Vanishing Point, page 5
part #7 of Birdcage Series
He got up and left the room and walked the Tudor panelled passageway to his bedroom. Some ghost of memory had haunted him while he had been speaking to the Frenchman . . . Maurice Crillon. The windows looked out over the garden and hillside fall to the river. Against the morning sunlight the coming and going of nesting house-martins to the eaves above threw flickering shadows about the room.
Over his dressing table was a portrait of himself as a young man by Augustus John. Studying it he saw that it had something of Crillon about it. Or was that imagination? Anyway . . . One was always, he supposed, a stranger to one’s own face. One could never see one’s self truly through one’s own eyes. Still, with a little imagination and good will . . . there was something of Crillon there.
He went back to his sitting room and telephoned his wife at their London house. He was told she was out and left a message for her to ring him. Until she returned there was little he could do or wished to do without consulting her. He went to his desk and wrote a note to Maurice Crillon and then gave instructions for his chauffeur, Lloyd, to drive into Salisbury and deliver it to the Red Lion Hotel.
Later that afternoon Maurice Crillon returned to the hotel to find the note waiting for him. It read –
Dear Monsieur Crillon,
I have read the documents you kindly left with me. I do not have to tell you that they moved me very considerably. At the moment Lady Starr is in London but she will be back at the weekend and then you must come and see us. So I will be in touch with you. I am sure you will understand that this is not the time for me to go into any description of my emotions. To say that they exist is enough. And please forgive me, if, for the moment, I sign myself –
Yours sincerely,
Andrew Starr
Crillon read it twice. Then with a shrug of his shoulders he put it in his pocket. It was neither more nor less than he had anticipated. The moments in life of intense surprise were the ones that drove most people, not only to hide their confusion to gain pause to think, but into the need for an interval of complete withdrawal to give emotion and shock time to weather a little; to give the body as well as the mind time to test the nature of the change in the coming new climate of their lives. Anyway, he was in no hurry. For some things there was no hardship in waiting. For others, though, there was only foolishness in delay. Opportunity was a flower with a short life, to be plucked promptly.
He had spent a couple of hours that afternoon in the Cathedral close doing a much better pencil drawing than the one the woman had admired. One way or another he could guess that he was going to have time on his hands. Some time he must send Carla a card. He could hear her brother exclaim – Mamma mia! What does he do in England while the Zais waits here unfinished? Well, maybe it would be forever unfinished and Aldo would have to complete the cleaning of the original and break his heart taking it back to the owner. For a moment or two he thought about Carla and Trudi, the one with the sweetness of a ripe peach . . . ah, what was Trudi if one should eat her? A cheese? A fine Emmenthal? But he was in England and the palate sought a change.
He pulled the piece of paper with her address on it from his pocket. Until now he had not looked at it since being given it. Margery Littleton. The address meant nothing to him – Flat 10, Amesbury Court, London Road. Well, the hotel porter would know.
He went out and bought a bottle of wine and a bunch of white lilacs and drove to the address just after seven. It mattered nothing to him if she had people with her – though he had the impression that she lived much to herself. People with friends and contentment seldom sat on public benches and steeled themselves to make conversation with strangers.
She opened the flat door to him and her surprise was unguarded and his eyes marked the quickening of her breath and the swift agitated movement as she crossed her arms and her hands clung to her elbows, fingers moving with a fine tremble. At once he was sorry for her because he knew she hung between disbelief and joy not untouched with apprehension. Everything was there to be read in her face. How different from Carla on the Ponte Santa Trinita . . . noli me tangere . . . walking like a well-fed panther. And Trudi. . . the gorgeous Amazon who had watched him for days without true recognition as he worked in her father’s yard and who, the first time he had come up behind her, put his hands round her waist and kissed the back of her sunburnt neck, had turned and back-handed him so that he had sprawled among the marble chips in the yard. Eh, bien, chacun a son gout.
He said, “When I make a promise I keep it. But if you wish me to go, please accept the flowers and the drawing – I’ve redone it for you, larger, so that you can frame it. But, if you send me away, I shall take the wine with me.”
She laughed then, a breathless laugh slowly easing, and stood aside to let him enter and said, “The place is in a muddle and I was just going to cook myself something and —”
He raised a hand, stilling her, and said, “You have eggs?”
“Yes, why?”
“If you permit – I will make us omelettes in the kitchen while you do the tidying that worries you.” He paused for a moment smiling at her and then said quietly, “I am a Frenchman bearing gifts – not a Greek. You have no need to beware of me “Oh, I didn’t think that for a moment.”
“Good–”
She led him into the sitting room and one glance told him that his drawing of the Cathedral would be among bad company. White horses rose from a stormy sea over the mantelpiece, and there was a semi-Cubist painting of a fishing village, angular boats and sails and white, red and blue cottages clinging to the side of a steep cove and – cut from some magazine he imagined – a colour print of a cat sprawling in a basket while kittens romped over her. But the kitchen to his surprise he liked. It was airy and well ordered, everything in place, spotless and shining, like some well-lit Aladdin’s cave. He turned to her and said smiling, “This is your love?”
She smiled, too, and said, “Yes – the room out there . . . I rent the place furnished. But this . . . well, I like cooking and I like things to be right. Just as at the office.”
Nothing was hurried. The was no desire in him to force anything. Time was always a man’s best ally. She tidied the sitting room and then came and laid the small dining table at the end of the kitchen, and when he felt the occasional rise in her of awkwardness, he smoothed it over by telling her about himself, not the truth of course, but off the cuff inventions. Yes, he was French. From Bordeaux. Did she know it? No – then he felt free to invent an art school and himself one of the masters, and he was over here with some vacation time still on his hands after fixing up a summer position as an art master with an Adult Education school in Brighton. With time on his hands he was free to indulge his own pleasure . . . visiting and drawing English country houses and cathedrals and churches. Had she ever been to Rheims or Chartres? No. Notre Dame, of course. Yes. And she went every summer with an aunt for three weeks to Majorca. And as his correctness gave her confidence, and her second glass of Petit Chablis smoothed the disturbed surface of the emotions he had aroused in her, she loosened and laughed and came to meet him with her own little burden of memories and regrets. She had been born in Devon and worked in a local government office in Taunton until both her parents had died and then she had come to Salisbury to a position as secretary in a solicitor’s office. And later. . . later. . . his correctness by now fully gentling her, offering sympathy with the odd catch of humour to lighten it. . . he learned of the young Green Jackets officer, to whom she had been unofficially engaged (in time the rather disapproving Indian Army father and the point-to-point and horse trials mother would have come round to it), who had gone to Northern Ireland on a tour of duty and an IRA land mine had blown him and three of his men to Kingdom Come. The smallest seed pearls of tears had briefly starred the corners of her eyes so that he had felt genuine sympathy and, under its cover, reached out and held her hand in a brief caress which, probably without knowing it, she had returned and so sealed the compact to come between them. And when he came to Brighton in high summer . . . he opened a brief glimpse of a possible friendship to be renewed.
As for now he realized – more than surprising himself – there was no exigent passion in him to spur him on to take uneJille si mal gardee. He left her at a polite hour, shaking her hand and formally thanking her for her hospitality. There was no need for rush. He would be here for a while, and Avoncourt Abbey waited. He needed no demanding attachments until his position there was clear.
Two evenings later on returning to his hotel he found a letter waiting for him, hand-delivered, from Sir Andrew Starr.
It read –
Dear Monsieur Crillon,
My wife and I will be very happy if you would come and have dinner with us tomorrow evening. My chauffeur will call for you at six-thirty.
Yours sincerely,
Andrew Starr
The chauffeur did. Lloyd was a middle-aged, short, slightly bow-legged man in bottle-green jacket and trousers, wearing a peaked cap with a little green rosette at its front. His face was like something out of a Rembrandt drawing, collapsed flesh about his mouth and a dark apple shine to his cheeks. The car was a Rolls-Royce of fairly recent date. He was driven in silent state to Avoncourt Abbey and for the first time he felt a slight sense of the ridiculous and unreal. All this and the rest to come was a world far, far removed from his mother’s cottage, from the untidy studio over the Arno and Carla padding around naked – but a world which he could either accept or reject. He held that thought firmly in his mind. But accept or reject, one way or the other he meant to take from it some profit or pleasure, or perhaps some other gain to which the gods would in time point the way. But for the present he was content to go with the smoothly regulated current of events.
He was taken around the far side of the Abbey to the entrance to the family’s private wing. A butler took him along a badly lit corridor, the limed wood framed panels covered with a soft mouse-brown antique leather and hung with pictures that sang briefly for him as he passed, his quick eye noting and identifying many of them. There was no nervousness in him. He was his own man – and nothing could ever change that.
Sir Andrew Starr, dark suited, guessing that he travelled without evening clothes, was waiting in a pleasant, well-lit sitting room. He was alone and greeted him with a slight twist of a smile, pleasant but masking . . . . . well, what emotions? He did not know and did not choose to guess. He knew himself and his position. On his father’s side, he guessed, similar constraints held their place. Whatever changes time might bring in were problematical and still distant.
They shook hands, and Hanson the butler left them, and Sir Andrew went to a table in the window to fetch them drinks. With his back to him, Sir Andrew said gruffly and with a short laugh, “Well, this is a fair turn up for the old book, isn’t it? Leaves us both like a couple of fish stranded out of the water. Where does one begin?”
Crillon laughed. “The beginning was long ago, Sir Andrew. Perhaps I did wrong by coming to you?”
“Oh, no – not that. We shall weather it one way or another. My wife will join us soon, but I wanted a little time to be alone with you so that we could get some things straightened out. I should warn you that she is a woman of sharply changing moods. You will do me a kindness by making allowances for that . . . and for the shock. One moment she is telling herself that this is all nonsense, and the next she is weeping, playing the part of the mother to whom a long lost child has been restored. Like something out of an old Drury Lane melodrama.”
“Drury Lane?”
“A London theatre.”
“Ah, yes, I see. Well, sir, it is melodrama. And that is the stuff of women’s nature.”
Sir Andrew lowered a bushy eyebrow and said, “Don’t know about that. They can be damned deep and as precise as a surgeon’s knife when they wish. Are you married?”
“No, sir.”
“May I ask what you do for a living?”
“I am an artist and picture restorer.”
“And you live at Cragnac?”
“No, sir. My mother did. But I go wherever I can find work. Which is not difficult.”
“Know about pictures, eh?”
“I think so.” As he answered he realized that Sir Andrew was probably as emotional and changeable as his wife in his own way, and that all this conversation was deliberately held off the line of the real purpose of this meeting in order to allow him to come to some assessment of his own. Was he dealing with a deceit or a genuine melodramatic truth?
“You’ve been through the galleries here?”
“Yes, I have.”
“What would you take if I offered you your choice?” Sir Andrew grinned under his bushy eyebrows, his face creased like a too long stored apple.
Crillon considered this, and then said, “Well, there are many I would like to have, but as I am a travelling man, going where I find my work, I would happily settle for the Eugene Boudin you have – Dieppe, La Plage. It would go easily into the bottom of a suitcase.”
Sir Andrew laughed. “Not bad, not bad. Though, by God, I have very different memories of Dieppe.” He was suddenly silent, lost in thought, and then said quietly, “Anyway, if all this is as it seems it will be yours one day. And, eventually, a title, and the worries. Aye, worries. I’m lucky as far as money is concerned, but cash don’t buy off all worries.” He laughed again suddenly and said, “My dear boy, my advice to you is to turn now and run. You won’t have any money troubles here – but, by God, you’ll have others if – as I do – you think out of fairness you should share some of your good fortune with others. They’ll rob you of peace. They’ll steal your plants, ruin your shrubs by taking cuttings, leave their disgusting crisps and chocolate papers all over the place, write their names on the backsides of any handy statuette, and let their unruly children fall down the long steps in the water garden and bring an action for damages – and that’s not all. When they’ve all gone and you’re alone and can call your home your own again you find you can’t walk round it at night if sleep escapes you without setting off magic eye alarms and God knows what. Take my advice, lad . . . aye, even my son . . . ask me to settle a handsome sum on you and go. Be free to wander and do the thing you like doing. Eh, how does that seem to you?”
Before Crillon could answer, a high, fluting voice came from the doorway of the room. “Like the stupid, self-pitying nonsense it is, my dear Andrew. And, my dear boy, my dear long lost one, pay no attention to your father. Life has given him so much happiness that it has turned him sour. My dear boy! I knew it. . . I knew it. . . Come let me embrace you!
Lady Starr advanced on Crillon, a tall, white-haired, still good-looking woman, full-bosomed, long-legged, wearing a red velvet evening gown, the room light sparking the rings on her hands and the emeralds around her neck, and she threw her arms around him and kissed him almost boisterously on one cheek after the other. Then, holding him away from her, went on, “Yes, yes. Of course. Your father’s eyes – but not his crabbed nature I hope? And you hold yourself well, as I do. Stand tall and face the world fearlessly. And what a nice, well cut suit. Just right for the occasion. Dress, you know, tells everything. My dear boy – welcome home.” She kissed him again on the brow and both cheeks and then stepped away leaving with him the ghosts of more than one large brandy.
From behind her and a little to one side Sir Andrew winked at Crillon, and then said, surprising him, “Tell us, my dear boy, what were your reactions when the good curé landed all this on your plate?” He spoke French now, and that language was held to for the rest of the evening largely, and Crillon soon realized that it was a language in which they both were fluent.
Smiling, he said, “Well, Sir Andrew, what would you and your dear lady have thought if after years and years of being French you learned that you were in fact English? Moi, j'étais étourdi.”
“My dear boy – how natural! The English really, most of them, are impossible. They are the bastard descendants of too many races and take a pride in it because they assume that it is a mixture designed by the gods to elevate and distinguish them from all other races.”
Lady Starr moved forward, patted him gently on the cheek, and then sitting down said to her husband, “Andrew . . . a brandy, I think. The whole thing is so improbable and delightful, so excessive that one’s mind reels and needs calming.”
“Yes, my dear.”
As Sir Andrew moved to get her drink, Lady Starr smiled and gave Crillon a little wink and said, “It was a tremendous shock, you know. Oh, a happy one. But nevertheless one’s whole psyche reels at the happy unexpectedness of it all and needs support. Your father has been marvellous about it and I share his feelings with him. Late come it may be. . . yes, sadly very late come. But we must accept God’s will. And your dear mother . . . how she must have been tormented over the years. My heart bleeds for her. Naturally, I don’t remember her very well. She was only with me a matter of weeks at Aiguebelle. But I understand the temptation . . . Oh, I do. I do.”
“Darling,” Sir Andrew came back with her brandy, “I don’t think we need to go into all that. In moments of crisis people act spontaneously often without a thought for the consequences. If you’re going to blame anyone, blame the bloody Boche and the spaghetti boys. It all happened a long time ago. Monsieur Crillon is the one who really has had the bombshell dropped into his lap.”
