Daphne du Maurier - The Apple Tree - a short novel & several long stories

"How thoughtful of you," said her husband, "a very kind gesture. But do you need to bother now? Why, we are ready to go."

"Tell her that," said his wife, "tell her that we are leaving almost immediately."

The Marquis turned to the telephone again, and after a word or two put his hand over the receiver and whispered to his wife.

"She is very insistent," he said. "She says she has some prints belonging to you that she wants to give to you personally."

A feeling of panic came over the Marquise. Prints? What prints?

"But everything is paid for," she whispered back. "I don't know what she can mean."

The Marquis shrugged his shoulders.

"Well, what am I to say? She sounds as if she is crying."

The Marquise went back into the bathroom, dabbcd more powder on her nose.

"Tell her to come up," she said, "but repeat that we are leaving in five minutes. Meanwhile, you go down, take the children to the car. Take Miss Clay with you. I will see the woman alone."

When he had gone she looked about the room. Nothing remained but her gloves, her handbag. One last effort, and then the closing door, the ascenseur, the farewell bow to the manager, and freedom.

There was a knock at the door. The Marquise waited by the entrance to the balcony, her hands clasped in front of her.

"Entrez," she said.

Mademoiselle Paul opened the door. Her face was blotched and ravaged from weeping, her old-fashioned mourning dress was long, nearly touching the ground. She hesitated, then lurched forward, her limp grotesque, as though each movement must be agony.

"Madame la Marquise…" she began, then her mouth worked, she began to cry.

"Please don't," said the Marquise gently. "I am so dreadfully sorry for what has happened."

Mademoiselle Paul took her handkerchief and blew her nose.

"He was all I had in the wor1d," she said. "He was so good to me. What am I to do now? How am I to live?"

"You have relatives?"

"They are poor folk, Madame la Marquise. I cannot expect them to support me. Nor can I keep the shop alone, without my brother. I haven't the strength. My health has always been my trouble."

The Marquise was fumbling in her bag. She took out a twenty thousand franc note. "I know this is not much," she said, "but perhaps it will help just a little. I am afraid my husband has not many contacts in this part of the country, but I will ask him, perhaps he will be able to make some suggestions."

Mademoiselle Paul took the notes. It was strange. She did not thank the Marquise. "This will keep me until the end of the month," she said. "It will help to pay the funeral expenses."

She opened her bag. She took out three prints.

"I have more, similar to these, back in the shop," she said. " It seemed to me that perhaps, going away suddenly as you are doing, you had forgotten all about them. I found them amongst my poor brother's other prints and negatives in the cellar, where he used to develop them."

She handed the prints to the Marquise. The Marquise went cold when she saw them. Yes, she had forgotten. Or rather, she had not been aware of their existence. They were three views of her taken in the bracken. Careless, abandoned, half-sleeping, with her head against his coat for a pillow, she had heard the click-click of the camera, and it had added a sort of zest to the afternoon. Some he had shown her. But not these.

She took the photographs and put them in her bag.

"You say you have others?" she asked, her voice without expression.

"Yes, Madame la Marquise."

She forced herself to meet the woman's eyes. They were swollen still with weeping, but the glint was unmistakable.

"What do you want me to do?" asked the Marquise.

Mademoiselle Paul looked about her in the hotel bedroom. Tissue paper strewn on the floor, odds and ends thrown into the waste-paper basket, the tumbled, unmade bed.

"I have lost my brother," she said, "my supporter, my reason for being alive. Madame la Marquise has had an enjoyable holiday and now returns home. I take it that Madame la Marquise would not desire her husband or her family to see these prints?"

"You are right," said the Marquise, "I do not even wish to see them myself."

"In which case," said Mademoiselle Paul, "twenty thousand francs is really very little return for a holiday that Madame la Marquise so much enjoyed."

The Marquise looked in her bag again. She had two mille notes and a few hundred francs. "This is all I have," she said, "you are welcome to these as well."

Mademoiselle Paul blew her nose once more. "I think it would be more satisfactory for both of us if we came to a more permanent arrangement," she said. "Now my poor brother has gone the future is very uncertain. I might not even wish to live in a neighbourhood that holds such sad memories. I cannot but ask myself how my brother met his death. The afternoon before he disappeared he went out to the headland and came back very distressed. I knew something had upset him, but I did not ask him what. Perhaps he had hoped to meet a friend, and the friend had not appeared. The next day he went again, and that night he did not return. The police were informed, and then three days later his body was found. I have said nothing of possible suicide to the police, but have accepted it, as they have done, as accidental. But my brother was a very sensitive soul, Madame la Marquise. Unhappy, he would have been capable of anything. If I make myself wretched thinking over these things, I might go to the police, I might suggest he did away with himself after an unhappy love affair. I might even give them leave to search through his effects for photographs."

In agony the Marquise heard her husband's footsteps outside the door.

"Are you coming, dearest?" he called, bursting it open and entering the room. "The luggage is all in, the children are clamouring to be off."

He said good morning to Mademoiselle Paul. She curtseyed.

"I will give you my address," said the Marquise, "both in Paris, and in the country." She sought in her bag feverishly for cards. "I shall expect to hear from you in a few weeks' time."

"Possibly before that, Madame la Marquise," said Mademoiselle Paul. "If I leave here, and find myself in your neighbourhood, I would come and pay my humble respects to you and Miss, and the little children. I have friends not so very far away. I have friends in Paris too. I have always wanted to see Paris."

The Marquise turned with a terrible bright smile to her husband.

"I have told Mademoiselle Paul," she said, "that if there is anything I can do for her at any time she has only to let me know."

"Of course," said her husband. "I am so sorry to hear of your tragedy. The manager here has been telling me all about it."

Mademoiselle Paul curtseyed again, looking from him back to the Marquise.

"He was all I had in the world, Monsieur le Marquis," she said. "Madame la Marquise knows what he meant to me. It is good to know that I may write to her, and that she will write to me, and when that happens I shall not feel alone and isolated. Life can be very hard for someone who is alone in the world. May I wish you a pleasant journey, Madame la Marquise, and happy memories of your holidays, and above all no regrets?"

Once more Mademoiselle Paul curtseyed, then turned and limped from the room.

"Poor woman," said the Marquis, " and what an appearance. I understand from the manager that the brother was crippled too?"

"Yes…" She fastened her handbag. Took her gloves. Reached for her dark glasses.

"Curious thing, but it often runs in families," said the Marquis, as they walked along the corridor. He paused and rang the bell for the ascenseur. "You have never met Richard du Boulay, have you, an old friend of mine? He was crippled, much as this unfortunate little photographer seems to have been, but for all that a charming, perfectly normal girl fell in love with him, and they got married. A son was born, and he turned out to be a hopeless club-foot like his father. You can't fight that sort of thing. It's a taint in the blood that passes on."