The Splendour Falls

  “Oh,” I said again.

  It was, I realized, an inadequate sort of comment to make, but the bus driver seemed quite pleased by it.

  “It grabs, does it not? It grabs you here,” he said, making a fist with one hand over his heart, to illustrate.

  I found my voice at last. “Yes, it does.”

  And it did. It grabbed me so completely, in fact, that when the driver announced: “Place Jeanne d’Arc” and another handful of passengers filed off the bus, I scrambled off after them without thinking, bumping my suitcase down the steps. It was only after everyone had scattered purposefully that I realized I hadn’t the faintest idea how to get to the Hotel de France.

  I stood for a moment with the river to my back and the plane trees stretching off to either side, and looked for someone to direct me. The square across the street was, I presumed, the Place Jeanne d’Arc, a great broad crossroads filled with a confusing swirl of bodies and faces and the half-familiar sounds of speech and laughter. I’d just prepared myself to grab the nearest person when, quite by accident, I saw a face I recognized.

  He had parked the Safrane in a no-parking zone beside the curb, and was leaning up against the bonnet as before, frowning slightly as he watched the milling crowd. I don’t know what impulse it was that made me cross the street toward him—simple weariness, perhaps, or maybe just his handsome face. I caught him this time unawares.

  “Is it also an expensive taxi ride,” I asked him, in English, “to the Hotel de France?”

  His head came round, startled, and the frown dissolved into a genuine smile. “No,” he conceded. “That is not expensive. I will take you.” He pitched the stub of his cigarette into the street and levered himself away from the car, coming round to open the passenger side door for me. “You have only the one suitcase?” he asked, taking it from my hand.

  “Yes.”

  There were already suitcases in the back seat of the taxi, the same expensive cases that I’d seen the round and red-faced man struggling with at St-Pierre-des-Corps.

  “But you already have a fare, Monsieur,” I said, looking at the suitcases. “I’m sorry, I didn’t realize…”

  “It is no problem,” he assured me. He shoved the costly luggage aside, unconcerned, to make room for my less impressive bag. “The gentleman has business to attend to. I will return for him. He will not miss me; your hotel is not so far.”

  It was, in truth, the shortest ride I’d ever taken in a taxi. A few moments along the river, back the way I’d just come, then up a narrow square wedged tight with plane trees to a still smaller square shaded by leaning acacias.

  “The Hotel de France,” my driver announced, with a smile that was wholly understandable. I could probably have walked the same distance myself in less than five minutes, and for free. I looked at the meter on the dashboard, and his smile deepened. The meter was blank.

  “There is no charge, Madame,” he told me.

  “Of course there is.” I reached for my wallet. I didn’t like to be in debt.

  “But I insist. The taxi, it has hardly moved at all.”

  “How much do I owe you?”

  He looked at me a long moment, silently weighing my will against his, and then he tipped his head, considering. “Ten francs.”

  “A cup of coffee costs ten francs,” I reminded him.

  “Fifteen francs, then.”

  I handed him twenty-five, and he took it with a thoughtful glance at my face. “I hope that you enjoy your stay in Chinon, Madame.”

  I’d have no problem doing that, I thought a moment later, as I looked around the quiet hotel lobby. For all my cousin’s failings, he did have his brilliant moments, and he’d chosen the Hotel de France in one of them.

  It was an older hotel, lovingly restored and decorated in rich classic tones of rose and cream, with an elegant hardwood staircase spiraling upwards from the entrance hall. To my left a few steps led up to the sunlit breakfast room, while on my right a door stood open to the bar. Both rooms were empty.

  The young woman at the front desk was amiable and pretty, if a little dim. No, Monsieur Braden had not yet arrived, but our rooms were all prepared… two rooms… I was sure that we wanted two rooms? Very sure, I told her, and with a small, perplexed shrug she handed me the key. “Your room is on the second floor, Madame. Room 215.”

  And so my holiday begins, I thought drily, with Harry, as I’d half expected, nowhere to be seen. I could almost hear Aunt Jane’s mild voice saying, Didn’t I tell you, dear? as I climbed the two flights of curving stairs to the second floor.

  My room, at least, was all that I’d been promised—bright and fresh-smelling, with a soaring, white-painted ceiling and walls papered in a soft, restful gold. And best of all I had a window, a huge casement window that looked out over the square and the clustered rooftops of the old medieval village.

  Swinging one half of the window inward on its hinges, I leaned out as far as I dared and inspected my view. There was a fountain nestled among the acacia trees in the square below me. I hadn’t noticed it on my arrival, but there it was, a large bronze fountain ringed by sculpted figures. Even above the confused noise of the street and square I could hear the steady dancing splash of water cascading from the two-tiered basin into the gathering pool below. The sound set off a rush of memory, and for a fleeting moment I was five years old again, my fingers trailing in another fountain while my father urged me, “Make a wish…”

  I pressed the memory firmly back, and focused. A man was sitting on the rim of the fountain’s pool with a spotted dog sleeping at his feet, and beside them a flower-seller was starting to dismantle his display of drooping marigolds and roses. I was drooping a little myself. Another wave of weariness swept over me, and I pulled myself away from the open window, turning my wrist to see the time. Three o’clock, nearly. Fifteen hours, I corrected myself with a faint smile. Time all travelers were at rest.

  It was sheer heaven to crawl between the sheets of the sprawling bed and draw the blanket to my chin. I was so completely and utterly exhausted that I would not have expected to dream. But I did dream, all the same. I dreamed that an angel was playing the violin outside my open window. It should have been a lovely dream, but it wasn’t.

  The angel wore my cousin’s smiling face.

  Chapter 3

  We were seven…

  I awoke refreshed, completing my revival with a half-hour in my private bathroom. The small tiled room was thick with steam when I finally switched off the shower spray and emerged, my skin the color of a boiled lobster above the plush white hotel towel. The steam followed me in a swirling great cloud as I dripped my way across the carpet and round the corner of the rumpled bed to push the window open wider.

  I had only slept an hour or so, but it might have been a different day. The gray sky had broken to reveal a clear, unblemished field of blue, through which the sun blazed its determined way toward the west. Bright sunlight touched the feathered tops of the acacia trees in the square below and glittered in the pools of the fountain. In the place where earlier I’d seen the flower-seller, a weary trio of tourists now sipped demis of beer at a little white table with red plastic chairs, one of a dozen or more such tables that seemed to have sprouted from nowhere in the square.

  I drew back again from the window, combing my fingers through my drying hair. The air was biting still, despite the sun—too cool, perhaps, for an outdoor table, but the idea of a drink appealed to me.

  Downstairs, I found the hotel bar no longer empty. A handful of people were taking advantage of the invitingly intimate modern decor—sectioned seats and ottomans arranged round tables of pale laminate, the rich terra-cotta tones of the upholstery glowing against gray linen walls and charcoal carpet. Enormous plants and artwork softened the modular angles, and the late afternoon light poured slanting through the floor to ceiling windows facing out upon the fountain squ
are.

  The conversation dipped, paused, and began again when I walked in, and I found myself facing the not unfriendly stares of two young men who sat together by the nearest window. One of them, a black-haired lad with gentle eyes, smiled cautiously and greeted me in French.

  “Would you care to join us?” he ventured. “There’s plenty of room.” At my hesitation his smile grew charming. “We’re quite well-behaved, I promise. It’s only that we’ve been traveling together for four months, now, and we’re tired of hearing each other talk. Please,” he urged me, indicating the vacant seat across from him. “Let us buy you a drink.”

  His companion sent me a vague but pleasant smile as I took the offered seat, reminding me a little of a chap I’d known at school—he, too, had worn tie-dyed shirts and let his hair grow straggling to his shoulders, and he’d carried with him something of the same distracted aura of a young man who has chosen to remain young, like the hippies of the sixties. The dark-haired lad, by contrast, was cleaner-cut, conservative, and better-schooled in manners. He raised his hand to get the bartender’s attention. “You’re new at the hotel, aren’t you?” he asked me. “I haven’t seen you before.”

  I nodded, trying without success to place his accent. Not Provençal, I thought—it was lighter than that. Not Breton, either, but something decidedly rustic, rather loose about the vowel sounds…

  “I’ve only just arrived,” I said, “this afternoon. From England.”

  He lowered his hand and grinned. “You’re English?” he said, in my own language. “I should have known. Every time I try to start up a conversation with someone—”

  “Good heavens,” I cut him off, astonished. “You’re American.”

  The long-haired youth winced visibly. “Canadian, actually,” he corrected me. It was the sort of stubborn, pained response that Hercule Poirot made in the detective books, when someone called him French instead of Belgian.

  His friend forgave me my mistake. “The accent sounds the same, I know.”

  “The hell it does.” The hippie grinned. “We don’t sound like the Whitakers.”

  “Well, true. But then, they’re from the Deep South, so that’s hardly surprising.” The dark young man glanced over at the gleaming oak-topped bar, where a middle-aged couple sat in conversation with the young bartender.

  Middle-aged, I decided upon closer examination, was perhaps the wrong label for them. The woman would certainly have resisted it. She was quite pretty, in a brittle sort of way, with artfully arranged auburn curls and fluttering hands that glittered with rings. At first her husband looked much older, until one noticed that his silver hair was not matched by his tanned and vital face.

  “I’m sure you’ll meet them,” the long-haired youth assured me. “Garland likes to keep up to date on new arrivals. She’s kind of… well, kind of unique.”

  “Her husband’s really nice,” the dark one added. “His name’s Jim.” Which reminded him he hadn’t yet introduced himself. “I’m Paul, by the way. Paul Lazarus. And this is my brother Simon.”

  “Emily Braden.” I shook hands with each of them in turn, relaxing back into the thick cushioned seat. Dark-haired Paul, I decided, was the younger of the two, despite appearances. I’d found that between siblings there was always a clear pattern of interaction, of deference and command, that set the first-born apart. Simon Lazarus might look the less mature but he was restless, more aggressive, and now that our conversation had switched to English he assumed the role of spokesman for both of them—assumed it with a natural ease born of long familiarity and habit.

  He sent me a friendly grin. “We’re doing the Europe thing. Paul finished university last spring and neither one of us could find a job, so we decided to squander our savings instead. We’re planning to go all the way around the world, if the money holds out. And if I can ever get Paul away from this place.” Simon grinned wider. “I had a hard enough time dragging him out of Holland, and now here we are,” he told me, “stuck again.”

  Paul smiled and would have said something, but he wasn’t given the chance. The bartender, having excused himself from the American couple, descended upon us in a whirl of youthful vigor.

  Seen at close range, the bartender appeared even younger than I’d first suspected. He couldn’t have been above twenty, but it was easy to see how I’d been deceived. Only in France, I thought, could a teenager look suave, even worldly. He would break a lot of hearts, this one. He probably had already.

  I watched in open admiration as he exhaled the expressive “pouf” of breath that was so undeniably French, muttered some brief comment about les américains, and winked conspiratorially at Paul Lazarus. “What can I bring you?” he asked, in flowing English.

  “Thierry will tell you,” Simon said positively, his accent anglicizing the bartender’s name so that it came out sounding like “Terry.”

  “Thierry, tell Miss…”

  “Braden,” Paul supplied.

  “Emily,” I said, over both of them.

  “…tell Emily what the difference is between Canadians and Americans.”

  The bartender looked down at me with a serious expression. “The Canadians, Madame, are much more difficult,” he confided. “They are impossible. This one,” he pointed at Simon, “makes always the curtain in his room to fall down, and always I must get the ladder to replace it.”

  “Twice,” Simon defended himself. “I’ve only done it twice. And it’s your own fault for putting a curtain in front of that window to begin with. Windows like that are meant to be opened, to be enjoyed. I can’t help it if your stupid curtain rod gets in the way.”

  “You see?” Thierry winked again. “Most difficult, these Canadians. But you, Madame, you are not Canadian?”

  “Worse.” I smiled up at him. “I’m English.”

  “Non!” He clapped a hand to his heart in mock agony, but his eyes twinkled at me. “You would like a café au lait, Madame? All the English, they enjoy the café au lait.”

  Only, I thought, because that’s what we learned to say at school. Until I’d lived in France I hadn’t known there were so many different kinds of coffee, from thickly fragrant café on its own, to the decadent richness of café crème. I considered my options. “Could I have a crème instead, please?”

  “Bien sûr,” he said. “With pleasure.”

  “Thierry,” Simon informed me, as the bartender left to fire up the gleaming monster of a coffee machine sitting behind the bar, “is the nephew of the proprietors, Madame and Monsieur Chamond. Have you met them yet? No? Well, don’t worry, you will. They’re terrific people, very easy to talk to. I’m surprised they’re not in here now, they usually are. Anyhow, Thierry’s their nephew. He’s a bit of a drain on them, I think, but he’s lots of fun. Just don’t let him know you speak French,” was Simon’s advice, “or he’ll talk your ear off. He kept Paul going for three hours our first afternoon here.”

  “You don’t speak French?” I guessed, and Simon shrugged.

  “Just the basics. Hello… where’s the bathroom… I have a blue hat—that sort of thing. Paul’s the expert. He spent a year in Switzerland, on a Rotary exchange.”

  I assured Paul that he’d done his sponsors proud. “You sounded terribly French, just now.”

  He smiled. “So did you.”

  Thierry had returned with my café crème. He set it with a flourish on the table in front of me, sent me a thoroughly disarming smile, and swept off again to take the order from a clustered group of older tourists—Germans, from the snatches of their conversation I could overhear. It wasn’t easy to hear things at a distance. The radio crooned steadily above our heads, not loudly but persistently, and Edith Piaf had just begun to sing “La Vie En Rose” when my wandering gaze came to rest upon the solitary figure in the far corner.

  Had I been drinking anything but coffee I’d have blamed it on the drink—that blinding
moment of illumination that made time, for one long heartbeat, cease to be. It was as if my mind said, see now, this must be remembered… this single moment, with Piaf’s voice rasping out the haunting lyrics and the clink of glasses fading to a far-off sound no louder than the trickle of a fountain.

  Time blinked. The moment held. There was no reason for it, really—none at all. None, at least, that I was willing to admit. The world, I thought, was full of handsome men.

  This one sat close against the tall French windows that opened to the street and fountain square. He looked German too, I thought, or maybe Swedish. His hair was so amazingly fair, the same whitish-gold color that one sees sometimes on very young children, and where it brushed against the collar of his crisp white cotton shirt it seemed to blend into the fabric. His eyes looked oddly dark in contrast, though of course I couldn’t tell their color. He looked too handsome to be human, really, sitting there—like some youthful middle-aged pop star, narrow-hipped and long-limbed, his classic face unlined.

  Simon Lazarus caught me staring. “That’s Neil,” he told me helpfully. “He’s English too, like you. He’s a musician.”

  I’m sure my face must have shown my reaction because Paul laughed, a short soft laugh of understanding. “No, not that kind of musician,” he said. “He’s a violinist. Plays with a symphony orchestra, I think. You’ll hear him practicing if you’re around the hotel in the afternoon.”

  So this, I thought, was my mysterious angel with the violin. He certainly looked the part, with that face and his loose white shirt and the sun turning his hair to a halo of light.

  “I think I heard him playing earlier,” I said, to Paul. “I was half asleep at the time. I thought I’d dreamed the music.”

  “He sounds like a recording when he practices,” Simon put in. “He’s that good. His room’s right underneath ours, on the first floor, so we can hear him pretty clearly. Hang on, I’ll introduce you.”

  There wasn’t time to voice a protest, he was already taking charge, turning his head to call across the bar, and a moment later I was being introduced. “Neil Grantham,” Simon said, “meet Emily…”