Philippe relaxed obediently into the shelter of the whins, and lay chin on hand, watching the road below him through a gap in the thick green. I turned on my back so that the sun was on my face, and closed my eyes. Even then I didn't want to face it. I wanted to go on, blind, cowardly, instinct-driven… but as I lay there listening for the engine of his car the thing that I had been trying to keep back, dammed out of mind, broke over me. And before I had thought further than simply his name I knew how very far I was-still was-from jettisoning him along with the others. Instinct might make me shrink from Léon de Valmy, and keep me a chilly mile away from Héloïse, but-it seemed-whatever evidence, whatever "proof' I was offered, I still sprang without thought straight to his defence.
Because you want it that way. Haven't you been enough of a fool, Cinderella? I stirred on the warm grass with sharp discomfort, but still somewhere inside me hammered the insistent advocate for the defence…
Everything that had happened since Raoul had entered the affair, everything he had said and done, could bear an innocent interpretation as well as a guilty one… or so I told myself, groping wearily, confusedly, back through the fogs of memory. A word here, a look there-never did frailer witnesses plead more desperately. He had not known of the attempts to get a non-French-speaking governess; he hadn't been worried, only amused, at the thought that I might have eavesdropped on his father's conversation; he had seemed as shocked as I was over the shooting in the wood; his sharp questions about William Blake, and that curiously touchy temper he had shown, might have been due to jealousy or some other preoccupation, and not to the realisation that the "friendless" orphan was in touch with a tough-looking Englishman in the neighbourhood; and that blast of the horn that brought Philippe out onto the balcony-that might have been fortuitous. Bernard hadn't spoken of it. As for Bernard's flat statement to Berthe that it had been Raoul who had shot at Philippe in the wood, I didn't regard that as evidence at all. Even in his drunken mood, and however sure he had made himself of Berthe, Bernard might well hesitate to admit that kind of guilt to her. Then at the dance…
But here the pleading memories whirled up into a ragged and flying confusion, a blizzard so blinding that, like Alice among the cards, I came to myself trying to beat them off. And I was asked to believe that these, too, were dead and painted like a pack of cards? Something to put away now in a drawer, and take out again, years hence, dusty, to thumb over in a dreary game of solitaire? Yes, there it was. For Philippe's sake I had to assume Raoul's guilt. I couldn't afford to do anything else. The child had only one life to lose, and I couldn't stake it. Raoul was guilty till he could be proved innocent. In that, if in no other part of my crazy fear-driven plans, I had been right. He was here but we couldn't run to him.
Close to my ear Philippe whispered: "Mademoiselle."
I opened my eyes. His face was close to mine. It was scared. He breathed: "There's someone on the hilltop behind. He's just come through the wood. I think it's Bernard. D'you suppose he's in it too?"
I nodded and put a swift finger to my lips, then lifted my head cautiously and peered through the screening whins towards the hill behind us. At first I saw nothing but the trees and the tangling banks of scrub, but presently I picked him out. It was Bernard. He was above us, about two hundred yards away, standing beside a big spruce. There was no need to tell Philippe to keep close; we both lay as still as rabbits in our thicket of green. Bernard was standing motionless, scanning the slope below him. The moments dragged. He was looking our way. His gaze seemed to catch on us, to linger, to pass on, to return…
He was coming quickly down the hill in our direction.
I suppose a rabbit stays still while death stalks it just because it is hoping against hope that this is not death. We stayed still.
He had covered half the distance, not hurrying, when I heard the Cadillac coming back.
My hand pressed hard over Philippe's on the short turf. I turned my head and craned to stare up the road. My muscles tensed themselves as if they would carry me without my willing it straight down into his path.
I don't know to this day whether I really would have run to him then or not, but before I could move I heard the brakes go on. The tyres bit at the soft gravel of the road and the car pulled up short some fifty yards away from us. I could see him through my screen of whins. He was looking uphill towards Bernard. The horn blared twice. Bernard had stopped. I saw Raoul lift his hand. Bernard changed course and walked quickly down the hill towards the car. He jumped the ditch and hurried up to the door. Raoul said something to him, and I saw Bernard shake his head, then turn with a wide gesture that included all the hill from where we lay back to Dieudonné. Then Raoul gave a sideways jerk of the head and Bernard went round the bonnet and got in beside him.
The Cadillic went slowly by below us. Raoul was lighting a cigarette and his head was bent. Bernard was talking earnestly to him.
I turned to meet Philippe's eyes.
After a while I got up slowly and reached a hand down to him. "Come along," I said, "let's get back from the road and find somewhere to have lunch."
After we had eaten we took to the woods again without seeing another soul, and some time in the middle of the afternoon our path led us out of a wild tangle of hornbeam and honeysuckle onto a little green plateau; and there, not so very far to the north of us we saw at last, through the tops of the still-bare trees, the blue levels of Lac Léman.
CHAPTER 17
Upon thy side, against myself I'll fight,
And prove thee virtuous…
Shakespeare: Sonnet 88.
"This," I said, "is where we stop for a while."
Philippe was surveying the little dell. It was sheltered and sun-drenched, a green shelf in the middle of the wood. Behind us the trees and bushes of the wild forest crowded up the hill, dark holly and the bone-pale boughs of ash gleaming sharp through a mist of birch as purple as bloom on a grape. Below the open shelf the tangle of boughs fell steeply towards Thonon. Those bright roofs and coloured walls were, I judged, little more than a mile away. I saw the gleam of a spire, and the smooth sweep of some open square with brilliant flowerbeds and a white coping above the lake. Even in the town there were trees; willows in precise Chinese shapes, cypresses spearing up Italian-fashion against the blue water, and here and there against some painted wall a burst of pale blossom like a cloud.
At my feet a small stream ran, and a little way off, under the flank of a fallen birch, there were primroses.
Philippe slipped a hand into mine. "I know this place."
"Do you? How?"
"I've been here for a picnic. There were foxgloves and we had pâtisseries belges."
"Do you remember the way down into Thonon? Where does it land us?”
He pointed to the left. "The path goes down there, like steps. There's a fence at the bottom and a sort of lane. It takes you to a road and you come out by a garage and a shop where they keep a ginger cat with no tail.”
"Is it a main street?"
He wrinkled his forehead at me. "We-ell-"
"Is it full of shops and people and traffic?"
"Oh, no. It has trees and high walls. People live there." A residential area. So much the better. I said: "Could you find your way from there to the Villa Mireille?"
"Of course. There's a path between two garden walls that takes you to the road above the lake and then you go down and down and down till you get to the bottom road where the gate is. We always went by the funicular."