I looked round, seeking some escape. Not down the stairs, I dismissed the obvious. There wasn’t time, and she was bound to see me. But beside the stairs a glass door stood propped open to the outside air, and, feeling a proper coward, I ducked my head and darted through it. Behind me, the rustle of footsteps swept by without stopping, and a heartbeat later I heard a sharp knock. The violin fell silent. Cautiously, I edged along the wall, away from the open doorway, away from the murmur of voices.
I hadn’t picked the best of hiding places, really. I was standing on a sheltered terrace, built upon the flat roof of the hotel’s garage – a broad, square stretch of pavement bordered by a wooden portico and hugged on three sides by the bleached stone walls of the hotel. One couldn’t truly hide, out here. All someone had to do was poke their head around the door, and there you were, in plain view. But for the moment, at least, the terrace was deserted, except for me.
The voices stopped. A door clicked shut. The rustling steps retreated down the corridor. But instead of going back inside, I crossed on tiptoe to the centre of the terrace, where a neat grouping of table and chairs basked in the fickle sunlight of the afternoon. Wiping the dampness from a chair. I sat down. From here I had a panoramic view along the cliffs, from the wedge-shaped Clock Tower guarding Château Chinon to the wilder fringes of the hills beyond the town.
High above me on the cliff path a small cluster of sightseers had paused against the waist-high wall, and their red and purple jackets made a splash of welcome colour on the drab white rise of rock behind them. One of the couples was holding hands and laughing, and I hated them without reason.
The violin began again. I closed my eyes against the beauty of it, settling back with a sigh. He wasn’t playing the Beethoven any more. No, this was stranger music, sweeter, more seductive … yet familiar. I searched my memory for it. Elgar, I decided. That was it. Edward Elgar. The Salut d’Amour.
Neil played it beautifully, with such emotion that the air around me trembled from the sound. I remember wishing he would stop, because I didn’t want to think of love just now. I remember squeezing my eyes shut tighter still, and feeling the sudden damp of tears upon my lashes. And after that, I don’t remember anything.
I hadn’t meant to sleep. But when I next opened my eyes the terrace was in darkness, and a scattering of stars gleamed faintly where the clouds had been before. The chill had penetrated to my bones. I rose and flexed my stiffened shoulders, picking my way cautiously across to the glass door into the hotel. Someone, while I’d slept, had closed that door. I tried the handle. ‘Damn,’ I said, aloud. They’d locked me out.
Hugging my arms to ward off the cold, I pressed my face against the glass and peered along the corridor. I knocked twice, loudly. No one came. ‘Damn,’ I said again, cursing my own stupidity. And then, quite by chance, I saw the stairs. It was a narrow flight of stone stairs, nearly invisible in the dark, curving downwards from the level of the terrace. Remembering that the hotel’s garage was underneath me, I plucked up my courage and started down, my hand clutching at the railing, expecting at any moment to miss my footing on the uneven stone. It was a relief to feel the ground again, safe and solid beneath my feet and, after a moment’s search, to find the door that I had hoped would be there.
It didn’t open into the garage, as I’d expected, but straight onto the street itself. The fountain gurgled placidly in front of me, bathed in the golden glow of street lamps, and the hotel’s front doors, brightly lit beneath the awning, beckoned me from several yards away. I shivered again and headed for those doors.
But before I reached them, I saw the child.
I stopped, and hovered, hesitating. It’s not your business, I warned myself. Don’t get involved. But I couldn’t help myself.
She was so young, I thought, no more than six or seven years of age, and so pitifully alone. A miserable figure all in black, sitting still as a statue on the bench at the far side of the fountain square, her large eyes fixed upon the doors of the hotel. She looked up as I approached, and my heart turned over tightly. She’d been crying.
Hunching down on my knees, I spoke to her as gently as I could, in French, and asked what was the matter.
‘I can’t go home,’ she said.
‘Why can’t you? Don’t you know the way?’
She shook her head, setting her short cap of dark brown curls bouncing around her pale face. ‘Papa will be so angry.’
Tears swelled again in the big eyes and I rushed to reassure her. ‘I’m sure he won’t be angry, really he won’t. You can’t help being lost.’
‘I’m not lost, Madame,’ she said, with another toss of her head. ‘I know how to get to my house. But my papa, he will be angry.’
‘Tell me why.’
‘Because I left them. They looked the other way, and so I left them. Papa, he said I was to stay with her until suppertime, but they did not want me there, you see …’
‘I see,’ I said, although of course I didn’t. ‘And who are “they”?’
‘My aunt and her friend. Her man friend.’
‘Ah,’ I said, comprehension dawning.
‘I was sorry, afterwards, for leaving them, but when I went back they had already gone, and so I came here to wait for them. My aunt’s friend stays at this hotel, and so I thought … I thought …’ Her lower lip quivered. ‘But they have not come. And I cannot go home.’