The Chateau (39 page)

As they came through the Place Redouté, they picked up the kodak films they had left to be developed. They were as surprised by what came out as if they had had no hand in it. Some of the pictures were taken on shipboard, and some in Pontorson and Mont-Saint-Michel. But there was nothing after that until the one of Beaumesnil, with the old trees rising twice as high as the roofs, and a cloud castle in the sky above the real one. The best snapshot of all was a family picture, taken on the lawn, their last morning at the château. This picture was mysterious in that, though the focus was sharp enough, there was so much that you couldn't see. Alix's shadow fell across Mme Bonenfant's face. There was only her beautiful white hair, and her hand stretched out to steady herself against the fall all old people live in dread of. Alix's hair blacked out the lower part of Harold's face, and what you could see of him looked more like his brother. Barbara had taken the picture and so she wasn't in it at all. A shadow from a branch overhead fell across the upper part of Mme Cestre's face, leaving only her smile in bright sunlight and the rest in doubt. The two small children they had hardly set eyes on were nevertheless in the picture, and Mme Viénot was wearing the green silk dress with the New Look. Beside her was a broad expanse of white that could have been a castle wall but was actually Eugène's shirt, with his massive face above
it looking strangely like Ludwig van Beethoven's. And Sabine, on the extreme right, standing in a diagonal shaft of light that didn't come from the sun but from an inadvertent exposure as the film was being taken from the camera.

“I don't see how we could not have taken more than one roll in all this time,” Barbara said.

“We were too busy looking.”

“We have no picture of Nils Jensen. Or of Mme Straus-Muguet.”

“With or without a picture, I will never forget either of them.”

“That's not the point. You think you remember and you don't.”

When they got home, she made him go straight out on the balcony where, even though it was late in the afternoon and the light was poor, she took a picture of him in his seersucker suit and scuffed white shoes, peering down into the rue Malène, and he took one of her in her favorite dress of black and lavender-blue, with the buildings on the far side of the Place Redouté showing in the distance and in the foreground a sharply receding perspective of iron railing and rolled-up awnings.

There were no sounds from behind the closed door of Mme Cestre's room. Nothing but a kind of anxious silence. Were they gone? Had somebody at last reached for a rubber stamp?

The Germans were not at the dinner party, and Eugène did not mention them all evening. The dinner party was not a success. The food was very good and so was the wine, and Alix's cousin was young and likable, but when he spoke to the Americans in English, Eugène fidgeted. Barbara never came out from behind the shy, well-bred young woman whom nobody could ever have any reason to say anything unkind to, and Harold did not want to repeat the mistake they had made with Jean-Claude Lahovary, and so he did not proceed as if this was the one moment he and Edouard Doria would ever have for knowing each other (though as a matter of fact it was). He did not ask personal
questions; he tried to speak grammatically when he spoke French; he waited to see what course the evening would take. In short, he was not himself. Edouard Doria sat smiling pleasantly and replied to the remarks that were addressed to him. Eugène did not explain to his three guests why he had thought they would like one another, and neither did he take the conversation into his own hands and make tears of amusement run down their cheeks with the outrageous things he said. As the evening wore on, the conversation was more and more in French, between the two Frenchmen.

I
N THE MORNING
, the study door was open and the room itself neat and empty. All through breakfast the Americans breathed the agreeable air of Eugène's absence from the apartment, and they kept assuring each other that he would not possibly return that night; it was a long hard journey even one way.

When Harold took the mail from Mme Emile there were several letters for M. Soulès de Boisgaillard, which he put on the table in the front hall, by the study door, and one for M. et Mme Harold Rhodes. It was from Alix, and when Barbara drew it out of the envelope, they saw that she had put a four-leaf clover in it.

“ ‘… I was so sad not to say good-by to you at the station on Sunday. But I love writing to you now. It was delightful to know you both, and I wish you to go on in life loving more and more, being happier and happier, and making all those you meet feel happy themselves, as you did here—' ”

“Oh God!” Harold exclaimed.

Barbara stopped reading and looked at him.

“Read on,” he said.

“ ‘We miss you a lot. Do write and give some of your impressions of Paris or Italy. And I hope we shall see one another
very often in September. I should like to be in Paris with you and Eugène now. I hope you have at least nice breakfasts. I suppose you are a little too warm—but I will know all that on Friday as Mummy and I will join Eugène in the train for Tours. Good-by, dear you two, and my most friendly thoughts. Alix.' ”

He put the four-leaf clover in his financial diary, and then said: “It's a nice letter, isn't it? So affectionate. It makes me feel better about our staying here. At least her part wasn't something we dreamed.”

“If she were here, it would be entirely different,” Barbara said.

“Do you think he will tell her how he has acted?”

“No, do you?… On the other hand, she may not need to be told. That may be the reason she waited so long to speak about our staying here.”

“But the letter doesn't read as if she had any idea.”

“I don't think she has.”

They went and stood in the kitchen door, talking to Françoise, who was delighted with the nylon stockings that Barbara presented to her. Holding up a wine bottle, she showed them how much less than a full liter of milk (at twenty-four times the price of milk before the war) they had allowed her for the little one, who fortunately was now in the country, where milk was plentiful. They told her about their life in America, and she told them about her childhood in a village in the Dordogne. They asked if the Germans had gone, and she said no. She had given them their dinner the night before, in their room.

“What a queer household we are!” she exclaimed, rolling her eyes in the direction of Mme Cestre's room. “Nobody speaks anybody else's language and none of us belong here.” But they noticed that she was pleasant and kind to the Germans, and apparently it did not occur to them that she might have any reason to hate them. They did not hate anyone.

The door to Mme Cestre's room was open, and the sounds that came from it this morning were cheerful; those mice, too,
were enjoying the fact that the cat was away. The Americans left their door open also, and were aware of jokes and giggling down the hall.

“When we need butter, speak to Mme Emile,” Eugène had said, and so Harold went downstairs and found her having a cup of coffee at her big round table. She rose and shook hands with him and he took out his wallet and explained what he had come for. While she was in the next room he looked at the copy of
Paris Soir
spread out on the dining table. The police had at last tracked down the gangster Pierrot-le-Fou. He had been surprised in the bed of his mistress, Catherine. The dim photograph showed a young man with a beard. Reading on, Harold was reminded of the fire in Pontorson. No doubt the preparations had been just as extensive and thorough, and it was a mere detail that the gangster had got away. Mme Emile returned with a pound of black-market butter, which she wrapped in the very page he had been reading, and since her conscience seemed perfectly clear, his did not bother him, though he supposed they could both have been put in jail for this transaction.

Shortly afterward, he went off to pick up their passports and the military permit to enter Austria, and when he returned at two o'clock, he found Barbara half frantic over a telephone call from Mme Straus-Muguet. “I didn't want to answer,” she said, “but I was afraid it might be you. I thought you might be trying to reach me, for some reason. I tried to persuade her to call back, but she said she was going out, and she
made
me take the message!”

What Barbara thought Mme Straus had said was that they were to meet her on the steps of the Madeleine at five.

They left the apartment at four, and took a taxi to the bank, where they picked up their mail from home. Then they wandered through the neighborhood, going in and out of shops, and at a quarter of five they took up their stand at the top of the flight of stone steps that led up to the great open door of the church. For the next twenty minutes they looked expectantly
at everybody who went in or out and at every figure that might turn out to be Mme Straus-Muguet approaching through the bicycle traffic. The more they looked for her, the less certain they were of what she looked like. Suddenly Barbara let out a cry; her umbrella was no longer on her arm. She distinctly remembered starting out with it, from the apartment, and she was fairly certain she had felt the weight of the umbrella on her arm as she stepped out of the taxi. She could not remember for sure but she thought she had laid it down in the china shop, in order to examine a piece of porcelain.

They left the steps of the Madeleine, crossed through the traffic to the shop, and went in. The clerk Barbara spoke to was not the one Harold had wanted her to ask. No umbrella had been found; also, the clerk was not interested in lost umbrellas. As they left the shop, he said: “Don't worry about it. You can buy another umbrella.”

“Not like this one,” she said. The umbrella was for traveling, folded compactly into a third the usual length, and could be tucked away in a suitcase. “If only we'd gone to the Rodin Museum this afternoon, as we were intending to,” she said. “I'd never have lost it there.”

He went back to the Madeleine and waited another quarter of an hour while she walked the length of the rue Royale, looking mournfully in shop windows and trying to remember a place, a moment, when she had put her umbrella down, meaning to pick it up right away.…

“I'm sure I left it in the china shop,” she said, when she rejoined him.

“It's probably in that little room at the back, hidden away, this very minute.… ”

He led her through the bicycle traffic to a table on the sidewalk in front of Larue's and there, keeping one eye on the steps of the church, they had a Tom Collins. It was possible, they agreed, that Barbara had misunderstood and that Mme Straus might have been waiting (poor old thing!) on the steps of some
other public monument. Or it could have been another day that they were supposed to meet her.

“But if it turns out that I did get it right and that she's stood us up, then let's not bother any more with her,” Barbara said. “We have so little time in Paris, and there is so much that we want to do and see, and I have a feeling that she will engulf us.”

“We've already said we'd have dinner with her and go to the theater, tomorrow night.”

“If she knows so many people, why does she bother with two Americans? She may be making a play for us because we're foreigners and don't know any better.”

“To what end?”

“Oh, I don't know!” Barbara exclaimed. “I don't like it here! Should we go?”

She was always depressed and irritated with herself when she lost something—as if the lost object had abandoned her deliberately, for a very good reason.

The waiter brought the check, and while they were waiting for change, Harold said: “She may call this evening.”

They crossed the street one last time, to make sure that their eyes hadn't played tricks on them. There were several middle-aged and elderly women waiting on the steps of the Madeleine, any one of whom could have explained the true meaning of resignation, but Mme Straus-Muguet was not among them.

That night, when they walked into the apartment at about a quarter of eleven, after dinner and another movie and a very pleasant walk home, the first thing they saw was that the mail on the hall table was gone. The study door was closed.

“Oh
why
couldn't he have stayed!” Barbara whispered, behind the closed door of their room. “It was so nice here without him. We were all so happy.”

A
LIX SENT YOU HER LOVE
,” Eugène said when he joined them at breakfast.

He did not explain why he had not stayed in the country, or describe the wedding. They were all three more silent than usual. The armchair, creaking and creaking, carried the whole burden of conversation. It had come down to Eugène from his great-great-grandfather. In a formal age that admired orators, military strategists, devout politicians, and worldly ecclesiastics, Jean-Marie Philippe Raucourt, fourth Count de Boisgaillard, had been merely a sensible, taciturn, unambitious man. He lived in a dangerous time, but, having bought his way into the King's army, he quickly bought his way out again and put up with the King's displeasure. He avoided houses where people were dying of smallpox and let no doctor into his own. He made a politic marriage and was impatient with those people who prided themselves on their understanding of the passions. He had children both in and out of wedlock, escaped the guillotine, noticed that there were ways of flattering the First Consul, and died at the age of fifty-two, in secure possession of his estates. His son, Eugène's great-grandfather, was a Peer and Marshal of France under the Restoration. Eugène's grandfather was an aesthete, and his taste was the taste of his time. He collected grandiose
allegorical paintings and houses to hang them in, married late in life, and corresponded with Liszt and Clara Schumann. His oldest son, Eugène's uncle, had a taste for litigation. The once valuable family estates were now heavily mortgaged and no good to anyone, and the house at Mamers stood empty. But scattered over the whole of France were the possessions of the fourth Count de Boisgaillard—beds and tables and armchairs (including this one), brocades, paintings, diaries, letters, books, firearms—and through these objects he continued, though so long dead, to exert an influence in the direction of order, restraint, the middle ground, the golden mean. But even he had to give way and became merely a name, a genealogical link, one of thousands, when the telephone started ringing. Seeing Eugène in his study, with his hat on the back of his head and the call going on and on in spite of his impatience and the air of distraction that increased each time he glanced over his shoulder at the clock, one would have said that there was no end to it; that it was a species of blackmail. The telephone seemed to know when he left the apartment. Once he was out the front door, it never rang again all day.