Vanishing Point Page 2

  At that moment the telephone rang. She picked it up and said, “Studio Crillon.”

  “Carla.”

  “Yes.”

  “Put Maurice on.”

  “He’s not here.”

  “Why not? He’s always there in the morning.”

  “He’s gone. And before you begin the questions let me go on. He had a telephone call this morning. Early. Then he came and woke me and said he had to go back to France for a few weeks – on a business matter – and that he would be back as soon as he could. That’s all I know.”

  “Didn’t you ask him?”

  “I never ask things like that. You know Maurice.”

  “Has he finished the Giuseppe Zais?”

  “No.”

  “The man drives me mad.”

  “And makes money for you.”

  “And treats my sister like a whore.”

  “That’s right. And she enjoys it. Give me my money, you bandit, and we could marry and I’d be respectable and give you little nephews and nieces to fuss over. You’d like that. You’re such a great family man.”

  “He’s got a mother in France, hasn’t he?”

  “Yes.”

  “Perhaps he’s gone there. Where does she live?”

  “Somewhere in the Dordogne.”

  “The address, idiot. He might have gone there.”

  “So he might, pig. But he didn’t say and I don’t know the address.”

  “You need a damned good beating to make you civil.”

  “I expect Maurice will get around to that one day. Ciao, Aldo.”

  She put back the receiver and went to the window and looked out over the river. Some way up the river she could see the Ponte Santa Trinita and she smiled to herself as she remembered her first meeting with Maurice. She had been walking over the bridge on her way to the boutique in which she worked – Aldo did not let any of the family of which he was head idle at home if they were old enough to go out to work, though he was rich enough to keep two mistresses – when Maurice had come towards her. She had paid little attention to him until he was about to pass her. It was then that he turned back abruptly and began to walk a little abreast of her. Without looking at her he had said, ‘It was on this bridge that Dante first saw his Beatrice. Would that be your name, too?’

  She had made no reply but he walked with her without another word until she entered her place of work. For two days he met her each morning and was waiting for her each evening as she walked home to the family apartment in the Piazza Santo Spirito, speaking no more than to give a greeting on meeting and a goodbye on leaving. On the third evening as she walked home and was about to enter the apartment building he handed her a large brown manilla envelope. In the apartment she had opened the envelope. On a grey sheet of cardboard was a red chalk drawing of her head and shoulders. On the back was written – Quite apart from having fallen in love with you, I would like to paint you. Tomorrow morning on the bridge if you hand this back to me without a word I shall probably commit suicide if I can find the courage to do so. Maurice Crillon.

  Aldo, whom she had already told of her encounters with Crillon, was in the room and without a word she had handed the drawing to him, saying, “Do you think when I walk past him without a word he really will jump into the river?”

  Aldo had said nothing for a while, intent on studying the drawing. Though he had no aptitude for art himself he had an eye which could instantly sort the gold from dross, and in his coarse, avaricious soul there lurked an aching, passionate love of beauty and craftsmanship. He was a pig of a man, full of coarse appetites, a bully and a ruthless man – but deep within was a man who would have walked from Florence to Rome and back barefoot over thorns to have been born with a tenth of the talent and genius he recognized in the portrait.

  He said quietly, “You walk past him without a word tomorrow and when you get home I’ll put you over my knee and beat your bare arse so that you won’t be able to sit for a week.” And so it had begun; her love for Maurice, and Maurice’s work for Aldo.

  * * * *

  Two days later – he had driven via Thun in Switzerland – Maurice Crillon arrived at his mother’s cottage. Getting out of his car he saw Gaston down at the bottom of the garden working the handle of the pump which drew water from the river to fill the garden’s two water tanks. He walked down to him, remembering the days when, as a boy, he had worked here with his mother – not enjoying it much but fully aware of her passion for the things she grew. Although as a mother she had not been outwardly affectionate, he had loved her. She had put nothing in the way he wanted his life to go when he had left school. She had given him money when he wanted it . . . sometimes squandered it . . . and when life had often beaten him over the head he had always been able to return here to lick his wounds, knowing, too, that she would ask no questions about his life that would embarrass him. At times he had felt that she served and comforted him, had given him money without question – did things for him, in fact, that in an odd way made him feel that she owed him something. Perhaps because of his father who had been taken prisoner by the Germans at the Fall of France and had never been seen again. Perhaps she had felt that no boy should be without a father, and that she should have married again . . . Himself, he had no such feelings. What you’ve never known you could never miss. And anyway, with a father he would never have known the freedom he enjoyed with her.

  He stopped, pulled a young spring onion from a row, washed it in one of the filling water tanks and ate it. Above, a pair of buzzards swung idly on the rising air currents. If he shut his eyes he knew that the sight of them and their movements would stay etched somewhere in his memory, ready to be recalled whenever he chose. So it was with Gaston. The old man’s face lay in his memory, like so many others, always available. In the Uffizi Gallery at Florence there was a Domenico Veneziano painting of the Madonna and Child with Saints and one of the saints was John the Baptist, and the face was the face of old Gaston – who was far from conventional holiness, but undeniably had his own form of holiness.

  The old man stopped his work on the pump, spat, then pursed his thick lips before saying with little friendliness, “You’ve arrived too late.”

  “I came as soon as I knew. The curé’s letter was delayed in the post.” It was not strictly true but it would serve, he thought. But the delay had been a genuine one. Had he received it he would have come at once.

  Gaston fished in the pocket of his pale blue working blouse and handed him the cottage key, saying, “Monsieur Bonivard wanted to know when you arrived. I’ll tell him on my way home. I’ll keep things going here, too – until you decide what you’re going to do. But – I do it for her, not for you.”

  Maurice took his case from the car and let himself into the cottage. The main room was as he had always known it. Everything had its place and had stayed in it. The room was swept and cleaned and free of dust. Gaston would have done that. There had been times, he knew, when his mother had been ill that Gaston had come in daily and looked after things for her. In Cragnac there had been a period when all had thought that Gaston would eventually marry his mother. He made a wry face at the thought of Gaston as a stepfather. However, despite the old man’s censure of him, he liked him and was grateful for the companionship he had given his mother over the years.

  Going upstairs he found his mother’s room tidy and aired and there was a small vase of wild daffodils and violets placed in the wall niche which held a blue-robed figurine of the Virgin Mary. Looking at it he closed his eyes and crossed himself and said the first genuine prayer in years. The flowers, he knew, must have come from Gaston – and that small act of Christian observance, against the grain of all the old man’s beliefs, could never have been made for any other woman.

  His own room with the low bed under the window looking over the garden was also unchanged and the small watercolour which he had made as a boy of the house and garden, crude, but with, he saw now, the touch of waking passion in it for line and colour which was to grow and obsess him over the years. Later, to amuse his mother when he came home on holiday from Paris, he would draw caricatures of the villagers that would make her laugh. Her laughter still hung in his memory, and now disturbed him for he knew that he had far from served her well except in material comforts. On the wall above a wash-hand stand was a faded photograph of the father he had never known, a tall, slim figure in a dark suit, holding a fedora in one hand to his breast and a walking stick in the other, his legs crossed as he leant against a studio pillar, his side-buttoned boots highly polished and a cat-that-had-had-the-cream smirk on his face. Early in his thirties he had come home once and without her knowledge had studied the face and then drawn it, putting back its life and true nature, and given it to his mother. She had wept for the first time he had ever known, and there had been nothing to tell him whether it was from joy or sadness.

  Disturbed by the memory, touched briefly with a nameless remorse and dissatisfaction with himself, he said aloud, “God makes us, and His will shapes us.”

  Recognizing the rare mood and knowing from experience that it might last if not challenged, he went down to the large living room and opened the walnut-wood hanging corner cupboard. His mother drank nothing but a little wine and water, but in the cupboard against any chance coming of his was a bottle of whisky. He poured himself a drink.

  He sat by the window watching the setting sun low over the hills beyond the river. It was higher up the river in one of these hills that he had, at the age of sixteen, found a small cave and had made his first forgeries. With red and black ochre he had drawn imitations of Palaeolithic art and made engravings on the rock face of outlined hands, black-spotted horses, a charging bison with a spear through its neck and also the figure of a naked, heavily breasted woman. He never attempted to profit from them, and never told anyone about them. But at times when his oncoming adolescence troubled him he would go and sit up in the cave’s mouth and smoke forbidden cigarettes. A year after he had done the drawings heavy winter rains had collapsed the hillside above the cave, blocking it off. Someday, he thought now, in a hundred or a thousand years they might come to light. . . so what?

  At that moment he heard a car stop outside the cottage and knew that it would be Monsieur Bonivard, the curé. He got up and went to the wall cupboard and brought out another glass and a bottle of Monbazillac which his mother always kept for the priest’s visits.

  CHAPTER TWO

  MONSIEUR BONIVARD, GLASS in hand, the golden wine taking the last of the day’s light through the window, their preliminary greetings and his condolences over, said, “She would have wished you here, of course. It is a sadness that you could not be reached in time, my son.”

  “I was away from Switzerland, father. On business. But I thank you for all the trouble you have had and taken on my behalf. I shall not forget it.”

  “I do God’s work. And the way He works is sometimes strange to us. This we can only but accept. And I speak now not of your being unable to come here, but of your mother – for there are things you must know about her which when you know them will leave you with decisions to make. Before she died she gave me something for you . . . a letter, which is also a form of confession. I wrote it at her request and she signed it and I witnessed it. I have it with me and I wish you to tell me whether you would like me to go away and let you read it alone, or whether you would wish me to stay?”

  Frowning a little, Maurice Crillon said, “Is it so disturbing, father?”

  “I think so. There was a point after she had dictated a little to me when I stopped her and asked her to consider whether what she was doing was wise. Whether, in fact, God was with her. She said she could not speak for God, but only from her conscience and from her love for you because she knew that you could then make your own decision and she was sure that God would direct you.”

  “I can’t believe that there was any true sin on my mother’s conscience, father. If she wanted me to read the letter then she must have had good reason. She was in her true mind when she got you to take down the letter?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “Then because she wished it I must read it.”

  “And you wish me to stay?”

  Maurice smiled. “Your glass is empty.” He reached over and filled the priest’s glass.

  As he did so the curé took an envelope from the pocket of his soutane and handed it to him, saying, “I will leave you alone for a little while and take my wine into the garden to catch the last of the sun. If when I return you hand me the letter and tell me to burn it I shall understand.” Monsieur Bonivard stood up and went out through the garden door.

  When he was gone Maurice opened the letter and switched on the electric table lamp. He spread the sheets of paper on the table before him and even as he did so found himself admiring the priest’s handwriting which was in a meticulously formed Italianate script. The man was old but his hand was that of a young man. The letter read:

  To my dearly beloved Maurice,

  I have tried to get in touch with you so that you could be here and have all this from my own lips and then give me your forgiveness. Now you can only read my words and then pray to God to give you a true direction.

  You know that I was born and lived all my early life at Lalinde, not far from Bergerac, and it was here that I met my husband to be, Paul Crillon, a journeyman carpenter from Sarlat. We were married in June 1939 and went to live just outside Toulon because, through a friend, your father had got a job on a big building contract nearby. We lived in two rented rooms. But at the beginning of September that year when war was declared on Germany your father was called up under the general mobilisation orders. I stayed on doing domestic work and sometimes helping in a neighbouring shop. I never heard any more of him. Nor much later could the authorities help me. It was thought that probably he had died in a German Prisoner of War camp.

  In October I knew that I was going to have a child. I worked as long as I could, and was helped out by your Uncle Maurice who when he died left me this cottage and a small legacy. My baby, a boy, was born on 30th April, 1940. He lived, poor soul, for only one week. If you were here I could speak of that time, but since you are not I can only leave you to imagine my feelings. What matters now is the truth which I owe to you.

  Through the midwife who had attended me I got a position as a wet nurse to the boy child of an English lady, who lived at the Villa Colombier near Aiguebelle, where naturally I lived in. The child had been born on May 15th, 1940, but the mother had no milk to feed it. And at this time she was trying to find a way to leave France and I was frequently left alone with the child and one housekeeper who came in daily from Aiguebelle.

  Late at night on Thursday June 13th an Italian bombing plane which had been attacking Toulon crashed on the villa and the place was completely destroyed. Earlier that night the baby boy had been feverish and I had taken him from the villa, hoping the cool night air would soothe him. I walked some way along the hillside with him and from a safe distance saw the air crash and the burning of the villa.

  Then I committed a sin for which daily I have asked God’s forgiveness. I walked away with the child in my arms along the road to Toulon, and then partly by train and partly by getting lifts I found my way back to Cragnac and your Uncle. I never told him the truth, or anyone else until this day. But to you, my dear son, for I can think of you no other way, the truth is owed. What you will do I know not. Monsieur the curé knows all the facts of your true parents and will give them to you if you wish to ask. I have sinned against you greatly, but I have always loved and cherished you dearly as my own.

  May God grant you the wisdom to act charitably and with compassion. God bless you my dearest child.

  The letter was signed by his mother and, under his authentication, by the curé. Maurice put it down on the table and without clear feeling or thought picked up his glass and finished his whisky. A long shadow fell across the evening sunlight coming through the door. The curé stood there, his face in the shadow, his tall bulk like some hunch-backed stork. He said nothing, but moved into the room, sat down at the table across from Maurice and poured into his glass the last of the Monbazillac. He touched his lips with the wine and then putting down the glass said gently, “You know what I wish to hear from you, my son, before anything?”

  Maurice nodded. “Yes, I know, father. I loved her. There were times when I was not a good son to her. I am glad, too, that she died with the burden taken from her. And with the whole of my soul, father, I forgive her.” Then he grinned and added, “But you must agree that for a Frenchman to discover that he is an Englishman is no pleasant surprise?”

  The curé smiled. “It could be worse . . . un sale Boche. But please do not quote me on that. So what do you propose to do? You know the counsel I would give.”

  “I know. But somewhere still living there are my true parents. Or are they dead?”

  “They live.”

  “And if I ask you will tell me where?”

  “Yes, I promised that.”

  “I must sleep on it.”

  “Then when you say your prayers you must ask God to give you true direction. If you look and listen He will make it known to you, my son.” The curé rose and came to him. Briefly he held his face between his hands and bent and kissed his forehead.