Bruno wondered whether she was talking about their relationship, rather than her former husband. She was still twisting her gloves in her hands, her knuckles white. He slowed at the last bend before the stop sign and the turn onto the bridge over the Dordogne. Some small drops of rain spattered his windshield.
“I don’t know why I’m talking about this,” she said. “The thought of seeing him again just adds to all the pressure, I suppose. And my mother will be so pleased to see him, probably more than she will to see me. I’m the daughter who let her down, with no grandchildren and a failed marriage.”
“It’s a difficult time for you,” he said. Pamela had always made it clear that she had no desire to settle down and was determined never to have children. They had never talked seriously about it, but it was something that Bruno knew placed a limit on their relationship. He sometimes asked himself if it had been a mistake to break his traditional rule of never starting an affair with someone who lived in St. Denis.
“He’ll probably expect to stay at the house when he comes up, and I’ll have to be polite to him,” she said, her voice cold. “God, I hate that kind of acting.”
Perhaps unconsciously, Bruno thought, she had timed her last remark to end just as he turned the final bend that led to the train station. They still had a few minutes before the train left.
“Just think about your mother. She’s the only thing that matters now.” He brought the car to a halt outside the station. “Would it help if I came to Scotland?”
“No, absolutely not. That would just make everything much more complicated and it’s much more help to me that you’ll be living at my place and looking after the horses. But it’s sweet of you to offer. I know this is a busy time for you, but I don’t want you to start living on pizzas and sandwiches.”
He laughed. “You know me better than that.”
“Fabiola will keep an eye on you. She said she’ll invite you around for meals.”
He opened the door, climbed out and walked quickly round to help her out with her carry-on bag, then held open the station door for her. “Have you got your train ticket?”
“I’ll get one onboard-no, don’t wait for me.”
He ignored her, went to the ticket counter and greeted Jean-Michel who played for St. Denis and whose nose was still swollen from his encounter with Teddy at the rugby practice. He bought her an open return, exchanged a joke about Jean-Michel’s bruises, punched Pamela’s ticket in the required yellow box and led the way across the rails to the platform for Bordeaux.
“I have no idea how long I’ll have to stay,” she said as they walked over the wooden pathway across the rails that led to the far platform for the Bordeaux train. “I suppose it will depend on her recovery and whether she can continue to live alone.”
“You could bring her over here. You have plenty of room.”
“She’d hate it, being away from Edinburgh and her friends. She’s always wanted me to move back there.”
Bruno hadn’t known that. He could see the train coming in the distance. They were the only people on the platform. He took her hand, still gripping the mangled gloves. He looked her in the eye, raised her hand to his lips and kissed the inside of her wrist. She looked back, her lip trembling.
“I’ll miss you, but we’ll take care of everything here. Don’t worry. And if you need me…”
“God, this is like a scene from Brief Encounter,” she said, looking behind her at the approaching train.
“From what?” He spoke loudly over the squeal of the train’s brakes and the rumble of metal wheels.
“It’s an old film that always makes me cry,” she said. “It’s very British, about a doomed love affair and a railway station. Only it had steam trains.”
“I like steam trains,” he said, pressing the little green button on the gleaming blue and silver door that slid back with smooth, electronic grace. He put her suitcase aboard, turned back and took her in his arms to kiss her firmly on the lips and then lifted her onto the train as the guard blew his whistle. Her bronze-red hair spread out, tumbling over the white cashmere on her shoulders, and there were tears in her eyes. As he watched, one spilled over and rolled down onto her cheek.
“Bon voyage, my beautiful Pamela, and I hope your mother is better soon, and don’t worry about the horses, or anything.”
The train doors slid together leaving her standing behind them, one hand to her eye, the other raised in an uncertain gesture that might have been a farewell wave, or she might have been reaching to him through the glass. The train began to move and he stood immobile, watching it diminish down the track.
“ Ca va, Bruno?” It was Jean-Michel. “Can I help you with something?”
He shook his head. “A woman,” he said. “Saying good-bye.”
Jean-Michel looked at him quizzically. “But that was your Mad Englishwoman. She lives here. She’ll be back.”
“She’s not mad,” said Bruno, quietly. “And she’s from Scotland.” He crossed back over the rails to the ticket hall and out to his car in the parking lot.
Bruno was putting down the phone after telling Clothilde there was still no news of Horst when the mayor called his name. Along with most of the rest of the employees of the mairie, the mayor was looking at the small TV set in the staff room beside the kitchen, and peering over the heads of others Bruno could see on the screen a shot of Gravelle’s wrecked showroom with a headline “War on Foie Gras?”
The next image was the scrawled slogan on the wall of the factory, and then a short interview with a tongue-tied Arnaud Gravelle. A brief cheer went up as they saw their mairie on screen, and then a close-up of the mayor standing beside the old stone pillars of the market hall.
“There’s no excuse for these attacks on innocent farmers and shopkeepers going about their normal and entirely legal duties,” the mayor was saying. “Foie gras is one of the glories of French cuisine and a pillar of our economy, and only crazy militants would resort to this kind of violence, bombing a quiet country town. We count on the police to bring these extremists to justice.”
Another brief cheer greeted the mayor’s remarks, but then the TV reporter, standing on the bridge with the River Vezere flowing placidly behind him, said not all the local authorities agreed. And some maintained that foie gras was indeed cruel to animals. The image shifted again, to Annette, their new magistrate, standing on the steps of the gendarmerie. She looked calm, attractive and highly professional in a neat white blouse and trim blue jacket.
“There have been other nonviolent attacks protesting against this cruelty to animals,” Annette said. “Two demonstrations have taken place against local duck farms, and on the second occasion the farmer fired his shotgun and we found blood at the scene. Perhaps in an understandable response to this violence, it seems an escalation has taken place. But I note that it was a bombing against property in which nobody was injured. As the investigating magistrate I take this very seriously, but I regret to say that the local authorities seem more concerned with protecting their foie gras industry than with seeing justice done.”
“Do you mean that your investigations have been deliberately obstructed?” the interviewer asked. The staff room of the mairie was silent in shock.
“I mean precisely that, and I will be filing a complaint to the proper authorities,” Annette said. “There are laws against cruelty to animals and I’m convinced that foie gras is not just cruel, it’s barbaric.”
The camera cut away as the dozen or so people in the staff room erupted in jeers and booing.
“If not a war on foie gras, it looks like a war over foie gras, here in St. Denis, in the Perigord, where a bomb destroyed a local factory producing the famed delicacy this morning,” said the reporter, signing off.
“And now sports,” said the news announcer, and the mayor stepped forward, turned off the TV, ejected the videotape and turned to the staff.
“This is a serious situation and I’ll be convening a full council meeting to discuss our response,” he told his staff. “All media questions, and any inquiries from the magistrate, will be referred directly to me until further notice. Bruno, please join me in my office.”
“This is war,” said the mayor, once inside his office with the door closed. “What grounds might she have for complaint against us?”
“Capitaine Duroc has made sure that she blames me for that demonstration when the farmers blockaded the gendarmerie,” Bruno said. “So now she thinks I organized it and she’s demanded my phone records to prove it.”
“What will those records show?”
“Nothing. No calls that morning. I said I was happy for her and Duroc to look at my phone logs.”
