The Chateau (20 page)

“Did anyone ever not like Paris?” Harold said.

“And you were comfortable at the Vouillemont?”

He laughed. “Once we found it, we were comfortable,” he said.

“And the weather?”

“The weather was beautiful.”

“Sabine telephoned this evening,” Mme Viénot said, on the way into the dining room. “She tried to reach you, it seems, after you had gone. I'm afraid she does not have a very exact idea of time.”

“But she wasn't on the train with us? We looked for her—”

“She is coming next week end instead,” Mme Viénot said as he drew her chair out for her. “I hope you didn't give yourself any anxiety on her account?”

He shook his head.

“She enjoyed meeting you,” Mme Viénot said.

“We enjoyed meeting her,” he said, and then, since she seemed to be waiting for something more: “She's charming.”

Mme Viénot smiled and unfolded her napkin.

He noticed that there were two people handing the soup plates around the table—Thérèse and a boy of seventeen or eighteen, in a white coat, with thick glasses and slicked-down hair. His large hands were very clean but looked like raw meat. He served unskillfully, in an agony of shyness, and Harold wondered if Mme Viénot had added a farm boy to her staff.

As always, he could speak better when he was sure he had an audience. “… There we were in the Métro,” he said, “with no idea of what station to get off at, or what arrondissement our hotel was in.”

“I should have told you,” Mme Viénot said. “I'm so sorry. And this time you didn't have M. Fleury to take you there.”

“Barbara thought it was somewhere near the Louvre—”

“Oh dear no! You should have descended at Concorde.”

“So we discovered. But we got off at the Louvre, instead, and walked two or three blocks until we came to a sidewalk café, and the waiter showed me where the telephone books were, but there were so many and I couldn't make head nor tail of them, so he and the proprietress and everybody there dropped what they were doing and thumbed through telephone directories and finally the waiter found it.”

“I should have thought anyone could have told you where it is,” M. Carrère said. “It is very well known.”

“
They
didn't know about it.… I tried to buy them all a drink before I left—they had been so kind—and they refused. Was that wrong? In America it would not have been wrong.”

“Not at all,” Mme Viénot said. “Another time just say: ‘I insist that you have a glass of wine with me,' and the offer will be accepted. But it wasn't at all necessary.”

“I wish I'd known that.”

“They were no doubt happy to have been of assistance to you. And you found your hotel?”

“We took a taxi,” he said. “And the fares have gone up. They have a chart they show you. I remembered that you had said not to pay more than the amount on the meter, and when the driver got angry I made him come into the hotel with me and the concierge straightened it out. After that, whenever we took a taxi I was careful to ask the driver if I had given him enough.”

“But they will cheat you!” Mme Viénot exclaimed.

“They didn't. I knew from the chart what it
should
be, and added the tip, and they none of them asked for more.”

“Perhaps they found you sympathetic,” Mme Bonenfant said.

“It was pleasanter than arguing.”

He saw that Mme Straus-Muguet was looking at him and he said to her with his eyes: I w
as afraid you wouldn't be here when we got back
.…

Mme Viénot lifted her spoon to her lips and then exclaimed. Turning to Barbara, she said: “My cook gave notice while you were gone. The new cook, poor dear, is very nervous. Last night there was too much salt in everything, so I spoke to her about it, and tonight there is no salt whatever in the soup. Do I dare speak to her again?” She turned to M. Carrère, who said, his clown's eyes crinkling: “In your place I don't think I should. It might bring on something worse.”

“I hope you will be patient with her,” Mme Viénot said. “She has a sister living in the village, whom she wanted to be near. The boy is her son. He has had no experience but she begged me to take him on so that he can learn the métier and they can hire themselves out as a couple.… Tell us what happened to you in Paris.”

“We spent all our time walking the streets,” Barbara said, “and looking in shop windows.”

“They are extraordinary, aren't they?” Mme Carrère agreed. “Quite like the way they were before the war.”

“And we had lunch with M. Gagny,” Harold said.

“Yes? You saw M. Gagny?” Mme Viénot said, and Mme Carrère asked if they had followed her directions on the night of the illumination. Harold hesitated, and then, not wanting to spoil her pleasure, said that they had. He had a feeling that she knew he was not telling the truth. She did not attempt to catch him out, but the interest went out of her face.

As he and Barbara were undressing for bed, they remarked upon a curious fact. They had hoped before they came here that a stay at the château would make them better able to deal with what they found in Paris, and instead a stay of three days in Paris had made them able, really for the first time, to deal with life in the château. Neither of them mentioned their reluctance to leave Paris, that afternoon, or the fact that their room, after the comforts of the hotel, seemed cold and cheerless. Thérèse had again forgotten to bring them a can of hot water; the fan of experience was already beginning to close, and in Paris it had opened all the way.

T
HEY SPENT
Saturday morning in their room. Barbara filled the washbasin with cold water and while she washed and rinsed and washed again, Harold sat on the edge of the tub and told her about the murder of the Duc de Guise, in the château of Blois, in the year 1588.

“He got in, and then he found he couldn't get out.… He was warned on the Grand Staircase, but by that time it was too late; there were guards posted everywhere. He asked for the Queen, who could have saved him, and she didn't come. He sent his servant for a handkerchief, as a test, and the servant didn't come back.… Are you listening to me?” he demanded above the sound of the soapy water being sucked down the drain.

“Yes, but I've got to change the water in the sink.”

“You don't have to make so much noise.… Everywhere he looked, people avoided meeting his eyes. He had just come from the bed of one of the Queen's ladies-in-waiting.”

“Which queen was this?”

“Not Queen Victoria. Catherine de Médicis, I think. Anyway, it was two days before Christmas. And he was cold and hungry. He stood in front of the fireplace, warming himself and eating some dried prunes, I guess it was. It's hard to make out, from
that little dictionary. The council of state convened, and they told him the King had sent for him. So he left the room—”

At this point Barbara left the bathroom and went to the armoire. Harold followed her. “The eight hired assassins in the next room bowed to him,” he said, helping himself to a piece of candy from the box on the table. “I suppose it comes from living in the same house with
her
, but somebody's been at the chocolates while we were away.”

“Oh, I don't think so,” Barbara said, and closed the doors of the armoire and went back to the bathroom with a nightgown and a slip, which she added to the laundry in the washbasin.

“Want to bet?”

“It doesn't matter if they did.”

“I know it doesn't. But I don't think it was Thérèse, even so.”

“Who else could have?”

“Somebody that likes chocolate.… He got as far as the door to the King's dressing room, and saw that there were more of them, at the end of the narrow passageway, waiting for him with drawn swords in their hands.”

“Poor man!”

“Mmm. Poor man, indeed—he was responsible for the Massacre of St. Bartholomew. It took forty men to do him in. He was huge and very powerful. And when it was all over, the King bent down cautiously and slapped his face.”

“After he was
dead
?”

“Yes. Then he went and told his mother. What people!”

“If you knew what it is like to wash silk in cold water!” Barbara said indignantly.

“Why do you do it, then? I could go down and ask them for a can of hot water?”

There was no answer.

He wandered back into the bedroom, and stood looking around the room, seeing it with the eyes of the person who took the chocolates. Not Mme Bonenfant. The flowers hadn't been changed. And anyway, she wouldn't. Not the houseboy, in all
probability. He was new, and he had no reason to be in this part of the house. Mme Viénot? Who else? If they were curious about her, why shouldn't she be curious about them?

She had stood in the doorway waving to them until the taxi disappeared around the corner of the house. And then what happened? Was she relieved? Was she happy to see them go? He put himself in her shoes and decided that he would have been relieved for a minute or two, and then he would have begun to worry. He would have been afraid that they would find in Paris what they were looking for—they were tourists, after all—and not come back. He had offered to have the luggage packed so that it could be removed from their room, and if she remembered that, she would surely think they had planned not to come back, and that in a day or so she would get a letter saying they'd changed their plans again, and would she send their luggage, which was all packed and ready, to the Hôtel Vouillemont.… Only the luggage was not packed, of course. And what she must have seen when she threw open the door of the room was that they had left everything—clothes, books, all their possessions, scattered over the room. There was a half-finished letter on the desk, and the box of Swiss chocolates open on the table. The room must have looked as if they had left it to go for a walk.

He stood reading the letter, which had lain on the pad of the writing desk since last Tuesday. It was to Edith Ireland, of all people. Barbara was thanking her for the book and the bottle of champagne she had sent to the boat. Barbara's handwriting was very dashing, and not very legible, because of a tendency to abbreviate and leave off parts of letters, but if you were patient you could get the hang of it, and no doubt Mme Viénot had.

On the table, beside a pile of guidebooks, were three pages—also in Barbara's handwriting—of a diary she was keeping. The entries covered the period from July 11, when they came to the château from Tours, through July 13, the day before they went up to Paris. He turned away from the table, relieved and grinning.

She had a façade that she retired behind when she was with strangers—the image of an unworldly, well-bred, charming-looking, gentle young woman. The image was not even false to her character; it merely left out half of it. Who could possibly have any reason to say anything rude or unkind to anyone so shy and unsure of herself? Nobody ever did.

It was the façade that was keeping the diary.

W
HEN THEY WENT
down to lunch they learned that Mme Viénot's relatives had arrived sometime during the morning. The dining-room table was larger by two leaves to accommodate them and there were three empty chairs. Two of them were soon filled, by a middle-aged woman and a young man. The cook's son brought two more soup plates, and Mme Viénot said: “How do you find Maman? Doesn't she look well?”

“She is more beautiful than ever,” the young man said, his face totally without expression, as if it had been carved out of a piece of wood and could not change.

“The weather has been most discouraging here,” Mme Viénot said.

“In Paris it is the same. Rain day after day,” the young man said. “One hears everywhere that it is the atomic bomb that is responsible. I myself think it is by analogy with the political climate, which is damp, cold, unhopeful.… Alix said to tell you that she is giving Annette her bottle. She will be down presently.”

“Perhaps she can manage some slight adjustment of the baby's schedule which will permit her to come to meals at the usual time,” Mme Viénot said. “It is not merely the empty chair. It upsets the service.… Your father and mother are well?”

“My father is having trouble with his eyes. It is not cataracts, though it seems that the difficulty may be progressive. It is a
question of the arteries not carrying enough food to the optic nerve. Maman is well—at least, well enough to go to weddings. There has been a succession of them. My cousin Suzanne, in Brittany. And Philippe Soulès. You remember that de Cléry girl everyone thought was a mental defective? She has turned out to be the clever one of the family. They are going to live with his parents, it seems. And my Uncle Eugène, for the third time. Or is it the fourth? And Simone Valéry. Maman has been thinking of taking a job. She has been approached by Jacques Fath. She has just about decided to say no. It is rather an amusing idea, and if she could come and go as she pleased—but it seems they would expect her to keep regular hours, and she is quite incapable of that. Besides, she has set her heart on a trip to Venice. In August.”