‘You looking for someone?’
‘No,’ I said.
Her eyes went beyond me to my suitcase on the pavement. ‘If you’re wanting a room—’
‘I wasn’t,’ I said, feeling suddenly foolish. ‘I was just – I used to live hereabouts, and I thought I’d just like to look at the place. Is – is Madame Leclerc still here? She used to be the concierge.’
‘She was my aunt. She’s dead.’
‘Oh. I’m sorry.’
She was leafing through the papers, still eyeing me. ‘You look English.’
‘I am English.’
‘Oh? You don’t sound it. But then I suppose if you lived here. … In this house, you mean? What name?’
‘My father was Charles Martin. The poet Charles Martin.’
The blonde said: ‘Before my time,’ licked a pencil, and made a careful mark on one of the papers she held.
I said: ‘Well, thanks very much. Good evening,’ and went back to where my case stood on the pavement. I looked up the now darkening street for a taxi. There was one coming, and I lifted a hand, but as it came nearer I saw that it was engaged. A street lamp shone into the back as it passed me. A middle-aged couple sat there, a wispy woman and a stoutish man in city clothes; two girls in their early teens sat on the drop-seats. All four were laden with parcels, and they were laughing.
The taxi had gone. The street was empty. Behind me I heard the blonde’s footsteps receding up the stairs of Number 14. I glanced back over my shoulder once at the house, then turned back to the street to watch for another taxi. Neither house nor street looked even remotely familiar any more.
Quite suddenly I ceased to be sorry I had come. It was as if the past, till then so longed-after, so lived-over, had slipped off my shoulders like a burden. The future was still hidden, somewhere in the lights that made a yellow blur in the sky beyond the end of the dark street. Here between the two I waited, and for the first time saw both clearly. Because of Daddy and Maman and the Rue du Printemps I had made myself a stranger in England, not only bereaved, but miserably dépaysée, drifting with no clear aim, resenting the life I had been thrust into with such tragic brutality; I had refused to adapt myself to it and make myself a place there, behaving like the spoilt child who, because he cannot have the best cake, refuses to eat at all. I had waited for life to offer itself back to me on the old terms. Well, it wasn’t going to. Because of my childhood I had rejected what England had for me, and now the Paris of my childhood had rejected me. Here, too, I had been dispossessed. And if I was ever to have a place, in whatever country – well, nobody ever wanted you anyway unless you damned well made them. And that was what I would have to do. I had my chance in front of me now, at the Château Valmy. As yet I knew nothing of the family but their names; soon those names would be people I knew, the people I lived with; the people to whom I would matter. … I said their names over slowly to myself, thinking about them; Héloïse de Valmy, elegant and remote with that chilly grace that would – surely – melt in time; Philippe de Valmy, my pupil, of whom I knew nothing except that he was nine years old and not very strong; his uncle, the acting master of the château, Léon de Valmy …
And then a queer thing happened. Whether it was because now for the first time I said the name over to myself, coupled with the fact that I was standing in the street where a million unconscious memories must be stirring, I don’t know; but now, as I said the name, some trick of the subconscious drew some of those memories together as a magnet draws pins into a pattern so that, clear, and till now unrecollected, I heard them speak. ‘Léon de Valmy,’ Maman was saying, and I think she was reading from a newspaper, ‘Léon de Valmy. It says he’s crippled. He’s cracked his back at polo and they say if he recovers he’ll be in a wheelchair for the rest of his life.’ Then Daddy’s voice, indifferently: ‘Oh? Well, I’m sorry to hear it, I suppose, though I can’t help feeling it’s a pity he didn’t break his neck. He’d be no loss.’ And when Maman said: ‘Charles!’ he added impatiently: ‘Why should I be a hypocrite about the man? You know I detest him.’ And Maman said: ‘I can’t think why,’ and Daddy laughed and said: ‘No. You wouldn’t …’
The memory spun away into silence, leaving me tingling with something that might have been apprehension, wondering if I had really remembered it at all, or if it were some new trick of that romantic imagination of mine. A taxi had appeared and I must have signalled it because here it was swerving in towards the kerb with a screech of brakes. Once again I said: ‘Hôtel Crillon, please,’ and climbed in. The taxi moved off with a jerk, swung left out of the Rue du Printemps and accelerated down a dark, shuttered street. The sound of the engine swelled and echoed back from the blind houses. Nine coaches waiting, hurry, hurry, hurry … Ay, to the devil … to the devil …
It wasn’t apprehension, it was excitement. I laughed to myself, my spirits suddenly rocketing. To the devil or not, I was on my way …
I rapped on the glass.
‘Hurry,’ I said.
Third Coach
2
This castle hath a pleasant seat; the air
Nimbly and sweetly recommends itself
Unto our gentle sense …
Shakespeare: Macbeth.
The raven himself is hoarse
That croaks the fatal entrance of Duncan
Under our battlements …
Ibid.
The little town of Thonon-les-Bains lies some twelve miles east of Geneva, on the southern shore of Lac Léman. Our plane had been met at Geneva by the big black Chevrolet from Valmy, which wafted us smoothly through the expensively-polished streets of Geneva, across the bridge at the end of the Lake, through gardens where magnolias already bloomed, and then turned east for the French border and Thonon.
Madame de Valmy had talked very little to me on the journey from Paris, for which I was grateful, not only because my eyes and mind were busy with new impressions, but because – although she had been kind and pleasant in the extreme – I could not yet feel quite at ease with her. There was that curious remoteness about her which made her difficult to approach, or even to assess. Conversation with her had an almost long-distance touch about it; far from feeling that she had come halfway to meet you, you found her suddenly abstracted, all contact withdrawn. I wondered at first whether she was deliberately keeping me at a distance, but when she had twice asked me a question, only to lose interest before I had answered, I decided that she had graver matters on her mind than Philippe’s governess, and myself retired contentedly enough into silence.
The car was purring along through flat, densely-cultivated country. Everywhere were prosperous-looking farms, and tree-bordered fields where red-and-white cattle fed sleekly. To our left, through thickets of poplar and willow, the gleam of water showed and hid and showed again; on the right the country rolled green and gradual to wooded foothills, then swooped dramatically up to the great ranges of the Alps and the dazzle of the colossal snows. One of them, I supposed, was Mont Blanc itself, but this, I thought, stealing a glance at Héloïse de Valmy beside me, was not the time to ask.
She was sitting with shut eyes. I thought as I looked at her that I had been right. She looked both tired and preoccupied, though nothing, it seemed, could impair her rather chilly elegance. She was, I supposed, about fifty-five, and was still a beautiful woman, with the sort of beauty that age seems hardly to touch. Bone-deep, that was the phrase; it was in the shape of her head and temples and the thin-bridged, faintly aquiline nose with its fine nostrils; it was only at another glance that you saw the tiny wrinkles etching eyes and mouth. Her skin was pale and clear, and expertly tinted; her brows delicately drawn and arched with a faint arrogance above the closed lids. Her hair was sculptured silver. Only her mouth under the curve of its expensive rouge, and the hands which lay grey-gloved and still in her lap, were too thin for beauty. She looked expensive, a little fragile, and about as approachable as the moon.
I sat back in my corner. In front of me were the square s
houlders of Madame’s chauffeur. Beside him, equally square and correct, sat Madame’s maid Albertine. If I – as the classic tales of governessing led me to expect – was to be insecurely poised between the salon and the servant’s hall, at least I was now at what might be called the right end of the car. For which I was grateful, as I didn’t much like what I had seen of Albertine.
She was a dark sallow-faced woman of perhaps forty-five, with a sullen, secretive expression and ugly hands. Although she had been most of the time about Madame de Valmy’s rooms last night when I had been there, she had not once spoken to me and I had seen her watching me with a sort of stony resentment which had surprised me, but which I now realised was probably habitual and without meaning. She sat rigidly beside the chauffeur, gripping Madame’s jewel-case tightly on her lap. Neither she nor the man spoke. Neither, as far as I could tell, was remotely aware of the other’s presence. They seemed so admirably suited that I found myself wondering, quite without irony, if they were a married couple; (I found later that they were, in fact, brother and sister). Bernard, the chauffeur, had impeccable manners, but he, too, looked as if he never smiled, and he had the same dark-avised, almost resentful air as the woman. I hoped it wasn’t a common Savoyard characteristic … I stole another look at Madame’s still face. It didn’t look as though, for gaiety, there was going to be much to choose between the drawing-room and the servants’ hall …
Well, after all, the schoolroom was to be my domain. I looked out of the window again, to wonder a little about Philippe, and more than a little about Léon de Valmy, the cripple, whom his wife had hardly mentioned, and of whom Daddy had said, indifferently: ‘It’s a pity he didn’t break his neck.’
I hadn’t noticed the road-barrier until the car slowed to a sliding halt, and two men in uniform emerged from a green-painted hut and came towards us.
Héloïse de Valmy opened her eyes and said in her cool high voice: ‘This is the frontier, Miss Martin. Have your passport ready.’
The frontier-guards quite obviously knew the car. They greeted Madame de Valmy, flicked a casual glance across my passport, and I heard them joking with the chauffeur as he opened the boot for what was the briefest and most formal of glances at the luggage there.
Then we were moving again, across the strip of no-man’s-land that divides the two countries, to pause once more for the same formalities at the French barrier.
Soon after this we reached Thonon, where our road turned south towards the mountains. The main part of the town lies fairly high above the Lake. As we climbed, the ground fell sharply away to the left, spilling a huddle of bright roofs and budding fruit-boughs down towards the belt of trees that bordered the water. Through the mist of still bare branches showed, here and there, the chimneys of some biggish houses. One of these – Madame de Valmy surprised me by rousing herself to point it out – was the Villa Mireille, where the third Valmy brother, Hippolyte, lived. I could just see its chimneys, smokeless among the enveloping trees. Beyond, mile upon glimmering mile, stretched Lac Léman, lazily rippling its silk under the afternoon sun. Here and there a slim sickle of white or scarlet sail cut the bright field of water, and clear on the distant shore I could see Montreux, etched in faint colours like a picture-book town against that eternally dramatic background of towering snows.
It was a warm afternoon, and the little town through which we drove was gay in the sun. Pollarded trees lined the streets, linking pleached branches where buds were already bursting into green. Shops had spilled their goods onto the pavements; racks of brightly printed dresses swung in the warm breeze; red and green peppers shone glossy among last season’s withered apples; there was a pile of gaily-painted plant-pots and a small forest of garden tools in brilliant green. And at the edge of the pavement there were the flowers; tubs of tulips and freesias and the scarlet globes of ranunculus; box after box of polyanthus, vivid-eyed; daffodils, sharply yellow; the deep drowned-purple of pansies; irises with crown and fall of white and ivory and blue and deeper blue … oh, beautiful! And all packed and jammed together, French-fashion, billowing and blazing with scent as thick as smoke in the sunlight.
I must have made some exclamation of pleasure as we slid past them and into the square, because I remember Madame de Valmy smiling a little and saying: ‘Wait till you see Valmy in April.’ Then we had swung to the right and the road was climbing again through a sparse tree-crowded suburb towards the hills.
Very soon, it seemed, we were in a narrow gorge where road, river, and railway, crossing and re-crossing one another in a fine confusion, plaited their way up between high cliffs hung with trees. After a few miles of this the railway vanished, tunnelling away on the right, not to reappear, but the river stayed with us to the left of the road, a rush of green-white water that wrestled down its boulder-strewn gully, now close beside us, now dropping far below as our road wound its way along the cliff under the hanging trees. The gorge was deep; the road was most of the time in shadow, only the higher trees netted the westering sun in branches where the faintest green-and-gold hinted at the spring. The cliffs closed in. Ugly grey bulges of some pudding-like stone showed here and there between the clouds of shadowed, March-bare trees. The road began to climb. Away below us the water arrowed loud and white between its boulders.
A grim little valley, I thought, and a dangerous road … and then we rounded the bend called Belle Surprise, and away in front of us, like a sunlit rent in a dark curtain, lay the meadows of Valmy.
‘That’s Soubirous,’ said Madame de Valmy, ‘there in the distance. You’ll lose sight of it again in a moment when the road runs down into the trees.’
I craned forward to look. The village of Soubirous was set in a wide, green saucer of meadow and orchard serene among the cradling hills. I could see the needle-thin gleam of water, and the lines of willows where two streams threaded the grassland. Where they met stood the village, bright as a toy and sharply-focused in the clear air, with its three bridges and its little watch-making factory and its church of Sainte-Marie-des-Ponts with the sunlight glinting on the weathercock that tips the famous spire.
‘And Valmy?’ I said, as the car sailed downhill again and trees crowded thickly in on either side of the road. ‘We must be near it now?’
‘Those are the Valmy woods on your left. They stretch most of the way back to Thonon. The Merlon – that’s the name of the river – marks the boundary between Valmy and Dieudonné, the estate to the right of the road. We cross the river soon and then’ – she smiled faintly – ‘you’ll see Valmy.’
She spoke as usual in that cool flute-clear voice, with nothing ruffling the silvery surface. But I thought, suddenly, she’s excited – no, perhaps nothing so strong as that, but there’s anticipation there and something more … I had been wrong in my judgment of her a while back; in spite of the rather fragile urban charm, she loved this lonely valley, and came back with pleasure to it. … I felt a little rush of warmth towards her, and said, impulsively: ‘It’s lovely, Madame de Valmy! It’s a beautiful place!’
She smiled. ‘Yes, isn’t it? And you’re lucky, Miss Martin, that spring has come early this year. It can be bleak and grim enough in winter, but it’s always beautiful. At least, I think so. It has been my – our home for many years.’
I said impetuously: ‘I shall love it here! I know I shall!’
The gloved hands moved in her lap. ‘I hope you will, Miss Martin.’ The words were kind, but formally spoken, and the smile had gone. She was withdrawn again, cool and remote. She looked away from me. I might be at the right end of the car, but it seemed I must keep to my own side.
I threw her a doubtful little look that she didn’t see, and turned again to my own window. And at that moment I saw the château.
We had been running for a little time along the bottom of the valley, with the Dieudonné plantations – tall firs with the sun and wind in their crests – on our right, and beyond the river the steep woods of Valmy, a wild forest where holly gleamed among oak and bir
ch, and great beeches rose elephant-grey from a tangle of hawthorn and wild clematis. Above these banked and ravelled boughs hung a high plateau; and there, backed by more forest and the steep rise of another hill, stood the Château Valmy, its windows catching the sunlight. I had only a glimpse of it, just enough to show me that here was no romantic castle of turrets and pinnacles; here was the four-square classic grace of the eighteenth century, looking, however, wonderfully remote, and floating insubstantially enough up there in the light above the dark sea of trees. It also looked inaccessible, but I had barely time to wonder how it was approached when the car slowed, turned gently off the main road onto a beautiful little stone bridge that spanned the Merlon, swung again into a steep tunnel of trees, and took the hill with a rush.
The Valmy road was a zigzag, a steep, rather terrifying approach which the big car took in a series of smooth upward rushes, rather like the movement of a lift, swooping up through woodland, then open hillside, and running at last under the high boundary wall that marked the end of the château’s formal garden. At the top was a gravel sweep as big as a small field. We swung effortlessly off the zigzag onto this, and came round in a magnificent curve to stop in front of the great north door.
The chauffeur had Madame de Valmy’s door open and was helping her to alight. Albertine, without a glance or a word for me, busied herself with wraps and hand-luggage. I got out of the car and stood waiting, while my employer paused for a moment talking to Bernard in a low rapid French that I couldn’t catch.
I did wonder for a moment if her instructions could have anything to do with me, because the man’s little dark eyes kept flickering towards me almost as if he weren’t attending to what his employer said. But it must only have been a natural interest in a newcomer, because presently he bent his head impassively enough and turned without a further glance at me to attend to the luggage.