Girl At the Lion d'Or Read online

  The afternoon was freakishly hot for early spring and there was a game of tennis in progress at the far end of the public gardens. The court belonged to the town’s richest family who, in a dubious deal with the mayor, had bought a site for it in the park where they allowed selected friends to borrow it, at a price. Thus Janvilliers, so backward in most respects, could boast a touch of Deauville in its public gardens.

  If the mayor had been over-zealous in his pruning of the plane trees along the boulevard he had gone for the opposite effect in this part of the otherwise trim park. When Anne spotted the court by chance through the small gate that broke the iron fence along the river bank, she felt as though she had found a clearing in a jungle.

  Four men were playing vigorously, with the sound of their rubber-soled shoes pounding the dry, sandy surface and the gut ringing in the wooden ovals of their rackets. One of them was Mattlin who, catching her eye, waved and motioned her to a green bench beneath the tendrils of a willow.

  Anne’s evening with him had passed off without difficulty. She found it strange that, having asked her to go with him, he then showed little interest in her, but talked of the people he knew in Paris. He smoked a good deal and glanced around the café; it seemed as if he were expecting a friend, or rather as if he were afraid of missing someone. This wasn’t flattering to Anne; but, she thought, if he has used me merely for display then so, in a way, have I used him to escape from the confines of the hotel and the presence of Mme Bouin, so I am in no position to complain. And nor did she, but drank her coffee and talked to Mattlin when his attention was on her.

  Now, as the men paused to change ends he spoke briefly to her from the tennis court and called out inaudibly the names of his friends in introduction. With the social moment past, Anne settled into her solitary watching. It was hard to know how seriously they took themselves, panting and running after each ball, yet teasing each other between points. Mattlin, the tips of his curls dampened and stuck to his face and neck by sweat, played with great energy, his thin legs never resting as he scampered over the court. On the other side were two men referred to as Jacques, Jean-Jacques, J-P, and sometimes Gilbert. It was impossible to say which name applied to which; both were shortish, rather stocky, and starting to go bald. This, and their rapid familiarity with each other, dispensing with half sentences and whole words at a time, made Anne think they must be brothers.

  When, from beneath the shade of the willow, she had watched them all and watched the ball fly, she found it was to the fourth man, Mattlin’s partner, that her eyes returned. She noticed at first his hands, which were curious. They were of great size, the right hand engulfing the handle of the tennis racket, but of startling articulation, with each joint visible under the skin and the knuckles thus slightly bent, as if over-assembled. At the tips, however, the fingers tapered into something like elegance, so that the hand attained a brutal delicacy. The wrist was inconsequently small, with a sharp little bone sticking out and a big blue vein pumping visibly, even from where Anne sat. His arm thickened from this point to the extent that it might have been called broad or muscular, though neither word was right because his arms, when not clenched by action, looked quite slender. Anne watched him as the players ran and hit the arcing ball and this man, though he sweated as much as the others and seemed to Anne no more skilled than they, appeared by turns angry and amused. He spoke less than the other three – perhaps, she thought, because he was unfamiliar with them. But his quietness was broken between games, when the players periodically changed ends. The atmosphere for a moment became awkward, neither ritual game nor ordinary social meeting, and it was he who filled the spaces until, with a louder jollity, the game was restarted by someone banging the ball over the tarred and shredding net.

  Anne no longer made her eyes desist, but scanned the man’s body, from the white shoes and flannel trousers to the bare arms and neck, where the long sinew from collarbone to jawline also seemed to join opposite things – the thick base of neck and shoulder with, at its tautest stretch, the soft and vague underline of his face. Once, when he hurried back behind Mattlin after a ball that one of the brothers had sent looping high up towards the sun, he overran it and plunged into the back netting of the court, which he leant against, breathless, as the brothers taunted him. Anne watched his diaphragm contract beneath the shirt and puff out again, as he gasped for breath, the material of the shirt seeking out the sweat-dampened parts of him that had marked it with skeletal patterns like pale symmetrical ink-blots. He lowered the head of the racket to the court and leaned forward to rest on the up-ended handle before giving way to a squat, so that his hair flopped down on to his forehead. In a moment Anne could see in his large hands and the strength of his movements all the other ages of his life, as if his body were a palimpsest on which had successively been inscribed the stories of his childhood, adolescence and youth, none of them entirely effacing its forerunner, so that suddenly the contradictions of his bigness and delicacy became understandable and she found herself seeing through his manly self-possession to the ghost of his vulnerable boyhood.

  In a dream of sympathy and excitement, she stared at him. She was convinced with a certainty that was both delightful and frustrating that she already knew him; that she knew him in fact better than these friends of his did, and that any slow acquaintance they might go through would be a waste of time because she had already seen into the heart of him. He stood up again and threw the ball back across the net, pantomiming exhaustion to Mattlin and indicating that it was he who should have run for the ball.

  The game ended. Anne stood up as the players made their way to the gate in the corner of the court and round under the overhanging branches to her bench. Mattlin shook hands but seemed uncomfortable as he formally introduced the brothers, Jacques and Jean-Philippe Gilbert, and his partner, Charles Hartmann. Anne remembered the name from Mattlin’s tale of Hartmann’s meanness.

  Jacques, the portlier of the two brothers, said, ‘What a welcome addition to the poor old Lion d’Or. We must all come and see you.’

  Hartmann and the other brother, Jean-Philippe, murmured polite agreement.

  ‘Did you enjoy watching the game?’ said Jacques.

  ‘Yes, thank you. But you seemed to go on for such a long time.’

  ‘These brothers will never give up,’ said Hartmann. ‘They never know when they’re beaten.’

  ‘But, mademoiselle, I expect you play yourself,’ said Jacques. ‘You must join in.’

  ‘No, I’m afraid not,’ said Anne, blushing. ‘We never saw a tennis court where we lived. It’s very expensive, isn’t it?’

  Jacques tried to press her, but it was clearly pointless.

  Mattlin threw his sweater over his shoulders and glanced at his watch. ‘Can you give me a lift back?’ he said to Hartmann.

  In a rush Anne said, ‘But I could come along and pick up the balls. Or watch.’

  She was aware of the four men looking at her – Mattlin with some embarrassment, Hartmann and Jean-Philippe with blank politeness. Then Hartmann said, ‘That would be delightful. André or I will let you know when we’re next going to play. We can make it coincide with your afternoon off.’

  ‘Come on,’ said Mattlin, still apparently restive. ‘I’ve got to get back.’

  ‘Why don’t we all go and have tea somewhere?’ said Jacques, looking towards Anne.

  Anne smiled. ‘All right. Thank you.’ And Jacques took the opportunity of putting an apparently paternal hand on her arm to guide her through the dense undergrowth out on to the sandy paths and ordered flowerbeds of the main part of the garden.

  Here Mattlin and Hartmann said goodbye, Mattlin adding to Anne, ‘I’ll call in later, probably.’ The two men walked off, sweaters over their shoulders, rackets swinging by their sides as they made their way to where Hartmann’s old black tourer was parked.

  When they were out of earshot, Hartmann said, ‘Was that the girl you were talking about the other day?’

  ‘Yes.
Don’t you think she’s charming?’

  Hartmann shrugged.

  ‘Well, I certainly think so.’

  ‘What are you going to do about it?’

  ‘Lay siege. She’ll come round before long.’

  ‘The Mattlin charm. Persistence.’

  ‘It has a good record.’

  Hartmann opened the gate from the park and stood back to let Mattlin pass.

  4

  IT WAS A pleasant day with only a whisper of wind coming off the headland when Hartmann stood in front of his house and explained to Roussel what he wanted done. He made large, suggestive movements with his hands, but found that Roussel kept asking awkward technical questions.

  The Manor was an isolated house, some five kilometres from Janvilliers, surrounded by acres of woodland. In his last ten years Hartmann’s father had quarrelled with most of his staff and had sacked both groundsman and gardener. The appearance of wildness had increased. The house was dominated by two towers with conical grey slate roofs. The rectangular section which joined them formed the main part of the Manor, though at its junction with the towers it extended backwards, away from them, as well as forwards, into them.

  ‘Now have you got that?’ said Hartmann.

  ‘Ye-es. I think so.’

  ‘I can’t think why there wasn’t a cellar built in the first place.’

  ‘Yes, it’s unusual in a house like this, Monsieur.’

  Hartmann senior had had a hole driven sideways into the bank at the rear of the house and had stored his wine in the resulting damp burrow whose roof was held up by shaky-looking planks. One day it had caved in when a storm caused a displacement of the earth in the woods behind it. Later, when the rain had eased, the bottles were dug out like the victims of a mining disaster. The rain had washed off or defaced many of the labels so that dinner at the Manor often had an air of suspense; to his irritation the old man frequently found he had treated his guests to a rare burgundy he had been meaning to save.

  The house was built from pale stone, and the windows and shutters were painted grey. In the middle of the long slate roof was a triangular protuberance, also slate-covered, into which was let a brick-surrounded dormer window. This had been boarded up with wood and now looked rather like the door half-way up a barn through which bales are loaded. On either side of it reared two thin rectangular chimneys in what appeared to be an unwise defiance of gravity. Some of the building was covered with a dense creeper, spangled green and red, which helped to counteract the bleakness of the pale stone and the house’s isolated position on the headland. Theoretically it was sheltered from the sea winds by the finger of land that stuck out and by the dense pine forests on the far side of the lake it overlooked. In fact, on bad days the wind seemed to accelerate off the bend of the land and funnel itself through the woods before sucking and tearing at the shutters and shaking the windows in their frames.

  ‘You think you’ll be able to manage a cellar, then?’

  ‘Oh, I think so, M. Hartmann. I’ll let you have an estimate.’

  ‘That’s wonderful. My father would have been pleased to think of someone bringing the old place back to life. We’ll have a party when you’ve finished. We could have it out here in front of the house, and people could go swimming in the lake.’

  Hartmann saw in his mind a covered walkway, hung with candles, leading from the house to a marquee with tables at the water’s edge. He would have all his own wine installed in the new cellar and begin to do something with the upstairs rooms as well. Perhaps they could have another party at the end of the year when all the redecoration would be complete. It would be better than Paris, better than Montparnasse or the Opera.

  ‘I could begin on Thursday,’ Roussel was saying.

  ‘Yes, yes.’

  ‘Here, monsieur, take one of our cards. We’re the first people in the town to have them.’

  He pressed into Hartmann’s palm an outsize card with a poorly printed drawing of a house with scaffolding. Hartmann looked at it and then at Roussel’s eager face.

  For reasons he could not explain, he felt a disabling surge of pity for Roussel. He looked at the small, dark-haired builder weighing up his job and felt for a moment as though he had lost his own identity in that of the other man. It was not a conscious act of sympathy, but an involuntary and unpleasant loss of control. Nevertheless, the feeling was so strong that he felt he could have cried.

  ‘Why on earth are you sitting there like that?’ said Hartmann’s wife Christine when she came downstairs ten minutes later with a bunch of dried flowers in her hands.

  ‘I was just thinking.’

  ‘What about?’

  ‘A strange thing happened. I was standing out there with Roussel, the builder, talking about the house, when a peculiar feeling came over me. I felt this desperate sense of pity for him.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I’ve no idea. I’ve no reason to think he’s in trouble. It just came from nowhere.’

  ‘Charles, you are ridiculous. Is he going to do the job or not?’

  ‘Oh yes. There’s no problem about that.’

  ‘Well, you’ve got no reason to feel sorry for him. Marie-Thérèse said he was very good with the work he did for them and not all that expensive either. Even so, this is going to be quite a big job, and I don’t suppose this M. Roussel will undercharge for it.’

  ‘No, I don’t suppose he will. It wasn’t anything specific, this feeling, you understand. Just a general . . .’ Hartmann trailed off, with a gesture of his hand.

  They crossed the hall to the small morning-room at the foot of the northern tower where Christine rang the bell for the maid. She was a small woman with fair wavy hair cut in the fashion of the times, parted and held by combs. There was a heaviness about her that was unbecoming; her features seemed to have been moulded roughly, leaving her lips full and set in a permanent pout. To her admirers, they were her most attractive feature; others thought them simply a part of her generally unrefined appearance. Her eyes were blue and knowing.

  ‘So, Charles, soon you’ll have all your father’s beloved wine stored up beneath your feet. A little Aladdin’s cave for you to wander round.’

  ‘Yes, there should be quite a choice. All those strange wines from Alsace and Austria he collected when he was old. I’m told his house in Vienna has crates of Italian wine too.’

  ‘Italian! I couldn’t drink Italian wine. Sometimes, Charles, I wonder about your taste. And your father’s.’ She stood up and made as if to leave the room. ‘I’m going to carry on with my work. We’re having lunch promptly because I’ve given Marie the afternoon off.’

  ‘I shan’t stray far.’

  I wonder, thought Christine, as she strode across the hall; I wonder. She watched her husband with a caution that bordered on jealousy and was aware that slow changes were taking place in him. Her hope was that by not making too much of them she could turn them to her advantage. He seemed to have reached a new threshold in his life and she wanted to be on the right side of any door that might be closing. Hartmann’s ease of manner and attention to social form had at first appeared to her merely the polished exterior of a man who had spent much of his life in polite society. Patiently she waited for them to evaporate and for the man inside to be revealed to her. She knew him to be passionate and thought his punctiliousness therefore only a mask; but it was one that he had never lowered.

  As well as a ready sense of the absurd, he seemed to have a reserve of anger inside him which he hardly ever turned on the world, almost, it sometimes seemed, out of politeness. Although he was quite willing to offer his opinions on any topic, he would never test his feelings on anyone except himself, and this perplexed Christine.

  They had married when she discovered herself to be pregnant, but she had miscarried and, as a result, was unable to have children. Hartmann was adamant that it made no difference and that he loved her for herself alone; Christine, however, sometimes feared that he stayed with her only from an innate se
nse of duty.

  I shan’t stray far, she repeated to herself as she went out into the garden with her secateurs.

  5

  THE NEXT MORNING Roussel began building a cellar beneath the Manor. He had discovered a trap-door in the kitchen which led down some steps into what had once been used as a store for wood and coal. His plan was to enlarge the area, install stone steps and an electric light and line the walls with bottle racks. He assured Hartmann that this would involve no major structural alteration to the house and could be finished in less than a month.

  What it did involve was a large amount of dust. Roussel’s workforce consisted of a very fat man in blue overalls and a youth in a beret with a bad cough. The fat man was of the opinion that the whole project was a mistake. Although he had two pickaxes and a number of spades and sledgehammers, which he carried nonchalantly under one arm, he spent much of his time smoking maize-coloured cigarettes and issuing doleful orders to the young man, such as: ‘You might as well give it a try, son.’ The youth would then wheezily aim his pickaxe at a partition in the store beneath the kitchen, causing puffs of old and evil-smelling dust to rise up on to the kitchen floor above. Roussel himself exercised a nervous supervision, occasionally removing his jacket to help, but more often taking the chance to bicycle back to town to pick up some vital tool that had been left behind.