6
ANNE AWOKE THE next day with what looked like tiny blisters on the palms of her hands. Her fingers were swollen and coloured white in blotches; they throbbed and itched intensely. She went down to the bathroom and held them under the tap. At first the water was cold, but gradually it grew warmer and finally reached a temperature at which it became too hot for the skin to bear. She kept her hands there for a moment longer until a shudder went through her body, causing her neck and spine to tingle. Although this eased the itching for a time it was not enough, and she had to take her towel and scrape her hands on its rough pile until all the little blisters of the palms were raw and the white blotches bleeding.
Then she ran a basin of cold water and plunged both hands into it. By the time she returned to the bedroom the itching had gone, but there was a good deal of healing to be done. She took a blue glass jar from the chest of drawers and dipped her fingers into the whitish greasy ointment it contained. It had been given to her by a doctor in Paris, and although it never seemed to do much good at least it stopped the wounds from cracking as they dried out.
She had been half expecting an attack of eczema ever since she had been at the Lion d’Or. The man who had given her the ointment said it would come on if she was nervous or unhappy; she maintained it was caused by certain things she touched, like raw potatoes. He had merely shrugged, and said it was not impossible. Her life over the past two or three weeks could have supported either theory, and Anne was convinced that she had not been helped by the excessive amount of washing up Mme Bouin gave her to do in cold water with stinging powder. She dressed gingerly, to avoid transferring ointment to her clothes, and wondered if the condition of her hands might now give her some respite.
She was not very hopeful, but after breakfast went away to search out Mme Bouin in her nook beneath the hotel stairs.
‘Madame . . .’
‘What is it?’
‘Madame, I have this problem. My hands are very sore. I think perhaps it may be the powder for the pans. Or the potatoes, possibly.’
She held out her hands for inspection, the bleeding palms upward. The old woman lowered her face over them and peered; the widening of her left eye was magnified by the thickness of her spectacle lens. ‘I hope,’ she said, returning to an upright position, ‘that you haven’t been touching any food with those.’
‘No, I don’t think so. It only happened this morning and all I’ve touched was the crockery.’
‘I see.’
‘I’m not supposed to touch food anyway. It isn’t my job to –’
‘I am perfectly aware what your job is, mademoiselle. The first part of your job is to do what you are told by me and the second part is to do what is required of you by the head waiter and the chef, in that order.’
‘Yes, madame.’
‘Clearly we cannot have you waiting at a table with hands in that condition. It might put the clients off their food.’
‘But madame, I like waiting. I like meeting people.’
‘I am not interested in your social aspirations. You will have to do cleaning work only for the time being.’
‘I’m sorry, madame, I didn’t mean –’
‘That’s all. I will give the chef instructions about what your duties are to be.’
‘Thank you, madame.’
Anne knew she must be sounding too proud for a waitress, but there was something false in her relation with the old woman that irritated her. Why shouldn’t she talk to clients? What was a client but someone who had paid to eat? Hadn’t she herself been a client in restaurants too? She searched out Pierre, who was going through the stocks in the cellar, checking the bottles in their racks against a long inventory he held clipped to a board.
‘You’re looking nice this morning,’ he said, holding up a bottle of wine under the light and running a duster over it.
She showed him her hands and told him what Mme Bouin had said. He swore with genteel violence.
‘You understand, don’t you, Pierre? I don’t want to be any different from anyone else. I like taking the plates and things through, and I thought I was doing it all right.’
‘Of course I understand. I’ll see if I can do something about it. Now you just sit and talk to me for a bit while I do this.’
‘Would you let me serve in the bar tonight? I know Mme Bouin says I’m not to wait at a table, but it would be all right in the bar, wouldn’t it?’
Pierre put down the bottle and glanced at her briefly before taking another one from the rack. She could see his face clearly now. ‘Anyone in particular you hoped to see?’
‘No. Why?’ Anne looked down at her feet.
‘Who was the man you were talking to for such a long time last night? I thought he must be ordering a banquet, but then it turned out he didn’t even want another drink!’
‘I can’t think who that was. M. Mattlin, perhaps?’
‘I think not. A friend of Mattlin’s, though.’
‘Oh, that man. Yes, what’s his name? I forget.’
‘Hartmann.’
‘Yes, that’s it. I remember now. Why? Do you know him?’
‘Oh well, one hears things.’
‘What sort of things?’
Pierre put the bottle he was holding down on the table and peered at her over the rim of his spectacles. ‘He used to live here as a child, but went away when his father travelled abroad. After the war he lived in Paris for a long time and then, when his father died, he came to live in the Manor. He’s a lawyer by profession, but I think he did other things in Paris as well. They’re a well-off family – Jewish blood, you know. The grandfather came from Austria. He made his money in some sort of business.’
‘But what about him? I mean, what do you know of him as a person?’
‘Anne?’
‘Yes?’
‘Is this wise?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘You know what I mean.’
Anne blushed. ‘I don’t – I – I only asked.’
‘All right,’ said Pierre. ‘We’ll say no more about it. Tell me about your family, then. What did your father do?’
‘He was a shopkeeper before the war. But we – there was difficulty in the family, and now we haven’t any money. Not that we were rich anyway.’
‘And what about your mother?’
‘What? Oh, Pierre, don’t ask me any more, please. I’m sorry, but it’s difficult, you see.’
‘Not if it’s upsetting you. I’m sorry.’
There was an embarrassed silence. Anne was familiar with the sequence of events. Often with someone she liked and wanted to befriend she had to repel intimacy at the moment it appeared to be offered. She watched Pierre who, for all his gentleness, looked a little affronted, and tried to win his trust again with unsuccessful small-talk.
She was glad for once to hear herself summoned from upstairs. ‘Goodbye, Pierre,’ she said, dashing up the steps to answer Mme Bouin’s call.
On Wednesday afternoon Anne borrowed Roland’s bicycle and made off on the south-west road out of town. She hadn’t told anyone at the hotel where she was going. If the job became hers and the visits regular, then she might tell Pierre, but she feared that if Mme Bouin knew about the work she would find a reason to forbid it. She told Roland she wanted to explore the coast and go for a walk along the beaches. He agreed readily enough, though he gave her, she thought, a strange, hungry look as he loosened the nut beneath the saddle to lower the seat for her.
The road bent between dense pine forests for a while, then opened up into a sparse and sandy-looking plain, in the middle of which was a small cluster of houses. As Anne cycled along, two or three men in fishermen’s overalls looked up from a table beneath a clump of trees and stared at her. The walls of the dozen or so houses were draped with drying nets, and a widow with a face that seemed to have been turned inside out like a dried fruit was splitting oysters over a metal bucket.
Anne pedalled on up the hill where the road once more entered the pines. She was wearing her plainest dress with thick stockings and had her hair pulled back beneath a scarf. She knew she must look businesslike if she was to impress Mme Hartmann, and for the moment would have to sacrifice any hints at femininity which, for other reasons, she might have preferred. She wore some lace-up walking shoes, bought specially from a barrow in the market.
The entrance to the Manor came abruptly and unsigned between a clump of budding rhododendrons and the interminable conifers. Anne braked and rose from the saddle as the bicycle juddered over the stony, pot-holed drive. Suddenly the dense trees on her right came to an end and she glimpsed a terrace with crumbling stone pots; soon she was passing the side wall of the house before the drive smoothed out a little and turned to the right, bringing her round to the front of the twin-towered house.
Anne leaned over, almost toppling, as she lowered her foot to the ground. She felt an acute nervousness as she stood in front of the old house. There was so much grey in it, so many rooms and big forbidding spaces foretold by the giant shutters and that long, voluminous roof. It was grander than any house she had entered – although its dilapidation was faintly reassuring. She wheeled her bicycle round to the side of the north tower to find a servants’ entrance and was met by a fat man in blue overalls pushing a wheelbarrow full of rubble. He muttered a greeting which was impeded by the cigarette between his lips.
‘Where can I find Mme Hartmann?’
The man gestured over his shoulder to Christine’s morning-room. Anne leaned her bicycle against the wall and went in through the kitchen door. The cracked tile floor was covered, in places, by sheets, and everywhere else by dust. From beneath her feet she could hear a dull banging, a pause, and then a long, parched cough.
She ventured through the kitchen and out into the small morning-room, calling, ‘Madame?’ There was no answer, so she glanced around her. The window in the front looked over the lake on which she could distantly see a rowing-boat crawl like a slow insect. There was some half-finished embroidery left in an armchair, down the side of which was stuffed a woman’s handkerchief.
She went through into the hall, a vast square area flagged with black and white marble, that separated the two parts of the house. Around its edge were assembled a number of unrelated objects – a fine walnut grandfather clock, a low piano with two ivory elephants and some photographs on top, an assortment of chairs, some obviously valuable and refined, others with torn rush seating. The walls were painted in blue rococo scrolls on a faded beige background. Anne peered in amazement at the chaotic elegance of the huge open area. There was enough in it to stare at for an hour or more, but she was frightened that Mme Hartmann might materialise at any moment. She called out again, but with the same result.
Near the front door in a pedestal was an iron vase filled with dried bulrushes and next to it a large terracotta pot, from which protruded fishing rods and nets and what looked to Anne like a hunting spear. The dominant feature of the hall, however, was an oak staircase that rose broadly from the marbled floor and zigzagged visibly back on itself before disappearing to a higher landing. Propped against the underside of the stairs was an old green bicycle.
Anne looked at the clock: five past two. She found that without meaning to she had set one foot on the big staircase. The spring of the wood beneath her foot and the broad sweep of the stairs in front of her made her feel like the lady of the manor, and with a sudden imperious movement she began to climb. It was satisfying to reach the half-landing and look down on the grandfather clock in the hall; and then to climb up to the first floor, feeling the carved banister beneath her hand. The landing was like an image from a dream: it had no logic or cohesion, and seemed half-finished. Corridors led off in all directions, through narrow doors with rattling handles. The main window was blocked by old, unpainted wooden shutters, while a smaller window gave a view of the terrace and the woods beyond. The polished oak wardrobe that stood grandly at the head of the stairs might have been rescued from a regal bedroom, but the dried pine chest and battered pewter jug seemed to have come from a village sale. There were thread-bare mats over the polished floorboards, and everywhere Anne looked there was neglect, with uncleaned oil pictures set against half-distempered walls. And as in dreams it was not the detail that was important, but the lingering impression of something real but unspecifiable that has come momentarily within one’s grasp.
Anne gazed around her, entranced at the thought of the people whose lives had been played out in these surroundings. It was only an ill-tended aggregation of wood and mineral, of uncertainly commanded space and broken furniture, but something in her heart was moved by it.
Reluctantly she went downstairs to look again for Mme Hartmann. She found her at last cutting some flowers in the woods beyond the terrace. Mme Hartmann seemed surprised when Anne explained who she was.
‘My husband said nothing about anyone coming today.’
‘I’m sorry. I was sure he said today.’
‘It doesn’t matter. It’s quite hard work. I don’t just want the ornaments dusted, you know. I already have Mme Monnier to do that. This way.’
The two women walked through the rooms that Anne had just gazed at alone, and Mme Hartmann explained what she wanted done. She watched Anne quizzically as she nodded her head in silent assent.
‘Of course this cellar is just a start. We’ll be doing up the rest of the house later.’
‘You won’t change it too much, will you?’ said Anne. ‘I mean, it’s so . . . unusual, so pretty as it is.’
‘It’s a mess. My father-in-law gave up caring towards the end of his life. Half the bedrooms are full of things that belonged to the previous owners, and their family was here for a hundred years.’
Anne was taken aback at the frank way Hartmann’s wife addressed her, a mere servant. She had expected her to be more distant and also, if she was strictly honest, more beautiful. She was rather forbidding, too, with small eyes that hardly seemed to blink as they travelled up and down Anne’s body, from the headscarf to the stout shoes.