Old Bones Read Free

openly staring across the room at another threesome, who sat stiffly in their high-backed wing chairs, as removed and alienated as if they’d been walled off.
    "If I’d known they were really going to be here, I assure you we would still be in Frankfurt," said Mathilde, grimly watching her son drain his glass with a second swallow and then go grubbing with a pudgy thumb and forefinger after the anchovy-stuffed olive at the bottom.
    "Don’t do that, Jules," she said disgustedly.
    "Well, why don’t they put a toothpick in it, then?" he asked, not unreasonably. He capitulated, however, bringing the glass to his lips, upending it, and helping the olive into his mouth with a pinky that followed it in rather more deeply than Mathilde thought strictly necessary.
    That, said Mathilde’s look, is repulsive. Unconcerned, Jules concentrated on liberating the anchovy with his tongue, then munching with deep satisfaction; first the anchovy, then the olive.
    "Now, Mathilde," René said reasonably, "if Guillaume invited the Fougerays, he must have had a very good reason. And you know he’s not being late on purpose. He’s probably forgotten about the time; you know how absentminded the old fellow’s been getting."
    You, his wife’s eloquent look said, are not the person to talk about absentmindedness.
    René took no offense; indeed, he seemed to take no notice. "So why upset yourself?" he continued. "There’s no point, is there?"
    Indeed, there wasn’t. The patriarchal Guillaume du Rocher convened these "family councils"—formal meetings of the dwindling and far flung du Rocher clan— whenever it pleased him, and he ran them however he wished. If it was increasingly in his nature to be high-handed and eccentric, well, that was to be borne with good humor. What choice was there?
    "Best to simply be thankful these things occur so infrequently," René concluded with a radiant smile, his logic triumphant and irrefutable.
    René du Rocher was a soft, placid, somewhat dandified man of sixty-two, a year younger than his wife—with shiny, thinning, plastered-down hair, a cherubic pink-and-white complexion, and small, delicate hands that he frequently rubbed together with a dry, rustly sound. He was clean in his habits, used cologne liberally, and took pride in the masculine vigor of his three-week-old moustache.
    In all, he looked like an affable and self-contented bank manager, which in fact he was. Or close enough; Monsieur du Rocher was a corporate-lending officer in the international division of the Crédit Lyonnais in Frankfurt, to which city he had moved three years earlier with his family, after three decades of unexceptional advancement in Paris, Geneva, and London. The advancing years had enhanced his naturally sweet temper and, less fortunately, his predisposition toward a slight vacancy of mind. At the urging of his superiors, he was now contemplating retirement.
    "I’ve always liked this room," he said mildly. "Did you know that Henri IV and his party were once feasted here? In 1595. The manoir was already a hundred years old."
    "Oh, be quiet," Mathilde said absently, picking an invisible shred of lint from the dark, broad, woolen field of her bosom.
    Jules had consumed the olive. His eyes roved to the hors d’oeuvres tray on the coffee table. "The point
is,
" he said querulously to his father, "that Cousin Guillaume hasn’t asked the Fougerays to a family council in
decades,
or haven’t you noticed?" Emulating his mother, he had adopted this petulant, deprecatory tone toward his father at fourteen, had found it satisfactory, and had not modified it in the ensuing sixteen years. "And with good reason. Look at the man; the quintessential peasant. Aside from a certain repulsive fascination, it’s awkward to be in the same room with him. Is he
really
related to us?"
    "You shut up too," Mathilde muttered, now brushing a thread from her ample skirt. "What a prig you are, Jules."
    If her son felt injury at this