Léonie was excited, but also curiously out of sorts, a state of affairs she put down to the events of the previous evening. She had no chance to speak to Anatole nor to discuss with him the coincidence of timing that had led to the invitation arriving so opportunely for his needs.
After lunch, making the most of the mild and pleasant afternoon, Marguerite and Léonie went walking in Parc Monceau, a favourite haunt of the ambassadors’ children from the embassies nearby. A group of boys were playing Un, Deux, Trois Loup with great exuberance, shouting and yelling encouragement to one another. A gaggle of girls in ribbons and white petticoats, watched over by nannies and dark-skinned bodyguards, were engaged in a game of hopscotch. La Marelle had been one of Léonie’s favourite childhood games, and she and Marguerite stopped to watch the girls throw the pebble into the square and jump. From the look on her mother’s face, Léonie knew she too was remembering the past with affection. She took advantage to ask a question.
‘Why is it that you were not happy at the Domaine de la Cade?’
‘It was not an environment in which I felt comfortable, chérie, that is all.’
‘But why? Was it the company? The place itself?’
Marguerite shrugged, as she always did, unwilling to be drawn.
‘There must be a reason,’ Léonie pressed.
Marguerite sighed. ‘My half-brother was a strange, solitary man,’ she said finally. ‘He did not wish for the company of a much younger sibling, let alone to be partly responsible for his father’s second wife. We felt always like unwelcome guests.’
Léonie thought a moment. ‘Do you think I will enjoy myself there?’
‘Oh yes, I am certain of it,’ Marguerite said quickly. ‘The estate is quite beautiful, and I imagine that in thirty years there will have been many improvements.’
‘And the house itself?’
Marguerite did not answer.
‘M’man?’
‘It was a long time ago,’ she said firmly. ‘Everything will have changed.’
The morning of their departure, Friday 18th September, dawned damp and blustery.
Léonie woke early, with a fluttering of nerves in her stomach. Now the day had arrived, she was suddenly nostalgic for the world she was leaving behind. The sounds of the city, the rows of sparrows sitting upon the rooftops of the buildings opposite, the familiar faces of neighbours and tradesmen, all seemed invested with a poignant charm. Everything brought tears to her eyes.
Something of the same seemed to have affected Anatole also, for he was ill at ease. His mouth was pinched and his eyes were wary, as he stood watchful at the drawing room windows, casting nervous glances up and down the street.
The maid announced that the carriage had arrived.
‘Inform the driver we will be down immediately,’ he said.
‘You are travelling in those clothes?’ Léonie teased, looking at his grey morning suit and frock coat. ‘You look as if you are going to your offices.’
‘That is the idea,’ he said grimly, walking across the drawing room towards her. ‘Once we are away from Paris, I will change into something less formal.’
Léonie blushed, feeling stupid not to have realised. ‘Of course.’
He picked up his top hat. ‘Hurry, petite. We do not wish to miss our train.’
In the street below, their luggage was loaded into the fiacre. ‘Saint-Lazare,’ Anatole shouted, to make his voice heard over the cracking of the wind. ‘Gare Saint-Lazare.’
Léonie embraced their mother and promised to write. Marguerite’s eyes were rimmed red, which surprised her and, in turn, made her tearful too. As a consequence, their final few minutes in the rue de Berlin were more emotional than Léonie had anticipated.
The fiacre pulled away. At the last moment, as the gig rounded the corner into the rue d’Amsterdam, Léonie pushed down the window and called back to where Marguerite stood, alone, on the pavement.
‘Au revoir, M’man.’
Then she sat back in the seat and dabbed at her glistening eyes with her handkerchief. Anatole took her hand and held it.
‘I am certain she will get along fine without us,’ he reassured her.
Léonie sniffed.
‘Du Pont will look after her.’
‘Did you make a mistake? Does the Express not depart from the Gare Montparnasse rather than Saint-Lazare?’ she said a little later, once the urge to cry had passed.
‘If anyone comes calling,’ he said in a conspiratorial whisper, ‘I wish them to believe in the fiction that we are heading for the western suburbs. Yes?’
She nodded. ‘I see. A bluff.’
Anatole grinned and tapped the side of his nose.
On their arrival at the Gare Saint-Lazare, he had their luggage moved to a second cab. He made a great play of chatting with the driver, but Léonie noticed he was sweating, even though it was damp and cold. His cheeks were flushed and his temples slicked with beads of perspiration.
‘Are you unwell?’ she asked with concern.
‘No,’ he said immediately, then added, ‘But this . . . subterfuge, it is a strain on my nerves. I shall be fine once we are away from Paris.’
‘What would you have done,’ Léonie said curiously, ‘had the invitation not arrived when it did?’
Anatole shrugged. ‘Made alternative arrangements.’
Léonie waited for him to say more, but he remained silent.
‘Does M’man know about your . . . commitments at Chez Frascati?’ she asked in the end.
Anatole avoided the question. ‘If anyone should come asking, she is well primed to perpetrate the fiction that we have gone to Saint-Germain-en-Laye. Debussy’s people are from there, so . . .’ He put both hands on her shoulders and turned her to face him. ‘Now, petite, are you satisfied?’
Léonie tilted her chin. ‘I am.’
‘And no more questions?’ he teased.
She gave an apologetic grin. ‘I will try.’
On their arrival at the Gare Montparnasse, Anatole all but threw the fare at the driver and shot into the station as if he had a pack of hunting dogs at his heels. Léonie played along with the pantomime, understanding that whereas he had wanted them to be noticed at Saint-Lazare, here he wished to be inconspicuous.
Inside the station, he looked for the board listing departures, then put his hand to the pocket of his waistcoat before appearing to think better of it.
‘Have you mislaid your watch?’
‘It was taken during the assault,’ he said cursorily.
They walked along the platform to find their seats. Léonie read the notices on the carriages of the places in which the train was scheduled to stop: Laroche, Tonnerre, Dijon, Mâcon, Lyon-Perranche at six o’clock this evening, then Valence, Avignon and finally Marseille.
Tomorrow, they were due to take the coast train from Marseille to Carcassonne. Then on Sunday morning, they would depart Carcassonne for Couiza-Montazels, the closest railway station to Rennes-les-Bains. From there, according to their aunt’s instructions, it was only a short carriage ride to the Domaine de la Cade, in the foothills of the Corbières.
Anatole purchased a newspaper and buried himself behind it. Léonie watched the people go by. Top hats and morning suits, ladies in wide sweeping skirts. A beggar with a thin face and grimed fingers lifted up the window of their first-class carriage to beg for alms until the guard chased him off.
There was a final shrill, sharp blast from the whistle, then a bellow from the engine as it spat out its first jet of steam. Sparks flew. Then the grind of metal against metal, another belch from the black funnel and, slowly, the wheels started to turn.
Enfin.
The train began to pick up speed as it pulled away from the platform. Léonie sat back in her seat watching Paris disappear in folds of white smoke.
CHAPTER 19
COUIZA SUNDAY 20TH SEPTEMBER
Léonie had enjoyed their three-day journey through France. As soon as the Express had cleared the dismal Pari
sian banlieue, Anatole had recovered his good spirits and kept her amused with stories, playing hands of cards, discussing how they would spend their time in the mountains.
At a little after six o’clock on Friday evening, they had disembarked in Marseille. The following day, they continued along the coast to Carcassonne and passed an uncomfortable night in a hotel with no hot water and surly staff. Léonie had woken with a headache this morning and, owing to the difficulty of finding a fiacre on a Sunday morning, they had nearly missed their connection.
However, as soon as the train cleared the outskirts of the town, Léonie’s mood improved. Now, her guidebook lay discarded on the seat, beside a volume of short stories. The living, breathing landscape of the Midi began to work its charm.
The track followed the line of the curving river south, through the silver valley of the Aude towards the Pyrenees. At first, the rails ran alongside the road. The land was flat and unoccupied. But soon she saw rows of vines to left and right, and the occasional field of sunflowers still in bloom, bright and yellow, their heads bowed to the east.
She glimpsed a small village - no more than a handful of houses - perched on a picturesque distant hill. Then another, the red-tiled houses clustered around the dominating spire of the church. Near at hand, on the outskirts of the railside towns, were pink hibiscus, bougainvillea, poignant syringas, lavender bushes and wild poppies. The green prickly helmets of chestnuts hung on the laden branches of the trees. In the distance, gold and polished copper silhouettes, the only hint that autumn was waiting in the wings.
All along the line, peasants were working in the fields, their starched blue smocks stiff and shining as if varnished, decorated with embroidered patterns on collars and cuffs. The women wore wide flat straw hats to keep off the blistering sun. The men bore expressions of resignation upon their leathery faces, turned away from the relentless wind, working so late a harvest.
The train halted for a quarter of an hour at a substantial town called Limoux. After that, the countryside became steeper, rockier, less forgiving as the plains gave way to the garrigue of the Hautes Corbières. The train rattled precariously on, perched on thin tracks above the river, until, rounding a curve, the blue-white Pyrenees suddenly appeared in the distance, shimmering in a heat haze.
Léonie caught her breath. The mountains seemed to rise up out of the very land, like a mighty wall, connecting earth to heaven. Magnificent, unchanging. In the face of such natural splendour, the manmade constructions of Paris seemed as nothing. The controversies about Monsieur Eiffel’s celebrated metal tower, Baron Haussmann’s grand boulevards, even Monsieur Garnier’s opera house, each paled into insignificance. This was a landscape built on an altogether different scale - earth, air, fire and water. The four elements were laid out in plain view, like keys on a piano.
The train rattled and wheezed, slowing considerably, lunging forwards in jagged bursts. Léonie pushed down the glass and felt the air of the Midi upon her cheeks. Wooded hills, green and brown and crimson, rose abruptly in the shadow of grey granite cliffs. Lulled by the swaying motion of the train and the singing of the wheels upon the metal tracks, she found her eyelids flickering shut.
She was jolted awake by the squeal of the brakes.
Her eyes flew open, and for an instant she forgot where she was. Then she glanced down at the guidebook on her lap, and across to Anatole, and remembered. Not Paris, but in a rattling railway carriage in the Midi.
The train was slowing.
Léonie peered drowsily out of the grimy window. It was hard to make out the lettering on the painted wooden board on the platform. Then she heard the stationmaster, in a heavy southern accent, announce:
‘Couiza-Montazels. Dix minutes d’arrêt.’
She sat forward with a jolt and tapped her brother on the knee.
‘Anatole, nous sommes là. Lève-toi.’
Already she could hear doors opening and falling back against the painted green side of the train with a heavy slap, like a desultory round of applause at the Concerts Lamoureux.
‘Anatole,’ she repeated, certain he must be feigning sleep. ‘C’est l’heure. We have arrived at Couiza.’
She leaned out.
Even this late in the season, and despite it being Sunday, there was a line of porters leaning on high-backed wooden trolleys. Most had their caps set back on their heads and waistcoats open, shirtsleeves rolled up to the elbow.
She raised her arm. ‘Porteur, s’il vous plaît,’ she called.
One leapt forward, clearly thinking how well a couple of sous would sit in his pocket. Léonie withdrew to gather up her belongings.
Without warning, the door was pulled open. ‘Allow me, Mademoiselle.’
A man was standing on the platform looking up into the carriage.
‘No, really, we can manage . . .’ she began to say, but he cast his eyes over the compartment, taking in Anatole’s sleeping figure and the luggage still upon the rack, and without invitation stepped up into the carriage.
‘I insist.’
Léonie took an instant dislike to him. His starched high collar, double-breasted waistcoat and top hat marked him a gentleman, and yet there was something not quite comme il faut about him. His gaze was too bold, too impertinent.
‘Thank you, but there is no need,’ she said. She identified the smell of plum brandy on his breath. ‘I am more than . . .’
But without waiting for permission, he was already lifting the first of their valises and boxes down from the wooden rack. Léonie noticed him glance at the initials inscribed in the leather as he placed Anatole’s portmanteau on the dirty floor.
Thoroughly frustrated by her brother’s inactivity, she shook him roughly by the arm.
‘Anatole, voilà Couiza. Wake up!’
At last, to her relief, he showed signs of stirring. His eyelids flickered, and he stared lazily around him, as if surprised to find himself in a railway carriage at all. Then he caught sight of her, and smiled.
‘Must have dozed off,’ he said, smoothing his long white fingers over his black oiled hair. ‘Desolé.’
Léonie winced as the man dropped Anatole’s personal trunk with a thud on the platform. Then he reached back inside for her lacquered workbox.
‘Take care,’ she said sharply. ‘It is precious.’
The man ran his eyes over her, then over the two gold initials on the top: L.V.
‘But of course. Do not concern yourself.’
Anatole stood up. In an instant, the compartment seemed very much smaller. He glanced at himself in the looking glass below the luggage rack, tipped the collars of his shirt, adjusted his waistcoat and shot his cuffs. Then he bent down and swept up his hat, gloves and cane in one easy motion.
‘Shall we?’ he said casually, offering Léonie his hand.
Only then did he seem to notice that their belongings had been set down from the carriage. He looked at their companion.
‘My thanks, M’sieur. We are most grateful.’
‘Not at all. The pleasure was mine, M’sieur . . .’
‘Vernier. Anatole Vernier. And this is my sister, Léonie.’
‘Raymond Denarnaud, at your service.’ He tipped his hat. ‘Are you putting up in Couiza? If so, I would be delighted to . . .’
The whistle blew once more.
‘En voiture! Passengers for Quillan and Espéraza, en voiture!’
‘We should step away,’ said Léonie.
‘Not in Couiza itself,’ Anatole replied to the man, almost shouting to make himself heard over the roar of the furnace. ‘But close by. Rennes-les-Bains.’
Denarnaud beamed. ‘My home town.’
‘Excellent. We are staying at the Domaine de la Cade? Do you know it?’
Léonie stared at Anatole in astonishment. Having pressed upon her the need for discretion, here he was, only three days out of Paris, publishing their business to a complete stranger without a second thought.
‘Domaine de la Cade,’ Denarnaud replied caref
ully. ‘Yes, I know of it.’