The White Room

by Craig Higginson

  These days, Pierre never asks his parents for news of Élodie, and they – no more fooled than anyone else about his true feelings – seldom mention her. All he knows is that she has the same phone number because his occasional text messages, which she has long ago stopped answering, never fail to reach her.

  Viens chez moi ce soir, Luca says. On fait une fondue. Tu peux apporter du vin.

  Pierre agrees to the invitation and watches them tick away again, feeding into each other’s paths, idle but dangerous. He thinks of the two Serbs hounding Hannah and of how frightening people are – how frightening their intent. He can remember a time when he knew exactly what Étienne and Luca did each day and what they thought on any given subject. How far away from that they had all become.

  Pierre knows no one expects him to come to Luca’s party and he has no intention of going there. He waits to see if Étienne will turn back to look at him.

  He doesn’t.

  * * *

  That night, however, Pierre finds himself walking downriver with a bottle of his father’s local wine in his fist. He holds it like a club, feeling like a murderer. The house at night disturbs him without his parents in it. Scenes from his childhood linger around every corner, in every doorway, on every chair. When his parents aren’t there, it feels as if they are already dead – and that only Pierre remains as a shadow of himself, a quietly grieving ghost. Of course, he could have distracted himself with television and got a bit drunk, and he could have rowed upriver through the dark water and got a bit drunker, but he has never much liked his own company – and his curiosity concerning Élodie has got the better of him.

  He is also interested to discover how any news of Élodie might affect him. He imagines he will be pleased to hear some bad news about her: a failed relationship, a critical illness. Yet he also knows that such information may hurt – in places he has been doing his best to forget.

  * * *

  Luca lives in a small, semi-detached house at the other side of Seurre. He has a younger sister – an attractive, spirited girl called Gabriella whom Pierre once tried to kiss – and a disabled, much younger brother who died when Pierre and Luca were in their early teens. Pierre went to the boy’s funeral, although right now the boy’s name eludes him.

  He finds his friends in the thin garden at the back, which still has the swing and monkey bars he remembers from before, although some of the monkey bars have since been snapped off their wooden supports. Étienne is sitting on the swing, talking to a girl Pierre doesn’t know, smoking a cigarette.

  He and Étienne smoked their first cigarette in the village cemetery where Luca’s brother is buried. They were around fourteen at the time and Étienne has been a committed smoker ever since. When he sees Pierre, he leaves the girl and offers Pierre a cigarette. Pierre has never much enjoyed smoking, but he takes the cigarette for old time’s sake and lets his former friend light it.

  Élodie me dit que tu as une nouvelle copine?

  Oui, une Anglaise, says Pierre.

  Son nom?

  Hannah Meade.

  Étienne repeats the name as if he might have met Pierre’s new girlfriend – in his extensive travels through Seurre and the surrounding area.

  T’as une photo?

  Pas sur moi, says Pierre.

  It has occurred to Pierre before that he has no photograph of Hannah. Even his bad attempts on the sketchpad were left in her apartment. The only remnants he had of their relationship were the notebooks, which he regretted burning not long after he did it.

  Et Élodie, comment va-t-elle? says Pierre.

  Elle est à Lyon. En fait, nous nous sommes séparés au Nouvel An, et c’est elle qui a rompu.

  Étienne tries for a self-deprecating laugh, but Pierre recognises the note of pain in him at the loss of Élodie, and is pleased to find it almost absent in himself.

  Je croyais que vous étiez en contact tous les deux, Étienne continues.

  Je lui ai écrit une ou deux fois, mais pas depuis un moment. À quoi bon, n’est-ce pas?

  Oui, à quoi bon.

  Étienne goes on to tell him that Élodie is now engaged to a middle-aged man who distributes bicycle pumps throughout Europe.

  The gods, Pierre thinks, are quick.

  * * *

  He spends that night with Gabriella in a flat she is renting that overlooks the mooring for visiting barges. They are gentle and tender together, and a bit stoned. It is the first time Pierre has made love since Hannah, and he is surprised how easy and natural it is, and how instantly forgettable it can be afterwards.

  VIII

  Hannah

  His ashes are on the top shelf of your mother’s cupboard, amongst old jumpers she hasn’t worn since her youth. It smells faintly of mothballs in there, and old wood in need of varnish. The package is still in its dark blue wrapping paper. You take it out, place it on the breakfast table.

  Isn’t it time we set him free? you ask your mother.

  She is peeling a boiled egg in warm water in a plastic bowl. Two peeled eggs glisten on a yellow side-plate. Pale winter light fills the kitchen. Your mother is wearing her sheepskin slippers. When she walks around the house, she drags her feet and it drives you mad.

  Where?

  Somewhere in the hills.

  You hire an expensive German car so you can get to your destination safely and swiftly, but half an hour out of Johannesburg you start to feel dizzy, and your hands and lips feel numb, and you stop under a concrete bridge knuckled with the mud nests of swallows – swallows that have already migrated back to Europe.

  I can’t drive an automatic, your mother says hopelessly. What are we going to do?

  I’ll feel better in a moment, you tell her, although you don’t believe it.

  You try again and make it to Harrismith, but you have been travelling half the speed you ought to be going and it’s already mid-afternoon. The sky above the Drakensberg ahead of you is a purple-grey and you have been driving in silence, your mother pretending not to be worried or afraid.

  You will have to take over, you tell her.

  But I’ve never driven an automatic.

  It isn’t difficult. All you do is sit there and steer. The car will do the rest.

  * * *

  You share a toasted chicken mayonnaise sandwich and have a coffee under the umbrellas of the service station, the oncoming storm blustering and making the umbrellas clank like rigging. Afterwards, your mother climbs into the leather seat and contemplates the dials and buttons. She’s never sat in a car like this before, let alone driven one. Yet you know you will blank out if you carry on driving, as you did on that road into Birmingham. Unlikely as it might seem, you don’t like the idea of dying. You are surprised to find that you want to live.

  Your mother manages to start the car and you are both amazed at how easy everything becomes afterwards. Soon you are speeding along the highway like everyone else. You start to make conversation and you even comment on the view.

  The storm reaches you shortly after you have passed the turnoff to Ladysmith, but still the car continues. The wipers keep re-establishing the world to a place where you can see. You and your mother wait for those glimpses of clarity between the permanent blur – and you find you can manage to fit them together sufficiently.

  It is already night when you check into the hotel. Along the walls of the reception area are framed panels stuck with trout flies and watercolours of birds. You think of Pierre and wish he was here. Yet he couldn’t be further away from this place. You think of him in Paris, walking the streets in the rain. You hope he sometimes thinks of you.

  In the morning, after breakfast, you and your mother take a stroll around the steaming lake that lies in front of the hotel. Yellow-billed ducks splice the water and a single heron stares into the weed. During the drive yesterday and at breakfast this morning, you have talked about Oliver only from odd angles – touching on him and then moving away again, like fish circling unfamiliar food.

  You
both remember staying at this hotel with Oliver – even though you don’t talk about it. He once stood on that warped wooden jetty over there – now bleached a silvery grey – and tried to catch a rainbow trout. When he won rider of the year in your first year at boarding school, your mother photographed him in front of the row of hydrangeas outside the long, thatched hotel. He was wearing a plum-coloured anorak with the rosettes pinned on him and the trophies arranged around him at odd angles in the grey grass. You yourself never rode at boarding school. You were scared of those tough little mountain ponies, which seemed intent on scraping you off under the low-hanging branches of trees.

  The ashes travelled with you on the back seat of the car – like a wrapped jack-in-the-box that at any moment might explode. You carried it up to your room last night and set it on the windowsill so it had a view of the lake. You can see it now, from where you are walking. A small blue square in your window. It could be a flower pot. It will soon be earth.

  You loosen the last of Oliver into the wind. You are surrounded by mist so you can’t see the hills he loved, but no doubt it will clear and the view you envisaged for him will be restored.

  You and your mother stand there in silence, solemn with your private thoughts. A fir plantation now grows on the hill where you and Oliver used to run around. The saplings are almost trees. The old rocks that were once covered in wild flowers and grass are now lying in the dead earth, peering under coppery heaps of needles. Barely a bird calls in this place. But you have found a little clearing and a cairn of rocks and here a bit of the old mountain remains.

  This will have to do, you tell your mother.

  To which she only nods.

  When it is done, you and your mother embrace properly for the first time since you were a girl. The last of the ash still hangs in the air, like smoke without a fire.

  IX

  Pierre

  He returns home feeling more alive to the world. Thanks to Luca’s sister, the weight of Hannah has been displaced slightly – although, absurdly, he also feels guilty, as if he has just betrayed her. He thinks of that long list of names in Hannah’s notebook – all the men who have loved her, or at least made love to her. Where are they now? Do they wander the earth like doomed men, like the spectres in that Keats poem? Or are they another breed of man entirely? The kind of man who can pass through the world of Hannah Meade and remain intact?

  At the chalets, on the thin tarmac road that stretches straight through the river mist, he encounters a hunched old woman he has known since childhood. Madame Dupont, walking her flat-faced dog. A widow now. Pierre knows from his mother that Monsieur Dupont died the previous year after a series of strokes. Madame Dupont had once objected to the new black family moving into the old ruined house at the edge of the village. She had even made her reservations clear to the mayor. But Madame Dupont was grateful for the presence of Pierre’s mother towards the end of her husband’s life – Pierre’s mother, who seemed to know more about suffering than anyone else.

  Bonjour, Madame.

  Bonjour, Pierre!

  As he approaches the house, he sees his parents’ pale yellow station wagon in the driveway, its boot yawning. He can hear his mother’s high voice, calling to his father. He wonders whether they have noticed his presence in the house. The rucksack on the bed, the raised toilet seat in the downstairs loo, the blood-red tisane bag on the saucer in the kitchen, the yellow kayak left to dry out against the walnut tree – the thousand indications that signify ‘Pierre’. But when he arrives at the garden, he sees from his mother’s look of surprise that his presence hasn’t yet been detected. She cries out and rushes forward to kiss him, and squeezes his arms. Right away, she wants to know if something is wrong.

  Pas de problème, M’man.

  His mother’s eyes look larger and her neck is thinner, and he notices the first threads of grey around her temples – but she gives him her most steady smile, which is her way of saying that she is going through ‘a better patch’. The trip to Dijon – or wherever they have been these past few days – has been good to her. His father has been good to her.

  Pierre has occasionally suspected that it is easier for his mother when he is not around. He is a part of herself that she never knows what to do with. She wants too much of him and also feels overwhelmed by him. At the very moment of wanting him, she also wants to escape.

  Salut, mon garçon.

  He turns to find his father emerging from the side of the house, looking weighty and professorial. He likes to perform the role of lecturer even when his students are not around to witness him. When he was younger, he had several affairs with colleagues and those he taught. Not so much for the sex as to find reprieve from a difficult wife.

  Tu es à la maison pour combien de temps?

  Je dois être de retour lundi, Pierre lies.

  Eh bien, je viens d’avoir un coup de fil d’une journaliste qui m’a dit qu’elle est en train d’écrire quelque chose sur les réfugiés congolais. Elle dit qu’elle t’a rencontré à ‘Language Works’. Le nom ‘Hannah Meade’ te dit quelque chose?

  Paris

  I

  Hannah

  I am leaving Paris in two weeks.

  To go where, may I ask?

  Home.

  And where is that?

  I suppose it is where I grew up.

  I see.

  Monsieur Levi takes the news easily, but then it is a small thing when in a few months or even weeks he will be dead.

  They are sitting in his gallery in the early morning darkness, the little bronzes glinting in the emerging yellow light, looking like something out of a children’s story – each of them transfixed in the midst of some revelry.

  Monsieur Levi seems only half of himself today. The veins and bones are all that are left of his hands and his voice is timorous and far off, like an old woman’s. Yet he seems to have regained his hearing completely – as if he is finally prepared to listen to the world now that he is about to leave it.

  How have you been? Are you in pain?

  To be alive is to be in pain, he says. Don’t worry, my dear, I have had my fair share of pleasures. Now it’s your turn – to live fully.

  I’m still learning how to do that, Monsieur. But maybe back home – if I can call it that yet – I’ll have a better chance. You’d think it’s enough to move to London or Paris, but I’ve realised that the actual place isn’t so important.

  Then why go back to where you grew up if the place is so unimportant?

  Because that’s where I’m connected. To the people, to what has passed between us – however awful it is. My future can be their future, and vice versa, in a way that’s impossible here.

  The world is changing, he says, looking around his shop, fixed as it is in time. Look at the wars we are feeding right now in Afghanistan and Iraq. Even this place will soon change – this city. And that place you are calling your home today, it will change too. In a way you might not find recognisable twenty years from now. But fortunately I won’t have to worry about that. That will be a problem for you and your children.

  If the country changes, I will change with it. I have a mother there. We have always fought against each other. Maybe it’s time to grow up – in a way I’ve never done before.

  That process never ends, he says. As soon as you think you’ve arrived at being an adult, you turn into a child again – wearing nappies, forgetting half the time how to sign your own name. Perhaps this sickness is a blessing. I can die still able to hold a conversation with a beautiful woman.

  One thing is certain, she smiles. You never needed my English lessons.

  You think I needed you for the English lessons? he laughs thinly. He has never laughed thinly before, as though his laughter has already been used up. English was the furthest thing from my mind.

  I have enjoyed our conversations too, Monsieur.

  That is the kindest thing that has been said to me since – my previous beautiful English teacher. That one was olde
r and I had a bit more success.

  Outside, the city is preparing itself for another day. Through the glass doors they watch the chairs and tables being set up outside an anonymous café. A truck passes, spraying water on the street. A group of young North African men is returning home from a club, sombre with drink.

  What are you going to do about the shop?

  I have nephews in Turin.

  I remember them. You’ll be leaving the business to them?

  * * *

  When Hannah is ready to leave, Monsieur Levi takes a small bronze sculpture of the boy Narcissus melting into the earth and presses it into her hand.

  What is this?

  For when you’re old like me.

  But I can’t take this.

  It is all I have to give.

  II

  Hannah

  She returns to the language school only to collect her textbooks. Andrew is in his glass office, cheerful with disappointment and a touch nasty. It’s not that she can’t be replaced. There’s no shortage of English teachers in Paris in search of a job. Maybe it is only that he resents her newfound freedom.

  * * *

  From Café le Moderne, at the table where she once sat with Pierre, she looks up the number of the post office in Pouilly. The woman who answers, a Madame Dupont, is eventually persuaded to give her Pierre’s parents’ home number.

  Allô, c’est Baptiste.

  Allô, je suis bien chez Monsieur Mande?

  Puis-je vous demander qui est à l’appareil?

  Monsieur Mande, je m’appelle Hannah Meade. Je suis journaliste et j’écris un article sur les réfugiés congolais. J’ai cru comprendre que vous aviez un fils adoptif qui s’appelle Pierre.

  J’ai effectivement un fils qui s’appelle Pierre. Comment le connaissez-vous ?

  Je l’ai rencontré à un cours d’anglais auquel il assiste à ‘Language Works’, près de la Bastille.