‘Car broken down?’ bawled the driver as he slowed up.
‘No. I’ve got a weekend pass from camp, so I’m hitch-hiking home. Got as far as Ussel last night and decided to push on to Tulle. I’ve got an uncle there who can fix me a lorry to Bordeaux. This was as far as I got.’ He grinned at the driver, who laughed and shrugged.
‘Crazy, walking through the night up here. No one comes this way after dark. Jump on the trailer, I’ll take you in to Egletons, you can try from there.’
They rolled into the little town at quarter to seven. The Jackal thanked the farmer, gave him the slip round the back of the station and headed for a café.
‘Is there a taxi in town?’ he asked the barman over coffee.
The barman gave him the number and he rang to call up the taxi company. There was one car that would be available in half an hour, he was told. While he waited he used the fundamental conveniences of the cold-water tap offered by the café’s lavatory to wash his face and hands, change into a fresh suit and brush his teeth which felt furry from cigarettes and coffee.
The taxi arrived at 7.30, an old rattletrap Renault.
‘Do you know the village of Haute Chalonnière?’ he asked the driver.
‘ ’Course.’
‘How far?’
‘Eighteen kilometres.’ The man jerked his thumb up towards the mountains. ‘In the hills.’
‘Take me there,’ said the Jackal, and hefted his luggage on to the roof rack, except for one case that went inside with him.
He insisted on being dropped in front of the Café de la Poste in the village square. There was no need for the taxi-driver from the nearby town to know he was going to the château. When the taxi had driven away he brought his luggage into the café. Already the square was blazing hot, and two oxen yoked to a hay-cart ruminated their cud reflectively outside while fat black flies promenaded round their gentle patient eyes.
Inside the café it was dark and cool. He heard rather than saw the customers shift at their tables to examine the newcomer, and there was a clacking of clogs on tiles as an old peasant woman in a black dress left one group of farm workers and went behind the bar.
‘Monsieur?’ she croaked.
He put down the luggage and leaned on the bar. The locals, he noticed, were drinking red wine.
‘Un gros rouge, s’il vous plaît, madame.’
‘How far is the château, madame,’ he asked when the wine was poured. She eyed him keenly from wily black marbles.
‘Two kilometres, monsieur.’
He sighed wearily. ‘That fool of a driver tried to tell me there was no château here. So he dropped me in the square.’
‘He was from Egletons?’ she asked. The Jackal nodded.
‘They are fools at Egletons,’ she said.
‘I have to get to the château,’ he said.
The ring of peasants watching from their tables made no move. No one suggested how he might get there. He pulled out a new hundred-franc note.
‘How much is the wine, madame?’
She eyed the note sharply. There was a shifting among the blue cotton blouses and trousers behind him.
‘I haven’t got change for that,’ said the old woman.
He sighed.
‘If only there were someone with a van, he might have change,’ he said.
Someone got up and approached from behind.
‘There is a van in the village, monsieur,’ growled a voice.
The Jackal turned with mock surprise.
‘It belongs to you, mon ami?’
‘No, monsieur, but I know the man who owns it. He might run you up there.’
The Jackal nodded as if considering the merits of the idea.
‘In the meantime, what will you take?’
The peasant nodded at the crone, who poured another large glass of rough red wine.
‘And your friends? It’s a hot day. A thirsty day.’
The stubbled face split into a smile. The peasant nodded again to the woman who took two full bottles over to the group round the big table. ‘Benoit, go and get the van,’ ordered the peasant, and one of the men, gulping down his wine in one swallow, went outside.
The advantage of the peasantry of the Auvergne, it would seem, mused the Jackal, as he rattled and bumped the last two kilometres up to the château, is that they are so surly they keep their damn mouths shut—at least to outsiders.
Colette de la Chalonnière sat up in bed, sipped her coffee and read the letter again. The anger that had possessed her on the first reading had dissipated, to be replaced by a kind of weary disgust.
She wondered what on earth she could do with the rest of her life. She had been welcomed home the previous afternoon after a leisurely drive from Gap by old Ernestine, the maid who had been in service at the château since Alfred’s father’s day, and the gardener, Louison, a former peasant boy who had married Ernestine when she was still an under housemaid.
The pair were now virtually the curators of the château of which two-thirds of the rooms were shut off and blanketed in dust covers.
She was, she realised, the mistress of an empty castle where there were no children playing in the park any more, nor a master of the household saddling his horse in the courtyard.
She looked back at the cutting from the Paris glossy society magazine that her friend had so thoughtfully mailed to her; at the face of her husband grinning inanely into the flash-bulb, eyes torn between the lens of the camera and the jutting bosom of the starlet over whose shoulder he was peering. A cabaret dancer, risen from bar hostess, quoted as saying she hoped ‘one day’ to be able to marry the Baron, who was her ‘very good friend’.
Looking at the lined face and scrawny neck of the ageing Baron in the photograph, she wondered vaguely what had happened to the handsome young captain of the Resistance partisans with whom she had fallen in love in 1942 and married a year later when she was expecting her son.
She had been a teenage girl, running messages for the Resistance, when she met him in the mountains. He had been in his mid-thirties, known by the code-name of Pegasus, a lean, hawk-faced commanding man who had turned her heart. They had been married in a secret ceremony in a cellar chapel by a priest of the Resistance, and she had borne her son in her father’s house.
Then after the war had come the restoration of all his lands and properties. His father had died of a heart attack when the Allied armies swept across France, and he had emerged from the heather to become the Baron of Chalonnière, cheered by the peasantry of the countryside as he brought his wife and son back to the château. Soon the estates had tired him, the lure of Paris and the lights of the cabarets, the urge to make up for the lost years of his manhood in the undergrowth had proved too strong to resist.
Now he was fifty-seven and could have passed for seventy.
The Baroness threw the cutting and its accompanying letter on the floor. She jumped out of bed and stood in front of the full-length mirror on the far wall, pulling open the laces that held the peignoir together down the front. She stood on tiptoe to tighten the muscles of her thighs as a pair of high-heeled shoes would do.
Not bad, she thought. Could be a lot worse. A full figure, the body of a mature woman. The hips were wide, but the waist had mercifully remained in proportion, firmed by hours in the saddle and long walks in the hills. She cupped her breasts one in each hand and measured their weight. Too big, too heavy for real beauty, but still enough to excite a man in bed.
Well, Alfred, two can play at that game, she thought. She shook her head, loosening the shoulder-length black hair so that a strand fell forward by her cheek and lay across one of her breasts. She took her hands away and ran them between her thighs, thinking of the man who had been there just over twenty-four hours before. He had been good. She wished now she had stayed on at Gap. Perhaps they could have holidayed together, driving round using a false name, like runaway lovers. What on earth had she come home for?