‘Excuse me. … I was thinking of the book I’m writing at the moment….’
‘A detective novel?’ she asked me, politely but distractedly.
‘Not exacdy.’
It was no use. The surface remained untroubled. Still waters. Or rather a thick sheet of ice, impossible to penetrate after fifteen years.
‘Shall we be going?’ asked Caisley.
He had his arm around her shoulders. He was a massive figure, and she seemed very small next to him.
‘I’m leaving too,’ I said.
‘We must say good-night to Darius.’
We looked for him without success among the clusters of guests on the terrace. Then we went downstairs to the living room. At the far end of the room, four people were sitting around a table playing cards in silence. Darius was one of them.
‘Well,’ said Caisley, ‘it’s obvious that nothing can compete with poker….’
He shook Darius’s hand. Darius stood up and kissed her hand. I shook hands with Darius in turn.
‘Come back whenever you like,’ he told me. ‘The door is always open for you.’
On the landing, I waited to take the elevator.
‘We’ll say good-bye to you here,’ said Caisley. We live just downstairs.’
‘I left my purse in the car this afternoon,’ she told him.
‘I’ll be right back up.’
Well, good-bye,’ said Caisley, with a nonchalant wave of the arm. ‘And it was very nice meeting you.’
He we;nt down the stairs. I heard a door shut. The two of us were in the elevator. She lifted her face toward me:
‘My car is down the street a little, near the park’
‘I know,’ I told her.
She was looking at me, her eyes wide.
‘Why? Are you spying on me?’
‘I saw you by chance this afternoon, getting out of your car.’
The elevator stopped, the double doors slid open, but she didn’t move. She was still looking at me with a slightly surprised expression.
‘You haven’t changed much,’ she told me.
The double doors closed again with a metallic sound. She lowered her head as if she were trying to shield herself from the light of the ceiling lamp in the elevator.
‘And me? Do you think Fve changed?’
Her voice was not the same as it was a while ago, on the terrace; it was the slightly hoarse, slightly gravelly voice she used to have.
‘No… Except your hair and your name….’ The avenue was silent. You could hear the trees rustling.
‘Do you know this neighborhood?’ she asked me.
‘Yes.’
I was no longer very sure I did. Now that she was walking next to me, I felt as though I had come to this avenue for the first time. But I wasn’t dreaming. The car was still there, under the trees. I gestured toward it:
‘I rented a car.… And I hardly know how to drive.…’
‘I’m not surprised….’
She had taken my arm. She stopped and gave me a smile: ‘Knowing you, you probably get the brake mixed up with the accelerator….’
I also felt as though I knew her well, even if I hadn’t seen her for fifteen years and knew nothing of her life. Of all the people I’d met up to now, she was the one who had stayed in my mind the most. As we walked, her arm in mine, I began to convince myself that we had last seen each other the day before.
We came to the park.
‘I think it would be better if I drove you home.…’
‘Fine with me, but your husband will be expecting you….’
The moment I spoke those words I thought to myself that they rang false.
‘No… He’s probably asleep already.’
We were sitting side by side in the car.
‘Where do you live?’
‘Not far from here. In a hotel near the Quai de Passy.’
She took the Boulevard Suchet in the direction of the Porte Maillot. It was completely the wrong direction.
‘If we see each other every fifteen years,’ she said, ‘you might not recognize me next time.’
What age would we be then? Fifty years old. And that seemed so strange to me that I couldn’t help murmuring,
‘Fifty…’
as a way of giving the number some semblance of reality. She drove, sitting a little stiffly, her head high, slowing down at the intersections. Everything around us was silent. Except the rustling of the trees.
We entered the Bois de Boulogne. She stopped the car under the trees, near the booth where you board the little train that runs between the Porte Maillot and the Jardin d’Acclimatation. We were in the shadows, beside the path, and ahead of us the lampposts cast a white light on the miniature train station, the deserted platform, the tiny wagons standing still.
She brought her face near mine and brushed my cheek with her hand, as if she wanted to be sure that I was really there, alive, next to her.
‘It was strange, just now,’ she said, ‘when I walked in and saw you in the living room…’
I felt her lips on my neck. I stroked her hair. It wasn’t as long as it used to be, but nothing had really changed. Time had stopped. Or rather, it had returned to the hour shown by the hands of the clock in the Café Dante the night we met there just before closing.
Chapter 22
The next afternoon I came to pick up the car, which I’d left in front of the Caisleys’ building. Just as I was sitting down behind the wheel I saw Darius walking along the avenue in the bright sunlight. He was wearing beige shorts, a red polo shirt, and sunglasses. I waved my arm at him. He didn’t seem at all surprised to find me there.
‘Hot day, isn’t it?…. Would you like to come up for a drink?’
I turned down the offer on the pretext that I was meeting someone.
‘Everyone’s abandoning me.… The Caisleys left this morning for Majorca…. They’re smart.… It’s ridiculous to spend August in Paris….’
Yesterday, she’d told me she wouldn’t be leaving until next week. Once again she’d slipped away from me. I was expecting it.
He leaned over the door of the car:
‘All the same, drop by some evening…. We’ve got to stick together in August….’
Despite his smile, he seemed vaguely anxious. Something in his voice.
‘I’ll come,’ I told him.
‘Promise?’
‘I promise.’
I started the car, but I accelerated too fast in reverse. The car hit the trunk of one of the plane trees. Darius spread his arms in a gesture of commiseration.
I set off toward the Porte d’Auteuil. I was planning to return to the hotel by way of the quais along the Seine. The rear fender was probably damaged, and one of the tires was rubbing against it. I went as slowly as possible.
I began to feel a strange sensation, probably because of the deserted sidewalks, the summer haze, and the silence around me. As I drove down the Boulevard Murat, my uneasiness took shape: I had finally discovered the neighborhood where I used to walk with Jacqueline in my dreams. But we’d never really walked together in this area, or else it was in another life. My heart beat faster, like a pendulum near a magnetic field, until I came out onto the Place de la Porte-de-Saint-Cloud. I recognized the fountains in the middle of the square. I was sure that Jacqueline and I usually turned down a street to the right, behind the church, but I couldn’t find it this afternoon.
Chapter 23
Another fifteen years have gone by, all running together in the fog, and I’ve heard nothing from Thérése Caisley. There was no answer at the telephone number she’d given me, as if the Caisleys had never come back from Majorca.
She might have died sometime in the past year. Maybe I would find her one Sunday on the Rue Corvisart.
It’s eleven o’clock at night, in August, and the train has slowed down to pass through the first suburban stations. Deserted platforms under the mauve fluorescent lights, where they used to dream of departures for Majorca and martingales around
the neutral five.
Brunoy. Montgeron. Athis-Mons. Jacqueline was born somewhere near here.
The rhythmic sounds of the wagons fell silent, and the train stopped for a moment at Villeneuve-Saint-Georges, before the marshaling yard. The façades on the Rue de Paris, alongside the tracks, are dark and shabby. Once there was a succession of cafés, movie theaters, and garages along here. You can still make out their signs. One of them is still lit, like a night-light, for nothing.
Out of the Dark Page 11
