Old Bones

by Aaron Elkins

  She lifted her head briefly, but not so briefly that he failed to see the glimmer of tears.

  "Of course, monsieur."

  He sat, and the astonishing confidence that had swelled his chest and straightened his back suddenly wasn’t there anymore. What was he doing? What was he supposed to say now? Had he made things worse for the wan, wretched woman across from him by calling attention to her? And what about the attention he had called to himself? The back of his neck burned; were they all still staring mutely at him?

  How would he explain to them that he’d merely surrendered to an irrational and momentary urge, that he hadn’t intended by any means to…Or had he? There was a strange tug at the corners of his mouth. A guilty grin? Jules had had it coming, and it had felt remarkably good to deliver it. It had felt splendid, in fact. No wonder so many people seemed to enjoy being rude. There was definitely something in it.

  "I want to apologize for my cousin’s behavior," he said.

  "Oh, no," Claire said, and looked at him. A tear broke loose and ran cleanly down her cheek; she wore no makeup. "It’s I who should apologize. My parents…It’s only when my father drinks that—that…"

  "There’s no need for you to apologize, mademoiselle." He smiled at her, rather smoothly, he thought. "Since we’ve already been introduced, and we’re relatives, after all, perhaps we might call each other by our first names? I’m Raymond."

  "Claire," she said softly.

  "Do you live near here, Claire?" he asked.

  "I live in Rennes, with my parents."

  "Ah. Well, that’s not far."

  She looked briefly at him again. Far from what, he was afraid she was going to say. He was struck by how very clear and calm her eyes were. Beautiful, really; melancholy and intelligent.

  "No," she said, "not far. Rennes is very nice."

  "I’m sure it is."

  They sat stiffly while he searched for something to talk about. Perhaps he ought to go; she was merely being polite to him, when it was he who had meant to offer politeness. But he continued to sit. Why, he wasn’t sure.

  "And you?" she said.

  "Pardon?"

  "Where do you live?"

  "Oh, in California; a city called San Mateo. You’ve probably never heard of it?"

  "Ah…no."

  "No, of course not. Well." He sipped suavely from a water glass, noticing too late the smudge of Madame Fougeray’s rich, plum-colored lipstick on the rim. "Yes," he said, "San Mateo. I’m a professor there. Uh, Claire, do you speak English? My French isn’t very good. That is," he added with uncharacteristic vanity, "my spoken French."

  "Yes, I speak it," she said in delightfully Gallic English, "but your French is excellent."

  "No, my accent is excellent. Which is a mixed blessing. Everyone thinks I understand much more than I do, and they speak so fast I can’t follow them."

  She smiled for the first time. "I have the opposite problem. I understand English very well, but my accent is so terrible people think I understand nothing, and shout at me and use sign language."

  No, he almost told her, your accent is beautiful, charming; it’s like music. His face grew warm. What a thing to say. Where were these ideas coming from?

  "You speak English extremely well," he said. "Where did you learn?"

  The conversation continued in this painful vein for another five minutes, then petered desolately out altogether. She had just told him that she was an accountant in her father’s sausage factory, and he simply couldn’t think of anything to reply.

  "Well…" he said, pushing back his chair.

  "You said you were a professor?" she said.

  He felt a swelling in his chest. She didn’t want him to go. "Yes, of European and American literature."

  Her eyes widened. "Truly? But I’m a graduate in literature myself. Of the University of Rennes."

  "You are? But you said you’re an accountant."

  "Well, yes, my father wants me to work in the factory, but my first love is literature. One day I will teach it too."

  "Really? That’s wonderful! I’m somewhat of a specialist in French literature myself," he proclaimed immodestly, "especially the nineteenth century. I have a Flaubert novel with me, as a matter of fact. In my opinion he’s the finest of them all. Well," he emended judiciously, "of the early nineteenth-century French novelists, that is. And of course with the exclusion of the romanticists."

  She laughed. "And I’ve brought a Balzac. I’ve been reading it for two days."

  "Which one?"

  "Les Illusions Perdues."

  "Ah."

  She tilted her head and looked at him, something like a sparkle in her pale eyes. "Oh? Don’t you like it? It seems to me a marvelous work, full of the most keen observation."

  "Of course it is, but an author isn’t a sociologist. I don’t believe he should be judged on ability to observe, but on the power of his literary style. Balzac’s is rudimentary at best, and he’s far too melodramatic for my taste, and too moralistic as well."

  "But isn’t Flaubert moralistic and melodramatic?"

  "Well, no, I don’t think I’d say that; at least, not as much. But it doesn’t matter; it’s the care he takes with each sentence that’s so wonderful—with settling for nothing less than the one wholly appropriate word. No one’s ever been a more scrupulous writer than Flaubert."

  Ray knew his own eyes were sparkling. He was enjoying himself, something he hadn’t expected to do until he was safely back in the library stacks at Northern Cal.

  "But," she said, "what has scrupulosity—" She giggled delightfully. "Is that a word? What has it to do with literature? A great book is defined by its power to move, not by how carefully the author peers through his Roget in search of le mot juste. Of course Madame Bovary is a great novel, but it’s because Flaubert had something great to tell us, not because he worried every line to get the words exactly right."

  Ray grinned happily. "No, I disagree…."

  THEY talked long past the dinner hour, remaining after the others had left and not getting up until the grumbling Madame Lupis began pointedly sweeping up almost under their feet. Ray had one more surprise in store for himself, and that was when he asked Claire if she’d like to walk to Ploujean with him the following morning for a cup of coffee in one of the cafés. If, of course, the weather was fine.

  "Tomorrow? But tomorrow is Cousin Guillaume’s funeral. It wouldn’t be—"

  "The next day then?" The boldly inspired Raymond Alphonse Schaefer was not to be so easily put aside.

  Claire lowered her eyes. "You’ll still be here?"

  "Of course," Ray said, deciding then and there.

  Claire hesitated, then accepted his invitation with graceful thanks.

  Later that evening, when she came to the salon with her set-faced, close-mouthed parents for ten o’clock coffee, she had added a small gold choker to her plain wool outfit of navy blue and appeared to have put a touch of color on her lips and cheeks. There was even, it seemed to Ray, the hint of a delicate, delicious floral scent when she passed him. She provided little competition to Leona’s chic plumage, but the change was noticeable. Ray spoke to her only in passing—earning a suspicious and belligerent look from Claude—but he had no doubt that she had made the effort for him, and the thought made him giddy with pleasure.

  He had no illusions about his own attractiveness. He knew very well that he was one of those gray, quiet men who fail to impress themselves on the consciousness of others. People never remembered whether or not he’d been at a particular meeting or cocktail party, and students who had been at one of his seminars in the morning walked by him in the afternoon without recognizing him.

  If you asked the people who knew him whether he smoked a pipe (he didn’t) or wore a bowtie (he did), nine out of ten would have no idea. Most would have said he wore glasses, although in fact he only looked as if he ought to. A few years before, in a wild fit of self-assertion, he’d grown a beard, which came in a startling, curly re
d. But except for a single acerbic remark from the dean of humanities when it was at the scruffy stage, no one commented. And when he shaved it off two years later, no one noticed at all.

  So when an intelligent, attractive woman made herself prettier for his sake, well, that was something to think about.

  When he got up to go to his room she was reading Balzac. He stopped at her chair.

  "I’ll see you Friday morning," he said gallantly, not caring who heard him say it.

  He went humming to bed, taking the stone steps two at a time. He had not bothered to apologize to Jules.

  GUILLAUME du Rocher’s funeral went smoothly, conducted with fitting sobriety and according to meticulous instructions left by the deceased. Afterwards, family and servants gathered in the library upstairs, where Monsieur Bonfante, Guillaume’s attorney of more than forty years, was to read the will.

  Ray had been in the handsomely wainscoted library on earlier visits to the manoir, but he never felt free to explore it, sensing in Guillaume a jealous and forbidding possessiveness. Now, while people settled themselves on chairs and couches, he moved, open-mouthed with veneration, before the thirty-foot-long wall of old books, many of them bound in gilt-decorated leather. Rabelais, Ronsard, Montaigne— my God, the 1595 edition!—Racine, Corneille, de Sévigné…

  "Isn’t it a pleasant room?" Sophie was standing alongside him, her plain, strong face dreamy and soft.

  "Pleasant! Sophie, there’s a first edition of Montaigne’s collected—"

  She seemed not to hear him. "When I was a little girl," she mused aloud, "and we’d come to visit the domaine, this was where I’d run to. I’d hide here all day if I could. The sun coming in the windows, the dusty smell of the books…I could hardly read yet, but there were pictures…and sometimes Alain would come and read to me for a while…la Fontaine, or Marie de France…and, oh, it was paradise…."

  Ray smiled at her. Sophie was full of surprises. She wasn’t much of a reader, he knew, but then you didn’t have to be a reader to love books. "That’s nice, Sophie," he said gently.

  "Of course," she said, "it usually didn’t last long. Guillaume didn’t approve of children in his library."

  "Or of adults."

  They were interrupted by the impatient throat-clearing of Monsieur Bonfante. The reading of the will was about to begin.

  FIVE

  GEORGES Bonfante tapped his sterling silver pencil methodically on the surface of the table and waited with a forbearing smile for the last few to settle down. The milk-and-waterish young man with the awful pre-knotted bowtie—that would be the distant cousin from America. Monsieur Bonfante discreetly shielded the small smile he permitted himself. A bowtie, by the good Lord, a green, polka-dotted bowtie and a brown suit, factory-made and fifteen years out of style (if it ever had been in style). Yes, that was certainly the American. Well, if he hoped to emerge any the richer from this little session, he had a sad disappointment coming.

  Monsieur Bonfante watched keenly as the young man chose his seat. Monsieur Bonfante was a student of human behavior, and he had already made his prediction. Yes, just as he expected; at the side of the thin, drab young woman who kept her hands in her lap and her eyes on her hands, the Fougeray girl. The observant Monsieur Bonfante had seen them come into the salon together earlier, and had not failed to notice the pathetically timid smiles they exchanged. Well, well, they would make a fine pair, like a couple from a children’s story book: Mr. and Mrs. Mouse. Perhaps they would live in a burrow somewhere and come out to eat Swiss cheese. And have many fine mouse-children.

  He tapped his pencil a final time, smiled authoritatively at the faces turned attentively towards his own, opened his attaché case, and removed the folder.

  From an old-fashioned metal case covered with flocked black silk he removed his reading glasses. "What we have," he said, "is a holographic will of great simplicity, written and signed by Guillaume du Rocher in my presence on January 19, 1978." He cleared his throat and began to read aloud.

  "‘This is my will, and I hereby revoke all prior wills. I direct that all my funeral expenses be paid out of my estate. To the University of Rennes I give my collection of mollusks and all materials pertaining to it. To Beatrice and Marcel Lupis I leave an annual allowance of twenty thousand francs for as long as either of them shall live.’ "

  This allowance was not as munificent as it would have been in 1978. It would provide butter on the spinach; no more. For their spinach they would still have to work. Nevertheless, it was received with a grateful murmur from Marcel and a pro forma dab of Madame Lupis’ handkerchief to a rough and perfectly dry cheek.

  Monsieur Bonfante smiled once more at his attentive audience. "‘To my cousin René du Rocher, or to his wife Mathilde in the event of his death, or to their descendants in the event of both their deaths, I leave the rest of my estate, except for the following stipulations.’ "

  He looked up again to catch a relieved Mathilde preening herself. The will could hardly be a surprise to her, but until it is read one never knows. Now she was wondering what the estate was really worth, what it would mean to her. Well, he could tell her and no doubt would. It meant she and René were rich; they now had a handsome home, the means to maintain it, and a yearly income roughly fifteen times René’s comfortable pension besides.

  "‘This bequest,’ "he continued," ‘is contingent on the stipulation that the beforementioned Marcel and Beatrice Lupis be allowed to continue in their positions for as long as they wish.’"

  "Of course, of course," René murmured to them. "Be delighted to have you."

  "‘In addition,’ " Monsieur Bonfante read on, "‘the following property is excepted: all of the contents of the room in the Manoir de Rochebonne known as the Library, including all books, furniture, ornaments, and carpets in it at the time of my death. These I bequeath to my well-loved niece Sophie Butts, née du Rocher.’ "

  At this there were gasps of surprise, among the most explosive of which came from Sophie herself, who followed it with a look of round-eyed astonishment at her husband.

  Monsieur Bonfante smiled tolerantly. "I will be happy to answer privately any questions you may have about any of the terms that affect you individually. In the meantime, are there any general questions?"

  His query went unanswered so long that he put the will into his attaché case and prepared his face for the congratulations and smiles required of him. The beneficiaries rose and came to the table to thank him.

  Claude Fougeray now made his first contribution: a long, gargling mutter. Head lowered and weaving ominously from side to side, he stared forward, pressed tensely into the tapestried cushion of his chair, like a jack-in-the-box jammed into place by its lid and about to burst the hook. "No," he said.

  "Monsieur?" said the attorney with a smile. Mathilde had warned him about Fougeray.

  Claude had placed himself apart from everyone, even his wife and daughter, up against the oaken wainscoting near the door, and one fist thumped rhythmically against the three-hundred-year-old linen-fold paneling behind him. His voice was strained, barely audible. "How do I know that’s really his will?"

  Georges Bonfante had nothing against Claude. He was familiar with the old stories about him, although he himself had been a young man in Lyons at the time. He did not fault Claude for his behavior during the war; what choice did a sensible man have in those days? Nevertheless, he felt his temper begin to swell at the base of his throat. He was not of a retiring disposition, and he did not care to have his ethics impugned.

  "It is a holographic will, monsieur," he said frostily. "Made in my presence."

  "Holographic, holographic—"

  "Made in his own handwriting," Leona Fougeray snapped from across the room.

  "In my presence," Monsieur Bonfante repeated yet again, with admirable patience.

  Claude shook his head stubbornly. "No, impossible. I know Guillaume; he told me long ago, before the war— The books would go to the Bibliothèque Nationale when he
died." He panted twice, like a beast. "Besides, he hated America—ever since the First War, when they came over, so sure of themselves, with their piss-on-you American walk—"

  "Piss-on-you American walk?" Ray was heard to murmur perplexedly.

  "All this may be so," said Monsieur Bonfante sharply, "but you are speaking of Guillaume du Rocher as a young man, many decades ago. And I fail to see the relevance—"

  "He would never leave his library to an American! Not his precious books!" Claude stood up abruptly, swaying on unsteady legs, propping himself with one arm against the wall.

  "An American? But surely his cousin Sophie—"

  "Not Sophie, her husband! Leaving them to her is the same thing as leaving them to him. Don’t you know what they must be worth? How long do you think she’ll keep them?"

  "Now just hold on a minute there," Ben said, moving a step forward. With her eyes, Sophie appealed to him to stop, which he did reluctantly.

  Monsieur Bonfante’s fund of patience was exhausted. "I advise you to hold your tongue, monsieur," he said to Claude in his firmest courtroom voice. "However, if you wish to contest Guillaume du Rocher’s will, there are legal means at your disposal."

  It was a good time to make an exit, but Claude stood blocking the door, head down, breathing as heavily as a bull and giving the convincing impression that he would attempt to gore anyone who took a step. No one moved. Monsieur Bonfante had placed himself in front of the others and was watching Claude closely, a matador shielding his peónes.

  "Legal means…" Claude repeated, muddled and wandering. He squeezed his eyes shut and passed his hand over his forehead. "Legal…" His eyes opened and fixed cunningly on the attorney. "How do I know it was his last will?"

  "I have been Monsieur du Rocher’s attorney for forty-two years," Monsieur Bonfante said coldly. "I assure you there was never a subsequent will."

  "And never talk of another will?" Claude stretched his lips in a malicious grin.

  "Monsieur, I don’t deal in talk." A fine close. Georges Bonfante snapped shut the latches of his attaché case with firm, incontestable clicks. "Ladies and gentlemen, I think our business here—"