‘Ah. Well.’ He looked faintly embarrassed. ‘With you I’m always too familiar, I know. Please forgive me. Sometimes I look at you and see instead my sister – you are very like her. She also had this sadness that does not belong in one so young.’ His eyes grew soft, remembering. ‘Life was not always very kind to Isabelle.’
My smile died. A faint prescient shiver chased along my spine. ‘Isabelle?’
François nodded. ‘My sister. There were three of us, born in this house: myself, and Isabelle, and Jean-Pierre, my brother. I was the youngest, and the only one to carry on in service to the family Valcourt. My brother died in the final days of the last war, and my sister …’ He shrugged, and looked away. ‘She left Chinon not long after the liberation.’
It seemed too wild a thought, but having lived enough to know the world could be quite small at times, I asked the question anyway. ‘Did your sister ever work at the Hotel de France, Monsieur?’
‘Why, yes, but how did you …?’ His eyebrows lifted and then fell again with a sudden nod of comprehension. ‘Of course, you’re staying there. You will have heard the story about Isabelle and Hans. It is romantic, don’t you think? I thought so myself, when I was a boy.’
I agreed that it was most romantic. Except for the ending, I added silently. ‘Where did she go, your sister,’ I asked him, ‘when she left Chinon?’
‘She went away.’ A door closed, firmly, and I didn’t venture further. Instead I asked him whether the diamonds had really existed. ‘Oh yes,’ he told me, ‘they were real diamonds. My sister showed them to me.’
‘And they’ve never been found?’
‘Isabelle hid them well.’ His mouth quirked slightly, with a hint of pride. ‘Monsieur Muret, he always said that he would find the diamonds. It was for him an obsession, the thought of money. He dug everywhere little holes, down in the cellars and up on the hills, looking for that fistful of jewels, but of course he never found them.’
I sent François a curious look. ‘Why, “of course”?’ I asked him.
He smiled cryptically, and shrugged. ‘Isabelle hid them well,’ he said again. ‘She was very clever, my sister.’
‘And very beautiful, I’m told.’
‘Yes.’ He cleared the coffee pot away and set it with the dishes on the sideboard. ‘I could find you a photograph, if you would like to see one. Perhaps you will see then why I am reminded of Isabelle, when I look at you.’
‘I’d like that,’ I said. ‘I’ve a fondness for old photographs.’
‘Then I shall find one for you,’ he promised me. ‘Perhaps tomorrow, when I have time to sort through my albums.’
‘I believe,’ I told him, slowly, ‘that I’ve already seen your sister, in a way.’
He arched an eyebrow. ‘Yes?’
‘Yes. She haunts the hotel corridors.’
His eyes forgave my superstition. ‘That is a legend, Mademoiselle, nothing more. And it is quite impossible. There are no ghosts.’
I wasn’t so sure. I saw again that gentle shadow drifting past my bed, its soft voice urging me to ‘Follow …’ Follow what?
‘Unless,’ said François, reconsidering, ‘you count the living. Then I would have to say that you were right.’ His lined face softened as he looked at me. ‘The Hotel de France this week is filled with ghosts.’
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
… notice of a change in the dark world
Was lispt about the acacias,
The hotel’s entrance lobby seemed dim and deserted for the time of day. Most mornings, cleaners bustled round the bar and breakfast room, the hoover doing battle with both typewriter and telephone to see which of the three could outperform the others. But this morning there was silence. Thierry, slouched behind the reception desk, was the only sign of life.
His eyes were strained and rimmed with red, and when he greeted me his voice sounded rough, as though his throat were hurting him. I wanted to say some word of comfort, but my own nerves were still raw and vulnerable and I was much too tired for tears. Besides, I thought, we each of us knew how the other felt. There was no need to say the words. ‘You’re on your own again, are you?’ I asked him. ‘Where have your aunt and uncle gone?’
‘They take Simon up to Paris, to meet his parents at the airport. They will be back tonight, I think.’ He paused a moment. ‘The police came here at breakfast. They have taken everything of Paul’s, everything but this.’ He reached beneath the counter and lifted the forgotten item up, to show me. It was Paul’s copy of Ulysses. ‘I found this in the bar. My aunt said that you finished reading it. You finished it for Paul.’
My own throat felt rather painful, just then. I coughed to clear it. ‘Yes.’
‘I wondered, maybe … do you want to keep it? Because, if you do not, then I would like …’ He broke off, frowning, and tried again. ‘I thought that I might like to read this book. To learn the English better.’
I didn’t bother telling him that Joyce’s tangled prose was not the best source for a student of the language. It wouldn’t have mattered anyway, not to Thierry. I knew what he was struggling to say. ‘You keep it, Thierry,’ I said gently. ‘I think Paul would have liked that.’
‘Thank you.’ He tucked the book away again, out of sight behind the overhanging counter. He didn’t meet my eyes.