The insoluble nature of his dilemma had been one of the factors that had reconciled Hartmann to marrying Christine. He knew he would never find a woman to end all desire, but there was much in his relationship with Christine, leaving aside the problem of her pregnancy, which disposed him to think they might be happy. There had been various outcomes and problems in his dealings with women, but the presence of sexual desire was something he had always taken as axiomatic. Yet now, with Christine, it had gone. Where once this feeling had been the most dependable presence in his life, now there was nothing.
Hartmann got up from the desk and turned out the lights. He went through to the hall, pulled the bolt across the front door and climbed the stairs to bed. Christine was still awake and smiled to him as he came in. He stood barefoot on the boards and gazed out across the lake to the swell of the woods on the other side. He was conscious of deferring an action, and knew that Christine would be aware of it too. When he climbed into bed he saw that she was naked – a sight which on countless previous occasions had caused a simple response in him. When he looked at her now, he felt something not unlike compassion. He saw her legs and arms, her heavy breasts and her face, eager and friendly, and he thought of all the difficulties of her life and of the way she had overcome them.
It occurred to him that really this was the normal way to view a naked woman. It was the way one would look upon a mother or a sister, or a work of art: with affection, with understanding, with an appreciation, even, of their elegance, but not through the filter of desire. It seemed that the way in which he had previously seen women was false. Here was this aggregation of flesh and skin and hair, not repulsive, but merely human, like his own body. No doubt its owner could view it with detachment, wishing it were different in some respects, but also with kindliness and respect. Why, then, shouldn’t he also see it in this way? Was this not the most civilised approach? It was not absence of sexual desire that was strange, he thought; on the contrary, the strangeness was in the leap of imagination and sustained belief, against all the evidence, that allowed men to see women through a veil of make-believe allure.
Christine wanted him to make love to her, and he felt baffled by his disinclination. It was as though he had cut himself and not bled, or opened his eyes and not seen. In his mind he thought of all the other women he knew, and in this mood he viewed them all in the same way. None was arousing. It didn’t occur to him to think of Anne or of what he had felt so strongly in the attic only a few days earlier.
3
T
HE NEXT DAY
Hartmann had a letter from Etienne Beauvais, a former colleague in Paris he had not seen for some years. Etienne had married and moved with his wife to a house near where her family had a large farm. He invited Hartmann to come for a weekend of shooting and ‘other country pursuits’. He concluded: ‘Bring yourself a companion. All is discretion here! Do come, Charles; it will be a jolly party and we haven’t seen you for a long time.’ Such a long time, in fact, that he clearly hadn’t heard that Hartmann was married. He would ask Christine if she wanted to go.
He stuffed the letter inside his jacket pocket and went to look for her. As he crossed the hall he was accosted by Roussel, his hair white with dust.
‘Ah, M. Hartmann, I’m so glad to have caught you. A little matter I wanted to discuss.’
‘You look as though you’ve been working.’
‘Ah yes, indeed. I thought I’d lend a hand today. We’re making such good progress. I wanted to show you what we’ve done and then perhaps you might think it’s time for another instalment.’
‘All right. What do you want me to look at?’
‘This way, monsieur. The cellar.’
Roussel led the way over the dust-sheets and into the kitchen, where they discovered the fat workman leaning against the range smoking a cigarette. The man grunted and held out his hand to be shaken. Hartmann took it with a nod before following Roussel down the steps.
There followed half an hour’s pleading from Roussel in which he argued that he had almost finished the job and was thus due to be paid the third of the four instalments. However, it was clear to Hartmann that Roussel had barely completed the first part of the job. The builder was also insistent that there should be an extra payment for the floor.
‘But you haven’t put in a floor,’ said Hartmann.
‘Not as such, I admit,’ said Roussel. ‘But I think it must be considered a separate item from the decoration and the main structural work.’
Hartmann looked at two huge struts that stuck up into the roof of the cellar.
‘Temporary supports, M. Hartmann. Just until the new joist settles.’
Roussel was a tenacious arguer. When it was obvious that Hartmann was unconvinced by his progress with the schedule, he suggested that the requirements had been changed. Next he said that his youngest daughter was sick, and needed care. Hartmann, wearied with the arguments, agreed to pay him some more money. Perhaps, he thought, that’s how Mattlin wears down his girlfriends: he bores them into submission.
His presence no longer required, Hartmann picked his way over the dust-sheets and out into the hall. He had felt no recurrence of the pity he had experienced on the first day that he and Roussel surveyed the house, though neither had he found an explanation for it.
He went to his study to do some work, but found to his irritation that he couldn’t concentrate. He was thinking about Anne. She had reminded him of feelings he thought he had put behind him.
He sighed and looked back at the desk. The negligence case needed work. He pulled out a bundle of papers giving details of the motor systems used in mechanical dredgers and bent his mind to them.
He kept seeing her face and the movement of her body. She was always demurely dressed, but it couldn’t quite conceal a rather womanly heaviness about the bust which was charmingly at odds with the girlishly quality of her face.
Good heavens, he told himself, three men died in this accident. Fiercely he studied the movement of the engine and tried to imagine the sound it made.
But he heard only the sound of Anne’s voice and felt the tugging of her hand on his sleeve. That look of pleading when she had whispered, ‘Monsieur . . .’
He looked back at the papers. He had once met one of the victims of the accident. He tried to remember what he was like.
Only one presence took shape in his mind. My God, he thought, throwing down the pen. He held his head in his hands, then rubbed his eyes fiercely.
He stood up and remembered that before Roussel had accosted him he had been going to find his wife. It was her birthday and she had invited some friends to come to the house for dinner.
She was still in bed, reading.
‘What time are the people coming this evening?’
‘About seven o’clock. But Marie-Thérèse is always late.’
‘Would you like your birthday present now?’
‘Oh, Charles, how delightful. Yes, please.’
Hartmann took out a package from the cupboard in the corner and handed it to Christine, who pulled eagerly at the strings and ribbon that held it together. The shop girl had done up the package with care, and it was some time before Christine’s impatient fingers were able to disinter a pair of binoculars.
‘For watching the birds,’ said Hartmann.
‘They’re beautiful. Such a lovely finish.’ She climbed out of bed and walked to the window with them. ‘They’re very powerful, aren’t they? There’s a moorhen out there, a long way out, and I can see it quite clearly with these. Do have a look, Charles.’
Hartmann took the binoculars and aimed in the direction Christine pointed. He saw the little bird paddling along across the lake, its diminutive body dwarfed by the expanse of water and the stretch of trees beyond. He handed the glasses back to her.
‘If you walk up to the dyke,’ he said, ‘you should be able to see a lot of birds in those trees on the way up. The water birds nest in the weeds there.’
Christine smiled and kissed him on the cheek. ‘It’s a lovely present.’
It was not at dinner that night that Hartmann made what in retrospect he could see was a decisive move in his affairs. He merely sat, tilting his head politely to Marie-Thérèse’s chatter and pouring more wine for Christine’s guests. Nor was it in the long hours of the night when he lay marooned in the giant bed his father had acquired at auction in Alsace, with the sound of his wife asleep beside him. Then he merely reflected on his father and on his pride in his assumed identification with the region of Alsace (Hartmann, he pointed out, was an established name in the district). He also thought about Poincaré, the fiddling Prime Minister who had retired to the neighbouring Lorraine, and about more mundane matters such as his next game of tennis with Jean-Philippe Gilbert.
At no point did he relent and decide that the only way he could find relief from the tormenting presence of Anne in his thoughts was by doing something. Even violent acts, he later told himself, cannot be seen clearly by the perpetrator until they are finished. And as for his own gently willed inertia, which might occasionally spill over into innocent gestures of kindness, it would take a philosopher of iron sternness to spot the moment at which an unformulated wish became, almost by inaction, a completed act.
Nevertheless, perhaps the thought of his father recalled to him the old man’s former secretary and her sister, Mlle Calmette, who was still living in Janvilliers.
It was her name, in any case, he mentioned to Christine the next morning when he told her he had to go into town on business.
‘There are some details of a trust fund for her sister which need clearing up,’ he said, as he laid down his newspaper in the morning-room.
‘Shall I expect you back for lunch?’
‘Certainly. It won’t take more than half an hour at the most. I feel rather guilty about her really. I ought to have done something before.’
It was not until this final claim, which was partially true, that he felt any unease about his expedition.
Christine was looking down at her needlework. Hartmann tried, but failed, to catch her eye in order to give her an insouciant smile. He cleared his throat and ran his hand quickly back through his hair. She looked up and smiled vaguely. He nodded, coughed again, and turned, the metal caps on the heels of his glossy boots ringing on the flagged hall.
4
A
T ABOUT FIVE
o’clock the same day a note was delivered for Anne by Jacqueline, the postman’s daughter. It was in an angular but firm hand that she at once recognised from the papers in the study at the Manor. It said, ‘Call as soon as possible at the address below and ring the bell bearing the name Mlle Calmette. You will, I hope, learn something that pleases you.’ It was signed in an illegible scrawl. Anne read the note several times, tracing the hurried movement of the spluttering black ink.
She found Pierre in the cellar and asked him where the street was. He told her it was on the north-west side of town, not far from the church; she estimated she just had time to go before her evening shift began. She hurried up the rue des Ecoles and into the Place de la Victoire from which she could see the spire of the church. In the Place de L’Eglise she asked the way from a widow with bandy legs and a headscarf who looked at her with toothless disapproval, as if she had asked for directions to a house of ill-repute. Anne barely knew what to expect, but was prepared to rush to any destination prescribed by that handwriting.
The street was narrow and quiet; some of the houses had dried wooden gables, and some had huge double doors that would lead into paved courtyards beyond. It was one of these doors, painted a dark green, that bore the number in the note. She found Mlle Calmette’s bell and rang it. There was a remote, disconnected jangling. A thin bark rose from behind the wall and was abruptly silenced.
At last she heard slow footsteps from behind the door and then a lock being turned. A small woman of about seventy with a crinkled face opened the door and peered nervously round it. Anne introduced herself.
‘Ah yes, mademoiselle.’ Anne noticed that the old woman’s hair seemed unnaturally brown for the age of her face. ‘Please come this way.’
A cat was sleeping against one of the side walls of the courtyard where a flowerbed held half a dozen wintry shrubs and under-watered plants. The woman paused at a narrow, black-painted door and fumbled in her cardigan. She pulled out a single key on a piece of string, then turned to Anne and smiled. ‘You are just as he said.’
Anne felt a moment of panic, as though she were a counter in a game being played by two other people.
The door opened on to a small square hallway and a flight of scrubbed stairs. Anne followed the old woman, tense with a mixture of fear and excitement. On the landing was a rug. and a pair of glass-panelled doors.
‘This is your sitting-room.’
‘My . . . ?’
She looked around a small neat room on whose polished wooden floor and circular table the sun shone gently. She felt a thin hand grip her forearm.
‘This is your bedroom.’
A door opened on a broad wooden bed with lacework and broderie anglaise covers and a mahogany dressing-table with a vase of freesias. The wrinkled hand waved again. ‘Bathroom. And behind the curtain on the landing is a little space for cooking, if you can get the gas to work. Don’t forget to open the window.’
‘For me?’
‘There’s a note for you on the dressing-table. From M. Hartmann. My apartment is next door if you should want anything. My sister used to live here, but since she died I’ve let it go on short lets. Here’s your key, and here’s one to the street door. I hope you like it.’
Anne was too confused to take in what the old woman was saying, but then it was too late and she had gone down the stairs, her heavy black shoes ringing on the bare wood.