Girl At the Lion d'Or Read online

  Contents

  Cover Page

  About the Author

  Also by Sebastian Faulks

  The Girl at the Lion d’Or

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Part One

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Part Two

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Part Three

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Sebastian Faulks was born and brought up in Newbury, Berkshire. He worked in journalism before starting to write books. He is best known for the French trilogy, The Girl at the Lion D’Or, Birdsong and Charlotte Gray (1989-1997) and is also the author of a triple biography The Fatal Englishman (1996); a small book of literary parodies, Pistache (2006); the novels Human Traces (2005) and most recently, A Week in December. He lives in London with his wife and their three children.

  ALSO BY SEBASTIAN FAULKS

  A Fool’s Alphabet

  Birdsong

  The Fatal Englishman

  Charlotte Gray

  On Green Dolphin Street

  Human Traces

  Engleby

  A Week in December

  ‘The Girl At The Lion D’Or’s opening sequence in a small French railway station is so minutely, meticulously and vividly described it is as if the place were being viewed through a slowly tracking camera. The beginning points to the whole. It is a book which reads like French and at times his characters even speak as if they had been translated – not quite perfectly – from the French. The novel is not only a topographical achievement, refracting life through the eye of a middle-aged, middle-class Frenchman caught in adultery’s torments. It has a greater concern – with Anne and the way that the end of her love affair is only one more devastation in a life already laid to waste. Abandonment, Faulks says persuasively in the novel, using a psychiatrist’s phrase, is the one true originator and motor of grief. And Anne, who has been greatly abandoned in life, suffers one more abandonment. . . . Faulks suggests that while there are limits to what a country can collectively endure in terms of suffering, “there is no limit to the endurance of individuals. And it never ceases to amaze me.” And at the end of this enthralling novel you gather the sense that Anne will indeed come through. A form of transcendence is exhilaratingly celebrated.’

  Guardian

  ‘In mid-Thirties France, seeking asylum from her past, a penniless orphan turns up as a waitress at a tatty hotel by the sea. Befriended by the local landowner, the girl entrusts him with the highly charged scandal that in the Great War left her parentless. Her longing to be loved seduces him into tackling his own problems – trauma at Verdun, decrepit estate, childless wife – with a courage matching hers. They redeem each other’s past. But has their love a future? To convey their fraught affair in an era stiff with threat, Faulks bravely deploys not only the charms of romantic fiction, but also a crisper response to politics, landscape – and character. His icy concierge, bootboy with acne and lout of a chef are jewels. With his second novel Faulks has deepened into a soft-hearted analyst of both the differences between people and their raw humanity. This is a sentimental novel of rare intelligence and passion.’

  Mail on Sunday

  The Girl At The Lion D’Or is not only a rare achievement, a supremely accomplished piece of work, but, it seems to me, a glorious justification of the traditional novel. It reminds one that novelists don’t have to try to be clever. Instead, they have to look at life with respect and imagination, draw from it, and arrange their material in aesthetically satisfying shape. Here in this marvellous evocation of a particular society at a particular time, Sebastian Faulks has done just that. He has also reaffirmed the importance of character in the novel; his Anne and Hartmann are as real, as moving and convincing as Anna Karenina and Vronsky or Colette’s Chéri and Léa. It is a novel to cherish and delight in.’

  Scotsman

  ‘Sebastian Faulks loves the cinema of Renoir and Carne and Bresson. The Girl At The Lion D’Or is a journey through time to pre-war France, the diary of a waitress at a provincial hotel. Her love affair with a married Jewish lawyer and political arranger allows the author to treat major themes of conscience and guilt, of anti-Semitism and the collapse of national morale . . . She believes what her guardian has told her, that courage is all – and she is enduring. She also comes to believe what her lover believes, that evil is continual rejection through death or desertion. This moving and profound novel is perfectly constructed, and admirable in its configurations of place and period.’

  The Times

  THE GIRL AT THE

  LION D’OR

  Sebastian Faulks

  VINTAGE BOOKS

  London

  This eBook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

  Epub ISBN: 9781407065526

  Version 1.0

  www.randomhouse.co.uk

  Published by Vintage 1990

  34 36 38 40 39 37 35

  Copyright © Sebastian Faulks 1989

  Sebastian Faulks has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988 to be identified as the author of this work

  This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

  First published in Great Britain in 1989 by

  Hutchinson

  Vintage

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  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  ISBN 9780099774907

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  Printed in the UK by CPI Bookmarque, Croydon, CR0 4TD

  FOR MY MOTHER AND FATHER

  The French newspapers in the 1930s offered a mixture of rumour, spite and inaccuracy. There was usually plenty of scope for all three. One bright November morning a national daily on the streets of Paris offered three items on its front page. The first brought the latest news of the investigation into the death of a government minister, Roger Salengro, whose body had been discovered by his maid in his apartment in Lille. The second concerned som
e final ramifications of the Stavisky affair – a matter of bribery and high finance in which only the suspicious demise of the protagonist himself, two years earlier, had prevented the involvement of an even greater number of powerful people.

  The third story rated no more than a paragraph at the bottom of the page. A female intruder had been surprised in the garden of the Prime Minister’s official residence. A negligent security guard was being questioned, but the police were not hopeful of finding her.

  ‘The girl, believed to be from Paris, is said by police to be approximately 20 years old. The Prime Minister, M. Léon Blum, was last night unavailable for comment.’

  These were the formulations of a tired journalist on a wet Friday night, anxious to finish and go home. In an editorial comment, held over for three days owing to pressure on the space, the newspaper asked questions about security at the Prime Minister’s house. Two or three readers wrote letters expressing their surprise at the incident.

  The security guard was dismissed; nothing was ever heard of the girl again, and there the matter rested. Compared to the deaths of public men like Stavisky and Salengro, the fate of an unknown girl was not important. It had no significance.

  PART ONE

  1

  IN THOSE DAYS the station in Janvilliers had an arched glass roof over the southbound platform as if in imitation of the big domes at St Lazare. When it rained, the impact of the water set up a nervy rattle as the glass echoed and shook against the fancy restraint of its iron framework. There was a more modest rumble emitted by the covered footbridge, while from the gutters there came an awful martyred gurgling as they sought out broken panes and unmended masonry down which to spit the water that was choking them. The thin sound of the locomotive’s wheeze as it braced itself for its final three stops up the coast was thus barely audible to the two people who alighted from the train that damp but not untypical Monday night.

  One was the driver, who was following the custom of years by climbing down from his cab, hat pulled over his ears, and racing to the side-door of the station buffet where his glass of brandy would be waiting for him. There was no time for conversation – just a quick gulp and he was gone, as usual, scuttling back up the platform, hoisting himself aboard with a word to the fireman and a reinvigorated haul on the levers as the engine hissed and the train set off to arrive, as usual, a minute and a half late at its next stop.

  The other was a slight, dark-haired girl with two heavy suitcases, frowning into the rain and trying not to feel frightened. She stood in the doorway of the ticket hall, hoping someone would have been sent to fetch her. ‘Be brave, little Anne, be brave,’ old Louvet, her guardian, would have said to her if he had been sober, or there, or – for all Anne knew – alive. After a time she did see the long bending approach of headlights, but the car circled the fountains in the middle of the square and disappeared in a spray of water.

  Louvet, who thought himself a philosopher, had a theory that all unhappiness was a version of the same feeling. As Anne felt a tremor of abandonment, gazing over the rainy square, she pictured him explaining to her: ‘When the good Lord made this world from the infinite number of possibilities open to him and selected – from another limitless pool – the kind of misery that his creatures should be subject to, he selected only one model. The moment of bereavement. Death, desertion, betrayal – all the same thing. The child sent from its parents, the widow, the lover abandoned – they all feel the same emotion which, in its most extreme form, finds expression in a cry.’ Practice had given an almost religious eloquence to Louvet’s blasphemous conclusion: ‘One cannot, my dear Anne, escape the conviction that the good Lord was, if not unimaginative, then at least rather simple.’

  Anne, who was not a philosopher, saw a dripping form, male by the look of it and wrapped in a cape, approach her from the darkness. His voice was rough and grudging. ‘Are you the waitress? For the Hotel du Lion d’Or?’ His face now appeared in what light spilled over from the yellow lamp in the ticket hall. He was a youth of about nineteen with thick black eyebrows and dark curls stuck against his forehead under a leather cap. He had an extinguished cigarette between his teeth and his cheeks were traumatised by spots.

  ‘Yes, that’s right. Who are you?’

  ‘I work there. My name’s Roland. I’ve got the van. The boss said to come and pick you up. It’s over here.’

  He led the way, shambling in a mixture of embarrassment and in an attempt to keep dry by wrapping his cape around him, which caused his knees to come too close together. Anne followed, struggling to keep up under the handicap of the heavy suitcases. Roland took her round the back of the station yard and gestured to a small van. He unlashed the canvas from the open back and gestured to her to throw in her suitcases. With considerable swearing and violence towards the tinny machine, he succeeded in making it creep, then jerk, then rush across the darkened square as he fought to locate the gears. Nervous at what might be waiting for her, Anne began to talk.

  ‘What do you do at the hotel?’

  ‘Stuff no one else wants to do. Boots. Washing up. Waiter on Sundays.’

  ‘Do you come from here?’

  ‘Yes. Never been away. Don’t really want to. I went to Paris once.’

  ‘Did you like it?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Don’t know.’

  ‘I’ve come from Paris.’

  Roland made no reply but pulled back the window on his side of the van and pushed at the little windscreen-wiper. The rubber had almost worn away on the fragile stick, and its small motor functioned properly only in dry weather. Roland peered forward in an attempt to see through the misty swathe that the wiper cut intermittently across the glass. Anne couldn’t think what to say to him; it seemed rude not to make conversation, but she didn’t want to distract him.

  ‘Do you often drive this van?’

  ‘No. Well, yes, it’s not that I’m not used to it, of course. I drive it just as much as anyone else. But petrol, you know.’

  ‘Is the boss very mean then?’

  ‘No, it’s Madame. He couldn’t care less.’

  ‘Madame his wife?’

  ‘No. Madame Bouin, the manageress. The Cow. She thinks we should only go to the market once a week and load up. You know, the big market down the road. The rest of the time we have to get the stuff from here. She sends us on foot.’

  ‘If you only go to the big market once a week, doesn’t the food get stale?’

  Roland’s nose emitted a snort of what might have been laughter. ‘Makes no difference to Bruno. It all tastes like pigshit, what he does with it.’

  They negotiated the perimeter of another square, with the town hall, a curious building beneath a black slate roof in the grand eighteenth-century manner, in one corner. They drove on in silence down a street called the rue des Ecoles, swung sharply left and found themselves face to face with the Hotel du Lion d’Or.

  ‘I hadn’t realised it was so near. I could have walked,’ said Anne.

  ‘Easily,’ Roland agreed, getting out of the van. ‘It was the old man, apparently. The Patron. Said I should come. I was playing cards.’

  ‘I’m sorry, I –’

  But Roland had gone, shuffling down a small alley by the hotel and vanishing into the night. Perhaps the other card players had waited for him, their hands concealed face down on some kitchen table. Perhaps they had cut the pack to see who should have the chore of picking up the wretched girl. Anne breathed in deeply.

  The hotel was secluded from the square by a courtyard and a grey wall with a pair of rusting iron gates. Anne heaved her cases up to the front doors through whose glass panels she could make out a broad lobby, leading up to a staircase in the crook of which was the concierge’s desk. She was aware of a woman behind it watching her as the suitcases dripped gently on to the parquet floor. She put them down on a threadbare mat in front of the counter.

  ‘Mademoiselle?’ It was the woman behind the desk who spoke,
her voice not so much interrogative as menacing. Mme Bouin, Anne supposed. Her eyes had a calm quality despite the fact that one of them was monstrously enlarged by the thick lens of her spectacles. Her bearing managed to combine world-weariness with a feline state of readiness. Anne had a sense that anything she herself might say would have been anticipated by this woman, and nothing she could devise would please her. Presumably she behaved in the same way with the guests.

  ‘I’ve come to take the waitress job.’

  ‘Have you now? Then why have you come through the front door? I understood from Monsieur the Patron that you had had previous experience of hotel work. Is this what you were told is normal?’

  The woman’s voice remained as level as her eyes.

  ‘I’m sorry, I – I didn’t know the way in. The young man who brought me, Roland, he – ’ Anne checked herself, fearing to bring Mme Bouin’s displeasure on to Roland, who had been anxious only to finish his game of cards.

  ‘Where did he go?’

  ‘I’m not sure. It was kind of him to come and pick me up on a night like this.’

  Mme Bouin said nothing. Instead, she took a card from among a sheaf of papers in front of her. ‘Details. Insurance and so on,’ she said, handing the card across the desk.

  ‘Do I have to do it now?’

  Again the woman said nothing but swivelled on her chair and took the handset from a telephone switchboard which she cranked vigorously by hand. She spoke fast and indistinctly. Anne noticed a pile of needlework on the table beneath the board from which hung the numbered bedroom keys. She took the forms and a pen from the desk.

  Surname: Louvet. She had grown used to this lie. The local lawyer had advised her as a child to abandon her family name when it was appearing daily in the newspapers. Forenames: Anne Marie Thérèse. These at least, and the date of her birth, she could give truthfully. Her handwriting was determined and precise. By the space for ‘Previous Place of Employment’ she put the name of a café near the Gare Montparnasse. Next of kin: she wrote down the name of Louvet, her assumed father, blurring with skilled certainty, though not without a qualm, the lines of her identity.