Songs of Blue and Gold (29 page)

Melissa pulled out a couple and chose the one which had the largest scale.

‘The arts centre, L'Espace Julian Adie – is it marked on here?' Melissa asked as the woman handed her some coins in change.

‘I'm not sure. May I?' She opened the map, and reached for a pen. ‘Here.' She indicated a street near the castle. ‘Would you like me to mark it?'

‘Yes, please. Will it be open now?'

A brief glance at a slip of a watch on her slim wrist. ‘It should be.'

Melissa thanked her and turned to leave. But as there was no one else in the shop, she took the chance to ask, ‘Excuse me, do people still remember Julian Adie well?'

The woman pouted slightly, then patted the top of her head as if to reassure herself the glasses were still there. ‘M'sieur Adie, he was a famous English writer. He lived here for many years. But he died . . . oh, fifteen, twenty years ago now.'

‘But people here still remember him?'

‘The older ones, yes.' How could it be otherwise, her eyes
seemed to say. She was on the point of dismissing her, when she added, ‘There is a small collection of his books and diaries on display there. If you're interested you should take a look.'

‘Thank you. I will.'

A fractious yapping that can only have come from a small, spoilt dog could be heard the other side of an open door at the back of the
librairie
, calling its mistress to heel. ‘I'm coming, I'm coming,
chéri
,' she cooed.

Melissa took her cue and left with the map.

Here and there were building works, the restoration of ancient houses,
Chantier interdit au public
, as if the public were there in any numbers to press its collective nose against the slats in the wooden barrier.

On one unprepossessing wooden door was a fly-speckled board showing faded photographs of women wearing feathers and bikinis. It was the portal to an old-fashioned Théâtre-Cabaret, open solely on Saturday nights. The pictures might have been taken thirty years before. The women in the pictures might now be pouchy grandmothers, still bumping and grinding out their routine for the same mechanics and farm workers who had slept with them at eighteen.

Further on, a bar pumped out pungent curls of Gauloise smoke, and strong coffee.

A window far above exuded the faint melody of a song she recognised. Her footsteps padded across stone to its rhythm.

And then, just as she was wondering how much further it was, Julian Adie was right in front of her. A vast banner unfurled his face, half-smiling, down the side of an austere
solid stone building. A few steps led up to a cobbled courtyard, where a tall, blue-grey door stood open. Inside that, was L'Espace Julian Adie, the town's arts centre.

Melissa went up.

Through the door was a high vaulted hall in bare brick and stone. The space was filled by metallic sculptures. A thin young woman in a short black tunic stood just inside, by a desk covered in leaflets.

She looked up but did not smile.

Melissa did. ‘Hello. I understand you have an exhibition of Julian Adie's books here?' She made it a question, for politeness' sake.

‘The permanent exhibition, you mean?' The girl's dyed red hair was pulled into untidy sprays of hair by elastic bands. She could not have been more than twenty.

‘I think it must be.'

‘Over there, in that room.'

Admission was free, it seemed. Melissa went across the cool floor, past aluminium torsos and agonised zinc corpses. The current sculpture display, she assumed. A small room to the side held a large glass-fronted cabinet, scuffed and chipped at its base where the wood had been pecked out by toecaps over the years.

It held a miscellany of objects. Prominent was a photograph of Adie with Anais Nin at the Bar Vidourle, the cafe she had noticed on the river embankment, its setting apparently unchanged from thirty years previously. In others Adie was grinning at a blonde woman who looked like his third wife Simone Réjane. Several handwritten notes rather than diaries, in English and French, and a scrawl on a programme for a summer art event in 1975 which stated that Sommières
had provided him with the happiest years he had ever known. An edition of
The Carcassonne Quartet
in French translation, the book that won the prestigious Prix de Grenoble, and another of his
Collected Poems
, open at the title page to reveal his signature.

Melissa stared hard, trying and failing to make them tell her something, these bits of paper he had touched or blazed to create. But they were random pieces of paper, nothing more. For about a quarter of an hour, no one else was there. But neither was any sense of immediacy, let alone intimacy.

When she emerged, the girl by the entrance counter had gone. Melissa was alone with the beaten metal torsos.

Had Elizabeth come and stood here too, with her own private memories? For now Melissa knew – surely – it was no coincidence that she had chosen a house in France so close to where Adie had made his home.
When did my parents buy the bergerie? Which year was that first summer at St Cyrice?

Lost inside her own head, she hardly registered movement at the periphery of her vision. It was the click of heels on the flagged floor approaching that jolted her back into the present.

‘Are you all right?' asked a woman.

Melissa started.

It was hard to tell whether the rapped enquiry was an offer to impart information about an artist, or concern for a tourist who had strayed out of her depth and looked uncomfortable. She was not tall – hence the stilettos, perhaps – and wore a laminated badge on the lapel of her tailored blue suit, ‘Mme Delphine MASSENET' along with an air of authority.

‘Yes,' said Melissa, ‘I'm fine, thank you.'

‘It seemed as if you wanted to ask something.' Mme Massenet's tone was matter-of-fact rather than unfriendly.

‘Well, actually, I would.'

She waited, head tilted. The olive skin across her proud cheekbones was smooth and plump.

‘I was interested in your permanent exhibition – Julian Adie's life and work.' Melissa used the grandiose terms the little display had claimed for itself and tried to keep the disappointed edge out of her voice.

‘You know his work?'

She nodded. ‘I was wondering, as I'm here in Sommières, if you could tell me where his house was?' It struck her as she said it, that had Adie still been alive, the request could well have been received with suspicion. A stalker's question. A deranged fan.

‘Monsieur Adie's house? Across the bridge, on the western side of town. Route de Saussines.'

Pointed in the right direction, Melissa had no doubt she would find it easily. When Adie bought the house it was the largest in the village, the
maison de maître
. It was a great shuttered nineteenth-century mausoleum straight from the pages of Flaubert. His family named it the Vampire House. There was a photograph of it in the biography.

‘Thank you, madame.'

‘You're welcome.'

‘I don't suppose . . .' she began, then hesitated.

‘Yes?'

‘I was thinking . . . obviously Monsieur Adie is remembered here,' Melissa waved a hand around to show she meant the arts centre. ‘But I assume there must be people here in the town who remember him as friends . . .' She tailed off,
unwilling to say what she really wanted. It seemed too presumptuous.

Madame Massenet visibly raised herself on her heels. ‘I knew him.'

‘Well, that's marvellous—!'

There was an awkward moment as Melissa's sudden enthusiasm met her equally unexpected blankness.

Melissa opened her mouth to say something, anything, when Madame Massenet interrupted. ‘You really need to speak to Annick.'

‘Annick,' Melissa repeated. ‘Is she here? I mean, could I speak to her here?'

‘She's in and out.'

It was not helpful. This was proving an odd encounter. Yet probably no odder than her questions – or did they have hundreds of people each year, sidling in, faintly embarrassed in their British way, of revealing their interest in a compatriot who wrote books, and some of them dirty ones at that? To this woman, Melissa must have been one more in a long line of tourists, crumpled clothes limp and big feet splayed in shoes suitable for pounding the ancient cobbles and climbing steps.

‘I enjoyed the exhibition,' she said, trying to reinstate their previous roles.

Madame Massenet nodded, as if dismissing her.

Melissa was almost at the door before she called out. ‘We have a literary evening here tomorrow. A French author, Gilles Barreau. Annick will be here if you want to find her.'

‘Thank you, madame.'

The girl was back at the counter as she passed. She caught Melissa's eye and held up an index finger to make her wait a
second. Flicking through a sheaf of pamphlets, she extracted a simple flyer. ‘
Une soirée avec Gilles Barreau,
' it announced.

‘The time is on there,' she said, handing it over.

Annick. The name was familiar but just out of reach, like a tune which once haunted and now cannot quite be pinned down. Was she imagining its resonance, mistaking the name of a film star or a parfumier, perhaps, for the answer she wanted?

Excitement stirred. Melissa walked faster and faster back to the car. Now, again, it was just possible to conjure the spirit of Julian Adie, to picture him on that corner, or disappearing down that alley.

Unlocking the car she paused, looking up at the stunted top of the tower rising over the town. She drummed her fingers on the roof of the vehicle, feeling the heat the metal had absorbed. She was warming up herself, infused with purpose.

Within minutes she had crossed back over the bridge to the western side of town, looking out for the Route de Saussines.

Would the new ring road have swallowed his Vampire House? She was looking for a grand
maison de maître.
A peculiar choice of residence for a man who professed to enjoy living as an olive farmer, or a fisherman.

Traffic snarled and smoked around a sharp bend. To judge from the vehicles, this was still an enclave of rusty vans and Peugeots, a France not much changed from Adie's time.

Melissa drove as slowly as she dared, constantly checking the rear-view mirror for anything coming up close behind.
The house, she was certain, was enclosed behind a wall, screened from the road by trees. Its mansard roof would be just visible from the road.

She could not see it. The town ended abruptly after a vast dusty graveyard and the road out was rapidly engulfed by fields. Either she had taken the wrong turning, or she had failed to recognise it.

Back at St Cyrice, the
bergerie
had an abandoned feel. Richard was not back.

Melissa's spirits dropped, though she was not surprised. It was hardly the first time he had lost days of a holiday due to a difficult deal. She called him, but his mobile was switched off and went straight to voicemail. She hesitated, wanting to leave a message, but finally pressed the button to end the call.

Melissa leaned back against the wall of the kitchen, suddenly weary. But ten minutes later she picked up the phone again.

‘Joe? It's Melissa.'

She and Joe Collins did some catching up – his wife was expecting their second child in July; no, Melissa was not sure when she was returning to work, and it was unlikely to be at Kew when she did – and then she asked him. ‘Listen Joe, I'd like a favour.'

‘Sure.'

Typical Joe: agree first, then ask what the favour was. Whatever else was going on in her life, she told herself firmly, she had some good friends. There were definitely times nowadays when she wondered how different her life might have turned out if she'd taken him up on his several
offers to turn the heat up under their friendship. That was before their respective marriages, of course. Why had she dismissed kindness and sincerity so readily in favour of a false excitement which had turned out to be nothing more than uncertainty?

‘I was hoping you might be able to do a quick google and then an index search for me,' she said, picturing him at his desk in London's most prestigious library, the computer never turned off on the untidy desk where he could lay his hands on any required information in a heartbeat. ‘I don't have my laptop here.'

‘Fire away.'

‘Dr Martin Braxton.'

It only took a few seconds.

‘Only seems to be one – US academic . . . currently at the University of Michigan . . . author of a study of Don Webber. . . . Is that the one you were after?'

‘Yes. That must be him.'

‘Do you want anything more?'

‘Not really, I just needed to check . . .'

‘You sure?'

‘Well, OK . . . could you try . . . Julian Adie and Annick?' She spelled out the woman's name.

‘Just . . . Annick?'

‘I don't have a surname. But it's not a common name, so—'

She could hear the keyboard clicking at the other end of the line. She held her breath, fidgeting with the box of matches next to a candle on the dresser.

‘No . . . nothing.'

‘Nothing at all?'

‘No. Are you all right, Mel?'

‘Yes . . . fine. No, well, I suppose I am disappointed – I remembered wrong, or rather didn't remember the name at all.'

‘What?'

‘Sorry, just thinking aloud. Been spending too much time on my own lately!' she tried to laugh it off.

‘I thought you said Richard was with you out there?'

‘Yes,' she said sadly. ‘He is.'

‘So . . . how?'

‘It's a long story.'

The thought crossed her mind to ask Joe to look up Alexandros on the internet – perhaps there was a Greek telephone directory on-line. Or perhaps she could get the number for Manolis at the boat hire office, and pass on a message that way. But she held back. It felt far too private to be exposed, even to a good friend like Joe.