A Place of Greater Safety: A Novel

“I expect you found it was tedious too.”

He closed his eyes. He was almost sure he was right. He opened them again. He wanted to be sure that she didn’t move. “I think I must go now,” he said.

“But Camille.” Her eyes became round. “If you leave, a message might come about the baby. You’d want to know right away, wouldn’t you?”

“Yes. Yes. Then perhaps we ought not to stay here.”

“Why not?”

Because I think you are trying to seduce me. Short of taking your clothes off, you couldn’t be much more plain about it. And you will probably do that in a minute. “You know damn well why not,” he said.

“People can have conversations in bedrooms. People can have whole parties in bedrooms. Whole conferences.”

“Yes, of course they can.” I should be gone by now.

“But you’re afraid of doing something wrong? You find me attractive?” You can’t say, I didn’t say that. She might weep, become permanently diffident, die a spinster. All right, you can’t say that, but there are worse things that you can say. “Elisabeth, do you do this often?”

“I don’t come up here often. Max is so busy.”

Oh, a neat wit, he thought. This is a sort of standard-bearer in the army of round-faced, middle-class virgins, the sort of girl you got into a lot of trouble over when you were sixteen. And might again.

“I don’t want you,” he said gently.

“That’s not the point.”

“What did you say?”

“I said that’s not the point.” She jumped from the bed and came towards him; her little slippered feet made no sound at all. Standing over him, she rested a hand lightly on his shoulder. “You’re here. I’m here.” She put a hand up, pulled at her hair, releasing it from its pins and shaking it out. Mouse-brown hair, disheveled now. And color in her cheeks …“Want to go now?” she said. Because then she would crash downstairs after him, and there would be (he knew these awful assemblies) Eleonore and the nephew and Maurice Duplay—as he stood up he caught sight of his face in the mirror, and saw that it was irate, guilty and confused. She moved backwards and leaned against the door, laughing up into his face: no longer the least significant member of the household.

“Oh, this is ridiculous,” he said. “This is incredible.”

She watched him narrowly. She had a poacher’s face, inspecting the early-morning traps.

“No romantic interlude you had in mind,” he said. “You just want to see the blood.”

“Ah,” she said, “then have we nothing in common?”

She was a little girl, but she was built on solid lines; she made herself into deadweight resistance. As he pulled her away from the door, the fichu that covered her shoulders slipped and unknotted and floated to the floor. I wonder, he thought, what Mme. Duplay’s dressmaker thought she was about. Such a quantity of white swelling adolescent bosom. “Look,” she said, “at the state I’m in.” She caught his hand and held it at the base of her bared throat. He could feel the pulse quiver beneath her skin. “You’ve touched me now,” she said. Her face invited violence. He wanted to hit her. Then she would scream. Dear God, I must warn people about her, he thought. He made a mental list of the people he must warn.

“You might as well, now,” she said. “We’re quite safe. There’s a lock on the door. Might as well go a little bit further.”

He scooped up the fichu from the floor, slid it around her shoulders, held her tight while he did it, his fingers digging into her arm above the elbow. “I shall call your sisters,” he said. “Perhaps you are not well.”

She gaped at him. “You’re hurting me,” she said faintly.

“No, I’m not. Pin your hair up.”

Strange, the expression he had time to notice on her face—not hesitation or anger, but disgruntlement. She tore herself out of his grip and lunged towards the window. Her face was flushed and she was taking deep breaths, great gulps of air. He came up behind her, shaking her a little: “Stop it. You’ll make yourself ill, you’ll faint.”

“Yes, then you explain that. Or I could call out now. No one would believe you.”

In the yard below them, the sound of sawing had stopped, and the men were looking up at the house. Their faces were a blur to Camille, but he could imagine every furrow on their brows. Maurice Duplay was walking slowly towards the house, and a second later he heard a woman’s voice raised, sharply questioning: Duplay’s voice, muffled but urgent: a sharp little feminine cry: the advance of footsteps, footsteps climbing the stairs.

He went cold. She can say what she likes, he thought, they’ll believe her. Below the window now, something like a small crowd. All of them Duplay’s people, and all looking up; and their faces, he thought, were expectant.

The door was flung open. Maurice Duplay filled it; energetic master, shirt-sleeves rolled up. He threw out his arms, the good Jacobin Duplay, and formed a sentence totally original, something which had never been uttered in the history of the world: “Camille, you have a son, and your wife is very well, and is asking you to be at home, right now.”

A sea of smiles in the doorway. Camille stood fighting down his fright. You need not speak, a voice said inside, they will think you are too pleased and surprised to speak. Elisabeth had turned her back to them. With deft unobtrusive movements, she was straightening her clothes. “Congratulations,” she said lightly. “What an achievement for you.”

“Maximilien has a godchild,” Madame Duplay said, beaming. “Please God one day he will have a fine son of his own.”

Maurice Duplay locked his arms about Camille. It was a horrible, brisk, patriotic hug, Jacobin to Jacobin,