François looked back at Neil and Lucie, his weary eyes softening. ‘She is just like her father sometimes, very charming. And she doesn’t take no for an answer.’
The child was giggling at the moment, a delighted and infectious sound. ‘Again,’ she commanded, and Neil sighed in mock despair.
‘They’ll fall off, you know, and then you’ll be sorry.’
But he wiggled his ears again, anyway, and was rewarded with another fit of giggles from his appreciative audience. It was a difficult sound to resist. So it was odd that François’s smile faded, the lines on his face deepening as though something had pained him.
Concerned, I touched his arm. ‘Are you all right?’
I saw the shiver, hastily suppressed, and fancied for a moment that his gaze seemed faintly questing on my face, but when he spoke he looked himself again.
‘Yes, I am fine, Mademoiselle. I am an old man, that is all. Sometimes I see the ghosts.’
CHAPTER TWENTY
Thro’ her this matter might be sifted clean.
I didn’t go straight back to the hotel. Instead I turned along a narrow street and went in search of the smaller square where Martine Muret kept her gallery.
It wasn’t difficult to find. A few acacias grew here as well, draped over cobbled stone, well pitted and grown dark with age. The sun shone warmly, cheerfully, upon the clustering of leaning shops and houses, reflected in the gleaming glass front of the little gallery.
Even without Christian’s paintings hanging in the window, I believe I would have known the place belonged to Martine. It looked like her, somehow – so smart and neat and elegant, with everything in perfect order. But Christian’s oils clinched the matter. They stood out from the other paintings easily, the bolder brush strokes and exquisite play of light and shadow lending them a warm, romantic feel. Stepping closer, I peered with interest at the softly swirled self-portrait Paul had mentioned. Christian, I thought, had a master’s touch. He’d shown himself no quarter, tracing every jutting outline of his sharply contoured face, the pale eyes gently sombre and the golden hair uncombed.
He’d breathed similar life into his landscapes. I saw the walls of Château Chinon shiver under storm clouds, and the idle spreading peace of fields flecked liberally with grazing cows, but my favourite of his paintings was the one that showed the river.
He had painted it at sunset, not far from the steps where Paul often sat. The steps themselves were plainly there, beneath the looming silhouette of Rabelais, and on the placid water three ducks drifted round a weathered punt, moored close against the sloping wall, while further off the gleaming arches of the bridge stretched like a golden thread from shore to shore. The only thing missing from that picture, I thought, was Paul himself, sitting halfway down the steps with his back to the traffic above, reading Ulysses and smoking an illicit cigarette.
It wasn’t often that a painting so transported me, and when Martine herself came out onto the doorstep to greet me, she had to speak twice before I heard her.
‘It is a lovely painting, that one, is it not?’ She smiled, understanding.
‘Very lovely.’ I bit my lip. ‘Is it very expensive?’
‘Not so expensive as his others. It is a smaller canvas, and there are no cows in it. Tourists,’ she informed me, ‘like the cows, and so the cows have higher prices than the river. But if you like, I have a price list.’
I came inside and waited while she went to fetch the list. The gallery’s interior was bright and white and spotless, meant to show off every sculpture, sketch and painting to advantage. Martine had a clever eye for art, I thought. I didn’t see a single work that I would not have wanted to own myself. Still, I fancied most of it was well outside my price range, and when Martine finally found the list and ran her finger down it, I braced myself for the inevitable. Not that it mattered, I consoled myself. I hadn’t come to buy a painting, anyway. I’d only come to ask Martine some subtle questions about her ex-husband, Didier Muret.
‘Painting number 88,’ she said at last. ‘Yes, here it is.’ The sum she quoted was almost twice what I earned in a month.
I heard a quiet footstep on the polished floor behind me. ‘Perhaps Christian will reduce his prices, for a friend.’ A man’s voice, but the accent was distinctly French, not German. I hadn’t seen Armand Valcourt come in. Martine had, though; she didn’t bat an eyelid as she shook her head, a smile softening her sigh.
‘Christian,’ she said, ‘would give them all away, I think, these paintings. He has too generous a nature. Always I must watch him and remind him painters, too, must eat.’
I glanced round at Armand, and said good morning. ‘I saw your daughter earlier, by the river.’
‘Yes.’ He smiled. ‘This is her morning with François. The ducks, I think, and then the ice cream … such a simple way to happiness. She likes her Wednesdays, my Lucie.’
His eyes were quite unhurried as they roamed the quiet gallery, and he didn’t seem in any rush to move. So much, I thought, for my chance of a private chat with Martine. I tried to hide my disappointment by asking him how old his daughter was, exactly.
‘Lucie? She has nearly seven years.’
‘And already she has genius,’ said her slightly biased aunt. ‘She can tell you every step of how the wine is made, that little one.’
‘She is a Valcourt,’ Armand said, as if that explained everything. ‘It will be hers one day, the Clos des Cloches, and so I pass traditions down, as I learned from my father.’