It was almost five o'clock, one of those dark, rain-laden April days with a warm gusty wind blowing. There had been showers earlier, but now a belated gleam from the west glissaded over the wet housetops and etched the budding chestnuts of the square in pale gold against a slaty sky. Many of the shop-windows were bright already, harshly-lit grocery-stores and boucheries mirrored to soft orange and copper in the damp pavements. Over the flower-stall where Raoul had bought me the freesias a naked gas-jet hissed and flared in the gusty wind, now a snake-long lash of brilliant flame, now a flattened moths- wing of cobalt and sulphur-yellow. The tyres of passing cars hissed softly on the wet tarmac. Here and there among the bare chestnuts an early street-lamp glowed.
I was longing for a cup of tea. But here my sense of economy, subconsciously outraged, no doubt, by the recent purchase, stepped in to argue the few francs' difference between tea and coffee. A salon de thé would be expensive, while coffee or an aperitif were at once far better quality and half the price.
I abandoned the tea and walked across the square towards a restaurant where a glass screen protected the tables from the fitful wind.
As I gained the pavement and paused to choose a table, a diffident voice spoke beside me.
"Miss Martin?"
I turned in some surprise, as the voice was unmistakably English. It was the fair young man of my encounter in Soubirous. He was dressed in a duffel coat supplemented by a shaggy scarf. His thick fair hair flopped in the wind. I had forgotten what an enormous young man he was. The general effect was that of a huge, shy blond bear, of a bigness incredible, as Philippe would have said.
He said: "D'you remember me? We met in Soubirous on Monday."
"Of course I remember you, Mr. Blake." I could have added that I was hardly likely to have forgotten him-the one English lamb in my pride of French tigers-but thought it was, perhaps, not tactful… "I hope you haven't had to use any of those bandages and things?"
He grinned. "Not yet. But I expect to daily. Were you- were you thinking of going in here for a drink? I wonder if you would-may I-I mean I'd be awfully glad if-"
I rescued him. "Thank you very much. I'd love to. Shall we sit out here where we can watch what's going on?"
We settled ourselves at a table next to the glass screen, and he ordered coffee in his laborious English-French. His look of triumph when in actual fact coffee did arrive, made me laugh. "You're coming on fast," I said.
"Aren't I? But really, you know, it's hard to go wrong over café.”
"Are you managing your shopping all right today?"
"Oh, yes. You can usually find someone who understands English in Thonon. Besides," he said simply, "it's cheaper. I usually shop in the market. I don't need a lot."
"Are you living up at the hut now?"
"For the time being. I sleep at the Coq Hardi in Soubirous a couple of nights in the week, and I have the odd meal there, but I like the hut. I get a lot of work done, and I can come and go and eat and sleep when I like."
I had a momentary and irresistible vision of him curling up in straw, nuts in the pocket, like a bear, for the winter. This made me think of Philippe. I said: "Does anyone from your side of the valley ever bring a gun over to Valmy?"
"Only if invited. There are shooting-parties in the autumn, I believe."
"I didn't mean that. Would the foresters or keepers or anyone ever go stalking foxes or chamois or something with a rifle?"
"Good Lord, no. Why?"
I told him in some detail just what had occurred on Tuesday afternoon with Philippe. He listened with great attention, shocked out of his shyness by the end into sharp expostulation.
"But that's frightful! Poor kid. It must have been a beastly shock-and for you, too. The best you can say of it is that it's bl-er, criminal carelessness! And you say they've found no trace of the chap?"
"No-one admits it, even now it's known that nobody was hurt. But that's easy to understand; he'd lose his job just like that, and jobs aren't all that easy to come by up here."
"True enough."
"What's more," I said, "when Monsieur de Valmy sent a couple of men down to look at the place where it happened, they found that the bullet had been dug out of the tree."
He whistled. "Thorough, eh?"
"Very. D'you see what it means? Those men were sent down there as soon as Philippe and I got back to the house. It means, first, that the chap with the gun knew what had happened when he loosed it off; and, second, that he didn't run away. He must have sat tight waiting for Philippe and me to go, then skated down to remove the evidence." I looked at him. "The thought of him hiding up there in the wood watching us is rather- nasty, somehow."
“I’ll say. What's more, the man's a fool. Accidents do happen, and if he'd done the decent thing and come tearing down to apologise and see you both home the odds are he'd have got off with just a rocket from the boss. He must have lost his head and then not dared own up. As it is, I hope they do get him. What's de Valmy doing about it?"
"Oh, he's still having inquiries made, but I don't think they'll produce anything now. All we've got so far is lashings of alibis, but the only two I'm prepared to believe are Monsieur de Valmy's and the butler's."
William Blake said: "The son was here, wasn't he?"
His tone was no more than idle, but I felt the blood rushing hotly to my cheeks. Furious with myself, I turned away to look out through the glass at the now twilit square. If I was going to blush each time his name was mentioned, I wouldn't last long under the Demon King's sardonic eye. And this sort of nonsense I couldn't expect him to condone. I fixed my gaze on the brilliant yellows and scarlets of the flower-stall, and said indifferently: "He was; he went away the morning after it happened. But you surely can't imagine-" In spite of myself my voice heated. "It certainly couldn't have been him!"
"No? Cast-iron alibi?"
"No. It-it just couldn't!" Logic came rather late in the wake of emotion: "Dash it, he'd have no reason to sneak about digging bullets out of trees!"
"No, of course not."
I said, rather too quickly: "How are the weevil-traps?"
That did it. He was the last person to see a reference to his work, however abruptly introduced, as a mere red herring. Soon we were once more happily in full cry… I listened, and asked what I hope were the right questions, and thought about the Valmy dance. Would he be there? Would he? Would he?
I came out of my besotted dreaming to hear William Blake asking me prosaically which bus I intended to take back to Valmy. "Because," he said, "one goes in about twelve minutes, and after that you wait two hours."
"Oh Lord, yes," I said, "I mustn't miss it. Are you getting the same one?"
"No. Mine goes just before yours. I'm sloping off this weekend to meet some friends at Annecy." He grinned at me as he beckoned the waiter. "So forget you saw me, will you, please? This is A.W.O.L. but I couldn't resist it. Some pals of mine are up in Annecy for the week and they want me to go climbing with them."
"I won't give you away," I promised.
Here the waiter came up, and Mr. Blake plunged into the dreadful struggle of The Bill. I could see all the stages; understanding the waiter's total, translating it mentally into English money, dividing by ten for the tip, reckoning to the nearest round number for simplicity, slowly and painfully thumbing over the revolting paper money, and finally handing over a sheaf of it with the irresistible feeling that so much money cannot possibly be the fair amount to pay for so little.