J. Janes - Hunting Ground

‘Please. How long have the taxes not been paid?’

‘Two years, madame. I’m sorry.’

Ah, Sainte-Mère! ‘How much does my husband owe on them?’

Picard cleared his throat and drained his glass. ‘Seventy-five thousand francs.’

Three hundred and seventy-five pounds sterling at the official rate! I stared at my glass. The wine was golden, a little sweet for that time of day, but so nice with the pears I had gone down into the wine cellar and had opened a bottle just for spite.

Now I was to pay for it.

‘Madame, please don’t distress yourself. You mustn’t think the authorities will throw you out of your lovely house.’ He clenched a fist. ‘I, Alphonse Picard, mayor of Fontainebleau, have some say in such matters. Leave it with me. Another month, two, perhaps even three, then a little payment, you understand. Just enough to sweeten the syrup and keep those jackals at bay.’

Never mind the war, the threat of the Germans.

I blinked and forced myself to smile. ‘You’re very kind, Monsieur le maire. It’s not every day one meets with such compassion.’

‘Ah, think nothing of it.’

The English were not so bad-the English, what had he been thinking? Madame de St-Germain’s mother was French!

We talked of the war, of the district, of the forest, and of Fontainebleau. When next in town, I promised to come to see him.

I gave him two jars of pears and pressed on him a third, and even now as I remember it, I wonder if that wasn’t what helped to save my life.

‘Dr. Laurier, could I ask you to send another telegram for me?’

It’s late. She looks up from her desk. She removes her glasses and asks me to sit down. ‘A cognac? It’ll help you to sleep.’

‘No … no, nothing for me, thanks.’

There’s a notepad beside the clinical paper she’s been working on. This she drags in front of her. ‘Well, who’s it to be to this time?’

More information. ‘A firm of insurance agents in London.’

She gives a nod and waits. I hear myself saying, ‘Fairfax, Gordon, and Scharpe, 83-A Lime Street. They were an old, established firm of underwriters before the war. They had a reputation for persistence.’

‘Anyone in particular?’

‘A senior partner-Gordon, perhaps. Look, it really doesn’t matter. Just do as I …’

‘There’s no need to get upset. I haven’t telephoned De Verville. I’m trusting you to handle this yourself.’

‘Then please send only this: Tommy was killed . That’s all.’

‘The sender?’

Does she think she’s being clever? ‘ Lily . Just say it’s from Lily.’

The car was huge, a dark, shiny forest green with sparkling chrome and a bonnet that must have been a kilometre long. It sat behind my tiny Renault on the drive before the house, and the hiss of my whisper was urgent. ‘Jean-Guy, come back! Marie, you, too. Vite, vite .’ I caught them by the hand and held them fiercely.

Together we watched him from the safety of the woods. He took off his jacket, loosened his tie, then used one arm of the jacket to polish the headlamps, even to spit on the chrome. The rims of that thing were wire-spoked, the tyres white-walled and huge. A man of means, then. The man from in front of that shop on the rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré. Suspenders held his trousers up, as before.

He played with us. He let us think he hadn’t seen Jean-Guy run out like that, sat on the front steps and opened a cake box. With a pocketknife, he cut himself a large slice only to decide that wine was needed and an apple, one of ours.

The cake sat there in the afternoon sun. The wine came from a well-stocked hamper in the car. ‘ Maman, he will eat it all!’ whispered Marie urgently.

‘Let him choke on it,’ I replied.

‘You’re a vase de nuit, maman ! A real stinker.’

‘Jean-Guy, he … he isn’t a friend, not this one. Behave yourselves. Let me deal with him.’

Each step we took brought us closer, and when at last we’d come round the car, he grinned at me and I realized then that he’d chosen to sit on the steps so as to be at eye level with the children. ‘ Salut, mes amis . Want some cake?’ he asked. ‘A glass of wine, Lily? A peace offering. Sorry I didn’t get here sooner, but things …’

He gave a distinctively personal shrug I was to see so many times, but left the war unsaid. It was too nice a day, and Tommy was always like that. The day came first, and he liked nothing better than to be outside, buggering about in an old pair of boots, cords, and a knitted turtleneck sweater, preferably dark blue or black. Ah, oui, oui, avec un Schmeisser in the crook of one arm and a satchel of ammunition in his other hand.

Not looking up, he cut the cake. ‘Lily, I wish you’d stop hating me. I want to help.’

‘Why? What the hell am I to you? If I’d had the chance to sell those earrings, you wouldn’t have found us here.’

‘And we wouldn’t be talking. I’d miss that, I think.’

He held out a slab of cake to Jean-Guy. A travelling salesman, an estate agent-what was he, some sort of magician? A gâteau Saint-Honoré -he’d known I’d see the significance of that with its pâte sucrée circle, golden brown at the edges. Droplets of pâte à choux had been baked and split in half to be filled with crème chantilly, the whole given a caramel glaze and a garnish of fresh fruit.

He had had the pâtisserie in Fontainebleau bake it specially, and that, of course, meant that he had waited at least a couple of hours and had paid dearly for the privilege-Henri-Jacques Rouleau would have seen to it.

‘Then it’s peace, at last, and we’ll drink to that,’ he said.

So we sat in the sun on the steps, the four of us, and we had our little feast. Very soon, Tommy was showing off the car, a Packard he’d had shipped all the way from America, from some little place in Montana where his ‘old man’ was a ‘car dealer.’

Jean-Guy was the first to sit in his lap and steer that thing, then Marie. We went for a drive. I threw caution away. How can I explain it? He made me feel good, made me laugh, but it wasn’t only that.

The children quickly came to love him, and when children do, it’s very hard to say no.

‘ Maman , can he stay with us tonight? Please … ah, please,’ said my son, no thoughts of Tante Marie and Georges, or what they would say to Jules. No thoughts of anything but that he should stay.

Defeated, I smiled and gave a futile shrug. ‘But, of course, chéri, if he’d like to. There’s plenty of room.’ How could I have known what he really wanted?

The Aubusson carpet was soft, of a swirled beige with shades of yellow, blue, and red to complement the linen of the walls whose flowered pattern, on a pale yellow background, offered muted tones of green, rust, soft pink, and faded Prussian blue. At one end of the room, there was a fireplace with wrought-iron firedogs and square blue tiles. The furniture-the big double bed-was Majorelle, bought at the turn of the century and cherished ever since. The carpenters had matched the burled walnut with panelling about the fireplace and wide mouldings against the ceiling. Under the mantelpiece, the wood was gently arched to match the curved top of the mirror above.

Meissonier-patterned candlesticks of tall, spun gold with white candles were reflected in that mirror. The blue porcelain vases were full of late asters, beech leaves on their branches, goldenrod, stalks of straw, some barley heads, too. Tommy stood there looking at that room, and I remember thinking how like the window of that shop it was. That same quickness came to him, that same sense of intense interest. He let me see this in the mirror as he said in English, ‘My God, this place is a treasure.’