Free now to concentrate on economics, I revised in my bedroom, by day and by night. After lunch, I’d sometimes go for a sleep on the roof terrace, where there was a comfortable sofa in the shade. I often lay there daydreaming about Clémence in her old-fashioned apartment, remembering the things I’d seen and done. I pictured the sewing shop and her sitting in the window, with her knees rising and falling. I remembered the folk song that had suddenly come to me as I watched from across the way. And the street door on the Avenue de Suffren beside which she, or the woman so like her, had hesitated and looked round. I thought a lot about Hannah and hoped that Julian was wrong about her being at her wits’ end. I’d sent her an e-mail, but she hadn’t answered. And as I was drifting off to sleep I thought most of all about Juliette Lemaire tripping down the steps from the Métro at Stalingrad, her coat flying open over her short dress and leather boots, catching my eye for a second as she passed.
The day came for the exam, and I went into college. Miss Aziz met me at the reception desk. She took me by the elbow and smiled. She was wearing a white linen dress down to her feet, where I could see the red-painted toes peeping out, a loose black hijab, mascara and dark lipstick.
‘We’re going to the old seminar room because it’s nice and cool in there. I’ll be invigilating the first paper and Dr Ahmed will be here for the second paper after lunch. Have you done all the work?’
‘Yes, I think I’ve got a grip on it.’
She drew the blinds in the small room to keep out the fierce sun and gave me a glass of cold milk and a banana. I sat at a table facing the wall and when the minute hand on the clock had reached the top of the hour, she opened an envelope and put the question paper down beside me.
As usual in exams, the questions weren’t the ones I’d wanted, but I had something to say on most of them. Where I ran out of relevant information, I wrote about other things, thinking they’d like evidence that I’d done some reading and was serious about the subject. Miss Aziz sat behind me in an armchair where I couldn’t see her. After two hours, I heard her cough quietly and stand up.
‘How was that, Tariq?’
‘It was fine, thanks. Not perfect, but okay. How soon will I know the results?’
We were walking down the corridor towards the canteen. ‘Are you in a hurry?’ She sounded amused.
‘Yes, a bit. But I don’t expect any favours. You know … It’s all my fault anyway.’
‘I can look at both papers tonight. Dr Ahmed’s finished next year’s syllabus planning, so I should think … By Friday?’
‘If I left you my cell-phone number, might you be able to …’
‘We’ll see.’
The second paper was a bit more statistical, not as interesting but easier to get right. I kept knocking down the obstacles it posed, while Dr Ahmed himself snored in the chair behind me. It seemed a pity to wake him when the time was up, but I had nothing left to say.
It was two days later that I received an SMS that said: ‘Dr Ahmed has not had time yet but won’t differ by more than a point or two from my marks. I’ve read both papers twice and confirm that you have passed with merit. K.A.’
I was still wondering what the ‘K’ stood for when I hit the ‘Forward’ button to Laila.
We agreed to meet on Saturday.
During the two-day wait, I worried that Laila would no longer like me. I was also anxious that she might have changed. She’d always seemed more grown up than me in some way. Although I was the one who’d done the daring thing, disappearing to Paris, perhaps she’d also found a way of moving on. Moving further.
Or what if she was unchanged, but somehow didn’t feel the same? I reminded myself of all the things I’d loved about her. The quickness of movement, the intense sympathy she could show, the way I was never afraid to admit to fear and weakness in her presence, the way we laughed, how it was us two against the rest.
When I got to the house on Saturday afternoon, she opened the door from the street into their huge garden.
‘We’re having a tennis game,’ she said. ‘Can you play?’
‘Of course I can.’
‘I’ll lend you a racket. You can borrow Billy’s tennis clothes. Some neighbours are coming.’
I needn’t have worried. There was so much more to her, so many things I’d forgotten, starting with the way she never bothered to say hello because there was always something more important to tell me. Oh, Laila.
‘I got you a present.’
‘It’s too much,’ she said, when she’d torn off the tissue paper. ‘But I love it.’
We were walking up a paved path through the grass towards the veranda at the back of the house. Laila kept staring at me, not looking where she was going. I was worried she might trip over.
‘Did you miss me?’ I said.
‘Just a bit.’
She stopped, put her arms round my neck and kissed me on the mouth. ‘You’re just the same,’ she said.
‘Is that a good thing?’
‘Oh yes. Come inside. I’ll show you where you can change your clothes.’
There was something different about Laila. I had the idea that she’d made her mind up about something.
These neighbours turned out to be older than us, maybe twenty-four or five, a brother and sister, and they were good at tennis. My knowledge of the game was based on having watched satellite tournaments on Eurosport 2 in the college common room. I’d played a handful of times on the public court, enough to be able to get the ball over the net. Laila was better than me, but not much, and she missed a lot because she seemed to be looking at me, not the ball. I suggested it might be a more equal game if she played with the other guy against me and the girl. It was pretty hot, and after about an hour Farida came out with a tray.
‘This is Laila’s favourite drink,’ she told the guests, her cow’s eyelashes fluttering. ‘I’m the only one who knows how to make it.’
Well, I happened to know that Laila’s favourite drink was Bacardi with Diet Coke, but I went along with Farida and to be fair the drink was pretty good. It had lemon and syrup and ginger and soda water and something else you couldn’t put your finger on.
‘It’s called a Scherzo,’ said Laila. ‘It’s an old Italian recipe. It’s named after a bar in Ferrara.’
I think she’d just made the whole thing up, but the brother and sister went on about how much they liked it. We were all sitting on a grass bank and I had an idea the brother was a bit too interested in Laila and I wished he wouldn’t keep telling her how brilliant she was at tennis. He had very hairy legs sticking out of his white tennis shorts which he kept crossing and recrossing as though he wanted people to admire them.
To my horror, Laila asked them if they’d like to stay to dinner. I tried to catch her eye, but for the first time she was looking the other way. The sister hummed and hah-ed a bit, then made a call on her cell phone and it was agreed that we’d play a bit more, then they’d go home and change and old Farida could prepare some extra chicken to stick on the grill.
When we’d finished tennis and the pair of them had gone away for the time being, Laila took me into the house so I could have a shower and change back into my own clothes.
‘Why did you have to ask them to dinner?’ I said as I followed her down one of the long, cool passageways.
‘I’m just being a good neighbour.’
‘But he’s a jerk. And it was our special—’
‘Oh, he’s all right, really.’
We had reached the staircase. ‘Can I come into the shower with you?’ I said.
‘Ssh … Farida might—’
‘Farida’s plucking the chicken.’
We went upstairs and along to Laila’s bathroom. Her father was abroad on business and her mother never came to this part of the house. It was a big place anyway, so it was all quite safe. We went inside the bathroom, which was painted dark green, a lovely colour, and had an open shower area. I kissed Laila on the lips and she held me.
�
��Aren’t you going to look in the mirror?’ she said.
‘What?’
‘I’ve never seen you able to resist.’
‘No. I … I’ve stopped doing that. After something that happened in Paris. A place called Drancy.’
‘Drancy?’
‘I got outside myself. I entered into other people.’
‘You entered …’
‘Stop repeating me.’ I laughed. ‘You’re like an echo.’
She laughed. ‘Well, if you’re not Narcissus any more then I suppose I’d better not be Echo.’
‘Ssh. Kiss me again.’
‘You’re all sweaty.’
‘Of course I am. That’s why I’m getting in the shower with you.’
Laila went to the door and looked down towards the gallery where the stairs came up. She was laughing in the way I liked, when she couldn’t stop. ‘Just for you,’ she said, and kissed me again.
And I knew then what the change in Laila was. She saw me now as something I was not. In her eyes I’d become somehow beyond criticism – so I was liberated from the burden of being me. It was a shock. But I was confident, because I knew that in order to become this hero, all I had to do in the thrilling new world into which I’d stumbled was to be myself.
I sat on a wooden chest by the window while she locked the door. She took off her shirt and bra and I watched her breasts fall forward as she released them. The water was pouring down from an overhead sprinkler the size of a dinner plate. She was too shy to look at me. For tennis she’d been wearing loose thin trousers made of cotton, like pyjamas, with a drawstring.
She stuck her bare arm under the water to test the temperature. She was wearing the bracelet I’d given her. Then she pulled the string, pushed the trousers to her ankles and stepped out of them. I was looking at the way her hair brushed her shoulders. She had her back to me now and she pulled down the tiny white thing she wore under the trousers. She reached out for the shampoo from a shelf inside the shower and began to wash her hair.
‘Come on,’ she said.
I whipped off Billy’s tennis clothes and went in under the warm waterfall with her.
Later, we had the best dinner of my life so far and I didn’t care that the brother and sister were there. Farida kept bringing salads and barbecued meat and more drinks onto the veranda, where we lit the candles and the hurricane lamps and played some music through an outdoor speaker.
The exercise from the tennis, combined with the beer, was having an exhilarating effect. But what was making me feel like a god was what had happened in the bathroom after the shower, when our bodies were still hot and dripping.
And I’d like to go into detail about how we managed it and how moved I was when Laila put her hand back between her legs to find me. But when I caught her eye in the darkness at dinner, I felt that there were some things I’d need from now on to hold back; I knew that what had happened would have to remain between us.
Twenty-Two
Austerlitz (by day)
In the apartment in rue Michal there was a dirty tee shirt under Tariq’s single bed and the remains of a bag of kif on the nightstand, but otherwise no trace of him.
On the table in the hall, the Wi-Fi router flickered, but the front windows onto the street were shut. In the bathroom, the tub was dry and the towels hung folded on the rail. The stove in the kitchen was clean, the crockery put away and the kettle cold.
In the sitting room, a closed laptop on the table was surrounded by notebooks with yellow stickers marking pages; inside, the handwriting showed lines and words highlighted in different colours. A Paris Pratique street plan lay on the floor beside the work table, open at ‘15e Est’, with Parc Georges-Brassens circled in ballpoint.
On the coffee table in the middle of the room was a photocopy of ‘La nuit de décembre’ by Alfred de Musset. Alongside it was an English prose version of its closing stanzas. ‘On my curtain I saw a shadow pass; it came to sit on my bed … Are you an idle dream? Or is this my own image that I am seeing in a mirror?’
A separate piece of paper was headed: ‘The Vision responds to the Poet’. It was followed by some scribbled words. ‘Not guardian angel … not god, not demon … But I will be with you always until the end of your days, when I shall sit on your tombstone.’
After the final stanza of the poem was a translation of what the Vision said.
Heaven has entrusted me your heart.
When you are in pain,
Come to me without worry.
I will follow always on your path,
Though I can never touch your hand.
My friend, I am Solitude.
Under it was written in French, ‘Ami, je suis la solitude.’ The line was repeated five times in the same American hand, twice with the word ‘solitude’ crossed out and ‘loneliness’ substituted. Next to it was written ‘Andrée B’. Under that, ‘Louise Masson’.
Beneath the coffee table, lying on its side on the floor, was an empty brandy bottle. A packet of cigarettes had been opened and two of them had been half smoked; an empty sheet of 400 mg ibuprofen lay curled beside the ashtray.
In the main bedroom, the closed curtains moved a little in the breeze from the open window. On the floor was a discarded linen dress, on top of which was a cell phone I’d switched to silent. From the bed where I lay, half dreaming, half imagining the quiet rooms and the clues and indications that they held, there came, no doubt, the sound of low breathing; and, some time in the late afternoon, a reluctant movement as I pushed back the duvet and opened my eyes.
So I climbed from the bed, searching for a clock or watch, and was reassured by the silent screen of the phone. There was time. Towards six o’clock in the evening, the bathtub was almost full. Emerging from the kitchen, cup of tea in hand, I went into the bathroom, brushed my teeth and sank into the hot water. For a long time, I lay still, my head resting on the back of the tub, staring upwards. Then I washed and rinsed my hair and thoroughly soaped and sponged the rest of me. Wrapped in a towel in front of the mirror, I turned on the hairdryer.
Back in the bedroom, almost revived, I began to act more quickly as I decided what to wear. Trousers, jeans and a skirt were thrown on the bed before I chose a black dress. It was more formal than I’d intended, but an amber necklace gave it a lift. In the bathroom again, I put on mascara and a dash of lipstick. I leaned back from the mirror. My thick dark hair never looked chic, so had to count as boho. The final look was armoured, yet feminine, I hoped: sophisticated enough, but ready for anything. Shame about the face. I stopped at the door, went back and put on more lipstick.
It was a brisk ten minutes to the Place d’Italie and then down into the Métro and up towards Bastille, where I would change. At Austerlitz station the train emerged from underground and pulled up in the open air, where it was still summer daylight. There was a short delay, and then we were on the bridge over the Seine; here even the world-weariest commuters looked up and out of the window. Away to my left I could see the blunt nose of Notre Dame, like an outsized tugboat pushing its way upstream.
I rested my forehead against the glass.
The second train rattled west and I checked the address on my phone. Emerging from the station, glancing at my Paris Pratique for help, I went down a passage, an arcade, and out on to a smaller street where I saw the name of the restaurant. It was almost like old Paris, before the alleyways had been swept away by Haussmann to give the police a field of fire along the new boulevards; you could imagine Thérèse Raquin and her lover living nearby in their sinful apartment.
I checked my watch. Five past eight, five minutes after the appointed time. I would walk once round the block and then …
Pushing open the door, I found a tall desk by the entrance and a grey-haired woman who politely welcomed me. ‘Yes, Madame. Monsieur is already here.’
My legs felt uncertain as I crossed the parquet, weaving between the tables on my heels; I was weak and had to concentrate on walking, not nudging the elbow of a di
ner with my hip, not finding myself fold and give way from the knees. He was sitting with his back to the entrance so I could have the seat on the banquette with a view out over the room.
He had never really missed a beat since the winter day more than six months ago that we’d met again at the Mauri Sept: not one. Julian jumped as I touched his shoulder. He stood up at once and offered his cheek, but I threw my arms round his neck instead.
‘Is this all right for you?’ he said, indicating the seat opposite.
A waiter brought a menu and two glasses of champagne.
‘I don’t like champagne,’ said Julian, ‘but I thought …’
I felt I should say something, but found it impossible to speak. I waved to Julian in an encouraging motion. He began to talk about the menu and the weather.
He looked over his reading glasses as if to ask if I was ready yet, but I made another keep-going movement with my hand. I drank some champagne, which seemed to help.
Eventually, I said, ‘I’m glad you came back.’
‘It was easy. But I needed you to ask.’
‘I know.’
‘How did you find me?’
‘You can’t disappear in the twenty-first century. Even when Tariq lost the number it wasn’t hard. The e-mail bounced back, but I knew you’d given Jasmine a different one.’
‘You sly old fox.’
‘Jasmine and I have no secrets.’
‘Nor did I want you to.’
‘But you were pleased I made the effort?’
‘God, yes. I just needed it to come from you. You do understand that, don’t you?’
Paris Echo Page 28
