‘No.’ I glanced upwards at my own curtain rod, which hung a good inch clear of the top of the frame.
‘I told you,’ said Simon to Paul, his chin defiant. ‘It’s only us. He does it on purpose.’
Paul shrugged and grinned. ‘Yeah, well, you’re on your own this time. You can tell him yourself.’
‘I don’t know the word for curtain,’ Simon hedged, a little hopefully, but Paul stood firm.
‘So go look it up in the dictionary. It’s the only way you’ll learn the language.’
After a final glance at his brother’s face, Simon withdrew from the window, and Paul turned back to face me, still grinning.
‘Beautiful day,’ he commented. ‘You must have brought the sunshine with you; we’ve had nothing but rain for three days.’
It was beautiful, I conceded. The shadows hung sharp and clear on the turreted houses and tightly clustered rooftops of the medieval town centre, and the pale stone walls gleamed brightly above the tufted green tops of the acacia trees. Two cars swung round the square below us, but the noise of traffic was muffled in the distance and the cheerful gurgle of the fountain carried over everything.
A second bell began to chime, quite near and rich and ringing, and I looked at Paul in some surprise.
‘I thought the bell just went,’ I said.
‘There are two bells. I’ve been trying to figure out exactly where the second one is – it’s either at the Church of St Maurice, just up the rue Voltaire, or it’s at the City Hall, which is that big building over there.’ He pointed out the large square building to our left, at the spot where the fountain square narrowed into the Place du Général de Gaulle. ‘I can’t quite make it out. But the first bell, the one you heard a few minutes ago, that’s up at the château.’ He used the proper French word for the castle. ‘Which reminds me,’ he went on. ‘Do you have any plans for this morning? Because Simon and I are going up to the château to putter around for an hour or so, and we thought if you didn’t have anything else to do …’
Well, I certainly wasn’t going to waste my first full day in Chinon hanging about the hotel in the hope that Harry would show up. He’d be here soon enough, I thought drily, and in the meantime there was no law that prevented me from touring on my own. ‘I’d love to come,’ I told Paul. ‘Thanks.’
‘Terrific. It’s really something to see, and you shouldn’t waste this sunshine. The weather here can be kind of unpredictable.’
We both heard the stern knock from the corridor.
‘That’ll be Thierry,’ Paul said, with a wink. ‘He’ll be irritated.’
‘Wouldn’t it be simpler to just leave the curtain off, instead of always hanging it back up again?’
‘Oh, sure.’ He shrugged. ‘But it’s sort of a game for them, I think, and Simon considers it a personal challenge. Simon,’ Paul told me in a positive tone, ‘loves a challenge.’
Which was, I learned as we set out after breakfast, quite a thorough summing up of Simon’s character.
He took charge of our impromptu tour party the moment we passed through the front doors of the hotel and stepped onto the pavement. ‘OK,’ he began firmly, ‘since this is Emily’s first real day in Chinon, I think we should take her down the rue Voltaire first, and then up to the château from there. It’s a lot easier than going straight up those steps, anyway.’
He meant the broad, inviting flight of cobbled steps that cut between the buildings to our right, in a direct line with the fountain. The steps themselves didn’t appear to be particularly steep, but it looked a long way up. I could just see the small cluster of yellow-white houses peering over the edge of the cliff that rimmed the town.
‘What is this stone, do you know?’ I asked my self-appointed guides. ‘All the buildings here seem to be made of it.’
Simon proudly supplied the answer. ‘It’s tufa-stone. Tuffeau in French. It’s the same stone they used to build Westminster Abbey, as a matter of fact.’
‘He’s been reading the guide books,’ Paul explained. ‘It’s just a porous limestone, really. That’s what the cliffs round here are made of.’
Tufa-stone. I filed the name away in my memory. On some of the buildings it almost looked like marble, hard and smooth and faintly reflective, cut in enormous blocks that had been fitted so expertly one could hardly spot the seams. Coupled with the slate-blue pointed roofs, it gave the town a certain unity of colour and style that lovingly embraced the eye. Most of the shutters were open, now – painted metal shutters stained with rust, and older wooden ones, unpainted, that hung unevenly on their hinges, fastened back against the walls of their respective houses by ancient iron latches. I could understand why Simon found his curtain rod such a nuisance. French windows begged to be flung wide – it seemed a crime somehow to keep them closed.
The rue Voltaire led off the square as well, a narrow cobbled street that cut a line between the cliffs and the river. It was a lovely street, tastefully restored and rich in atmosphere, but I only caught the briefest glimpses of its tight-packed houses as Simon drove us past them at a breathless pace.
‘And here,’ he said, coming to a full and sudden stop where a narrow street angled across the rue Voltaire, ‘is the Great Crossroads. Well, it was a lot greater in the old days, I guess. This,’ he told me, pointing up the smaller sloping street, ‘was how people used to get to the château back then. And that well over there, against the wall, is where Joan of Arc got off her horse when she came to Chinon to see the Dauphin.’