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Paul shrugged again. “It’s what I felt, that’s all.”
“Well, it’s no small praise, that, for a musician. I can’t say as I’ve ever etherealized anybody’s grief before.”
“Do you practice every day?” I asked Neil.
“Every day. Not as much as I ought to, of course, but as much as I’m able.”
“Neil’s not really on vacation,” put in Garland. “He’s recuperating. He broke his hand.”
“Tell her how,” Simon dared him.
Neil grinned. “Stupidity. I let myself get dragged into a fist fight, in some bar in Munich.” He held his left hand up to show me. It was a nice hand, square and long-fingered, neatly kept. “It’s getting better, but I can’t do all my fingering properly yet. So my employers kindly gave me some time off. On the condition,” he added, “that I don’t enjoy myself too much.”
“And is this your first trip to Chinon?” I asked him.
He shook his head. “No. This would be my eighth visit, I think—maybe even my ninth. It’s an addiction, really, Chinon is. You’ll understand, if you stay long enough.”
Beside me, Simon nodded. “Monsieur Chamond says once you’ve been to Chinon, you’re hooked for life. He says you’ll keep on coming back.”
“He sounds like a wise man,” I said. “I haven’t met him yet.”
“I’m sure you’ll meet them eventually,” Jim Whitaker assured me. “They’re nice people, both of them.”
“They speak English,” Garland said. “Not like that nephew of theirs. Honestly, you’d think with all the tourists they get around here, more people would take the time to learn English. It’s so frustrating, trying to communicate.”
At the far end of the table, Paul smiled gently. “I’m sure the French feel the same way,” he said, “when they visit America.”
Our waiter seemed to understand us well enough. He took Paul’s order first, then Neil’s, then waited while Garland tried to choose a wine and Simon tried to learn which pizza had the egg on it. I settled on a galette for myself—a buckwheat crêpe filled with cheese and mushrooms—washed down with a half bottle of sweet cider.
The food, when it arrived, was excellent, and yet the meal itself was slightly off. I tried, and failed, to put my finger on the cause.
The atmosphere around our table was, at its surface, entirely normal for a group of people who’d just met on holiday—a little forced, perhaps, but normal. And yet, I thought, there was a tension here… a tension spun from more than my awareness of the man across the table. One couldn’t shake away the sense that something deeper flowed beneath the smiles and salt-passing, some darker conflict hinted at but never quite revealed. It made me feel excluded.
I ate my meal in silence, for the most part, and let the others talk. In time the conversation dwindled to a kind of battle between Simon and Garland Whitaker, both of whom seemed fully capable of carrying the standard single-handed. Garland proved the more experienced combatant, and more often than not her voice came out on top.
She had remarkable stamina, I had to admit. The table conversation had exhausted several topics, and still she showed no sign of wearing down. Her husband, though, I noticed, had stopped listening. He went on eating quietly, his gaze occasionally focusing with mild interest on someone or something at another table—a laughing child, an old man eating alone, a frilly woman slipping titbits to a poodle underneath her chair… But he’d tuned his wife’s voice out completely. It was, I assumed, a defense mechanism he’d acquired over the years.
Garland chattered on about the château that they’d visited that morning. “We stay in one place,” she said to me, “and take our day trips out from there. So much easier than jumping from place to place, don’t you think? And I can actually unpack my clothes, which is a blessing. This time we’re doing all the Loire châteaux. We always like to have a theme for our vacations, don’t we, Jim? Always. We did the D-day beaches on our honeymoon.”
“How romantic,” muttered Simon. He tore a piece of bread in half to mop up what remained of his runny egg, and looked toward Jim Whitaker. “Were you in the Army, during the war?”
It was the first real smile I’d seen from the American. He looked rather nice, when he smiled. “I’m not that old, son,” he said. “I wasn’t even born until after the war ended.”
“Oh,” said Simon. “Sorry.”
Garland laughed her tinkling laugh. “Your father fought in France, though, didn’t he?” she asked her husband. “That’s how he met your mother.”
“Yes.”
“And Jim was in the Army, Simon, when I married him. We lived in Germany for two whole years.” She shuddered. “God, that awful little apartment, darling, do you remember it? But then I guess it was just fine, for Germans.”
Christian flicked a brief look down the table, but made no comment. It was Neil who asked the Whitakers just where in Germany they’d lived, and nodded when they told him. “I do know it,” he said, smiling. “There’s a wonderful music festival not far from there, every June. Lovely place.”
“I hated it,” said Garland with a shrug. “The people were so unfriendly. Nazis, probably, most of them.”
Her husband pushed his empty plate away and smiled at her with patience. “Now come on, honey, you know they weren’t.”
“Darling, it’s true. Don’t you remember all those little holes someone kept digging, all over town? Mrs. Jurgen’s dog fell into one, and the police got suspicious? Well, that was Nazis, the police proved it.” To the rest of us she explained: “There’d been money hidden there, or something, at the end of the war, and these people were coming back to find it thirty years later. Incredible. And then there was the time…”
