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He was only a flirt, and a harmless one, and I was decidedly single, but still I felt a twist of guilty conscience. I cast a quick glance upwards at the hotel, along the row of empty balconies, to where the tall and graceful windows of Neil’s room reflected back the calmly drifting clouds. I thought I saw a flash of something pale behind the glass, but I might have imagined the movement.
I must have imagined it. The château bell was chiming three o’clock when I entered the hotel lobby—it was Neil’s normal practice time, but there was no violin this afternoon. There was only Thierry, looking very bored behind the desk. No, he told me, nobody was back yet. There was only him, and the telephone, and… He broke off, brightening. “You would like a drink, Mademoiselle? In the bar?”
I shook my head. “The last thing I need, Thierry, is a drink. I’m floating as it is. No, I think I’ll go upstairs and have a nap.”
He rolled his eyes. “The naps,” he said, “are for old women, and for children.”
He was quite wrong, I thought later, buried deep beneath my freshly-ironed sheets and soft wool blanket. An afternoon nap was a glorious indulgence, tucked into the middle of a long and active day, with rich food and fine wine fuzzing round the edges of one’s drifting mind. I sighed and snuggled deeper.
Few sounds rose to drown the murmur of the fountain underneath my open window. Now and then a car passed by, or someone shouted to a friend across the square. Nearby a dog barked sharply and was silenced by a quick command. But nothing else disturbed the peace, the perfect peace that filled my shadowed room. The fountain’s voice grew louder still, subtly altering pitch, becoming low and deep and lulling like the darkly flowing river to the south.
It was so close, that sound… so close…
It was beside me. I hardly ever dreamed, not anymore, so I was rather surprised to find myself moving in that strange, disjointed way that dreamers do, not in my room but down along the river, where the plane trees wept like mourners in the wind beneath a gray uncertain sky. I moved with no real purpose, no true course. One moment I was standing on the bridge, and then there was no bridge, and I was sitting on the riverbank, my arms hugged tightly round my upraised knees. Across the calm water I could see my cousin Harry, pacing back and forth along the tree-lined shore of the little island. He wanted to cross, but without the bridge it was impossible.
“No point in worrying about Harry,” my father said beside me. Smiling, he reached into his pocket and handed me a King John coin. “Here, make a wish.”
I took the coin from Daddy’s hand, without thinking, and tossed it in the water. It changed, too, as it fell, no longer silver but a diamond, and where it sank the river ran pure red, like blood.
Alarmed, I looked up at the place where I’d seen Harry, but he wasn’t there. The only person standing on the far shore was a lean tall man with pale blond hair, his eyes fixed sadly on my face. He was trying to tell me something—I could see his lips moving, but the wind stole his voice, and all that reached me was a single word: “Trust…”
A cold shadow fell across the grass beside me, and I looked up to meet the gentle gaze of the old man François. “Seeing ghosts?” he asked me. Then, incredibly, he raised a violin to his shoulder and began to play Beethoven.
I opened my eyes.
One floor below, Neil stopped his practicing a moment, tuned a string, began again. I listened, staring at the ceiling. Ordinarily, I found Beethoven soothing, just the thing to clear my mind of stray and troubling dreams, but this afternoon it proved no help at all.
At length, I simply shut it out. Closing my eyes to the light, I turned my face against the pillow and felt the unexpected trail of tears.
Chapter 22
There moved the multitude, a thousand heads:
“You’ve got a snail on your sleeve,” Neil pointed out, quite calmly, as if it were an everyday occurrence. I looked down in surprise.
“So I have. Poor little thing. Making a break for it, that’s what he’s doing.” Gently I detached the clinging creature from the slick material of my windcheater. I ought to have put him back in the bucket with the others, I suppose, but I just couldn’t bring myself to do it. Instead I closed my fingers softly round the snail and wandered on, away from the fishmonger’s stall. The noisy Thursday market crowd pressed in on all sides, but Neil managed to stay close by my shoulder.
“Thief,” he said, grinning.
“I’m not stealing him, I’m liberating him,” was my stubborn reply. “Bravery should be rewarded.”
“Well, I’d hardly think that chap back there with the tattoo and the cleaver would agree with you. He’s charging a good penny for his escargots.”
I shrugged. “Plenty more in the bucket. Do you see a planter anywhere about?”
“Whatever for?”
“I can’t put him down here, now can I?” I explained, patiently. “He’d be trodden on.”
Neil sent me a lopsided smile and lifted his eyes to look over my head. “Would a flower pot do?” he asked. “There’s a flower seller over there, by the fountain.”
The fountain square was not so crowded, and one of the benches was actually free. Neil sat down with a grateful sigh while I set free my pilfered snail among the potted geraniums.
I was rather glad myself to be out of the crush for a moment. For all its festive fun and color, the market was a confusing sort of place, with everybody jostling and disagreeing over the price of a bolt of calico or a hunk of cheese, and children coming loose from their parents and being chased down with a stern warning not to wander off again, and the vendors themselves doing everything short of a strip-tease to make one stop beneath the bright striped awnings and take notice.
Some of the vendors had gone high tech. With microphones shoved down their shirt-fronts they kept their running patter up and drowned the ragged voices of their neighbors, while from every corner of the Place du General de Gaulle came blaring music, blending like a weird discordant symphony by some off-beat composer.
I didn’t mind the noise—it was the crowd that was a nuisance. We’d started off in company with Simon and Paul, only to lose them several minutes later. I’d tried myself to lose Neil, once or twice, but it hadn’t worked. He was tall enough to see above the milling heads, and my bright blue jumper made me easy to spot. And, to be honest, I hadn’t really tried that hard.
