Hunting Ground (6 page)

‘In the general mobilization of last August? Ah, no. He’s essential where he is.’

‘The Louvre. They’re crating everything they can and shipping it to repositories in châteaux along the Loire. I can’t imagine that place with its doors closed and locked.’

‘He’s at the Sorbonne, a professor.’

‘But is also attached to the Louvre.’

‘Yes. Yes, he’s there also.’

‘What have they got him doing?’

At times, Tommy demanded answers, and this was one of them. It wasn’t simply the determined look in those deep brown eyes with their touches of green, or the set of his chin. It was everything about him. ‘He’s making an inventory of all the holdings in private collections.’

Again, I heard him say, ‘How lovely,’ like a schoolboy—tickled pink but with the salt of larceny. ‘It’ll be done in time then,’ he added. ‘He’ll see to it. You can bet your bottom dollar.’

I had to wonder how much he actually knew about Jules. ‘In time for what?’ I hazarded.

‘For when the Nazis arrive, as they will.’

He asked if Marcel could have sold things to that shop, and I realized then what he’d been after all along, and I knew I couldn’t lie to him, even though the items would have to have been stolen. ‘Marcel, he’s not above such things.’

And the husband must know this, but all Tommy did was to nod curtly. For him, for me the matter was closed, or so I thought. But, of course, it wasn’t. It could never have been, not with someone like Tommy.

You mustn’t think that I paid no attention to the day-to-day events of the war or that I was self-centred and uncaring of the tragedy that was happening to others. At the time of Tommy’s visit, and from then on, that whole business was constantly with me, but just like everyone else, there were things I had to do. The children, school for Jean-Guy in Fontainebleau, sometimes the car, sometimes the walk, mostly our bicycles, but if I’d known then what I know now, I’d have driven to and from everyday. There was also the firewood to get and split, the house to clean, the garden, et cetera. Jules and all that mess with my sister.

Having joined hands with Hitler and eaten the eastern half of Poland, the Russians now threatened war with Finland. A German submarine had penetrated the British naval base at Scapa Flow and had sunk the
Royal Oak
, a battleship, with the loss of 833 men, most of whom had been asleep. Mines were being sown at sea by aeroplanes. The RAF was dropping leaflets on Berlin. Leaflets! Can you imagine? Sides were being chosen. Nearly one hundred sixty thousand men of the British Expeditionary Force were stationed in northern France along the Belgian border, but the British were not doing their fair share, according to the French who had, by then, mobilized something like two-and-a-half million men. To be British was to be … ah, what can I say? Suspect? Unwanted? This feeling was to grow strongly later, after the defeat, the old animosities surfacing. Jeanne d’Arc, Napoléon, and all that rubbish.

Tommy’s warning kept coming back to me and I thought again and again about taking the children to England while there was still a chance. My father wasn’t well, so I could use that excuse. I wanted so much to see him but Jules wouldn’t have let me take the children, not at a time like that or any other. No, if I went, I’d have to kidnap them. So I waited. I thought a lot about it. I tried to lay in enough things to help us over the worst of times. Petrol, food, clothing, medicines—all those sorts of things, even pears. Everyone else was hoarding, so why shouldn’t I?

Tommy’s thirty thousand francs was my escape money, and I thanked God each night for such generosity in a fellow human being—he had let me keep the earrings and had said we should simply consider it a loan—and sometimes as I lay there in my loneliness, I made love to him in my mind.

But more of Jules, more of my husband. In that last weekend of October 1939, the train had brought them from Paris in the early morning. We’d been to the
palais
, the Château de Fontainebleau so deserted our steps had echoed. Jules knew the owners of Vaux—the Château de Vaux-le-Vicomte—so we had gone there, too. Such beautiful things, so many of them.

Now our guests sat about two picnic tables that had been placed end to end among the pear trees so as to catch the sun. Jules was at the far end, with Janine on his left, everyone eating, drinking, endlessly discussing politics and the war. Oh, for sure, it was good to see Simone and André de Verville again, nice of Jules to have included them, Simone, in particular, for she was special to me, but the others … Apart from Marcel Clairmont, whom you know I didn’t trust and would rather not have had as a more-or-less permanent house guest, I simply didn’t know them.

In secret, from behind the parted curtains of Jean-Guy’s room, I looked down at those tables. Louis and Dominique Vuitton were thin, stiff, greying, black-haired, and from the Ministry of Culture and the Louvre, respectively, and wasn’t it nice how some couples could have their fingers in so many pies?

As is often the case with a married couple, it’s either the one or the other who is dominant. A strand of ancient Egyptian beads was held out from that long, skinny neck, those little bits of history fiddled with as if nothing. Worn in a tight ponytail, that woman’s hair had been stabbed by an antique silver barrette, which flashed in the afternoon sun. Carnelian and agate signets of spice traders had been made into bracelets, others into rings. A bitch draped in antiquity. Nefertiti? I remember thinking. The hawklike nose, pinched face, hard dark narrow eyes, pencilled-in eyebrows, mascara, rouge, and lipstick, made me wonder what she was after. Little boys or little girls, for her eyes kept returning to my children. Am I being too harsh? A Royalist if ever there was one, a Fascist anyway, and bitter enemy of the Third Republic.

Those two were friends and associates of my husband, and mustn’t business always be combined with pleasure, especially at a time of war? They were very influential, and paid servants of that same Republic.

The rest were young—friends of Janine’s. Michèle Chevalier was the baby and absolutely exquisite. Twenty years of age? Ah, no, eighteen I think. Deep brown eyes that were so serious at times, shoulder-length wavy light brown hair in which there were reddish tints. A manner of delicately tracing the tip of a forefinger under the soft, warm curve of her chin when in thought. This I found touching. Superb breasts, lovely kissing lips, an absolutely unbelievable figure—I was to see it later. Naked, you understand.

A musician, a violinist and a good one, too, or so Janine had told me. A student, of course, but when would my Jules try to seduce her? Nini’s dark flashing eyes kept flicking to Michèle who sat some distance from her on the opposite side of the tables. Had overtures already been made?

Vuitton also had an interest in Michèle, that wife of his encouraging this. She would touch the girl’s hand and say something while looking to her husband for agreement. He would then study Michèle and gravely nod or delicately knuckle his thin grey moustache then give a tight little smile or say something profound to which his wife would respond. From the room up here, he looked to be about sixty-five, she on the tired side of fifty and trying hard to hide it, and I became afraid for Michèle, something that would only increase as time went on.

Henri-Philippe Beauclair was a tall, thin, and bespectacled Socialist. He had asked me to show him the house and when confronted by the embarrassment of a marriage bed he had known was being betrayed, had confessed that though he liked restoring paintings at the Louvre, and was worried about his job, as a chemist he was probably of far more use making explosives.

Michèle had a passing interest in him; he would die for her.

And Dmitry Alexandrov, what of him? A White Russian from that
quartier
, he had about him the air of a closet Communist. Nini had picked him up in a bar and had felt sorry for him, but shouldn’t have. Not with that one. Dmitry probably knew every Russian waiter, chef, and
plongeur
in Paris, and what they didn’t steal for themselves from the kitchens, some of them would have stolen for him.

He was twenty-six, short, with the broad shoulders, strong arms, and hands typical of the Russian peasant. A stocky ox with slicked down, flaxen hair, he had invested in a barber for the weekend, had made certain the haircut would last, but was it butter he had used, or the brilliantine of someone he’d met on the street?

The faded, grey-blue eyes were seldom still, he taking in everything and giving little away. As a student of electrical engineering, the French army should have had him by now, for Paris and all the major centres had been systematically drained of tradesmen by the military. Had he ignored his call-up papers?

He looked as if eating a last meal, as if searching for a way out, the eyes widely spaced about a cart driver’s nose and hooded beneath the strong, bland forehead with its thick, fair eyebrows.

Marcel wasn’t particularly fond of him—overripe cheese on a plate of meringues—and was still in that faded blue smock he always wore, the red handkerchief knotted about that swarthy neck, the black beret looking like the drooping pancake of an angry albatross.

Yes, Marcel Clairmont was being his usual self, smoking his filthy cigarettes, coughing, hawking up wads of phlegm to be chewed, swallowed, or spat to one side, gesticulating like a fisherman, regaling any who would listen with his stories, his lies, his laughter and politics, the paintings he hadn’t sold but was going to.
Merde!
Some men …

Janine looked so lovely, fresh and gay. No housework, no meals to get. No children to care for or to keep you awake at night when they’re sick or there’s thunder and lightning or the distant sound of approaching guns.

‘Lily, what is it? What’s wrong?’

Simone had been watching me from the doorway for some time and I, in my bitterness, hadn’t even realized she’d left the table. Jean-Guy and Marie-Christine were with her, haunted eyes surveying their mother.

‘Nothing. I’m just worried about this war. I’ll be down in a minute.’

‘It’s Jules, isn’t it? Jules and Janine.’

I nodded. I couldn’t look at her. Even then I wasn’t worried about Jules and the Vuittons. I should have been!

‘Jean-Guy, take Marie and go downstairs to your father,’ said Simone. ‘Let me talk to your mother, just for a little.’

She kissed them both and watched as they walked to the head of the stairs until I felt myself being taken and firmly held. Simone was taller than me, with thick, wiry, dark black hair that fell to her shoulders and was worn back off her brow and teased out at the sides. Her eyes were strikingly grey, the face a smooth, if delicate oval, the slender nose turned up a little and always shiny.

‘So what can I do to help?’ she asked. ‘Smack Jules’s face or Nini’s?’

We kissed on the cheeks. She dried my eyes and somehow got me calmed down, but for a long, long time she simply held me, then we talked, just the two of us as we always did, and finally I told her what I’d done.

The wine cellar was dank, low-ceilinged, and filled with rows of dusty bottles whose sleep had been left undisturbed except for the spiders. Simone knew of the
cave
, of course, but even so, was aghast at the bottles of Château Lafite, Château Latour, Château Mouton … ‘
Bon Dieu, de bon Dieu de merde,
don’t you two ever touch these?’ she asked.

‘Not since Jules’s father died. Now the bottles just wait, and we spend our money drinking other stuff.’

‘But why?’

I shrugged. ‘He has a thing about his father—the family name. The old man was a collector, a connoisseur in the true sense of the word, even if I didn’t think much him or he of me. Jules knows he can’t afford to follow in his footsteps, so at least he has preserved the collection.’

Our shadows moved over the rows of bottles to the walls beyond. At the very back of the cellar, there was a room where some empty barrels, pipettes, a press, and other wine-making things were stored. From there, a door and a stone staircase led outside to the garden, and when I opened this, shaded sunlight entered.

Gingerly, I lifted the cloth. My friend caught her breath. ‘Lily …
Ah, mon Dieu,
it’s so beautiful.’

It was. ‘In my anger, in my jealousy, yet have I done this. Sometimes fate brings out the best in us.’

I’d made a sculpture in wax, in the style of Rodin, a perfect likeness of Janine posing nude before that drawing class. Even her expression was there.

Slowly, I turned the wheel on which I’d sculpted the piece. It was as if Nini’s soul had been bared: the trace of mockery on her lips, the hint of debauchery in her eyes, the taunt. My little sister.

The depths of the wax had suggestions of blue, and at first Simone thought this had been accidental, but then she realized with a start, that it wasn’t so. Like the organs of the dead, the blue showed through the translucency of the wax.

‘What will you do with it?’ she asked.

‘Show it to him, of course, but only after I’ve escaped to England with the children.’

‘And for now?’

I knew she would hate to see me go, but upstairs in Jean-Guy’s room, I’d realized that I absolutely had to leave. ‘For now, I’ll do nothing. I’ll let them have their weekend, for it will be good, will it not, to see my husband playing with his mistress and thinking he’s putting one over on me?’

At Dr. Laurier’s earnest knock, I open the door to hear her saying, ‘Lily … your name is Lily de St-Germain. That firm in London has said they’ll reply in the morning. I think we should wait until they do.’

‘I can’t. I have to go back. My sister …’

‘Was she also killed?’

‘In a hail of bullets. I saw her smashed to pieces. She died, and they wouldn’t let me go to her.’

‘Is that why you were crying? I could hear you from down the corridor.’

‘Yes … yes, that’s why. For her, for Simone, for all of us.’

‘The night’s too long to be alone, Lily, the room too dark. Let me stay with you. Talk to me. Please try. You’ll feel so much better. Someone has to listen. That’s what you really want. Pick up the story wherever you left off. Let the memories come.’