The bedroom she had been allotted was under the eaves of the Hotel du Lion d’Or and its single window overlooked a back yard where she could see only filmy rain tumbling into the dark. There was an iron bedstead, a plain wooden chair, a small writing table and a chest of drawers with, as Mme Bouin had promised, a jug and bowl. A curtain in the corner concealed a hanging area for clothes which contained a black uniform. Although the room was plain and small, the rafters that slanted diagonally from above the window gave it a secure rather than imprisoning feeling; the agonised Christ above the bed could be moved somewhere he would be less visibly tormented; the bed linen, though rough and thinning, was clean; the bare floor, even if it was made only from boards, not parquet, had been scrubbed; and above the writing table hung a picture of a medieval knight.
Everything Anne owned was in her two suitcases. Her favourite possession, a second-hand gramophone with a cracked but sonorous horn attachment, she had had to sell, since it was too heavy to carry and she didn’t think the Patron would approve of the sound of dance music coming from a servant’s room. The records themselves she had been unable to part with – half a dozen heavy black plates in brown paper covers which she stowed in the bottom drawer of the chest.
Anne had left her door a few inches ajar so anyone on the landing below could see her light and might then be tempted to come and talk to her. Apart from Roland, Mme Bouin and the Patron, she had no idea who else the staff might comprise, but she hoped there would be at least someone who would be a friend for her – a girl of her own age, perhaps, with a big family in the town where she would be taken at weekends. When alone, Anne constructed fantasies of a kind in which the events were all conceivable but in which the crucial element of luck ran well for her. She didn’t want to live in a grand manor with cavernous rooms and wooded lands, but in one of those simple houses behind gates where children could be seen playing on the sandy paths and a dog padded silently across the grass. If once she saw such a place, her fantasy was unstoppable and she would bare its inner rooms to her scanning eye, and reshape, recolour and repeople them until they contained what she wanted.
With her clothes unpacked, she arranged her half dozen books along the top of the writing table and propped her picture – a view of Paris roofs, layered and rainswept – on the chest of drawers. On the writing table, next to the books, she placed a photograph of her mother, taken fifteen years before. She wore a formal, posed expression which did not quite conceal a look of timid puzzlement about the eyes.
The rain had stopped when Anne closed the shutters on the small window, though from outside she could hear the water that had gathered as it dripped from the eaves and rang on the paved courtyard below. She pushed her door a little further open and listened. She could hear the sound of crockery, distantly, and of a door banging, but otherwise nothing. Most people, she guessed, would now be in bed, so it was too late to ask Mme Bouin or anyone else whether it was permissible for her to have a bath. She took her dressing-gown from behind the curtain and went quietly down the twisting staircase and along the corridor to the bathroom. She went in and locked the door, a simple action which caused an eruption of furtive activity backstairs.
Roland’s scabrous face was boiling with a mixture of anguish and excitement as he bent down and took off his shoes. He tiptoed out of the back pantry and down the corridor. He passed a vast sink which was awash with cold water and the hotel’s feebly crested crockery (‘Leave it for the new girl in the morning,’ Bruno, the chef, had said) and a wall full of unused culinary implements of the more sophisticated kind – peculiar fish-kettles and elaborate double-steamers – which Bruno regarded with robust contempt.
The room next to the servants’ bathroom was a linen store, and it had been Roland’s aim, planned over many months, to steal the key from Mme Bouin’s bunch, copy it and return the original before she should notice. Since the keys seldom left her bosom this operation had not been without problems. The copied key didn’t fit very well, but it did turn the lock into the little windowless box whose slatted shelves were heated by the long pipes that ran down the wall. Roland breathed heavily, smelling timber, mice and mothballs, as he lifted the linen from one of the shelves, noting how it had been stored, before he put it to one side.
High on the other side in the bathroom he had removed a tile, and twice a week on bath-nights he had worked away at the plaster, taking away the débris in his washbag at the end of the operation. Once the connection was made, he had concealed the hole in the linen closet with old bedspreads and curtains he knew were unlikely to be required. He ended up standing on one leg on the support of a lower shelf, craning diagonally upwards and drawing the rogue tile through to the linen room on a piece of string.
The reward for his hard work had been the sight of Sophie, Anne’s predecessor, taking her twice-weekly bath. She was a sturdy girl from Lyon and not one who had previously attracted much attention from men, but Roland was loyal to her charms. Although the steam sometimes made it hard for him to see as clearly as he would have liked, he never missed an opportunity.
He had waited anxiously for his first view of Sophie’s replacement and, when he had first glimpsed her at the station, he had not been disappointed. Now in his hurry he pulled the tile through with more than the usual noise. He waited for a moment, holding his breath, listening for a sound of protest from the bathroom. He heard nothing, and when he could wait no longer he jammed his bursting face against the opening.
The first thing he saw was a girlish undergarment of whose exact name or purpose he was unaware. It had lace trimmings and hung over a wooden towel horse, irritatingly close to his line of vision. Through the equally frustrating steam that rose from the bath he saw the girl’s hair pulled up from her neck by a ribbon and saw where the stray wisps hung dark against the whiteness of her shoulders. There were perhaps some freckles there too, but Roland’s eye scorned such detail.
She leant forward to turn on more water and he saw the fall of her breasts, a movement of surprising weight given the slightness of her frame. Then she raised her knee and he could make out the line that traced the distance from calf to mid-thigh; it ran like the outline of the fashion drawings he sometimes saw in newspapers – just a casual sweep that seemed to hint, by slenderness, at unforetold curves. He remembered the sturdy legs of Sophie which, until then, had seemed quite adequate.
Anne herself had little vanity about her body, though sometimes she felt a vague gratitude towards it for what it had taken her through. When she looked at her ankles and feet, so soft they seemed almost unused, or gazed in the mirror at her dark eyes, which were unlined and full of light, she wondered where she carried her experiences. Perhaps they lay stored in microscopic cells in her blood, or perhaps they lay waiting to ambush her in her mind. The body itself seemed full of health and latent energy; the physical contrasts of girl and woman, still not quite resolved, gave it charm.
When she stood up with her back to him, Roland almost made the mistake of closing his eyes in ecstasy. She let the water out of the bath and went to the wash basin where she cleared the steam from the mirror and leaned forward, her feet apart, to look closely at her face. She moved then with a youthful swiftness, her body visible only momentarily as she dried it out of the line of Roland’s questing eye.
Anne climbed the stairs after her bath, glad that she had not been interrupted by Mme Bouin hammering on the door. She pulled out the bolster from under the sheets and up-ended it behind the hanging curtain. She lay down in bed and found the ache of carrying heavy baggage, the noise of the train and the fear of newness were all forgotten as she clutched herself tight beneath the eiderdown, sailing out into sleep.
Frequently she dreamed, strange unpleasant dreams relating to the events of her childhood. She never told people about them. She had read in a magazine that it was bad manners to tell others what you dreamed at night. Things which seemed so real to you meant nothing to them. It was hard enough to show an interest in the actual events of other people’s lives without being bored by their night-time imaginings.
The trouble was that Anne’s dreams weren’t really fantasies or exotic figurations. They were prosaic, repetitive and based on fact. Her dream on that first night at the Lion d’Or held all the usual elements, though with the puzzling variation that much of it took place in an old-fashioned inn with straw on the floor, perhaps because Anne had fantasies about rustic inns which the Lion d’Or had not fulfilled.
The end came in what old Louvet termed the only misery, abandonment. She ran into a field and called out some word, some mysterious sound.
Then, that night anyway, she fell away into calmness.