A third woman joined the two. Who is that girl showing her legs? We know nothing about her—except that she is a whore from Bayonne. And not even Basque! Do you think she might be a Protestant? Oh no, I wouldn’t go that far. Just a poor putain who has slept with the husband of her sister. It is what always happens, if you go about with your breasts unbound.
True, true.
As she passed, Hannah looked up and noticed the three women. “Bonjour, mesdames,” she said.
“Bonjour, mademoiselle,” they chanted together, smiling in the open Basque way. “You are giving yourself a walk?” one asked.
“Yes, Madame.”
“That’s nice. You are lucky to have the leisure.”
An elbow nudged, and was nudged back. It was daring and clever to come so close to saying it.
“You are looking for the château, Mademoiselle?”
“Yes, I am.”
“Just keep going as you are, and you will find what you’re looking for.”
A nudge; another nudge. It was dangerous, but deliciously witty, to come so close to saying it.
Hannah stood before the heavy iron gates. There was no one in sight, and there did not seem to be any way of ringing or knocking. The château was set back a hundred meters, up a long curving allée of trees. Uncertain, she decided to try one of the smaller gates down the road, when a voice behind her asked in a singsong, “Mademoiselle?”
She returned to the gate where an old gardener in blue working apron was peering out from the other side of the barrier. “I am looking for M. Hel,” she explained.
“Yes,” the gardener said, with that inhaled “oui” that can mean almost anything, except yes. He told her to wait there, and he disappeared into the curving row of trees. A minute later she heard the hinges creak on one of the side gates, and he beckoned her with a rolling arm and a deep bow that almost cost him his balance. As she passed him, she realized that he was half-drunk. In fact, Pierre was never drunk. Also, he was never sober. The regular spacing of his daily twelve glasses of red protected him from either of those excesses.
Pierre pointed the way, but did not accompany her to the house; he returned to trimming the box hedges that formed a labyrinth. He never worked in haste, and he never avoided work, his day punctuated, refreshed, and blurred by his glass of red every half hour or so.
Hannah could hear the clip-clip-clip of his shears, the sound receding as she walked up the allée between tall blue-green cedars, the drooping branches of which wept and undulated, brushing the shadows with long kelplike sweeps. A susurrant wind hissed high in the trees like tide over sand, and the dense shade was chill. She shivered. She was dizzy after the long hot walk, having taken nothing but coffee all day long. Her emotions had been frozen by fear, then melted by despair. Frozen, then melted. Her hold on reality was slipping.
When she reached the foot of a double rank of marble steps ascending to the terraces, she stopped, uncertain which way to go.
“May I help you?” a woman’s voice asked from above.
Hannah shaded her eyes and looked up toward the sunny terrace. “Hello. I am Hannah Stern.”
“Well, come up, Hannah Stern.” With the sunlight behind the woman, Hannah could not see her features, but from her dress and manner she seemed to be Oriental, although her voice, soft and modulated, belied the twittering stereotype of feminine Oriental speech. “We have one of those coincidences that are supposed to bring luck. My name is Hana—almost the same as yours. In Japanese, hana means flower. What does your Hannah mean? Perhaps, like so many Western names, it means nothing. How delightful of you to come just in time for tea.”
They shook hands in the French fashion, and Hannah was struck by the calm beauty of this woman, whose eyes seemed to regard her with a mixture of kindness and humor, and whose manner made Hannah feel oddly protected and at ease. As they walked together across the broad flagstone terrace toward the house with its classic facade of four porte-fenêtres flanking the main entrance, the woman selected the best bloom from the flowers she had been cutting and offered it to Hannah with a gesture as natural as it was pleasant. “I must put these in water,” she said. “Then we shall take our tea. You are a friend of Nicholai?”
“No, not really. My uncle was a friend of his.”
“And you are looking him up in passing. How thoughtful of you.” She opened the glass doors to a sunny reception room in the middle of which tea things were laid out on a low table before a marble fireplace with a brass screen. A door on the other side of the room clicked closed just as they entered. During the few days she was to spend at the Château d’Etchebar, all Hannah would ever see or hear of staff and servants would be doors that closed as she entered, or soft tiptoeing at the end of the hall, or the appearance of coffee or flowers on a bedside table. Meals were prepared in such a way that the mistress of the house could do the serving herself. It was an opportunity for her to show kindness and concern.
“Just leave your rucksack there in the corner, Hannah,” the woman said. “And would you be so good as to pour, while I arrange these flowers?”
With sunlight flooding in through the French windows, walls of light blue, moldings of gold leaf, furniture blending Louis XV and oriental inlays, threads of gray vapor twisting up from the teapot through a shaft of sunlight, mirrors everywhere lightening, reflecting, doubling and tripling everything; this room was not in the same world as that in which young men are shot down in airports. As she poured from a silver teapot into Limoges with a vaguely Chinese feeling, Hannah was overwhelmed by reality vertigo. Too much had happened in these last hours. She was afraid she was going to faint.
For no reason, she remembered feelings of dislocation like this when she was a child in school… it was summer, and she was bored, and there was the drone of study all around her. She had stared until objects became big/little. And she had asked herself, “Am I me? Am I here? Is this really me thinking these thoughts? Me? Me?”
And now, as she watched the graceful, economical movements of this slender Oriental woman stepping back to criticize the flower arrangement, then making a slight correction, Hannah tried desperately to find anchorage against the tide of confusion and fatigue that was tugging her away.
That’s odd, she thought. Of all that had happened that day: the horrible things in the airport, the dreamlike flight to Pau, the babbling suggestive talk of the drivers she had gotten rides from, that fool of a café-owner in Tardets, the long walk up the shimmering road to Etchebar… of all of it, the most profound image was her walk up the cedar-lined allée in subaqueous shadow… shivering in the dense shadow as the wind made sea sounds in the trees. It was another world. And odd.
Was it possible that she was sitting here, pouring tea into Limoges, probably looking quite the buffoon with her tight hiking shorts and clumsy, Vibram-cleated boots?
Was it just a few hours ago she had walked dazedly past the old man sitting on the floor of Rome International? “I’m sorry,” she had muttered to him stupidly.
“I’m sorry,” she said now, aloud. The beautiful woman had said something which had not penetrated the layers of thought and retreat.
The woman smiled as she sat beside her. “I was just saying it is a pity that Nicholai is not here. He’s been up in the mountains for several days, crawling about in those caves of his. Appalling hobby. But I expect him back this evening or tomorrow morning. And that will give you a chance to bathe and perhaps sleep a little. That would be nice, wouldn’t it.”
The thought of a hot bath and cool sheets was almost swooningly seductive to Hannah.