I ate my meal in silence, for the most part, and let the others talk. In time the conversation dwindled to a kind of battle between Simon and Garland Whitaker, both of whom seemed fully capable of carrying the standard single-handed. Garland proved the more experienced combatant, and more often than not her voice came out on top.
She had remarkable stamina, I had to admit. The table conversation had exhausted several topics, and still she showed no sign of wearing down. Her husband, though, I noticed, had stopped listening. He went on eating quietly, his gaze occasionally focusing with mild interest on someone or something at another table – a laughing child, an old man eating alone, a frilly woman slipping titbits to a poodle underneath her chair … But he’d tuned his wife’s voice out completely. It was, I assumed, a defence mechanism he’d acquired over the years.
Garland chattered on about the château that they’d visited that morning. ‘We stay in one place,’ she said to me, ‘and take our day trips out from there. So much easier than jumping from place to place, don’t you think? And I can actually unpack my clothes, which is a blessing. This time we’re doing all the Loire châteaux. We always like to have a theme for our vacations, don’t we, Jim? Always. We did the D-day beaches on our honeymoon.’
‘How romantic,’ muttered Simon. He tore a piece of bread in half to mop up what remained of his runny egg, and looked towards Jim Whitaker. ‘Were you in the Army, during the war?’
It was the first real smile I’d seen from the American. He looked rather nice, when he smiled. ‘I’m not that old, son,’ he said. ‘I wasn’t even born until after the war ended.’
‘Oh,’ said Simon. ‘Sorry.’
Garland laughed her tinkling laugh. ‘Your father fought in France, though, didn’t he?’ she asked her husband. ‘That’s how he met your mother.’
‘Yes.’
‘And Jim was in the Army, Simon, when I married him. We lived in Germany for two whole years.’ She shuddered. ‘God, that awful little apartment, darling, do you remember it? But then I guess it was just fine, for Germans.’
Christian flicked a brief look down the table, but made no comment. It was Neil who asked the Whitakers just where in Germany they’d lived, and nodded when they told him. ‘I do know it,’ he said, smiling. ‘There’s a wonderful music festival not far from there, every June. Lovely place.’
‘I hated it,’ said Garland with a shrug. ‘The people were so unfriendly. Nazis, probably, most of them.’
Her husband pushed his empty plate away and smiled at her with patience. ‘Now come on, honey, you know they weren’t.’
‘Darling, it’s true. Don’t you remember all those little holes someone kept digging, all over town? Mrs Jurgen’s dog fell into one, and the police got suspicious? Well, that was Nazis, the police proved it.’ To the rest of us she explained: ‘There’d been money hidden there, or something, at the end of the war, and these people were coming back to find it thirty years later. Incredible. And then there was the time …’
She was still going, like a wind-up doll on overload, when we finally paid the bill and rose and wound our way through the labyrinth of tables to the front door.
It was heavenly to breathe the outside air. The restaurant fronted on the long and narrow Place du Général de Gaulle, and against the dark green trees the streetlamps glowed a softly spreading yellow. Further up the square the fountain gurgled merrily, and I saw the sign of the Hotel de France illuminated through the shifting leaves.
Christian apparently saw it too. He mumbled some faint words of thanks for dinner, and wandered off towards the beckoning lights. A moment later Neil Grantham followed suit. He had a long unhurried stride, and watching him I felt again that strange unbidden twinge of interest. I pushed it back, and tried to hold my thoughts to what was going on around me.
Simon and Garland had switched from Nazis now to neo-Nazis, and the rising tide of tension in Europe. ‘It’s all the immigration,’ Garland was saying. She tossed her auburn head. ‘It’s the same everywhere, I think, all these foreigners moving in and taking over. It’s like the Jews all over again, isn’t it? I mean, you can’t condone what the Nazis did, don’t get me wrong, but you can almost understand it. These immigrants can get so uppity …’
It was an ugly thing to say. I stared at her, and Jim burst out: ‘God, Garland, honestly …!’ and then to my delight Simon recovered from his own stunned silence with a vengeance and began to give her proper hell. In the midst of all this Paul turned placidly to me and smiled. ‘Feel like taking a walk?’ he asked.
‘Sure.’
I don’t think anybody even noticed us leaving. Paul turned towards the river, away from the hotel, and I ambled along beside him, content to let him set the pace.
We walked past a statue that I recognised from my travel brochures – a seated figure of the great humanist Rabelais, once a traveller and a lover of life, now confined to one small patch of garden at the end of the Place du Général de Gaulle. Bathed by floodlights, the seated scholar seemed immense, brooding in gloomy silence as the river murmured on behind him.
Paul sauntered across the road and round the far side of the statue, where a narrow breach in the river wall revealed a long fall of sloping stone stairs that vanished into the dark water below. On the seventh stair down, he sat and waited for me.