But it’s terribly far away.”
For a while they sat in silence.
“What did you mean when you said just now you hadn’t been crying for the reason I thought?” asked Charley at length.
She gave him once more a curious, suspicious look.
“Do you really mean that you don’t know who I am?
I thought that was why your friend Simon sent for me.”
“He told me nothing except—except that you’d give me a good time.”
“I’m the wife of Robert Berger.
That is why, although I’m a Russian, they took me at the Serail.
It gives the clients a kick.”
“I’m afraid you’ll think me very stupid, but I honestly don’t know what you’re talking about.”
She gave a short, hard laugh.
“Such is fame.
A day’s journey and the name that’s on every lip means nothing.
Robert Berger murdered an English bookmaker called Teddie Jordan.
He was condemned to fifteen years’ penal servitude.
He’s at St. Laurent in French Guiana.”
She spoke in such a matter-of-fact way that Charley could hardly believe his ears.
He was startled, horrified and thrilled.
“And you really didn’t know?”
“I give you my word I didn’t.
Now you speak of it I remember reading about the case in the English papers.
It created rather a sensation because the—the victim was English, but I’d forgotten the name of the—of your husband.”
“It created a sensation in France, too.
The trial lasted three days.
People fought to get to it.
The papers gave it the whole of their front page.
No one talked of anything else.
Oh, it was a sensation all right.
That was when I first saw your friend Simon, at least that’s when he first saw me, he was reporting the case for his paper and I was in court.
It was an exciting trial, it gave the journalists plenty of opportunity.
You must get him to tell you about it.
He’s proud of the articles he wrote.
They were so clever, bits of them got translated and were put in the French papers.
It did him a lot of good.”
Charley did not know what to say.
He was angry with Simon; he recognized his puckish humour in putting him in the situation in which he now found himself.
“It must have been awful for you,” he said lamely.
She turned a little and looked into his eyes.
He, whose life had been set in pleasant places, had never before seen on a face a look of such hideous despair.
It hardly looked like a human face, but like one of those Japanese masks which an artist has fashioned to portray a certain emotion.
He shivered.
Lydia till now, for Charley’s sake, had been talking mostly in English, breaking into French now and then when she found it too difficult to say what she wanted in the unfamiliar language, but now she went on in French.
The sing-song of her Russian accent gave it a strange plaintiveness, but at the same time lent a sense of unreality to what she said.
It gave you the impression of a person talking in a dream.
“I’d only been married six months.
I was going to have a baby.
Perhaps it was that that saved his neck.
That and his youth.
He was only twenty-two.