Day of the Arrow Read online

  He was still wrestling with this problem, and she was still pressing his hand, staring into his sulky face, when they heard the unmistakable roar of the Mercedes.

  Françoise turned her head sharply. ‘She’s stopping.’

  They both looked up at the road, which at this point followed the curve of the lake, divided from it by only a narrow field. The white car was driving slowly round the bend, and the face of the girl at the wheel was turned towards them, very dark glasses masking her eyes. The brilliant hair shone in the sunlight.

  ‘She is stopping.’

  Lindsay was shocked to recognize fear in her voice; he turned to look at her. She was staring up at the car, biting her lip.

  ‘Steady on,’ he said. ‘She’s not really a witch, you know.’

  ‘I don’t like her.’

  ‘Evidently.’

  But the white car was slowing to a standstill; it bumped onto the grass verge and came to a stop. The girl got out, waved to them, and began to climb the fence into the field.

  ‘Now why?’ said Françoise. ‘Why?’ She looked reflectively at her children, who were sailing the grounded punt across oceans of the imagination; then she looked at Lindsay.

  ‘You,’ she said. ‘Yes, it must be something to do with you.’

  ‘Does it have to be something to do with something? I mean, people do talk to people without motives.’

  Françoise gave him one of her unfathomable looks, when the light, the life, in her eyes seemed to have withdrawn into a deep dark cave. She said nothing, but turned and watched the girl coming towards them.

  To Lindsay she looked almost exactly like any one of the rather untidy maidens who slopped about St. Tropez all summer. She wore the same trousers that he had seen before and a shirt hanging outside them; her feet were bare; she was very brown. Whatever else she might be was obscured by the dark glasses.

  Françoise said, ‘Odile! I haven’t seen you for ages. This is James Lindsay. Mlle. de Caray.’

  The girl smiled at Lindsay and sat down in one movement like a cat; the fact that she settled a little way from them—that is to say, a little farther from them than was quite natural—and then in a tuft of long grass, increased her likeness to that animal.

  She said, ‘It’s so hot; it makes me lazy.’

  Lindsay felt (quite wrongly as it happened) that he was beginning to get the measure of the people who frequented Bellac; in any case she had tickled his sense of humor so that he could not help laughing. The dark glasses were leveled at him. ‘You find this funny—that the heat makes me lazy?’

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘It’s you, mademoiselle; you are so like a cat.’

  She smiled. ‘How nice of you, monsieur! My mother says that I am like a ferret. Now, I ask you, is that a nice thing to call your daughter?’

  ‘Horrible.’

  She shrugged. Clearly what her mother thought was of no interest to her.

  The children had now rejoined them—Tante Estelle was not the only person at Bellac unable to resist strangers—and stood looking at Mlle. de Caray.

  Gilles said, ‘Show us a trick, Odile.’

  ‘It’s too hot.’

  From the sudden stillness of Françoise beside him, Lindsay gathered that this was the first time she had heard of ‘tricks’; a moment later she verified his suspicion by saying, ‘But how interesting! What trick did Odile show you, darling?’

  The small boy rubbed one leg against the back of the other. ‘Oh, just tricks. You know.’

  Odile, sucking a piece of grass, said, ‘I turned a frog into a goldfish, didn’t I, Gilles?’

  Antoinette, jumping up and down, shouted, ‘You didn’t, you didn’t! The goldfish was there all the time under the water lily.’

  ‘No, truly,’ said Gilles, ‘truly, Maman, she did turn the frog into a fish. I saw.’

  Antoinette chanted, ‘Silly, silly, silly.’

  Françoise, pulling her son towards her and hitching up his trousers, which seemed to be in danger of falling off, said, ‘You’ve got too much imagination, that’s your trouble.’

  ‘No one,’ the girl replied, ‘can have too much imagination.’

  ‘Wait until you have children.’

  ‘Children? Me!’ She really was genuinely surprised—almost, Lindsay could have sworn, affronted. ‘Françoise, what do you take me for?’

  Something in all this had made Françoise angry. She said, ‘I take you for a child yourself—and sometimes a rather naughty one.’

  Odile lay down with her cheek against the grass. Reflectively she said, ‘Yes. I daresay you’re right there. But, Holy Face, what would life be like with no imagination?’ She rolled over and took off the dark glasses. ‘Don’t you think so, Mr. Lindsay?’

  This was the first time that Lindsay had seen her eyes, and they took him by surprise, for they were amber, two gleaming disks of tawny amber. And disks was the right word, for the pupils were very little darker than the iris—there was absolutely no denying that the effect was rather uncanny. He could well understand that the local peasants might call her a witch.

  ‘Imagination,’ he said. ‘I’m the wrong person to ask. I never quite know where imagination begins and reality ends.’

  At this the girl sat up and looked at him; focused all of her rather remarkable personality on him. The amber eyes widened. ‘Ah,’ she said, ‘but this is the point—how intelligent of you! There is no such thing as either reality or imagination; they are the same thing. Gilles saw me turn the frog into a goldfish; Antoinette knew that the goldfish was underneath the water lily all the time. As it happens neither of them was right, but where is the reality and where the imagined thing? Which is which?’

  ‘This,’ Lindsay said, ‘makes scientists the stupidest people in the world.’ He was absolutely fascinated by her eyes.

  The girl spread her hands. ‘Who denies that they are? Give a scientist enough time and he would arrive at what he would call the truth, which is that I had caught the goldfish before the children appeared; then I saw the frog, and I thought, Here’s a chance for some magic. What’s childhood without a little magic? And so I did my “trick.” But the reality was not the dry truth, it was what the children saw—and what they saw, they saw with their imaginations.’

  Lindsay could see, in his mind, the little cold body of the goldfish secreted in her brown hand; each golden scale was clear to him, and the magical sheen of the belly, as if it had been painted with a rainbow. And the wonderful golden eye, ringed with a circle of black. And in the golden eye of the golden fish could be seen reflected the Chateau of Bellac and the lake, and the round, surprised faces of the children—children watching a miracle in the golden eye of a goldfish. . . .

  Suddenly he felt violently sick; it began with a nausea, and then gripped his stomach so that he had to fight in order not to vomit. He heard himself let out a groan. The sea of quivering gold—it was like looking out to sea directly into the eye of the sunset—receded, lapped away into illimitable distance.

  Françoise said, ‘James, are you all right?’

  He opened and shut his eyes once or twice. ‘Yes. Yes, perfectly.’

  He looked up. Odile de Caray was plaiting three pieces of grass, very intent on what she was doing.

  ‘I . . .’ He shook his head again. ‘I felt a bit sleepy, that’s all.’

  The girl smiled. ‘Ah,’ she said, ‘so I am not the only one the heat affects in that way. Well—I’d better be going.’

  She stood up, again in one sinuous movement, and put on her dark glasses. ‘Nice to see you again, Françoise—and you, monsieur.’

  She waved to the children, who had returned to the punt, and walked slowly away from them across the field.

  Françoise said, ‘James, what on earth . . . ? I thought you were going to faint.’

  Lindsay, frowning at the slim retreating back, said, ‘What a little bitch! She hypnotized me—just like that.’

  Françoise let out a gasp.

  ‘Just like t
hat,’ he said. ‘I fell for it completely.’

  ‘Hypnotized you!’

  ‘There’s nothing extraordinary about it. Masses of people can do it. But not as quickly as that, not as effortlessly.’

  ‘But why? Why did she?’

  ‘I may be wrong, but I think as a warning.’ He told her then about the book of fairy tales that had taken the place of the Montfaucon history while he slept.

  ‘Oh no,’ she said. ‘Oh, I don’t like that at all, James.’

  ‘I do. I like it very well.’

  ‘But I feel . . . It was my idea that you should come here; I feel responsible for you.’

  He ignored this. Eyes narrowed against the glare, he watched the girl get into her glamorous car.

  ‘I like it,’ he said, ‘because it proves that we’re on the right track. I must get back to my history, Françoise.’

  8

  The Frightened Aunt

  Lindsay counted ten people, excluding himself, sipping their apéritifs in the great hall, between the two smoldering log fires. Although he could never be sure who was lurking in the maze of passages, the honeycomb of rooms, which constituted the castle, he judged this to be something like a full turnout.

  His host and hostess stood side by side, for all the world like an ordinary husband and wife, while their guests circulated round them. The Countess Betty, still in her riding clothes, in which, Lindsay had to admit, she did not look at all bad, had taken up a position at Philippe’s elbow; no matter who spoke to him on what subject, she kept up an intertwined dissertation on horse breeding. Young Christian was carrying on a conversation—apparently amusing—with Prince Cottanero, his lady friend Natasha, and Cousin Odile. The latter caught Lindsay’s eye and smiled as soon as he entered the hall, but if this was an invitation for him to try his hand at resistance to hypnosis he ignored it. He joined Françoise, who, with occasional help from her husband—when he could withdraw momentarily from the subject of horses—was entertaining the new arrivals, two of them, and, for Lindsay’s money, well up to what he was beginning to regard as the Bellac standard.

  He was interested to find that his normal shyness with new acquaintances had altogether vanished, routed by this new-found curiosity—if such a mild word could describe his almost passionate interest in the people around him.

  Françoise, her eyes avoiding his, introduced him to the Abbé Luchard and his secretary, Herr Kautzmann. Luchard was a rather fleshily handsome prelate of perhaps fifty; if he looked younger it was because his dark hair had retained—naturally, Lindsay was inclined to think—its color and thickness. He was a well-upholstered, jovial man—smooth as cream, civilized, never lost for a word, and seldom for a witty one.

  His secretary, by way of contrast, was one of those one-colored Germans: hair, face, eyebrows, lips, all a kind of medium beige. His eyes did little to alleviate the boredom because they were so light a blue; they looked as if they had been much washed—but if in tears, than in tears, at the most, of self-pity. His features were absolutely regular, and should have added up to good looks; however, they did not—not even to languid, vapid good looks. He gave the impression that he would remain for the most part silent, like Natasha, but this was unfortunately not the case; he talked a great deal in a humorless but rather lush voice, off which the language of his birth dripped like gobs of cement out of a mixer. He was perhaps twenty-five years old.

  It struck Lindsay as odd that a man as obviously cultivated and witty as the abbé should tolerate for one instant this dreary flow of Germanic platitude. But he did, and there must clearly be a reason. Lindsay hoped that the atmosphere of Bellac was not turning him into the kind of bloodless cynic who always jumps at the most obvious and least charitable conclusion.

  Herr Kautzmann—his Christian name was Heinz—was holding forth about the castles of the Rhine; he would probably have been hurt if anyone had told him so, but the implication of every word he said was that in Germany there were bigger castles than Bellac, situated in better positions, and infinitely more beautiful. He expressed this opinion obliquely in a tedious recitation of statistics.

  The Abbé Luchard, perhaps glad to escape from this performance, which for his own good reasons he would not stem, began to discuss with Lindsay the paintings of Leonardo da Vinci.

  During this, Tante Estelle came down the wide staircase deep in conversation with a man whom Lindsay at once guessed to be the village priest. He wore the usual rather ancient soutane, walked with his hands folded in front of him, and was nodding periodically as he listened to the old lady’s monologue—for monologue it certainly was.

  As they drew nearer, Lindsay heard her say, ‘. . . you’ll have to advise me; I’m sorry but there it is—I must have been born without the usual moral sense.’

  The priest smiled, and it was a delightful smile—warm, friendly, compassionate. He was not a big man, yet he gave an impression of size. He had a brown, wise face and grizzled gray hair cut very short. His eyes were of a startling blue, like two polished pieces of lapis lazuli; they were restless and inquisitive, and, Lindsay thought, if the whole of his personality had not been so kindly they would have been alarming—they were too sharp.

  The hand which he offered to Lindsay was dry and hard like a piece of sun-warmed wood. It was impossible not to like him.

  He had, Lindsay noticed at once, a curious effect upon the Abbé Luchard. It would not have been surprising if this man—worldly, undoubtedly wealthy, and probably powerful in the hierarchies of the church—had patronized the dusty parish priest a little; on the contrary, the abbé greeted him with something like deference, and the eyes that he turned on his insufferably loquacious secretary were suddenly hard and watchful as he introduced the young man to Père Dominique. There must indeed have been some prior discussion of this unassuming character; Lindsay caught the glance that passed between the abbé and the German, and Herr Kautzmann was suddenly humble—a state, Lindsay thought, almost more revolting than his former arrogance.

  It was all very interesting. He tried to catch his hostess’s eye to see what she was thinking, but Françoise was still assiduously avoiding him. As before, however, Tante Estelle was doing just the opposite.

  ‘I observe,’ she said, ‘that you find our guests interesting.’

  ‘You’re quite right.’

  She nodded, glancing round the hall. ‘I have to agree with you; it takes a great deal to drag me away from my little luncheons with the children.’ She smiled at his look of surprise. ‘But how should you know? Yes, we have the meal together every day; their conversation is better suited to mine—we are all surrealists.’

  She was staring at him with the vacant look which he had seen before. It meant, he knew, that she was thinking about a subject far removed from the one she was talking about, and he was not in the least surprised when she performed one of her conversational somersaults and said, ‘It has been on my conscience: I was wrong to say the things which I said to you at lunchtime yesterday. It is nothing to do with me whom my nephew asks to stay in his house—now, is it?’

  ‘No. And nothing to do with me either.’

  ‘How wise of you to see that.’

  So, he was thinking, Françoise had been right. The old lady was in some way afraid of Philippe.

  ‘You’re a very sensible young man,’ she was now saying. ‘It would be a happier world if everybody realized that nothing is ever gained by meddling in the lives of other people.’

  ‘Live and let live,’ said Lindsay vacuously, wondering who else would take time off to offer him oblique warnings.

  If indeed there were any truth in what Françoise supposed—if a shadow of death did really hang over her husband—it was alarming how many people seemed to be against any action being taken. A suspicious person could have been forgiven for imagining that these people were actually in favor of Philippe de Montfaucon’s departing this life. He decided that it would be interesting to try the direct approach on Tante Estelle. He said, ‘Do you
think that Philippe is afraid of dying?’

  She stared at him. ‘Of dying! My dear young man, I don’t suppose he has given it a thought; in another twenty years maybe . . . One does begin to consider such things as middle age draws on.’

  He could not tell whether she was genuinely ignorant of the subject under discussion or not; her eyes were at all times too restless ever to betray her in a lie.

  ‘I meant,’ he said, ‘afraid of dying soon. This year, perhaps.’

  The effect was not exactly what he had anticipated but it was disturbing. She shut her mouth tightly and came a step nearer to him; then she gazed into his face in silence for what seemed a long time—he became aware of people glancing at them. At last she said, ‘What made you say a thing like that? What have you heard? What has someone been saying to you?’

  It was his turn to be oblique. ‘I’ve been reading about the Montfaucon family, and the really extraordinary ends that some of them have met with.’

  But, he realized—with something like panic—the old lady was not going to be diverted. She suddenly took hold of his arm with a hand like the talon of a bird; her pale eyes, unblinking, never left his face. ‘What did you mean?’ she demanded.

  Lindsay looked round, appalled. There seemed to be no chance of a movement towards the dining room—and even if there were he very much doubted whether Tante Estelle would release him until he had answered her question. Entirely unable to think of a lie which would seem in the least possible, he fell back on the truth. He said, ‘Françoise seems to have some idea . . .’

  ‘Françoise! She said nothing to me.’

  He realized three things quite suddenly. First, that the old woman had been expecting this—that it had been at the back of her mind, perhaps for years. Second, that she had not questioned the truth of the idea, only the source from which it had sprung. And third, that now, for the first time, he himself knew—absolutely and without doubt—that unless some action were taken Philippe de Montfaucon was indeed going to die.

  Tante Estelle was now seized with an indecision which it was painful to witness. She said, ‘It’s not possible. Why didn’t she . . . ? The child!’ She looked towards the stairs, her mouth working, her poise utterly deserting her. Then she looked back at Lindsay, pale eyes wide-open, face alarmingly white. She said again, ‘It’s not possible. He wasn’t even born.’ She stared round her as if looking for a way of escape. Then her eyes focused on something or someone just over Lindsay’s shoulder. ‘No,’ she said. And then, very loud, ‘No.’ Lindsay turned instinctively to see what it was that had produced such a cry; he saw only the wall of the room.