Girl at the Lion D'Or Read Online Free PDF Page B

installed in the new cellar and begin to do something with the upstairs rooms as well. Perhaps they could have another party at the end of the year when all the redecoration would be complete. It would be better than Paris, better than Montparnasse or the Opera.
    ‘I could begin on Thursday,’ Roussel was saying.
    ‘Yes, yes.’
    ‘Here, monsieur, take one of our cards. We’re the first people in the town to have them.’
    He pressed into Hartmann’s palm an outsize card with a poorly printed drawing of a house with scaffolding. Hartmann looked at it and then at Roussel’s eager face.
    For reasons he could not explain, he felt a disabling surge of pity for Roussel. He looked at the small, dark-haired builder weighing up his job and felt for a moment as though he had lost his own identity in that of the other man. It was not a conscious act of sympathy, but an involuntary and unpleasant loss of control. Nevertheless, the feeling was so strong that he felt he could have cried.
    ‘Why on earth are you sitting there like that?’ said Hartmann’s wife Christine when she came downstairs ten minutes later with a bunch of dried flowers in her hands.
    ‘I was just thinking.’
    ‘What about?’
    ‘A strange thing happened. I was standing out there with Roussel, the builder, talking about the house, when a peculiar feeling came over me. I felt this desperate sense of pity for him.’
    ‘Why?’
    ‘I’ve no idea. I’ve no reason to think he’s in trouble. It just came from nowhere.’
    ‘Charles, you are ridiculous. Is he going to do the job or not?’
    ‘Oh yes. There’s no problem about that.’
    ‘Well, you’ve got no reason to feel sorry for him. Marie-Thérèse said he was very good with the work he did for them and not all that expensive either. Even so, this is going to be quite a big job, and I don’t suppose this M. Roussel will undercharge for it.’
    ‘No, I don’t suppose he will. It wasn’t anything specific, this feeling, you understand. Just a general . . .’ Hartmann trailed off, with a gesture of his hand.
    They crossed the hall to the small morning-room at the foot of the northern tower where Christine rang the bell for the maid. She was a small woman with fair wavy hair cut in the fashion of the times, parted and held by combs. There was a heaviness about her that was unbecoming; her features seemed to have been moulded roughly, leaving her lips full and set in a permanent pout. To her admirers, they were her most attractive feature; others thought them simply a part of her generally unrefined appearance. Her eyes were blue and knowing.
    ‘So, Charles, soon you’ll have all your father’s beloved wine stored up beneath your feet. A little Aladdin’s cave for you to wander round.’
    ‘Yes, there should be quite a choice. All those strange wines from Alsace and Austria he collected when he was old. I’m told his house in Vienna has crates of Italian wine too.’
    ‘Italian! I couldn’t drink Italian wine. Sometimes, Charles, I wonder about your taste. And your father’s.’ She stood up and made as if to leave the room. ‘I’m going to carry on with my work. We’re having lunch promptly because I’ve given Marie the afternoon off.’
    ‘I shan’t stray far.’
    I wonder, thought Christine, as she strode across the hall; I wonder. She watched her husband with a caution that bordered on jealousy and was aware that slow changes were taking place in him. Her hope was that by not making too much of them she could turn them to her advantage. He seemed to have reached a new threshold in his life and she wanted to be on the right side of any door that might be closing. Hartmann’s ease of manner and attention to social form had at first appeared to her merely the polished exterior of a man who had spent much of his life in polite society. Patiently she waited for them to evaporate and for the man inside to be revealed to her. She knew him to be passionate and thought his