I stared at her stupid, kindly, half-excited eyes, and felt a bit sick.
‘David’s father, you mean?’ I asked numbly. ‘David’s father a murderer?’
She nodded.
‘That’s right. Strangled with a blind cord. Horrible. An Act of Jealous Madness, it said.’
I said, inadequately, looking away from her:
‘Poor little boy … how long ago was all this?’
‘The trial was in April. Of course, she’s not the boy’s mother, you know, she was his second wife. But of course she took the boy away: she couldn’t leave David to him. Not after what happened.’
‘What do you mean? D’you mean he’s still alive?’
‘Oh yes.’
‘In prison?’
She shook her head, leaning a little closer.
‘No. That’s the awful part of it, Mrs. Selborne. He’s At Large.’
‘But—’
‘He was let off. Insufficient evidence, they called it, and they acquitted him.’
‘But perhaps he’s not guilty. I mean, the courts of law—’
‘Guilty,’ said Mrs. Palmer, tapping my arm. ‘Guilty as hell.’ She broke off and went rather pink. ‘That’s what Mr. Palmer says, you understand, Mrs. Selborne. And it’s my belief he was mad, poor soul, or he’d never have gone for the boy like he did, murder or no murder.’
‘Gone … for the boy?’ I repeated, a bit shakily.
‘Yes. Terrible, isn’t it?’ I could see the easy moisture start into her pale kindly eyes, and I warmed towards her. There was nothing of the ghoul about Mrs. Palmer; she was not enjoying the story, any more than I was. ‘They found David unconscious in the bathroom near the bedroom where the body was found. He’d been knocked on the head.’
‘Did he say his father had done it?’
‘He didn’t see who hit him. But it must’ve been the murderer. Caught in the Act, as you might say. Oh, it was an awful business; I’m surprised you don’t remember it, really. The papers went on about it for long enough.’
‘No, I don’t remember it.’ My voice sounded flat, almost mechanical. Poor David. Poor little boy. ‘I don’t remember hearing the name before at all. It’s – it’s terrible.’
Mrs. Palmer gave an exclamation, grabbed her handbag, and rose.
‘Oh, there’s Father and Carrie, off down the other side of the square, they can’t have seen me … I must run. It’s been lovely having a little chat, Mrs. Selborne, really lovely.’ She beamed at me. ‘And don’t take on about poor Mrs. Bristol and the little boy. She’s divorced from that Man, you know. He can’t do a thing. And children do get over things, they say.’
Over some things, yes.
‘I’m glad you told me,’ I said, ‘I might have said something … I had no idea.’
‘Well, if you didn’t see the photos—’ said Mrs. Palmer. ‘Of course, Bristol isn’t their real name, so you wouldn’t have heard it. The real name was Byron. Richard Byron, that was it. And now I must run. Good night, Mrs. Selborne.’
She went across the square, away from me, and I sat there for a long time before I even realized she had gone.
3
Sur le pont d’Avignon
L’on y danse, l’on y danse
Sur le pont d’Avignon
L’on y danse, tout en rond.
(French nursery rhyme)
By ten the next morning it was already as hot as on the hottest day in England, but with no sense of oppression, for the air was clear and light. Louise, true to her word, retired with a book and a sketching pad to the little green public gardens near the hotel.
‘You go and play tourist,’ she said. ‘I’m going to sit under a tree and drink grape juice. Iced.’
It sounded a tempting programme, but tomorrow would be no cooler than today, and in any case the heat does not worry me unduly, so I set off for a gentle tour of exploration. This time I went out of the city gate, and turned along under the massive outer walls, towards the quarter where the Rhône races under the Rocher des Doms and then round the western fortifications of the city. It was a dusty walk, and not a very pleasant one, after all, I discovered. The verges of the narrow road were deep in dust and grit, the only vegetation, apart from the trees along the river, being thistles as dry as crumbling paper. Even along the flat edge of the Rhône itself, under the trees, there was no grass, only beaten dirt and stones, where beggars slept at night on the bare ground. A pair of enormous birds dipped and circled above the river.
But presently, round a curve in the city wall, the old bridge of the song came into view, its four remaining arches soaring out across the green water to break off, as it were, in midleap, suspended half-way across the Rhône. Down into the deep jade water glimmered the drowned-gold reflection of the chapel of St. Nicholas, which guards the second arch. Here, held by a spit of sand, the water is still, rich with the glowing colours of stone and shadow and dipping boughs, but beyond the sand-bank the slender bridge thrusts out across a tearing torrent. Standing there, you remember suddenly that this is one of the great rivers of Europe. Without sound or foam, smooth and incredibly rapid, it sucks its enormous way south to the Mediterranean, here green as serpentine, there eddying to aquamarine, but everywhere hard in colour as a stone.
And then I saw David, playing with Rommel beside the pool under the chapel. Both boy and dog were wet, David, since he was in bathing trunks, more gracefully so than Rommel, who looked definitely better when his somewhat eccentric shape was disguised by his wool. I was on the bridge, actually, before I saw them below me. They seemed absorbed, David in building a dam, Rommel in systematically destroying it, but almost at once the boy looked up and saw me sitting in the embrasure of the chapel window.
He grinned and waved.
‘Are you going to dance up there?’ he called.
‘Probably not,’ I called back. ‘It’s too narrow.’
‘What’s in the chapel?’
‘Nothing much. Haven’t you been up?’ I must have sounded surprised.
‘No money,’ said David, succinctly.
‘Tell the concierge I’ll pay for you on my way down.’
‘I didn’t mean that, you know.’
‘No, I know. But I did. Only for heaven’s sake hang on to Rommel. There’s no parapet, and he’d be at Marseilles by tea-time if he fell into this.’
Boy and dog vanished into the concierge’s lodge, and presently emerged on to the bridge, slightly out of breath, and disputing over Rommel’s right to hurl himself sportingly straight into the Rhône.
But presently Rommel, secured by the inevitable piece of string, was reckoned as being under control, and the three of us cautiously went to the very end of the broken arch – cautiously, because the bridge is only a few feet wide and there is always a strong breeze blowing from the North – and sat down with Rommel between us. We sang ‘Sur le pont d’Avignon’ in the style of Jean Sablon, and David told me the story of St. Bénézet who confounded the clerics of Avignon, and built the bridge where the angel had told him, and we watched the two big birds, which were kites, David said, and which soared and circled beautifully up in the high blue air.
Then we went down to the road, and I paid the concierge, and David thanked me again, and we set off back to the hotel for lunch.
It seemed impossible, on this lovely gay morning, that David’s father might be a murderer, and that David himself had been struck down, for no reason, in the dark, by a hand that must surely have belonged to a madman.
‘Where do you spend most of your days?’ I asked.
‘Oh, by the river, mostly. You can swim under the bridge at the edge, inside the sand-bank where there’s no current.’
‘You haven’t seen – well, the countryside? The Pont du Gard, and the arena at Nîmes, and so on? Perhaps you don’t bother with that sort of thing?’
‘Oh yes. I’d love to see the arena – do you know they have bull-fights every Sunday and one of the matadors is a woman?’
??
?Well I should hate to see a bull-fight,’ I said decidedly. ‘But I intend to go and see the arena tomorrow anyway, and if you’d like to come, there’s plenty of room in the car. Do you think your mother would let you?’
‘My step-mother,’ said David distinctly.
He shot me a little sidelong look and flushed slightly. ‘That’s why we have different names, you see.’
‘I see. Would she let you come? That is, if you would like to come?’
He hesitated oddly for a moment, and once again I saw the mask fall across his face, and as before, for no reason that I could guess. It was as if he considered some grave objection, rejected it eventually, and finally shrugged it away.
‘I should like it very much, thank you,’ he said formally. ‘And I don’t think my step-mother will object at all. It isn’t her kind of thing, you know,’ naïvely enough, ‘but she doesn’t much mind what I do.’
When we reached the hotel, people were gathering for apéritifs in the cool courtyard. I came down from my room to find Mrs. Bristol already installed at a table beside an orange tree. She smiled at me, and made a gesture of invitation, so I went over and sat down at her table.
‘I hear you have been with David,’ she said to me, ‘so very kind of you to trouble.’
‘Not at all. We met by accident – I enjoyed the morning immensely.’ I murmured commonplaces, and she thanked me charmingly for what she called my kindness.
She bought me a drink and we talked nothings about the heat, and the town, and the shops for some time. She was very charming and talkative, but I noticed that the worried lines round her mouth seemed rather more pronounced today, and that whenever David’s name cropped up in the conversation, there seemed to darken in her eyes the same shadow – of wariness, was it? – that had crossed David’s face when I spoke of the trip to the arena at Nîmes.
‘I had thought of taking the car to the Pont du Gard tomorrow,’ I said at length, ‘and then on to Nîmes, to look round a bit. If you have no objection, I should like to take David with me? I don’t know whether my friend will want to go, and I should very much like to have David’s company.’
She was lighting a cigarette when I spoke, and she paused with the flame of the lighter an inch from the cigarette-end, in the queerest, most exact repetition of David’s own deliberation. I saw her assimilate the question, look at it carefully, hesitate, and then decide. For the life of me I couldn’t understand why a proposal for a day’s sight-seeing tour (which was surely what one came to Roman France for anyway?) should raise such problems as mine apparently did.
‘It’s so very kind of you,’ said Mrs. Bristol, and the lighter finally made contact with the cigarette. ‘I’m sure David will enjoy it.’ She made a charming grimace. ‘These antiquities – they are not for me; I am for Paris, the cities, the people – places where one amuses oneself … you understand?’
‘Oh yes – but I rather like it both ways,’ I laughed. ‘And I’m afraid I adore sight-seeing. I’m a born tourist, but I don’t like to go in a crowd. But what on earth do you find to do in Avignon if you don’t like – er, antiquities?’
She hesitated again, and sent me a quick look from under her darkened lashes.
‘We do not stay long – we pass through to Monte Carlo. We rest a few days in Avignon on the way.’
‘Well, thank you for the drink, Mrs. Bristol,’ I said, getting to my feet. I had caught sight of Louise, who had taken a corner table, and was looking at the lunch menu. We murmured more civilities, and I turned to go, but the strap of my bag caught on the back of the chair, and as I swung round again quickly to disentangle it, I saw Mrs. Bristol staring at me, with her lovely eyes narrowed against the smoke of her cigarette, and in them a look of half-pleased, half-apprehensive speculation that puzzled me considerably.
That evening, as Louise was no more inclined than formerly to go for a walk, I left her sketching in a café in the city square, and went alone up the little dark street that leads to the Popes’ palace and the gardens among the pines, high up on the Rocher des Doms.
Unlike the main square, the Place du Palais was almost empty, the buildings on three sides dark and blank, while on the right the great façade of the Palace soared up out of the living rock, shadowy yet luminous in the starlight. I lingered for a while gazing up at it, then went slowly up the sloping zigzag walk through the pines towards the high gardens, which lie at the very edge of the city, and are girdled in by the city wall itself. Very few people appeared to be up there that evening, and only occasionally, it seemed, I heard the murmur of voices and the soft scrunch of the gravel under someone’s foot. The air was still, and the cicadas were quiet at last, but the pines kept up a faint continuous murmuring overhead, almost as if, in sleep, they yet gave back the sound of the wind that sweeps down the river all winter, and, in summer, lingers in them still.
Climbing slowly up through the winding alleys of evergreens, I came at length to the topmost edge of the gardens, above the Rhône, and leaned over the low battlemented wall to rest. Below me the wall dropped away vertically, merging into the solid cliff which bounded the river. The Rhône, beneath, slipped silently under the darkness on its wide and glimmering way.
It was very quiet.
Then suddenly, from somewhere behind me, came a man’s voice, speaking low, in French.
‘So this is where you are!’
Startled, I turned my head, but behind me was a thick bank of evergreen, and I could see nothing. I was alone in my little high corner of the wall. He must be on the lower walk, screened by the bushes. A woman’s voice answered him.
She said: ‘You’re late. I’ve been here a long time. Have you a cigarette?’
I heard the scrape of a match, then he said in a voice which sounded sullen: ‘You weren’t here when I passed ten minutes ago.’
‘I got tired of waiting, and went for a walk.’ Her voice was indifferent, and I heard the gravel scrape, as if he made an angry movement.
I had no intention of letting myself be marooned in my corner while a love scene went on within hearing, and I determined at this point that, as I would have to pass them to get back to the main path, I had better emerge before anything passed that might make my appearance embarrassing. But as I turned to move, the woman spoke again, and I realized, suddenly, two things: one, that the voice was that of Mrs. Bristol, and secondly, that she was very much afraid. I suppose I had not recognized the voice immediately because I had previously only heard her speak in English, but as her voice rose, edged with fear, I recognized it.
She said: ‘It’s happened. I knew it would happen. I knew …’
His voice cut in sharply, almost roughly: ‘What’s happened?’
‘He’s here. He’s come. I had to see you, I—’
He interrupted again.
‘For God’s sake, pull yourself together. How do you know he’s here?’
She spoke breathlessly, still with the tremor in her voice.
‘I got a phone call tonight. His car’s been seen. They traced it as far as Montélimar. He must be coming this way. He must have found out where we are—’
‘Loraine—’
‘What are we going to do?’ It was a desperate whisper. I leaned against the wall in my little corner; not for anything could I have come out now. I could only trust they would not seek its greater privacy for themselves.
I heard the man (I think it was he) draw in a long breath. Then he spoke quietly and with emphasis.
‘There is nothing that we can do, yet. We don’t know for certain where he is, he may be anywhere in Provence. When was he seen in Montélimar?’
‘Yesterday.’
He exploded with wrath. ‘God in heaven, the clumsy fools! And they only telephoned tonight?’
‘They weren’t sure. It was a big grey car with a GB plate, and they think it was his. It was the first glimpse they’d had since Chartres.’
‘They should have been sure. What the hell are they paid for?’ he said angrily. br />
‘Can’t we find out where he is? I – I don’t think I can stand much more of this – this suspense.’
‘No, we must do nothing. We’ll find out soon enough, I’ve no doubt.’ His voice was grim. ‘And for God’s sake, Loraine, take hold of yourself. You shouldn’t have got me up here tonight, you don’t know who’s about, and this is such a tiny place. Anybody from the hotel—’
Her voice was sharp with new alarm: ‘You don’t think he’s got someone planted in the hotel? Do you mean …?’
‘I don’t mean anything,’ he returned shortly. ‘All I’m saying is, that we mustn’t be seen together. You know that as well as I do. Anyone might see us, they might mention it to David, and he has little enough confidence in you anyway, as far as I can see.’
‘I do try, I really do.’
‘I know you do,’ he said more gently. ‘And I know David’s not easy. But it’s not David I’m thinking about, so much as him. If he ever got to know we were connected I’d be a hell of a lot of use to you, wouldn’t I? He’d find a way to get me out of the road first, and then—’
‘Don’t, please!’
His voice softened: ‘Look, my dear, stop worrying. It’ll be all right, I promise. I got you out of the mess before, didn’t I? I got you away from England, didn’t I? and the boy too?’
She murmured something I couldn’t catch, and he went on: ‘And it’ll be all right again, I swear it. I know it’s hell just sitting around wondering what’s going to happen, but I’m in charge and you trust me, don’t you? Don’t you?’
‘Yes. Yes, of course.’
‘Here, have another cigarette.’ I heard him light it for her, and there was a pause.
‘Those damned English police,’ she said bitterly. ‘If they’d known their job this would never have had to happen. He ought to be dead and done with.’ The way she repeated it made me shiver, ‘Dead and done with,’ she said.