Mattlin lit a cigarette and pulled a loose shred of tobacco from his lower lip. ‘You mustn’t blame Hartmann alone,’ he said. ‘Roussel’s business was in trouble before he started the work at the Manor.’
Anne had not seen Hartmann for five days, and the sound of his name brought him closer in her mind. She was sure he was unhappy. Whatever the truth about the damage to the Manor, she knew how much he loved the house and how upset he would be. She sensed a further sadness and struggle in him, something greater and more abstract than his worry about the building. When she pictured him now she saw him in the guise of a boy, as in the photograph of him about to go to war, with the protective layers of manhood stripped away. Since she had first seen him at the tennis court she had imagined his boyhood and sometimes sensed its influence in his adult actions, but she had been too awed by him and too frightened of saying the wrong thing to let this more vulnerable side of him figure much in her picture. Since she had come to know him better, however, and since she had also seen photographs of his youth, the earlier period of his life seemed more real to her. Her love for him held some degree of understanding in addition to dependence.
Her shift behind the bar finished at eleven o’clock, and she prepared to walk back to her rooms in the rain. She recognised as she walked up the rue des Ecoles that her sense of Hartmann’s needing her was in part a projection of her own wish to be with him. She battled with the feeling almost as far as the church, then could bear it no longer. She ran back down the glistening streets to the hotel and down the narrow alley to the side to the courtyard behind the kitchen. She let herself in and went to the small room off the scullery where she discovered Roland playing cards with a friend.
‘Roland, I must borrow your bicycle,’ she panted. ‘Please. It’s terribly important.’
‘At this time of night? In this weather? You must be barmy.’ Roland turned back to his cards.
‘Please, Roland. It’s desperately important. I’ll do anything in return.’
‘Anything?’ Roland looked up, a slow smile spreading across his face.
‘Anything.’
‘What about doing all these boots for the morning, then?’ he said, pointing to a pile in the corner.
‘All right,’ said Anne.
Roland seemed taken aback. ‘And I’ll want a kiss.’
‘All right.’
He grabbed her round the waist and pressed his face against hers. She let him kiss her hard on the lips then pushed him away. He wiped his mouth.
‘Where is it?’ she said.
‘Round the back. Against the wall in the corner.’
‘Thank you. I’ll do the boots when I get back.’
Roland smirked and took up his cards again while Anne ran out into the night.
There were no lights on the bicycle and once she was out of town it was hard to see where she was going, as the rain drove into her face. She knew that what she was doing was foolish, but she barely noticed the juddering of the seat or the rain seeping in through her clothes. By pedalling hard, she was just able to control her fear. She began to breathe heavily as she rode faster and faster among the pine trees whose long dripping branches stretched downward over the road in damp theatrical despair.
At last she found herself at the end of the drive and swung the bicycle down it. Only then did she pause to think that Hartmann might have gone to bed, or that he might be with Christine. She muttered hasty prayers that he should be alone as she flung the bicycle into the bushes by the side of the drive and went cautiously forward on foot.
There was a narrow moon over the woods on the other side of the lake, and by its light she could see the clouds spitting and surging round it. She crept up to the corner of the south tower, her hand flat against the stone wall, then looked round to the front of the house where she could just make out the lamp swinging by the glass-panelled door. She trembled and took a step or two backwards. It was impossible, ridiculous, she told herself. But her nerve was strong, and she inched forward again round the corner of the house.
Through the shutters of the study on the ground floor she could see a light. She raised her hand and knocked gently. There was no sound from within and the light was not shadowed or changed as it would have been had someone moved in front of it. She knocked again, a little more loudly. This time she saw the light darken for a moment, and she knew that someone inside the room had moved. She knocked again. She heard a hand on the bar of the shutters and she pulled away ready to run if it should be Christine. She heard his voice. She whispered back.
‘Go round to the scullery door.’ He sounded shocked.
He let her in, and she flung herself against him, holding on to him, sobbing and laughing in relief.
‘You’re soaked,’ he said. ‘What on earth are you doing?’
‘I – I,’ she gasped, but he put his finger over her lips, saying, ‘Ssh, we mustn’t wake Christine. Let me get you a towel.’
‘No!’ She grabbed his arm as he moved away. ‘Please, don’t go.’
She looked up at him, holding his arm. ‘I was in the bar tonight and they were all talking about Roussel.’
Hartmann nodded.
Anne said, ‘And then they talked about what had happened here. I felt . . . I don’t know.’
‘Felt what?’
‘I felt . . . I felt you needed me.’
‘My dear girl.’ He smiled and held her to him.
He made her some coffee and they sat on the bench in the corner of the scullery. At first she was worried about the damage to the house, but when Hartmann had reassured her that it was no more than a nuisance, she seemed satisfied. She thought so little of Mattlin that she didn’t think it worth telling Hartmann what he had been saying in the bar. Hartmann talked to her, but Anne said nothing as she sipped from her cup, resting her body against him. She seemed to withdraw into a contented calm, and slowly a thin, remote smile spread across her face, as if she were transported. Gradually he spoke less and less. He assured her he was all right, and that she had no need to worry on his account. He told her he didn’t mind her having come to the house, even though it had been an appalling risk. Then gradually he too fell silent.
‘It was lucky I decided to do some work,’ he said at last. ‘Normally I would have gone to bed by this time.’
She nodded. He lifted a damp strand of hair from her forehead and kissed the skin where it had lain. She wrapped her arm across his chest, feeling the dry warmth of his shirt beneath her hand. She allowed her eyes to wander slowly round the room, dwelling on the arrangements that had been made to press the scullery into service in place of the kitchen. For some minutes she imagined what she would have done with this room and the whole house if she had been mistress of it. She seemed disinclined to talk at all and when she had been there for half an hour or so Hartmann told her she must leave.
‘I’d like you to stay,’ he said. ‘But you understand.’
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I don’t mind now. Not now I’ve seen you and know you’re all right. You did need me, didn’t you?’
He looked at her big eyes fixed on him. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘yes, I think I did.’
Anne looked through the window where the rain still fell, and pouted in distaste. Hartmann laughed and went to find her something to keep out the wet.
When he had said goodbye, she retrieved Roland’s bicycle from the bushes, and, with an old waterproof of Christine’s on her shoulders and with the imprint of Hartmann’s lips still on her own, set off for the town.
The rain had eased a little, and she rode more slowly on the way back. She deposited the bicycle in the back yard and prepared to fulfil her side of the bargain by polishing all the boots. It would take her an hour or more, but she felt it had been worth it.
It was past midnight, and there was only one light on in the hotel, on the second floor at the back, above the servants’ quarters. Just as Anne was about to let herself in by the side entrance she saw a woman with long hair sitting down beneath the light, framed by the window. She was wearing a white, frilled night-gown, and began to brush the waist-length hair with long, even strokes. She was obviously looking into a mirror that wasn’t visible from where Anne stood. The woman kept up the brushing for some time before carefully massaging her face with cream. Her fingers moved deftly down and outwards from beneath her eyes in a motion of pampering gentleness. Suddenly Anne saw something familiar in the colour of the long hair released from the prison of its bun, and she recognised with a pang that the woman was Mme Bouin.
With the shutters closed to the rainy night, Mme Bouin prepared for bed. She arranged her hair over her shoulders, the way she had done every night since, at the age of fourteen, she had first been considered old enough to grow it, and then made sure her door was locked. She folded back the bedclothes in a careful V-shape and placed the striped bolster in the cupboard. Then she knelt down to say her prayers, the knotting of her finger joints exaggerated by the intertwining of her hands.
Her prayers were mostly incantations, well-known phrases repeated for their solemnity and the sense of continuation they gave her. She believed in everything she said – the ever-present nature of sin, the need for vigilance, the death of Christ which had made redemption possible for all sinners, even for herself.
She liked to pray for not less than fifteen minutes, but as she grew older she permitted herself to steal occasional glances at the small clock which was positioned on her bedside table where she could see it by opening her stronger eye for just a moment. She remembered all those who had died and all the saints they had been named after; she prayed to the Virgin Mary and then allowed some of the staff of the hotel into her thoughts. She didn’t consider them individually worth praying for, but she asked for a blessing on the place and on its work. Secretly she worried about the boy, Roland, and the girl, Anne. She thought they were too interested in the cinema which had recently opened, to say nothing of the other rumours that had reached her. She worried for the head waiter Pierre also, thinking that at his age he should be married. The Patron was an absolute authority to her who did not need either her prayers or her solicitude. She had been shocked when she heard Bruno laughing about him once, saying he was a coward.
When the hands of the clock signalled her release, Mme Bouin stood up and fetched her book from the dressing-table. It was a novel that one of the guests had left behind, and although she had opened it with trepidation she now found herself enjoying it. It was a frivolous story, but so far she had found no real harm in it.
After one chapter she laid it aside to prepare for sleep. She checked that her clothes were ready for the morning and that the alarm was set, then she went to the dressing-table and picked up a picture frame which held a photograph of her son. He had a long thin face and a somewhat vacant expression. He looked to be no more than fourteen or fifteen, but had in fact been eighteen when despatched to the front. She had had only one letter from him, posted from Verdun. Some months later she had received official notice of his death, but not until the end of the war did she learn how he had died, when the mother of another soldier wrote to her. The two boys had been friends and were found together in a wall of French dead where they had lain for twelve days before the bodies could be moved. He was, she learned, one of almost a million men who died in a mere ten-month siege, and she was only one more mother to be informed.
She lifted the photograph, touched the glass once with her hand, then turned off the light and climbed back into bed.