Day of the Arrow Read online

  She held out a hand, and he took it, touched by the softness of it, the defenseless feel of a small hand.

  Françoise said, ‘Oh, why . . . ?’ She never said it, but he knew that she had been going to speak of their youth and of the countless, countless times he had asked her to marry him—yes, even in front of Philippe, who had smiled his knowing smile. Instead she said, ‘I really must go and see the children; they’ve been kept out of the way all day, and they do so hate it.’

  ‘When do I see them?’

  ‘Now if you like. Come along as soon as you’re ready.’

  Lindsay laughed. ‘No. You wait while I put on a tie; I can’t even find my way to the staircase, let alone the nursery.’

  Françoise watched him with the affectionate exasperation which seizes women when they are forced to witness the vagaries of the male toilet; she would not have thought twice about keeping him waiting an hour while she changed her entire dress and make-up that went with it, but because he had to make three attempts to shape his bow tie to his satisfaction her foot was quite soon tapping the polished floor.

  Together they went along the corridor, stone-flagged, echoing, down a flight of stairs, across a wide landing where six angry-looking Montfaucons gazed down upon them from the walls, up another flight of stairs, through a heavy oak door, and into another wing of the castle.

  Glancing out of one of the windows that lit the long passage in which they now found themselves, Lindsay caught a glimpse of a courtyard which he had not seen before, and in it the flash of something white and shining; it was the Mercedes. He turned, the question on his lips, to Françoise, who was at that moment opening the door to the nursery quarters. The sight of her face killed the question stone dead; he could have sworn that in that instant she was mortally afraid of something, yet even as he caught this expression, it changed—Françoise changed it by an effort of the will. She turned to him with a small half-smile and said, ‘Philippe’s here.’

  The Marquis de Bellac was sitting on the floor of the big, friendly room, telling a fairy story; a small boy was clinging round his neck, looking over his shoulder, and a smaller, rather fat little girl was kneeling in front of him, gazing up into his face in open-mouthed wonder. Becoming aware of the intruders—because there was no doubt that this was what they were—all three of them turned, staring.

  Philippe smiled. ‘James! You haven’t changed at all.’ He stood up, scattering his children. The little girl ran to her mother, shouting, ‘It was the Black Cat who hid the ring; I told you it was.’

  Shaking hands, Philippe said, ‘You should have come to see us before. Are you still painting? Shall I commission you to do a portrait of these two? No, they’d never sit still.’

  He had not, Lindsay noticed, lost the habit of starting and finishing a conversation by himself, as if despairing of anyone else ever getting it done quickly enough.

  ‘Yes, I paint—on and off,’ he said, pleased to feel such warmth in this man who had once been his friend, pleased to feel a reciprocated warmth in himself. For a moment, glancing at Françoise, who was whispering to the little girl, he even felt the old, deep-seated antagonism—the antagonism of men for women, who must always complicate their simple friendships with desires, fears, questions.

  The small girl, acting presumably on the whispered instructions, came forward and executed a somewhat unsteady curtsey. With a flourish her father introduced her. ‘This is Antoinette. Five years old—gargantuan appetite, which accounts for her unfashionable shape—insatiable love of flattery and tall stories.’

  They shook hands ceremoniously. The small boy, scowling, marched forward, bowed stiffly and offered his hand.

  ‘Gilles,’ said his father. ‘Aged six—distinguished astral explorer—expert horseman and show jumper.’

  The boy flashed him a delighted grin at this latter allusion. Françoise explained, ‘He did all six fences this afternoon without falling off.’

  Antoinette said, ‘I ride too.’ She added proudly, for Lindsay’s benefit, ‘I fell off.’

  ‘You bounced,’ her father said. ‘You’re so fat, you bounced.’

  The child squealed with delight.

  Lindsay found himself in the grip of unreality. Mother, father, two delightful children—all handsome, rich, smiling; and yet she had spoken of death, of secret fears, of her husband’s not having touched her for three years. He glanced at her face, and was appalled by the almost ferocious look of guarded calm on it. He looked at Philippe, and was aware of the fact that he had not, indeed, directed a look or a word to his wife. He was saying, ‘James, it’s good to see you—you look as if you’d just walked out of Eleven Rue Jaquinot.’ (This was the address of the apartment they had shared together.) He put an arm round Lindsay’s shoulder and turned to his wife. ‘He hasn’t changed, has he?’

  ‘Not a bit.’

  Yes, Lindsay thought, it was true what she had said. The words they spoke to each other had the flat resonance of a pretense; nothing lay behind them.

  Françoise, as if this were unbearable for her, gathered up the children. ‘Come,’ she said. ‘Time to get ready for bed.’ A young nursemaid came forward from the far side of the room.

  Gilles said, ‘It’s always bedtime when new people come.’

  Antoinette, essaying another curtsey, said, ‘Will you paint my picture?’

  Her father gathered her up and smacked her plump behind. ‘Minx,’ he said. There were squeals of delight.

  Lindsay was watching the nursemaid, transfixed by the look which she had turned on her master—a look of blind adoration which it was almost embarrassing to witness. Inwardly he grimaced to himself, thinking, Oh well, I suppose it’s a tradition to adore the noble Marquis. And yet he was uncomfortably aware that this cliché did not quite fit the case—or the look. A tangent thought, perhaps a memory, tried to express itself in his brain, but he could not quite grasp it. He wondered suddenly about the servants in the chateau. If all that Françoise had said were true—if, indeed, her husband had moved into a separate room three years ago—there must have been some wild surmise below stairs, he a handsome thirty, and she a ravishing twenty-five.

  The vague curiosity he had felt was beginning to sharpen itself. He found that he believed almost everything Françoise had said, though he was aware of much that she had left unsaid; also he was beginning to feel the exasperation, almost the fury which people like this produced in him: people who had a perfect life at their fingertips, but who seemed incapable of taking advantage of it. The application with which human beings always seemed to set about destroying their happiness really was immoral. Suddenly he thought, Damn them, they must be mad. I’ll get to the bottom of this little mess if it kills me.

  Philippe de Montfaucon was saying good night to his children. Lindsay might not have changed in his eyes, but he himself had certainly changed. He had grown thinner, but this had improved his features; he was now remarkably handsome; he reminded Lindsay of some portrait: yes, a Velásquez portrait of a young nobleman or even, possibly, of a young and noble priest. He turned now, smiling, and said, ‘James, we’ll go riding tomorrow. I’ll show you Bellac; we can talk. Do you like riding? Yes, of course you do; I remember.’

  Françoise turned, halfway across the room with the children. ‘Philippe, you’re coming down to dinner?’

  ‘My dear, I can’t. I have work to do. Boutet is bringing up his accounts.’

  The face he turned to his wife was courteous, but cold—without passion; yet as it came round to Lindsay again warmth returned to it. What was it she had said? ‘The interior of the person is gone.’ Yes, that was it exactly.

  Yet so devious are human relationships—so prone to little flatteries, jealousies, blindnesses—that at this moment Lindsay was appalled to find himself thinking, What has she done to make him like this? Immediately he was ashamed; he knew at once that this was only something inside himself responding to Philippe’s strong personality, the charm that went with it.

&nb
sp; ‘I’d love to be taken on a conducted tour of your kingdom,’ he said.

  For an instant something shadowed the handsome face, and was banished. He said, ‘We’ll have a gossip. Are any of them left in Paris—Didier, or Jean-Françoise, that awful woman Olga . . .’ He laughed. ‘Oh, it’s good to see you, James.’ He glanced at his watch. ‘I must go. There’ll be drinks down on the terrace. Have you met Betty yet? Isn’t she terrifying? Yet put her on a horse and she becomes a goddess. Well, don’t believe it, but I assure you it’s true. Give my regards to Christian; tell him to behave himself. Do you know the way? Back through the oak door, straight down that staircase and turn sharp left. See you tomorrow.’

  Left alone, Lindsay looked back for Françoise; but she had gone off with her children. Philippe had disappeared through a heavy door at the far end of the passage. Again Lindsay was aware of how quiet it was. He could not decide whether his nerves were responsible for this, or whether, in fact, there was in this whole place a kind of intensity of silence which he had not encountered anywhere else. He was curious suddenly to know where his host had gone—what sort of retreat he had created for himself in this enormous stronghold of his ancestors.

  The door, iron-studded, at the end of the passage told him nothing; he moved to one of the windows and looked out. He could see now that the door must lead into what had once been the ancient keep of the castle—possibly in its earliest days—for the tower, although high and massive, had not been conceived on the same vast scale as the rest of the building. Only at the top of it were there any real windows. Yes, it was very old; it had the heavy, rocklike quality of primitive architecture, hewn rather than built.

  Lindsay opened the window and leaned out. The small courtyard below him was also very old; here, he was sure, was the original center of the chateau, almost unused now (there was a line of newly washed tablecloths hanging across one corner), brooding over its ancient secrets. The sparkling white Mercedes looked impudent standing in the middle of it.

  Lindsay was aware of a chill in the warm evening. He remembered how, two summers ago, he had climbed the hill at Mycenae, had come upon that ancient palace of doom; he realized that this courtyard and keep affected him in the same way—death was here, a long memory of blood.

  And Philippe de Montfaucon, Marquis de Bellac, had told his wife . . . No! Lindsay banged a fist onto the window ledge, hurting it. He had not told his wife that he was going to die. Some alchemy of stress and intuition and the shades of inflection in a known voice had told her so. There was no kind of evidence. No evidence whatsoever. And yet Lindsay, leaning at this window, feeling the weight of the past that thrust up at him from these ancient stones, could indeed believe that what she had felt was right. Death was a germ in the brain of every living man; and here at Bellac, and particularly in this one part of Bellac, death seemed very close, very . . . Ah! Yes that was it. Very personal, almost friendly.

  He was jerked out of these reflections by a movement below him. A door at the base of the massive tower was opening. Instinctively—how quickly a secret place infects one with its secrecy—Lindsay withdrew his head from the window. Yes, this door led directly onto a spiral staircase; he could just see the bottom two steps. He had, of course, expected Philippe to appear; but it was girl, a slim, almost boyish girl of perhaps eighteen. She wore a sweater and tight black trousers; he thought that she might well have been the sister of the boy Christian, except that whereas his hair was black, hers was very fair, almost white. It was a moment before he recognized her, with a sense of shock, as the driver of the Mercedes. Yet he could forgive himself for having thought that the car was driven by a man; he remembered that she had been wearing some kind of hat, probably a beret, and in any case the remarkable hair was cut short like a boy’s so that the head, which was beautifully poised, seemed to be wearing a helmet of bright gold.

  She was moving now towards her car; at the same moment, Lindsay noticed, the door at the base of the tower began to swing slowly shut. The girl became aware of this too; she turned, made a little movement as if she would run to stop it, realized that she was too late, and stood watching it as it banged shut. She shrugged to herself, and Lindsay understood that it was a latched door—that she was locked out of the tower.

  She turned back to her car, unfastened the tonneau cover and slipped a hand under it. Lindsay could not see what it was that she took out: something small, he judged by the pose of her body, but something not too easy to handle. He might have caught sight of it at the moment she refastened the cover except that, as she did so, she glanced up directly towards him and he had to jerk his head back for fear she should see him spying on her. When he dared move again it was to catch the merest glimpse of her hair as she passed right under the window. Somewhere beneath him he heard a door slam. At once he understood. The door to the tower had latched itself against her; so she was going to use this one, just to his left at the end of the passage.

  Already, he was slightly appalled to find, he took it for granted that he must hide; this implied so many things that his brain reeled a little. He was eaten up with curiosity to know who and what she was, what relation she bore to Philippe, what it was that she carried; also implicit was the fact that they must not meet face to face like ordinary people, both guests in the same house, but that she had something to hide and that it was to his advantage to find out what it was. All this he realized in a fraction of a second, and it made him grimace to himself. Who could argue that places, that inanimate stones and wood did not dictate methods of behavior? As he hid himself behind the heavy velvet curtain at the side of the window embrasure he realized that Bellac had got him firmly by the scruff of the neck. At Bellac this sort of behavior was normal; it had been for hundreds of years.

  He heard the girl come through the door at the far end of the passage; he was delighted to realize from the rhythm of her step that she was moving cautiously. He had been right to hide; he was sure now that she did not wish to meet anyone.

  He waited until she had just passed his hiding place; then he looked out. He caught a glimpse of her face, seeming almost shockingly close to him. The features were interesting rather than beautiful, the nose a little too long, the chin not quite definite enough; he thought that there had been a suggestion of remarkable, high cheekbones and of very strong brows over dark eyes, but he had not really seen the eyes. In any case he had been more eager to find out what it was that she carried—something covered with a handkerchief.

  She had reached the door at the end of the passage before the full impact of it hit him. By that time she had pulled a key from her pocket and was fitting it into the lock. A moment later she had gone, closing the door behind her—had gone into the tower, carrying with great care the body of the white dove, still transfixed by the arrow.

  4

  The Black Boy

  They reined their horses in at the top of the bluff that overlooked the lake. It was another somber day, but between the vast cloud bastions there were glimpses of clear blue. Patterns of sunlight slid across the valley below them; a group of trees, a terraced vineyard, a solitary house, or sometimes the great brooding mass of the chateau itself was dramatically lit for a moment.

  Lindsay turned from the view and looked at Philippe de Montfaucon. There was an odd contrast between the splendor of the valley laid out at their feet and the face of the man to whom it belonged. For a time, riding in the freshness of the morning, they had talked lightly, with laughter even, of the old days in Paris, the absurdities of their youth; but for the last ten minutes they had been silent; the silence had indicated, as it always had in Philippe, a change of mood. He was gazing at his domain as if it hurt him; after a moment, aware of Lindsay’s eyes on him, he turned.

  ‘I love it,’ he said. ‘Isn’t that strange? Remember how I used to mock it?’

  Lindsay nodded.

  ‘I think that perhaps I knew all the time, at the back of my mind . . .’

  ‘Knew?’

  ‘That m
y destiny lay here.’

  Destiny, thought Lindsay, was an odd word to use, surely. And yet it had been chosen with care. Philippe had always been a little pedantic in this respect; he had a regard for the French language.

  ‘I spent a lot of time here as a child; it was a wonderful place to be a child in. Wonderful. Then, later . . . One gets very provincial in one’s teens, don’t you think? I suppose it’s the desire to seem smart, up-to-the-minute. I grew to think of Bellac as the absolute back of beyond—a sort of Siberia; and yet . . . it was there, James. It was in me. Do you understand that? It was waiting for me.’

  ‘What happened? What did make you give up that life?’

  ‘That life!’ He threw back his head and laughed; it made him look ten years younger. ‘Dear God, what Scottish censure do I detect in the phrase?’

  ‘None. Scottish envy more like.’

  He was serious again suddenly. ‘Never envy those people, James. Living the way we did: a month here, three months there—Rome, New York, Lisbon, London, Rio—it’s like . . . like a chain of caves; one progresses ever deeper into absolute nothingness, absolute darkness, a kind of living extinction. You can see it in their faces.’

  He turned his horse away from the valley, and together they rode slowly towards the terraced vineyards above them. Again Philippe was silent. Lindsay was thinking, How simple and delightful it would be if, during this ride, he would tell me everything that is at fault here. He had a sudden quixotic vision of James Lindsay, the healer, driving away up the valley in his hired Renault, leaving behind him peace where there had been discord, laughter where there had been fear. He realized that he would like to do this very much. He had spent a somewhat restless night, tormented by the mental picture of Françoise and Philippe and their delightful children. It had seemed to him almost impossible that he had come to Bellac in the faint but regrettably definite hope that in being nearer to Françoise physically he might find a way of getting nearer to her emotionally; for this he now felt ashamed of himself. At this moment—and he knew that it was a mood that would change as surely as any other—what he wanted most in the world was to see that handsome and charming family group made reality instead of the almost chilling pretense, beautifully performed withal, that he knew it to be. And so, riding slowly towards the vineyards with Philippe, he found himself thinking how satisfactory it would be if, here and now, he might be made Father Confessor to the whole complicated business.