Fortnight of Fear (28 page)

David said, “Here's ours.”

One of the Pee Wee Hermans brought them two huge steaming tureens of
moules marinières
and a vast plateful of
pommes frites. “Attention, c'est tres chaud
,” he warned; but Jeremy took a
frite
straight away, and then dropped it in his beer because it was too hot.

“Brilliant shot,” laughed Robert.

After that, they were quiet for a while, although the French pensioners were growing noisier and noisier, scraping their chairs and laughing and arguing at the tops of their voices. David forked out mussels and dipped his bread into the oniony liquor and felt extremely at peace for the first time in months.

There was nothing very special about this part of France, the Opal Coast, apart from its beaches and its marshes and its wildlife. They had come here for only three days, simply for the quiet and the change of scenery. The weather had been dreadful, most of the time, but they had gone for walks along the promenade and up into the cobbled medieval town, and sat in cafes watching the rain trickle down the windows, drinking wine, and that had been all that they had either expected or needed.

David had recently finished a complicated eleven-month
design project, updating the corporate identity of British Allied Fibres, which had meant producing a new company logo, new livery for the company's vans, new notepaper, and even redecorating the company's headquarters. He had just wanted to escape for a while from anything that looked like a British Allied Fibre.

He was a dark, rather Scottish-looking man of 45, a once-keen tennis-player gone to seed. Robert was unmistakably his father's son, only an inch or two taller, while Jeremy was blonde and snub-nosed and looked much more like his mother.

They finished their meal with strong cups of coffee, and then the three of them strolled back along the promenade. The promenade was almost a mile long, very straight, flanked on one side by tall, black-painted lamp-posts, and on the other by the greasy gray banks of the Somme. There were thirty or forty little fishing dinghies moored in a line on the mud, just beginning to bob and jiggle as the tide came in.

The wind came off the Channel steady and cold, and David was glad that he had remembered his raincoat.

They passed a sad, red-brick Gothic hotel, with towers and balconies and a tangled garden criss-crossed with colorless bracken. They passed a tatty casino, closed until the summer; and a small cafe called Brasserie Jehanne D'Arc where lorry-drivers sat, smoking and drinking coffee. They paused at a small marble monument with a plaque on it which read, “On this spot, on May 13, 1940, Maurice Renaud fell to the bullets of the enemy.” Then they reached their hotel, La Colonne de Bronze, a nondescript yellow-stucco building on a tight corner of the town's main road.

Inside, in the small gloomy bar,
madame
was polishing wine-glasses. She was a thirty-sevenish woman with tightly-braided hair and a sharp, vixen-like face. She appeared always to be immaculately dressed: today, in one of
those boxy gray suits that French women seem to like so much. “
Monsieur
” she said tightly, as the door swung shut behind them.

The boys had brought some schoolbooks with them, and they went up to their room to revise for a while (and probably to wrestle). David thought that he would look in on Carole, to see if she was feeling any better, and then maybe take a walk up to the town's medieval gatehouse, and take a few photographs.

He climbed the narrow stairs to the landing, and eased open the door of Chambre 1. The curtains were still drawn, as he had left them, and the room was overheated and gloomy. “Carole?” he said. “Carole? Are you awake?”

She didn't answer. He closed the door behind him and tiptoed over to the bed. It was then that he saw that the orange bedcover had been neatly drawn over it, and that there was nobody in it.

“Carole?” he called. She must have felt better, and decided to get up. It was odd that she hadn't opened the curtains, though. He went to the bathroom, and opened the door. Carole wasn't there, either. The shower dripped monotonously into shower-tray.

He drew back the curtains. The room filled with wan gray daylight. From here, David could see across the road, to the cafe where the lorry-drivers were still sitting, and the nub of granite that commemorated the falling of Maurice Renaud.

He went back downstairs. Madame was still polishing wine-glasses in the bar. Carole certainly wasn't here, because there were only three tables, two barstools and a potted palm, and hardly enough room to swing
une chatte
.

He poked his head around the door of the dining-room. Perhaps Carole had felt hungry, after a whole night of being sick, and had ordered herself some lunch. But the
dining-room was silent and empty, with all the cutlery and napkins set out for this evening's meal.

“
Monsieur
?” asked
madame
.

“
Je cherche ma femme
” said David. “
Est-elle sortie, peut-etre
?”

Madame
frowned at him, looking even more vixenish than ever. “
Pardonnez, monsieur, je ne comprends pas
.”

“
Ma femme
,” David repeated. “
Ce matin, elle était très malade. Elle dorme. Mais, elle n'est plus dans nôtre chambre
.” God, he wished his French were better.

Madame
continued to frown. “
Je ne comprends pas
,” she repeated.

“
Madame
…,” said David, fully aware that he was sounding more and more like an impatient Englishman Abroad. “I am looking –
je cherche, comprenez-vous?
– for my wife –
ma femme
. This morning she was sick – sick,
malade, dans l'estomac
. I left her asleep while my sons and I went
pour manger
. Now she has gone.
Elle a disparu
.”

Madame put down the glass she was polishing, went to the side of the bar, and unhooked the key marked Ch.1. Without a word, she beckoned David to follow her, and stamped ahead of him up the stairs. She flung open the door, stretched out her hand, and said, “
Voilà, monsieur
.”

David sighed. “I don't think you understand. I know that my wife isn't here. What I want to know is, where is she?
Où se trouve ma femme
?”

Madame shook her head. “
Je ne sais pas, monsieur. Vous êtes arrivés avec deux fils, n'est-ce pas? Deux fils, oui? Mais, pas de la femme
. You understand, monsieur? You arrive with two boys, two sons. But, no wife. Last night you rested in this room
tout seul
. You were alone.”

“Well, that's patently ridiculous,” said David. “My wife was sick all night. I just want to know where she is. Maybe
she's gone to the chemist,
la pharmacie
? Or the doctor? Is there a clinic around here?”

“
Ah, oui monsieur. A
very short way along the street, only
cent metres
. But, you had no wife.”

“Of course I had a wife! You saw her yourself! You spoke to her! Do you think I could hallucinate my own wife? All of her things are here – look!”

He wrenched open the door of the small brown-varnished wardrobe, and there was a discordant jingling of wire coat-hangers. Inside hung a navy-blue blazer, a two pairs of trousers, three clean shirts and two ties. On the shelves were socks, underpants, and a neat stack of four clean handkerchiefs. None of Carole's clothes at all.

For the first time, David felt a genuine sense of dread. He looked at
madame
and said, “
Je ne comprends pas
.”

Madame
shrugged. “
Monsieur
, you came here with your two sons. That is all.”

David hesitated, thinking, looking around. Why on earth would Carole have left like that, without telling him? They hadn't argued. She hadn't been depressed. Everything had been going swimmingly until she ate that damned cheese in Abbeville.

Madame
was about to go back downstairs, but David said, “Wait,
s'il-vous plait – un moment
” and swung their suitcase on to the bed. They were due to leave tomorrow: maybe Carole had simply packed all her clothes for the want of something to do.

But when he clicked open the catches, and opened the lid, he found that the suitcase was completely empty, apart from a plastic bag crammed with soiled laundry. He tipped the laundry across the bed, but there were no bras, no lacy panties, no rose-embroidered handkerchiefs. All of the laundry was his. Socks, underpants, handkerchiefs initialed with the letter J.

“
Monsieur
…,” said
madame
. “I regret that I am very busy.”

“That's all right, yes,” said David, and
madame
went back down to the bar, her high-heels banging on the stairs. David let the lid of the case drop; and then he stood in front of the bed and wondered what to do next.

Had Carole left him? Had she really had enough, and taken her clothes, and disappeared? But why would she do it here, in France, on a three-day holiday? She could just as easily have disappeared in England. She could just as easily have said, “David, I need some breathing-space, why don't we separate for a while?”

He knew that he hadn't been behaving very well: not as far as Carole was concerned, anyway. He'd been arriving home late from the office, elated, excited, smelling of drink. But that had been all part of the high – all part of the office adrenaline that had enabled him to finish a first-class corporate identity package in eleven months flat, right on schedule, and nothing missed out, not a single mistake, right down to the visiting cards and the British Allied Fibres ballpens.

But he couldn't believe that she would have left. Not here, not now. Not without discussing things first. And she adored Robert and Jeremy. How could she have left Robert and Jeremy, without a word?

He opened the boys' bedroom door. They were wrestling on Jeremy's bed – or at least, they had been until about a millisecond after they heard his hand on the doorknob. Now they were sitting six feet apart, reading
The Mystery of Edwin Drood
and
The White Company
, sweating, flushed, but very studious.

“Hi, daddy,” said Robert, nonchalantly.

“You haven't seen mummy?” he asked them.

Robert looked up. “What do you mean?”

“I mean mummy wasn't here, when we got back.” He didn't like to tell them that her clothes had gone, too.

Jeremy shrugged. “Perhaps she felt better. Perhaps she
went to that antique shop. She said she liked those china ducks.”

David didn't answer. He didn't know what to say.

“She probably went for a walk, that's all,” said Robert, going back to his book.

David said, “She did come with us, didn't she? I mean, she
was
here?”

They both stared at him. “Of course she was here.”

“It's just that her clothes have all gone; and her makeup, too, out of the bathroom; and
madame
downstairs doesn't seem to remember her.”

“But that's stupid!” Jeremy protested. “Of course she was here! Her coat's in the car, and everything!”

Together, they walked across the road. From a second-story window next to La Colonne de Bronze, a fat man in a dark-blue fisherman's sweater watched them with unabashed curiosity and smoked. In the next window, an old woman in a floral housecoat watched them with unabashed curiosity and knitted.

David opened the boot of their silver Rover and it was empty. No coat, no shoes, nothing. He opened the glovebox and there was no hairbrush with blonde hairs clinging, no eau-de-toilette, no lipstick, no tissues, no hairgrips, nothing feminine at all.

He covered his mouth with his hand while the boys watched him in bewilderment. At last he took his hand away, and said, “She
was
with us, wasn't she?”

“Of course she was with us,” said Jeremy. Both of the boys' faces were very white. “I mean, she was with us, she was here. She couldn't have just disappeared.”

They walked back to La Colonne de Bronze. Madame wasn't in the bar, so David rang the bell and eventually she appeared, bustling and displeased. The restaurant was making preparations for tonight's dinner.

“
Madame
, I'm sorry to trouble you, but my wife
was
here, and now she has gone. My sons are both witness
to that. I mean, it's possible that
I
may have been hallucinating, but not all three of us.”

Madame's
face remained impassive. Either she hadn't understood very much of what David had said, or else she simply hadn't been listening.

“I am sorry,
monsieur
,” she said, at last. “I do not know how to help you.”

David and the boys went back up to the room, and searched it yet again. Jeremy even went down on to his hands and knees and looked under the bed. On one wall there was a very bad painting of a yacht; on the other, a reproduction of an Ingres painting of a girl reading. Neither the room itself nor anything in it gave any clue as to what might have happened to Carole. David even sniffed the pillow and the bedsheets, trying to detect Carole's perfume, but the bed had been freshly made, and it smelled of nothing but the inside of French linen-cupboards.

“Where do you think she's gone?” asked Robert, and David had never heard him sound so frightened. He put his arm around Robert's shoulders (even though Robert was taller than him) and gave him a reassuring squeeze.

“It's okay … there has to be some logical explanation.”

“She couldn't have been kidnapped, could she?” Jeremy suggested.

“Well, no … I don't think so. I mean, she's taken all of her clothes and all of her makeup and everything –
and
her coat from the car. You'd think that if anybody had taken her away against her will, there would have been some signs of a fight.
Madame
downstairs would have heard something.”