Page 79 of The Splendour Falls
I didn’t think to question where she’d heard it. Women like Garland Whitaker always seemed able to tap into the local grapevine with shocking efficiency, unhindered by barriers of language and culture. She’d been kept well occupied, this morning. “This Prieur man,” she went on, having fortified herself with a sip of her unsatisfactory Manhattan, “was the fellow who came to drag away poor Thierry, for questioning.”
Her husband smiled. “Come on now, honey, I’d hardly call that dragging. The man was pretty polite about it, from what I could see.”
“Well,” Garland sniffed, “Thierry didn’t want to go, you could tell. And anyhow, my point was that since Mr. Prieur was the one who came for Thierry, I’d have thought that he’d be busy right now asking Thierry questions, but it looks as though he’s found some other person now… look, just who is that, I wonder?”
She meant the middle-aged man climbing from the rear of the second patrol car, straightening his back with a motion that spoke of weariness and apprehension. I could have told her, from that distance, who the man was. I could have said: “That’s Victor Belliveau. He’s a poet, quite a famous poet, and he lives just up the river.” It might have been my own distaste for gossip that kept me silent, or the fact that it satisfied me knowing and not telling her, denying her that bit of information. Whatever the reason, I said nothing.
“He must be somebody.” Garland lifted her chin like a hound sniffing the quarry’s elusive scent. “A suspect, maybe, do you think? Really, it’s just so exciting, to be in the middle of a murder case.”
“If it was murder.” Her husband took the rational point of view. “In which case, we’re probably all under suspicion. Even you.”
She looked vaguely surprised at the thought. “Me? Oh, I don’t think so, darling.” The four men had moved off now, out of sight, along the rue Voltaire. Deprived of her entertainment, Garland sighed and turned round again in her chair, facing me across the table. She was drawing breath to speak when voices raised in argument came filtering down through the feathery branches of the acacias, from an open hotel window. The voices spoke neither English nor French, and so I didn’t understand a word of what they said, but the passionate delivery promised some fresh scandal, and Garland tipped her head appreciatively. “That sounds like the young couple that just arrived. The ones that Gabrielle put into the boys’ room—and Thierry isn’t going to like that, I can tell you, there’ll be feathers flying when he finds out what she’s done. But like I said to Jim, it’s just a room, and you can’t keep shrines when you’re supposed to be making a profit.” She paused, and listened to a few more lines of unintelligible arguing, and clucked her tongue. “Such a shame, they were a cute couple. Swedes, I think she said. On honeymoon. I wonder what she’s mad about.”
I rather suspected she was giving the poor chap the devil on my account, demanding to know why some other woman had come knocking at the door, but I kept my suspicions to myself. Fortunately, Garland Whitaker wasn’t seeking my opinion.
“Maybe it’s the room that’s unlucky,” she mused. “Maybe Thierry was right after all, about that French girl killing herself in that room at the end of the war. You know, we only have Monsieur Chamond’s word for it that there isn’t a ghost. I think…” A glimpse of movement through the windows of the hotel bar interrupted her train of thought. I twisted round and saw, as Garland did, the tall proud figure of the Swedish woman, seating herself at the deserted bar with an indignant flip of her long pale hair. Garland’s eyes grew predatory. “Will you excuse me for a minute? I think I need to freshen up my drink.”
She bustled off, clutching her empty glass with purpose. Across the table, Jim Whitaker’s gaze held kind apology. “She can’t help it,” he said. “It fascinates her, other people’s lives.”
I summoned up a smile for him. They were very different, Jim and Garland. I’d rarely met a couple so ill-matched. The stray thought made me look again toward the open window of the ro
om beside my own, where the honeymooning husband was presumably now sitting by himself.
“She’s wrong about the room, you know,” I said, remembering what François had told me earlier about his luckless sister. “Isabelle didn’t kill herself there. In fact, I don’t believe she killed herself at all.”
“I know.” He lifted his drink, slowly. “She died of cancer in Savannah, Georgia, twenty years ago.” Above the glass, his eyes swung calmly round to lock with mine. “She was my mother.”
Chapter 27
See that there be no traitors in your camp:
“It made a nice enough story,” said Jim Whitaker, “in the bar, the other night. And it was accurate, for the most part—all except the ending. Hans may have died at the end of the war, but Isabelle…” He shook his head. “She wanted to, she thought about it, but she couldn’t bring herself to offend God any more than she had already. So she did the next best thing. She married my father.”
Above our heads the sunlight filtered through a cool and trembling canopy of green and set the shadows swaying, and the fountain sprayed the pavement beside us. The chattering confusion of the patrons at the other tables blended into one soft muted background, like an artist’s wash upon a colored canvas. And Jim Whitaker, who’d always seemed to me so bland, so indistinct, now stood out clearly in relief.
“He met her just after the liberation,” he went on, still in that calm and quiet voice. “Here in Chinon. He felt sorry for her, I think. The French didn’t have much sympathy for collaborators of any kind, and everyone knew that my mother had been fooling around with a German officer. She didn’t have an easy time of it. My father offered her an out. He married her in private, took her home to the States, and that was that.”
The dappled sunlight danced across my face, and I shaded my eyes as I looked at him. “So the story has a happy ending, then.”
“In some ways, yes. She lived a good life—three children, a nice home, a husband who took care of her. But I’m not sure that I’d ever have called my mother happy.” He slung one leg over the other and leaned back in his chair, considering. “I don’t know—is happiness a thing we choose, I wonder? Or is it something handed out to some, and not to others?”
“A bit of both, I should think.”
“My mother would have said that it was God’s will she and Hans were separated. But I’m not so sure.” His gaze swung gently to the open door of the hotel bar, through which he could plainly see his wife’s sharp silhouette bent close in conversation with the Swedish bride. “I think we all make choices in our lives that set us down the road to happiness or disappointment. It’s just that we can’t always see where the road is leading us until we’re halfway there.” There was a hint of regret in his calm voice; regret, too, in the way he dragged his eyes around to look at me. “My mother chose her road.”
Somebody laughed beside us and the breeze blew past a fleeting whiff of roses. I breathed it in and sighed a little sigh. “She must have missed it terribly, this place.”
“I guess.” His shrug was very French. “She never talked about it, not to me. I didn’t know a thing about my mother’s past until she died. The day of the funeral my Dad got drunk, and the whole damn story came pouring out of him.” He narrowed his eyes in remembrance. “Since then, I’ve always wanted to come here, to see the place where it all happened. I should have done it years ago. I was stationed at a base in Germany back then—it would have been so easy just to hop on a train, but…” His smile also held regret. “I just never got around to it, somehow. I kept on saying next year, next year… and then last spring Garland said that she was bored with going to the Mediterranean, she wanted to vacation someplace else, so I said what about Chinon.” Again his gaze searched out the animated figure of his wife. “She doesn’t know,” he added. “Garland, I mean. I’ve never told her about my mother.”
I stared at him. “But… I mean, you’ve just told me.”
“Yes. It doesn’t make much sense, I know, but it’s different somehow, telling you. There were times, and I hope you won’t take this wrong, but there have been times this past week when you’ve made me think of her. Of my mother. I don’t know what it is, exactly, but there’s a resemblance.”
I smiled. “You’re the second person who’s told me that today.”
“Oh, really? Who was the first?”
“This man I know, up at the vineyard… Heavens,” I broke off suddenly, as the realization struck me, “he’d be your uncle, I suppose. Your mother’s younger brother, a rather nice old man named—”