The Girl at the Lion D'Or

by Sebastian Faulks

  Anne, however, was not thinking about centimes as she leaned across the tables to gather up the dirty plates. An idea had occurred to her; but before she could begin to form a plan the street door opened again, this time revealing the stocky figure of Jean-Philippe, the quieter of the Gilbert brothers. Hartmann bought more drinks and at once he and Jean-Philippe fell into agitated conversation with Mattlin.

  Like Roussel earlier in the evening, like most men in bars and cafés up and down France that night, they were concerned by news that two days earlier the German army had reoccupied the Rhineland, a zone demilitarised by treaty at the end of the war. All three had at some time been in the army, Jean-Philippe from the first battle of the Marne until the Armistice, during which time he had twice been wounded. Although they talked robustly, each man knew with a low certainty that such supreme effort of resistance could never be made again, and they looked to their political leaders to ensure that it should not be necessary. In this they were constantly let down and their sacrifice, as they saw it, betrayed.

  ‘But I suppose Mandel is at least aware of the threat,’ said Mattlin.

  ‘I agree,’ said Jean-Philippe, who was the most passionate of the three. ‘He is aware of the threat, but there is nothing he can do about it. Sarraut will do nothing. Did you hear him on the wireless last night? He will insist on doing nothing – that’s why he was chosen in the first place.’

  ‘And because he was not Laval,’ said Hartmann.

  It was not as if the three of them were arguing, Anne thought, as she passed by; it was more that each wanted to make the same point more loudly than the others.

  ‘But Flandin,’ said Jean-Philippe, ‘at least he’s an anglophile.’

  ‘The best thing you can say for Flandin,’ said Hartmann as he drained his glass, ‘is that he’s an extremely tall man.’

  Anne left them talking until a few minutes before closing time. It would have been better for her to wait until another day to propose her scheme, but by then it might have been too late.

  When she saw Jean-Philippe put his hand on Mattlin’s shoulder the better to emphasise a point, thus momentarily excluding Hartmann from the circle at the bar, she moved over with her tin tray full of empty beer glasses, touched the sleeve of Hartmann’s jacket and murmured, ‘Monsieur . . .’

  He turned and looked down to where she stood.

  ‘Monsieur,’ she began again, her voice very soft because she was frightened and she didn’t want the others to hear, ‘I overheard you say you wanted someone to come and do some work in your house while the builders are there. I could come and do it for you if you liked.’ She lifted her gaze from the floor and looked into Hartmann’s face.

  He was surprised by the pleading he saw in her brown eyes. ‘What a kind offer, mademoiselle. I didn’t think I would find someone so soon. But how would you manage it?’

  ‘I have Wednesday afternoon off every week.’

  Hartmann knew this because she had said so at the tennis court, but he wanted to give himself time to think. What would Christine say when she saw this girl? She was expecting a sturdy peasant, brought up to carry milk churns and chicken feed, well-muscled from baling straw. She would be suspicious when she saw this slender young woman with her tight black skirt and the hair escaping from the scarlet ribbon. Yet he wanted to help her. Something in him stirred; perhaps, he thought, it was a flicker of the same feeling he had felt so unaccountably for Roussel that day when they were gazing at the Manor.

  ‘It’s very hard work, mademoiselle. We have a maid already to help my wife. What we wanted was someone to do the heaviest cleaning. I’m not sure you’d like it.’

  ‘I’m sure I could manage,’ said Anne, whose hands gripped the edge of the tray. If he didn’t decide quickly, Mattlin would butt in and ask what they were talking about, or the barman would shout at her with another order.

  ‘Wouldn’t you be tired after all your work at the hotel? Surely you need your afternoon off?’

  ‘Oh no, monsieur, I’m not tired. It’s all right, it’s not that hard, the work I do here. And I need a little extra money, for my father, you see.’ She looked at him again. ‘Please let me do it.’

  ‘All right. Come next Wednesday at two, and we’ll discuss it with my wife.’

  ‘Thank you, monsieur.’

  She rounded the bar as calmly as she could, though inside she felt the bump and swell of elation.

  When the barman asked everyone to leave, Mattlin and Jean-Philippe paused to interrupt their anxious questioning of the Government only to say goodnight to Anne. It was easy for them, she thought; their lives were both more elevated and more placid than hers.

  Hartmann stopped gesticulating with the others and turned to smile at her. She thought there was a trace of uncertainty in his expression; he almost missed his step in the doorway as he turned. When he disappeared into the darkness she felt the momentary vertigo of desertion.

  Up in her room beneath the rafters, Anne felt the anxiety of separation gradually replaced by the pleasures of anticipation.

  Later, when she went downstairs to the bathroom, it was with such a lightness of tread that her feet seemed barely to touch the boards.

  The sound was loud enough, however, to be heard by one whose ear for such things was sharper even than that of Mme Bouin. And so it was, a few minutes later, as Anne lay in the steaming quietness, that a tense face pressed itself against an open space high in the opposite wall. She would probably not have noticed had Roland demolished the entire partition in his frenzy, such was her preoccupation with her thoughts. For Roland, the urge that drove him to his uncomfortable and dangerous balancing act on top of thin wooden slats and mothballed curtains was so strong that he would willingly have taken apart each tile and brick in the Hotel du Lion d’Or for the sake of half a minute alone there. To his surprise, there was a sound from the bath: the new maid appeared to be singing to herself.

  Despite her elation, Anne’s sleep that night was again disturbed. When she awoke from her dream, she lay for some time having an imaginary conversation with Hartmann in which she explained to him the thoughts that troubled her. If all your life you endure the consequences of a single deed, then you cannot imagine life before it; it is almost as if the consequences precede the action. The deed itself meanwhile becomes harder to imagine as some isolated event which, by some easy twist of human will, might not have happened at all. It becomes the subject of faint memory, conjecture, insufficient detail.

  All this was very hard to explain, however, and in her mind Anne saw Hartmann merely smile his well-mannered smile and tell her not to worry. When at last she fell asleep again she dreamed that she had known him as a child and had enlisted his help to stop her life from changing.

  6

  ANNE AWOKE THE next day with what looked like tiny blisters on the palms of her hands. Her fingers were swollen and coloured white in blotches; they throbbed and itched intensely. She went down to the bathroom and held them under the tap. At first the water was cold, but gradually it grew warmer and finally reached a temperature at which it became too hot for the skin to bear. She kept her hands there for a moment longer until a shudder went through her body, causing her neck and spine to tingle. Although this eased the itching for a time it was not enough, and she had to take her towel and scrape her hands on its rough pile until all the little blisters of the palms were raw and the white blotches bleeding.

  Then she ran a basin of cold water and plunged both hands into it. By the time she returned to the bedroom the itching had gone, but there was a good deal of healing to be done. She took a blue glass jar from the chest of drawers and dipped her fingers into the whitish greasy ointment it contained. It had been given to her by a doctor in Paris, and although it never seemed to do much good at least it stopped the wounds from cracking as they dried out.

  She had been half expecting an attack of eczema ever since she had been at the Lion d’Or. The man who had given her the ointment said it would come on
if she was nervous or unhappy; she maintained it was caused by certain things she touched, like raw potatoes. He had merely shrugged, and said it was not impossible. Her life over the past two or three weeks could have supported either theory, and Anne was convinced that she had not been helped by the excessive amount of washing up Mme Bouin gave her to do in cold water with stinging powder. She dressed gingerly, to avoid transferring ointment to her clothes, and wondered if the condition of her hands might now give her some respite.

  She was not very hopeful, but after breakfast went away to search out Mme Bouin in her nook beneath the hotel stairs.

  ‘Madame . . .’

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘Madame, I have this problem. My hands are very sore. I think perhaps it may be the powder for the pans. Or the potatoes, possibly.’

  She held out her hands for inspection, the bleeding palms upward. The old woman lowered her face over them and peered; the widening of her left eye was magnified by the thickness of her spectacle lens. ‘I hope,’ she said, returning to an upright position, ‘that you haven’t been touching any food with those.’

  ‘No, I don’t think so. It only happened this morning and all I’ve touched was the crockery.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘I’m not supposed to touch food anyway. It isn’t my job to –’

  ‘I am perfectly aware what your job is, mademoiselle. The first part of your job is to do what you are told by me and the second part is to do what is required of you by the head waiter and the chef, in that order.’

  ‘Yes, madame.’

  ‘Clearly we cannot have you waiting at a table with hands in that condition. It might put the clients off their food.’

  ‘But madame, I like waiting. I like meeting people.’

  ‘I am not interested in your social aspirations. You will have to do cleaning work only for the time being.’

  ‘I’m sorry, madame, I didn’t mean –’

  ‘That’s all. I will give the chef instructions about what your duties are to be.’

  ‘Thank you, madame.’

  Anne knew she must be sounding too proud for a waitress, but there was something false in her relation with the old woman that irritated her. Why shouldn’t she talk to clients? What was a client but someone who had paid to eat? Hadn’t she herself been a client in restaurants too? She searched out Pierre, who was going through the stocks in the cellar, checking the bottles in their racks against a long inventory he held clipped to a board.

  ‘You’re looking nice this morning,’ he said, holding up a bottle of wine under the light and running a duster over it.

  She showed him her hands and told him what Mme Bouin had said. He swore with genteel violence.

  ‘You understand, don’t you, Pierre? I don’t want to be any different from anyone else. I like taking the plates and things through, and I thought I was doing it all right.’

  ‘Of course I understand. I’ll see if I can do something about it. Now you just sit and talk to me for a bit while I do this.’

  ‘Would you let me serve in the bar tonight? I know Mme Bouin says I’m not to wait at a table, but it would be all right in the bar, wouldn’t it?’

  Pierre put down the bottle and glanced at her briefly before taking another one from the rack. She could see his face clearly now. ‘Anyone in particular you hoped to see?’

  ‘No. Why?’ Anne looked down at her feet.

  ‘Who was the man you were talking to for such a long time last night? I thought he must be ordering a banquet, but then it turned out he didn’t even want another drink!’

  ‘I can’t think who that was. M. Mattlin, perhaps?’

  ‘I think not. A friend of Mattlin’s, though.’

  ‘Oh, that man. Yes, what’s his name? I forget.’

  ‘Hartmann.’

  ‘Yes, that’s it. I remember now. Why? Do you know him?’

  ‘Oh well, one hears things.’

  ‘What sort of things?’

  Pierre put the bottle he was holding down on the table and peered at her over the rim of his spectacles. ‘He used to live here as a child, but went away when his father travelled abroad. After the war he lived in Paris for a long time and then, when his father died, he came to live in the Manor. He’s a lawyer by profession, but I think he did other things in Paris as well. They’re a well-off family – Jewish blood, you know. The grandfather came from Austria. He made his money in some sort of business.’

  ‘But what about him? I mean, what do you know of him as a person?’

  ‘Anne?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Is this wise?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘You know what I mean.’

  Anne blushed. ‘I don’t – I – I only asked.’

  ‘All right,’ said Pierre. ‘We’ll say no more about it. Tell me about your family, then. What did your father do?’

  ‘He was a shopkeeper before the war. But we – there was difficulty in the family, and now we haven’t any money. Not that we were rich anyway.’

  ‘And what about your mother?’

  ‘What? Oh, Pierre, don’t ask me any more, please. I’m sorry, but it’s difficult, you see.’

  ‘Not if it’s upsetting you. I’m sorry.’

  There was an embarrassed silence. Anne was familiar with the sequence of events. Often with someone she liked and wanted to befriend she had to repel intimacy at the moment it appeared to be offered. She watched Pierre who, for all his gentleness, looked a little affronted, and tried to win his trust again with unsuccessful small-talk.

  She was glad for once to hear herself summoned from upstairs. ‘Goodbye, Pierre,’ she said, dashing up the steps to answer Mme Bouin’s call.

  On Wednesday afternoon Anne borrowed Roland’s bicycle and made off on the south-west road out of town. She hadn’t told anyone at the hotel where she was going. If the job became hers and the visits regular, then she might tell Pierre, but she feared that if Mme Bouin knew about the work she would find a reason to forbid it. She told Roland she wanted to explore the coast and go for a walk along the beaches. He agreed readily enough, though he gave her, she thought, a strange, hungry look as he loosened the nut beneath the saddle to lower the seat for her.

  The road bent between dense pine forests for a while, then opened up into a sparse and sandy-looking plain, in the middle of which was a small cluster of houses. As Anne cycled along, two or three men in fishermen’s overalls looked up from a table beneath a clump of trees and stared at her. The walls of the dozen or so houses were draped with drying nets, and a widow with a face that seemed to have been turned inside out like a dried fruit was splitting oysters over a metal bucket.

  Anne pedalled on up the hill where the road once more entered the pines. She was wearing her plainest dress with thick stockings and had her hair pulled back beneath a scarf. She knew she must look businesslike if she was to impress Mme Hartmann, and for the moment would have to sacrifice any hints at femininity which, for other reasons, she might have preferred. She wore some lace-up walking shoes, bought specially from a barrow in the market.

  The entrance to the Manor came abruptly and unsigned between a clump of budding rhododendrons and the interminable conifers. Anne braked and rose from the saddle as the bicycle juddered over the stony, pot-holed drive. Suddenly the dense trees on her right came to an end and she glimpsed a terrace with crumbling stone pots; soon she was passing the side wall of the house before the drive smoothed out a little and turned to the right, bringing her round to the front of the twin-towered house.

  Anne leaned over, almost toppling, as she lowered her foot to the ground. She felt an acute nervousness as she stood in front of the old house. There was so much grey in it, so many rooms and big forbidding spaces foretold by the giant shutters and that long, voluminous roof. It was grander than any house she had entered – although its dilapidation was faintly reassuring. She wheeled her bicycle round to the side of the north tower to find a servants’ entrance
and was met by a fat man in blue overalls pushing a wheelbarrow full of rubble. He muttered a greeting which was impeded by the cigarette between his lips.

  ‘Where can I find Mme Hartmann?’

  The man gestured over his shoulder to Christine’s morning-room. Anne leaned her bicycle against the wall and went in through the kitchen door. The cracked tile floor was covered, in places, by sheets, and everywhere else by dust. From beneath her feet she could hear a dull banging, a pause, and then a long, parched cough.

  She ventured through the kitchen and out into the small morning-room, calling, ‘Madame?’ There was no answer, so she glanced around her. The window in the front looked over the lake on which she could distantly see a rowing-boat crawl like a slow insect. There was some half-finished embroidery left in an armchair, down the side of which was stuffed a woman’s handkerchief.

  She went through into the hall, a vast square area flagged with black and white marble, that separated the two parts of the house. Around its edge were assembled a number of unrelated objects – a fine walnut grandfather clock, a low piano with two ivory elephants and some photographs on top, an assortment of chairs, some obviously valuable and refined, others with torn rush seating. The walls were painted in blue rococo scrolls on a faded beige background. Anne peered in amazement at the chaotic elegance of the huge open area. There was enough in it to stare at for an hour or more, but she was frightened that Mme Hartmann might materialise at any moment. She called out again, but with the same result.