Day of the Arrow Page 2

  There was silence while the waiter brought their coffee.

  Lindsay said, ‘But what does it mean? What’s happened to him? Has he got another woman—a mistress?’

  ‘No.’ She said it with certainty. ‘I was going to say, “I’m sure,” but . . . No, I’m not sure of anything any more. And yet I’d swear there isn’t a woman; one can feel that, always.’

  ‘There must be something; you must suspect something.’

  ‘It’s Bellac,’ she said with surprising passion. ‘If he would leave Bellac everything would be all right.’

  Lindsay stared at her in amazement. ‘Bellac! The family place. He’s there?’

  ‘We,’ she said, ‘are there.’

  ‘But he used to laugh about it; he used to say he’d rather die than live there; he used to do wicked imitations of the people and the dialect . . .’ He broke off, disturbed by the deep misery of her stare.

  ‘He hasn’t left the valley for two years. He isn’t living at Bellac, he is Bellac. Dear God, how I hate the place.’

  Lindsay stared at her in amazement. ‘I always thought of you traveling around the world together. I kept seeing your names in the dirt columns, pictures sometimes: “The Marquis and Marquise de Bellac in New York . . . Amalfi . . . Venice . . . Casablanca”—all over the place. Tahiti once, I’m sure.’

  Françoise said darkly, ‘Yes, we were in Tahiti; we traveled too much, spent too much . . . Oh God, drank too much, lay in the sun too much. I admit that; I even said so to Philippe.’

  Lindsay shook his head over this; he could not visualize Philippe as lord of his enormous domain; that faultlessly dressed, witty, always slightly mocking figure would not compose itself into the foreground of an immense pastoral landscape. When people said that the French aristocracy were effete, it was men like Philippe they were thinking of—if, indeed, they were thinking at all. Born to an enormous fortune, his mother the daughter of a Swiss banker, his grandmother a South American heiress, he had liked beautiful women, beautiful pictures, beautiful wine and food, and beautiful places—in that order.

  Françoise removed her hand and took a sip of her coffee.

  ‘You were very fond of Philippe, weren’t you, James?’

  ‘Yes, I was.’

  ‘Will you help me? Will you help him?’

  Lindsay laughed. ‘What am I meant to do? Go down to the Auvergne with a spade and dig him out of Bellac?’

  Françoise let out a little gasp and almost dropped her coffee cup. Lindsay was appalled to see that her eyes were tight shut, that the color had drained from her face. He thought that she was going to faint, or perhaps had fainted.

  The waiter ran forward—however crowded a café, waiters somehow manage to keep an eye on the needs of women like Françoise de Montfaucon. The magnificent coat was wiped, cognac was produced, there was a reassuringly everyday fuss during which something dark receded from the table, and Lindsay realized how strangely the noisy extrovert world around them had dropped away during their conversation, leaving them alone in a place which was not quite real. Indeed, what had he said to bring about this moment of terror? Something about going down to Bellac with a spade and digging . . .

  He leaned forward, staring at the woman who sat opposite him. Gradually the fuss around them subsided; the solicitous waiter withdrew. At last Françoise looked up from her small glass of brandy.

  Lindsay said, ‘Françoise, you don’t . . . You can’t mean . . . He isn’t ill, is he?’

  ‘I don’t know what ill means.’ The flatness of this took his breath away.

  ‘He’s in danger?’

  The eyes over the brandy glass were composed again, almost withdrawn. ‘He . . . he says he is going to die.’

  ‘He says . . . !’ Lindsay could not believe his ears.

  Françoise said, ‘He’s as strong as a horse; he admits it, the doctor admits it; in fact, the doctor thinks I’m crazy. But then Philippe hasn’t . . . hasn’t told him.’

  ‘He told you?’

  ‘I said to him, “Philippe, I thought I would go and stay with my Aunt Claudine during September.” And he . . . he just nodded. So I said, “You won’t mind my going?” ’

  Lindsay could see that she was reliving this conversation exactly as it had happened; the effort which she was making to be exact was almost pathetic to watch.

  ‘He said to me, “No, why should I mind? I won’t be here myself.” So you see I was rather excited; I thought, At last he’s going away; he’s going to leave this dreadful place. I ran to him. I said, “Philippe, I’m so glad. Where are you going?” I said, “It’ll do you so much good to get away. Are you sure you wouldn’t like me to come too?” ’

  She was peering into the amber light of her brandy, almost as though she could see the whole scene contained there in miniature.

  ‘Then he turned and looked at me. And it was . . . James, it was such a strange look. He ran his fingers down my cheek; and that was something he hadn’t done for years—something he used to do when . . . well, after we had made love. He said, “No, I don’t want you to come too, little one.” ’

  She stopped speaking and finished her brandy.

  Lindsay leaned forward. ‘Now wait a minute, Françoise . . .’

  She interrupted him passionately. ‘It was his voice, it was the way he said it. James, you can’t love a man and live with him for six years without knowing something of what is in his mind.’

  ‘He never said in so many words that he was going to die.’

  She dismissed this with an impatient gesture. ‘Look, James, on such and such an evening maybe I ask the Jehan de Marchals to dinner, and I say to Philippe, “Oh darling, by the way, the Marchals are dining tomorrow.” And Philippe says, “But, my dear, you know I am going over to see Jacques Lacombe tomorrow about replanting the south shore of the lake.” Do you imagine I don’t know what he really means? That he can’t stand his Cousin Georges, who is always trying to borrow money off him; he knows that I am right to ask them; he simply doesn’t intend to be present, that’s all.’ She gazed at him almost fiercely, and Lindsay, against all rational thought, knew that she might very well be right. Everything she said gave him a fresh glimpse into a world of which he knew nothing—a glimpse of a Philippe de Montfaucon of whom he knew nothing.

  Françoise laid both her hands palms downward on the marble top of the table and looked at them severely; it was as if, by this study of two objects so well known to her, she could in some way calm herself. ‘Very well,’ she said. ‘I will tell you the end of it. During this conversation—about his going away—he was sitting at his desk. Naturally when he had said this appalling thing . . . No, James, there was no mistaking it. He said, “No, I don’t want you to come too, little one.” And his voice was . . . oh, empty, desolate, as if already he were speaking to me from a long way off. And then the touch of his fingers . . .’ She raised one of her own slim hands to her cheek, reliving that touch.

  ‘James, I was horrified; I know what people mean when they say their blood ran cold. I took hold of him, and I think I almost shouted at him—it’s difficult for you to realize how, at Bellac . . . My nerves used to be so strong. I said to him, “Philippe, what do you mean?” And he didn’t answer. I think I probably shook him, and I asked again, “What do you mean?” Then he stood up, James, and he took my wrists—he’s terribly strong, did you know that?—and he sort of bent me away from him. His face was hard, a stone face.’ Her fingers felt the wrist of the other hand. ‘He hurt me. He walked straight out of the room. And it was then, you see, that I looked down at his desk.’ She broke off, and said, ‘James, I’d like some more cognac.’

  Lindsay summoned the waiter and ordered the brandy. Françoise shook her head as if to clear away the evil things that clouded her brain. ‘You know the crest, you must have seen it in the old days: on that fob, on his signet ring?’

  Lindsay nodded. ‘The falcon. Montfaucon.’

  ‘Yes. Well, naturally it’s at the head of our note
paper. There was a pile of notepaper on his desk, and he had drawn something while he was talking to me—without thinking or even intentionally, I don’t know.’ She looked up, her eyes very dark, very pained. ‘He had drawn an arrow through the falcon, James.’

  2

  The White Bird

  James Lindsay was not a man for prospects; being Scottish by extraction he had been spoon-fed too many mountains, lakes and torrents in infancy; when there is no basis of comparison, size hardly matters—and, anyway, to a child everything seems too large. So there it was—Loch Tay or Lago di Como, Ben Nevis or the Matterhorn, he preferred a crooked street or a well-worn face, or a glimpse of a hot sea through a shuttered window.

  However, it has to be a very hardened traveler who can take the road from Ussel to Aurillac and not find himself pausing now and again to stare at the gothic peaks of the Auvergnes or at the shimmering Dordogne far below among crags and perilously leaning pines, the river of all fairy tales.

  Lindsay stopped the small Renault which he had hired, and walked out onto a dizzy bluff poised between mist-wreathed mountains and dull, pewter river; it was an overcast, warm, ominous day. He sat down and regarded the prospect, but after a few minutes he no longer saw it, for his mind was turned inwards. He had been impelled to stop as much by the desire to do some soul-searching as by the gloomy magnificence of the view.

  His motives for taking this journey were suspect, that was the trouble; and he was too honest a person simply to shut the lid on suspect motives and sit on them. Honesty apart, he knew from past experience that if you did this the motives had a way of working on themselves like rotten refuse, or like wine bottled too young. An explosion followed. Therefore he sat, frowning at the River Dordogne but not seeing it.

  Very well then—Françoise. The fascination she held for him had not abated one iota, rather the reverse; moreover, he could not help feeling that in what she had told him there were evasions and omissions, some intentional; this, of course, increased the fascination. So—he must be honest: he had agreed to make this journey to Bellac because he wanted to see more of her. And then, Philippe. He had to admit that a driving, gnawing curiosity impelled him towards this man, some facet of whom he had once called friend. Yes, indeed, friend. In those golden days of their early youth the two of them had been inseparable; they had not only shared an apartment, they had shared life, carving off chunks of it and eating as much as they could stomach. Françoise had said, repeatedly, how well she knew her husband; undoubtedly, because he was her husband, what she said was true. Yet there are things in a man that only another man can recognize, and that a woman—no matter whether she be wife or mother—is blind to.

  Curiosity, then, and a desire to be near Françoise impelled him towards Bellac. What else? Continuing in honesty, he doubted—even if the fantastic situation she imagined really did exist—whether he could help her. Gazing into her eyes in that café, full of students, islanded with her amongst that alien din, he had been strangely convinced. Next morning, already committed to making this fantastic journey, he could not help feeling that maybe she was the one whose brain needed a rest and possibly treatment. How embarrassing, he thought, if on arrival at the Chateau de Bellac he found this to be the case: some grizzled and kindly family doctor leading him aside—into the library; it was always the library—and explaining that poor dear Françoise . . . since she had lost that child. . . .

  Lindsay shook his head at the Dordogne, frowning.

  But she had a lover—of that there was no doubt—and he had not been able to resist asking her why, if she needed help so badly, she had not turned to the elegant and self-assured Daniel. Her reply, though what the Anglo-Saxons would call ‘very French,’ was unarguably right. Because Daniel had been her lover, he could never be asked for help; he was a friend of Philippe’s; he would not, of course, have been able to refuse her, but think of his position! At Bellac! In Philippe’s own house! Françoise had only been a little irritated by Lindsay’s laughter. Besides—and this had probably been the best part of the whole conversation for him—she did not trust Daniel; she knew the world he lived in; she knew how delicious a morsel it would be: ‘You haven’t heard? My dear, Philippe de Montfaucon has to be kept down at Bellac. No, dear, not exactly dangerous. But you remember his Uncle Antoine. One feels sorry for her, poor thing.’

  Lindsay looked up at the mountains, immense in the mist that wreathed them; he grimaced at them. He stood up and stretched—he was a little too large for the small Renault—and he spoke aloud to the peaks and the pines and the pewter river far below. ‘I’m curious,’ he said. ‘By God, I am curious. Also I love Françoise, I always have. Come to that, I suppose I love Philippe too. Or did.’

  He shook his head over Love, which in youth can embrace so much so gallantly and which the passing of time, and the grubbiness of humanity, can tarnish so quickly. Then he went back to the car.

  After the little town of Dennat, where he had an excellent meal, finding the way became complicated. The three people whom he asked all had very clear notions of the best route but all their ideas were different; there was a quick way, a beautiful way, an easy way; between the three Lindsay lost himself four times. When he finally came to the sturdy, discreet wooden arrow pointing up a side road and emblazoned with the one word Bellac, it was only to realize that he had in fact passed it not half an hour before, going in the opposite direction.

  The first five miles were easy; the road surface was good, the sun emerged from behind lowering clouds, birds sang, and the plateau of bracken and heather growing amongst forests of giant boulders seemed a friendly place. Then suddenly, with no warning, there was a sharp right turn and the road appeared to vanish altogether. Appalled, Lindsay jammed on the brakes; he raised himself in the seat and looked over the edge. He discovered that the road did not in fact come to an abrupt end, though it did the next best thing; it plunged into a ravine with a series of hair-raising corkscrew twists. Lindsay slipped into bottom gear and advanced.

  Immediately the landscape changed; vegetation vanished except for a few brave weeds which had somehow found soil among the crannies of the smooth, sheer cliffs.

  Water had done this, Lindsay realized. The boulder-strewn plateau had in reality been the bed of a vast river at some lost point in time; and the river, coming to this cliff, had at first thundered over in a prehistoric Niagara; later, wearing and wearing the rock, it had tunneled for itself this hellish gorge. When at last the road straightened out sufficiently to allow him to look upwards Lindsay was horrified, because he was to a slight degree subject to claustrophobia, to see that the sky had gone away from him and was now a bright slit framed by towering cliffs of limestone. The road shared the bottom of this ravine with what had once been the river and was now—in July, at least—a cowed-looking stream.

  He was glad when, after another two miles, the gorge began to open out; trees reappeared—pines and oaks and mountain ash. Still, however, the road ran downhill, twisting and turning along the line of the ancient riverbed. Then, suddenly, it shot off at a tangent, plunged into the gloomiest forest of fir trees that even Lindsay, a Scot, had ever seen, and finally flung him out into a burst of sunshine and his first tremendous sight of Bellac. He stopped the car and got out.

  Where the ancient river had curved round a great pine-clad bluff there now lay a beautiful sickle-shaped lake; on the opposite shore to the bluff was a smiling valley, a bowl of sunny fields and coppices some seven or eight miles across; above the fields vineyards climbed the lower slopes of the hills, and above the vineyards were more trees and rocky outcrops, and above the rocks—but in some way removed and no longer menacing—were the peaks of the Cevennes or the Auvergnes, he was not sure which. And at the far end of the lake, cushioned in this green bowl, was the Chateau de Bellac, turrets and towers shining in a patch of sunlight, golden-gray stone against shadowed trees beyond.

  Aloud, Lindsay said, ‘Well!’

  After this moment of excitement, of elatio
n, doubt came tumbling into his mind; he would dearly have liked to turn round and drive back to Paris. Suddenly, faced with this castle gleaming like an ancient jewel in a bed of green velvet, he knew that he had dreamed his meeting with Françoise and everything that she had told him. He turned and looked with distaste at the little car, at the litter of his painting things in the back seat; he thought, his stomach dropping away from him, of the telegram—that absurd telegram worked out so carefully with Françoise at a table in the Café de l’Univers in the Boulevard Saint Michel in Paris, France: ‘Saw in papers you were in residence stop will you remember me if I appear Tuesday afternoon stop James Lindsay.’

  Now, looking down at Bellac, he trembled to think of it; it would not deceive a child of six. Françoise had said, ‘Don’t fuss, James. Telegrams are always brought to me. No one will even see it but me.’

  Lindsay grimaced to himself. Madame la Marquise was very sure of herself. Faced with the smiling pleasance before him he could only hope that Madame la Marquise was not off her beautiful nut.

  In this mood James Lindsay got into his hired Renault and drove down into the valley towards the chateau. He had not gone more than a few hundred yards before the first of his surprises took place. There was a screech in his left ear like three trumpets played fortissimo out of key, he wrenched the Renault onto the grass verge, and a long, low, white Mercedes howled past him and vanished round the corner ahead. Apart from being glad that he had not had to try conclusions with this vehicle on any hairpin bends, Lindsay could not equate the car with his preconceptions about Bellac; the driver had been very fair, so it had not been Philippe; Françoise had, perhaps unwittingly, given him the impression of a rural-monastic life, miles from civilization. How exactly did the white Mercedes fit into this picture? It would be interesting to find out.