Day of the Arrow Page 6

  Lindsay was so absorbed in all this—so fascinated to find how perfectly what she was telling him complemented his preconceptions about Christian—that it was nearly the end of the meal before, in turning to address one of his token remarks to the delicious Natasha, he became aware of Tante Estelle regarding him with a good deal more than her customary birdlike interest. Having caught his eye, she favored him with one of those conspiratorial smiles. He glanced away quickly; he did not trust Tante Estelle.

  He concentrated on the general topic of discussion, which appeared to be some local fete or saint’s day which was soon to be celebrated, with the usual rustic junketing. A few minutes later they rose from table in a disorder of polite chatter.

  Back in the little salon Lindsay found himself staring out of the window, deep in his thoughts. Françoise was pouring coffee. Madame the Comtesse Betty had again seized Prince Cottanero while his lady friend stood alone in the middle of the room, beautifully posed, staring into space.

  Tante Estelle appeared at Lindsay’s elbow.

  ‘You were right,’ she said suddenly, making him jump. He turned, staring at her. Evidently his obtuseness irritated her; she scowled at him. ‘About the boy, about that black boy.’

  Abandoning a startled vision of some young Negro, Lindsay jumped back to the present with the realization that she was talking about Christian.

  ‘That wicked, black boy.’

  ‘Wicked?’

  They were very close to each other. The smell of the pomander with its load of camphor warred with what he took to be Chanel’s Cuir de Russie.

  ‘I said wicked. I meant it.’

  Her eyes really did look quite crazy, but then, as he knew only too well, most people’s eyes looked crazy in absolute proximity.

  ‘I’m right,’ he said, ‘about Christian?’

  ‘She’s never been here before, but he has. In secret, you see. In secret.’

  Some part of Lindsay’s mind registered the fact that he was really quite afraid of Tante Estelle. But to find his suspicion so immediately, and so venomously, proved correct was a much more interesting experience.

  Evidently she took his silence for some kind of doubt. ‘You think that because I never go out of the house . . . Oh yes, except to take tea on the lawn.’ She snorted contemptuously at this particular pastime. ‘You think I don’t see and know.’

  ‘Not at all,’ said Lindsay. It was, indeed, the last thing he had been thinking.

  ‘Well,’ said Aunt Estelle, ‘I do see and know.’ She came a little closer. ‘I hear things. And I have a pair of binoculars—does that surprise you?’

  ‘Not in the least,’ replied Lindsay, quite truthfully.

  ‘What’s more,’ she said, ‘he knows that I know. Oh yes, he knows, the wicked child.’

  There flashed through Lindsay’s mind a picture of the young man’s face, rather beautiful in anger, as he leaned across to say to this old woman, ‘Mlle. de Montfaucon does not like young people.’ And what was it she had replied? ‘Oh, but you are wrong. I am very fond of young people.’ Yes, he remembered that odd accent on the word young.

  Tante Estelle was peering into his face, trying to read what was there. He turned, and for an instant they looked at each other very closely again.

  The faded eyes wavered. Surprisingly she bit her lip.

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘No, no. You must be very careful. It would be better, I think, if you went back to Paris.’

  Then she turned and hurried out of the room.

  5

  The Praying Man

  He found Françoise reclining on a chaise longue in her own blue-and-gold sitting room. She had a large pair of horn-rimmed glasses balanced on the end of her pretty nose and she was reading Figaro. She glanced up as he came in and said, ‘Ah!’

  Lindsay looked at her gloomily. ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘I was expecting you.’

  He sagged into a capacious wingbacked chair facing her. They regarded each other in silence for quite a long time.

  ‘All right,’ he said at last, ‘so you know exactly what I’ve been thinking.’

  Françoise nodded. ‘Tante Estelle isn’t the only one who can carry on a conversation and listen to somebody else’s.’

  Again they were silent. The buhl clock on the mantelpiece struck four times: a hurried, harassed chime as if to remind them that Time was not on their side.

  Lindsay said, ‘It’s so damn quiet here; how do you stand it?’

  ‘Isn’t it obvious,’ she said, ‘that I don’t?’ She put down the newspaper and picked up an enormous piece of gros point. ‘It’s not what it seems,’ she added. ‘The silence, I mean. There’s always a great deal going on. Perhaps these extremely thick walls have something to do with it.’

  ‘Perhaps.’

  She looked up from threading a piece of scarlet wool into her needle, and again their eyes met.

  ‘I must say,’ he burst out, ‘I think you might . . .’

  ‘James!’ Her voice overrode his. ‘This is going to be difficult enough for both of us without you shouting at me.’

  ‘All right, all right.’ He stood up nervously and went over to the window, looking out but not seeing anything. ‘All the same, I do think you might have saved me a lot of trouble, yes and worry, if you’d told me right away what you thought—what you knew.’

  ‘I’m not sure what I know.’

  ‘No?’ He turned on her almost brutally. ‘When I asked you in Paris whether he was in love with another woman, you said, ‘No, I’m sure he isn’t.’ You could have added that you were just as sure that he was in love with a young man. Good God, there’s nothing unusual about it.’

  Immediately, of course, he was ashamed of the brutality; as soon as he had given vent to the rancor—and he was sincerely annoyed with her for saying so little—it was as if the rancor had never existed.

  Françoise sighed. ‘I wanted someone, someone from outside, someone I could trust, to come to a conclusion; I said nothing of what I thought because I didn’t want you to be influenced by other opinions.’

  ‘Of course, of course. I’m sorry.’

  ‘I suppose I guess correctly what that naughty old Estelle was hissing at you after lunch.’

  Lindsay gave a mirthless snort of mirth. ‘It was all about the boy having stayed here before.’

  ‘Yes. While I was away.’

  ‘How did you find out then?’

  She gave him a quick look. ‘Oh, there are ways.’

  ‘Tante Estelle didn’t tell you.’

  ‘Good heavens, no; she’d be afraid to.’

  ‘Afraid! Who of? Not Philippe.’

  ‘And why not Philippe, may I ask?’

  He stared at her.

  ‘Oh yes,’ Françoise said. ‘She’s afraid of Philippe all right. I don’t know why, but she is.’

  There was no sound for a time except the pluck of her needle through the thick canvas of the tapestry.

  Eventually Lindsay said, ‘He’s a very odd young man, is Christian—in more ways than one.’ He told her about the shooting of the dove and was slightly appalled when she expressed no surprise.

  ‘Nothing,’ she added, ‘would surprise me about him—he has such ugly hands. And then his father’s a saint. That must be extremely difficult.’

  ‘You’re taking it all very calmly,’ said Lindsay.

  ‘Yes, I am, aren’t I? Now.’

  She was again silent; after a moment or two he became aware of a quality in her silence. He looked at her. ‘And?’

  ‘And,’ she said, ‘it isn’t as simple as that.’

  ‘Isn’t it?’

  ‘Definitely no.’ She spoke with such finality that he forgot his own point of view for a moment and was impressed.

  ‘I hope,’ he said, ‘that we aren’t going to attempt any amateur psychiatric probings into the matter; we aren’t either of us equipped to do so.’

  ‘We both of us know Philippe extremely well.’

&nb
sp; Lindsay grunted. ‘I thought I did.’

  ‘You,’ said Françoise, not deflected by this, ‘shared an apartment with him for . . . what? Nearly two years, wasn’t it?’

  ‘Yes, I did.’ He turned to stare at her. ‘Yes, I did, didn’t I?’ He was lost in thought suddenly, throwing his mind back across the years.

  ‘He had,’ said Françoise over her stitching, ‘an affair with the girl who danced at that terrible place in Montparnasse.’

  ‘It didn’t last long.’

  ‘Then there was Annabel.’

  ‘Oh God,’ said Lindsay, remembering that beautiful but totally empty American head, ‘there was Annabel, all right. And then Martine. Martine was a very spry girl; I thought she’d marry him.’

  Françoise nodded. ‘And there were others. He told me—the usual premarital confession.’ She looked up at him, her brows raised in a mute question above the absurd spectacles.

  He shook his head. ‘No,’ he said, still thinking back. ‘No, I’m damn sure there was nothing . . . nothing else. I’d have known; good God, of course I’d have known. I mean that fellow upstairs . . . what was his name? Gregoire. He and his Italian boy friend were in and out of the place all the time, borrowing things and generally raising hell. If there’d been anything, they’d have been onto it like a couple of bloodhounds. No.’

  ‘You see,’ she said, ‘it’s not simple, is it? Men don’t suddenly . . . change—for no reason.’

  ‘No, not generally.’

  She repeated, ‘For no reason.’

  He watched her for a while in silence. The delicate fingers moved expertly over the tapestry. He thought, with a pang of tenderness, She’s had a lot of time to become expert.

  ‘Also,’ she said, ‘nothing in this explains the fact that he is afraid he is going to die—soon.’

  Lindsay went across the room to her and stood looking down at her fingers as if fascinated by them. ‘I’ve got to know something,’ he said at length. She nodded, and sighed. He sat down at the foot of the chaise longue watching her face and her swift fingers. After what seemed a long time she put down the work, took off her glasses and lay back, regarding him with those very brown, very bright eyes. ‘No,’ she said. ‘I don’t love him any more, not in the way you mean.’ She shook her head almost wonderingly. ‘I sometimes think that violent physical love—and that’s what ours was, violent—comes at one moment to a point where it . . . it has to change into something else. I don’t quite mean that either; I mean that it needs . . . What do they call it with these wretched rockets they’re firing all over the place?’

  ‘A booster,’ Lindsay suggested.

  ‘Yes. And it needs to find a new dimension too, a new depth. Is that it, James? Love has to keep finding new dimensions or it dies. A marriage isn’t only a very special love affair, though it seems like it for a time. I think most affairs end when this point comes; either there isn’t any depth, or the people concerned aren’t interested in finding it.’ She lay back and closed her eyes. ‘Our love, Philippe’s and mine, had just reached that point—it needed the booster; it needed the new dimension. And instead . . . there was this. Nothing.’

  Lindsay did not speak, and she sighed deeply.

  ‘Love died then,’ she said. ‘It took . . . months, years perhaps, and it was painful. But it died.’ She opened her eyes again. ‘But I do love him, as I love my children—do you understand that?’

  ‘Yes. I suppose in a way I love him too.’

  ‘Of course. That’s the other reason that I wanted you . . . you, James, to come down here and help me.’

  ‘Help you!’

  ‘I don’t want him to die.’

  Lindsay was on his feet suddenly; he began to stride about the room, touching things. She watched him for a moment, then lifted her legs off the chaise longue and stood up also. He was gazing into the face of the buhl clock as if willing it to smile at him. Françoise went across to him and he turned, surprised; she stood in front of him, her eyes dark and brilliant and mysterious. Presently he put his arms round her and kissed her, hesitantly at first and then with growing passion. She realized, because of the quality of the passion, that he was angry, and she thrust him away.

  ‘And what’s that?’ he demanded furiously. ‘A bribe?’

  Françoise slapped his face very hard indeed.

  They stood there, glaring at each other, both flushed, both tensed, like a couple of animals.

  ‘All right,’ he said at last. ‘Perhaps we’ll get it quite straight, Mme. la Marquise.’ He managed to catch her arm as it came up again, and, but less expertly, he warded off the other hand which was about to scratch his face. He held her firmly, her wrists seeming as frail as a child’s against the palms of his hands. ‘I want you,’ he said. ‘I wanted to marry you once before, and I want to marry you now, but I’m not so sure . . .’ He put his face nearer to hers. ‘. . . that I want to help you save your husband’s life—if, as you seem to believe, it’s in any danger. Do you see what I mean?’

  Icy now, Françoise said, ‘Very clearly. I’m surprised I ever thought you civilized.’

  ‘Fine!’ He shook her slightly, firmly. ‘Well, I’m not. I’m not French either, remember that. I’m one of your uncouth allies from over the Border, and we never have liked people who try to bribe us.’

  ‘Let go. You’re hurting me.’

  ‘You deserve to be hurt.’

  Before she had time to escape him he clapped his arms round her and kissed her again. For a moment she tried to avoid his lips, but then, quite suddenly, she gave way to them; and, a second later, she bit him hard. He released her, swearing. The hand which he removed from his mouth was bloody. He turned away to the window, pulled a handkerchief from his pocket and held it to his lip.

  Behind him he heard her footsteps receding; a door opened—and closed. There was finality in the sound of its closing.

  Well, he thought bitterly, that’s that. He knew a little about his temper; he knew where it had come from, too: his mother, a Highlander and proud of it. What was it about lips and ears that made them bleed so prodigiously? His handkerchief made him think of the white dove, and the thought of that plump body with the arrow through it made him think of Françoise, only a moment ago saying, ‘It isn’t as simple as that.’ Suddenly, as if a shutter had lifted in his brain, he caught a glimpse of the truth—so brief a glimpse that he could not quite recognize what it was, except that it involved the dove and the girl with the helmet of golden hair, and the boy, Christian, with his different-colored eyes . . . and the death, or the possible death, of Philippe de Montfaucon.

  Blinded by his vision, he wheeled round, his mouth open as if to cry out. And he came face to face with Françoise.

  He had not heard her come back into the room, but there she stood, a few feet from him, a dark green bottle in one hand, a piece of cotton-wool in the other, and the most enigmatic smile on her face that it had ever been his lot to witness.

  He offered her his bleeding lip without saying anything; she swabbed it in silence. The impatient clock struck the half-hour.

  When she had finished, he took her hand, raised it to his lips and kissed it lightly, leaving a tiny stain of blood on its whiteness. Françoise wiped off the blood with the piece of cotton-wool. Lindsay went and looked at himself in the mirror which hung behind the clock.

  ‘How the hell am I going to explain it?’

  ‘I think you’d better have a headache and dinner in your room; the swelling will be gone by tomorrow morning if you use plenty of this.’

  He turned back to her. ‘Who’s the fair girl who drives the Mercedes?’

  Françoise looked slightly surprised. ‘Cousin Odile. You’ve met her?’

  ‘I’ve seen her. Whose cousin?’

  ‘Philippe’s. What was she doing?’

  ‘Now that,’ Lindsay said, ‘is a damned odd question.’

  Françoise nodded, her eyes very serious. ‘Yes, isn’t it? For a damned odd girl.’

 
‘Does she spend a lot of time here?’

  ‘More than one suspects, I sometimes think. They don’t live far away. They’re a very weird family, James—one of the oldest in France, one of the most inbred: no one else being quite good enough for them.’

  He was interested to observe that their passage-at-arms, whatever she might think of it privately, had brought about a change in her. The passivity that had so maddened him had vanished; her eyes were alive with intelligence and, he suspected, malice. He felt a little surge of excitement.

  ‘Well,’ he said, ‘it may interest you to hear that I haven’t told you the full story of that bird Christian massacred.’

  ‘Don’t tell me Odile was in on it too.’

  ‘Oh yes.’ He described how he had seen the girl take it out of her car—how he had seen her carry it into the tower. Françoise merely nodded, pursing her lips.

  ‘And while we’re on the subject,’ Lindsay said, ‘what about the tower? I take it to be Philippe’s stronghold.’

  ‘Yes, it is, but there’s nothing surprising in that; his grandfather had it converted. It’s really a sort of self-contained residence inside a residence; the old man was mad about astronomy—he had his telescope there.’

  Lindsay snorted. ‘You may not find it surprising, but I do; and I find the idea of that girl retiring behind locked doors, carrying a dead bird as if it were some kind of eucharist, a lot more than surprising—I find it bloody sinister.’

  Françoise stood very still for a moment, deep in thought. Then she said, ‘If you asked anyone in this valley about the girl they would tell you at once that she was a witch.’