3
THE NEXT DAY Hartmann had a letter from Etienne Beauvais, a former colleague in Paris he had not seen for some years. Etienne had married and moved with his wife to a house near where her family had a large farm. He invited Hartmann to come for a weekend of shooting and ‘other country pursuits’. He concluded: ‘Bring yourself a companion. All is discretion here! Do come, Charles; it will be a jolly party and we haven’t seen you for a long time.’ Such a long time, in fact, that he clearly hadn’t heard that Hartmann was married. He would ask Christine if she wanted to go.
He stuffed the letter inside his jacket pocket and went to look for her. As he crossed the hall he was accosted by Roussel, his hair white with dust.
‘Ah, M. Hartmann, I’m so glad to have caught you. A little matter I wanted to discuss.’
‘You look as though you’ve been working.’
‘Ah yes, indeed. I thought I’d lend a hand today. We’re making such good progress. I wanted to show you what we’ve done and then perhaps you might think it’s time for another instalment.’
‘All right. What do you want me to look at?’
‘This way, monsieur. The cellar.’
Roussel led the way over the dust-sheets and into the kitchen, where they discovered the fat workman leaning against the range smoking a cigarette. The man grunted and held out his hand to be shaken. Hartmann took it with a nod before following Roussel down the steps.
There followed half an hour’s pleading from Roussel in which he argued that he had almost finished the job and was thus due to be paid the third of the four instalments. However, it was clear to Hartmann that Roussel had barely completed the first part of the job. The builder was also insistent that there should be an extra payment for the floor.
‘But you haven’t put in a floor,’ said Hartmann.
‘Not as such, I admit,’ said Roussel. ‘But I think it must be considered a separate item from the decoration and the main structural work.’
Hartmann looked at two huge struts that stuck up into the roof of the cellar.
‘Temporary supports, M. Hartmann. Just until the new joist settles.’
Roussel was a tenacious arguer. When it was obvious that Hartmann was unconvinced by his progress with the schedule, he suggested that the requirements had been changed. Next he said that his youngest daughter was sick, and needed care. Hartmann, wearied with the arguments, agreed to pay him some more money. Perhaps, he thought, that’s how Mattlin wears down his girlfriends: he bores them into submission.
His presence no longer required, Hartmann picked his way over the dust-sheets and out into the hall. He had felt no recurrence of the pity he had experienced on the first day that he and Roussel surveyed the house, though neither had he found an explanation for it.
He went to his study to do some work, but found to his irritation that he couldn’t concentrate. He was thinking about Anne. She had reminded him of feelings he thought he had put behind him.
He sighed and looked back at the desk. The negligence case needed work. He pulled out a bundle of papers giving details of the motor systems used in mechanical dredgers and bent his mind to them.
He kept seeing her face and the movement of her body. She was always demurely dressed, but it couldn’t quite conceal a rather womanly heaviness about the bust which was charmingly at odds with the girlishly quality of her face.
Good heavens, he told himself, three men died in this accident. Fiercely he studied the movement of the engine and tried to imagine the sound it made.
But he heard only the sound of Anne’s voice and felt the tugging of her hand on his sleeve. That look of pleading when she had whispered, ‘Monsieur . . .’
He looked back at the papers. He had once met one of the victims of the accident. He tried to remember what he was like.
Only one presence took shape in his mind. My God, he thought, throwing down the pen. He held his head in his hands, then rubbed his eyes fiercely.
He stood up and remembered that before Roussel had accosted him he had been going to find his wife. It was her birthday and she had invited some friends to come to the house for dinner.
She was still in bed, reading.
‘What time are the people coming this evening?’
‘About seven o’clock. But Marie-Thérèse is always late.’
‘Would you like your birthday present now?’
‘Oh, Charles, how delightful. Yes, please.’
Hartmann took out a package from the cupboard in the corner and handed it to Christine, who pulled eagerly at the strings and ribbon that held it together. The shop girl had done up the package with care, and it was some time before Christine’s impatient fingers were able to disinter a pair of binoculars.
‘For watching the birds,’ said Hartmann.
‘They’re beautiful. Such a lovely finish.’ She climbed out of bed and walked to the window with them. ‘They’re very powerful, aren’t they? There’s a moorhen out there, a long way out, and I can see it quite clearly with these. Do have a look, Charles.’
Hartmann took the binoculars and aimed in the direction Christine pointed. He saw the little bird paddling along across the lake, its diminutive body dwarfed by the expanse of water and the stretch of trees beyond. He handed the glasses back to her.
‘If you walk up to the dyke,’ he said, ‘you should be able to see a lot of birds in those trees on the way up. The water birds nest in the weeds there.’
Christine smiled and kissed him on the cheek. ‘It’s a lovely present.’
It was not at dinner that night that Hartmann made what in retrospect he could see was a decisive move in his affairs. He merely sat, tilting his head politely to Marie-Thérèse’s chatter and pouring more wine for Christine’s guests. Nor was it in the long hours of the night when he lay marooned in the giant bed his father had acquired at auction in Alsace, with the sound of his wife asleep beside him. Then he merely reflected on his father and on his pride in his assumed identification with the region of Alsace (Hartmann, he pointed out, was an established name in the district). He also thought about Poincaré, the fiddling Prime Minister who had retired to the neighbouring Lorraine, and about more mundane matters such as his next game of tennis with Jean-Philippe Gilbert.
At no point did he relent and decide that the only way he could find relief from the tormenting presence of Anne in his thoughts was by doing something. Even violent acts, he later told himself, cannot be seen clearly by the perpetrator until they are finished. And as for his own gently willed inertia, which might occasionally spill over into innocent gestures of kindness, it would take a philosopher of iron sternness to spot the moment at which an unformulated wish became, almost by inaction, a completed act.
Nevertheless, perhaps the thought of his father recalled to him the old man’s former secretary and her sister, Mlle Calmette, who was still living in Janvilliers.
It was her name, in any case, he mentioned to Christine the next morning when he told her he had to go into town on business.
‘There are some details of a trust fund for her sister which need clearing up,’ he said, as he laid down his newspaper in the morning-room.
‘Shall I expect you back for lunch?’
‘Certainly. It won’t take more than half an hour at the most. I feel rather guilty about her really. I ought to have done something before.’
It was not until this final claim, which was partially true, that he felt any unease about his expedition.
Christine was looking down at her needlework. Hartmann tried, but failed, to catch her eye in order to give her an insouciant smile. He cleared his throat and ran his hand quickly back through his hair. She looked up and smiled vaguely. He nodded, coughed again, and turned, the metal caps on the heels of his glossy boots ringing on the flagged hall.