The Warning Bell Read online

  Down in the port a siren sounded. I turned my head. From where I stood, high above the town, I could see a ferry, twinkling with lights, nosing out of the harbour mouth to the open sea. I took out my phone and called the flat. Kate answered at once.

  ‘Oh, hi Dad.’ I could hear music in the background and the clink of glasses. She said: ‘Where are you?’

  ‘I’m in Dover.’

  ‘Oh, yes?’

  There was a giggle from behind her and a girl’s voice said: ‘Brett, not in the sink!’

  I said: ‘Is Mum back yet?’

  ‘No. She’s got more sense than that.’

  ‘I’m thinking of staying overnight. Will you let her know?’

  ‘Sure. Of course.’

  I paused. ‘Do you need me for anything?’

  ‘Need you?’ She laughed fondly. ‘You’re a liability.’

  I watched the dwindling ferry, its wake churning white. ‘I might stay away for a day or two. I’m thinking of going over to France.’

  ‘Right,’ she said, with more attention now.

  ‘I’ll give you a call tomorrow and tell you what’s going on. OK?’

  She was silent for a couple of beats, long enough for me to wonder if we’d lost the connection.

  ‘Kate?’

  ‘I knew it,’ she said.

  ‘Knew what?’

  ‘That he was just your dad. And you were just his little boy.’

  8

  The fields on either side were heavy with rain. I had been driving for an hour or more down winding coastal lanes and no longer knew exactly where I was, but I assumed I must be somewhere near St Cyriac by now. I came over a small humpbacked bridge across a river, and I slowed to get my bearings. On my left, set back from the road, stood a fine old house with tall windows and ornamental turrets. I glanced at it and overshot the turning to the village, so that I had to stop and back up.

  I drove down a narrow lane between stone walls, catching a glimpse of houses and slate roofs and a quadrant of iron dark sea. The lane opened into a village street – boulangerie, Citroen garage, minimarket – and abruptly I was in St Cyriac. Most of the shops were shuttered against the gloomy afternoon. Another hundred metres and I emerged into an unexpectedly handsome square surrounded by buildings of honey coloured local stone.

  The Hotel de Ville looked out over a small park set with plane trees and benches. A large grey church stared across the open space from rising ground on the other side. There were puddles of rainwater on the gravel and the benches were deserted. Between the buildings I saw a harbour wall and boats.

  I parked and got out. Three middle-aged men in anoraks and woollen hats, all with binoculars slung over their shoulders, were unloading backpacks from the boot of a car, but otherwise the square was empty. It was peaceful in the soft afternoon light. Drops fell from the leafless branches above me, thunking onto the Discovery’s bodywork.

  I looked around the square, wondering where to start. A school behind black railings, a pharmacy, gloomy Bar du Sport, estate agents, solicitor’s office, Credit Agricole bank, photo shop. The buildings along the seaward side were mostly residential, two-storey houses and guesthouses with mansard flats which, on the far side, must look directly out over the Channel.

  A rose arbour stood in the square immediately opposite the church. I walked over to it and glanced inside. At the far end was a bas relief carved in grey and pink granite. The stone wings of the monument curved towards me on either side to form benches, and into the backs of the benches were cut the names of the dead from both world wars, and from Algeria and Indo-China.

  I walked up to the bas relief under the arch of roses. I had expected a soldier in heroic or tragic pose, but this was a family group – a smiling dapper man, an elegant woman, and a girl with large sad eyes. The inscription underneath read simply: Famille Rosen - 1942.

  I left the monument and turned down an alleyway between two fine old houses. Stepping out onto the seafront was like emerging from a quiet wood directly onto a windswept plain. The sea stretched away grey and broken under a bruised sky. A formation of high flying geese cruised seaward, honking faintly as they went, and out on the harbour wall a knot of watchers in rain gear followed them excitedly through binoculars. They were the only people in sight.

  I strolled left, towards the harbour. A score of boats rocked here, six or seven fat little fishing craft and oyster boats, a ferry kitted out for day trips but still sheeted down under tarpaulins awaiting the start of the season, a couple of rental yachts and a port authority barge. But almost at my feet lay easily the most handsome vessel in the basin, an exquisite cabin cruiser about eight metres long, with brass fittings, a spoked wheel and polished decks which might have been teak. Even I could see it was an antique, perhaps as old as my father’s craft, though this vessel had clearly been built for pleasure and style. A tarpaulin was stretched over the bow and through the cabin window I could see tools laid out and lengths of timber. Someone was evidently in the process of restoring the vessel, and lovingly. Its name - The Gay Dog - was lettered in a burgundy scroll on the transom.

  A bell jangled as a door opened behind me, and I turned and saw a steamy restaurant window with lights glowing behind dribbling glass. I crossed the road and went in. It looked as if most of the population of the village had taken refuge inside. The tables were crowded and the bar, with its rows of china beer pumps and old-fashioned mirrors, was two deep with people, shoulder-to-shoulder.

  I leaned in a corner, hoping a seat would materialise somewhere. I liked the feel of the place, and didn’t mind waiting. There were opera posters on the walls and, close to where I stood, framed black-and-white and sepia photographs of old ships and buildings. The proprietor appeared magically at my elbow, a handsome fleshy man of about forty with a fine moustache and a gold earring.

  ‘A table, M’sieur?’ Before I could answer he gestured at two youths hunched over a window table and roared: ‘Move your backsides, you idle layabouts! Make room for some quality custom there!’

  The youngsters – working lads in sweaters and parkas – grumbled while the owner stood in magnificent disdain, one hand on his hip and his head thrown back, but they rose and drifted off to the bar. My host led me through the crowd, seated me with extravagant courtesy, and began to polish the table top. He cracked the napkin like a whip and tucked it into his apron.

  ‘Staying for a while, M’sieur?’

  ‘A few days.’

  ‘Congratulations. You’re the first this year. You’ve extended our holiday season all by yourself. In fact you may be our holiday season.’ He drew himself up and offered me his hand. ‘I am Henri. And you are welcome. But if you’re planning to stay in the village I hope you’ve booked.’

  ‘At this time of year?’

  ‘It’s the migratory geese, M’sieur. They gather out on the Shoals. Please understand I’ve nothing against geese. Very good roasted with apricots. But the people who observe them are rather odd, and these odd people have taken over most of the rooms in town.’ He produced his order pad with a flourish. ‘But you could always try Evangeline Didier’s. She’s so strange that even goose watchers steer clear of her. I can’t say I’d exactly recommend her place, but at least no one else is likely to be there.’

  ‘It sounds perfect. Where can I find it?’

  ‘You can’t miss Evangeline’s. It’s a ghastly three-storey monstrosity just behind the library, painted the colour of mould.’

  ‘Thanks.’ I waited, but Henri still didn’t seem in any hurry to take my order.

  ‘Though perhaps you too are interested in migratory geese, M’sieur?’ he went on. ‘I must say, you don’t look quite peculiar enough.’

  ‘I’m on a different mission. I’m looking for an old boat.’

  ‘We have plenty of them around here. Almost as many as geese.’

  ‘One old boat in particular.’ I took the magazine article out of my wallet and spread it on the table for him to see.

 
Henri looked down at the picture and pulled down the corners of his mouth. ‘You’d do better with a new one, M’sieur.’

  ‘You don’t recognise it?’

  He shook his head. ‘They all look the same to me.’

  In a village this size I had assumed everyone must know about the old launch, but if Henri did, he seemed determined not to admit it.

  I said: ‘It’s supposed to have been here since the War.’

  ‘The War, eh? Which war would that be, now?’ He swung back towards the bar, where a tall and beautiful blond man was pulling glasses of Kronenbourg lager. ‘Gunther? Did you ever hear of a war around here?’

  The tall man sliced foam off a glass with a spatula and flicked it into the sink. ‘Nah,’ he said, without looking up. ‘I would have noticed that.’

  ‘I’ll have a grand crème,’ I said, weakly.

  9

  By the time I left the café the rain had started to fall again.

  I stood for a while on the quay, between the iron bollards and the piled lobster pots. The small adventure of getting here was over, and I felt tired and deflated. But I thought that I should be making some effort, so I trudged along the front for a few hundred metres, following the promenade round. Behind the cottages lay a patch of open ground, a child’s playground, deserted in the rain, and beyond that a flash of what must be the River Vasse. I crossed the playground to the water’s edge. It wasn’t broad - could have thrown a stone halfway across - but the steepness of the little valley in which the river flowed suggested it might be deep. The water was overhung with trees, the sliding surface black in the failing light and stippled with rain. On the point opposite me, half swallowed in the undergrowth, I glimpsed a jumble of broken concrete, an old blockhouse, perhaps. There were no other buildings on the river bank.

  In the estuary of the Vasse. That was where the boat had been found. Did that mean here? There was no sign of any boat or of anything else unusual, just this deep, swift little river winding down through the woods from my right. If the boat was somewhere along these wooded banks, it could be anywhere. Perhaps it was no longer here at all. The rain strengthened, drops slapping through the leaves above me. Had there even been a war? Oh, no. Henri and his friend Gunther would have noticed that.

  I plodded back into the square, got my bag from the Discovery and made my way to the guesthouse.

  Madame Didier’s false lashes sat on her eyelids like large spiders. She reclined against the doorframe, and looked me sourly up and down, moving only her eyes. They were large blue eyes, like a child’s marbles, and fitted only approximately into their sockets.

  ‘You wish to take a room, Monsieur?’

  ‘Henri at the café recommended you, Madame.’

  ‘Ha!’ Her bark of laughter startled me.

  I began to lose confidence, standing in the street with the rain falling on me and this dour old woman observing me like a specimen.

  Finally she said: ‘This establishment has not been open for business for three years, Monsieur. Not since Jean-Luc was carried off. My husband, that is. That was.’

  ‘I’m sorry to hear that.’

  ‘Don’t be. He was carried off by the wife of the man who empties the fosse septique. They deserved one another.’

  ‘I’m sorry to have troubled you, Madame.’ I turned to go, mentally cursing Henri for having sent me.

  ‘Don’t run away,’ she commanded suddenly. ‘Perhaps something may be arranged. Come.’

  I didn’t have the courage to refuse her summons and I followed her through the door, closing it behind me. The house was dim and congested. Glass-fronted cases crammed with cheap porcelain figurines flanked the corridor, and above them the wall was crowded with framed black-and-white photographs of a much younger Madame Didier in sequined gowns posing with men in dinner jackets.

  I followed her into a large room so cluttered with overstuffed furniture that it seemed small. A bald man in shorts sat in an armchair eating peanuts and drinking Stella lager from a bottle. He leapt to his feet so quickly that he had to catch the glass dish of peanuts before it fell. He stood blinking from me to Madame Didier and back again.

  ‘Gaston, prepare the Camellia Suite,’ she ordered, ‘and take the gentleman’s bag.’

  He grabbed my bag and fled with it.

  ‘Gaston is an uncultured yokel.’ Madame Didier settled into a brocade armchair and waved me to the one opposite. ‘But he has his uses. He empties the septic tank. A most necessary function.’ She lit a long white cigarette and grew languid. ‘I will tell you the truth, M’sieur. There were times when I considered pushing Gaston’s little slut of a wife into that same fosse septique, but my husband was so besotted that he would only have jumped in to rescue her. Not that he would have been able to distinguish her from all the other shit.’

  She tapped the ash from her cigarette into a brass Moorish pot. I heard a wet snuffling beside my chair and an elderly boxer dog shambled into view, stretched, and without further preliminaries attempted to mount my left leg. I prised the dog off, but instantly he grappled my shin again. I dislodged him with a struggle, and he lay down on the rug and gazed at me, grunting with lust.

  Madame Didier blew out a long stream of smoke but said nothing.

  Desperate to make some normal conversation, I said: ‘You’ve lived in St Cyriac for some time, Madame?’

  ‘All my life, M’sieur. My aunt and uncle owned the house before me.’

  ‘Well, in that case, Madame, I wonder if you’d be able to help me with a little research I’m undertaking?’

  ‘Research?’

  ‘I realise this was long before your time, Madame, but I’m investigating events that took place here during the War.’

  She stared at me coldly, disdaining my ridiculous flattery.

  I pulled the magazine cutting out of my pocket and held it out to her. ‘Perhaps you recognise this vessel?’

  Her face clenched, and I knew at once that I had overstepped some mark.

  She said: ‘I was much too young to understand what was happening during the War, M’sieur.’ She made no attempt to look at the cutting but sat gazing at me through her cigarette smoke for so long that I began to find it unsettling. ‘There are a lot of stories from those days. Or perhaps only one, told by many different tellers.’

  I waited but she didn’t elaborate and a moment later Gaston reappeared and led me up to the room.

  The Camellia Suite was at the very top of the house, wedged under the angle of the roof, and it was as tasteless as any room I had ever stayed in. A glass cabinet of crystal animals stood beside the door and a huge print of Landseer’s The Stag at Bay hung on the wall beside the bed. A child’s chest of drawers, thick with blue paint and with two of its knobs missing, sat under the mansard window. On it sat a burn-scarred Cinzano ashtray and a Lladro ballerina.

  I shut the ballerina and the ashtray in the top drawer and pushed open the window. The view gave out over angled slate roofs, dark with the rain, and the backs of the houses along the seaward side of the square. Beyond that lay the wide black expanse of the sea. The air was cool and rainwater clucked miserably in the gutters.

  I sat on the end of the bed, and asked myself what in God’s name I thought I was doing here.

  10

  The weather was still dull the following morning. I ate croissants and drank coffee in solitary state at a camping table set up in the sitting room, served by a terrified Gaston. Of Madame Didier there was no sign. It was utterly quiet, and the ringing of my cutlery sounded like a fire alarm.

  I escaped as soon as I could and spent an hour wandering round the wet streets. I fooled myself that I was exploring the little town, but the reality was that I had no idea what to do next. Someone, presumably, must at least know about the boat: I asked in the pharmacy and the minimarket. The pharmacist was Vietnamese and the manageress of the minimarket came from Lannion. Neither of them knew what I was talking about.

  In a moment of inspiration I thought of the
local library. I found it, housed in a modern annexe beside the Hotel de Ville, but the sign on the door told me it was only open three days a week, and today was not one of them.

  I wandered back across the square. I felt very much a stranger here. I thought of Chantal and Kate, already packing, I guessed, for our new life. I was holding that up with this ridiculous quest. The sight of the Discovery parked under the trees was almost enough at that moment to tempt me to give up the whole thing.

  Still debating that with myself, I walked over to the war memorial under its rose arbour, and ducked in under the dripping branches. I moved close to the monument itself, that sad little family group - portly father, handsome mother, the girl with huge eyes.

  ‘The Rosen family,’ a man’s voice said from behind me.

  He was sitting at the end of the bench quite close to where I stood, but so lost in the gloom of the arbour that I had not noticed him. He was an old man with a white moustache and white hair tucked under a beret. A very old man, I saw now. He was slightly built and wore a fawn gabardine coat, dark with moisture on the shoulders, over a maroon cravat and a tweed jacket. His brogues shone like conkers, even in the dim light. He had kindly blue eyes and the dignity of a patrician.

  I said: ‘Who were they? The Rosens?’

  ‘Gustave was our mayor at the start of the Second World War. That’s him, his wife Rachael and daughter Madeleine – Lena, as everyone called her. Jewish, of course.’

  ‘Ah.’ I looked again at the monument.

  ‘They were taken in 1942.’

  ‘They must have been terrible times,’ I said.

  ‘Terrible, yes, and in many different ways. It is a curiously corrosive experience to see foreign soldiers marching through the streets of one’s village, and the swastika flying from one’s Town Hall.’

  ‘I can imagine.’

  He smiled. ‘Forgive me, but I’m sure you cannot.’

  There didn’t seem to be anything I could say to that.