It couldn’t possibly have been Anthony, of course it couldn’t. Even assuming that Anthony is alive, why would he be employed as a kitchen worker in Paris? ‘Yes, I’m afraid we fear the worst,’ his father said on the telephone, years ago now. ‘He sent a few belongings here, but that’s a good while back. A note to you, unfinished, was caught up in the pages of a book. Nothing in it, really. Your name, no more.’
In rue du Bac there is a window Wilby likes, with prints of the Revolution. The display has hardly changed since he was here last: the death of Marie Antoinette, the Girondists on their way to the guillotine, the storming of the Bastille, Danton’s death, Robespierre triumphant, Robespierre fallen from grace. Details aren’t easy to make out in the dim street-light. Prints he hasn’t seen before are indistinguishable at the back.
At a bar he has another calvados. He said himself when people asked him—a few had once—that he, too, imagined Anthony was dead. A disappearance so prolonged, with no reports of even a glimpse as the years advanced, did appear to confirm a conclusion that became less tentative, and in the end wasn’t tentative at all.
In rue Montalembert a couple ask for directions to the Métro. Wilby points it out, walking back a little way with them to do so, as grateful for this interruption as he was when the woman at the traffic crossing caught his interest.
‘Bonne nuit, monsieur.’ In the hall of the Hôtel Merneuil the night porter holds open the lift doors. He closes them and the lift begins its smooth ascent. ‘The will to go on can fall away, you know,’ Anthony’s father said on the telephone again, in touch to find out if there was anything to report.
Monsieur Jothy shakes his head over the pay packet that hasn’t been picked up. It’s on the windowsill above the sinks, where others have been ignored too. He writes a message on it and props it against an empty bottle.
At this late hour Monsieur Jothy has the kitchen to himself, a time for assessing what needs to be ordered, for satisfying himself that, in general, the kitchen is managing. He picks up Jean-André’s note of what he particularly requires for tomorrow, and checks the shelves where the cleaning materials are kept. He has recently become suspicious of Jean-André, suspecting short-cuts.
His risotto, once an attraction on the menu, is scarcely ever ordered now; and with reason in Monsieur Jothy’s opinion, since it has lost the intensity of flavour that made it popular, and is often dry. But the kitchen at least is clean, and Monsieur Jothy, examining cutlery and plates, fails to find food clinging anywhere, or a rim left on a cup. Once he employed two dish-washers at the sinks, but now one does it on his own, and half the time forgets his wages. Anxious to keep him, Monsieur Jothy has wondered about finding somewhere for him to sleep on the premises instead of having the long journey to and from his room. But there isn’t even a corner of a pantry, and when he asked in the neighbourhood about accommodation near rue Piques he was also unsuccessful.
The dishcloths, washed and rinsed, are draped on the radiators and will be dry by the morning, the soup bowls are stacked; the glasses, in their rows, gleam on the side table. ‘Très bon, très bon,’ Monsieur Jothy murmurs before he turns the lights out and locks up.
Wilby does not sleep and cannot read, although he tries to.
‘A marvel, isn’t it?’ Miss Davally said, the memory vivid, as if she’d said it yesterday. You wouldn’t think apricots would so easily ripen in such a climate. Even on a wall lined with brick you wouldn’t think it. She pointed at the branches sprawled out along their wires, and you could see the fruit in little clusters. ‘Delphiniums,’ she said, pointing again, and one after another named the flowers they passed on their way through the garden. ‘And this is Anthony,’ she said in the house.
The boy looked up from the playing cards he had spread out on the floor. ‘What’s his name?’ he asked, and Miss Davally said he knew because she had told him already. But even so she did so again. ‘Why’s he called that?’ Anthony asked. ‘Why’re you called that?’
‘It’s my name.’
‘Shall we play in the garden?’
That first day, and every day afterwards, there were gingersnap biscuits in the middle of the morning. ‘Am I older than you?’ Anthony asked. ‘Is six older?’ He had a house, he said, in the bushes at the end of the garden, and they pretended there was a house. ‘Jericho he’s called,’ Anthony said of the dog that followed them about, a black Labrador with an injured leg that hung limply, thirteen years old. ‘Miss Davally is an orphan,’ Anthony said. ‘That’s why she lives with us. Do you know what an orphan is?’
In the yard the horses looked out over the half-doors of their stables; the hounds were in a smaller yard. Anthony’s mother was never at lunch because her horse and the hounds were exercised then. But his father always was, each time wearing a different tweed jacket, his grey moustache clipped short, the olives he liked to see on the lunch table always there, the whiskey he took for his health. ‘Well, young chap, how are you?’ he always asked.
On wet days they played marbles in the kitchen passages, the dog stretched out beside them. ‘You come to the sea in summer,’ Anthony said. ‘They told me.’ Every July: the long journey from Westmeath to the same holiday cottage on the cliffs above the bay that didn’t have a name. It was Miss Davally who had told Anthony all that, and in time—so that hospitality might be returned—she often drove Anthony there and back. An outing for her too, she used to say, and sometimes she brought a cake she’d made, being in the way of bringing a present when she went to people’s houses. She liked it at the sea as much as Anthony did; she liked to turn the wheel of the bellows in the kitchen of the cottage and watch the sparks flying up; and Anthony liked the hard sand of the shore, and collecting flintstones, and netting shrimps. The dog prowled about the rocks, sniffing the seaweed, clawing at the sea-anemones. ‘Our house,’ Anthony called the cave they found when they crawled through an opening in the rocks, a cave no one knew was there.
Air from the window Wilby slightly opens at the top is refreshing and brings with it, for a moment, the chiming of two o’clock. His book is open, face downward to keep his place, his bedside light still on. But the dark is better, and he extinguishes it.
There was a blue vase in the recess of the staircase wall, nothing else there; and paperweights crowded the shallow landing shelves, all touching one another; forty-six, Anthony said. His mother played the piano in the drawing-room. ‘Hullo,’ she said, holding out her hand and smiling. She wasn’t much like someone who exercised foxhounds: slim and small and wearing scent, she was also beautiful. ‘Look!’ Anthony said, pointing at the lady in the painting above the mantelpiece in the hall.
Miss Davally was a distant relative as well as being an orphan, and when she sat on the sands after her bathe she often talked about her own childhood in the house where she’d been given a home: how a particularly unpleasant boy used to creep up on her and pull a cracker in her ear, how she hated her ribboned pigtails and persuaded a simple-minded maid to cut them off, how she taught the kitchen cat to dance and how people said they’d never seen the like.
Every lunchtime Anthony’s father kept going a conversation about a world that was not yet known to his listeners. He spoke affectionately of the playboy pugilist Jack Doyle, demonstrating the subtlety of his right punch and recalling the wonders of his hell-raising before poverty claimed him. He told of the exploits of an ingenious escapologist, Major Pat Reid. He condemned the first Earl of Inchiquin as the most disgraceful man ever to step out of Ireland.