Lydia felt the room sway slightly. Sipping champagne and admiring Renaissance windows and feeling her toes squeezed, she had rather lost track of what it meant to be lunching with the President of a country. An unimaginably powerful man, who could change national policies at will, who could drop or propose taxes that could affect the livelihoods of thousands of people. A new wave of prosperity for the merchants of the Dordogne, continued fat profits for the art houses of London, just casually tossed onto the luncheon table. Suddenly she thought of the phone call she could make back to London with the happy news. No, this deserved more than a phone call. This could wait until her triumphant return. Better treat it rather casually. Perhaps over a drink with one of the partners. Just had lunch with Malrand at his country place-I think I’ve half-persuaded him to drop this silly European tax plan on art sales. That should be worth a raise. A raise? Ye gods. It should be worth a partnership. A little game of footsie under the table was a picayune price to pay.
“And now a toast,” said Malrand. “That this lost part of our great national heritage will soon be home, where it belongs.” They all drank and began to eat their lamb.
“We will sadly not have time to linger too long over our coffee,” Malrand said casually. “I have arranged for us all to visit Lascaux this afternoon. The real one, that is. We might as well remind ourselves of the heritage we are all trying to safeguard.”
They had driven up the road that ran along the Vezere, past their hotel at la Campagne and through Les Eyzies itself, past the high limestone cliffs that contained cave after cave. Layer after layer of continuous history. Lydia worked it out. Say twenty-five years to a generation, four to a century, forty to a millennium. Seventeen thousand years since Lascaux. Seventeen times forty. Six hundred and eighty generations. And there were still people living in these caves into the twentieth century, some perhaps even descended from the originals who had carved and drawn upon the cave walls the first evidence of a distinctive human sensibility. Who could tell what genes had drifted down from the people of Lascaux to this placid loveliness of modern France? So all but the last two or three generations had been born and bred and died in these gray cliffs, looking at this river, at these blue skies. Probably never dreaming that one day tourists would stand in line to come and tread along the stones where they lived, and pay money to see the carvings they had left.
“Have you visited any of these caves?” Lydia asked Lespinasse, the bald-headed security man with the mustache who had seemed to be in charge of the security staff back at Malrand’s house. He was driving them in one of the big Citroen limousines. To her relief, Malrand had whisked off Clothilde in another car. She remembered one of her mother’s phrases about some men being NSIT, not safe in taxis. Malrand would probably have qualified. Lespinasse had shown her and Manners into this one, and a dark blue Renault Espace followed them with some of the tough young security men.
“Of course, mademoiselle. I was born and raised in le Bugue and used to play in Bara-Bahau, our local cave. My father was with President Malrand in the war.” He did not turn his eyes from the road but directed his voice to Manners. “He knew your father, too. They blew up railway lines together. My father’s dead now, like yours. I met yours when he came out to the funeral. He always came to funerals, your father. He signed the book at Papon’s, the funeral parlor, when he came to pay his respects. Came to the church in le Bugue and to the grave.”
“Really,” said Manners. “I never knew.”
“Must have come four or five times. Always stayed at Malrand’s place. I picked him up a couple of times at the station at Perigueux and drove him here. They always sat up half the night talking, the two of them. It’s normal. I have some old comrades from the time we were in Lebanon. I like to see them, drink a pot or two. You’re a soldier too, I hear.”
“Yes, but there’s not much about Northern Ireland that I like to remember. Which unit were you in?”
“Paras. I served my time, finished as a sous-off, and then applied for the security detail. Malrand was already President. He and my father fixed it up.” Lespinasse leaned forward, punched the cigarette lighter, and fired up a Gauloise. They were cruising quite fast along the open road.
“Are you always based here in Perigord?” Lydia asked.
“No, mademoiselle. I’m deputy chief now, so I always travel with the President, in France and abroad. I met them all with Malrand, your Thatcher, and Gorbachev, and Yeltsin, Reagan, and Kohl. Japanese whose names I can’t remember. I got to know some of your English security people, the ones from Scotland Yard. We went on some courses together. They came and used our special driving school at Nantes, and we spent two weeks with your SAS at Hereford. Tough guys. You did the SAS course, didn’t you?”
“A long time ago,” said Manners. “I’m back with my regiment now.” Lydia raised her eyebrows-that came as a surprise. But then French security would have checked out his career. Manners seemed eager to change the subject. “Were you in Lebanon when the bombs went off? The one that killed a lot of your chaps and then the Americans.”
“Yes, but I wasn’t in the barracks at the time. I was off with the UN in the Bekaa Valley. A bad time. But you know what Napoleon said about the quality he wanted most in his generals?”
“Yes, that they should be lucky,” said Manners.
She glanced at him. Some sort of communication had taken place between the two men that Lydia could not begin to decode. A month ago, she might have jumped into the conversation to make some joke about men joining armies to recapture the boys’ clubs of their youth. Lydia smiled inwardly. It would have been the direct, the American thing to do, forcing the two men to turn their attention back to her. Clothilde would never have done it, being far too subtle in her wiles to stoop to the obvious, and perhaps that explained to Lydia the unconscious decision she had made not to interrupt the two men and the contact they had established. She was learning a lot from Clothilde. That elaborate flirtation with Malrand over the sexual symbols of cave art had been fascinating to watch, a most accomplished and discreet seduction of Malrand through his passion for ideas. It did not seem to have made much impression on the pragmatic Manners. But then the English were supposed to be suspicious of ideas. What, she wondered idly, would be the technique that would affect Manners in a similar way? Clothilde, she suspected, would know by instinct, and would probably employ the right technique out of sheer habit. Lydia was far from sure that she would. By agreeing to join him on this jaunt in Perigord, Lydia told herself, she had made no commitment, although she had not ruled out the prospect of a pleasant romantic dalliance should the mood take her. Manners, she suddenly thought, might not be thinking in the same way at all. What mysteries men were.
They turned off at Montignac, crossed the river, and then ignored the signs that steered the tourists toward the mock cave that had been built for them, taking a side road that wound up the hill and through a thin screen of trees. Looking down, Lydia saw a long slope falling to a stretch of flatter land by the river, then the ground rising from the small town of Montignac beyond. Screen out the town, she thought, and this is the view the artists of seventeen thousand years ago saw as they left the cave each evening.
CHAPTER 11
The Vezere Valley, 15,000 B.C.
Deer was sketching, as he always did. Down by the riverbank, sitting cross-legged by the water, a small stretch of moist clay smoothed flat by his hand, and a twig drawing lines that seemed to flow unbidden from his fingers. Somehow it was never beasts that sprang from the clay at times like this. What was emerging now was that fallen tree on the far bank of the river, the sad way one branch leaned into the water, while the heavy trunk just squatted on the shore. The water built up around the obstruction of the branch, making a fat lip that flowed into two arms that raced along either side of the bough and set the leaves dancing into the sudden turbulence of the river. Heavy lines for the tree, lighter lines for the flow of water, but how could he capture the way the leaves danced? Quickly, he scratched three tiny shapes alongside each other. One leaf that was curling up, another that curled down, another bent into a suggestion of movement and merged into the one of the lines of the water. That was almost right.