The Splendour Falls
Page 98‘My wife will not be staying,’ Jim said quietly. ‘She’s going on to Paris, and then home.’
I’d thought it odd that Garland hadn’t joined us, but at some point between my third and fourth glasses of Calvados it had ceased to be important. Now I looked at Jim and thought: He told her, that’s what happened. He told her about Martine.
Jim shrugged. ‘But I’ll be here for quite some time, I think. As long as I’m needed.’
Christian made some comment, low, in German, and I saw a warm approving smile flash across Neil’s face, his dark eyes crinkling at the corners. I quickly looked away again before he caught me staring. Not that it would have made a difference if he had, I told myself. Unless of course he’d turned that smile on me, and then … and then …
I sighed. Well, that was the whole problem, wasn’t it? I didn’t know just what would happen then. I only knew I’d been avoiding him since we’d come down from the château, feeling uncertain without knowing what I wasn’t certain of. It all came, I supposed, of having someone charge to your rescue like a bloody-minded prince out of a fairy tale; of having someone take you in his arms the way a lover might, as though you really mattered.
I felt my cousin watching me, his blue eyes frankly curious, and with a silent curse upon all men I sipped my drink, ignoring him.
It didn’t work. Instead, he turned his curiosity on Neil. ‘My cousin was convinced you were the culprit,’ he said cheerfully.
Neil raised an eyebrow. ‘Really?’
‘Mm. Something about Nazis, I think, and diamonds. I’m afraid I didn’t follow it all, but then she never does make sense when she’s upset.’
‘Ah,’ said Neil.
‘God, yes.’ Neil grinned. ‘Wherever did you dig that up? It’s quite a damning likeness, that.’
Christian swivelled round upon his stool, addressing Neil in a mild voice. ‘I am very angry with you. All these years you are a German, like myself, and I am never knowing this.’
‘Half German. My mum’s pure English, through and through. Dad moved to England when the war was over, and she met him there.’
Madame Chamond frowned prettily. ‘Except your name,’ she said. ‘Grantham. It does not sound a German name.’
‘Dad wasn’t very proud of being German in those days. He took the name of the place he moved to first, in Lincolnshire.’
‘Oh, right,’ said Harry, smiling. ‘I’ve gone through Grantham dozens of times on the train. It’s on the main line north to York, isn’t it?’
Neil nodded. ‘Mum and Dad still live there, actually, and my brother Ron.’
I tried to recall what he’d told me of his family. ‘The painter?’
‘No, the chemist.’ Again the grin. I had to look away. ‘Michael, he’s the painter, lives in London. Then there’s Isabelle. My sister,’ he explained, as Jim and François both reacted. ‘So you see, he didn’t quite forget.’
‘He was afraid, I think, that she would hate him. I used to think it terribly romantic, as a boy – like something out of Shakespeare.’
François smiled softly. ‘That is why you came to Chinon in the first place, was it not? To do what your father could not?’
‘I put it down to destiny,’ said Neil.
‘Ah, yes,’ said François, ‘destiny has played a part. It was destiny, I think, that your old friend Brigitte married Armand, that she came to live in my house, and that she invited you to visit her.’
‘Destiny, too,’ Madame Chamond put in, looking from Neil to Jim to François, ‘that the three of you should be together, here at our hotel.’
Jim smiled. ‘That’s true.’
‘Although,’ Neil qualified, ‘if you want to be technical, that was Emily’s doing.’
‘Me?’ I did look at him that time, eyes widening. ‘What on earth did I have to do with it?’
‘Well, you took off like a rabbit when you saw me coming, and no one knew where you had gone. Poor Thierry was beside himself.’
‘You were concerned.’
‘Ah. Yes, I showed to Monsieur Neil the photograph, a photograph of him, I was thinking, and he asks me where it came from, and I told him—’
‘So I rang up François,’ Neil went on, recapturing his narrative. ‘I thought you might have gone up there, to have a word with him, but of course he hadn’t seen you.’
‘And then I am worried,’ François said in turn. ‘Because I’m told that you were most upset, and so I called someone to come and stay with Lucie, and I came down here.’
‘Where he met me,’ said Jim. ‘So you see, Emily, it really was your doing.’
And the rest, I knew, had happened pretty much as I had thought it would. Danielle and Harry, on arriving at the meeting place to find I wasn’t there, had marched post-haste to the police station where, from all accounts, my cousin had stirred up a minor riot. The police in turn had telephoned the hotel to check my whereabouts. Naturally, that only raised the level of confusion as, with torches waving, everyone had formed a siege force the like of which had not been seen in Chinon since medieval times. In all, I’d heard, some fifteen people had swarmed up the château steps to rescue me. Odd, I thought – I’d noticed only one.