Mary Stewart - Nine Coaches Waiting

How stupid to have come! How unutterably stupid to have come! It was like finding the glass empty when you lifted it to drink. I turned away.

Someone was coming down the stairs. I could hear the click of high-heeled shoes. I waited, perhaps still in some faint hope that it might be somebody I knew. It wasn't. It was a young woman, cheap and smart, with that tight-black-sweater-and-skirt smartness made to look very Place Vendȏme with ropes of improbable pearls. She was blonde, and chewed gum. She eyed me with slight hostility as she crossed the lobby to the concierge's desk by the door and reached to the rack for a bundle of papers.

"You looking for someone?"

"No," I said.

Her eyes went beyond me to my suitcase on the pavement "If you're wanting a room-"

"I wasn't," I said, feeling suddenly foolish. "I was just- I used to live hereabouts, and I thought I'd just like to look at the place. Is-is Madame Leclerc still here? She used to be the concierge."

"She was my aunt. She's dead."

"Oh. I'm sorry."

She was leafing through the papers, still eyeing me. "You look English."

"I am English."

"Oh? You don't sound it. But then I suppose if you lived here… In this house, you mean? What name?"

"My father was Charles Martin. The poet Charles Martin."

The blonde said: "Before my time," licked a pencil, and made a careful mark on one of the papers she held.

I said: "Well, thanks very much. Good evening," and went back to where my case stood on the pavement. I looked up the now darkening street for a taxi. There was one coming, and I lifted a hand, but as it came nearer I saw that it was engaged. A street -lamp shone into the back as it passed me. A middle-aged couple sat there, a wispy woman and a stoutish man in city clothes; two girls in their early teens sat on the drop-seats. All four were laden with parcels, and they were laughing.

The taxi had gone. The street was empty. Behind me I heard the blonde's footsteps receding up the stairs of Number 14.1 glanced back over my shoulder once at the house, then turned back to the street to watch for another taxi. Neither house nor street looked even remotely familiar any more.

Quite suddenly I ceased to be sorry I had come. It was as if the past, till then so longed-after, so lived-over, had slipped off my shoulders like a burden. The future was still hidden, somewhere in the lights that made a yellow blur in the sky beyond the end of the dark street. Here between the two I waited, and for the first time saw both clearly. Because of Daddy and Maman and the Rue du Printemps I had made myself a stranger in England, not only bereaved, but miserably dépaysée , drifting with no clear aim, resenting the life I had been thrust into with such tragic brutality; I had refused to adapt myself to it and make myself a place there, behaving like the spoilt child who, because he cannot have the best cake, refuses to eat at all. I had waited for life to offer itself back to me on the old terms. Well, it wasn't going to. Because of my childhood I had rejected what England had for me, and now the Paris of my childhood had rejected me. Here, too, I had been dispossessed. And if I was ever to have a place, in whatever country -well, nobody ever wanted you anyway unless you damned well made them. And that was what I would have to do. I had my chance in front of me now, at the Château Valmy. As yet I knew nothing of the family but their names; soon those names would be people I knew, the people I lived with; the people to whom I would matter… I said their names over slowly to myself, thinking about them; Héloïse de Valmy, elegant and remote with that chilly grace that would-surely-melt in time; Philippe de Valmy, my pupil, of whom I knew nothing except that he was nine years old and not very strong; his uncle, the acting master of the chateau, Léon de Valmy…

And then a queer thing happened. Whether it was because now for the first time I said the name over to myself, coupled with the fact that I was standing in the street where a million unconscious memories must be stirring, I don't know; but now as I said the name, some trick of the subconscious drew some of those memories together as a magnet draws pins into a pattern so that, clear, and till now unrecollected, I heard them speak. “Léon de Valmy," Maman was saying, and I think she was reading from a newspaper, "Léon de Valmy. It says he's crippled. He's cracked his back at polo and they say if he recovers he'll be in a wheel-chair for the rest of his life." Then Daddy's voice, indifferently: "Oh? Well, I'm sorry to hear it, I suppose, though I can't help feeling it's a pity he didn't break his neck. He'd be no loss." And when Maman said: " Charles!” he added impatiently: "Why should I be a hypocrite about the man? You know I detest him." And Maman said: "I can't think why," and Daddy laughed and said: "No. You wouldn't…”

The memory spun away into silence, leaving me tingling with something that might have been apprehension, wondering if I had really remembered it at all, or if it were some new trick of that romantic imagination of mine. A taxi had appeared and I must have signalled it because here it was swerving in towards the kerb with a screech of brakes. Once again I said: "Hotel Crillon, please," and climbed in. The taxi moved off with a jerk, swung left out of the Rue du Printemps and accelerated down a dark, shuttered street. The sound of the engine swelled and echoed back from the blind houses . Nine coaches waiting, hurry, hurry, hurry… Ay, to the devil…to the devil…

It wasn't apprehension, it was excitement. I laughed to myself, my spirits suddenly rocketing. To the devil or not, I was on my way…

I rapped on the glass.

"Hurry," I said.

The little town of Thonon-les-Bains lies some twelve miles east of Geneva, on the southern shore of Lac Léman. Our plane had been met at Geneva by the big black Chevrolet from Valmy, which wafted us smoothly through the expensively-polished streets of Geneva, across the bridge at the end of the Lake, through gardens where magnolias already bloomed, and then turned east for the French border and Thonon.

Madame de Valmy had talked very little to me on the journey from Paris, for which I was grateful, not only because my eyes and mind were busy with new impressions, but because- although she had been kind and pleasant in the extreme-I could not yet feel quite at ease with her. There was that curious remoteness about her which made her difficult to approach, or even to assess. Conversation with her had an almost long-distance touch about it; far from feeling that she had come half-way to meet you, you found her suddenly abstracted, all contact withdrawn. I wondered at first whether she was deliberately keeping me at a distance, but when she had twice asked me a question, only to lose interest before I had answered, I decided that she had graver matters on her mind than Philippe's governess, and myself retired contentedly enough into silence.

The car was purring along through flat, densely-cultivated country. Everywhere were prosperous-looking farms, and tree-bordered fields where red-and-white cattle fed sleekly. To our left, through thickets of poplar and willow, the gleam of water showed and hid and showed again; on the right the country rolled green and gradual to wooded foothills, then swooped dramatically up to the great ranges of the Alps and the dazzle of the colossal snows. One of them, I supposed, was Mont Blanc itself, but this, I thought, stealing a glance at Héloïse de Valmy beside me, was not the time to ask.