4
IT WAS A pleasant day with only a whisper of wind coming off the headland when Hartmann stood in front of his house and explained to Roussel what he wanted done. He made large, suggestive movements with his hands, but found that Roussel kept asking awkward technical questions.
The Manor was an isolated house, some five kilometres from Janvilliers, surrounded by acres of woodland. In his last ten years Hartmann’s father had quarrelled with most of his staff and had sacked both groundsman and gardener. The appearance of wildness had increased. The house was dominated by two towers with conical grey slate roofs. The rectangular section which joined them formed the main part of the Manor, though at its junction with the towers it extended backwards, away from them, as well as forwards, into them.
‘Now have you got that?’ said Hartmann.
‘Ye-es. I think so.’
‘I can’t think why there wasn’t a cellar built in the first place.’
‘Yes, it’s unusual in a house like this, Monsieur.’
Hartmann senior had had a hole driven sideways into the bank at the rear of the house and had stored his wine in the resulting damp burrow whose roof was held up by shaky-looking planks. One day it had caved in when a storm caused a displacement of the earth in the woods behind it. Later, when the rain had eased, the bottles were dug out like the victims of a mining disaster. The rain had washed off or defaced many of the labels so that dinner at the Manor often had an air of suspense; to his irritation the old man frequently found he had treated his guests to a rare burgundy he had been meaning to save.
The house was built from pale stone, and the windows and shutters were painted grey. In the middle of the long slate roof was a triangular protuberance, also slate-covered, into which was let a brick-surrounded dormer window. This had been boarded up with wood and now looked rather like the door half-way up a barn through which bales are loaded. On either side of it reared two thin rectangular chimneys in what appeared to be an unwise defiance of gravity. Some of the building was covered with a dense creeper, spangled green and red, which helped to counteract the bleakness of the pale stone and the house’s isolated position on the headland. Theoretically it was sheltered from the sea winds by the finger of land that stuck out and by the dense pine forests on the far side of the lake it overlooked. In fact, on bad days the wind seemed to accelerate off the bend of the land and funnel itself through the woods before sucking and tearing at the shutters and shaking the windows in their frames.
‘You think you’ll be able to manage a cellar, then?’
‘Oh, I think so, M. Hartmann. I’ll let you have an estimate.’
‘That’s wonderful. My father would have been pleased to think of someone bringing the old place back to life. We’ll have a party when you’ve finished. We could have it out here in front of the house, and people could go swimming in the lake.’
Hartmann saw in his mind a covered walkway, hung with candles, leading from the house to a marquee with tables at the water’s edge. He would have all his own wine installed in the new cellar and begin to do something with the upstairs rooms as well. Perhaps they could have another party at the end of the year when all the redecoration would be complete. It would be better than Paris, better than Montparnasse or the Opera.
‘I could begin on Thursday,’ Roussel was saying.
‘Yes, yes.’
‘Here, monsieur, take one of our cards. We’re the first people in the town to have them.’
He pressed into Hartmann’s palm an outsize card with a poorly printed drawing of a house with scaffolding. Hartmann looked at it and then at Roussel’s eager face.
For reasons he could not explain, he felt a disabling surge of pity for Roussel. He looked at the small, dark-haired builder weighing up his job and felt for a moment as though he had lost his own identity in that of the other man. It was not a conscious act of sympathy, but an involuntary and unpleasant loss of control. Nevertheless, the feeling was so strong that he felt he could have cried.
‘Why on earth are you sitting there like that?’ said Hartmann’s wife Christine when she came downstairs ten minutes later with a bunch of dried flowers in her hands.
‘I was just thinking.’
‘What about?’
‘A strange thing happened. I was standing out there with Roussel, the builder, talking about the house, when a peculiar feeling came over me. I felt this desperate sense of pity for him.’
‘Why?’
‘I’ve no idea. I’ve no reason to think he’s in trouble. It just came from nowhere.’
‘Charles, you are ridiculous. Is he going to do the job or not?’
‘Oh yes. There’s no problem about that.’
‘Well, you’ve got no reason to feel sorry for him. Marie-Thérèse said he was very good with the work he did for them and not all that expensive either. Even so, this is going to be quite a big job, and I don’t suppose this M. Roussel will undercharge for it.’
‘No, I don’t suppose he will. It wasn’t anything specific, this feeling, you understand. Just a general . . .’ Hartmann trailed off, with a gesture of his hand.
They crossed the hall to the small morning-room at the foot of the northern tower where Christine rang the bell for the maid. She was a small woman with fair wavy hair cut in the fashion of the times, parted and held by combs. There was a heaviness about her that was unbecoming; her features seemed to have been moulded roughly, leaving her lips full and set in a permanent pout. To her admirers, they were her most attractive feature; others thought them simply a part of her generally unrefined appearance. Her eyes were blue and knowing.
‘So, Charles, soon you’ll have all your father’s beloved wine stored up beneath your feet. A little Aladdin’s cave for you to wander round.’
‘Yes, there should be quite a choice. All those strange wines from Alsace and Austria he collected when he was old. I’m told his house in Vienna has crates of Italian wine too.’
‘Italian! I couldn’t drink Italian wine. Sometimes, Charles, I wonder about your taste. And your father’s.’ She stood up and made as if to leave the room. ‘I’m going to carry on with my work. We’re having lunch promptly because I’ve given Marie the afternoon off.’
‘I shan’t stray far.’
I wonder, thought Christine, as she strode across the hall; I wonder. She watched her husband with a caution that bordered on jealousy and was aware that slow changes were taking place in him. Her hope was that by not making too much of them she could turn them to her advantage. He seemed to have reached a new threshold in his life and she wanted to be on the right side of any door that might be closing. Hartmann’s ease of manner and attention to social form had at first appeared to her merely the polished exterior of a man who had spent much of his life in polite society. Patiently she waited for them to evaporate and for the man inside to be revealed to her. She knew him to be passionate and thought his punctiliousness therefore only a mask; but it was one that he had never lowered.
As well as a ready sense of the absurd, he seemed to have a reserve of anger inside him which he hardly ever turned on the world, almost, it sometimes seemed, out of politeness. Although he was quite willing to offer his opinions on any topic, he would never test his feelings on anyone except himself, and this perplexed Christine.
They had married when she discovered herself to be pregnant, but she had miscarried and, as a result, was unable to have children. Hartmann was adamant that it made no difference and that he loved her for herself alone; Christine, however, sometimes feared that he stayed with her only from an innate sense of duty.
I shan’t stray far, she repeated to herself as she went out into the garden with her secateurs.