Century Rain

by Alastair Reynolds

“A mouth on you, too,” the guard said.

  “It comes in handy. I’m a singer.”

  “You should learn some manners, in that case.” The guard handed the papers back, making a show of giving them to Floyd rather than Greta. “This passport expires next year,” he said. “Under the new arrangements, not everyone will find it easy to obtain a replacement. Especially mouthy German girls. Perhaps you should reconsider your attitude.”

  “I doubt it’ll be a problem for me,” Greta said.

  “We’ll see.” The guard nodded at his colleague and slapped a hand on the window pillar. “Move on, and learn your girlfriend some manners.”

  Floyd did not breathe normally until they had crossed the Seine, putting the river between them and the checkpoint. “That was… interesting,” he said.

  “Buffoons.”

  “Buffoons we have to live with,” Floyd snapped. Nervous, he crunched the gears. “Anyway, what did you mean, that it won’t be a problem for you?”

  Greta shook her head. “It meant nothing.”

  “Sounded like it meant something to you.”

  “Just drive, Floyd. I’m tired, all right? I’m tired and I’m not looking forward to any of this.”

  Floyd aimed the car towards Montparnasse. It started raining, first a light drizzle that softened the city lights into pastel smudges and then a harder rain that had people scurrying for the shelter of restaurants and bars. Floyd tried finding something on the car wireless, sliding past a momentary burst of Gershwin, but when he reversed the dial and tried to find the station again all he heard was static.

  Floyd helped Greta carry her things up the stairs, into the spare room next to the small kitchen on the first floor of her aunt’s house. The entire place was cold and smelled faintly of mildew. The light fittings either emitted a feeble, stuttering glow, or failed to work at all. The telephone was dead, as Greta had claimed. The floorboards sagged beneath Floyd’s feet, sodden with damp and beginning to rot. The broken skylight above the stairwell had been repaired with a piece of corrugated iron against which the rain drummed sharp-nailed, impatient fingers.

  “Put my things on the bed,” Greta said, indicating the tiny bunk-sized cot squeezed into one corner of the room. “I’ll go and see how Aunt Marguerite’s doing.”

  “You want me to come along?”

  “No,” she said, after thinking about it. “No, but thanks anyway. From now on I think it’s best if she only sees familiar faces.”

  “I thought I counted as a familiar face.”

  She looked at him, but said nothing.

  “I’ll see if I can scrape up something to eat,” Floyd said.

  “You don’t have to wait if you don’t want to.”

  Floyd placed her things on the bed, along with the tin box containing Susan White’s papers. “I’m not going anywhere. At least not until this weather clears up.”

  They had been let into the house by a young woman who rented a small room on the third floor. She was a French girl called Sophie, a stenographer by profession, with prescription glasses and a nervous, braying laugh that culminated in a nasal snort. Floyd filed her under “perpetual spinster,” and then felt immediately guilty when Greta told him about the girl.

  “She’s been an angel,” Greta said, when Sophie was out of earshot. “Buying food, cleaning, writing letters, generally taking care of my aunt’s affairs… all the while still paying her rent. But she’s been offered a job in Nancy, and she can’t delay taking it up any longer. It’s been good of her to stay this long.”

  “And that’s it? No other relatives but yourself?”

  “No one who can be bothered,” Greta said.

  While Greta was upstairs with Marguerite, Sophie showed Floyd around the enamelled metal cabinets in the kitchen. The place was spotlessly clean, but most of the shelves were bare. Abandoning any thoughts of eating, Floyd made himself tea and waited in the spare room, taking in the cracks in the plaster and the tears and stains in the fifty-year-old wallpaper. From somewhere else in the old building he heard very low voices, or rather one very low voice holding up one end of a conversation.

  Sophie poked her head around the door and said she was going out to see a film with her boyfriend. Floyd wished her well and then listened to her footsteps descend the creaking old staircase, followed by the click as she closed the front door without slamming it.

  As quietly as he dared, he left the spare room and climbed the stairs to the next floor. The door to Marguerite’s bedroom was slightly ajar and he could hear Greta’s voice more clearly now, reading aloud from the local pages of a newspaper, bringing Marguerite up to date on Paris life. Floyd edged closer to the door, freezing as he stepped on a creaking floorboard. Greta paused in her monologue, then turned the page over before continuing.

  Floyd reached the door. He looked through the gap and saw Greta sitting on a bedside chair, one leg hooked over the other, the paper spread across her lap. Behind her, he could just make out the bedridden form of her aunt. She was so frail, so drained of life, that at first glance the bed just looked as if it had yet to be made, the bunching of the blankets only accidentally suggestive of a human form. He couldn’t see Marguerite’s head from the doorway; it was hidden behind Greta’s back. But he could see one of her arms, poking like a thin, dry stick from the sleeve of her nightgown. Greta held her aunt’s hand in her own as she read from the newspaper, stroking the old woman’s fingers with infinite kindness. It made something catch in Floyd’s throat, and for the second time that evening he felt ashamed of himself.

  He stepped back across the hallway, avoiding the bad floorboard, and returned to Greta’s room. This couldn’t be Marguerite: not the lively woman he had known only a handful of years ago. So little time couldn’t have done so much harm to her.

  She had been suspicious when he had first started dating her niece; even more suspicious when it turned out that he wanted her for his band. But by turns the two of them had come to a grudging state of mutual understanding, and that chill had thawed into an unlikely friendship. Oftentimes, when Greta had gone to bed, Floyd had stayed up playing chequers with Marguerite, or talking about the old films from the twenties and thirties that both of them loved so much. He had lost touch with her during the last couple of years, especially once Greta had moved into a flat of her own on the other side of town, and now he felt a wave of sadness pass through him like a sudden chemical change in his own blood.

  Looking for a distraction, he opened the tin again and took out the postcard, noting once more the deliberate way in which the words “silver” and “rain” had been underlined. If “silver rain” was indeed a message—and he had no real evidence that it was—what did it mean to the mysterious Caliskan, to whom the postcard was addressed?

  He put the card aside as Greta came into the bedroom.

  “I told you not to wait,” she said.

  “It’s still raining,” Floyd replied. “Anyway, I was just going through this stuff again.” He looked into Greta’s face, noticing that her eyes were wet with tears and fatigue. “How is she?” he asked.

  “She’s still alive, which is something.”

  Floyd smiled politely, although privately he wondered if the kindest thing would not have been for the woman to have died before Greta arrived. “I made some tea,” he said. “The kettle’s still warm.”

  Greta sat down next to him on the bed. “Do you mind if I smoke instead?”

  Floyd stuffed the postcard back into the tin. “Go right ahead.”

  Greta lit her cigarette and smoked it wordlessly for at least a minute before speaking again. “The doctors call it a respiratory obstruction,” she said, then took another drag on the cigarette. “They mean lung cancer, although they won’t come out and say it. The doctors say there’s nothing anyone can do for her. It’s just a question of time.” She laughed hollowly. “She says it’s all the cigarettes she smoked. She told me I should stop. I told her I already had, for the sake of my singing voice.”


  “I think we can allow you one or two white lies,” Floyd said.

  “Anyway, maybe it wasn’t the cigarettes. Twenty years ago they had her working on the armament production lines. A lot of women her age are unwell now, because of all the asbestos they had to work with.”

  “I can believe it,” Floyd said.

  “Sophie spoke to the doctor yesterday. They say a week now, maybe ten days.”

  Floyd took her hand and squeezed it. “I’m sorry. I can’t imagine what this is like for you. If there was anything I could do—”

  “There isn’t anything anyone can do,” Greta said bitterly. “That’s the point.” She took another hit from the cigarette. “Every morning the doctor comes around and gives her some morphine. That’s all they can do.”

  Floyd looked around the dismal little room. “Are you going to be all right here? You don’t sound as if you’re in the best state of mind to be cooped up in here. If you’ve said goodnight to your aunt, she won’t know if you leave and come back first thing in the—”

  She cut him off. “I’m staying here. It’s where I told her I’d be.”

  “It was just an offer.”

  “I know.” Greta waved her cigarette distractedly. “I didn’t mean to sound ungrateful. But even if I hadn’t promised to stay here, I don’t need any more complications in my life at the moment.”

  “And I count as a complication?”

  “Right now, yes.”

  Without wanting to sound confrontational, Floyd said, “Greta, there must have been a reason for that letter. It wasn’t just because you needed a ride to Montparnasse, surely?”

  “No, it wasn’t just that.”

  “What, then? Something to do with the way you spoke to that jackass at the checkpoint?”

  “You noticed?”

  “I couldn’t help it.”

  Greta smiled thinly, perhaps remembering the way she had spoken: that small, meaningless instant of triumph. “He said that mouthy German girls might have trouble with their passports in a year or two. Well, he’s right—I’m sure of that. But it won’t matter to me.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because I won’t be here. I’m taking the flying boat to America as soon as I’m finished here with my aunt.”

  “America?” Floyd echoed, as if he might have misheard her.

  “I knew it wasn’t happening with you and Custine. As I said, that’s why I left Paris. But what I didn’t count on was getting the same feeling with the other band.” Greta rubbed her eyes, perhaps to keep herself from sleeping. “We were in Nice one evening. The show had gone well and we were sitting around in the bar afterwards, accepting drinks from the clientele.”

  “Nice work if you can get it,” Floyd said. “After Custine and I finish, we usually go out of our way to avoid the clientele.”

  Greta shook her head. “Always putting yourself down, Floyd. Always living in the past and clinging to your own cherished sense of inadequacy. Is it any wonder things don’t work out for you?”

  “About this meeting in the bar.”

  “A man was there,” Greta said. “An American: a fat man with a bad suit, a worse haircut and a very thick wallet.”

  “There are always consolations. Who was he?”

  “He didn’t tell any of us at first, just said he was ‘in town’ and that he’d parked his boat in the marina at Cannes. He told us he liked the band, although he made a few pointed remarks about how we needed to keep up with the times if we were ever going to ‘get ahead.’ He meant we were old-fashioned, but good at what we did.”

  “I hear that a lot as well,” Floyd said.

  “Well, the man kept us in drinks for the evening. But you know what those guys are like—after a few hours they barely knew what planet they were on, let alone what club they were in. With them taken care of, the man started concentrating on me. Said he was a television producer.”

  “Television,” Floyd echoed, as if it was something he vaguely recalled someone mentioning once.

  “It’s bigger in America than it is here,” Greta said, “and it’s growing by the year. They say that if you can afford a new auto, you can afford a new television.”

  “It’ll never catch on.”

  “Maybe it won’t, but the point is that I have to try. I have to see for myself if I have what it takes. The man said they’re crying out for new talent.” Greta reached into her jacket pocket and handed Floyd the business card that the television producer had given her. It was printed on good card stock, with the man’s name and business address next to a pair of silhouetted palm trees.

  Floyd scanned it for a second and gave it back to her. “Why would they want a German girl?”

  “I speak their language, Floyd. And the man said there’d be novelty value in it.”

  “They’ll use you up and burn you out.”

  “And you’d know, would you?”

  Floyd shrugged. “I’m just being realistic.”

  “Then let them use me up. I’ll take that over a slow death in some dead-end jazz band, playing music that no one wants to hear any more.”

  “You really know how to wound a fellow,” Floyd said.

  “Look,” Greta said, “the fact is that my mind’s already made up. I’ve saved enough money to take the flying boat. I’ll give them two years. If it hasn’t happened for me by then, maybe I’ll return to Europe.”

  “It’ll never be the same,” Floyd said.

  “I know that, but I still have to try it. I don’t want to be lying on my own deathbed fifty years from now, in some damp old house in Paris, wondering what would have happened if I’d taken the one chance life offered me.”

  “I understand,” Floyd said. “Believe me, I do. It’s your life and it’s none of my business what you do with it. But what I don’t get is why you’re telling me any of this. You still haven’t answered my earlier question. Why did you send me the letter?”

  “Because I’m offering you the chance to come with me. To America, Floyd. To Hollywood. The two of us.”

  He supposed that on some level he had known this was coming, ever since she mentioned America. “That’s not a proposition to be taken lightly,” Floyd said.

  “I’m serious about it,” Greta said.

  “I know. I can tell. And I’m grateful that you asked.” Meekly, he added, “I don’t deserve a second chance.”

  “Well, you’re getting one. But I’m serious about leaving as soon as this whole horrible business is over with.”

  What she meant was: when her aunt was dead.

  Floyd didn’t dare think about the implications yet, didn’t dare allow himself to be seduced by the idea of joining her, with everything that it would mean for his life in Paris.

  “How about this,” Floyd said. “I can join you there soon, but I can’t travel with you—not while we’re still working on this homicide enquiry. And even if we solve the case, I’ll still have a lot of business to deal with. I couldn’t just up sticks from one week to the next.”

  “I want you to go with me,” she said. “I don’t want some vague promise that you’ll fly out when you’ve cobbled together enough money. Knowing you, that could take the better part of a decade.”

  “I just need some leeway,” Floyd said.

  “You always need leeway,” she said. “That’s your problem. If money is the issue, I have some spare. Not enough for a ticket, but enough if you sold that car and whatever else you could stand not to take with you.”

  “How long afterwards? I mean, after she…” Floyd trailed off, unable to come out and say it. “You mentioned a week to ten days.”

  “I’d need a week or so afterwards to deal with the funeral. That gives you at least two weeks, maybe longer.”

  “I’d worry about Custine.”

  “Give him the business. God knows, he’s worked hard enough to deserve it.”

  She had, Floyd thought, obviously given the matter some consideration herself. He imagined her working out the de
tails on the train as she journeyed up from the south, and he felt both flattered and irritated to have been the subject of so much undeserved attention.

  “Why are you giving me this second chance?” he asked.

  “Because there’s still some part of me in love with you,” she said. “In love with what you could be, if you stopped living in the past. You’re a good man, Floyd. I know that. But you’re going nowhere here, and if I stick with you here then I’m going nowhere either. And that’s not good enough for me. But in America things could be different.”

  “Is that true? That you still love me?”

  “You wouldn’t have come to the station if you didn’t feel the same way about me. You could have ignored that letter, pretended it never arrived or that it arrived too late.”

  “I could have,” Floyd admitted.

  “Then why didn’t you? For the same reason I wrote to you—because as much grief and heartache as we cause each other when we’re together, it’s worse when we’re apart. I wanted to be over you, Floyd. I kidded myself that I was. But I wasn’t strong enough.”

  “You’re not over me, but you’ll leave me anyway if I don’t agree to come to America with you?”

  “It’s the only way. It’s either be together, or not be on the same continent.”

  “I need some time to think about it,” Floyd said.

  “Like I said, you have a couple of weeks. Shouldn’t that be enough?”

  “A week or a year, I don’t think it’d make much difference.”

  “Then don’t agonise over it,” Greta said. She moved closer to him, holding his hand tightly and snuggling her head against his shoulder. “I grew up in this room,” she said. “It was the centre of my universe. I can’t believe how small and dark it seems now, how terribly sad and adult it makes me feel.” Her grip on his hand tightened. “I was happy here, Floyd, as happy as any girl in Paris, and now all it makes me feel is that I’m a good way through my life and there’s a lot less of it ahead now than when I was last here.”

  “It gets us all in the end,” Floyd said. “Growing up, I mean.”

  She slid closer to him, until he could smell her hair; not just the perfume from the last time she had washed it, but the accumulated smells of the arduous journey she had made today: the smoke and the grit and the odour of other people, and, buried in there somewhere, something of Paris.