J. Janes - Hunting Ground

‘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.’

* * *

The memories … that weekend … I was sitting in front of the fire when my sister came up behind me. ‘You’re being too quiet tonight. Don’t you want to join us?’ she asked.

I shook my head. ‘I’m tired. It’s the children, Nini. They take the stuffing out of me sometimes.’ I forced a smile, then drew the shawl more closely about my shoulders.

‘Want another vermouth?’

‘I think I need it. Has Simone taken Jean-Guy up to bed? Check for me, will you? He’ll procrastinate, and you know how she is with him.’

Janine gave my cheek an affectionate touch. ‘You do look tired. Has André spoken to you yet?’

‘Of what?’ I asked, sitting up in alarm.

‘About the tonic he wants you to take. He says you look as though you need iron.’

‘ Ah, merde! Am I to be dissected like one of his patients? I’m quite all right. André does not have children.’

‘You’re angry with me.’

I turned away. ‘Of course not. Why should I be?’

Neither of us said a thing. Janine didn’t move but kept her hand on the back of my chair. I wished we could have a little tête-à-tête like old times, but that could never be. Not now. ‘Nini, what will we do with them tomorrow? Sit around all day worrying about the war? Let’s take them to Pincevent, to the sand pits, and then, why then to the millpond.’

I had said it like a person pleading for her life. Somehow Janine found the courage to look at me and touch my cheek again. ‘You really are worried. What is it? Why don’t you tell me?’

Did she really want the truth? ‘It’s nothing. It’s just a feeling I have about this war. Me, I want the weekend to be like it used to be for the two of us.’

‘Then I would like that, too. Yes, I would.’

The breath of her perfume lingered with the lightness of her touch, and as I turned to watch her leave the room, Janine caught sight of me in one of the mirrors that flanked the doorway, and for an instant saw the depth of my desperation.

Then she was gone from the room, her bright skirt swaying in such a businesslike way, and I returned to my gazing into the fire. Pincevent, why had I suggested we go there? It was down in the valley of the Seine, on the river flats just at the bend above where the Seine and the Loing were joined. Thousands and thousands of years ago, it had been a ford in the ancestral Seine, the migratory route of reindeer herds at the close of the last Ice Age. Nomads had hunted them and worked the nearby cliffs of chalk for flint. Now dredges mined the sands creating craters and mountains as if the place had been a battleground, which it had, after a fashion, for the river would have run red with blood and the slaughter would have been terrible.

I could hear the shrillness of our childhood shouts as we had hunted imaginary reindeer much to the delight of our father. I could hear the quiet exclamations as we found, in some discarded ball of clay, the imprint of a long dead leaf, the hard spear point or scraper of Magdalenian man. How beautifully those people had made their stone tools, how clever of them to have done such things. The relics of later ages had been there, too, all churned up by the dredges, and our father, showing as much delight as ourselves, had introduced us to each period of history. Bronze daggers, bits of iron or tile, some coins from late Gallic times, others from the Romans who had conquered them. So much, and in the warmth of a summer’s sun, my sister, having eluded us, sitting proudly atop the highest mountain of sand with delight in her lovely eyes and a great big grin.

There’s a time for tears and a time when one has shed far too many. Dmitry Alexandrov found me all alone by the fireplace and, for a moment, I think he was struck by the way I must have looked like someone out of the past. The suit I wore was of light beige velvet, the needlepoint of a darker shade of brown. Very Russian, very tsarist, worn that evening, but not because of him.

The lace blouse was ruffled, and at the throat, pinning a silk kerchief, was a bit of antique silver. How in keeping I was with that drawing room, with the sumptuousness of it. The furnishings were nearly all from the mid-eighteenth century, some still covered with the original Beauvais tapestry.