‘I’ll leave it till later, if I may.’
‘It’s as you wish.’ Again the shrewd twinkling glance. ‘Shall I send Berthe to unpack for you?’
‘No, thank you.’ That look meant that she knew quite well that I wouldn’t want a maid exploring my meagre suitcase. Far from resenting the thought, I was grateful for it. ‘Where’s the nursery?’ I asked. ‘Beyond Master Philip’s bedroom?’
‘No. His bedroom’s the end one, then yours, then your sitting-room, then the nursery. Beyond that come Madam’s rooms, and the Master’s are round the corner above the library.’
‘Oh, yes. He has a lift there, hasn’t he?’
‘That’s so, miss. It was put in soon after the accident. That’d be, let’s see, twelve years ago come June.’
‘I was told about that. Were you here then, Mrs. Seddon?’
‘Oh, yes, indeed I was.’ She nodded at me with a certain complacency. ‘I came here thirty-two years ago, miss, when the Master was first married.’
I sat down on the edge of the bed and looked at her with interest. ‘Thirty-two years? That’s a long time, Mrs. Seddon. Did you come with the first Madame de Valmy, then?’
‘That I did. She was from Northumberland, the same as me.’
‘Then she was English?’ I said, surprised.
‘Indeed, yes. She was a lovely girl, Miss Deborah. I’d been in service at her home ever since she was a little girl. She met the Master in Paris one spring, and they was engaged in a fortnight, just like that. Oh, very romantic it all was, very romantic. She said to me, she said: “Mary” – that’s my name, miss – “Mary,” she said, “you’ll come with me, won’t you? I won’t feel so far from home then,” she said.’ Mrs. Seddon nodded at me, with an easy sentimental moistening of the eye. ‘So, seeing as I was courting Arthur – that’s Mr. Seddon – meself at the time, I married him and made him go along too. I couldn’t let Miss Debbie adventure all by herself to foreign parts, like.’
‘Of course not,’ I said sympathetically, and Mrs. Seddon beamed, settling her arms together under the plump bosom, obviously ready to gossip for as long as I would listen. She gave the appearance of one indulging in a favourite pastime whose rules were almost forgotten. If I had been delighted to see her pleasant English face after the secret countenances of Albertine and Bernard, it was obvious that Mrs. Seddon had been equally pleased to see me. And the governess, of course, was not on the proscribed list: this could not be called Gossiping with the Servants. I supposed that, for me, Mrs. Seddon was hardly on the proscribed list either. At any rate I was going to gossip all I could.
I prompted her: ‘And then when your Miss Debbie … died, you didn’t go back to England? What made you stay on, Mrs. Seddon?’
As to that, it seemed that she was not quite sure herself. Miss Debbie’s father had died meanwhile and the house in England had been sold, while here at Valmy Mrs. Seddon and her husband had excellent jobs which ‘the Master’ seemed quite disposed to let them keep. … I also gathered that Miss Debbie’s interest had lifted them into positions which in another house they might never have filled; Seddon himself had been on my one sight of him impeccably polished, neutral and correct; Mrs. Seddon, too, had all the trappings of the competent and superior housekeeper; but her voice and some of her mannerisms had, gloriously defying gentility, remained the homely and genuine voice and ways of Mary Seddon, erstwhile second-gardener’s daughter.
I listened to a long description of Miss Debbie, and others of Miss Debbie’s home, father, pony, clothes, jewellery, wedding, wedding presents and wedding guests. When we appeared to be about to launch (via how much Miss Debbie’s mother would have liked to be at the wedding if only she had been alive) on a description of Miss Debbie’s mother’s clothes, jewellery, wedding, and so on, as observed by Mrs. Seddon’s mother – then I thought it was time to prod her gently back to foreign parts.
‘And there was Miss Debbie’s son, wasn’t there? Of course you wanted to stay and look after him?’
‘Mr. Rowl?’ She primmed her lips a little. ‘French nurses they had for him. Such a quiet little boy as he was, too – a bit like Master Philip here, very quiet and never a mite of bother. You’d never have thought—’ But here she stopped, sighing a little wheezily, and shook her head. ‘Eh, well, miss, he’s half foreign, say what you will.’
There was all rural England in the condemnation. I waited, gravely expectant, but she merely added, maddeningly: ‘But there, I never was one to gossip. And now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ll have to be getting about my work and leaving you to unpack. Now, miss, if there’s anything you want you’ve only to ask me or Seddon and we’ll do our best to help you.’
‘Thank you very much. I’m awfully glad you’re here, Mrs. Seddon,’ I added naïvely.
She looked pleased. ‘Well, now, that’s very nice of you, miss, I’m sure. But you’ll soon feel at home and pick things up. I couldn’t speak a word of French when I came here first, and now I can talk it as fast as they can.’
‘I heard you. It sounded wonderful.’ I stood up and clicked back the locks of my suitcase. ‘As you say, thirty years is a long time, especially when one’s away from home. You didn’t feel tempted to go back to England, say, when Monsieur de Valmy married again?’
‘Oh, we talked of it, Seddon and I,’ she said comfortably, ‘but Seddon’s that easy-going, and we liked the new Madam, and she was satisfied, so we stayed. Besides, I’ve had the asthma terrible bad since a girl, and, say what you like, none of these new-fangled things they give you, anti-hysterics and such-like, seem to do me any good. I used to get it terrible bad at home, but up here it cleared up something wonderful. It still comes now and again, but it soon goes off. It’s the air. Wonderful healthy it is up here, and very dry.’
‘It’s certainly lovely.’
‘And then,’ said Mrs. Seddon, ‘after the Master had his accident, she wouldn’t hear of us going. He couldn’t stand changes, you see.’
‘I did gather that from what he said to me in the hall. Does he – does he have much pain, Mrs. Seddon?’
‘Pain? No. But he has his days,’ said Mrs. Seddon cryptically. ‘And you can’t blame him, the way things are.’
‘No, of course not. He’s bound to get depressed at times.’
‘Depressed?’ She looked at me blankly. ‘The Master?’
I was still trying to equate the self-confessed ‘neurotic’ with the impression of easy and competent power that Léon de Valmy gave. ‘Yes. Does he get sort of sorry for himself at times?’
She gave a sound suspiciously like a snort. ‘Sorry for himself? Not him! Mind you, this last few years he’s not been just as sweet-tempered as he might be, but he’s all there, miss, you may be sure. He’d never be the one to give up because of a little thing like being crippled for life!’
‘I think I can see that. In fact you never think of that when you talk to him.’ (I didn’t add ‘unless he reminds you’, but the thought persisted.)
‘That’s so.’ She nodded at me again. ‘And he forgets it himself, most times. What with that electric chair of his, and the lift, and the telephone to every corner of the place, and that there Bernard to be the legs of him, there’s nothing he can’t do. But now and then, just like that, something’ll bring it home to him, and then. …’
I said, still thinking of the scene in the hall: ‘What sort of thing?’
‘Dear only knows. It might be a bad night, or a report coming in that something’s gone wrong or been neglected in some place he can’t get to himself to see to it, or something that needs doing and no money to do it with, or Mr. Rowl—’ As before, she stopped abruptly.
I waited. She pulled unnecessarily at a chair-cover to straighten it. She said vaguely: ‘Mr. Rowl runs the other estate for him, Bellyveen, in the Midi, and there’s always trouble over money, and it upsets the Master, and besides … ah, well, he’s not often here, which is as it should be, seeing he’s the one that reminds the Master most often that h
e’s a helpless cripple for all the powerful ways he has with him.’
I stirred. ‘Reminds him? That’s rather beastly.’
She looked shocked. ‘Oh, not on purpose, you understand. I didn’t mean that! It’s only that he – well, Mr. Rowl might be the Master like he was twenty years ago, you see.’
‘Oh, I see what you mean. He does all the things his father used to like doing. Polo, for instance?’
She shot me a surprised look. ‘Did they tell you about that?’
‘No. I heard it from someone who knew them – someone I met on the plane.’
‘Oh, I see. Yes, that sort of thing. He could put his hand to anything, the Master.’ She smiled reminiscently and a little sadly. ‘Miss Debbie always did say he’d break his neck one day. He was such a one for sport – all sorts, motor cars, horses, speedboats … fighting with swords, even. He’s got a shelf of silver cups for that alone.’
‘Fencing?’
‘That’s it. But cars and horses were the chief thing. I’ve often thought he’d break his own neck and everyone else’s, the way he’d come up that zigzag from the Valmy bridge. Sometimes,’ added Mrs. Seddon surprisingly, ‘you’d think a devil was driving him … like as if he had to be able to do everything – and do it better than anybody else.’
Yes, I thought, I can believe that. And even crippled he has to be a crippled archangel …
I said: ‘And now he has to sit and watch his son riding and driving and fencing—?’
‘As to that,’ said Mrs. Seddon, ‘Mr. Rowl hasn’t got the money … which is just as well, or maybe he’d go the same way as his father. And like I said, he’s not here very often anyway. He lives at Bellyveen. I’ve never been to Bellyveen myself, but I’ve heard tell it’s very pretty.’
I said ‘Oh?’ with an expression of polite interest as she began to tell me about Bellevigne, but I wasn’t really listening. I was reflecting that if Raoul de Valmy was really a younger copy of his father it was probably just as well he visited Valmy only rarely. I couldn’t imagine two of Léon de Valmy settling at all comfortably under the same roof … I stirred again. There was that same damned romantic imagination at work still … And what had I to go on, after all? A vague snatch of memory twelve years old, and the impression of an overwhelming personality in some odd way playing with me for its own amusement, for some reason concerned to give me a picture of itself that was not the truth …
It struck me then, for the first time, that there had been a notable omission from my welcome to the Château Valmy.
And that was the owner of all this magnificence, the most important of the Valmys, Monsieur le Comte, Philippe.
And now Mrs. Seddon was preparing to go about her own affairs.
She plodded firmly away to the door, only to hesitate there and turn. I bent over my case and began to lift things out onto the coverlet. I could feel her eyeing me.
She said: ‘You … the Master … he seemed all right with you, did he? I thought I heard him laugh when I was waiting upstairs for you.’
I straightened up, my hands full of folded handkerchiefs. ‘Perfectly all right, Mrs. Seddon. He was very pleasant.’
‘Oh. That’s good. I’d like to have been able to have a word with you first and warn you what he sometimes was like with strangers.’
I could well understand her slightly anxious probing. It was obvious that the emotional temperature, so to speak, of the Château Valmy, must depend very largely on Léon de Valmy and ‘his days’.
I said cheerfully: ‘Thanks very much, but don’t worry, Mrs. Seddon. He was awfully nice to me and made me feel very welcome.’
‘Did he now?’ Her eyes were anxious and a little puzzled. ‘Oh, well, that’s all right, then. I know he was very pleased when Madam’s letter came about you, but as a rule he hates changes in the house. That’s why we were so surprised when Master Philip’s Nanny was dismissed after being with the family all those years, and they said a new girl was coming from England.’
‘Oh, yes, Madame de Valmy told me about her.’ I put the handkerchiefs down and lifted some underwear out of the suitcase. ‘But she wasn’t dismissed, surely? I understood from Madame that she didn’t want to live in the wilds of Valmy and, as Madame was in London at the time, Monsieur de Valmy wrote urgently and asked her to find an English governess while she was there.’
‘Oh, no.’ Mrs. Seddon was downright. ‘You must have misunderstood what Madam said. Nanny was devoted to Master Philip, and I’m sure she broke her heart when she had to go.’
‘Oh? I was sure that Madame said she’d left because the place was so lonely. I must have been mistaken.’ I found myself shrugging my shoulders, and hastily abandoned that very Gallic gesture. ‘Maybe she was just warning me what it would be like. But she did seem very anxious to engage someone to teach him English.’
‘Master Philip’s English is excellent,’ said Mrs. Seddon, rather primly.
I laughed and said: ‘I’m glad to hear it. Well, whatever the case, I suppose if Philippe’s nine he’s old enough to graduate from a Nanny to a governess of sorts. I gathered from Monsieur de Valmy that that was the idea. And for a start I’m going to try and remember to call the nursery the “schoolroom”. I’m sure one’s too old for a nursery when one’s nine.’
‘Master Philip’s very young for his age,’ she said, ‘though there’s times when he’s too solemn for my liking. But there, you can’t expect much after what’s happened, poor mite. He’ll get over it in the end, but it takes time.’
‘I know,’ I said.
She eyed me for a moment and then said, tentatively: ‘If I might ask – do you remember your own folks, now?’
‘Oh, yes.’ I looked across the room and met the kindly inquisitive gaze. Fair was fair, after all. She must be every bit as curious about me as I was about the Valmys. I said: ‘I was fourteen when they were killed. In an air accident, like Philippe’s. I suppose Madame de Valmy told you I’d been at an orphanage in England?’
‘Indeed, yes. She wrote that she’d heard of you through a friend of hers, a Lady Benchley, who comes up every year to Evian, and Lady Benchley thought very highly of you, very highly.’
‘That was very nice of her. Lady Benchley was one of the Governors at the orphanage for the last three years I was there. Then when I left to be assistant at a boys’ school it turned out she had a son there. She came up to me on Visitors’ Day and talked to me, and when I told her I hated the place she asked me if I’d ever considered a private job abroad, because this friend of hers – Madame de Valmy – was looking for a governess for her nephew and had asked her if she knew of anyone from the Home. When I heard the job was in France I jumped at it. I – I’d always fancied living in France, somehow. I went straight up to London next day and saw her. Lady Benchley had promised to telephone about me, and – well, I got the job.’ I didn’t add that Madame must have taken Lady Benchley’s recommendation to be worth a good deal more than it actually was. Lady Benchley was a kindly scatterbrain who spent a good deal of her time acting as a sort of private labour-exchange between her friends and the Constance Butcher Home, and I doubt if she had ever known very much about me. And I had certainly got the impression that Madame de Valmy had been so anxious to find a suitable young woman for the post during her short stay in London that she hadn’t perhaps probed as far back into my history as she might have done. Not, of course, that it mattered.
I smiled at Mrs. Seddon, who was still eyeing me with that faintly puzzled look. Then all at once she smiled back, and nodded, so that the gold chain on her bosom glittered and swung. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘well,’ and though she didn’t actually add ‘You’ll do,’ the implication was there. She opened the door. ‘And now I really will have to be going. Berthe’ll be up soon with some tea for you; she’s the girl that looks after these rooms and you’ll find she’s a good girl, though a bit what you might call flighty. I expect you’ll make yourself understood to her all right, and Master Philip’ll help.’
‘I expect I shall,’ I said. ‘Where is Master Philip, Mrs. Seddon?’
‘He’s probably in the nursery,’ said Mrs. Seddon, her hand on the door. ‘But Madam particularly said you weren’t to bother with him tonight. You were to have a cup of tea – which I may say is tea, though it took near thirty years to teach them how to make it – and settle yourself in before dinner and you’ll be seeing Master Philip tomorrow. But not to bother yourself tonight.’
‘Very well,’ I said. ‘Thank you, Mrs. Seddon. I shall look forward to that tea.’
The door shut behind her. I could hear the soft plod of her steps along the corridor.
I stood where I was, looking at the door, and absently smoothing the folds of a petticoat between my hands.
I was thinking two things. First that I was not supposed to have heard Mrs. Seddon mentioning the lift in her conversation with Madame de Valmy, and that if I was going to make mistakes as easily as that I had better confess quickly before any real damage was done.
The second thing was Mrs. Seddon’s parting admonition: ‘not to bother with him tonight.’ Had that really been Héloïse de Valmy’s phrase? ‘Not to bother with him.’ And he was ‘probably’ in the nursery. … I laid the petticoat gently in a drawer, then turned and walked out of my pretty bedroom, across the roses-and-ivory sitting-room, towards the schoolroom door. There I hesitated a moment, listening. I could hear nothing.