Garland Whitaker perused the menu with an expression of vague distrust. ‘Maybe a pizza,’ she decided. ‘Though they’re not real pizzas here, you know. Not like we get back home. Jim ordered a pizza here a couple of nights ago and when it came to the table it had an egg in the middle of it. Can you imagine? A runny egg. I tell you, I nearly died …’
‘Sounds kind of good, actually,’ Simon mused, leaning forward. ‘Which one was that, Jim?’
Garland was mortified. ‘Oh, Simon, don’t. If there’s anything I can’t stand, it’s the sight of a runny egg.’ She looked away, missing Simon’s smirk, and turned enquiring eyes on Christian Rand. ‘You’ll be moving into your new house tomorrow, I take it?’
‘Yes.’
Garland turned to Neil and smiled sweetly. ‘Then I guess you’ll be our only artist left in residence, darling.’
I’d been trying, since we left the hotel, not to notice Neil at all. For reasons I chose not to explore, I found it easier to talk to Simon or to Paul – or even to the taciturn Christian – than to meet those quietly intense dark eyes. But I couldn’t keep it up for ever, especially not since he’d taken the chair directly opposite mine. I glanced up, in time to see him shrug off Garland’s comment with a small, indulgent smile. ‘I’m hardly in Christian’s league.’
‘Nonsense,’ Simon said. ‘You had Paul reciting poetry today, in the stairwell.’
Neil’s eyebrows lifted. ‘Poetry?’
‘Yeah. In French, of course, so I didn’t understand it. What was it you said, Paul?’
Paul lifted his head, looking faintly embarrassed, and shrugged. ‘Just a quotation I remembered. Not poetry. Just something George Sand wrote in her diary about Liszt.’
‘What was it?’ I asked him, curious myself now. He sent me such a look as Caesar must have given Brutus, and repeated the quotation out loud. It was a lovely phrase, almost lyrical in its sentiment, and it told me rather more about the boy Paul Lazarus than it did about Neil’s violin playing.
‘Are you going to share it with the rest of us?’ Garland Whitaker prompted, a trifle impatiently.
It was only when I looked up, into Neil Grantham’s blank expectant face, that I suddenly realised Paul and I must be the only ones who understood the French language on that level.
‘Sorry,’ I apologised. ‘It means: “My griefs are etherealised, and my instincts are …”’ I faltered, and looked to Paul. ‘How would you translate that last word?’
‘Exalted?’
‘That’s it.’ I nodded. ‘“My instincts are exalted.”’
‘How pretty.’ Garland eased back in her chair, satisfied.
‘Indeed.’ Neil looked sideways at Paul. ‘Thank you.’
Paul shrugged again. ‘It’s what I felt, that’s all.’
‘Well, it’s no small praise, that, for a musician. I can’t say as I’ve ever etherealised anybody’s grief before.’
‘Do you practise every day?’ I asked Neil.
‘Every day. Not as much as I ought to, of course, but as much as I’m able.’
‘Neil’s not really on vacation,’ put in Garland. ‘He’s recuperating. He broke his hand.’
‘Tell her how,’ Simon dared him.
Neil grinned. ‘Stupidity. I let myself get dragged into a fist fight, in some bar in Munich.’ He held his left hand up to show me. It was a nice hand, square and long-fingered, neatly kept. ‘It’s getting better, but I can’t do all my fingering properly yet. So my employers kindly gave me some time off. On the condition,’ he added, ‘that I don’t enjoy myself too much.’
‘And is this your first trip to Chinon?’ I asked him.
He shook his head. ‘No. This would be my eighth visit, I think – maybe even my ninth. It’s an addiction, really, Chinon is. You’ll understand, if you stay long enough.’
Beside me, Simon nodded. ‘Monsieur Chamond says once you’ve been to Chinon, you’re hooked for life. He says you’ll keep on coming back.’
‘He sounds like a wise man,’ I said. ‘I haven’t met him yet.’
‘I’m sure you’ll meet them eventually,’ Jim Whitaker assured me. ‘They’re nice people, both of them.’
‘They speak English,’ Garland said. ‘Not like that nephew of theirs. Honestly, you’d think with all the tourists they get around here, more people would take the time to learn English. It’s so frustrating, trying to communicate.’
At the far end of the table, Paul smiled gently. ‘I’m sure the French feel the same way,’ he said, ‘when they visit America.’
Our waiter seemed to understand us well enough. He took Paul’s order first, then Neil’s, then waited while Garland tried to choose a wine and Simon tried to learn which pizza had the egg on it. I settled on a galette for myself – a buckwheat crêpe filled with cheese and mushrooms – washed down with a half bottle of sweet cider.
The food, when it arrived, was excellent, and yet the meal itself was slightly off. I tried, and failed, to put my finger on the cause. The atmosphere around our table was, at its surface, entirely normal for a group of people who’d just met on holiday – a little forced, perhaps, but normal. And yet, I thought, there was a tension here … a tension spun from more than my awareness of the man across the table. One couldn’t shake away the sense that something deeper flowed beneath the smiles and salt-passing, some darker conflict hinted at but never quite revealed. It made me feel excluded.