The Dart Players by Jerrard Tickell

Author:Jerrard Tickell [Tickell, Jerrard]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Endeavour Media
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

13

Marie-Josephe ran quickly up the stairs and along the passage to her grandmother’s room. The grandmother was sitting in her high-backed chair by the window, her hands lightly clasped in her lap. There was about her a calmness, a sort of timeless serenity, that was wholly at variance with Marie-Josephe’s eager mood, and it was with difficulty that she checked the impatience that quickened her words.

“You wish to speak to me, Grandmère?”

“Yes, Marie-Josephe.” She indicated a chair with an unhurried, deliberate gesture of her hand, reclasped her fingers in her lap. “Sit down, child.”

Marie-Josephe tried not to glance at the clock on the mantelpiece. It was a clock she had always loved and one that would one day be hers, but now she bitterly resented every delicate movement of its mechanism as it snipped the precious seconds away, as if with sharp scissors. She tried to look anywhere in the room other than towards the mantelpiece — and failed. The hands of the clock pointed to three. Jim’s boat sailed for England, for the other end of the world, at a quarter-past six. All that was left to them was a bare three and a quarter hours, a hundred and ninety-five fugitive minutes. Madame Berthier intercepted her granddaughter’s glance. She said gently and with great affection, speaking in English:

“Even if I were to stop the hands of the clock for you, Marie-Josephe, it would do nothing to arrest the passage of time.”

Marie-Josephe frowned in bewilderment. Again that extraordinary fluency, again that hint of an Irish brogue.

“Forgive me, Grandmère. It was not polite of me. Please forgive me.”

“There is nothing to forgive. It is a glance I would have given had I been you at this time. More than that, it is a glance I have many times given when I was younger than I am today.” The dark eyes glimmered. “But believe me, child, it is better for Henri, better for the Englishman, Jim, that you stay here, even for a few minutes.”

Marie-Josephe looked sharply at her grandmother.

These strange words to hear from the puckered lips of an old lady, and Marie-Josephe saw her lined face with a new perception.

She had always been there, as unchanging as the straight-backed chair in which she invariably sat by the window. She had always been old, old as her chair or her clock were old, immortal as the youth of a child was immortal. She was “Grandmère” — and Grandmère was not a person. Grandmère was a terrible teacher of manners, a timely provider of gingerbread and nougat, a mender of torn frocks, a figure on whose dry breast one could surprisingly cry away a toothache. Now, all of a minute, she had changed. Youth had come upon her, and Marie-Josephe saw her own face reflected. She seemed to see the wrinkles dissolve into smooth skin, she saw the nascent fire in the dark eyes, she realised with a sense almost of shock that the dry breast had once been divided and springing and young.

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