Girl at the Lion D'Or (32 page)

As she walked slowly down the street, her trailing hand encountered iron railings and she stopped to peer through them. On the other side was a large, well-ordered garden. What held her attention was not its size or splendour or the neatness of the tended paths, but a solitary apple tree. Something low in her memory was stirred by it. She thought of the tree at the foot of the garden at Merlaut. She wanted to touch its bark and lie beneath its branches; there again she might find peace. She climbed the gate in a side street, feverish with fatigue and desperation. She tore her dress and the skin on her hands, but noticed nothing in her desire to be by the tree. The sound of her landing on the gravel path provoked a distant barking which was abruptly silenced. The street behind her was empty.

She went silently over the grass, pausing only when she stumbled on a pair of shears and a sturdy garden knife the careless gardener must have left out in the twilight. She slipped the knife into the pocket of her dress and lay down on the cool grass beneath the apple tree.

Courage, she heard that gruff and slightly tipsy voice telling her yet again;
it is the only thing that counts.
But what if courage does no good? What, she thought, if my life will never emerge by one final act of bravery on to a new and brighter course? What if all our lives are just a circle where at a certain point you cross an unseen trip-wire that sets spinning the same process again? One act of will, of self-restraint might break the circuit, but neither her father nor her mother had shown it.

Anne felt in her pocket for the knife. Yes, it did take courage. The blade was lifted. Her father’s hand was holding it – just flesh and hair and veins and sinew in their determined course – but driven by evil into a blow repeated. Before she could say ‘forgive’, or ‘me’ or ‘him’, the knife descended; but this time it was her hand that held it, plunging it deep and viciously into the fleshy moss at the root of the tree.

She gasped at what she had done. It was not what she had intended. She began to mutter rapid and distracted prayers, then stopped on hearing her voice in the quietness of the garden. She stood up and rubbed the grass and twigs from her skirt. She was terrified by what she had done, or failed to do. To be alive was now truly to be alone.

She heard a dog barking from nearer the house, and this time it was not silenced. There was the sound of footsteps and a man’s cry. Anne, startled from her reverie, flew across the grass towards the tall iron gates to tear and claw her way up them. A male voice shouted at her to stop and the sound of running footsteps came closer. In her panic and lightheadedness she recognised no obstacle to freedom: as the security guard arrived at the gate to resume the position he should never have left, she was already dropping on to the other side. He reached through the bars of the gate and grabbed her arm, but she pulled herself away. As she ran down the street she heard him fumbling with the keys. The pavement rang with the sound of her slapping feet and she felt a strength fill her limbs as if she could have run across the whole of Paris, all the way south to the Cantal, over the mountains and down into Spain.

After a time she rested in a backstreet in the Latin quarter. There were enough unusual-looking people for the sight of one breathless and dishevelled girl to pass without comment. Two or three men even glanced at her admiringly as she panted in the doorway of a furniture shop. There was music coming from a café a few doors down, and she went to peer in through the window. A fat, friendly-looking man with a beard cleared a space on the steaming pane with his hand and gestured her in. She shook her head and smiled, but he came out and took her arm firmly. He bought her some soup and an omelette and gave her two glasses of wine from the bottle on his table. He asked if she had run away from home. She shook her head, her mouth too full to allow her to speak. He watched her as she ate and when he found he could prise no information from her began to tell her instead about a scheme he had for a new kind of motor car.

Anne nodded and smiled at his story. When she had finished eating, the man, who introduced himself as Georges, gave her some money so she could take a taxi to the house near the Gare Montparnasse where she had left her suitcases. She told him she had friends there; he looked at her sceptically, but pressed more coins into her hand. He made her promise to meet him in the same café the following evening. Anne thanked him and shook his hand.

When the taxi had dropped her off she found she still had a little money left. She showed it to the landlady of the house who took her upstairs to a box-room which, she said, was all the money would buy. Anne unpacked some clothes and stole along to the bathroom. When she had scrubbed the stains from around the rim she found to her amazement that the water was hot. Carefully bolting the door, she undressed and sank into the water. Clouds of grime floated from her legs with puffs of dried blood where she had scraped them on the railings.

Back in the bedroom she found that she was crying, tears that were not squeezed or choked from her but which ran in a hot profusion. In bed she hugged the bolster to herself and for the first time since she had been in Paris slept long and without dreaming.

The next day she looked in the newspapers and the shop windows for work. Twice she offered herself as a shop assistant only to find the position had already been taken. Vacancies were few, and the wages on offer even smaller than those she had been paid at the Lion d’Or.

Anne, however, didn’t feel discouraged. She walked all morning, and although she had little idea of where she was going, she felt a lightness and vigour in her movements. Her wanderings eventually brought her to the Avenue Foch which she remembered was spoken of in hushed tones by Parisians. The people who lived there were so rich they didn’t have to work; they drove to the seaside at weekends and had parties every evening. Feeling she might be arrested even for being there, Anne hurried across into the Avenue de la Grande Armée, a broad thoroughfare which began with a pompous flourish at the Arc de Triomphe but whose massive grey houses acquired an air of the suburban as the road trailed down towards Neuilly.

When she had walked a little way she saw a street called the rue des Acacias. At first she was angry that even in Paris there seemed to be no escape from the sadness of Janvilliers; but then she smiled as she walked slowly down it, past the tranquil open food shops with their displays of vegetables and shellfish, the stationers and huddled cafés. In the window of one she saw a sign advertising vacancies for bar staff. It was not what she wanted to do, but there could certainly be no question about her suitability or experience. Before she committed herself, she decided to walk once more up and down the narrow sloping street.

Through one of the ground-floor windows she saw a telephone, and the thought of the instrument that waited silently on the table in the hall at the Manor. She imagined Christine answering it. Then she imagined Hartmann doing so. It wasn’t difficult to resist the temptation.

The unexpected sensation of being alive lent her a precarious self-confidence. She turned over her hand to feel the rain that was drifting in from the wide spaces of the Avenue de la Grande Armée. It didn’t trouble her; and in the breeze that filtered down the street, blowing the rain beneath the awnings, causing the shoppers to hurry for the doorways, there was a lightness that could be taken for a blessing. She turned her face to it, the pale cheeks with their handful of freckles, the long-lashed eyes, and felt on her skin the touch of the world in its renewed strangeness.

She found herself once more at the door of the café that was advertising vacancies. Two small lines of determination ran diagonally from the corners of her mouth as she pushed at the door. A couple who were sitting at the window looked up without interest.

A wireless was playing loudly. Behind the bar a bald man wearing glasses sat with a proprietorial air, reading a newspaper.

Anne went and stood in front of him, playing with the handle of her bag.

The man continued reading. She coughed and shifted from foot to foot. At last he put down his paper and peeled the glasses from his nose.

He looked her up and down, appraising her from the dusty shoes to the expression of guarded hope in her eyes. ‘Can I help?’ he said.