Read Online Girl at the Lion D'Or by Sebastian Faulks - Free Book Online

walk along the beaches. He agreed readily enough, though he gave her, she thought, a strange, hungry look as he loosened the nut beneath the saddle to lower the seat for her.
    The road bent between dense pine forests for a while, then opened up into a sparse and sandy-looking plain, in the middle of which was a small cluster of houses. As Anne cycled along, two or three men in fishermen’s overalls looked up from a table beneath a clump of trees and stared at her. The walls of the dozen or so houses were draped with drying nets, and a widow with a face that seemed to have been turned inside out like a dried fruit was splitting oysters over a metal bucket.
    Anne pedalled on up the hill where the road once more entered the pines. She was wearing her plainest dress with thick stockings and had her hair pulled back beneath a scarf. She knew she must look businesslike if she was to impress Mme Hartmann, and for the moment would have to sacrifice any hints at femininity which, for other reasons, she might have preferred. She wore some lace-up walking shoes, bought specially from a barrow in the market.
    The entrance to the Manor came abruptly and unsigned between a clump of budding rhododendrons and the interminable conifers. Anne braked and rose from the saddle as the bicycle juddered over the stony, pot-holed drive. Suddenly the dense trees on her right came to an end and she glimpsed a terrace with crumbling stone pots; soon she was passing the side wall of the house before the drive smoothed out a little and turned to the right, bringing her round to the front of the twin-towered house.
    Anne leaned over, almost toppling, as she lowered her foot to the ground. She felt an acute nervousness as she stood in front of the old house. There was so much grey in it, so many rooms and big forbidding spaces foretold by the giant shutters and that long, voluminous roof. It was grander than any house she had entered – although its dilapidation was faintly reassuring. She wheeled her bicycle round to the side of the north tower to find a servants’ entrance and was met by a fat man in blue overalls pushing a wheelbarrow full of rubble. He muttered a greeting which was impeded by the cigarette between his lips.
    ‘Where can I find Mme Hartmann?’
    The man gestured over his shoulder to Christine’s morning-room. Anne leaned her bicycle against the wall and went in through the kitchen door. The cracked tile floor was covered, in places, by sheets, and everywhere else by dust. From beneath her feet she could hear a dull banging, a pause, and then a long, parched cough.
    She ventured through the kitchen and out into the small morning-room, calling, ‘Madame?’ There was no answer, so she glanced around her. The window in the front looked over the lake on which she could distantly see a rowing-boat crawl like a slow insect. There was some half-finished embroidery left in an armchair, down the side of which was stuffed a woman’s handkerchief.
    She went through into the hall, a vast square area flagged with black and white marble, that separated the two parts of the house. Around its edge were assembled a number of unrelated objects – a fine walnut grandfather clock, a low piano with two ivory elephants and some photographs on top, an assortment of chairs, some obviously valuable and refined, others with torn rush seating. The walls were painted in blue rococo scrolls on a faded beige background. Anne peered in amazement at the chaotic elegance of the huge open area. There was enough in it to stare at for an hour or more, but she was frightened that Mme Hartmann might materialise at any moment. She called out again, but with the same result.
    Near the front door in a pedestal was an iron vase filled with dried bulrushes and next to it a large terracotta pot, from which protruded fishing rods and nets and what looked to Anne like a hunting spear. The dominant feature of the hall, however, was an oak staircase that rose broadly from the