and went on: ‘Why do you need consoling?’

  ‘Oh,
I don’t, really.’ But the sigh with which she said it belied her. ‘I’m just being selfish, I suppose. Probably all it is, really, is that another adventure with Alcuin Hare and Mr. Largo Frog and the Coneys sounds awfully appealing to me right now. I could shut the door, and close the curtains, and curl right up, and just devour it, the way I did when I was a little girl.’

  ‘Is your … is the tour not going well, then?’

  ‘Hm? Oh, no, no, it’s going fine.’

  ‘Miss Dangerfield, the English doubtless appear to you a most obtuse race. You probably have no idea what we are talking about, and assume that we, for our part, are incapable of understanding even the simplest thing you say to us. But the one area in which we cannot be deceived is brave-facery. It is an English vice, and we are experts at detecting it. And that oh, no, it’s going fine was as unmistakable a piece of brave-facery as I have heard in years.’

  This was the longest speech I had ever made to her, and it took her quite by surprise. She gave the kind of embarrassed giggle you hear when you walk in on a woman unexpectedly, and discover her half-undressed.

  ‘Very well, then,’ she said. ‘The truth is, it’s a whole lot more lonely than I thought it would be. I write home, of course, every day. And my family write me. But that’s not the same as having somebody to talk to. A friend to confide in. And I have no friends here at all.’

  ‘Well, that, at least, I understand,’ I said.

  ‘You have no friends here, either?’

  ‘Not a solitary soul.’

  ‘Oh. Then why –?’

  ‘Listen, Miss Dangerfield, as one foreigner to another, would you care to have dinner with me?’

  ‘Well, yes, thank you. That would be … that would be … oh, just –’

  ‘Not the Grand, I think, don’t you? Too grand. We’ll find somewhere rather cosier.’

  We fought our way back to the promenade, and then – as if by some previous agreement, though neither of us had suggested it – looked back to watch the death-throes of the sun as it plunged into the sea and broke up, strewing the surface with fiery wreckage. For ten minutes or more we stood there, still arm in arm, saying nothing. Only when the last pulsing sliver of red had finally sunk below the horizon did we turn again, and continue into the town.