“I don’t know.” Hanley had said at last. And that was the way it had been left. Everything depended on Manning and Jeanne Clermont.
“Reestablish the relationship,” Hanley had said.
“You’re crazy.”
“It may not be possible. You see, it is a reasonable risk. To take the chance…”
Chance. Risk. Logic. None of it made any sense and they knew it, but they had to cloud the nonsense in words that would mask their own doubts.
Manning put down the glass of beer in the bistro. The students had left the machines and were at the front door. And across the street, the door of the English bookstore opened. For a moment, Jeanne Clermont stood framed in the opening, the thin light from the shop behind her. She glanced up at the leaden sky and felt the mist on her pale face. She looked up the street and down and seemed to consider; then she started across the shimmering street.
Manning watched her through the mist and the streaked window glass as though he saw her in a dream, through memory.
He had taken the photograph from her room that day. He had replaced all the books and the diaries and the papers, and he had made certain that she would find no trace of the intruder in her rooms. But he had taken the photograph; it was absurd, it broke all the rules, but he could not have left it.
She crossed to the walk in front of the brasserie, the book purchase tucked under the sleeve of her raincoat, and opened the door as though it were not a momentous act.
Manning could only look up at her as though he had been startled. His eyes were wide, and he felt a little afraid; he could not imagine being so close to her again.
Jeanne Clermont stopped in the doorway and stared at him. The door was partially open behind her, blocked by the frozen gesture of her hand. Then she dropped the book on the tiles; it made a loud sound, and the proprietor stopped in midargument, frowned, and glared at her.
Manning could not speak.
Jeanne picked up the book and let the door swing shut behind her.
She stood still for a moment. Her eyes were unchanging, large and calm and so blue that they made her pale skin seem even more pale by contrast. Perhaps there were little lines of age at the edge of her eyes, but perhaps they had always been there. Her mouth was still wide and handsome in the frame of her face. She did not speak.
“Jeanne.” He half rose, pushing the chair screeching behind him.
Silence for a moment; they might have been the only people left alive in the city.
And then her eyes changed, her soul shifted behind the blue irises. Manning watched her eyes and thought he saw pain cross them. Or was it only a reflection of his own pain?
“William,” she said. Her voice was low, as he had remembered it, but not young and not soft; it had acquired a burden with the years.
“I never expected, I never—” He began the lies and then stopped; the words were not needed. He could only hope the deception of their meeting would be agreed to by her. Words would not mask it.
“No,” Jeanne Clermont said. She stared at him the way one stares at an old photograph or recalls a memory. “Neither did I,” she said.
And she took one hesitant step toward him.
3
Pim seemed to bounce up and down in the pew as he sang the familiar words with earnest feeling but without a decent regard for pitch or harmony. It did not really matter: His voice was lost with the others in the small congregation huddled at the back of the damp old church, and seemed nothing more than a surging whisper in the tide of the others, as though each word he spoke — however keenly felt — had to be hidden.
Next to him, Gaunt did not sing, but waited with ill-conceived impatience for the evensong service to be concluded. It was bizarre; nothing that had happened since Pim phoned him in London at noon and urgently asked to meet him in this rural village in the fens seemed real. And now, without saying anything to him by way of explanation, Pim had hurried Gaunt along into this ancient pile of church architecture to take part in evensong.
Gaunt looked down at Pim as the hymn progressed and saw that tears glistened in the small, deep hazel eyes. Gaunt, not for the first time that day, felt uncomfortable, as though Pim were embarrassing himself and Gaunt was helpless to do anything about it; it was akin to the feeling he sometimes had in the theater during a bad performance. Gaunt fancied himself a man of rare sympathies.
Gaunt — he was aptly named, for his dark face was cadaverous and his limbs seemed to hang as limply as rumpled clothes from his trunk — turned his eyes away from Pim and his tears and fixed them on the young vicar enthusiastically leading the song. White alb and purple stole. Something stirred memory: Purple was the color of Lent, wasn’t it? But it must be Lent, it was March; in any case, Easter would be late this year.
Not since childhood had Gaunt thought about matters such as Lent or the color of liturgical vestments in the Anglican Church. Why had Pim dragged him to this place on a dull, foggy Sunday afternoon?
“But you must come,” Pim had said. “Something has transpired.”
Gaunt, comfortable in his library in the elegant flat he owned off the Marylebone Road, had not wanted to respond to Pim’s telephone call. In the first place, he did not want to be connected to Pim’s strange little network at all, but circumstances and politics inside Auntie had conspired against him. There were always conspiracies in the intelligence branch, and Gaunt felt, with some justification, that he was often made the victim of them.
“I’m sorry I had to call you,” Pim had said at the remote Lakenheath train station.
“Had to change trains at Ely,” Gaunt complained.
“I know, I know. Back of beyond here, only sixty-five miles from London. Difficult to believe, isn’t it?”
“What dreadful thing has transpired—”
“Not now, wait till we get into the village.” He had pushed the little Ford Escort down the narrow A highway to the winding high street of Lakenheath, two miles away. As he talked, his breath rose in steamy puffs from his thick red lips. Gaunt could almost read his words like the smoke signals of red Indians.
“Is the heater broken?”
“Yes, I’m afraid so, meant to have it repaired but there are too many—”
“My God, I’m certain Auntie can come up with the necessary funds to finance it if—”
“Not that,” Pim had said. The words had tumbled out of the roly-poly mouth like clowns on a mat. “Actually, just have time to go up to the church in the village, got myself in a bit of a bind, I’m afraid, you see. I’ve been studying this particular church for weeks now, wanted to get around the vicar. The old vicar was a bit of a curmudgeon, this new one is much better. Really fascinating church, you see, I told the vicar I would attend evensong and he let me have an hour with the brasses.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Brasses. Brass of the De Lacey knight, really superb, though a bit small. Fourteenth-century, been closed for years and—”
“Brass? Are you speaking of brass rubbings? Is that what this is all about?”
The irritation had startled Pim, and he had turned to his companion in the cold little car as it chugged into Lakenheath. Pim’s eyes had widened, and his mouth dropped. “Why, of course not. I wouldn’t have called you up here about brass rubbings, Gaunt. That’s just my little hobby, you might say. What do you think this is about, anyway?”
The response irritated Gaunt into temporary silence. The irritation had begun with the phone call and been compounded by the race across London to the train to Anglia leaving from Liverpool Street Station, and heightened by the five-minute wait at Lakenheath platform.