The Caves of Périgord (22 page)

As Manners parked the Jaguar, Lydia looked behind her and realized that the real entrance drive had come that way, from the river and what must once have been the road along the river’s bank. The glint of the Vézère lay perhaps a quarter mile down a handsome avenue of trees, which were flanked on one side by vines and on the other by an orchard of neatly pruned apple and pear trees. Before the trees began, an outbuilding in bright new stone overwhelmed the old stables. They had already passed one guard post as they had left the road. This was clearly another, with three big, black Citroëns parked alongside it, and three tough-looking young men leaning too casually against them. In the doorway of the new building, a big bald man with a thick stripe of mustache cupped his hand to his ear, listened attentively, and then nodded at them. As Lydia looked again at the front of the château, realizing that this had once been a small medieval fortress before the Renaissance window had been knocked into its facade, and before some seventeenth-century Malrand had rebuilt the rear, the front door seemed to open by itself. The effect was almost eerie, until a maid appeared, tucking her hair into a white starched bonnet, to guide them in.

Malrand awaited them in a large and rather cold room that ran the entire width of the house. He stood smoking a yellow cigarette before his Renaissance window, dressed as if going for a stroll, in sturdy brogues, corduroy slacks, and a tweed jacket, his checked shirt open at the neck. His clothes were somehow familiar. Lydia suddenly recalled a rather grand shop on one of the Paris boulevards just by the Madeleine called Old England, and her curiosity was satisfied. He looked just like one of the window displays. His hair was thick and white, his face strikingly pale apart from the sharp redness of his cheeks; his thin nose and
lips gave him a hawkish look. He appeared far more intense and less tranquil than his photographs in the newspapers, as if still full of a youthful nervous energy.

“Welcome to my home, Major Manners. It is over fifty years since your father first stood where you are now,” he said genially in excellent English, his voice like gravel after a lifetime of smoking, as he advanced upon them with hand outstretched. “I knew that you were accompanied, but had not known that we were to be honored by the presence of such a lovely woman.” He took Lydia’s hand, bowed slightly, and raised it to within an inch of his lips. “Mademoiselle, a perfect English rose.”

“American, Monsieur le Président, and honored to meet you.”

“American? Then this is almost like old times. A Malrand, a Manners, and an American, here in the old château, just as we were when we first landed back in 1944. It would be too much of a coincidence, mademoiselle, for your name to be McPhee?”

“Too much indeed, Monsieur le Président. My name is Dean,” she said, a little irritated. His security men would not only know her name and nationality but he had probably checked out her ancestry, her education, and her tastes in everything from food to music.

“Mademoiselle Dean,” he said. “An Anglo-Saxon rose. Have a glass of champagne, and come and admire my new vineyard. We now have some decent wine again, for the first time in over a hundred years. You know about the phylloxera, the disease that wiped out so many of our vineyards in the time of Napoleon the Third? In Bordeaux and Burgundy, they were wise enough to replant with good American vines from California, which resisted the disease. In these parts, they decided there was more money in tobacco. A great mistake. So the only wine we grew here was our own
pinard,
the rough stuff that used to be given to the soldiers when they got two liters a day as part of the rations. We drank it ourselves, too. More fool us.”

He was putting himself out to be charming, with considerable success. Lydia, who had been fretting about the suitability of her ivory silk
dress with a red scarf and shoes, felt herself relaxing quickly. Not too quickly, Lydia, she warned herself.

“Mademoiselle Dean, or if I may call you Lydia, you are far too beautiful to keep calling me Monsieur le Président. It makes me feel even older than I am. If you must call me anything, call me François, since we are all off duty and at our ease and you are my most welcome guests. I have to suffer far too many formal occasions, so indulge me in a happily private one.” There was a distinctly jolly twinkle in his eye, and Lydia recalled reading one or two scurrilous accounts of his romantic reputation. It had probably done him no harm with the voters.

“I’m afraid, sir, that a very thorough look through my father’s papers found no draft of his memoirs, just a few jotted notes and chapter headings,” said Manners. “They were mainly about North Africa, rather than his time in France. There were a couple of letters to my grandmother, one which mentioned meeting you in the summer of 1942, after the Gazala battles and Bir Hakeim, and another about the visit you paid to our home. Apparently Granny rather took to you.”

“Probably because I told her that I thought your house was a great deal more comfortable than my own. More attractive, too.” He turned to Lydia. “Don’t you find this house a terrible muddle? Not knowing whether it is an old fortress or a comfortable château—quite apart from the place being back to front.”

“It is rather distinctive, monsieur—I mean, François.”

“Thank you, Lydia. You say my name charmingly. Well, it would have been good to have had the memoirs of such a distinguished old soldier and great friend of France,” said Malrand. “I want to hear all about this rock painting of his that you found, and whether the police are going to get it back, but that had better wait until our final guest arrives. I asked her to come a little later, to give us time to chat, and Lydia, you know about these things. What do you think of my fireplace?”

“Renaissance, Italian-style, quite early. Good marble, pity about the damage to the caryatids,” she said automatically.

“German bullets. Used it for target practice after I was arrested,” Malrand said. “Anything else?”

“Yes, the plaque,” she said, bending to peer at the great irregular iron plate attached to the rear of the fireplace, to bounce its heat back into the room. “It’s marvelous. Are those your family arms?”

“No,” he said with a wink at her and a wicked grin at Manners. “The English did not win all their wars, whatever they like to think. They are the arms of the Talbots, a great English family, and my ancestors looted it from their château down the river after we kicked the last of the English out five centuries ago. Not long afterward, that Malrand’s great-grandson invaded Italy with Francis the First in 1515.”

“The invasion that brought the Renaissance back to France,” Lydia said.

“Yes, and the fireplace.” Malrand turned to Manners. “We did our best to pass the Renaissance on to you English a few years later, at the Field of the Cloth of Gold. But your King Henry the Eighth was more interested in women, I think. Understandable, of course.”

“Why do you French and English tease each other so?” she asked, smiling to take any offense from the question.

“Joan of Arc, Trafalgar, and Waterloo,” said Manners. “I suppose the French think we have a lot to answer for.”

“There were battles that went the other way—Hastings, Calais, La Rochelle, Fontenoy,” Malrand snapped. Then he caught himself. “No, it’s not that. That’s not what I want to say. After all, during the Revolution, it was Frenchmen who made my palace into a public dance hall, Frenchmen who turned Notre Dame de Paris into a temple of reason, and held a mock mass with a prostitute on the main altar. Ah, the English, what can I say about the English? They who gave me refuge and guns and hope and helped me come back to liberate my poor France.” He gazed off into some private space.

“It’s an intimacy, like an unending Catholic marriage in a family too poor to own more than one bed,” he went on. “We have fought, invaded
each other, loved each other’s women, fought alongside each other for a thousand years. There are no two peoples on earth who have shared so much, and stayed so different, and yet retain this profound, almost frightening attraction for one another. You drink our wines, we drink your scotch. You English holiday here, fall in love with old France and buy houses. Our young French people fall in love with your music and your tax laws and open businesses in Kent. I have a young great-nephew who tells me he will be a millionaire when he launches his computer company later this year. He went to Brighton to learn English, fell in love, started a company, and now his children are English.”

Malrand paused, his mood too intense to be interrupted, sipped some champagne, and took out a cigarette. Instead of lighting it, he walked across to Manners, and put his hand on the Englishman’s shoulder. “Sometimes I think we are twins, you and I, separated at birth. Sometimes I think of that old Greek legend of the man and the woman constantly trying to reunite into the original whole. Your father, you know, was as close to me as my brother.”

“That reminds me, sir,” said Manners. “I thought you might appreciate some memento of my father, and when he first gave me this, he said it came from the war, from France.” He reached into his jacket pocket and brought out the leather chess set Lydia had seen in the car.

Malrand took it, opened the flap, and looked at the tiny chips of ivory with black and red chess symbols painted onto the rounded ends. The thinner ends slotted into tiny slits cut into the checkerboard of light and dark squares on the leather. “I remember him with this, playing chess with McPhee,” the President said softly. “It came from a dead German.” He passed his hand gently over the leather. “I am very glad to have this. Thank you. But it must come back to you someday.”

From the courtyard below came the racing blip of an engine, a squeal of brakes, and the almost tidal roar of the gravel being plowed up by a car being driven too fast and stopped too quickly. Lydia looked out of the window to see dust rising from behind a small Japanese convertible,
with Clothilde merrily flashing her legs at the security men as she took off her high heels to skip through the gravel to the entrance stairs.

The President’s white wine had been extremely good, Lydia thought, dry enough to counter the richness of the crayfish salad, and yet with enough fruit and flowers to hold up well on its own. She nibbled a little bread, and sipped it again. In London, she’d paid over ten quid a bottle for a Chablis that was a lot less appealing than this.

What she really wanted to know was whether Clothilde had already enjoyed the presidential favors, or was she simply trying rather hard to do so. She was not quite flirting, but nor was she being the cool, professional Clothilde of her meetings with Lydia’s bosses and the police and the insurance men back in London. She was being witty, gay, and just a little irreverent about the changing fashions in interpreting the cave paintings. Lydia knew the Abbé Breuil had seen them as a hunting ritual, portraying the beasts that the tribes needed to catch and eat. That had always seemed quite reasonable to Lydia as a hypothesis, although she remembered reading that the bones left in the middens of their campsites seldom came from the bison and horses that were most frequently depicted. They mainly ate reindeer, as she recalled, which were not that common in the cave art.

“Then came the 1960s, and the revolutions,” said Clothilde. “We had the political revolution in Paris that got rid of de Gaulle, then the sexual revolution, the intellectual revolution.”

“The what?” asked Manners.

“Structuralism. France’s great contribution to the age. Everything had to be reinterpreted. There were no authors, only texts, and your reading of it was as valid as mine, worth no more and no less than the considered opinion of the most learned professor.”

“Intellectual revolutions must always begin by discrediting the existing
professors,” Malrand. said with a smile. “How else can they be pushed aside to make room for promotions for the brilliant young revolutionaries? The phenomenon is not unknown in politics.” He turned to Clothilde. “So, structuralism invades the caves?”

“Indeed, Monsieur le Président. Only in this case, the attack came from my teacher, André Leroi-Gourhan. He made a statistical and rigorously structural analysis of the cave paintings and found them divided between male and female symbols. There were quite enough phallic symbols and vulvas to justify this approach, but it must be said that this fit with the spirit of the times.”

“There was neither phallus nor vulva before the 1960s?” mocked Manners. Precisely the question she was thinking, thought Lydia, but did not presume to ask.

“Oh, every generation has to think it discovered sex for itself,” said Malrand. “My grandfather talked of
la belle époque
before 1914. My father waxed lyrical about the delights of the Jazz Age. And of course, we had the war. But continue, madame. The poor celibate priest, the Abbé Breuil, is confounded by the assault of the sexual organs.”

“He was not much of a priest,” Clothilde said. “He spent all his time in caves. But Breuil had trouble with sexual organs. There’s a famous cave painting in Africa, which he identified as the White Lady or the White Goddess, which is what everybody called it until somebody noticed that she sported an impressively erect penis. I’m surprised that even a priest could have missed it.”