Old Bones

* * * *

WITHOUT looking at the dark, solemn servant who proffered the tray of aperitifs, Mathilde du Rocher waved him away with an impatient flick of a beringed and impeccably manicured hand.

'I, for one,” she had been saying, and now said again for the benefit of her amiably smiling husband, “I, for one, find the entire business intolerably overbearing on Guillaume's part, and inexcusably rude as well. We've been waiting here for nearly an hour. An hour!” She compressed her firm mouth eloquently. “Collecting seashells!'

'Well,” said Rene du Rocher, accepting a champagne cocktail, “I'm sure there are reasons.'

Mathilde did not dignify this feeble response with one of her own. She merely glared at his newly furry upper lip with a look that said: Your moustache is utterly ridiculous. Rene smiled pleasantly and sipped his cocktail.

Mathilde turned to her son. “That's your second martini. Where did you learn to drink martinis?'

Neither were these comments acknowledged. Jules du Rocher's plump arm swept the long-stemmed glass from the tray directly to his lips, which he smacked loudly after downing half the drink.

'What are they doing here, is what I'd like to know,” he grumbled, openly staring across the room at another threesome, who sat stiffly in their high-backed wing chairs, as removed and alienated as if they'd been walled off.

'If I'd known they were really going to be here, I assure you we would still be in Frankfurt,” said Mathilde, grimly watching her son drain his glass with a second swallow and then go grubbing with a pudgy thumb and forefinger after the anchovy-stuffed olive at the bottom.

'Don't do that, Jules,” she said disgustedly.

'Well, why don't they put a toothpick in it, then?” he asked, not unreasonably. He capitulated, however, bringing the glass to his lips, upending it, and helping the olive into his mouth with a pinky that followed it in rather more deeply than Mathilde thought strictly necessary.

That, said Mathilde's look, is repulsive. Unconcerned, Jules concentrated on liberating the anchovy with his tongue, then munching with deep satisfaction; first the anchovy, then the olive.

'Now, Mathilde,” Rene said reasonably, “if Guillaume invited the Fougerays, he must have had a very good reason. And you know he's not being late on purpose. He's probably forgotten about the time; you know how absentminded the old fellow's been getting.'

You, his wife's eloquent look said, are not the person to talk about absentmindedness.

Rene took no offense; indeed, he seemed to take no notice. “So why upset yourself?” he continued. “There's no point, is there?'

Indeed, there wasn't. The patriarchal Guillaume du Rocher convened these “family councils'—formal meetings of the dwindling and far flung du Rocher clan— whenever it pleased him, and he ran them however he wished. If it was increasingly in his nature to be high-handed and eccentric, well, that was to be borne with good humor. What choice was there?

'Best to simply be thankful these things occur so infrequently,” Rene concluded with a radiant smile, his logic triumphant and irrefutable.

Rene du Rocher was a soft, placid, somewhat dandified man of sixty-two, a year younger than his wife—with shiny, thinning, plastered-down hair, a cherubic pink-and-white complexion, and small, delicate hands that he frequently rubbed together with a dry, rustly sound. He was clean in his habits, used cologne liberally, and took pride in the masculine vigor of his three-week-old moustache.

In all, he looked like an affable and self-contented bank manager, which in fact he was. Or close enough; Monsieur du Rocher was a corporate-lending officer in the international division of the Credit Lyonnais in Frankfurt, to which city he had moved three years earlier with his family, after three decades of unexceptional advancement in Paris, Geneva, and London. The advancing years had enhanced his naturally sweet temper and, less fortunately, his predisposition toward a slight vacancy of mind. At the urging of his superiors, he was now contemplating retirement.

'I've always liked this room,” he said mildly. “Did you know that Henri IV and his party were once feasted here? In 1595. The manoir was already a hundred years old.'

'Oh, be quiet,” Mathilde said absently, picking an invisible shred of lint from the dark, broad, woolen field of her bosom.

Jules had consumed the olive. His eyes roved to the hors d'oeuvres tray on the coffee table. “The point is,” he said querulously to his father, “that Cousin Guillaume hasn't asked the Fougerays to a family council in decades, or haven't you noticed?” Emulating his mother, he had adopted this petulant, deprecatory tone toward his father at fourteen, had found it satisfactory, and had not modified it in the ensuing sixteen years. “And with good reason. Look at the man; the quintessential peasant. Aside from a certain repulsive fascination, it's awkward to be in the same room with him. Is he really related to us?'

'You shut up too,” Mathilde muttered, now brushing a thread from her ample skirt. “What a prig you are, Jules.'

If her son felt injury at this inconsistency, he did not show it. He concentrated instead on loading a triangle of buttered toast with all the beluga caviar it would bear and conveying it slowly and carefully to his mouth. As cautious as he was, a few oily, shining beads fell into his lap. Mathilde lowered her lids and looked the other way.

Across the room, Claude Fougeray smiled stonily at his wife and daughter, not easy for a man whose hyperthyroid condition afflicted him with a pop-eyed stare of permanent, outraged surprise. “Let them look down their long noses at us, these damned du Rochers,” he said. The tight smile faded to a sneer. “Look at them. I could buy all of them put together, if I wanted to. I have—'

Leona Fougeray, tiny, vivid, raven-haired despite her fifty-three years, interrupted her husband. “Yes? I'd like to see you buy Guillaume du Rocher.” Her mobile lips turned downward. “And you're drinking too much. As usual.'

'Goddamn it,” Claude whispered throatily, bald head lowered like an angry bull's, so that his neck, thick and