The Girl at the Lion D'Or

  She began to tremble through the length of her body. ‘I can’t bear it,’ she sobbed. ‘I can’t bear it happening again. No, oh God, no!’

  Hartmann said nothing. She sat down at the table and laid her face on her arms. The words that came out were muffled, and punctuated by wails. Suddenly she swung round, pushing back the chair and collapsed to her knees. She clung to Hartmann’s legs, speechless with sobbing.

  He lifted her up and once more took her in his arms. She grew calmer for a moment and he said, ‘I will think of you every day for the rest of my life.’

  ‘I don’t want you to . . .’ she sobbed, ‘think of me. I want you to . . . be with – oh,’ and the words died away in another convulsion.

  Hartmann began to guide her out into the hall. When she looked up and thought she might never see these walls again, she imagined for a moment that she loved the house as much as she loved him.

  She felt herself being propelled towards the door, and screamed. ‘You can’t do this to me, you can’t do this!’ Her resolution faltered. ‘You couldn’t . . . Oh please, oh my darling please . . .’

  Hartmann’s face was ugly with the effort of self-control. Anne hated the sight of it; she wanted that gentle humour back; she wanted back his strength which was to have redeemed her life.

  He said, ‘You must go.’

  ‘No!’ She began to scream again. ‘I won’t go. You’re going to kill me, you’re a murderer. Oh my darling, oh my love, don’t make me, please, please . . .’

  She was on her knees again. As he took her by the elbows to lift her to her feet she propelled herself once more into his arms.

  He slapped her face hard and shouted at her. ‘You must go at once. Go now!’

  Stunned, she fell silent and stopped crying.

  Hartmann shouted at her again. ‘Get out of here at once. Go now!’

  To her disbelief, Anne felt her fingers on the handle of the door, found that it turned under her pressure. She took a pace outside and then, struck by what she had done, stopped and looked back. She saw him. He was so beautiful to her eyes, but she heard him shout again, and found that she had begun to walk away.

  He turned and flung his arms around a wooden pillar in the hall, sobbing tearlessly.

  8

  THAT NIGHT ANNE was serving dinner at the Lion d’Or. She told herself, as she asked the diners, ‘Have you chosen?’, ‘What would you like for dessert?’ and all the other questions it was her job to put, that at least this was the last time she would be doing it. She would leave tomorrow. Moving on had worked before: it would work again.

  After dinner she went to work for an hour in the bar, which was abnormally busy. The bad weather had kept ashore many of the fishermen from the coastal villages, and some of them had come into town. Anne gave them drinks and took their money with measured politeness, riding the lewd remarks, unaware of her surroundings. One fisherman offered her a drink and she accepted, even though it was strictly against the rules. What did it matter now, anyway? It seemed to have no effect on her, so she drank another, to the delight of the men at the bar.

  Mattlin appeared at his usual time and elbowed his way through the press. He smiled at Anne in his abstracted way, suggesting he had better things he should be doing. Anne smiled back as she gave him his drink.

  When her shift was ending, Mattlin asked her if she wanted to go with him for a drink. She didn’t but she was stunned by what had happened and befuddled by the three glasses of wine she had already had. It was kind of anyone to want her company, she thought; so she agreed. As she took her coat from a hook behind the bar she cast one last look around the room, at the earnest talkers and drinkers and the one or two foolhardy diners who had tackled Bruno’s dish of the day at the far end of the room where the lamps gave a splashed effect on the brown wallpaper behind them.

  Mattlin took her to a bar near the station, the same one she had been to with Hartmann after their weekend away. He ordered a bottle of wine and a waitress lit the candle in their raised wooden stall where no one else could see them. Mattlin smoked and waved his hands around. Anne watched the shapes the glowing end of the cigarette made in the air. She was aware dimly that she was smiling in a vacant way and that Mattlin was becoming increasingly excited. He poured her more wine and she raised the glass again to her lips.

  He grinned. ‘You seem very relaxed tonight, Anne.’

  ‘Oh yes, oh yes. Very relaxed.’

  He spoke of a project he was working on and asked her about her work, but she answered only in the briefest sentences, still with the same dazed smile. He ordered another bottle of wine and she, to his delighted surprise, made no resistance when he filled her glass again. When he had taken her to a café or a bar before she had never drunk more than one glass.

  He saw her put her head forward into her hands and took her by the wrist. ‘Would you like to go now?’ he said.

  Anne nodded, and as she tried to extricate herself from the stall, she stumbled. Mattlin caught her arm and stopped her from falling.

  ‘Shall I walk you home?’

  She nodded, and he took her arm, guiding her along the back streets towards the church.

  At the street door in the rue des Acacias, Anne fumbled for her key and Mattlin opened the lock for her. He guided her across the courtyard and to the narrow black door. He said, ‘I’d better help you upstairs,’ and she made no protest.

  She said, ‘I want to sleep,’ and moved over the polished wooden hallway towards the bedroom. Mattlin followed and took her in his arms. She wanted to cry, but no tears came, so she clung to him. He was someone; she was not alone.

  He pressed his face into hers and parted her lips with his tongue. She pulled her head away, but she did not let go of his arms because she didn’t want to be on her own.

  He began to run his hands over her body, squeezing her breasts, then pushing her towards the bed. She was overtaken by a fatigue so complete that even her will to resist was affected.

  Again she felt his tongue, huge and hard, sticking into the corners of her mouth, crushing her own fluttering and retreating tongue with its muscular probing. She felt his weight on top of her and his right shoulder jarred into her chin as he tore off his jacket. His breath seemed to blow hotly through her head; so close were his lips that his whisper sounded like a shout and when he began to tell her the things he was doing and what further things he intended to do, it sounded like a threat.

  He lifted himself from her to kneel on the bed and fumble with the buttons on his trousers. The sight of his urgency filled her only with indifference. When she felt him inside her she was reminded for an instant of the night at Merlaut when she had experienced this frightening but wonderful sensation for the first time. Then she had felt transfixed and defenceless but also powerful and renewed. Now she felt, more than anything else, exhausted.

  Although she heard Mattlin grunting with the effort of self-restraint, it didn’t take him long to finish. He eased himself off her and felt in his abandoned jacket pocket for a cigarette. He lay back puffing the smoke to the ceiling.

  ‘I hope that was all right,’ he said.

  Anne rolled over on her side and closed her eyes.

  When he had finished his cigarette, he took her elbow and tried to rouse her. Anne, half-asleep, feigned deeper sleep. He spoke to her kindly and asked if he could fetch her anything. He sounded anxious when she didn’t reply.

  He stumbled about the room, picking up pieces of discarded clothing. When he was dressed again he leaned over the bed and listened to her breathing with his ear against her face. He kissed her on the forehead.

  She heard his footsteps going down the stairs and echoing as he crossed the courtyard. Without undressing or opening her eyes, she pulled the covers over her.

  9

  EARLIER IN THE evening Christine had telephoned to say she would be back the next day. She and Marie-Thérèse had quarrelled, though Christine didn’t sound too upset. Hartmann said he would tell Marie to prepare
lunch for two.

  He couldn’t eat the dinner she had left him, but took a bottle of wine into his study where he tried to read. The sentences seemed to sit meaninglessly in front of his eyes, however many times he looked at them. He walked around the room and sorted out some papers into different files, but there was nothing really left to do. He had prepared all he needed for the insurance case arising from the negligence at the marsh reclamation works and none of the other cases he was working on needed attention. Marie came to ask him if there was anything else he wanted, and he told her she could go to bed.

  He thought of driving into town for a drink at one of the small bars up by the station, but since he didn’t want to talk to anyone it seemed pointless. Normally he liked being on his own, but on this occasion he found his thoughts exhausting company. For minutes at a time he was quite calm, and then it was as if a sluice had been opened and his mind was filled again with anguish. He didn’t know if it was his own or someone else’s.

  At about eleven he turned off the lights downstairs and went up to bed. He fastened the shutters tight, shivering in the cold blast that drove in between the insubstantial flaps of wood. He climbed into the wide expanse of unwarmed bedclothes and closed his eyes in the darkness. He thought of the dawn at Merlaut when he sat beneath the apple tree before returning to find Anne’s arm childishly reach out to him. When briefly he had been able to step aside from the sensuous delight of the evening’s events his thoughts had turned to the book of essays, by Montaigne, that he had seen in Anne’s rooms. At Merlaut he knew he had gone against one of Montaigne’s precepts: I desist. Now by banishing Anne was he following more closely the philosopher’s advice? He was desisting in a way; but too brutally and far too late.

  After an hour or so he got out of bed and took his dressing-gown from the chair. The floorboards on the landing creaked comfortably beneath his bare feet, and as he descended the stairs he felt the risen banister smooth against his palm. Running his fingers through his hair in some automatic vanity he crossed the cold marble floor of the hall to the piano, on top of which he found a box of cigarettes and some matches. He began to smoke as he walked about the silent house, leaving a thin grey trail behind him. In the dining-room he found his feet lifted by the sprung parquet floor, and he thought of how his father used to sit at the head of the table on one of his rare visits home and of the cowed anxious looks his mother used to give him as she supervised the dinner.

  He pulled back the shutters and sat in the window seat gazing out towards the lake. He placed the flat of his right hand against his forehead and leaned his elbow on the window sill. Twice, when Christine had been away, he had slept with Anne. In the course of the night he had been woken by her restlessness and had wondered if the past would ever leave her, even when she slept.

  He had loved her then, he was certain, when he had put out his arm to still her troubled movements and willed a sense of peace into her heart. What strange connections in his mind had then corroded that pure feeling?

  The energy that had driven him when he had first made love to her at Merlaut had been diverted. Instead of gusting, as it should have done, fitfully and playfully in his dealing with her, it had precipitated a long inward storm of compassion. His obsessed identification with her plight had prevented him from seeing her as someone opposite, discrete, and satisfactorily herself.

  It was not through cruelty that he had turned her away, he thought now, as he tried to forgive himself for what he had done, but through an excess of sympathy. The dark-eyed waitress he had longed for when she first stood beside him in the attic of his house, the lover whose name had erased the memory of all others when he whispered it in her ear – Anne, whose every action towards him had been illuminated by the gentlest trust and hope, had gone from his mind. In the slow rage of his imagination, he had subsumed her.

  These thoughts were not all clear in Hartmann’s mind. Often he saw only a man’s hand slip itself around the butt of a revolver. He began to feel rage towards Anne’s father. He too could have desisted. What consequences he had unleashed; what chain of despair and loneliness that would contaminate the lives of so many people for decades yet to come.

  When Anne had come that day to the Manor and he had stroked her hair, he had felt as though the pain passed through his hand, as though he were a medium of some greater evil. When she had said, ‘This is worse than anything I have ever known,’ all his frantic imaginings had been confirmed; they were the words he had most dreaded to hear.

  Hartmann clasped his hands tight on the window-ledge as he looked out into the darkness. He felt angry, and this anger was better than the aimless anguish he had felt before, but it depended on his being able to hold in his mind the picture of the murder and on his being sure that the consequences followed so surely on the events.

  At other moments he felt that every action in the world was alone and complete in itself without reference to others, and then he was filled with a sorrow he could not bear.

  Anne did not awake till noon the next day. She washed and changed her clothes and began to pack her suitcases, placing in them the picture of the Parisian roofs, the coffee pot, the doll, and throwing her clothes on top. The first train she could take was at three o’clock, and this would give her time to prepare for the journey. She wrote letters to Mlle Calmette, to Pierre and to her friend Mathilde, promising the last two she would write again from Paris. She had just enough money from her wages and from what she had earned by sewing for Mlle Calmette to pay for lodgings for a day or two in Paris until she could find a job.

  She tried to put the episode with Mattlin out of her mind. It troubled her that she had done the same thing with him as with Hartmann; that the most joyous thing to her could also be the most regrettable. Her sense of repulsion, however, was not as great as her sadness. Because she had no respect for Mattlin she determined not to waste her thoughts on him.

  She bumped the heavy cases down the scrubbed stairs and out into the courtyard, then looked back for a moment at the window of her sitting-room, where she had sat and watched the sun on the old walls below. ‘Goodbye, Zozo,’ she called out to the empty space as she moved towards the street.

  She hoped she would see no one she knew as she made her way along the back streets towards the station. Luckily it was cold, and such people as were out had their chins buried in their coats and their gaze on the pavements in front of them. Down a diagonal road Anne saw the sweep of the Place de la Victoire and she remembered that she had promised the Patron to look at the war memorial and think about the men who had died. She glanced towards the station, where she could see the clock: twenty to three. She dragged her cases down into the square and went over to the obelisk with its large stone slab whose inscription bore witness to the town’s unwilling sacrifice. What was it the Patron had said? That they would be only names for her? And so they were – sixty or so, with initials, some bizarre but mostly local, homely names with two or three sets of people with the same surname. She wondered what their families must have thought. She tried to put a face and a laugh to some of them, to imagine what they had been like to those who knew them, but it was impossible. At least their names remained; against the gore and squalor of their deaths there was this tiny counterweight of balance.

  She bought her ticket and sat down in the station waiting-room. She had not been able to bring the gramophone with her because it was too much to carry; she might send for it later. Or perhaps, she thought, as she began unconsciously to rub the swollen palm of her right hand against the rough waistband of her skirt, she might not.

  Hartmann sat at the desk of his study. He had told Christine at lunchtime that Anne would not be returning, and she had tactfully concealed her elation beneath some neutral talk about replacing her.

  Hartmann knew what Anne was doing. He knew that she would move swiftly to escape and start again, just as she had done before. He knew how hard she would be fighting in her mind. She was saying to herself that it had not been so very w
onderful in any case; that most of her time had been taken up in frustration and waiting. He could feel the energy of her mental processes and wished that she would drain him of his resources and use them too. He willed her to succeed, sitting with his hands folded staring straight ahead in his reverie.

  He recalled the time he had first watched her in the bar at the hotel and how she used to swing her long black-stockinged leg backwards and forwards as her shoe grazed the floor in time to an imaginary dance beat. And then the flush of colour in her cheeks, and those long-lashed eyes that had begun their slow undermining of his self-control. He remembered how he had wondered what her life might be like; and then how, some time after that at Merlaut, he had stroked her hair as she lay in her troubled sleep and how he had tried to bring calm to her through the gentle touch of his fingers. Then he thought of the explosion of a revolver shot, echoing in a shocked silence underground, and the cry of a small girl running alone into a field.

  He looked out of the window, across the lake, with his head in his hands. In his mind he saw a girl, sitting in a railway carriage with two heavy suitcases on the rack opposite her. He saw her hair, her face, her eyes and all her movements. He believed that now his long effort of imagination was over, and he knew truthfully what she was feeling, and so, when he lowered his hands from his face, he found at last that tears were streaming from his eyes.

  10

  ANNE WATCHED FROM the window as the train chugged through the pallid countryside towards Paris, blowing clouds of smoke into the November afternoon. She thought of the landscape of her childhood and the wooded slopes around the house where she was born. They seemed as alien to her now as these anonymous fields through which she passed. Since she felt she belonged to no part of it, she could make no sense of this material world, whether it was in the shape of natural phenomena, like woods and rivers, or in the guise of man-made things like houses, furniture and glass. Without the greeting of personal affection or association they were no more than collections of arbitrarily linked atoms that wriggled and chased each other into shapes that men had named. Although Anne didn’t phrase her thoughts in such words, she felt her separation from the world. The fact that many of the patterns formed by random matter seemed quite beautiful made no difference; try as she might, she could dredge no meaning from the fertile hedgerows, no comfort from the pointless loveliness of the swelling woods and hills.