Young Once

by Patrick Modiano

  Gilbert, not wanting to pass up a chance to rejoin the conversation, added: “It’s a Mediterranean climate. Lots of pine trees, and flowers. As Mr. Axter has often remarked, Bournemouth is the Cannes of Dorset.”

  His fawning fell flat. Axter shrugged his shoulders.

  He took a list out of his pocket and, turning to face Odile and Louis, said, “We’ll drop off the young people with the families they’re staying with. It won’t take long.”

  “We’re arriving at Christchurch, sir,” Gilbert said gravely, sounding like the guide on a jungle expedition, pointing out a path to his client.

  Axter checked his list.

  “We have someone getting out at Christchurch. Marie-José Quinili, with the Guilfords. 23 Meryl Lane. Tell the driver to stop at 23 Meryl Lane.”

  Gilbert obeyed.

  And the same ceremony took place every time. The bus stopped at the address on the list, a cottage or little house with a garden in front. The family was waiting outside: mother and children on the stoop, father on the sidewalk in front of the open garden gate, all standing at attention, so to speak. Axter stepped out of the bus with the boy or girl from the group, whom he introduced to the father. Gilbert followed behind them, carrying the student’s suitcase. Then the father, Axter, and the youth exchange student walked over to the stoop, where a short conversation took place with the members of the family, while Gilbert put the suitcase down. Then the father walked Axter and Gilbert back to the bus. The exchange student stayed on the stoop with the mother and children, and they all stiffly watched the bus, again, as it left.

  There was no one left in the bus except Axter, Gilbert, Odile, and Louis. Gilbert was getting more and more anxious.

  “I’ll take you to Cross Road, the same family as last year,” Axter said.

  “Thank you. That way I’m very near you . . .” He paused. Then he blurted out: “And them? What family are they staying with?”

  “They’re staying with me, at the school.”

  Gilbert stared wide-eyed. “With you?”

  He looked like he had just been punched in the stomach. He face crumpled and his lips were bigger than ever, as though pumped full of air, pneumatically somehow, and about to burst.

  “Why with you?”

  “Just because. Does that surprise you?”

  The bus stopped at Cross Road, in front of a tidy little cottage with a white picket fence around the garden.

  “Here you are, Gilbert.”

  Gilbert didn’t move, trying to delay the moment of parting. Axter picked up his suitcase. Gilbert had no choice but to stand up sadly.

  “They’re lucky they get to stay with you,” he said in a wheezing voice.

  Axter put Gilbert’s suitcase down at the garden gate and shook his hand, then rejoined Odile and Louis in the bus.

  Gilbert stayed unmoving, in front of the cottage, ignoring his suitcase. His face was alarmingly pale and he eyed Odile and Louis hungrily, lips curled, until the moment the bus started. Louis was amazed at the envy and hate in Gilbert’s eyes.

  “He’s not a bad kid, but he is a bit clingy,” Axter said.

  •

  A sandy lane snaking past a closely mowed lawn and masses of rhododendrons led to the house, a big Norman-style mansion with a bell tower soaring overhead. A white marble plaque above the entrance bore the inscription: BOSCOMBE COLLEGE.

  “Here we are,” Axter said. “Let me show you to your room.”

  They walked down a hallway with classrooms visible through the open doors.

  “The classes are held here,” Axter said. “Every morning. Of course, it’s not required that you attend.”

  He winked at Odile and Louis, which came as a surprise from this Englishman.

  They walked upstairs to the fourth floor. Axter opened a door. They went down another hallway that ended in an attic room with white walls and not a single piece of furniture. There was a mattress on the floor, covered in pink sheets and a Scottish wool blanket.

  “Here you have the bathroom,” Axter said.

  A frosted glass booth with a sink and shower.

  “I think you’ll be fine here. I’ve just renovated this floor of the building.”

  He took Odile’s suitcase and Louis’s backpack, opened the room’s closet, and began putting their clothes on the shelves. Louis wanted to stop him.

  “No, please . . .”

  Odile and Louis exchanged a shocked look. Axter arranged their shirts, sweaters, dresses, and pants, in impeccable order.

  “This is fun. It reminds me of when I was back at Trinity College.”

  When everything was in its place, he took the bundles of banknotes out of the backpack and suitcase with the most natural-looking gesture imaginable.

  He slipped them one by one into a large green plastic bag he had taken out of his pocket and unfolded like a handkerchief. Then he turned to Odile and Louis.

  “Now you can call Roland de Bejardy and tell him that everything went well.”

  The telephone was in the hall, attached to the wall. Axter spoke in English. He nodded his head to the instructions that Bejardy must have been giving him.

  “Cheerio, Roland. Give my regards to Nicole.”

  Then he passed the phone to Louis.

  “Study hard and learn English well,” Bejardy told him. “It will serve you well in life.”

  •

  They were woken up around nine in the morning by the voices of the students walking across the lawn. There were more than fifty young men and women attending Boscombe College and Louis saw Gilbert among them, with his pipe and his clenched jaw. He went from group to group, wearing a Scottish kilt and a turtleneck sweater.

  Odile and Louis had wanted to take the classes but they would have had to get up early, and besides, the students taking English at Boscombe College, although close to them in age, seemed like strangers. What could they talk about? Nothing. They did not share the same worries. The bell rang three times to indicate a break, and the young people scattered across the grass. Pairs were always kissing, assiduously, as though timing their sessions. A happy, unspoiled adolescence, perfectly sure of itself. Axter charged a lot of money for the classes at Boscombe and recruited customers from the families of the seventh or sixteenth arrondissements, or in a pinch from among the rich French Algerians.

  The two of them stayed in bed, pressed against each other, and listened to the serious voice of the professor dictating a text in English. Later, the murmuring of a mysterious chorus reached them, tirelessly repeating the same song over and over again.

  •

  It was sunny every day they were there, and Odile and Louis often had lunch with Axter in the Boscombe College dining hall. Axter cooked, set the table, and served the food himself, delighted to be performing these domestic tasks while his wife was away, spending some time in London. Boscombe was the country house of his parents, now deceased, and when he went down from Cambridge he turned the villa into a college, the only way he could keep the house, which had so many childhood memories for him.

  Where had he met Bejardy? Oh, it was purely by chance, on a trip to France when he was twenty-five. An American friend had introduced him to “Roland,” who was running a floating restaurant on a boat in the Seine, in Neuilly. It’s true. It certainly was funny, this “boat-restaurant.” But Louis noticed a certain awkwardness in Axter whenever Bejardy was brought up.

  In the afternoons, he and Odile would go out and walk down the avenue of Boscombe College, lined with white-fenced houses and bushes so dark green they were almost black. Here and there a pine tree. They would stroll to Fisherman’s Walk, an intersection with several stores around it. There was a teashop there, with a high ceiling, large plate-glass windows, and tables so tiny they looked lost in an orangery. At the end of a sloping street was the sea.

  A telephone booth, red and solitary, stood in the middle of a roundabout overlooking the beach, and inside it you stood on a carpet of sand several centimeters thick, but the ph
one worked and the phone book was current. One afternoon, Louis called Brossier collect. He had to give the operator the phone booth’s number and they would call him back within half an hour. When the phone rang in the empty landscape, Louis and Odile jumped. A woman’s voice: Jacqueline Boivin, Brossier’s fiancée.

  “Here’s Jean-Claude.”

  Louis asked Brossier how long they had to stay at Bournemouth. Until next week, Brossier said. He was getting ready for his own holidays, with Jacqueline. Where? At Cité Universitaire, of course, in the Deutsch de la Meurthe area. That was better than all the spas and resorts in Europe.

  •

  There were dunes with patches of grass growing on the sides. On the peak of these dunes there is sometimes a bench. They leave their clothes on one of these benches and put on the striped bathrobes Axter has lent them. They run down into the sea. The water is icy but they’ve won their bet: Axter had dared them to swim in the ocean in Bournemouth in April.

  They climb back up to the road to Fisherman’s Walk, their two robes rolled up in a beach bag. The wind is blowing hard. They enter the teashop the size of an orangery to have a cup of grog.

  What if they did stay here several months? Axter would find them a little hotel, or maybe he would continue to put them up. They had forgotten all about about Paris. And it made them happy to hear a foreign language at the tables next to theirs, one they would soon know, soon speak with each other, with the feeling of starting a new life.

  •

  At the end of the Boscombe dune road, they met a man in a navy blue raincoat, wearing a checked cap. The man said a few words to them, but they didn’t understand what he said very well. He asked them if they were “French students.” When they said yes, he waved an ID card with a purple line through it in front of them and said slowly, several times, the words “cinema detective,” no doubt trying to convey his profession. Then he offered them a dozen tickets. Free seats, for several movies. They didn’t have time to thank him—he was already gone, with his raincoat, too big for him, waving in the wind like a banner.

  The cinema was in Christchurch, a neighborhood of Bournemouth near Boscombe College, and the show started every night at nine thirty. They crossed the bridge over the Stour, a river running between meadows where the grass took on a bluish tint in the twilight. On the other side, a riverside park with a bandstand, shooting galleries, stalls with rows of slot machines, and little refreshment stands on floating decks where boats were moored that you could rent during the day.

  Later, this park with its attractions, the river, the sound of the slot machines would be associated in Louis’s memory with Odile’s smell of lavender—she had found a bottle of perfume at the back of the closet in their room at Boscombe College. A loudspeaker was playing songs and instrumentals. Crowded around the rowboats were groups of men in black leather jackets, who were called “teddy boys.” You could hear their arguments and laughter even before you had crossed the bridge.

  A girl, also wearing a black leather jacket, would be sitting alone at a table in front of the main refreshment stand, half in shadow. She was a redhead with an upturned Irish nose, her neck adorned with a large chain strung with twenty or more charms. One night, she showed these mementos to Odile and Louis: Each was engraved with a name—Jean-Pierre, Christian, Claude, Bernard, Michel . . . They had belonged to the French boys she had loved in Bournemouth, at night, under the pier. The others, the teddy boys, avoided her like the plague and never spoke a word to her. But was it her fault she liked Frenchmen?

  •

  When they entered the theater, the man in the blue raincoat was standing stiffly next to the cash register. He led them to their seats personally, flashlight in hand. There were never many people in the audience, on the dark brown wooden seats.

  While the film was showing, the man walked up and down the center aisle, always in his cap. He sat down every once in a while, and looked around, at a different place each time. At the end of the movie, he would station himself at the cash register again and stare hard at the spectators, one by one, nodding a greeting to Odile and Louis. This was when they should have asked him about his work as a “cinema detective,” but his serious, concerned look intimidated them. Louis even felt he should give the man a present in return, to thank him for the free tickets.

  They asked Axter what “cinema detective” might mean. Axter had no idea—this was the first time in his life he had heard of such a profession.

  •

  When they got back to Boscombe College, the large ground-floor window was often still lit. One night, when they were starting up the stairs, Axter, who had seen them walking across the lawn, waved them over and invited them in for a drink.

  They walked into a spacious lounge filled with leather sofas and armchairs, their footsteps sinking into the wool carpet. There were paintings of hunting scenes on the walls, and an engraving that Louis particularly noticed: the members of a family standing around a horse-drawn carriage with a melancholy young man inside. The scene was labeled: Going Off to College.

  “My wife,” Axter said.

  A large, sturdy blonde with a severe face and blue eyes, who looked much older than Axter. She was sitting with another woman on one of the sofas.

  “Louis and Odile Memling.”

  Axter had always pretended to believe that they were brother and sister.

  “Enchantée,” she said.

  She smiled distractedly at them.

  “And this is the wife of my friend Harold Howard.”

  She hardly looked at them. She was as tall as Mrs. Axter, with very short brown hair and a square, mannish face. She kept shoving a cigarette holder between her teeth with a jerky gesture. The two women continued their conversation without paying any further attention to Odile and Louis. Axter, embarrassed by their cold reception, coughed slightly. Louis, to save face, admired the engraving.

  “It’s lovely.”

  “But sad too, don’t you think?” Axter said. “Leaving for college. Can you believe I sometimes still have dreams about going off to college. At my age, you understand . . .”

  “Michel is a damned sentimentalist,” a voice behind them said in nearly perfect French.

  They had not heard anyone come in and all three of them turned around.

  “May I introduce my friend, Harold Howard.”

  He was a colossal redhead with age spots on his face, in a dark red turtleneck sweater, a thick tweed jacket, and wide, green velvet trousers.

  “Howard is an old friend from Trinity College.”

  Axter took them over to the part of the lounge as far away as possible from where the two women were talking.

  Howard sat down in an armchair and rested his long legs on a windowsill.

  Axter leaned toward him. “Guy Burgess sent a postcard,” he said, in French, in a low voice.

  “Guy? No! Impossible!” Howard said, dumbfounded.

  Axter glanced furtively in the direction of the two women, as though needing to keep this important event a secret from them. Then he took the postcard out of his inside jacket pocket and handed it to Howard, who stared at it for a long time, clearly shaken.

  “Wonderful old boy! He must be unhappy there.”

  “You know perfectly well that Guy always wanted to be unhappy,” Axter said.

  Still feeling the shock of the news, Howard mechanically handed the postcard to Louis. It showed a public park in Moscow, and on the back, these simple words:

  With kind regards

  from

  GUY

  Louis handed the postcard to Axter, who tucked it back into his pocket. Many years later, at Sunny Home, Louis read about the adventures of Burgess and his friends, and that name, Guy Burgess, was enough to bring back the whole atmosphere of Bournemouth, the rhododendrons, the Boscombe beach, the cool freshness of the ivy, the “cinema detective,” Odile’s lavender perfume.

  “Let’s have a drink, to Guy,” Axter declared. “What’s your poison?”

&nb
sp; “That means ‘What would you like to drink?,’ ” Howard said.

  But Axter was already pouring a drink into their tiny glasses without waiting for an answer: a liquor glinting a dark red that matched Harold Howard’s sweater.

  “To Guy!” Axter said gravely.

  “To Guy!” Odile repeated, laughing.

  “To good old Guy!” Harold said.

  They drank.

  “Guy was the oldest in our group at Dartmouth and Cambridge,” Axter said.

  Harold looked at Odile and Louis with an engaging smile.

  “And what do you do?”

  “Not much,” Louis said.

  “They’re still too young to have done anything bad in life,” Axter said.

  Odile laughed. “Or anything good.”

  Axter and Howard, in an almost perfectly synchronized gesture, had taken their pipes out of their pockets. Axter stuffed his pipe while Harold didn’t take his eyes off Odile and Louis.

  “Yes, that’s true,” Axter said dreamily. “You’re both still children . . .”

  The lamps cast a harsh light on Odile and Louis, and they moved very close to each other on the sofa. Axter and Harold watched them. Two motionless butterflies, pinned to a piece of cloth, observed by amateur butterfly collectors.

  Meanwhile, Harold and Axter had put their pipes in their mouths. The women’s whispers from the other end of the lounge were barely audible. Maybe the men were taking advantage of their wives’ distance to relax and get comfortable, feel the way they had felt back in their rooms at Trinity College. Axter had unbuttoned the collar of his shirt and draped his calves over one of the arms of the chair. Harold Howard was still leaning his legs on the windowsill, and his tan wool socks, too large for him, slipped slowly down to his ankles.

  “You should really see something of England . . . If you want, Michael and I can take you on a drive,” Harold said. “Don’t you think so, Michael? We could take you to Cambridge, for instance.”

  “I’d be glad to. But I think they’re going back to France.”