Mademoiselle Paul took the notes. It was strange. She did not thank the Marquise. 'This will keep me until the end of the month,' she said. 'It will help to pay the funeral expenses.'
She opened her bag. She took out three prints.
'I have more, similar to these, back in the shop,' she said. ' It seemed to me that perhaps, going away suddenly as you are doing, you had forgotten all about them. I found them amongst my poor brother's other prints and negatives in the cellar, where he used to develop them.'
She handed the prints to the Marquise. The Marquise went cold when she saw them. Yes, she had forgotten. Or rather, she had not been aware of their existence. They were three views of her taken in the bracken. Careless, abandoned, half-sleeping, with her head against his coat for a pillow, she had heard the click-click of the camera, and it had added a sort of zest to the afternoon. Some he had shown her. But not these.
She took the photographs and put them in her bag.
'You say you have others?' she asked, her voice without expression.
'Yes, Madame la Marquise.'
She forced herself to meet the woman's eyes. They were swollen still with weeping, but the glint was unmistakable.
'What do you want me to do?' asked the Marquise.
Mademoiselle Paul looked about her in the hotel bedroom. Tissue paper strewn on the floor, odds and ends thrown into the waste-paper basket, the tumbled, unmade bed.
'I have lost my brother,' she said, 'my supporter, my reason for being alive. Madame la Marquise has had an enjoyable holiday and now returns home. I take it that Madame la Marquise would not desire her husband or her family to see these prints?'
'You are right,' said the Marquise, 'I do not even wish to see them myself.'
'In which case,' said Mademoiselle Paul, 'twenty thousand francs is really very little return for a holiday that Madame la Marquise so much enjoyed.'
The Marquise looked in her bag again. She had two mille notes and a few hundred francs. 'This is all I have,' she said, 'you are welcome to these as well.'
Mademoiselle Paul blew her nose once more. 'I think it would be more satisfactory for both of us if we came to a more permanent arrangement,' she said. 'Now my poor brother has gone the future is very uncertain. I might not even wish to live in a neighbourhood that holds such sad memories. I cannot but ask myself how my brother met his death. The afternoon before he disappeared he went out to the headland and came back very distressed. I knew something had upset him, but I did not ask him what. Perhaps he had hoped to meet a friend, and the friend had not appeared. The next day he went again, and that night he did not return. The police were informed, and then three days later his body was found. I have said nothing of possible suicide to the police, but have accepted it, as they have done, as accidental. But my brother was a very sensitive soul, Madame la Marquise. Unhappy, he would have been capable of anything. If I make myself wretched thinking over these things, I might go to the police, I might suggest he did away with himself after an unhappy love affair. I might even give them leave to search through his effects for photographs.'
In agony the Marquise heard her husband's footsteps outside the door.
'Are you coming, dearest?' he called, bursting it open and entering the room. 'The luggage is all in, the children are clamouring to be off.'
He said good morning to Mademoiselle Paul. She curtseyed.
'I will give you my address,' said the Marquise, 'both in Paris, and in the country.' She sought in her bag feverishly for cards. 'I shall expect to hear from you in a few weeks' time.'
'Possibly before that, Madame la Marquise,' said Mademoiselle Paul. 'If I leave here, and find myself in your neighbourhood, I would come and pay my humble respects to you and Miss, and the little children. I have friends not so very far away. I have friends in Paris too. I have always wanted to see Paris.'
The Marquise turned with a terrible bright smile to her husband.
'I have told Mademoiselle Paul,' she said, 'that if there is anything I can do for her at any time she has only to let me know.'
'Of course,' said her husband. 'I am so sorry to hear of your tragedy. The manager here has been telling me all about it.'
Mademoiselle Paul curtseyed again, looking from him back to the Marquise.
'He was all I had in the world, Monsieur le Marquis,' she said. 'Madame la Marquise knows what he meant to me. It is good to know that I may write to her, and that she will write to me, and when that happens I shall not feel alone and isolated. Life can be very hard for someone who is alone in the world. May I wish you a pleasant journey, Madame la Marquise, and happy memories of your holidays, and above all no regrets?'
Once more Mademoiselle Paul curtseyed, then turned and limped from the room.
'Poor woman,' said the Marquis, ' and what an appearance. I understand from the manager that the brother was crippled too?'
'Yes…' She fastened her handbag. Took her gloves. Reached for her dark glasses.
'Curious thing, but it often runs in families,' said the Marquis, as they walked along the corridor. He paused and rang the bell for the ascenseur. 'You have never met Richard du Boulay, have you, an old friend of mine? He was crippled, much as this unfortunate little photographer seems to have been, but for all that a charming, perfectly normal girl fell in love with him, and they got married. A son was born, and he turned out to be a hopeless club-foot like his father. You can't fight that sort of thing. It's a taint in the blood that passes on.'
They stepped into the ascenseur and the doors closed upon them.
'Sure you won't change your mind and stay for lunch? You look pale. We've got a long drive before us, you know.'
'I'd rather go.'
They were waiting in the hall to see her off. The manager, the receptionist, the concierge, the maitre d'hotel.
'Come again, Madame la Marquise. There will always be a welcome for you here. It has been such a pleasure looking after you. The hotel will not be the same once you have gone.'
'Gooda€”bye… Good-bye…'
The Marquise climbed into the car beside her husband. They turned out of the hotel grounds into the road. Behind her lay the headland, the hot sands, and the sea. Before her lay the long straight road to home and safety. Safety…?
Kiss Me Again, Stranger
I LOOK AROUND FOR a bit, after leaving the army and before settling down, and then I found myself a job up Hampstead way, in a garage it was, at the bottom of Haverstock Hill near Chalk Farm, and it suited me fine. I'd always been one for tinkering with engines, and in R.E.M.E. that was my work and I was trained to it — it had always come easy to me, anything mechanical.
My idea of having a good time was to lie on my back in my greasy overalls under a car's belly, or a lorry's, with a spanner in my hand, working on some old bolt or screw, with the smell of oil about me, and someone starting up an engine, and the other chaps around clattering their tools and whistling. I never minded the smell or the dirt. As my old Mum used to say when I'd be that way as a kid, mucking about with a grease can, 'It won't hurt him, it's clean dirt,' and so it is, with engines.
The boss at the garage was a good fellow, easy-going, cheerful, and he saw I was keen on my work. He wasn't much of a mechanic himself, so he gave me the repair jobs, which was what I liked.
I didn't live with my old Mum — she was too far off, over Shepperton way, and I saw no point in spending half the day getting to and from my work. I like to be handy, have it on the spot, as it were. So I had a bedroom with a couple called Thompson, only about ten minutes' walk away from the garage. Nice people, they were. He was in the shoe business, cobbler I suppose he'd be called, and Mrs. Thompson cooked the meals and kept the house for him over the shop. I used to eat with them, breakfast and supper — we always had a cooked supper — and being the only lodger I was treated as family.
