Marie-Noel had asked me to say good night, and presently I went through the swing-door to her own turret stair and turned the handle of her door, expecting to find her still dressed, or at her prie-dieu. But the long day had closed upon her at the last. She was in bed, asleep. The image of the chapel had not left her untouched, as I had thought. Two lighted candles stood at the foot of the bed, and the duck now knelt in prayer between them. A celluloid baby doll with a battered skull reposed in her arms, upon her breast, and on a piece of paper, pinned to the head of the bed, these words were written: 'Here lie the mortal remains of Marie-Noel de Gue, who departed this life in the year of our Lord 1956, and whose faith in the Blessed Virgin brought peace and repentance to the humble village of St Gilles.'
I blew out the candles, and, leaving the window open, closed the shutters. Then I went down to the turret stairs and through to the other side of the chateau, to that other room in the tower. Here there were no candles burning, only a light beside the bed, and the woman on the pillows was not asleep like the child, but awake and watchful. Her eyes, sunk in her grey exhausted face, stared up to mine.
'I thought you weren't coming,' she said.
I dragged the chair from beside the stove, and pushed it close to the bed. I sat down in it and put out my hand to her. She held it fast.
'I sent Charlotte to her room,' she said. 'I told her, "Monsieur le Comte is looking after me tonight. I don't need you." That's what you meant me to say, didn't you?'
'Yes, Maman,' I answered.
Her grip tightened, and I knew she would hold it thus, through the night, as her defence against darkness, and I must not move, nor withdraw it, for if I did the bond would be loosened and the meaning lost.
'I've been thinking,' she said. 'In a few days' time, when everything's over, I shall leave this room and go downstairs to my old one. It's more practical. I can keep my eye on things.'
'Just as you like,' I answered.
'Lying here,' she said, 'I find my memory goes. I don't know if I am in the present or the past. And I have bad dreams.'
The gilt clock beside her bed ticked loudly, and the pendulum, showing through a glass case, moved backwards, forwards, the two combining to make the minutes slow. 'Last night,' she said, 'I dreamt you were not in the chateau. You were fighting with the Resistance once again, and I was reading the note you smuggled to me the evening Maurice Duval was shot. I kept reading it over and over again until I thought my head would burst. Then, when you gave me the morphine I didn't dream any more.'
In Villars, Bela had a luminous clock in a small leather case, the hands showing white against the dark face, and the tick, rapid and so quiet that one barely heard it, was like the quick, live pulse of a human heart.
'If you dream tonight,' I said, 'I shall be here. It won't matter.'
I leant forward and turned out the light with my burnt hand, and at once the darkness seemed to press upon me, enveloping me. The despair that was in the shadows invaded me, and she began to talk and mutter in a half-sleep that I could not share but could only listen to, with the ticking clock. Sometimes she called out, cursing, sometimes she fell into a prayer, once she broke into uncontrollable laughter; but never, as the fragmentary thoughts pursued her, did she clamour for relief, nor yet release my hand. When, just after five o'clock, she fell asleep and I leant forward and looked down at her, her face seemed to me no longer a mask, haggard, fearful, hiding the torment of months and years; but peaceful, relaxed and oddly beautiful, not even old.
24
I knew now she would continue sleeping and I could leave her. I rose from the chair and went out of the room, down through the silent house to the salon, and, opening the shutters, let myself out on to the terrace. I crossed the moat and walked up the pathway under the chestnut trees, and so to the rides and the stone huntress standing in the midst of them. The air had the cold clarity that comes just before dawn, and the sky, no longer black with the intensity of the night hours, had grown dim, receding, as it were, before the challenge of the day, the stars more pallid, more withdrawn, the little cluster of the Pleiades already setting in the west, poised above the dark trees. Here on the high ground by the statue I could look down upon the chateau and the village beyond, the spire of the small church stabbing the sky, the group of houses beside the church, giving the appearance of one homestead, the rising ground to the east and the encircling forest, all of them making St Gilles a single entity of chateau, church and village.
I sat by the base of the huntress and waited for the day and as the sky paled, and the light came, and the village and the chateau took on shape and substance, the earth itself seemed to solidify, the warm wet tang of it rising with the sun, the moisture of the night and the dew of morning blending together to fructify the soil. A white mist, warm and spongy, cloaked the trees, soon to evaporate, leaving them golden-red, and miraculously, as soon as the sun topped the plateau beyond the village, the village itself awoke. In a moment, so it seemed, there was smoke coming from a chimney, a dog barking, the lowing of cattle. I was no longer isolated, watching apart, numb with exhaustion, but one among many, part of St Gilles. I thought of the cure waking to the day, his untroubled face clouding as he remembered the disaster at the chateau, and how at once he would surely pray for all bereaved, his faith, like a talisman, protecting them from harm, the same faith reaching out and embracing those about him. And I thought also of the people in the village, unknown to me, who had come to the Mass last night from respect for Francoise, standing with bent heads and eyes averted. Ernest, the driver of the lorry, had been there, and Julie too, and her small grandson Pierre. I knew suddenly, with conviction, that it was not a stranger's curiosity that drew me to them, a sentimental attraction to the picturesque, but something deeper, more intimate, a desire so intense for their wellbeing and their future that although akin to love it resembled pain. This longing, strongly felt, was yet somehow impersonal: it did not spring from a wish to stand well with them, and it embraced, in some curious fashion, not only the village people and those who now seemed part of me, sleeping within the chateau, but inanimate things beyond - the contour of a hill, a sloping sandy road, the vine clinging to the master's house, the forest trees.
The feeling deepened, seeming to pervade my whole being, just as the physical burn of my hand three days before had touched each part of me; and the two things now mingled, what had been the searing, senseless hurt of Saturday merging to the enfolding fire within. As I sat there by the base of the statue, the sun rose and the morning mist dissolved. The chateau itself stood out clearcut yet sleeping still, until the shutters of a room in the western tower opened suddenly, the sound coming to me sharp and distinct across the park, and I saw a figure stand for a moment by the long window, looking, not in my direction, to the statue and the alleyways, but upwards to the sky, the figure somehow remote, strangely forlorn, believing itself alone to watch the dawn. It was Blanche; and her sudden action, flinging wide the shutters of her room, made me wonder whether she too had held vigil all the night, and now at last, hungry for the sleep that would not come, had put the hope behind her for twelve hours, and, flooding her cold room with light and air, was giving a grudging welcome to the day.
I got up and walked across the park towards the chateau, and it was not until I had crossed the moat and stood beneath her window that she noticed me. I saw her reach to the windows to close them again, but before she could do so I called up to her, 'My hand is troubling me. Would you dress it for me?'
She did not answer but withdrew into her room, leaving the windows open, from which I concluded that, as always, her silence meant indifference to my presence, but she did not refuse to help me. Going to her room I knocked, but hearing no answer, turned the handle and entered. She was standing by a table unrolling a fresh dressing. Her face was set, expressionless. She was wearing a dark-brown dressing-gown, and her hair, swept back from her face and pinned in a bun behind, was as she wore it during the day. The bed was already
made, the covers over it. Here was no disarrangement, nothing out of place; no tumbled disorder of a sleepless night showed in this chill bleak room. Only the flowers on her prie-dieu gave life, and colour too. They were dahlias, the same vivid flame that Bela had bought in the market-place in Villars, which had filled the little salon of her house with life and warmth.
Blanche did not look at me, but putting out her hand took mine in hers and removed the dressing Bela had placed upon it on Sunday night. She must have seen that it differed from the one which she had put upon it herself on Saturday, but she showed no surprise; her action was that of an automaton, silent, unconcerned.
'If you made a vow of silence,' I said to her, 'you broke it yesterday, in the hospital. It isn't valid any more.' She did not answer. She went on dressing my hand. 'Fifteen years ago,' I said, 'the death of one person came between us. It took the death of another, yesterday, to loosen your tongue. Wouldn't it be simpler for both of us, and for the family too, if we made an end to silence?'
My hand seemed suddenly defenceless now it was bare. I could move it, clench the fist, and it no longer hurt. She took the new dressing and covered the burn. It felt fresh and cool and clean.
'It would be simpler for you,' she said, without raising her eyes, 'just as it was simpler for you to let Francoise die. It has made life easier for you. She's no longer in your way.'
'I did not let her die,' I said.
'You lied about your blood,' she said. 'You lied about that contract. You've lied about everything, always, through the years. I don't want to speak to you, now or in the future. We have nothing to say to one another.'
She had finished the dressing. She let go my hand. The gesture was final, a dismissal.
'You're wrong,' I said. 'I have much to say to you. If you accept me as head of the family you are bound to listen to me, even if you don't agree.'
She glanced up at me briefly, and then moved away, replacing the stock of dressings in a chest-of-drawers. 'Coming into a fortune may give you a sense of power,' she said, 'but it doesn't entitle you to respect. I don't think of you as head of the family, nor does anyone. You've never done anything to justify the name.'
I looked about me, at the severity, the coldness, the tortured pictures of the scourged Christ, the crucified Christ, that must face her upon the blank impersonal walls as she lay there in her high narrow bed, and I said to her, 'Is that why you hang those pictures there? To remind yourself that you can't forgive?'
She turned and looked at me, the eyes bitter, the mouth hard and set.
'Don't mock my God,' she said. 'You've destroyed everything else in my life. Leave Him to me.'
'Would you have hung them in the master's house?' I asked. 'Would they have gone as part of your dowry to Maurice Duval?'
Now at last I had broken down reserve. The agony of years came to the surface, showing in her mouth and eyes like a sudden flame.
'How dare you speak of him?' she said. 'How dare you even utter his name? Do you think I ever forget one moment, day or night, what you did to him?'
'No,' I said, 'you haven't forgotten. Nor have I. You can't forgive me - perhaps I can't forgive myself. In that case, why were we both so moved yesterday morning, when we discovered that Marie-Noel had gone to the well?'
What I had hoped for, and what I had also feared, then happened. Tears rose in her eyes, ran down her cheeks: not the grief of sudden loss or pain, but the anguish of years set free through innocence. She went over to the window and stood beside it looking out, her back defenceless, betraying the emotion that I could not see. I wondered how much of her life had been wasted here, confined, the bitter thoughts rising in her like a tide as she sat or lay or read or prayed. Presently she turned, dry-eyed now, composed, and yet more vulnerable because of the grief she had shown before me.
'That exhibition must have pleased you,' she said. 'It amused you, even as a boy, to see me cry.'
'Then perhaps,' I said, 'not any more.'
'In that case, what are you waiting for?' she asked. 'Why are you still here?'
I could not ask forgiveness for something I had not done. As scapegoat, I could only bear the fault.
'I was looking in the album last week,' I said. 'I found the old snapshots of ourselves as children. And later ones as well. Groups at the verrerie, with Maurice there amongst them.'
'Well?' she asked. 'What of it?'
'Nothing,' I answered. 'Only that I wished what came about fifteen years ago had never happened.'
Perhaps because what I said was out of character, unexpected, she looked up at me, startled momentarily out of her composure, and then, seeing that I spoke sincerely, without cynicism or any sort of mockery, she said quietly, 'Why?'
My own truth was all that I could give her. If she did not believe it there was no more to say. 'I liked his face,' I said. 'I had never looked at those photographs before. I realized, turning the pages, that he was good, and that the workmen must have loved and respected him. It came to me that when he was killed it was through jealousy; the man who shot him, or ordered him to be shot, did it not from mistaken patriotism but because he envied him, because Maurice Duval was finer than he was himself.'
She stared at me, incredulous, and I suppose that what I was telling her was so alien to anything her brother might have said that she could not accept it.
'You think I'm lying,' I said. 'I'm not. It's true. I mean every word.'
'If you want to make your confession,' she said, 'don't make it to me. It's fifteen years too late.' She moved about the room, straightening things already orderly, using preoccupation to disguise emotion. 'What use is it to either of us now,' she asked, 'to come here and accuse yourself? You can't restore the past. You can't bring Maurice back. You hadn't even the courage to shoot him yourself, but went that night to the verrerie pretending to be alone, asking him to hide you; and he came down and opened the door to let you in, and there you stood with your little band of murderers. God may forgive you, Jean, I can't.'
She went and stood by the window once again, the air coming fresh and cool into the room. But when I followed her and stood beside her she did not move away, which seemed to me forgiveness in itself.
'From the first you were against Maurice, you and Maman,' she said. 'Even in the early days, when he first came to work at the verrerie and you and I were growing up, you were envious because Papa thought so much of him, even though you took no interest in the verrerie yourself and hardly ever went near it. Then later, when Papa gave him control and made him master, you began to hate him. I can see you now, you and Maman, in the salon, laughing, and Maman saying, "Can it be that Blanche, the fastidious Mademoiselle de Gue, is amorous at last?"'
She did not look at me but stared out across the park, and her profile now was the profile of the girl in the album, already sombre, already reserved, possessor of a secret she did not wish revealed.
'Ridicule was your weapon always, yours and Maman's,' she said. 'Because Maurice came from the people you pretended to despise him. Papa was never like that, he understood. He wouldn't have tried to prevent us marrying, as you did. When the Armistice came, and the Occupation, you had your chance. So easy, wasn't it, to make murder seem heroic? It happened in other families. Ours wasn't the only one.'
She gestured with her hands. It was suddenly over. The past was the past. She turned and looked about her at the alcove set in the tower, bare and simple like a convent cell, the prie-dieu in the corner, the crucifix above.
'Now I have this,' she said, 'instead of the master's house. If I was emotional yesterday morning, you know why.'
I think that what endeared her to me most was that she 'tutoye'd' me still. The custom of a lifetime could not be broken by the silence of fifteen years. There was hope for the future in this if nothing else.
'I want you to go to the master's house and make it yours,' I said. 'I want you to make it come alive again, as it was when Maurice had it, to be the master now in place of him.' Dumbfounded, she did
not answer, only stared at me in disbelief, and swiftly, so that she could not reject me utterly, I went on talking. 'I've told Paul he can go,' I said. 'He's only been directing the verrerie since the war through a sense of duty - you know that. His heart's not in it. They ought to get away to travel, he and Renee. It's the one likelihood they have, at the moment, of pulling their marriage together, apart from anything else. Paul has never had a chance of showing what he can do in business, in meeting people, outside St Gilles. It's time he did.'
Perhaps it was the note of urgency in my voice, belying cynicism, that most astounded her. She sat down, not realizing, I believe, that she did so, and stared at me, clasping the arms of her chair.
'Some one of the family has to take over,' I said. 'I can't. I don't know the first thing about it, and have no desire to learn. As you said yourself, I've never had the slightest interest in it. If you had married Maurice you would have shared the verrerie between you, made something of it, instead of letting it decay and become out-of-date, which it is today. When Marie-Noel grows up it will be hers. If she marries it can be her dowry. Either way, the only person who understands and loves it is yourself. I want it to be your trust, your responsibility, because of Maurice, because of Marie-Noel.'
Still she said nothing. I think if I had struck her across the face she could not have been more stunned. 'The house is waiting there for you,' I said. 'It's been waiting for fifteen years. Pictures, china, tables, chairs, even his books, all the things you would have used together. You're wasted here - don't you realize it? Ordering meals, directing Gaston and the rest, who know what to do anyway, giving lessons to the child, which could be done by any capable governess ...You belong to the verrerie, to that house; you could design and engrave again, as you did once, and create something delicate and fragile like the chateau the child found in the well. And then, instead of sending scent bottles and medicine phials to a firm like Carvalet, who would do better to buy them mass-produced, you could choose your own market, the market Paul will find for you, demanding fine workmanship, artistry, skill, which was what St Gilles gave once, long ago, and can give again.'