Excerpt: Behind the Truth

They met the next day at the mairie, having parted as the party got underway the night before. Alice had spent the evening wandering through the crowds, listening to the music and eating local delicacies from the stalls that did appear as the streets filled up.
Jean had an office at the little town hall and Alice waiting in the cool darkness of the hall while he finished some business. She had walked the town that morning, trying to imagine her grandfather there – with some measure of success. Her grandfather had been a quiet man and Alice could imagine Samuel finding a sort of solace in the small, quiet town. When she had known him, he had lived in London, but she had always felt that he was happier away from the city.
It was her grandmother, Lillian, who loved the city. And Samuel had loved her, so they lived there. Lillian would have been harder to place in this sleepy area, but Alice had no doubt that had she been given the challenge, Lillian would have integrated herself into the community and never once looked back.
Jean was finally ready, and he apologised as he led her to his car. The business of town officials is never really over, he explained, and while he was actually at his office he could not simply tell the people to go away and come back tomorrow. But now he was free, he added with a smile, and he hoped that she would enjoy the trip he had in store for her.
They drove for about a mile outside of the town, to a little stone villa on a hill, so unutterably picturesque that it transfixed Alice at the gateway. Jean looked back at her from half-way along the path.
‘Are you all right?’ he asked.
‘My grandfather lived here?’ she asked incredulously.
‘Yes,’ he answered. ‘This is the Englishman’s house. It is being rented by an American couple at the moment – they will not be able to tell you very much about the history, I’m afraid. But this is where he lived.’
‘I never imagined it would be so …’ she gestured at the building. ‘I thought perhaps he had a little house like the ones in town. Not … this …’
Jean smiled understandingly. ‘Come,’ he held out his hand to her. ‘Come and meet your grandfather’s house.’
The American couple were at home. Jean had phoned them earlier in the day and they had drinks ready to sip on the terrace at the back.
‘This bit is new, of course,’ said the woman, whose name was Susan. ‘I think it was added in the eighties. But I don’t think anything inside the house has changed since the days of Noah and the Ark.’
‘Now, Susan,’ her husband remonstrated. ‘That’s not fair.’
‘No,’ she acknowledged. ‘It’s a charming house. It just has some very old-fashioned plumbing.’
‘Did my grandfather own the house?’ asked Alice.
‘No,’ Jean told her. ‘I looked up the records this morning. He rented it from a family who no longer wished to be here after the war. He lived here for seven years.’
‘So long?’ Alice caught the look the Americans were giving her. ‘I’m sorry, it’s just I know so little of all this. I knew he lived here and that my grandmother arrived one day with more or less the intention of marrying him. They came back to England shortly after they were married. Grandfather would never speak of his time in France, and Grandma would only tell me of how she set out to get him. I know almost nothing of what Samuel was doing here.’
‘Would you like to see the house?’ Susan asked, rising to her feet.
‘I would love that.’
They wandered through the rooms together, Susan pointing out the charming but no doubt inconvenient rusticity of the whole set-up. ‘I suppose,’ she concluded at one point, ‘in the 1950s this must all have been rather modern.’
‘Newer, perhaps,’ Jean remarked from the doorway where he had been watching them, ‘but not exactly modern.’
‘And he lived here alone?’ Alice asked.
‘Alone,’ Jean confirmed. ‘There would have been a woman from the village to cook and clean for him, but nobody else lived here.’
‘It’s so strange,’ Alice told him, reaching out to brush one of the walls with her fingertips. ‘I thought I would find something of him here, or learn something. But there’s nothing, nothing I can connect with him here. I thought … I guess I was being more sentimental than I realised.’
‘Houses don’t often talk to us humans,’ he said. ‘But I do have something else for you.’
They took their leave from the Americans, who tried not to look relieved to see them go, and walked back to the car. Alice paused at the gate to look back.
‘I just can’t see him here,’ she said.
‘He was a younger man than when you knew him,’ Jean pointed out.
‘Oh, I forgot!’ Alice opened her bag and began to rummage in it. ‘Here!’ She emerged with some old, black and white photographs. ‘I only have two, but you can see bits of the house in them. Look!’
She held out the photographs to him and he took them. There were, as she had said, two: one of a man looking uncomfortable, standing on the path that wound round the house to the back garden, and one of the woman sitting on the step leading to the door of the house, laughing up at the camera.
‘That’s my grandfather,’ Alice pointed to the man. ‘That’s Samuel.’
The man in the picture was in his late thirties, dressed conservatively in a jacket and tie. His hair was light, probably blond, and combed flat to the top of his head with Brylcreem. One curl had come undone and fell forward onto his forehead. He was smoking, the cigarette held carelessly in his right hand, and he was looking at the camera as if he would rather be anywhere else than having his picture taken.
The corner of the house was visible behind him, not enough to tell the extent of its picturesque prettiness, but enough to identify it once you had seen the real thing.
‘He must have been standing …over there.’ Alice scanned the garden and pointed. ‘And she took his picture.’
‘And she is sitting on the front doorstep.’
‘Yes – there. She always said that she sat on the front doorstep waiting for him to come home, the day she arrived in town. I suppose he must have wanted the picture to remind him.’
Jean handed the photographs back to her and she stowed them carefully in her bag.
‘Now,’ he said, turning back towards the car, ‘about the next stop on our agenda.’