'Where are you going?' she said.
She had changed into a blue silk frock, white socks, and pointed shoes. She wore a little gold cross round her neck, and round her cropped fair hair was a blue velvet band. Her face was flushed with excitement. This was her fiesta evening; she was helping to entertain the guests. I remembered the promise made to her on my first evening.
'I don't know,' I said, 'I might not come back.' She knew at once what I meant, because the colour went from her face and she made a movement as though to rush at me and seize my hands. Then she remembered my bandaged hand and stood still.
'Is it because of what happened at the shoot?' she asked. I had forgotten the futility of the morning, the ridiculous spoiling of the sportsmen's fun, the cognac and the wine and the ill-timed bravado of my speech.
'No,' I said, 'it has nothing to do with the shoot.' She went on looking at me, her hands clasped, and then she said, 'Take me with you.'
'How can I?' I asked. 'I don't know where I'm going.'
It was raining hard, falling on to her thin shoulders in the blue silk party frock. 'Will you walk?' she said. 'You can't drive because of your hand.'
The simplicity of her remark brought me to the full realization that I was without thought or plan. How indeed did I intend to get away? I had walked blindly out of that upstairs room and down into the hall with only one idea in mind - that I must leave the chateau as soon as possible. Instead of which the idiocy of the burnt hand kept me a prisoner.
'You see,' said the child, 'it's not very easy, is it?'
Nothing was easy, neither being myself nor being Jean de Gue. I was not born to be the son of the woman upstairs, nor the father of the child before me. I had nothing to do with them. They were not my people: I had no people. Being the accomplice in an elaborate practical joke did not mean I must be its victim too. Surely it should be the other way round, and it was for them to pay the penalty, not me? I was not bound to them in any way.
The voices sounded loud again from within the salon. Marie-Noel looked over her shoulder. 'They are beginning to say goodbye,' she said. 'You will have to make up your mind what you're going to do.' She suddenly did not seem a child any more, but somebody old and wise whom I had known in a different age, a different time. I did not want it to be like that, because it hurt. I wanted her to be a stranger still. 'The time hasn't come for you to leave me yet,' she said. 'Wait till I'm older. It won't be long.'
A footstep sounded in the hall, and someone came and stood in the entrance. It was Blanche. The fanlight above the door shone on her hair, and I could see the mizzle of rain strike slantwise against the light, then fall to darkness on the step.
'You'll catch cold,' she said. 'Come in out of the rain.' She did not see me, standing there, she only saw the child, and I realized that, believing herself to be alone with Marie-Noel, she spoke in a voice I had never heard before. It was gentle and affectionate, the hard, abrupt quality gone. She might have been a different person. 'Everybody is going in a moment,' she said. 'You only have to be polite a few minutes longer. Then I'll come upstairs and read to you, if Papa is still sleeping.' She turned and went indoors.
The child looked at me. 'Go on in,' I said, 'do what she says. I won't leave you.' She smiled. Oddly, the smile reminded me of something. Then I remembered - it was release from pain. I had seen the same smile not ten minutes ago in the room upstairs. Marie-Noel ran back into the chateau after Blanche.
I heard the sound of a car coming down from the village and passing through the gateway. As it turned in to the archway the headlights must have picked me up, for it stopped and Gaston got out. It was the Renault, and he came across the drive towards me. He looked flushed, a little awkward.
'I had not realized Monsieur le Comte was below,' he said. 'Forgive me, but it was raining hard, and I took Madame Yves and one or two other older people who had been celebrating with us back to the verrerie. I did not ask permission. I did not want to disturb you.'
'That's all right,' I said. 'I'm glad you took them home.'
He came nearer, and peered up at my face. 'You look upset, Monsieur le Comte. Is anything wrong? Are you still feeling ill?'
'No,' I told him 'It's just ... a combination of circumstances.' I gestured with my hand towards the chateau. It did not matter to me what he thought. I was not sure what I thought myself.
'Excuse me,' he said, his manner diffident, yet somehow reassuring, gentle, 'I don't wish to be indiscreet, but would Monsieur le Comte perhaps like me to drive him to Villars?'
I kept silent, not understanding, hoping that his next words would make his meaning plain.
'You have had a hard day, Monsieur le Comte,' he went on. 'At the chateau here everyone believes you to be in bed. If I drove you now to Villars you could spend several hours there in comfort, without anxiety, and I could come back for you early in the morning. I only suggest it because at the present moment Monsieur le Comte cannot drive himself.'
He glanced away from me, apologetic, tactful, and I knew that what he suggested was so profoundly the answer to my turmoil of mind and body and spirit that he expected no comment even, no word of affirmation. He went to the car, reversed it, and brought it back to the driveway below the terrace. He opened the door for me and I got in, and as he drove along the pitch-dark lanes to Villars, the rain beating against the windscreen, neither of us speaking, it seemed to me that there was nothing left now of that former self who had changed identity in the hotel bedroom at Le Mans. Every one of my actions, instincts, weaknesses, all had merged with those of Jean de Gue.
18
I thought for a moment it was the rain pouring from the gargoyle mouth, bearing away the silt and debris of the years, and the gargoyle himself, with flattened, evil ears, was cracking at the base, the stone-work crumbling, so that he too would moulder and soften with the flood. Then the horror of the dream departed and it was day, and the sound was Bela's bath-water running. The darkness had gone and the rain with it, and the early morning sun was turning the rooftops gold.
I leant back, my hand behind my head. Through the open window I could see the shapes and angles of the roofs, the lichened tiles, the twisted chimneys, the dormer windows, and behind and above them all the fluted spire of the cathedral. From the street below came the first movements of the day: shutters thrown back, the sluicing of the pavement, footsteps passing, somebody whistling, the waking to another week of this small, unhurried market-town. The running bath-water merged pleasantly with the bright street sounds and I was filled with a lazy peace, aware of the presence near by, so close that I had only to raise my voice and she would turn off the water and come to me, someone who asked no questions, accepting me as part of a life shared at odd moments, depending upon mood and time - mine, not hers - just as the adult puts aside work and occupation to attend to the child she loves. My hand, untouched the day before, was now re-dressed, re-bandaged, cool in its oiled silk package; and the experience of being waited upon, ministered to, with nothing demanded of me and no show of possessiveness, was novel to both the old self and the new. It was something I was reluctant to surrender: I wished to savour its delicacy as long as possible.
I could hear her throwing open the shutters in the room across the passage, talking to the budgerigars, putting their cages out on to the balcony, their twittering chatter a variation of the running water. Presently I called to her and she came at once from the other room, dressed in wrapper and slippers, and bent over me and kissed me with the quiet unconcern of someone in charge, whose heart and mind are free of trouble.
'Did you sleep well?' she asked.
'Yes,' I told her, and it was a delight to feel her arms and her shoulders bare under the loose flowing sleeves, and to be aware of skin smelling of apricots and to know that being with her was stepping into yet a third dimension which was no part of the first world, or the second, but somehow contained them both, like the case of a Chinese puzzle.
'I'll make you coffee directly,' she said,
'and as soon as Vincent comes I'll send him for croissants from the baker up the street. Your hand doesn't hurt you? Good I'll dress it again before you leave.'
Then she was gone, and I gave myself up once more to lassitude and peace.
She had a quality of being surprised by nothing. Last night, when Gaston had deposited me outside the Porte de Ville and driven away, and I crossed the canal by the footbridge and tapped at the shuttered window, she had opened it instantly, without any startled query. Noticing at once my bandaged hand and general appearance of weariness and strain, she gestured to the deep chair where I had sat before, and fetched me a drink. She did not ask one question, and it was I who broke the silence first by feeling in my pocket for the broken phial and tossing it into the wastepaper basket beyond the chair.
'Did I ever tell you my mother took morphine?' I asked her.
'No,' she answered, 'but I suspected it.'
'How?'
She hesitated. 'From little hints you dropped from time to time. It wasn't my business to interfere.'
Her voice was practical and cool, warning me that she accepted without praise or condemnation whatever Jean de Gue should choose to tell her, reserving her opinion for herself.
'Would it disgust you,' I asked, 'if you learnt that I supplied her with morphine, bringing it with me from Paris as a gift, just as I brought you the bottle of "Femme"?'
'Nothing disgusts me, Jean,' she said. 'I know you too well to be repelled now by anything you choose to do.'
She looked at me steadily. I leant forward and took a cigarette from the box on the table beside me.
'This morning she came downstairs and went with us all to Mass,' I said, 'and then received about fifty guests on the terrace of the chateau, in the rain. She looked magnificent. She did it, of course, from spite, to spoil Renee's day, who wanted to play hostess, Francoise being unwell and in bed. This evening the little femme de chambre, Germaine, called me to her - her own personal maid, Charlotte, was below - and I went up and found her ...' I broke off, because it was vividly with me once again, the dark close bedroom, the dressing-room, the cupboard above the washbasin. 'I found her wanting me to give her that.' I looked at the wastepaper basket where I had thrown the empty phial.
'And you did so?'
'Yes.'
She said nothing. She went on looking at me.
'That's why I've come to you,' I said, 'in self-pity and self-disgust.'
'Those are things you must deal with in your own way,' she said. 'I can't act as a purge and rid you of them.'
'You have before,' I told her.
'Yes?'
Perhaps it was my imagination. Was her manner harder, more abrupt than it had been that afternoon two days ago? Or merely without interest, unmoved?
'I wonder how many times in the past,' I said, 'I've come here to this house, to you, knowing what was going on at home in the chateau, wanting to forget, and succeeding in forgetting because of what I found here?'
I pictured him leaving the car outside the Porte de Ville, crossing the footbridge, and tapping at the window as I had done tonight, shedding all the guilt and all the care as soon as he passed the threshold, ridding himself of trouble as I wished to now.
'If you don't remember,' she said, 'let it alone. It doesn't help the present. Anyway, you told me on Friday that your difficulties and problems were likely to be easier in the future, that you were going to tackle them in a different way. Hasn't the new Jean de Gue been successful after all?'
Now she was smiling, and the faint mockery in her voice made me realize that she had no faith in him and never would have, and that what I had told her on Friday about wanting to save the verrerie and safeguard the people working there had been dismissed as a moment's idle whim born of a drunken mood.
'He's failed,' I said, 'in precisely the same way that he's failed before. He gives his family what they ask for, through cowardice, through evasion, not only his mother but his daughter too. The only difference is that once it was done with gaiety and possibly charm. Now it's done with reluctance and distaste.'
'That could be an advance,' she said. 'It depends on the point of view.' And then the smile faded with the mockery in her voice. She came over to me, and took my hand, and said, 'So you didn't shoot today. Do you want me to do anything about this? I hear you burnt yourself.'
'Who told you?' I asked.
'One of the chasseurs,' she said, 'whose sport was not as usual, and who, after lunching at the farm, decided to return to Villars.' She was undoing the bandage as she spoke. 'I don't suppose this hurts you any more,' she added, 'but it needs re-dressing. I can manage that for you, if I can't purge you of your sins.'
She went out of the room, and I wondered how much more Jean de Gue knew of her than I did, whether their intimacy dated back through months or years, and whether the photograph of the man in uniform on the mantelpiece, with 'Georges' written across it, was a likeness of a dead husband. Above all, I wondered how much she enjoyed, despised, accepted or tolerated, for money or for love, the man who was not me.
She came back with new dressings, as efficient in her own way as Blanche had been in hers, and as she knelt beside me and dressed my hand I said, 'I burnt myself on purpose. I did not want to shoot.' This surely would bring surprise to those candid eyes, so that the Jean de Gue she knew so well, whose character and faults could not disgust her, might take on a new aspect, might at least have some idiosyncrasy hitherto unsuspected.
'Why?' she said. 'Were you afraid of shooting badly?'
The truth, coming from her, was such a shock that I did not answer. I waited for her to finish tying the bandage and then withdrew my hand, discomfited.
'Once before,' she said, 'your eye was out and your hands were hopeless, after a drinking bout like this one in Le Mans. You made some excuse - I forgot what - not to shoot. It was over beyond Montdoubleau, not at St Gilles. Burning your hand instead is rather drastic. But perhaps it was intended as a penance on the part of the man in charge?' The irony in the voice was back again, and as she rose to her feet she tapped my shoulder in a gesture half mocking, half affectionate. 'Go on,' she said, 'sit back in the chair and finish your cigarette. I understand you had more to drink than to eat at midday, so possibly you can manage an omelette now.'
She must know, then, about the speech as well, the lack of applause, the melting away of the guests. Her informant could be anybody, from the financier to the outraged Marquis de Plessis-Braye. It did not matter much. Disgrace was well established, and the seigneur of St Gilles had brought no lustre to the day.
I followed her through to the small kitchen and watched her prepare the omelette. 'At any rate,' I said to her, 'I broke my rule, and did not minister to the greed of the guests - on this occasion the greed for flattery and the meaningless banalities one utters on these occasions. I was only trying to be honest. I had no idea it would upset them so much.'
'The truth is always embarrassing,' she said. 'You of all people might have learnt that by now. At a picnic lunch it happens to be misplaced.'
'I can't help it,' I went on, 'if my truth happened to be theirs as well. I only told them that if I had had a gun some of them might not have been alive by the end of the day.'
She was busy beating the eggs with a fork. 'Coming from a one-time Resistance leader,' she said, 'to a group of well-known collaborators, it must have sounded curious, all the same.'
I stared at her blankly. It was my secret I had come near to blurting out at the farm, not the jigsaw past of Jean de Gue.
'But that's not what I meant,' I said, seeing, through the confusion of wine and smoke and haze that had been the atmosphere of the barn, the scattered uneasy faces amongst others that had kept their serenity. 'That's not what I meant at all.'
'That's what they understood,' she said, and the laughter behind her eyes was the same as the twitch at the corner of Gaston's mouth. She neither applauded nor condemned; what had been said was said. 'Don't ask me how far they deserved the d
ig, intentional or not. I don't know what was happening here then - I was still trying to get out of Hungary.'
Hungary? That helped to explain the Bela, if nothing else, though why she should bear a man's name was more than I could guess.
She poured the eggs into the pan and stood looking at me, the empty bowl and the fork in her hand. 'If your new-found sense of responsibility wants to get things straight,' she said, 'surely there's only one person who can do that for you - your sister Blanche?'
She stared at me a moment, and then turned to the omelette. And the years that were gone, that I had no business to intrude upon, seemed to merge into a single entity, like the eggs and the butter and the herbs. They could never be separated now, or examined one by one. I was responsible for the present, not the past.
'How long can you stay?' she asked.
'Until the morning.'
'No questions asked? No indignant wife or curious mother?'
'No. Gaston will see to that.'
She had the omelette on a plate, and the plate on a tray, and the tray in an instant on the table beside the chair in the small salon, the wine uncorked and poured.
'So this new Jean', she said, 'is not possessed by his family any more?'
'He never was.'
'That's where you're wrong,' she said. 'The bond isn't easily broken. Wait till tomorrow.'
And tomorrow had already come, and the budgerigars sang in their cages on the balcony, the cathedral chimed the half-hour, someone called good morning to a passer-by in the street below, and the idyll I had stolen from Jean de Gue was over.
As I drank my coffee, dressed and ready to depart, on the balcony overlooking the canal, I saw that Gaston, faithful to his word, was sitting in the car outside the Porte de Ville. And my moment in time was like a dream within a dream, for I belonged neither to her world nor to the one that waited for me. The lover Bela had held in the night was a shadow who did not exist, and the master for whom Gaston watched was a ghost, dwelling only in his fancy, loved for what he once had been.
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