Background
Charles and Helen have been investigating the mystery of the French letter, but circumstances are changing and a rift has come between them.
|
from Chapter 35
Three hours later I was roaring through the Picardy countryside on the Eurostar express, my face pressed to the window, and my thoughts, like the wheels of the train, turning along the preordained lines of my prejudices. We were due to arrive at St. Pancras station around 4 p.m., just in time for the London rush hour.
Chapter 36
There is no turning back on the path of iron. One rushes through the landscape in madcap motion, borne by grappled and grinding wheels, locked on parallel lines, inevitably impelled. No deviation, no escape, no matter how maudlin the machinations of the mind. The heart goes clickety-clack, clickety-clack, driving the throbbing pulse of humors; rust encrusted blood, bile, black as night, yellow as the lick of a London fog, and phlegm. Each one striving for ascendency. Life's Chemin de Fer, its deadly game of chance. Nine temperaments, one life to rule them all. Should I stick on the mediocrity of five, I mused, or draw a third card for the chance of a Baccarat?
How I began to regret my reaction to the news of Helen's bisexuality. Maybe her flirtation with me had merely been an attempt to assuage her conscience. She might well have been using me to sublimate a sin she had been schooled to view as unnatural. Was my ego so fragile that I could not bear the thought of being used in this way? The copper pot on the stove is more honoured by boiling broth than by hanging from its hook over the range, an onlooker in life's kitchen.
Clickety-clack, clickety clack, and the lick of a London fog, a maudlin seep of thoughts going round, and round, and round.
With a sinuous sway, the train raced past long straight roads, poplar lined, erect and pencil thin, grey-green against the swathes of ripening corn. They suggested columns of marching soldiers, and memories of the Somme. I watched the poppies nod and nudge against the scars of long forsaken trenches. How far, I wondered, would Madame Durand drag Helen down among poppies of a different kind, bleeding sap and the sticky sweetness of lingering death? I dwelt on this and dozed, falling in and out of sleep, haunted by foul imaginings borne on nightmare's foetid breath.
Awakened now, I registered the recent arrival of a fellow passenger, slumped down opposite me, belching garlic breath and over-ripened cheese.
"Salut, mon frère - ça va?" he said, with a broad and vacuous grin. "Allez. Très bien!" He stretched across and proffered a piece of baguette, smeared with a crawling ooze of brie, into which he had pressed a small white onion that bore an uncanny resemblance to the eye of a dead man.
I declined and closed my eyes once more.
Again, the dreams took hold. This time they were of Helen, festering in a Bangkok jail, pale with pleading eyes and arms stretched out in supplication. My hands were being thrust aside by Jeanne, whose thin lips sneered as she mocked and jangled keys.
The prison bars morphed slowly into trees, with rays of sunlight flashing in-between, then, all of a sudden, the train plunged into the gloom of a charnel house, its song becoming a hollow sound as it thundered through the Chunnel.
At length, we were disgorged, breaking out into the Garden of Eden, cobnut lanes of Kent with cockeyed oasts and fields of hops, orchards groaning with the promise of the cider press and golden pints in firelit English pubs.
Soon the hollyhocks and climbing roses of Kent cottage gardens gave way to the grey, amorphous sprawl of London. The train tunnelled like a tapeworm into the entrails of the East End and the Thames dockland, before emerging and coming to rest in the majestic upper concourse of St Pancras Station.
I rescued my overnight case from the luggage rack and disembarked. Not yet ready to launch myself into the seething mass of humanity below, I sought out Searcys champagne bar for a celebration of my homecoming, and a gathering of my wits. Nothing but native fare would do for this occasion, so I selected a medley of English seafood - Colchester rock oysters, Portland crab and some mussels from the West Country - then asked for a large glass of sparkling Rosé from Dorset's famous Furleigh Estate to wash it all down.
Alone at last and looking forward to a week or two of solitude, I gradually became aware of a silver-haired gentleman in a well-cut coat, who was eyeing me from a nearby table. His pink shirt set off a black silk tie with blue diagonal stripes that proclaimed him to be an Old Etonian. I raised my glass, then turned slightly away.
A few moments later, he was at my side and, attracting my attention with a discreet cough, he opened with, "I say, old chap. Sorry to intrude and all that, but it's Brandon, isn't it? Charles Brandon, the famous travel writer? Mind if I join you?"
Well, what could a chap say? "Of course, my dear fellow! But you have me at a disadvantage, for though your face seems familiar, I can't immediately recall your name."
"Brockenhurst. Forgive me. Sir David Brockenhurst. I am somewhat of a fan of yours, in a roundabout way."
He signalled the waitress and ordered a Vichy water before making a steeple of his carefully manicured hands. I noticed his signet ring had a boar's head on it, and sighed inwardly, hoping that he wouldn't turn out to be too much of a bore himself. Hoping, in fact, that he'd sink back into the woodwork again after having made his interest known to me.
As things turned out, that was not to be the case.
Author Notes
Chemin de Fer, the French for a railway, is also an alternative name for the game of Baccarat, the purpose of which is to score as close as possible to nine with two or three cards.
The Chunnel - a common contraction for Channel Tunnel
List of characters:
Charles Brandon: The narrator, a well-known travel writer.
Helen Culverson: A woman of some mystery, also a travel writer, who develops a liaison with Charles.
Kayla Culverson: Her older sister, who disappeared somewhere in Bangkok, but has now turned up in Paris.
Madame Jeanne Durand: A French magazine editor, who was involved in a serious accident, and seems also to be involved with the Mafia in some way.
Andre (aka Scaramouche) - one of Kayla's friends in Montmartre.
Mr Bukhari - a Pakistani businessman, now deceased.
Madame Madeleine Bisset - Helen's landlady in Paris
Henri Carron - a rag-and-bone man, owner of an heroic dog called Bonaparte.
Monsieur Bellini - a denizen of the French Underworld.
Dr. Laurent: A veterinary surgeon in Versailles.
Father Pierre Lacroix, vicar of the Versailles Notre Dame church.
Madame Lefauvre: An old woman living in Versailles - the town gossip.
Francoise Gaudin: An intellectually disabled woman living in Versailles.
Alain Gaudin: brother of Francoise, a gardener at Monet's house in Giverney and part-time stagehand at the Moulin Rouge.
Estelle Gaudin [deceased]: mother of Francoise and Alain, a prostitute
Mademoiselle Suzanne Gaudin [deceased]: Alain's grandmother, to whom the mysterious letter of 1903 was addressed.
Image is of the stamps on the envelope from the Paris Stamp Market that started us out on this wild goose chase. (See Chapter 1)
|
|
