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My hostess looked in silence from my face to the book, and back again, pressed my shoulder with a gentle hand and rose with the grace of a dancer, leaving me alone in the quiet bar. I heard her talking to someone in the entrance hall, and then I heard the lower timbre of Neil’s voice, and then they both moved on and there was only silence.
My fingers found the turned-down corner on the page where Paul had stopped. The book wanted concentration, so I curled myself against the seat and did my best.
I sat there all night, reading.
At four o’clock the dustmen rumbled in the darkness round the square, but I paid them no heed. The first pale streaks of dawn had just begun to split the steel-gray sky when I finally closed the worn covers of the book and lowered it to my lap. It was done, now. Finished. I spoke the word again, out loud, though there was no one there to hear me: “Finished.” No more labors for Ulysses, no more voyages to make. Paul, wherever he had gone to, could find rest.
I felt the warmth of tears upon my face, and my body ached with a hollow weariness that was almost more than I could bear, but I felt better, all the same.
Wiping the wetness from my cheeks, I turned my head. Outside the window, the three pink petals clung and trembled on the bowing geranium, the only spot of color in that gray and dreary morning. The wind was rising from the distant river, chasing the wall of cloud before it. It caught a handful of dry twisted leaves and sent them scuttling across the deserted fountain square. It caught the lone geranium as well, and set the pale pink petals dancing.
And as I sat there watching, one by one they, too, were torn away, swirling past my window out of sight, until only the stripped and naked stem remained.
Chapter 25
That morning in the presence room I stood…
I had met death before, in different forms—I knew quite well the pattern of my grieving. First came shock, and then the tears, and then a bitter anger, followed by a softer grief that time would wear away. As I stood alone now on the steps to the château, looking down on the spot where Paul had died, I felt the anger come creeping up inside me. The Jews might call it a sin, being angry on their Day of Atonement, but I welcomed the emotion. It was something real, at least—something warm and hard and tangible, where before there had been nothing, only numbness.
Someone had washed the step, since yesterday. A crumpled mass of yellow leaves lay rotting in the crease between the stone steps and the wall, and except for a few spots of darker color in their midst everything was as it had been before. It might have been imagined, what I’d seen here yesterday afternoon, and Paul himself might never have existed.
“It isn’t fair,” I said. There was no one there to hear me. It was too early yet for anyone to be wandering about. Back at the hotel, the kitchen staff would be only just beginning now to set the breakfast tables and brew the first pot of morning coffee. I was thankful not to be there. It would have only made me angrier still, to watch the daily routine unfold with all its petty rituals, as if nothing had happened. It had to be that way, of course, I knew that—but understanding something didn’t make it easier.
It was strange, I thought. On a different level, I’d faced the same grim tangle of emotions when my parents had divorced, five years ago. I’d grieved then, too. But where that loss had deadened me, killed dreams and hope together, losing Paul had sparked some part of me to burning life.
Don’t get involved. It had become my motto, almost, that small phrase. Safer not to care too much, and better not to love at all than risk a disappointment. But with Paul, I thought, how could one help but care?
“Damn,” I whispered.
I don’t know how long I stood there, looking down at the unspeaking stone. I had no way of telling time. The sky, I thought, grew faintly brighter, but the sun stayed tucked behind its veil of clouds and the wind on my face promised rain. After what seemed a minor lifetime I raised my eyes and, turning, climbed the final flight of steps up to the road.
The château bell began to strike the hour and I turned to watch it ringing, a small black swaying silhouette high in the narrow wedge-shaped tower that loomed at the bend of the road. Seven times the bell rang out; the last note hung and quivered on the morning air.
It wasn’t difficult to find the place where Paul had been sitting. The wall here was indeed the perfect height for sitting on, its broad top capped with rougher stone. There was a sign here, slightly dented, warning people that the road ahead was not for common use. Paul must have sat beneath that sign for some time. Three spent cigarettes lay clustered at the base of the wall, their frayed ends showing that he’d stubbed them out against the stone, as was his habit. He had sat here, and smoked, and then…
I forced myself to take the short step forward, to the wall, and gazed down at the sheer relentless drop to the hard steps below. It was more difficult to look at than I’d thought. I took a hasty step back from the low wall, shoving my hands in my pockets in a gesture that was unconsciously defensive. I was wearing Paul’s red jacket over yesterday’s rumpled clothes, and although I’d left Ulysses in the bar, the left-hand pocket still held something firm and full of angles. My fingers brushed it, recognized it. Cigarettes. There couldn’t be too many left, after my self-destructive binge last night. I drew them from my pocket now, not because I craved one but because a tiny thought was troubling me.
If Paul had left his cigarettes behind, forgotten for the moment in the pocket of his coat, then how had he smoked three here yesterday afternoon? He might, I thought, have simply bought another packet, but then he would have bought the same brand, surely? It was a popular French brand, sold at every corner store—a longish cigarette with a plain white paper filter and the brand name stamped in simple black. I’d never seen Paul smoke a different type.
And yet here before me was the evidence—the three spent ends on the pavement had dark spotted yellow filters. I picked one up to look, but there was no clear name or logo visible. Not only were the cigarettes a stranger’s brand, but there were no match stubs anywhere. Paul had always used matches, and I thought it unlikely he’d have bought himself a lighter all of a sudden. Not impossible, of course, but decidedly unlikely.
Which meant, to me, that someone else had given Paul those cigarettes; that someone else had held the lighter for him. That no matter what the witnesses had said to the police, Paul hadn’t been alone here yesterday, not all the time. He hadn’t been alone.
Knowing this myself was one thing; telling it to the police was quite another. In my mind I could already hear the quiet tolerance, the kind but oh, so firm dismissal by the weary young inspector. If only someone else could speak for me, instead—someone with a bit more clout, and knowledge of the system. The Chamonds, perhaps, or maybe even…
I bit my lip. What was it that Armand Valcourt had said to me in Martine’s gallery? “The price one pays for influence is isolation.” Influence…
The bell below me in the town began to chime the hour, a tardy echo of the older peal from the château. With thoughtful eyes I raised my head again to look along the steeply rising road.
***
If François thought the hour an early one for visitors, he gave no indication of it. “You may wait here,” he said, politely. “He will not be long.”
I thanked him and he withdrew, leaving me alone in the quiet room. This was not the glittering sitting room into which I’d been shown on my first visit to the Clos des Cloches. The windows here were thickly curtained, and the room itself was small. It appeared to be a study of sorts, or an office, with richly paneled walls and shelves for books. A writing desk stood angled in one corner, and on its surface, neatly dusted, a row of framed photographs stood waiting for inspection.
The photographs were all of Lucie, at different ages, solemn and smiling. There was no one else. I moved closer to examine them, brushing the glass of one with wondering fingertips. My mind drifted back, I don’t know why, to the argument I’d overheard last Saturday, between Armand and Martine. “What do you know of love?” she’d taunted him. Lord, I thought, how could she ask that, having seen these photographs?
Behind me the door to the study opened and closed again, quietly. I spun round, hands laced nervously behind my back, to face him.
