Time: The Present
The Chateau Malrand looked imposing as they first drove up the long gravel drive from the road, but then it seemed curiously to get smaller the closer they approached. It was not at all as grandiose as Lydia had expected of the country residence of the President of France. Her sense of proportion was jolted again as she suddenly realized that the drive was taking them past the formal garden and what she had not realized was the rear of the building, and around the side to deposit them abruptly into the entrance yard. What from the rear had been a reasonably proportioned seventeenth-century building with three stories and a turret with a pointed spire became from the front something shrunken. There was a narrow, almost mean little door on the ground floor into the base of the turret. And then a stone staircase began by being as wide as their car and then shrank to the width of a single person as it reached the main entrance on the first floor. It was topped incongruously by a small glass portico, an afterthought to keep off the rain while waiting for the door to be answered.
As Manners parked the Jaguar, Lydia looked behind her and realized that the real entrance drive had come that way, from the river and what must once have been the road along the river’s bank. The glint of the Vezere lay perhaps a quarter mile down a handsome avenue of trees, which were flanked on one side by vines and on the other by an orchard of neatly pruned apple and pear trees. Before the trees began, an outbuilding in bright new stone overwhelmed the old stables. They had already passed one guard post as they had left the road. This was clearly another, with three big, black Citroens parked alongside it, and three tough-looking young men leaning too casually against them. In the doorway of the new building, a big bald man with a thick stripe of mustache cupped his hand to his ear, listened attentively, and then nodded at them. As Lydia looked again at the front of the chateau, realizing that this had once been a small medieval fortress before the Renaissance window had been knocked into its facade, and before some seventeenth-century Malrand had rebuilt the rear, the front door seemed to open by itself. The effect was almost eerie, until a maid appeared, tucking her hair into a white starched bonnet, to guide them in.
Malrand awaited them in a large and rather cold room that ran the entire width of the house. He stood smoking a yellow cigarette before his Renaissance window, dressed as if going for a stroll, in sturdy brogues, corduroy slacks, and a tweed jacket, his checked shirt open at the neck. His clothes were somehow familiar. Lydia suddenly recalled a rather grand shop on one of the Paris boulevards just by the Madeleine called Old England, and her curiosity was satisfied. He looked just like one of the window displays. His hair was thick and white, his face strikingly pale apart from the sharp redness of his cheeks; his thin nose and lips gave him a hawkish look. He appeared far more intense and less tranquil than his photographs in the newspapers, as if still full of a youthful nervous energy.
“Welcome to my home, Major Manners. It is over fifty years since your father first stood where you are now,” he said genially in excellent English, his voice like gravel after a lifetime of smoking, as he advanced upon them with hand outstretched. “I knew that you were accompanied, but had not known that we were to be honored by the presence of such a lovely woman.” He took Lydia’s hand, bowed slightly, and raised it to within an inch of his lips. “Mademoiselle, a perfect English rose.”
“American, Monsieur le President, and honored to meet you.”
“American? Then this is almost like old times. A Malrand, a Manners, and an American, here in the old chateau, just as we were when we first landed back in 1944. It would be too much of a coincidence, mademoiselle, for your name to be McPhee?”
“Too much indeed, Monsieur le President. My name is Dean,” she said, a little irritated. His security men would not only know her name and nationality but he had probably checked out her ancestry, her education, and her tastes in everything from food to music.
“Mademoiselle Dean,” he said. “An Anglo-Saxon rose. Have a glass of champagne, and come and admire my new vineyard. We now have some decent wine again, for the first time in over a hundred years. You know about the phylloxera, the disease that wiped out so many of our vineyards in the time of Napoleon the Third? In Bordeaux and Burgundy, they were wise enough to replant with good American vines from California, which resisted the disease. In these parts, they decided there was more money in tobacco. A great mistake. So the only wine we grew here was our own pinard, the rough stuff that used to be given to the soldiers when they got two liters a day as part of the rations. We drank it ourselves, too. More fool us.”
He was putting himself out to be charming, with considerable success. Lydia, who had been fretting about the suitability of her ivory silk dress with a red scarf and shoes, felt herself relaxing quickly. Not too quickly, Lydia, she warned herself.
“Mademoiselle Dean, or if I may call you Lydia, you are far too beautiful to keep calling me Monsieur le President. It makes me feel even older than I am. If you must call me anything, call me Francois, since we are all off duty and at our ease and you are my most welcome guests. I have to suffer far too many formal occasions, so indulge me in a happily private one.” There was a distinctly jolly twinkle in his eye, and Lydia recalled reading one or two scurrilous accounts of his romantic reputation. It had probably done him no harm with the voters.
“I’m afraid, sir, that a very thorough look through my father’s papers found no draft of his memoirs, just a few jotted notes and chapter headings,” said Manners. “They were mainly about North Africa, rather than his time in France. There were a couple of letters to my grandmother, one which mentioned meeting you in the summer of 1942, after the Gazala battles and Bir Hakeim, and another about the visit you paid to our home. Apparently Granny rather took to you.”
“Probably because I told her that I thought your house was a great deal more comfortable than my own. More attractive, too.” He turned to Lydia. “Don’t you find this house a terrible muddle? Not knowing whether it is an old fortress or a comfortable chateau-quite apart from the place being back to front.”
“It is rather distinctive, monsieur-I mean, Francois.”
“Thank you, Lydia. You say my name charmingly. Well, it would have been good to have had the memoirs of such a distinguished old soldier and great friend of France,” said Malrand. “I want to hear all about this rock painting of his that you found, and whether the police are going to get it back, but that had better wait until our final guest arrives. I asked her to come a little later, to give us time to chat, and Lydia, you know about these things. What do you think of my fireplace?”
“Renaissance, Italian-style, quite early. Good marble, pity about the damage to the caryatids,” she said automatically.
“German bullets. Used it for target practice after I was arrested,” Malrand said. “Anything else?”
“Yes, the plaque,” she said, bending to peer at the great irregular iron plate attached to the rear of the fireplace, to bounce its heat back into the room. “It’s marvelous. Are those your family arms?”
“No,” he said with a wink at her and a wicked grin at Manners. “The English did not win all their wars, whatever they like to think. They are the arms of the Talbots, a great English family, and my ancestors looted it from their chateau down the river after we kicked the last of the English out five centuries ago. Not long afterward, that Malrand’s great-grandson invaded Italy with Francis the First in 1515.”
“The invasion that brought the Renaissance back to France,” Lydia said.
“Yes, and the fireplace.” Malrand turned to Manners. “We did our best to pass the Renaissance on to you English a few years later, at the Field of the Cloth of Gold. But your King Henry the Eighth was more interested in women, I think. Understandable, of course.”
“Why do you French and English tease each other so?” she asked, smiling to take any offense from the question.
“Joan of Arc, Trafalgar, and Waterloo,” said Manners. “I suppose the French think we have a lot to answer for.”
“There were battles that went the other way-Hastings, Calais, La Rochelle, Fontenoy,” Malrand snapped. Then he caught himself. “No, it’s not that. That’s not what I want to say. After all, during the Revolution, it was Frenchmen who made my palace into a public dance hall, Frenchmen who turned Notre Dame de Paris into a temple of reason, and held a mock mass with a prostitute on the main altar. Ah, the English, what can I say about the English? They who gave me refuge and guns and hope and helped me come back to liberate my poor France.” He gazed off into some private space.
“It’s an intimacy, like an unending Catholic marriage in a family too poor to own more than one bed,” he went on. “We have fought, invaded each other, loved each other’s women, fought alongside each other for a thousand years. There are no two peoples on earth who have shared so much, and stayed so different, and yet retain this profound, almost frightening attraction for one another. You drink our wines, we drink your scotch. You English holiday here, fall in love with old France and buy houses. Our young French people fall in love with your music and your tax laws and open businesses in Kent. I have a young great-nephew who tells me he will be a millionaire when he launches his computer company later this year. He went to Brighton to learn English, fell in love, started a company, and now his children are English.”
Malrand paused, his mood too intense to be interrupted, sipped some champagne, and took out a cigarette. Instead of lighting it, he walked across to Manners, and put his hand on the Englishman’s shoulder. “Sometimes I think we are twins, you and I, separated at birth. Sometimes I think of that old Greek legend of the man and the woman constantly trying to reunite into the original whole. Your father, you know, was as close to me as my brother.”
“That reminds me, sir,” said Manners. “I thought you might appreciate some memento of my father, and when he first gave me this, he said it came from the war, from France.” He reached into his jacket pocket and brought out the leather chess set Lydia had seen in the car.
Malrand took it, opened the flap, and looked at the tiny chips of ivory with black and red chess symbols painted onto the rounded ends. The thinner ends slotted into tiny slits cut into the checkerboard of light and dark squares on the leather. “I remember him with this, playing chess with McPhee,” the President said softly. “It came from a dead German.” He passed his hand gently over the leather. “I am very glad to have this. Thank you. But it must come back to you someday.”
From the courtyard below came the racing blip of an engine, a squeal of brakes, and the almost tidal roar of the gravel being plowed up by a car being driven too fast and stopped too quickly. Lydia looked out of the window to see dust rising from behind a small Japanese convertible, with Clothilde merrily flashing her legs at the security men as she took off her high heels to skip through the gravel to the entrance stairs.
The President’s white wine had been extremely good, Lydia thought, dry enough to counter the richness of the crayfish salad, and yet with enough fruit and flowers to hold up well on its own. She nibbled a little bread, and sipped it again. In London, she’d paid over ten quid a bottle for a Chablis that was a lot less appealing than this.
What she really wanted to know was whether Clothilde had already enjoyed the presidential favors, or was she simply trying rather hard to do so. She was not quite flirting, but nor was she being the cool, professional Clothilde of her meetings with Lydia’s bosses and the police and the insurance men back in London. She was being witty, gay, and just a little irreverent about the changing fashions in interpreting the cave paintings. Lydia knew the Abbe Breuil had seen them as a hunting ritual, portraying the beasts that the tribes needed to catch and eat. That had always seemed quite reasonable to Lydia as a hypothesis, although she remembered reading that the bones left in the middens of their campsites seldom came from the bison and horses that were most frequently depicted. They mainly ate reindeer, as she recalled, which were not that common in the cave art.
“Then came the 1960s, and the revolutions,” said Clothilde. “We had the political revolution in Paris that got rid of de Gaulle, then the sexual revolution, the intellectual revolution.”
“The what?” asked Manners.
“Structuralism. France’s great contribution to the age. Everything had to be reinterpreted. There were no authors, only texts, and your reading of it was as valid as mine, worth no more and no less than the considered opinion of the most learned professor.”
“Intellectual revolutions must always begin by discrediting the existing professors,” Malrand. said with a smile. “How else can they be pushed aside to make room for promotions for the brilliant young revolutionaries? The phenomenon is not unknown in politics.” He turned to Clothilde. “So, structuralism invades the caves?”
“Indeed, Monsieur le President. Only in this case, the attack came from my teacher, Andre Leroi-Gourhan. He made a statistical and rigorously structural analysis of the cave paintings and found them divided between male and female symbols. There were quite enough phallic symbols and vulvas to justify this approach, but it must be said that this fit with the spirit of the times.”
“There was neither phallus nor vulva before the 1960s?” mocked Manners. Precisely the question she was thinking, thought Lydia, but did not presume to ask.
“Oh, every generation has to think it discovered sex for itself,” said Malrand. “My grandfather talked of la belle epoque before 1914. My father waxed lyrical about the delights of the Jazz Age. And of course, we had the war. But continue, madame. The poor celibate priest, the Abbe Breuil, is confounded by the assault of the sexual organs.”
“He was not much of a priest,” Clothilde said. “He spent all his time in caves. But Breuil had trouble with sexual organs. There’s a famous cave painting in Africa, which he identified as the White Lady or the White Goddess, which is what everybody called it until somebody noticed that she sported an impressively erect penis. I’m surprised that even a priest could have missed it.”
Manners was now blushing, Lydia noticed, and much as she was enjoying Clothilde’s performance, she rather approved of his reaction. To her sudden dismay, she felt the President’s foot brush against her own, and stay there. Heavens, what on earth was the protocol of rejecting a presidential pass at his own luncheon table?
“The whole point of structuralism was that it was supposed to be an all-embracing system, a theory of knowledge that could explain and account for everything,” Clothilde went on. Malrand was clearly fascinated. “So after the phallic symbols, Leroi-Gourhan had to bring all the rest of the cave art into this male-female dualism.”
“Male and female animals, I suppose. A bit like Noah’s ark,” suggested Manners.
“Not at all, Major Manners. Leroi-Gourhan suggested that that was a grand plan behind the cave art, and he found enough sexual symbolism to conclude it was used for initiation ceremonies into sexual adulthood. The problem was that with some obvious exceptions like the bulls or the pregnant horses, it was often not easy to tell which was male and which was female among the animals. So Leroi-Gourhan decided that all the bison were female symbols and all the horses were male.”
“I thought you said some of the bison were visibly male and some of the horses were pregnant?” objected Manners.
“I did. But when did a French intellectual ever permit some tedious little fact to stand in the way of a sublime theory?”
“Magnificent, madame,” laughed Malrand. “You make this Leroi-Gourhan sound like some politicians I know. But even if this ingenious theory is now exploded by the wisdom of the present day, you have established the predominant role of France and French scholarship in this field of prehistoric art. The good Abbe Breuil, the inventive Leroi-Gourhan, and now our new experts such as yourself.” He bowed courteously to Clothilde. The fun and games were over. Time for the President’s business. Lydia noticed, with only a slightly spiteful glow of pleasure, that Malrand had not asked Clothilde to call him Francois. “So, madame, you are persuaded that this tragically vanished example of cave art comes from the hands that gave us Lascaux?” Malrand asked.
“Hands in the generic sense, Monsieur le President. Not a single pair of hands. A group, a culture, a tradition that created Lascaux. Yes, of that I think I am convinced.”
“So, French without question.”
“I would stake my reputation on that, with the smallest caveat that this could just possibly have come from the Altamira culture of Spain. I doubt it most strongly, since the stylistic traditions are markedly different. But I must warn you that Spain would certainly feel entitled to make a claim. We shall have to move quickly to secure this treasure for France.”
“Which is to say that my ownership of the item would seem to leave me a choice of buyers,” smiled Manners.
“Possibly-if you can show that your father was ever in Spain,” flashed Clothilde. “We know he was here in the Dordogne.”
“Indeed so, but you seem to suggest that an auction between Paris and Madrid might be in prospect.”
“It is to avoid such an outcome that we have offered the reward,” she retorted briskly, before looking across the table to the young woman opposite. “Lydia, you must see the justice of our case.”
Lydia, feeling distracted by the pressure of Malrand’s shoe upon her own and hoping it would not mark the silk, muttered something about its being Manners’s decision, and all a bit academic unless they got the thing back.
“What I don’t see,” said Manners, with labored reasonableness, “is why this single painting is so precious to you. You have one big cave full of the things, dozens of other caves with other works. What’s so special about this one?”
“Perhaps I, as one who knows a little of public opinion, might try to explain,” said Malrand, silencing Clothilde’s eager reaction by simply talking over her.
“Madame’s estimable museum at Les Eyzies, thanks to a generous state grant that I authorized, is being rebuilt, greatly extended, and modernized,” he began, sitting up in his chair. Lydia suddenly had a vision of him at a public meeting, and took advantage of his movement to slide her shoe gently from beneath his. She crossed her legs, putting her feet out of temptation’s way.
“It will become an even greater attraction for the tourist trade, on which this region depends for much of its prosperity, if it were to include, as the highlight of the collection, a genuine example of the finest example of prehistoric art in the world. Since we do not know where it comes from, we can hardly put it back. We are therefore free to display it, as the new museum’s prime exhibit, the Mona Lisa of the Louvre of prehistory.” He bowed graciously to Clothilde, who turned bright red.
“The publicity alone will bring crowds,” he went on sonorously, as the maid brought some plates of a temptingly pink lamb. Scents of rosemary and garlic arose. He poured some of his red wine for Lydia, Clothilde, and Manners, half-filled his own glass, and raised it to the table.
“Eventually, no doubt, the search for the lost cave will catch the attention of scholars, the imagination of the public, and the curiosity of schoolchildren. The good citizens of Les Eyzies and the Dordogne in general, with their hotels and restaurants and shops, will reap the advantage. And France will benefit from the advance of knowledge and the wider dissemination of her unique place as the custodian of the art of humanity’s ancestors.” The President paused, and looked around the table. “I think I can guarantee you that there will be no difficulty in finding state funds to ensure this happy outcome, whether for a greater reward, or indeed, Major Manners, as compensation for your loss. Your family deserves well of France, and we are a generous people.”
You cunning old devil, Lydia thought in admiration. You’re rehearsing this and using us as your test audience. She could see him now rehearsing a public statement, perhaps on television, announcing some lavish reward for the return of France’s property. National pride, high culture, lots of profits for the merchants of his home region so that the reward would look like a clever investment rather than a cost. And a generous gesture to the son of a war hero of France’s Liberation-that would get approving headlines in Britain. How clever these politicians could be. Lydia, thinking hard, saw no downside in the gesture Malrand was preparing, except possibly some waspish articles in the Spanish press. Across the table, her eyes bright with the prospect of becoming queen of this new Louvre of prehistory, Clothilde looked ready to die for her President.
“That seems a most statesmanlike plan, sir,” Lydia said, suddenly thinking it unwise to call him Francois in front of Clothilde. “I am sure my auction house would be happy to fall in with your wishes.”
“Ah yes,” said Malrand. “Your auction house. That reminds me. They are campaigning very hard with my friends in the British government to keep a tax-free rate for the London art market. Is that not so?”
“Indeed, sir.” All the London auction houses were forecasting gloom and bankruptcy if the new European tax plan went through, although it probably meant they would just shift the most lucrative sales to New York and Switzerland.
“I often think there are far too many taxes,” said Malrand. “Perhaps France should reconsider this tax scheme. I’m sure our friends in the Paris salons would agree.”
Lydia felt the room sway slightly. Sipping champagne and admiring Renaissance windows and feeling her toes squeezed, she had rather lost track of what it meant to be lunching with the President of a country. An unimaginably powerful man, who could change national policies at will, who could drop or propose taxes that could affect the livelihoods of thousands of people. A new wave of prosperity for the merchants of the Dordogne, continued fat profits for the art houses of London, just casually tossed onto the luncheon table. Suddenly she thought of the phone call she could make back to London with the happy news. No, this deserved more than a phone call. This could wait until her triumphant return. Better treat it rather casually. Perhaps over a drink with one of the partners. Just had lunch with Malrand at his country place-I think I’ve half-persuaded him to drop this silly European tax plan on art sales. That should be worth a raise. A raise? Ye gods. It should be worth a partnership. A little game of footsie under the table was a picayune price to pay.
“And now a toast,” said Malrand. “That this lost part of our great national heritage will soon be home, where it belongs.” They all drank and began to eat their lamb.
“We will sadly not have time to linger too long over our coffee,” Malrand said casually. “I have arranged for us all to visit Lascaux this afternoon. The real one, that is. We might as well remind ourselves of the heritage we are all trying to safeguard.”
They had driven up the road that ran along the Vezere, past their hotel at la Campagne and through Les Eyzies itself, past the high limestone cliffs that contained cave after cave. Layer after layer of continuous history. Lydia worked it out. Say twenty-five years to a generation, four to a century, forty to a millennium. Seventeen thousand years since Lascaux. Seventeen times forty. Six hundred and eighty generations. And there were still people living in these caves into the twentieth century, some perhaps even descended from the originals who had carved and drawn upon the cave walls the first evidence of a distinctive human sensibility. Who could tell what genes had drifted down from the people of Lascaux to this placid loveliness of modern France? So all but the last two or three generations had been born and bred and died in these gray cliffs, looking at this river, at these blue skies. Probably never dreaming that one day tourists would stand in line to come and tread along the stones where they lived, and pay money to see the carvings they had left.
“Have you visited any of these caves?” Lydia asked Lespinasse, the bald-headed security man with the mustache who had seemed to be in charge of the security staff back at Malrand’s house. He was driving them in one of the big Citroen limousines. To her relief, Malrand had whisked off Clothilde in another car. She remembered one of her mother’s phrases about some men being NSIT, not safe in taxis. Malrand would probably have qualified. Lespinasse had shown her and Manners into this one, and a dark blue Renault Espace followed them with some of the tough young security men.
“Of course, mademoiselle. I was born and raised in le Bugue and used to play in Bara-Bahau, our local cave. My father was with President Malrand in the war.” He did not turn his eyes from the road but directed his voice to Manners. “He knew your father, too. They blew up railway lines together. My father’s dead now, like yours. I met yours when he came out to the funeral. He always came to funerals, your father. He signed the book at Papon’s, the funeral parlor, when he came to pay his respects. Came to the church in le Bugue and to the grave.”
“Really,” said Manners. “I never knew.”
“Must have come four or five times. Always stayed at Malrand’s place. I picked him up a couple of times at the station at Perigueux and drove him here. They always sat up half the night talking, the two of them. It’s normal. I have some old comrades from the time we were in Lebanon. I like to see them, drink a pot or two. You’re a soldier too, I hear.”
“Yes, but there’s not much about Northern Ireland that I like to remember. Which unit were you in?”
“Paras. I served my time, finished as a sous-off, and then applied for the security detail. Malrand was already President. He and my father fixed it up.” Lespinasse leaned forward, punched the cigarette lighter, and fired up a Gauloise. They were cruising quite fast along the open road.
“Are you always based here in Perigord?” Lydia asked.
“No, mademoiselle. I’m deputy chief now, so I always travel with the President, in France and abroad. I met them all with Malrand, your Thatcher, and Gorbachev, and Yeltsin, Reagan, and Kohl. Japanese whose names I can’t remember. I got to know some of your English security people, the ones from Scotland Yard. We went on some courses together. They came and used our special driving school at Nantes, and we spent two weeks with your SAS at Hereford. Tough guys. You did the SAS course, didn’t you?”
“A long time ago,” said Manners. “I’m back with my regiment now.” Lydia raised her eyebrows-that came as a surprise. But then French security would have checked out his career. Manners seemed eager to change the subject. “Were you in Lebanon when the bombs went off? The one that killed a lot of your chaps and then the Americans.”
“Yes, but I wasn’t in the barracks at the time. I was off with the UN in the Bekaa Valley. A bad time. But you know what Napoleon said about the quality he wanted most in his generals?”
“Yes, that they should be lucky,” said Manners.
She glanced at him. Some sort of communication had taken place between the two men that Lydia could not begin to decode. A month ago, she might have jumped into the conversation to make some joke about men joining armies to recapture the boys’ clubs of their youth. Lydia smiled inwardly. It would have been the direct, the American thing to do, forcing the two men to turn their attention back to her. Clothilde would never have done it, being far too subtle in her wiles to stoop to the obvious, and perhaps that explained to Lydia the unconscious decision she had made not to interrupt the two men and the contact they had established. She was learning a lot from Clothilde. That elaborate flirtation with Malrand over the sexual symbols of cave art had been fascinating to watch, a most accomplished and discreet seduction of Malrand through his passion for ideas. It did not seem to have made much impression on the pragmatic Manners. But then the English were supposed to be suspicious of ideas. What, she wondered idly, would be the technique that would affect Manners in a similar way? Clothilde, she suspected, would know by instinct, and would probably employ the right technique out of sheer habit. Lydia was far from sure that she would. By agreeing to join him on this jaunt in Perigord, Lydia told herself, she had made no commitment, although she had not ruled out the prospect of a pleasant romantic dalliance should the mood take her. Manners, she suddenly thought, might not be thinking in the same way at all. What mysteries men were.
They turned off at Montignac, crossed the river, and then ignored the signs that steered the tourists toward the mock cave that had been built for them, taking a side road that wound up the hill and through a thin screen of trees. Looking down, Lydia saw a long slope falling to a stretch of flatter land by the river, then the ground rising from the small town of Montignac beyond. Screen out the town, she thought, and this is the view the artists of seventeen thousand years ago saw as they left the cave each evening.