Diana Glass
The Help
Late night, but a fire still crackles in the grate in the near-empty bar, throwing strange shadows across the silk-lined walls.
Smoky jazz seeps from the gramophone. The few guests sitting at tables talk in low murmurs.
The staff move about silently, grim-faced: no longer chatting and joking with guests and one another.
I realise I haven’t heard the sound of laughter in some time.
I use the not-so-secret painting entrance to step into the deeper privacy of the rustic Stübli, order a whisky from the bartender and take a seat at one of the stools. ‘Pas de glace, merci.’
‘For a moment there you sounded like one of my countrywomen!’
I turn. ‘Inspector Moreau.’
‘Call me Christophe, please,’ he says. ‘I am off-duty. May I?’ He indicates the seat next to me.
‘Of course,’ I say, take a sip of my drink and wince as the alcohol stings my injured lip.
‘It hurts?’ he says.
I shrug. ‘Only a little.’
‘But then you seem like someone who is very brave. I imagine it would take a great deal for you to complain.’
There is a long pause. In this darkened room, empty save for the two of us and the man behind the bar, the air suddenly feels as though it has a weight to it – a charge.
I am conscious of the physical presence of the person beside me, the warmth of his body, the movement of his hands as he picks up his glass, even the rise and fall of his flat stomach as he breathes.
For goodness’ sake, Diana. This is what being cooped up like this does to you. This is what being alone for too long does, too.
‘I wish the circumstances were different,’ he says, in a sudden rush, ‘in which the two of us were sitting in a bar together.’
I can’t think of anything to reply. I feel suddenly stupid, tongue-tied. But there is also a kind of triumph. So he feels it too.
A new record on the gramophone. Charles Trenet’s ‘Que reste-t-il de nos amours’.
We listen for a moment in silence. Tonight, the wind that strikes my door / Speaks to me of dead loves / Before the dwindling fire … ‘You know this one, I think?’ Moreau asks, looking at me closely.
‘Yes.’ I clear my throat. ‘I haven’t heard it for a few years. Perhaps … ‘43?’
The part where it unexpectedly picks up in tempo – a sudden memory … capering like children, cackling with laughter … then the song becomes wistful again.
‘Did you know,’ he says, casually, lifting his glass, ‘I’ve just realised your eyes are the same colour as this cognac? No,’ he lifts it up to the fire so that the light shines through. ‘This is it.’
‘Oh,’ I wave a hand, embarrassed.
‘I’m sorry,’ he says, with a sudden grin, ‘am I being too French? I apologise … but you know, ever since I lost my wife I decided that I would never pass up an opportunity to pay a compliment. I wish I had told her every day how beautiful, how special she was, how rare. Beauty, youth, even life – they are so fleeting, no? And those fascinating elderly ladies you spend your time with … they know it better than any, I would think. And you, did you lose someone too?’
‘What makes you ask that?’
What remains of our love …
‘Nothing in particular. Or everything, I suppose. You carry it with you.’
I actually laugh out loud at this. ‘Well, that’s just wonderful! You make me sound deformed …’
He smiles, but says, earnestly: ‘No, I didn’t mean it like that. Only that I know it because I recognise the burden myself.’
We order another drink and all too quickly, it seems, these are finished too.
I feel a little too buoyant, as though a few of the strings that tether me to a particular code of behaviour have been cut.
It feels precarious – and exciting. Then the barman tells us that he is closing up the Stübli for the evening.
‘That is a sign that I should go to bed,’ says Inspector Moreau.
‘So should I.’ But I have a dread of returning to the solitude of my room and my thoughts.
I walk with him out of the bar and into the lift.
We seem to be standing very close to one another.
I can feel the warm draught of his breath against my cheek.
My skin prickles. I am suddenly aware of the nerve endings in my fingertips, on my scalp, between my shoulder blades; the sensation of my clothing against my skin.
Each of us could give the other more room if we chose to, but neither of us makes any immediate attempt to move away.
There is something about space, or lack of it, that is so eloquent.
Our proximity makes a mockery of any pretence we have made up until this point that there is no attraction between us.
The lift seems to rattle agonisingly slowly up through the floors.
If I stand here with his gaze on me for a moment longer I feel that I will say or do something humiliating.
His room is on the same floor as mine; the third. Finally the doors open and I find myself taking a deep breath, as though the space inside the lift was short on air.
We walk along the corridor. We reach my door. His gaze slides across to meet mine.
‘I suppose I could come to your room,’ I say. ‘For a nightcap.’
He blinks quickly a couple of times. Those thick-lashed, dark blue eyes.
In spite of the dim light I think I see a faint blush surface on his cheeks.
He is flustered, on the back-foot – and I rather like it.
This beautiful man; this man who perhaps represents a danger to me …
I have a brief power over him. It is like rediscovering a muscle I thought had atrophied.
Coming so close to death on the train yesterday reminded me of this, but also the war taught us too.
If you want something, take it while you can.
We pass my door and keep walking.
Inside his room, I find that I suddenly have to think about how to breathe.
My heart is going double time – whether with excitement or nerves I cannot tell.
I excuse myself to go to the bathroom. I splash water on my face, dab scent on my wrists, stare at myself hard in the mirror.
I do not look quite like myself. I have the slightly glassy eyes and flushed cheeks of a woman with a fever.
But I am also reminded of someone. It takes me a moment to understand who.
It is myself, but my younger self – who feels these days like a stranger, divorced as I am from her.
I hadn’t realised she was still in there.
I pinch my cheeks and then feel silly for doing so …
will he notice the effort I’ve made? Hopefully not, in the low lighting.
This sort of thing was easier in the war. There was an unspoken code. Niceties could be forgotten when death was so near. To cling to another warm body, even a stranger’s, was a way of clinging to life.
It has been so long. At first it would have felt like some terrible infidelity – and besides I was simply too sad. And then I worried that I might forget the smell of his skin, as though it might be eclipsed by another’s. Recently, I realised I had forgotten it anyway.
I step out of the bathroom. I step towards him.
Afterwards, I stand and begin to dress. I forgot myself for a while: a blessed relief. But now I am aware of a knot of feeling in my neck, like unshed tears. I’m not sure if it is more from guilt or grief. But there is definitely both.
‘Are you all right?’ he asks.
‘Yes,’ I say, with effort, through the knot.
I reach for my necklace, clumsily, and as I lift it the ring slides down and off the chain; it clinks to the ground and rolls away underneath the bed.
‘Oh!’ The whole thing feels freighted with meaning, somehow – an ill omen.
I drop to my knees and reach a hand under the bed just as Christophe Moreau shouts: ‘No!’
But I am already reaching with my hand. I encounter drifting pieces of lint and dimly register that even in this grand hotel they do not clean that well under the bed. Then I finally touch the ring and then … my fingertips nudge up against something else.
‘What—’ I draw the thing out. Things … photographs.
I am aware of him standing there in an attitude of great tension, as though he wants to snatch them from me but knows he can’t.
Instead he lets me spread them across the coverlet of the bed.
‘What are these?’ I ask, dread mounting before I even fully understand what I am looking at.
The photographs show two men, on the mountain, at night. They are familiar – very familiar – and yet they don’t make any sense here, like this. I look across at him and see his expression of dismay. ‘These … are from my camera?’
A long pause.
‘I had them developed,’ he says, finally.
‘You took the film?’ I feel winded. ‘The other night, when you came to my room?’
It must have been in that brief few minutes when I turned my back to make the drinks.
I’m ashamed at myself too, at my own stupidity.
I have been so careful, for so long. All my planning, all my hard work …
all of it thrown away over a man, who, it appears, has simply been using me for his own ends.
He at least has the good grace to look apologetic.
‘I’m sorry. I have an investigation to conduct here.
I sensed that you were very reluctant to hand the film over.
So reluctant, in fact, that I thought it would probably disappear or even …
suffer some accident if I didn’t act quickly.
So yes, I confess it: I took the roll of film from your room when I visited you there.
It was easy to create a darkroom downstairs – there are many small, lightless spaces in a hotel.
The staff were very accommodating. They understood it was important for the investigation.
No, it was not orthodox. But nothing about this has been.
I have to … to do things I wouldn’t normally do. ’
I stare down at the photographs, unable to look at him. My face burns. Could the latter be a reference to what just happened between us?
‘Can you explain why you took them?’ he asks.
‘They are nearly all of Anthony Narracott and Bruno Crane.’ He moves a new photograph to the top of the pile to illustrate this point, then another, pointing with his finger as though I can’t see it all myself with my own two eyes – as though, for goodness’ sake, I wasn’t there that very night on the other side of the lens.
I simply follow the movements of his hands stupidly, obediently, still unable to speak.
‘Here they are, talking together. Here – it is difficult to make out, because I think it is taken using the light of the full moon as your only source, but it shows them going into some sort of mountain hut. You followed them up the mountain, at night … why?’
I don’t answer. I try to pick up one of the photographs but it vibrates in my hand so much I have to set it back down. I am shaking with shame, fear and, perhaps most of all, the sense of betrayal.
When he speaks again he is on the offensive, the police detective once more: ‘All of your photographs, Madame Glass’ – Madame Glass, no Diana now – ‘are of two men who have recently been murdered in this place. Other than this one and this, which shows some of the nuns, and this mountain scene … You do see how this looks, don’t you? ’
‘I—’
‘It looks as though you were very preoccupied with the activities of these two men.’
He points at the photograph taken by moonlight. It is blurry, but it has come out better than I might have expected in the conditions. In very different circumstances I might almost find some pride in my work.
He points to the one with the men entering the mountain hut.
‘What are they doing here? Can you tell me?’
I don’t think I could get my mouth to form words even if I wanted to.
He tries again with the next one. ‘Did they take anything out of the hut?’
I shake my head again, dumbly.
‘And here,’ he says, putting the next in front of me, ‘do you see this? There is another figure in this photograph. Do you see?’
‘What?’ It is more a sound than a word – a shocked yelp.
I look properly at the image in question and as I do a chill washes over me, like an echo of the cold felt on that freezing night.
No, I had not realised there was another person caught inside the frame.
I had not been aware that there was anyone else there that night.
I stare at the figure. They are almost completely in silhouette and a blurry one at that, because they were clearly moving during the long exposure.
Someone else was up there on the glacier.
But who on earth could it have been? I wasn’t aware of anyone other than the two men at the time …
but then I was so focused on them and their activities that I perhaps wasn’t paying as much attention to the surroundings as I should have been.
I squint at the figure, my heart racing.
Did they see me? The idea that someone else might have been watching me while I watched the others is truly frightening.
‘Who is it?’ I ask.
‘Impossible to tell,’ he says. ‘But if I can develop it again and blow it up this time … I believe there are ways you can make an enlarger from scratch.’
‘Whoever that is,’ I say, ‘might be the murderer.’
I look at him and realise he is watching me with an inscrutable expression. Understanding dawns. ‘You can’t think …’
He shrugs. ‘I’m not sure what to think, Madame Glass.
’ Again, the formality of my surname stings.
Then he sighs, softens. ‘The truth is, I wanted to show you first,’ he says, ‘even though it is – yes – unorthodox. I am not the official investigator of this case. I— I like you, Diana. I want to give you a chance to explain yourself. Can you explain yourself?’
Again, he is watching me closely. He waits for an answer, but again I find that I cannot speak.
Then, all of a sudden, there is the faintest sound: it comes from outside, from the corridor. His head snaps up. He is thinking the same thing I am, that someone is listening at the door.
How much have they heard?
‘Who’s there?’ Inspector Moreau calls.
No answer, of course. He stands and walks in quick strides to the door, throws it open.
‘No one,’ he says, showing the empty corridor beyond. He shakes his head, stepping back into the room. ‘Whoever it was, they were too quick.’
I have the strange and slightly outrageous idea that it could have been Miss Marple, listening hard with those keen ears of hers. I’m sure that she is nimbler than she appears. The idea of it fills me with dread.