The Child on the Terrace by Virginia Winters

Author:Virginia Winters [Winters, Virginia]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: From The River Publishing
Published: 2017-03-30T22:00:00+00:00

Chapter 20

The GPS directed Anne around the little city of Narbonne to the A-9. Before Nimes, she left the motorway at the junction with A-54. She crossed over the broad brown expanse of the Rhone as she passed through the town of Arles. She would have like to stop here. She noticed signs for a Nature Reserve and Roman ruins and the sea was close. Vincent van Gogh painted here—a work called Starry Night over the Rhone, a beautiful night sky with haloed stars reflected in the dark water—and hundreds of other paintings and sketches. Allied bombing of Arles in World War II destroyed the house where he painted his Yellow Room.

But they needed sleep and food. She took an off-ramp when she cleared the suburbs of the city, following a sign for a countryside hotel. She drove past fields of lavender and sunflowers, radiant purple and saffron in the evening sun, on a road that passed through an arch of Sycamores. Everywhere the landscape was familiar from the paintings of the Impressionists.

Another sign indicated the turn to a gravel lane, its center choked with weeds, erosion reducing it to barely enough room for one vehicle, led to a sprawling stone and brick bungalow. A German Shepherd, its ribs showing beneath a shaggy coat, growled and barked at the car as Anne stopped on the drive in front of the building. Not too promising, she thought, taking in the shed attached by what looked to be two nails to the end of the house, and a few rangy geraniums struggling in window-boxes.

She tapped on her horn, but that only drove the dog to more frenzied barking. She waited. No one emerged from the building. She sat on the horn again.

A thin, almost wasted man, walked up from the barn and bellowed at the dog. He slunk away, his tail firmly between his legs. Anne rolled down her window.

“Yes, Madame.”

“Do you have a room free for tonight?”

“Yes.”

“Could I see it please?”

The front door, scratched and ripped at the bottom—from the dog, Anne presumed—opened to a narrow foyer with a hallway leading off to the left. Anne followed, past two doors to a room at the end.

The dark room, furnished with two beds and a dresser scarred with cigarette burns and white rings from wet glasses, smelled of smoke and dog and old clothes. But the bathroom was spotless and the linen on the beds, clean.

“And the cost?”

“Fifty euros.”

“Fine. We will stay one night. Do you provide breakfast?”

“Seven a.m.—9 a.m.”

“And where is the breakfast room?”

“Down here.”

She followed him back down the dank corridor.

“Register here.” He pointed to a desk in one corner of a room furnished with three tables covered in yellow cloths. Thin sunlight struggled through one dusty window. A pale woman, equally as thin as the man, her black hair tied in a loose bun, drew back as they approached.

“One night,” he said and tromped off.

“Passports, Madame. For you and the child. Is she your child, Madame? She does not look like you.

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