William Maxwell - The Chateau

“The Stationmaster said we could walk,” Barbara said, “but we had the suitcases, so I stayed with them, at the station, and my husband walked into the village and found a store that was open, a fruit and vegetable store. And a very nice woman—”

“Mme Michot. She’s a great gossip and takes a keen interest in my guests. I cannot imagine why.”

“—told us that M. Fleury had a truck,” Barbara finished.

Mme Viénot turned and called out to a servant girl who was watching them from a first-floor window to come and take the suitcases that the two men were lifting from the back of the truck. “So you found M. Fleury and he brought you here.… M. Fleury is an old friend of our family. You couldn’t have come under better auspices.”

Harold tried to prevent the servant girl from carrying the two heaviest suitcases, but she resisted so stubbornly that he let go of the handles and stepped back and with a troubled expression on his face watched her stagger off to the house. They were much too heavy for her, but probably in an old country like France, with its own ideas of chivalry and of the physical strength and usefulness of women, that didn’t matter as much as who should and who shouldn’t be carrying suitcases.

“You are tired from your journey?” Mme Viénot asked.

“Oh, no,” Barbara said. “It was beautiful all the way.”

She looked around at the courtyard and then through the open gateway at the patchwork of small green and yellow fields in the distance. Taking her courage in both hands, she murmured: “Si jolie!”

“You think so?” Mme Viénot murmured politely, but in English. A man might perhaps not have noticed it. Barbara’s next remark was in English. When Harold started to pay M. Fleury, Mme Viénot exclaimed: “Oh dear, I’m afraid you don’t understand our currency, M. Rhodes. That’s much too much. You will embarrass M. Fleury. Here, let me do it.” She took the bank notes out of his hands and settled with M. Fleury herself.

M. Fleury shook hands all around, and smiled at the Americans with his gentian-blue eyes as they tried to convey their gratitude. They were reluctant to let him go. In a country where, contrary to what they had been told, no one seemed to speak English, he had understood their French. He had been their friend, for nearly an hour. Instinct told them they were not going to manage half so well without him.

The engine had to be cranked five or six times before it caught, and M. Fleury ran around to the driver’s seat and adjusted the spark.

“I never hear the sound of a motor in the courtyard without feeling afraid,” Mme Viénot said.

They looked at her inquiringly.

“I think the Germans have come back.”

“They were here in this house?” Barbara asked.

“We had them all through the war.”

The Americans turned and looked up at the blank windows. The war had left no trace that a stranger could see. The courtyard and the white château were at that moment as peaceful and still as a landscape in a mirror.

“It looks as if it had never been any other way than the way it is now,” Harold said.

“The officers were quartered in the house, and the soldiers in the outbuildings. I cannot say that we enjoyed them, but they were correct. ‘Kein Barbar,’ they kept telling us—‘We are not barbarians.’ And fancy, they expected my girls to dance with them!”

Mme Viénot waited rather longer than necessary for the irony to be appreciated, and then with a hissing intake of breath she said: “It’s exciting to be in the clutches of the tiger … and to know that you are quite helpless.”

The truck started up with a roar, and shot through the gateway. They stood watching until it disappeared from sight. The silence flooded back into the courtyard.

“So delicious, your arriving with M. Fleury,” Mme Viénot said.

He searched through his coat pockets for a pencil and the little notebook, wherein the crises were all recorded: “Rennes départ 7 h50 Le Mans 10 h20, départ 11 h02,” etc. Also the money paid out for laundry, hotel rooms, meals in restaurants, and conducted tours. This was a mistake, he thought. We shouldn’t have come here.… He wrote: “100 fr transportation Brenodville-sur-Euphrone to chateau” and put the pencil and notebook back in his breast pocket.

Mme Viénot was looking at him with her head cocked to one side, frankly amused. “I wonder what it was that made me decide you were middle-aged,” she said. “Why, you’re babies!”

He started to shoulder the dufflebag and she said: “Don’t bother with the luggage. Thérèse will see to it.” Linking her arm cozily through Barbara’s, she led them into the house by the back door and along a passageway to the stairs.

When they reached the second-floor landing, the Americans glanced expectantly down a long hallway that went right through the center of the house, and then saw that Mme Viénot had continued on up the stairs. She threw open the door on the left in the square hall at the head of the stairs and said: “My daughter’s room. I think you’ll find it comfortable.”

Harold waited for Barbara to exclaim “How lovely!” and instead she drew off her black suede gloves. He went to the window and looked out. Their room was on the front of the château and overlooked the park. The ceiling sloped down on that side, because of the roof. The wallpaper was black and white on a particularly beautiful shade of dark red, and not like any wallpaper he had ever seen.

“Sabine is in Paris now,” Mme Viénot said. “She’s an artist. She does fashion drawings for the magazine La Femme Elégante . You are familiar with it? … It’s like your Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar , I believe.… We dine at one thirty on Sunday. That won’t hurry you?”

Barbara shook her head.

“If you want anything, call me,” Mme Viénot said, and closed the door behind her.

There was a light knock almost immediately, and thinking that Mme Viénot had come back to tell them something, Barbara called “Come in,” but it was not Mme Viénot, it was the blond servant girl with the two heaviest suitcases. As she set them down in the middle of the room, Barbara said “Merci,” and the girl smiled at her. She came back three more times, with the rest of the luggage, and the last time, just before she turned away, she allowed her gaze to linger on the two Americans for a second. She seemed to be expecting them to understand something, and to be slightly at a loss when they didn’t.

“Should we have tipped her?” Barbara asked, when they were alone again.

“I don’t think so. The service is probably compris, ” Harold said, partly because he was never willing to believe that the simplest explanation is the right one, and partly because he was confused in his mind about the ethics of tipping and felt that, fundamentally, it was impolite. If he were a servant, he would resent it; and refuse the tip to show that he was not a servant. So he alternated: he didn’t tip when he should have and then, worried by this, he overtipped the next time.

“I should have told her that we have some nylon stockings for her,” Barbara said.

“Or if it isn’t, I’ll do something about it when we leave,” he said. “It’s too bad, though, about M. Fleury. After those robbers in Cherbourg it would have been a pleasure to overtip him—if four hundred francs was overtipping, which I doubt. She was probably worrying about herself, not us.” Trying one key after another from Barbara’s key ring with the rabbit’s foot attached to it, he found the one that opened the big brown suitcase. “What about the others?” he asked, snapping the catches.

“Maybe we’ll run into him in the village,” Barbara said. “Just that one and the dufflebag.” She took the combs out of her hair, which then fell to her shoulders. “The rest can wait.”