“He sat and stared at me for a while, and then he said, ‘I can do it, and I alone. It must be done in a certain room in Arles, upon the nineteenth of August, at sunset. At no other time and in no other place can it be done, and by me alone. For me, personally, it will be both difficult and dangerous. My fee therefore will be a hundred thousand francs.’ That’s about thirteen thousand pounds.
“Of course I said that there was no question of my company coming up with a sum like that on the basis of a sketchy verbal outline, but I went on pretending to negotiate in case he let something else slip. I didn’t get very far, I’m afraid, because he saw what I was up to, and lost patience. He took a napkin and wrote an address on it and gave it to me and said, ‘Go back to England and talk to your friends. If they decide to make use of my services, come to this place at eight in the evening of the seventeenth of August. At this point I will explain to you what is required. All must be agreed by the evening of the eighteenth. Upon the nineteenth I will perform the operation. You will pay me ten thousand francs before I begin. Your friends will then have twenty-four hours in which to decide whether they are satisfied with the result. If they are, you will then pay me the remaining ninety thousand. That is all I have to say.’ And he walked out.
“I tried again at the circus later that morning and they didn’t want to know me. In fact they pretty well threw me out. And that’s about it.”
Mum looked at Melanie and Melanie looked at the tablecloth. Mum sighed.
“We’ve still got to go ahead,” she said.
“I was afraid you’d say that,” said Eddie.
Now I’m going to go back. I knew almost all of what Eddie had told us, because as soon as he’d come back from France he’d reported to Janice, and she’d phoned Mum and Mum had told me. Janice had been very upset about it and spent hours on the phone to Mum several evenings in a row.
“It seems quite mad,” Mum told me. “In fact Eddie thinks we’re being totally irresponsible, but we both believe this is something we’ve got to try. You’ve seen what Melanie’s been like these last few days. Melly’s been the same. We all know they’re working up to some kind of crisis. We can actually feel it coming …”
“On the nineteenth of August?” I said. “Could be.”
“Janice left the circus on the eighteenth,” said Mum. “So the nineteenth is fourteen years to the day since whatever it was happened to Melly when M. Perrault took her away.”
“Monsieur Albert would know that, though,” I said. “If he helped, I mean.”
“Yes, of course. But there are still some things he said to Eddie which I don’t see how he could have known. Let me go on. You know what Janice is like. She’s not the sort to go along with any kind of out-of-this-world explanation, but even so … You know what she said? ‘I feel as if Melly was dying of some kind of galloping cancer and there was this miracle cure which somebody told me about. If I was desperate as I’m getting to be about this, I think I’d try it. It would be better than feeling guilty for the rest of my life because I hadn’t.’
“And there’s something else. Dr. Wilson has phoned a couple of times because he’s worried about Melly, but Melly’s absolutely adamant she doesn’t want to see him again, and Janice daren’t tell him any more than she has in case he decides he ought to get social workers in, and they’d almost certainly want to take Melanie into care, and perhaps Melly too. But at one point he said that it might be just as dangerous for the girls not to meet when they felt they were ready as it would be for them to meet when they weren’t.”
“I’d go along with that,” I said. “Melanie would go crazy. I mean crazy. Throw herself under a bus or something. I’m serious about that, Mum.”
“Janice has been saying almost the same thing about Melly,” said Mum.
The point about this was that Janice hadn’t got thirteen thousand pounds, and she’d have needed quite a bit more, what with fares and hotels and so on, not to mention hiring Eddie again. And there was no way she could raise it. Mum could, because of my dad’s insurance money. She’d bought our house outright, without a mortgage, but there was still a bit of a nest egg left. So a lot of the telephone calls to Janice were about persuading her to let Mum use it. And the reason why Eddie had come to Bearsden was so that he could try to persuade her not to. She hadn’t paid him to come. He’d done it on his own account because he was so unhappy about it.
“I think you’re making a bad mistake,” he said.
“Tell me something,” said Mum. “Don’t you think ten thousand francs is actually rather a little for him to ask? I mean if he’s simply going to lay on some kind of conjuring trick so that he can walk off with our deposit, wouldn’t he be asking more? Fifty thousand, I’d have thought. Doesn’t that suggest he himself believes he can do what he says, so he’s prepared to wait for the full fee?”
“All it suggests to me is that he thinks his conjuring trick is going to be good enough to persuade you he’s done what he promised. That’s why I’m not pulling out now, which I’m otherwise very inclined to. But I’m sticking with it because I believe you’ll get into a worse mess without me than you will if I’m there.”
“Thank you,” said Mum.
We flew out to Marseilles on separate flights. Melanie didn’t have a passport, but luckily Melly had one of her own as well as being still on Janice’s, and of course the photograph was spot on, apart from the hair, so that was no problem. Eddie met us at the airport in a hired car and drove us to Arles across a flat, dusty, baking plain with dingy white cattle and vineyards. While he was driving us up he told us what had been happening. After that he was going back for Janice and Melly on the next flight.
“I’m not at all happy about this,” he said. “In fact I’m still hoping I can get you to cry off. I’ll refund my fee, if that will make the difference.”
“I wouldn’t dream of asking you to do that,” said Mum, “whatever else happens. You’ve been marvelous. But it’s worse than we thought, is it?”
“You’ll have to make your own minds up about that. I know what I think. I wish I could tell you this was some sort of straightforward scam, and he’s just going to perform a lot of mystic passes and then pocket the fee. I could cope with that. But there’s something else going on and I can’t make out what. Anyway, I saw him yesterday evening. There didn’t seem any point in going on with the story that I was some kind of film scout, so I told him I was acting on your behalf and you’d hired me to protect your interests. I then took up a fairly tough negotiating position—nothing he could object to if he was on the level, but plenty if he wasn’t. The main point is that I’ve insisted on a legally enforceable contract, with all the money in the lawyer’s hands until what he calls the operation is completed to your satisfaction. I was expecting him to jib at that, but he didn’t.
“Then I insisted on seeing the room where it was going to happen. It turned out to be in the building where I met him, which is an old inn out in the suburbs. He took me upstairs and showed me. It’s a large room on the top storey. It looks as if some kind of club or something used to meet there once, but it’s almost empty now. The point is that it can be reached by two sets of stairs at opposite ends of the building, so that the girls don’t even have to use the same entrance before they finally meet. I went over it very thoroughly and I couldn’t find anything wrong with it.
“Now I’ll come to his demands. The first seems to me pure hocus-pocus but ought to be possible. The girls have to be identically dressed, and their hair identically cut and arranged. They have to be exact mirror images of each other. That means no fastenings on the dresses, and everything else symmetrical. If there’s a pocket on the left breast there must be one on the right, and so on. I didn’t get it about the fastenings until he showed me on my own shirt. My shirt buttons left over right, so my mirror image looks as if it buttons right over left …”
“I knew it was something to do with mirrors,” said Mum. “You remember what happened in the Wardrobe,
darling? And that’s why their scars are on opposite arms. Go on, Eddie. There’s bound to be a Carrefours or a Prix Unique in Arles. I’m sure I can find something for them there. And Janice will have to take Melly to a hairdresser and get her hair cut to match. Hell, we’ll need a photograph.”
“That’s OK,” said Eddie. “I’ll take one as soon as we get to the hotel. Now the next thing is a good deal trickier. Albert told me he’d be bringing an assistant. To push him a bit further I thought I might as well offer to do that myself, though I was pretty sure he’d find some kind of occult nonsense reason to turn me down. Sure enough, he asked me when my birthday was and when I told him May he said that wouldn’t do because it had to be somebody born as near as possible to the cusp of Sagittarius and Capricorn, which I gather is just before Christmas—I’m not into astrology myself. Again I thought I might as well call him on that, so I told him I’d find somebody else, and very much to my surprise he accepted that at once. All he said was that it mustn’t be a woman, and he gave me till this evening to come up with someone suitable. I spent an hour this morning ringing round the local agencies, but without any luck so far. It’s not a big deal. We can always just tell him—”
“No,” said Mum. “If we’re going to go along with this at all we’ve got to do it properly. That means doing exactly what he says. Anyway, Keith’s birthday is the twentieth of December. Is that any good?”
“Well,” said Eddie. “I have to tell you I don’t trust this guy an inch. He knows something, and he’s up to something. No offense, Keith, but … Look, Trish, give me another hour, and if I don’t come up with a genuine cusp-of-whatsit candidate I’ll try Keith on him this evening. I’m seeing him in any case with the contract. And if I don’t find someone and if he then turns Keith down I’m going to do my damnedest to persuade you and Janice to call the whole thing off, after all.”
“We can’t do that now,” said Mum. “Not if we can possibly help it.”
“Let me tell you this,” said Eddie. “I was trying to get him to agree what we meant by your being satisfied with the operation—you, Janice, and both the girls, all happy, or what? Then I realized that he was talking as if there was only going to be one girl around when it was over.”
“That’s right,” said Melanie.
She and I were in the back of the car and Mum was in front with Eddie. I’d been leaning forward to hear what Eddie was saying, but she’d spoken in such an odd way that I turned and looked at her. We’d all been having a very much easier time since Eddie had come back from France and it had been settled that we were going out to Arles. Melanie (and Melly too, Janice said) had stopped her wild fizzing and calmed down almost to normal. Beyond normal, even, because she’d spent most of the time in a sort of gentle daze, just waiting. “Getting myself ready,” she told me. Now she was fizzing again all right. As I turned she grabbed me and whispered in my ear, “Dinna let them back out now, Keith. Please! They canna do it now!”
“Do my best,” I whispered, and went back to listening to Mum and Eddie. Out of the corner of my eye I’d seen Eddie banging the side of his fist against the steering wheel, he was that upset.
“I don’t get it!” he said. “I absolutely don’t get it! You’re responsible adults. OK, you’re a bit gone on the mumbo jumbo yourself, but you’re grown-up. And Janice doesn’t believe a word of it. And yet you’re both prepared to put these girls into the hands of this charlatan. Not to mention risking a considerable amount of money.”
“Is it really like that?” said Mum gently. “I mean … No, look. We’re upsetting Melanie. Get us to the hotel and take your photograph. And then—you’ve got a bit of time before you need to go back for Janice and Melly?—we’ll talk about it then while Melanie and Keith are getting settled in. All right?”
Arles is roasting in August. There are shade trees down the main streets, but the heat bounces off the shabby plaster houses and the air crackles in your nostrils, and smells of dust and diesel fumes and garlic and cooking oil, and if there’s a breeze you pick up wild, dry herby smells from the baking plain. Your clothes stick to you and you stick to anything you sit on and you sleep under not even a sheet and you’re still too hot.
Our hotel was in a quiet little back street and didn’t look at all smart. (Janice and Melly were staying on the other side of the town.) Eddie took some pictures of Melanie with an instant camera, for the hairdresser, while we were still out on the pavement, and then Mum checked us in and Melanie and I waited upstairs while she talked with Eddie. We had tall, shuttered rooms with incredibly old-fashioned furniture. Mum and Melanie were in one room and I was in a sort of annex off theirs.
Melanie was extremely jumpy until Mum showed up, just as bad as she’d been those first few weeks in Glasgow.
“I hope it’s going to be all right,” Mum said. “I think I’ve persuaded him to carry on for the moment anyway, though he still thinks we’re taking a terrible risk with the girls. Which we are—there’s no getting away from it—but anything else seems worse. And of course we’ve still got to see what Janice says.
“Eddie’s going to see this Monsieur Albert this evening, and he’s going to tell him straight out that we don’t trust him, and that we’ve got to be absolutely sure that there’s no way he can do anything to harm either of the girls. Eddie’s got it into his head that he’s going to try and make off with one of them by some sort of conjuring trick—he is a conjurer after all, so he’s going to insist on there being someone from our side in the room the whole time—Keith if he can’t find a grown-up who fits. If the man won’t accept Keith then we’ll know he’s trying to cheat us, because Keith’s perfectly genuinely on the cusp of Sagittarius and Capricorn. I’ve realized what that’s about, by the way. We’re almost on the cusp of Leo and Virgo now, and the girls were born almost on the cusp of Arles and Taurus, and that makes a perfect triangle—I think it’s called a trine, and it’s supposed to be very significant—I don’t remember why. So at least it wasn’t something Monsieur Albert just made up as an excuse for not having Eddie.
“The other thing he’s going to insist on is that we’ve got to be able to seal the room off completely, so that no one can get in or out from the moment it starts till it’s over. Apparently there are two little rooms at the top of the two stairs—that’s on either side of the big room, like lobbies. The doors lock, so we won’t be able to interfere. Eddie’s going to go over the whole place again this evening, and measure everything, and make sure there aren’t any secret doors or compartments and so on. I must say I don’t see how the man could possibly imagine he could get away with something like that. Surely the other girl … Anyway, if he turns us down over any of that Eddie’s going to call it off … I’m sorry, Melanie—I think we’ll have to … God, I wish this was over. I’m absolutely sick with worry. I don’t think I want any lunch.”
“I do,” I said.
“Me too,” said Melanie. “I’m really hungry.”
It was strange. A few minutes before she’d been so jittery it almost hurt to watch, and now she’d calmed down completely. She’d barely seemed to register what Mum had been saying about calling things off if Monsieur Albert wouldn’t agree, and now she lay on her bed and looked at the ceiling while Mum unpacked enough to change her shoes and so on.
“They must have landed by now,” said Mum as she got her things together for going out.
“A wee while back,” said Melanie. “They’re in the terminal now, showing their passport. There’s a bairn behind them, crying.”
“If you could do that on the stage you’d make a fortune,” said Mum, but she sounded cross about it.
We went out and found a store and bought long French loaves and butter and cheese and peaches and Coke, and made ourselves a picnic in the shade of some trees in a hot little square with a dribbling fountain in the middle. Then we went off to find the clothes, with Melly drifting along in a kind of happy daze, letting herself be pushed and shunted round this enormous superstore while we
looked for absolutely mirror-image dresses. Everything seemed to have a little logo on one side, or a pocket, or something. At last we found two bright yellow shift things with zips at the back. Melanie just glanced at them and said, “Yuck,” but Mum and I went over them inch by inch looking for some way of telling them apart.
“I suppose they’ll do,” said Mum. “Only I wish they weren’t so hideous.”
We were trying on sandals and Melanie had hold of my shoulder while she balanced on one leg getting her heel right in the other foot, when she froze. Her nails dug into me like claws.
“Ouch!” I said. “You needn’t do that!”
She didn’t hear me. She stuck there, except that her head turned slowly as if she was watching something extraordinary going along the next aisle. Then she relaxed.
“What was that about?” I said.
“They were driving by,” she whispered. “In the road just out there.”
From then on, for the rest of the day, she was a quite different sort of dreamy, quiet, smiling, doing little dance steps while she walked, breaking off in the middle of something she was saying for a few seconds and then carrying on, as if she’d just said hello to a friend who’d passed by. Mum paid for the clothing and went off to talk to Janice and Eddie while Melanie and I walked slowly back to the hotel along the shady side of the streets, turning off to look at anything that seemed interesting. Melanie too. Being interested, I mean—even more than me. It was as if she kept saying, “Look! Look!” to somebody I couldn’t see was there.
We stopped at a cafe and had what was their idea of tea—in a glass, just hot water, with your own tea bag which you put into it, and no milk, but French milk is disgusting anyway. Then we got a bit lost, so we weren’t back at the hotel until only just before Mum. I’d been expecting problems, in fact I thought Eddie might have persuaded Janice to call the whole thing off. I mean she saw things almost the same way as he did. But no.
The Lion Tamer’s Daughter Page 20