The Day of the Jackal

He put down the luggage and leaned on the bar. The locals, he noticed, were drinking red wine.

“Un gros rouge, s'il vous plait, madame'

“How far is the chateau, madame,» he asked when the wine was poured. She eyed him keenly from wily black marbles.

«Two kilometres, monsieur.»

He sighed wearily. «That fool of a driver tried to tell me there was no chateau here. So he dropped me in the square'

«He was from Egletons?» she asked.

The jackal nodded.

«They are fools at Egletons,» she said.

«I have to get to the chateau,» he said.

The ring of peasants watching from their tables made no move. No one suggested how he might get there. He pulled out a new hundred-franc note.

«How much is the wine, madame?»

She eyed the note sharply. There was a shifting among the blue cotton blouses and trousers behind him.

«I haven't got change for that,» said the old woman.

He sighed.

«If only there were someone with a van, he might have change,» he said.

Someone got up and approached from behind.

«There is a van in the village, monsieur,» growled a voice.

The jackal turned with mock surprise.

«It belongs to you, mon ami?, 'No, monsieur, but I know the man who owns it. He might run you up there.»

The jackal nodded as if considering the merits of the idea.

«In the meantime, what will you take?»

The peasant nodded at the crone, who poured another large glass of rough red wine, «And your friends? It's a hot day. A thirsty day.»

The stubbled face split into a smile. The peasant nodded again to the woman who took two full bottles over to the group round the big table. 'Benoit, go and get the van,» ordered the peasant, and one of the men, gulping down his wine in one swallow, went outside.

The advantage of the peasantry of the Auvergne, it would seem, mused the Jackal, as he rattled and bumped the last two kilometres up to the chateau, is that they are so surly they keep their damn mouths shut-at least to outsiders.

Colette de la Chalonniere sat up in bed, sipped her coffee and read the letter again. The anger that had possessed her on the first reading had dissipated, to be replaced by a kind of weary disgust.

She wondered what on earth she could do with the rest of her life. She had been welcomed home the previous afternoon after a leisurely drive from Gap by old Ernestine, the maid who had been in service at the chateau since Alfred's father's day, and the gardener, Louison, a former peasant boy who had married Ernestine when she was still an under housemaid.

The pair were now virtually the curators of the chateau of which two-thirds of the rooms were shut off and blanketed in dust covers.

She was, she realised, the mistress of an empty castle where there were no children playing in the park any more, nor a master of the household saddling his horse in the courtyard.

She looked back at the cutting from the Paris glossy society magazine that her friend had so thoughtfully mailed to her; at the face of her husband grinning inanely into the flash-bulb, eyes torn between the lens of the camera and the jutting bosom of the starlet over whose shoulder he was peering. A cabaret dancer, risen from bar hostess, quoted as saying she hoped «one day' to be able to marry the Baron, who was her «very good friend'.

Looking at the lined face and scrawny neck of the ageing Baron in the photograph, she wondered vaguely what had happened to the handsome young captain of the Resistance partisans with whom she had fallen in love in 1942 and married a year later when she was expecting her son.

She had been a teenage girl, running messages for the Resistance, when she met him in the mountains. He had been in his mid-thirties, known by the code-name of Pegasus, a lean, hawk-faced commanding man who had turned her heart. They had been married in a secret ceremony in a cellar chapel by a priest of the Resistance, and she had borne her son in her father's house.

Then after the war had come the restoration of all his lands and properties. His father had died of a heart attack when the Allied armies swept across France, and he had emerged from the heather to become the Baron of Chalonniere, cheered by the peasantry of the countryside as he brought his wife and son back to the chateau. Soon the estates had tired him, the lure of Paris and the lights of the cabarets, the urge to make up for the lost years of his manhood in the undergrowth had proved too strong to resist.

Now he was fifty-seven and could have passed for seventy.

The Baroness threw the cutting and its accompanying letter on the floor. She jumped out of bed and stood in front of the full-length mirror on the far wall, pulling open the laces that held the peignoir together down the front. She stood on tiptoe to tighten the muscles of her thighs as a pair of high-heeled shoes would do.