Caravaggio's Angel (5 page)

I aimed the car through it into a square court. It was bounded on one side by the wall with the arch; the house, which was U-shaped and painted a faded apricot, formed most of the square’s other three sides. An enormous
Magnolia grandiflora
dominated the courtyard, its huge white flowers, scattered like moons amid the dark, leathery leaves, filling the air with lemony sweetness. To one side stood a dented silver people carrier. No one was in sight.

I parked beside the people carrier and got out. Immediately ahead, in the centre of the façade, was a hefty planked door. There was no sign of a bell, just a knocker in the shape of a brass hand. I knocked: from somewhere to the back of the house the inevitable dog barked. I knocked again, and stood back to wait.

The dog stopped barking, and I heard footsteps approach. Then the door swung open, to reveal a dishevelled-looking young woman wearing cut-off jeans and a blue T-shirt. She was perhaps thirty years old, with a mop of dark, curly hair tied back in a rough pony-tail, a thin-lipped, smiling mouth, and bright dark eyes. A fat black labrador, its muzzle grey with age and breathless with the effort of locomotion, followed some distance behind her, its tail furiously wagging.

‘Madame Peytoureau? I’m Reggie Lee – I phoned earlier.’

‘Of course – come in.’ She held out a hand. ‘I’m Delphine.’

The door opened on to a big farmhouse kitchen, dim and cool, with a floor of unglazed pink terracotta tiles. The dog sniffed me comprehensively, then turned and trotted wheezily through a door in the opposite wall. We followed it into a small, elegant room, half-panelled in chestnut, its floor a pattern of thick oak cross-boards and thin length-ways strips. An open french window gave on to a garden, where the dog took its place beneath a hammock slung between two plum trees, closed its eyes, and began to snore loudly.

‘Do excuse him,’ Delphine said. ‘He’s getting old.’

The plum trees were part of an orchard, from which, presumably, the house took its name. The hot air, perfumed with bursts of fragrance from the magnolia in the court-yard, echoed with the rasp of cicadas. Delphine rubbed her eyes, a juicy sound that was mildly alarming. She said, ‘Sorry, I was asleep. You know how it is, the children are out with friends, I sat down for a minute and I must have dropped off. What time is it?’

I looked at my watch. ‘Nearly three. What a beautiful place.’

‘Isn’t it? We used to live in Paris, and our Parisian friends wonder how we can bear it, stuck out here. But we love it. Olivier, my husband’s from round here . . . He still has to be in Paris during the week. But I wouldn’t go back there. Do you want to see your room?’

We walked back through the kitchen to one of the side wings. The room was clean and bare, with twin beds, whitewashed walls, and white curtains. A small shower-room opened off it. Delphine threw back the shutters, let-ting in a shaft of sunlight and the scent of magnolia. ‘OK?’

‘It’s lovely. Am I the only guest?’

Delphine nodded. ‘It’s midweek. And the season hasn’t really started properly yet. It’ll fill up next week, after 14th July. Would you like something to drink? I’m always thirsty when I wake up.’

We wandered back into the garden, picking up a bottle of cold mineral water en route, and sat down at a rough wooden table set under one of the trees. ‘Are you here on holiday?’ she asked.

‘No, I’ve come to see someone.’

‘Really? Who? Or perhaps it’s a private matter.’

‘Not particularly. It’s a Madame Rigaut. It’s in connection with an exhibition. I work for the National Gallery in London.’

‘The National Gallery, how interesting! I used to think I’d have a career. But then the children came along and somehow it never happened . . .’

‘It’s just a job,’ I said. ‘One must live.’

What a lie! Without my job, where –
who
– would I be? I could never live out here, even with children, even in a place as beautiful as this. Whenever I’d felt tempted by Caroline’s life all I had to do was try and imagine actually living out there in Gloucestershire. Trees, fields, sheep. Or in this case, geese. Meyrignac’s byroads were bespattered with notices inviting tourists to come in and watch geese being force-fed – a curious entertainment, and not (one would have thought) calculated to sell more foie-gras. I doubt whether many butchers would think a glimpse of the slaughterhouse the best advert for prime fillet. But that’s the country for you: people so desperate for some-thing to do that they will even pay to watch geese eat.

‘Is that Madame Rigaut at La Jaubertie?’ Delphine enquired.

‘Yes – do you know her?’

‘She’s a friend of yours?’ The drawing-back was unmistakable.

‘No, I’ve never met her before. Why?’

‘Nothing, really.’ She fidgeted with her glass. ‘It’s just – there are some strange stories about her. About the family . . .’

‘The family?’ I said. Something for Joe, perhaps. ‘What kind of thing?’

Perhaps I sounded too eager. Delphine shook her head and looked awkward, evidently regretting her indiscretion. ‘Nothing, really. Just gossip.’

Suddenly, all my motivation seemed to have evaporated. Perhaps it was the air. If you breathed enough of it, the outside world would simply fade away, leaving this shimmery orchard as the only reality. Maybe that was what had happened to Delphine – she’d fallen under the spell, and couldn’t break out. I felt about in my brain for the remnants of urban edge. ‘Is she a murderess or something?’ I inquired, carefully simulating casual disinterest.

Delphine laughed. ‘No, nothing like that. It’s just that – her son’s the Minister of the Interior, and not too popular with some people. Though I suppose quite a lot of them must have voted for him. And – oh, well.’ She lifted her empty glass, then put it down again. ‘More water?’

I shook my head. The anaesthetic hadn’t taken long to wear off. ‘And?’

Delphine shook her head. ‘Oh, it’s nothing. Really.’ But the mask of virtue was unmistakably slipping. One more push should do it.

‘
Allez
, you can’t leave it there!’ I said persuasively.

‘Well – they say – she was shaved.
Tondue
.’

‘
Tondue
?’

Delphine put her hand up to her head. Of course. This was the punishment reserved, after the war, for women who had slept with Germans: to have their heads publicly shaved as the crowd jeered. There was a famous photo-graph – the weeping girl, the grinning barber, the crowd shouting obscenities, savage with hatred and relief, happy to pile the communal guilt on to a convenient scapegoat.

‘But that’s impossible! She was married to a Communist!’

‘Who knows. It’s just gossip.’ She gave an awkward little shrug.

Once more the gauze dropped, the light dimmed. ‘Do people still remember that kind of thing?’

‘Apparently . . . Of course it doesn’t affect people’s daily lives any more. But everybody knows. When we arrived, it was almost the first thing I heard about her. The Resistance was very strong round here. Did you see the memorial to the men that were shot in Meyrignac? Most of the people who live round here were probably related to one or another of them. They don’t forget who was on what side.’

‘Even so. It was a long time ago.’

Delphine blushed. ‘I know, it’s shameful. Blackening people’s names . . . I don’t know why I mentioned it. Olivier would say it’s because I don’t have enough to think about, I’m becoming a local, that’s all they do round here, yap yap yap. I’ve nothing against Madame Rigaut, I hardly know her. She’s very old now, she doesn’t go out much. The few times we’ve met she’s been charming.’

‘Olivier doesn’t gossip?’

‘Oh, yes, but about politics, not local things.’

‘What does he do?’

‘He’s a journalist.’

‘Like my old boyfriend.’

We laughed. ‘Why old?’

‘We split up.’

‘I sometimes think I might just as well have split up with
mine
,’ Delphine said. ‘We enjoy different things, that’s the problem. He likes city life and I really can’t stand it.’

‘So why don’t you divorce?’

She shook her head. ‘It’s not so easy. There are Fabien and Magali. And when he’s here, I love him. He just isn’t here very often.’

‘What’s he like?’ I said idly.

Delphine laughed. ‘Oh – normal. Charming. You’d like him. Everyone does.’

‘Perhaps I’ll meet him.’

‘Not if you stay here,’ she commented, glancing at her watch. ‘Heavens, is that the time? I’ll have to go and get the children in a moment, they’re at a friend’s.’

I said, ‘How far’s La Jaubertie from here? Can you walk there?’

‘Absolutely. It’s a lovely walk. If you want I can show you the way on the map.’

We went into the kitchen. She picked a map off a heap on a chair, spread it on the table and traced the route in red biro. ‘We’re here – you want to go out the back, then turn down here – and here. If you feel energetic you can do a circle, or else you can just come back the same way. Do you like walking?’

I said I did, though I hadn’t done very much of it recently, apart from the odd few days in Gloucestershire. Of course one does walk in the city, but it’s mostly to the tube station and back: not something you could really call walking, even if it does involve putting one foot in front of another in a rhythmic way. Still, the basic technique was there. ‘Will I be all right in trainers?’

‘Of course. It’s not exactly mountaineering.’ Delphine pointed to a gate in the wall at the back of the orchard. ‘You go out there.’

I took the map and set off into the hot, green afternoon. The gate had box bushes on either side of it, once clipped into neat balls, but now overgrown into enormous mop-heads. On the other side, a path of trodden grass led down a gentle slope to a wood.

The way at first was along old green roads, some recently cleared, some almost overgrown, through copses and between fields of still-furled sunflowers and drying hay. Then the path plunged into thick woodland, emerging on to a bare hillside scattered with moon daisies. From here there was a wide view across a river valley to blue hills beyond; in the garden of a villa slightly below and to the left, children played around a bright cobalt swimming pool. The path led away from them; according to the map, La Jaubertie should be quite near, on the next ridge.

By now it was getting on for five o’clock. The hillside was almost colourless in the heat, and by the time I reached the valley floor, my nose was dripping with sweat. But the path up the opposite slope led through a pinewood, scented and shady, and when I reached the crest of the ridge a breeze had begun to blow. La Jaubertie ought to be directly ahead, on the other side of a stand of tall lime trees. I thought I could just make out the pointed top of a conical roof.

I plunged into the shade of the limes, then out into a clearing with a small building. It looked like a private chapel, not particularly graceful – built perhaps in the nine-teenth century – and now in a state of some disrepair. A gravestone could just be made out half-buried in the long grass beside it. I pulled the grass away and read:
Robert de
Beaupré, 1915–1937, fils bien-aimé d’Etienne et Véronique. RIP
.

So this was where he’d ended up. Back in the ancestral home. There must be a family vault somewhere – all families of this sort had one, a house of the dead where they awaited eternity stacked up in stone drawers – but if he’d committed suicide they wouldn’t have been able to bury him in consecrated ground.

I continued walking, and emerged on to a long lawn. There, before me, stood La Jaubertie: a fantastical, four-square castle in pale limestone with a round tower at each corner. I’d arrived by a back route, and the two towers nearest me were comparatively small, but the two furthest away, flanking the building’s front façade, were massive. All had steep conical roofs, their fairytale quality intensifying my recurrent sense, on this hot July day, of having moved temporarily into some parallel life.

Keeping just inside the covering woods, I skirted around the back of the château. Beneath its main roof – the most enormous roof I had ever seen, tall, red and steeply pitched – ran a corbelled walkway, lit by widely spaced small openings half-hidden beneath deep eaves. About two-thirds of the way along, the façade was pierced by a low, half-open round-arched door.

By now I was level with one of the big main towers. Here, in front of the house, the gardens, hitherto little more than grass surrounded by woodland, became more formal. A carved stone fountain played in the centre of a mown lawn; on one side a sunken avenue, culminating in a statue, was lined by a double row of box bushes carved, as they receded, into ever-smaller lozenges to create a three-dimensional
trompe l’oeil
. A gravelled drive, emerging from the surrounding woods, skirted the lawn on the side furthest from where I stood, terminating in a sweep in front of the far tower, where a red BMW and a shabby blue Renault 4 stood parked. On the side nearest me two figures sat at a wrought-iron table beneath a cedar tree, while a dog – it looked like an alsatian – lay torpidly in the shade nearby.

The sight of the dog sent me back hurriedly into the shelter of the trees. My walk had been punctuated by frenzied barking every time I passed within sight of a farmhouse, and I had no wish to be found out ignominiously spying. It would hardly be the best of introductions. Fortunately, however, the dog seemed not to have noticed me. Perhaps it was asleep.

One of the figures rose, a man, tall and unnaturally thin. Manu! Why had I not anticipated that he might be here? Somehow all my imaginings had pictured a one-to-one conversation between myself and the old woman. But that, of course, was absurd: at a time like this, Juliette would naturally be surrounded by her family. Perhaps she had told him I was coming – not that he’d be surprised, it was his doing, after all.

The figure turned. It was not, after all, Manu. This man’s hair was grey, and cut
en brosse
. It was the Minister, the man I’d seen on television. He was slightly thicker-set than his son, but they had the same attenuated build, the same way of standing and moving. Had he seen me? He seemed to be looking directly at me, but no – the trees were too thick, and he was too preoccupied with something else. He and the old woman were having some sort of argument – he was gesticulating, turned towards her now, while she sat back in her chair, apparently unmoved, certainly unmoving. Finally he flung up his hands in a gesture of supreme impatience, turned on his heel and made for the BMW. Its door slammed and it drove off at speed, leaving her alone with the dog.