The Splendour Falls by Susanna Kearsley Read Free Book Online Page B

mumbled some faint words of thanks for dinner, and wandered off towards the beckoning lights. A moment later Neil Grantham followed suit. He had a long unhurried stride, and watching him I felt again that strange unbidden twinge of interest. I pushed it back, and tried to hold my thoughts to what was going on around me.
    Simon and Garland had switched from Nazis now to neo-Nazis, and the rising tide of tension in Europe. ‘It’s all the immigration,’ Garland was saying. She tossed her auburn head. ‘It’s the same everywhere, I think, all these foreigners moving in and taking over. It’s like the Jews all over again, isn’t it? I mean, you can’t condone what the Nazis did, don’t get me wrong, but you can almost understand it. These immigrants can get so uppity …’
    It was an ugly thing to say. I stared at her, and Jim burst out: ‘God, Garland, honestly …!’ and then to my delight Simon recovered from his own stunned silence witha vengeance and began to give her proper hell. In the midst of all this Paul turned placidly to me and smiled. ‘Feel like taking a walk?’ he asked.
    ‘Sure.’
    I don’t think anybody even noticed us leaving. Paul turned towards the river, away from the hotel, and I ambled along beside him, content to let him set the pace.
    We walked past a statue that I recognised from my travel brochures – a seated figure of the great humanist Rabelais, once a traveller and a lover of life, now confined to one small patch of garden at the end of the Place du Général de Gaulle. Bathed by floodlights, the seated scholar seemed immense, brooding in gloomy silence as the river murmured on behind him.
    Paul sauntered across the road and round the far side of the statue, where a narrow breach in the river wall revealed a long fall of sloping stone stairs that vanished into the dark water below. On the seventh stair down, he sat and waited for me.
    ‘I lied,’ he confessed, with a sheepish smile. ‘I didn’t really feel like a walk. I felt like a cigarette.’ He shook one loose and offered the pack to me, but I declined, watching his face in the brief flare of the match.
    ‘I didn’t know you smoked,’ I said.
    ‘Only when Simon’s not around. He’s got opinions on all kinds of things, and smoking’s one of them. I try to avoid arguments when I can. In case you hadn’t noticed.’ He grinned suddenly, and I knew that he was thinking not of his brother but of Garland Whitaker, and the little scene we’d just escaped from.
    I envied him his self-control, and told him so. ‘I’m afraid she makes me lose my temper.’
    ‘Bad luck to lose your temper on the Sabbath – that’s what my mother always tells me.’
    ‘I’m safe, then. It’s only Friday.’.
    ‘After sundown on Friday.’ He smiled. ‘My Sabbath.’
    It took me a moment to digest that. ‘You’re Jewish?’
    He shrugged, still smiling. ‘With a name like Lazarus I’d better be.’
    To be truthful, I hadn’t noticed his surname at all. But then, I fancied myself a different sort of person than Garland Whitaker. I thought again of what she’d said, of how she’d said it … ‘She really is a hateful woman.’
    ‘No she isn’t. Not really. She just gets a little bit much sometimes, that’s all.’ His eyes touched mine briefly, warmly, then drifted away again, out across the wide expanse of river to the shadowed line of trees that rimmed the opposite shore. ‘She doesn’t mean anything by it. It’s simple ignorance with her, not spite.’
    I wasn’t convinced. ‘Sure about that, are you?’
    ‘Pretty sure. Besides, you get used to it, after a while.’ He paused, drawing deeply on the cigarette, still gazing out over the swiftly flowing water. ‘You see those trees over there? That’s not the other side of the river, it’s an island. You can’t tell, really, unless you see it from the cliffs, or walk across the bridge, there.’ His voice was soft and even, storytelling. ‘They burned the Jews of