The Girl at the Lion D'Or

  She moved to the top of the stairs. He said, ‘Do you mind finding your own way back? I want to stay here for a few minutes.’

  She was hurt by his coldness. ‘No,’ she said. ‘That’s all right.’ She quickly descended the steps before he should see the hot swell and flow of her tears.

  7

  ON SUNDAY EVENING Hartmann went to play chess with Jean-Philippe. Since his father had spent so much of his life travelling, Hartmann had seldom spent time at what was supposed to be his home. He had scarcely seen Jean-Philippe since they had been at school together, though that shared experience was enough to form the basis of a renewed friendship.

  He left shortly before midnight, and on the way home the headlights of the car picked out the sandy paths that led away into the pines; through the open window came the smell of the trees and the black onrushing loneliness of the night. Such troubles as Hartmann had were barely yet stirring in his head and were not enough to prevent his taking pleasure in the scented darkness and the approach of home.

  He climbed the broad wooden stairs on tip-toe, seeing the lights were out, then undressed in the bathroom and quietly opened the bedroom door in his nightshirt. There was no movement from the bed. Gently he pulled the shutters open and stood, barefooted in front of the big window watching the woods on the other side of the lake and the grey moon apparently charging upstream against the current of the clouds. He heard a rustle of bedclothes, then a hand touched his shoulder. Christine murmured in his ear as she ran her fingers over his chest and kissed his neck.

  ‘Why are you so late?’

  ‘It’s not late, is it? I went to play chess with Jean-Philippe.’

  ‘I was tired, I went to bed early.’ She ran her hands through his hair. ‘Come to bed now.’

  Hartmann stood where he was, disinclined to move. Christine circled round in front of him, placing herself between him and the window. She kissed him on the lips, then let her head fall to his chest. She murmured to him as she knelt, and let her lips travel over his body. Hartmann felt a complete absence of desire – a condition that was so unusual in him that for a moment he couldn’t recognise it. Then he quickly turned away. He could barely believe what he had felt, or rather failed to feel, as he climbed into bed.

  During her subsequent weekly visits to the Manor, Anne found herself devising little tricks to try to be alone with Hartmann. She disliked having to be so cunning but she couldn’t bring herself to disapprove of the feeling itself: there seemed nothing in it that was mean or calculated to do harm; and, this being the case, there was surely no reason why she shouldn’t act on the impetus of such a natural and friendly emotion. She felt some slight misgivings towards Mme Hartmann, but it would have been presumptuous to elevate them to the status of guilt.

  Her chief problem lay in breaking down Hartmann’s reserve. Although he was pleasant to her and talked to her as she worked, both at the Manor and the hotel, he never overstepped the limits of propriety. His relations with her were those that a married man of once bohemian habits, confident in his position, might have with a waitress of slightly unusual qualities. If he was occasionally more intimate or more indiscreet than one might expect, that merely proved his disregard for bourgeois prescriptions of behaviour. The spirit of that prescription, however, was one he followed faithfully. Anne thought that if she could once cajole him into something rash, it would perhaps unlock the feeling she felt sure he must be harbouring unknown, perhaps, even to himself. So when he ordered brandy in the town bar of the hotel she half-filled a tumbler with it; when he asked for red wine she placed the bottle on the counter and constantly refilled his glass. On one occasion she even fortified a dark beer with a covert shot of eau de vie. But his constitution or his self-control remained stronger than anything she could concoct.

  Mattlin, on the other hand, needed no encouragement to continue his campaign of attrition. He was philosophical in his pursuit of women. At this time he was carrying on an affair with a doctor’s widow who lived on the Boulevard. Her husband had been twenty years her senior and had lived for only five years after their marriage. Mattlin’s affair with her had begun before she met the doctor, had continued after his death and, as far as anyone knew, had not stopped at any point in between. He went to her house each Wednesday and Sunday for lunch. The visits were not without their disagreeable sides – chiefly the small but sharp-toothed dog that seemed to suspect Mattlin’s motives, and the widow’s own vague resentment of his behaviour. She was, however, a formidable cook who specialised in fish bathed in cream and brandy sauces and in elaborate puddings of her own devising built with egg yolks, spun sugar and yet more cream. As he hiccuped gently into his digestif, Mattlin sometimes felt too bloated to follow the widow through the double doors of her bedroom to fulfil the function of his visit, but the thought of losing her incomparable lunches proved a potent aphrodisiac.

  And then there was Jacqueline, the postman’s daughter, whom Roussel had suggested might be willing to take on the extra work at Hartmann’s house. She was certainly an energetic girl. Mattlin had first encountered her when she arrived at his house one morning on a man’s bicycle in the course of distributing some letters in place of her sick father. She had only recently left school but it took little persuasion from Mattlin to allow him to deflower her one evening on the sofa of his sitting-room after she had come round to deliver a telegram. She had developed a sentimental attachment to him which he had done little to discourage in view of the physical rewards she offered by way of her willing, freckled body.

  There was also his sister-in-law, though she lived far enough away for their couplings to be both irregular and taken at full speed in the brief interludes of his brother’s excursions into the garden.

  Finally, there was also, technically speaking, Mattlin’s fiancée, Isabelle, a timid creature with irregular teeth and a passion for collecting porcelain. After two years of postponed wedding plans both she and her father, a local magistrate, were beginning to suspect that Mattlin’s heart was not in it.

  With the doctor’s widow, however, growing more rapacious and his own waistline thickening, with Jacqueline nearing twenty and starting to lose her allure, with his sister-in-law so far away and with Isabelle starting to grow restive, it was clearly time for Mattlin to strengthen his flagging love life with a vigorous new affair. So, the following Saturday, he sipped his pastis patiently till Anne had finished her shift in the dining-room.

  But all was not well there. Bruno had decided that it was to be one of his gastronomic evenings and had prepared a fixed menu which was more adventurous than his usual leg of lamb and beans with thin gravy. To begin with he offered a sideboard full of hors d’oeuvre from which the diners were invited to help themselves. Anne explained that there were too many dishes for her to bring on a trolley or to enumerate for each of the clients. What awaited them was certainly varied, comprising a large number of pâtés and salads, but presented in a way that characterised Bruno’s cooking. A wooden-handled knife, which he had intended as an invitation to a healthy portion, extruded from a trough of terrine; but the effect, in the mangled and undercooked meat, was of a murder weapon. There was a shoal of sardines arranged across three dishes without even a leaf of parsley to relieve their multiplied cyclopean stare. A flagon of wine vinegar with an inch-wide neck was difficult to control with any precision and the small, slippery drum of olive oil rebuffed all attempts to pick it up.

  The centrepiece of the dinner was a saddle of venison stuffed with kidneys and other indeterminate offal. Bruno left Roland in charge of the kitchen and went to see how his hors d’oeuvre was progressing in the dining-room. He came from the Vaucluse and saw it as his mission to bring some southern warmth to the grey-fronted, shuttered town of Janvilliers. When he noticed that his food was hardly touched he imagined that it was because of a natural reluctance on the part of the guests.

  ‘Don’t be shy, my friends,’ he said to a table of six. ‘Take your plates back and fill them again.’
>
  ‘You are very kind, monsieur,’ replied the head of the family, Clissard, a clerk who worked at the town hall. ‘I am sure we shall in due course.’

  Bruno’s idea of charm was an unusual one. He was a man of enormous size with a squinting eye set like a bloated pearl slightly lower than the good one in a red expanse of flesh. He held his left arm limply from the elbow as though it had been mangled in a piece of farm machinery or deformed by the constriction of an unnatural birth. In fact it seemed to function perfectly well when he used it in the kitchen, and the dangling was just a mannerism he had cultivated in the belief that it added refinement to his appearance.

  Mme Bouin disapproved of his excursions into the dining-room and had told him so on several occasions, but when the mood was on him Bruno could not easily be gainsaid.

  In the kitchen Roland was prodding at the venison with a long fork. ‘Stupid pig,’ he said to Anne. ‘He thinks they don’t eat this dog-shit because they’re too shy to go to the sideboard.’

  Bruno came through the swing doors. ‘Girl, where are those cheeses? Have you laid them out?’

  Anne started and put down the pan she was holding. ‘Yes, I put them on a vine leaf I took from the courtyard and then I put them on their board in the larder.’

  ‘Larder! Jesus Christ, it’s like a tomb in there. Go and bring them into the warmth where they can breathe. And you, boy, what are you poking at that meat for?’

  ‘To see if it was ready. I suppose you’ll want it carving.’

  ‘Not yet, idiot. I’m going to take it in and show them next door before I carve it. You know nothing about food. All you think about is girls. Oh yes, I know your tricks. Don’t think I don’t know what you’re up to, you perverted little bastard!’

  Bruno’s voice rang round the stone-flagged kitchen and echoed off the walls; it soared over the single beam with its throttled string of onions and round over the big stone sink, across the slatted rows of hotel crockery with its bogus crest acquired at auction in a bankrupt château; it boomed around the small courtyard with its vines and cracked tiles in which the grey drizzle was seething; it travelled down the tight, dark corridor to the echoing hall and the bend beneath the stairs where a steel-nibbed pen rendered the costed hours into columns of black debit; and it pierced the gap between the swing doors to the dining-room in which it obliterated the polite formalities of the diners to ring with the kind of passion and authority that Bruno imagined were the identifying features of his cooking.

  Clissard the clerk coughed and poured a glass of wine for his wife and some water for his sister-in-law.

  Bruno carved the venison at the sideboard among the remnants of the hors d’oeuvre and handed the plates to Anne, who distributed them among the reluctant diners. One of them, a dentist with a thin moustache who was said to beat his wife, called out to her.

  ‘Mademoiselle, I distinctly asked you for half a bottle of Bordeaux when I sat down. This is not Bordeaux. Even if you cannot read, you ought to know that this is not a Bordeaux. The bottle is the wrong shape.’

  Anne fetched him the wine-list and the dentist fussed over his spectacles before complaining that now the wine would not have time to breathe. ‘And the meat is getting cold,’ he added when he had finally found the vintage he had ordered.

  Anne went to ask Mme Bouin for the key to the cellar. ‘I’m afraid you gave me the wrong bottle last time,’ she said.

  Mme Bouin raised her head from the ledger. ‘Are you suggesting that I am incompetent, mademoiselle?’

  ‘What? No, no, of course not.’

  Mme Bouin stood up and wrapped her cardigan around her. ‘I will fetch it myself,’ she said, and set off down the corridor. Anne stood by the counter and hummed to herself, swinging her left leg gently so the shoe grazed the floor in time to an imaginary beat.

  ‘You are a disgrace, mademoiselle,’ the dentist said to her when she returned to his table.

  ‘I’m sorry, monsieur?’

  ‘Your service is appalling. And as for the food. What is this muck? This “gastronomic” menu?’

  ‘Venison, monsieur. It’s one of the chef’s specialities.’

  ‘Specialities my foot! And those disgusting sardines. Has the man no idea of how to make even a simple hors d’oeuvre?’

  ‘Monsieur, if you want to complain I can ask the chef to –’

  ‘Don’t interrupt me, young woman. You’re new here, aren’t you? You’ll soon learn how I like things. I shall have to make a complaint, you know.’

  ‘If Monsieur would like to speak to the chef about the food –’

  ‘It’s the service I’m complaining about. I don’t come out to dinner to be told by the waitress she can’t be bothered to bring me my first course because there’s too much for her to carry. And then to be given the wrong wine. After all the years I’ve been coming here.’

  ‘I’m very sorry, monsieur, I –’

  ‘I don’t want to hear your excuses. Just get back to the kitchen.’

  ‘Yes, monsieur.’

  Although she was taken aback by the dentist’s ferocity, Anne felt pleased with the way she had remained calm. She hoped that now the dentist had given her a telling-off he would feel satisfied and would not complain to Mme Bouin or even the Patron.

  When she pushed open the doors of the kitchen she found Bruno drinking deeply from the dentist’s returned half-bottle which had somehow found its way on to the draining board. He put it down with a thump as she came in.

  ‘Mademoiselle,’ he said with unusual delicacy, ‘will you take wine with me?’

  ‘I shouldn’t.’

  ‘But you will. To please me.’

  She laughed, her spirits quickly restored by Bruno’s theatrical courtesy. ‘To please you.’

  ‘Allow me,’ he said, taking a small glass from the top of the dresser and filling it. She raised it to him. He lifted the half-bottle, drained what was left and threw it into the rubbish bin in the corner of the room.

  ‘Your good health, mademoiselle.’ He belched, as the air rushed back up his gullet.

  ‘And yours, monsieur,’ she said, quickly draining her glass.

  ‘And now for some cheese,’ said Bruno. ‘Go and get the plates first.’

  It was a melancholy job, thought Anne, collecting the almost untouched plates of food from the dining-room. It had gone quiet again in there and on every plate that she lifted the knife and fork seemed to clink more loudly. She dreaded the dentist’s table where she tried not to catch his eye as she calmly lifted his plate.

  ‘A disgrace,’ he muttered again, ‘a disgrace.’

  She put the plates on a trolley in the corner, and, instead of taking them through the swing doors to the kitchen, wheeled them out through the side door into the corridor and along to the backyard. She quickly scraped as much of the rejected food as she could into a dustbin, covered it with some newspaper, wiped her hands and returned to the kitchen via the dining-room where she braved the inquisitive glances of the diners.

  Bruno was too busy with the cheese to notice.

  ‘They liked it, Bruno.’

  ‘Yes, yes, of course. It never fails. Where’s that boy taken the bread? Here, scab-face. Yes, yes, the secret is to get a great deal of garlic into the sauce.’

  Bruno took the cheeses through himself and toured the tables with them, explaining the provenance of each. The last table was that of Clissard and his family. Bruno brandished his knife in the air and fixed Mme Clissard with his good eye. He stood behind her sister who arched her back away from his blood-spattered apron.

  When Bruno returned to the kitchen, Anne described the woman’s face as she had tried to keep her black dress and bare shoulders away from his belly. Anne clasped her hand over her mouth so the sound of her laughter would not be audible in the dining-room. She didn’t hear the door from the corridor swing open and it wasn’t until she heard a familiar voice that she realised she and Bruno were not alone.

  ‘Mademoiselle.’

&
nbsp; She turned to see the tall figure of Mme Bouin lit from the dingy light behind, her lips turned downwards in angular furrows.

  ‘Please come with me.’

  Anne wiped her eyes with the back of her hand and straightened her skirt. She followed Mme Bouin to the foot of the stairs.

  ‘Mademoiselle, I don’t know quite what you think your function in this hotel is, but I think it is time we cleared up one or two things. I have tonight received a detailed complaint from one of the guests about your slapdash service. It seems you failed to take down his order correctly –’

  ‘I’m sorry, madame, it was because Pierre wasn’t here. I –’

  ‘Don’t interrupt me.’ Mme Bouin rapped the top of the desk with her knuckle, causing the keys to clank against her bosom. Anne noticed that her left eye seemed almost sightless now; perhaps she had a cataract. Then both eyes seemed to ignite as she leaned forward. ‘It is not only the wine, mademoiselle. I understand you wheeled the trolley full of plates backwards and forwards like a – like a gardener with a wheelbarrow. And then, with this same guest, you make impolite remarks when he addresses a civil question to you –’

  ‘But, madame, that’s completely –’

  ‘I wouldn’t have believed it myself, but, when I come to the kitchen to see you, I find you in a state of collapse against the wall and I believe, mademoiselle, you have been drinking.’

  The final word was cut off with the force of a slammed door. Anne felt the tears she dreaded beginning to prick her eyes. She told herself her only chance was to keep calm.

  Mme Bouin breathed in deeply. ‘Mademoiselle, from the day you arrived here you have clearly considered yourself too good for the job which was offered to you. You arrived here by the front door and strolled up to the desk as if you had booked a room. You then inform me that you are above doing kitchen tasks because of a rash on your hands. Don’t interrupt me! Tonight I hear from a client who has dined in this hotel weekly for many years that you are not only incompetent but that your pertness verges on what is . . . what is quite intolerable. I then find you in a state of collapse in the kitchen. It is not good enough. Tomorrow morning I shall go to see Monsieur the Patron and –’