by Nina George
Madame Gulliver gave a deep sigh.
‘Good gracious. You never want anything; have you ever noticed that?’
‘That’s …’
True.
‘… not because of you. Really it isn’t. You’re charming, courageous and … er …’
Yes, he was rather fond of Madame Gulliver. She seized life with both hands. More of it than she probably needed.
‘… very neighbourly.’
Heavens. He was so rusty when it came to saying something nice to a woman! Madame Gulliver began to totter down the stairs with a waggle of her hips. Clack-slap, clack-slap went her corn-gold slippers. When she reached his step, she lifted her hand. She noted that Perdu shrank back when she reached out to touch his muscled arm, and instead laid her hand resignedly on the banister.
‘Neither of us is getting any younger, Monsieur,’ she said in a low, husky voice. ‘We’re well into the second half.’
Clack-slap, clack-slap.
Perdu raised his hand involuntarily to his hair, to the spot on the back of the head where many men developed a humiliating bald patch. He didn’t have one – yet. Yes, he was fifty. Not thirty. His dark hair had grown silvery, his face heavily shadowed. His tummy … he pulled it in. Not bad. His hips bothered him: every year a thin extra layer. And he couldn’t carry two crates of books at once any more, dammit. But all of that was irrelevant. Women no longer eyed him – with the exception of Madame Gulliver, but then she viewed every man as a potential lover.
He squinted up at the landing where Madame Bomme would be lurking to snare him in conversation. About Anaïs Nin and her sexual obsessions – at top volume since she had mislaid her hearing aid in a box of chocolates.
Perdu had organised a book club for Madame Bomme and the widows of Rue Montagnard, who hardly ever received a visit from their children and grandchildren, and were withering away in front of their televisions. They loved books, but more than that, literature was an excuse to get out of their flats and hand around colourful ladies’ liqueurs for close examination and tasting.
The ladies generally voted for erotic books. Perdu delivered this kind of literature inside more discreet jackets: Alpine Flora wrapped around Millet’s The Sexual Life of Catherine M.; Provençal Knitting Patterns for Duras’s The Lover; Jam Recipes from York for Anaïs Nin’s The Delta of Venus. The liqueur researchers were grateful for the disguises; they were wary of their relatives who thought that reading was an eccentric hobby for people who were too snobbish to watch television and that eroticism was unnatural in women over sixty.
This time, however, no Zimmer frame blocked his path.
On the second floor lived the pianist Clara Violette. Perdu heard her practising Czerny runs. Even scales sounded brilliant under her fingers.
She was considered one of the five best pianists in the world. Yet fame was denied her because she couldn’t stand to have anyone in the room when she played. In the summer she gave balcony concerts. She would open all the windows, and Perdu would push her Pleyel grand piano over to the balcony door and place a microphone beneath the instrument. Then Clara would play for two hours. The residents of number 27 sat out on the steps in front of the house or set up folding chairs on the pavement. Strangers would crowd the tables at the Ti Breizh. When Clara came out onto her balcony after the concert and bowed with a shy nod, she reaped the applause of nearly half the population of a small town.
Perdu managed to make it the rest of the way upstairs without further interruptions. When he reached the fourth floor, he saw that his table had disappeared; maybe Kofi had lent Catherine a hand.
He knocked on her green door and realised that he had been looking forward to this moment.
‘Hello,’ he whispered. ‘I’ve brought some books.’
He put down the paper bag against the door.
As Perdu stood up, Catherine opened it.
Short, blond hair; mistrustful, but with soft, pearl-grey eyes beneath delicate eyebrows. Her feet were bare and she was wearing a dress with a neckline that gave a faint glimpse of her collarbone. She was holding an envelope.
‘Monsieur. I found the letter.’
8
Too many impressions at the same time: Catherine – her eyes – the envelope with the pale-green writing on it – Catherine’s closeness – her scent – the collarbone – life – the …
Letter?
‘An unopened letter. It was in your kitchen table, in the drawer, which was completely sealed with white paint. I opened it. The letter was lying under the corkscrew.’
‘No,’ said Perdu politely, ‘there wasn’t a corkscrew.’
‘But I found …’
‘No you didn’t!’
He didn’t mean to be so loud, but neither could he bring himself to look at the letter she was holding up.
‘Forgive me for shouting at you.’
She held out the envelope.
‘But that’s not mine.’
Monsieur Perdu retreated backwards to his flat.
‘It’d be better if you burned it.’
Catherine followed him across the landing. She looked him in the eye, and a searing flush burned across his face.
‘Or throw it away.’
‘But then I might as well read it,’ she said.
‘I don’t care. It’s not mine.’
Catherine continued to stare at him as he pushed his door shut, leaving her standing outside with the letter.
‘Monsieur? Monsieur Perdu!’ Catherine knocked. ‘Monsieur, it’s got your name on it.’
‘Go away. Please!’
He had recognised the letter. The handwriting.
Something shattered inside him.
A woman with a head of dark curls pushing open a compartment door, first gazing outside for a long time, then turning to him with tears in her eyes. Striding through Provence, Paris and Rue Montagnard, before finally stepping into his flat. Taking a shower, then walking around the room naked. A mouth drawing close to his own in the half darkness.
Wet, water-wet skin, water-wet lips taking his breath away, drinking his mouth.
Drinking and drinking.
The moon on her small, soft tummy. Two shadows in the middle of a red window frame, dancing.
How she then covers herself with his body.
—is sleeping on the divan in the Lavender Room, as she called the forbidden room, rolled up in her Provençal patchwork quilt, which she had sewed during her engagement.
Before—had married her vigneron, and before …
She left me.
And then left me a second time.
— had given a name to every room they had met in during those five short years: the Sun Room, the Honey Room, the Garden Room. They were rooms that meant the world to him, her secret lover, her second husband. She had named the room in his flat the Lavender Room; it was her home away from home.
The last time she’d slept there was a hot August night in 1992.
They had showered together; they were wet and naked.
She had caressed Perdu with her hand, cooled by the water, then slid on top of him and, raising his two hands in her own, pushed them down onto the sheet-covered divan. She had fixed him with a wild look and whispered, ‘I’d like you to die before me. Will you promise me that?’
Her body had taken his, more unbridled than ever before, while she moaned, ‘Promise. Promise me!’
He promised her.
Later that night, when he could no longer see the whites of her eyes in the darkness, he had asked her why.
‘I don’t want you to have to walk from the car park to my grave on your own. I don’t want you to have to mourn. I’d rather miss you for the rest of my life.’
‘Why did I never tell you I loved you?’ whispered the bookseller to himself. ‘Why didn’t I, Manon? Manon!’ He had never confessed his feelings. So as not to embarrass her. So as not to feel her fingers on his lips as she whispered, ‘Shush’.
He could be a stone in the mos
aic of her life, he thought at the time. A beautiful, sparkling one, but a stone all the same, not the whole picture. He wanted to do that for her.
Manon. The vibrant, never-dainty, never-perfect girl from Provence, who spoke with words that he felt he could grasp with his hands. She never planned; she was always entirely present. She didn’t talk about dessert during the main course, about the coming morning as she was falling asleep, about meeting again when saying good-bye. She was always in the now.
That August night 7,216 nights ago was the last time Perdu slept well; and when he woke up, Manon was gone.
He hadn’t seen it coming. He had thought it over again and again, had sifted through Manon’s gestures and looks and words – but had found no possible clue that could have told him she was already leaving.
And wouldn’t come back.
Instead, a few weeks later, her letter.
This letter.
He had left the envelope on the table for two nights. He had gazed at it as he ate alone, drank alone, smoked alone. And as he wept.
Tear after tear had run down his cheeks and dripped onto the table and the paper.
He hadn’t opened the letter.
He had been so tired back then, from crying and because he could no longer sleep in the bed that was so big and empty without her, so cold. He was tired from missing her.
He had thrown the letter into the drawer of the kitchen table, angrily, despairingly and above all unopened. To join the corkscrew that she had ‘borrowed’ from a brasserie in Ménerbes and spirited away to Paris. They had come from the Camargue, their eyes bright and almost glazed from the southern light, and had stopped off in the Luberon, in a guesthouse that clung to a craggy slope with a bathroom halfway down the stairs and lavender honey for breakfast. Manon wanted to show him everything about herself: where she came from, the kind of country that was in her blood; yes, she’d even wanted to introduce him to Luc, her husband, from afar, on his tall tractor moving along the grapevines in the valley below Bonnieux. Luc Basset, the vigneron, the winemaker.
As if she wanted the three of them to be friends, and each to grant the other their desire and their love.
Perdu had refused. They had stayed in the Honey Room.
It seemed as though the strength was bleeding out of his arms, as though he could do nothing but stand there in the darkness behind the door.
Perdu missed Manon’s body. He missed Manon’s hand against his buttocks as he slept. He missed her breath; her childish grumbling when he woke her too early in the morning – always too early no matter how late it was.
Her eyes watching him lovingly, and her fine, soft, short, curly hair when she snuggled up to his neck. He missed all these things so much that his body would twitch as he lay in the empty bed. And every day when he awoke too.
He hated waking up to a life without her.
The bed was the first thing he smashed, then the shelves and the footstool; he cut up the carpet, burned the pictures, laid waste to the room. He got rid of every piece of clothing, gave away every record.
The only thing he kept were the books from which he had read to her. He had read aloud every evening – lots of verse, scenes, chapters, columns, short extracts from biographies and other nonfiction books, Ringelnatz’s Little Bedtime Prayers (oh, how she’d loved The Little Onion) – so that she could drop off to sleep in this strange, barren world, the chilly north with its frozen northern folk. He couldn’t bring himself to throw those books away.
He’d used them to wall up the Lavender Room.
But it wouldn’t go away. The damn missing simply wouldn’t go away.
He’d only been able to cope by starting to avoid life. He’d locked away the loving with the missing deep within. Yet now it swept through him with unbelievable force.
Monsieur Perdu staggered into the bathroom and held his head under a stream of ice-cold water.
He hated Catherine, and he hated her cursed, unfaithful, cruel husband.
Why did Le P.-Dipstick have to leave her now, without giving her so much as a kitchen table as a send-off? What an idiot!
He hated the concierge and Madame Bernard and Jordan, Madame Gulliver, everyone – yes, everyone.
He hated Manon.
He flung the door open, his hair soaking wet. If that’s how that Madame Catherine wanted things, then he would say: ‘Yes, dammit, that is my letter! I just didn’t want to open it at the time. Out of pride. Out of conviction.’
And any mistake was reasonable if backed up by conviction.
He had wanted to read the letter when he was ready. After a year. Or two. He hadn’t intended to wait for twenty years, and to become fifty years old and peculiar in the meantime.
At the time, not opening Manon’s letter had been the only safe option, refusing her justification the only weapon he had.
Definitely.
If someone left you, you had to answer with silence. You weren’t allowed to give the person leaving anything else; you had to shut yourself off, just as the other person had closed her mind to your future together. Yes, he had decided that was the way it was.
‘No no no!’ cried Perdu. There was something wrong with this; he sensed it, but didn’t know what. It was driving him mad.
Monsieur Perdu strode over to the opposite door.
And rang the bell.
And knocked and rang the bell again, after a suitable pause, for as long as it would take a normal person to emerge from the shower and shake the water out of her ears.
Why wasn’t Catherine there? She had been a minute earlier.
He rushed back to his flat, tore the first page out of the first book that came to hand on one of the stacks, and scribbled:
I’d like to ask you to bring the letter around, no matter how late. Please don’t read it. Sorry for the inconvenience. Regards, Perdu.
He stared at his signature and wondered whether he’d ever be able to think of his first name. Every time he thought of it, he heard Manon’s voice too. The way she sighed his name. And laughed. Whispering, oh, whispering.
He squeezed in his initial between ‘Regards’ and ‘Perdu’: J.
J for Jean.
He folded the piece of paper in half and stuck it to Catherine’s door at eye level with a bit of tape. The letter. Either way, it would be the kind of helpless explanation that women give their lovers when they’ve had enough. There was no need to get worked up.
Of course not.
Then he went back to his empty flat to wait.
Monsieur Perdu felt suddenly and truly alone, like a stupid little rowing boat on the mocking, scornful sea – without a sail, a rudder or a name.
9
As night took flight, abandoning Paris to a Saturday morning, Monsieur Perdu sat up, back aching, took off his reading glasses and rubbed the swollen bridge of his nose. He had knelt there for hours over the floor puzzle, noiselessly pushing the cardboard pieces into place so as not to miss the sound of Catherine moving about in the other flat. Yet it had remained completely silent over there.
Perdu’s chest, back and neck hurt as he took off his shirt. He took a cold shower until his skin went blue, then it turned lobster-red as he rinsed himself with hot water. Steam rose off him as he strode over to the kitchen window with one of his two towels slung around his hips. He did some press-ups and sit-ups as the coffee pot bubbled away on the stove. Perdu washed his only cup and poured himself some black coffee.
Summer had indeed descended on Paris overnight. The air was as warm as a brimming teacup.
Had she left the letter in his letterbox? After the way he had behaved, Catherine probably never wanted to set eyes on him again.
Clutching his towel by the knot, Perdu walked barefoot down the silent staircase to the letterboxes.
‘Now listen here, that’s no … Oh, is that you?’
Madame Rosalette, wearing a housecoat, peeked out of her lodge. He sensed her eyes running over his skin, his muscles and the towel, which felt as if it had s
omehow shrunk.
Perdu felt that Rosalette really did linger a bit too long. And was that a satisfied nod?
He hurried upstairs with burning cheeks.
As he approached his door, he spotted something that hadn’t been there before.
A note.
He unfolded the piece of paper in a rush. The knot gave way, and his towel fell to the floor. However, Monsieur Perdu was hardly aware of the bare backside he was parading to the staircase as he read, with increasing irritation:
