Holding a hand up to my stinging cheek and the other in front of me as if clearing a path through the fusty air, I staggered back to the first room, where no one, it seemed, had moved so much as an inch. Pierre was rooted to the same spot where I’d last seen him. He had lit a new cigarette, the rivulet of smoke curling up towards the ceiling. A few feet away stood Daniel, also in the same position as a few minutes earlier, his hands deep in his pockets as if trapped in a thought he couldn’t find his way out of.
Someone released the pause button. Daniel freed his hands and his gaze wandered from Pierre to me. It must’ve been the line of blood down my check, as he did a double take and rushed over.
‘What happened?’
‘I scraped my face against a wall.’
He frowned and said it looked like a scratch, then pulled a handkerchief from his jacket and pressed it against my broken skin, which made it sting even more. I pushed him away and said I’d be fine.
‘But where’d you go?’
‘I ran after him.’
‘And?’
‘Nothing. He disappeared up a turret.’
The guide was waiting for us in the garden. When and why he’d left the room, nobody knew. In a worn-out voice he called Daniel over to the pond to show him the family of newts that had been living at Challement for centuries.
Pierre, meanwhile, remained near the walls of the chateau. Every now and then I saw him glancing expectantly up at the windows, as if hoping for another encounter with the chatelain. And I too began to glance up, hoping that Marc Cointe would reappear there above like a Green Man carving, branches and foliage snaking out of his mouth, so that I could at least fire off a response with my eyes.
But there was to be no encore.
I felt I had admired a painting, stepped into it, and been cast out. From the looks of it, so did Pierre. For the first time I saw a glimmer of expression pass over his face, a small cloud of unease that moved across his features and dissolved. With the tail end of one cigarette he lit another and turned away, just as Daniel and the guide were returning from the pond.
We drove to the station in uncomfortable silence, Daniel in the front seat beside our guide, neither wearing a seat belt, and I in the back next to Pierre. I was anxious for water and a mirror.
On the platform, a polite And if you ever come to… farewell. The guide avoided eye contact when shaking my hand and seemed much more concerned with whether my companions had enjoyed their trip. Once on the train, I found the nearest bathroom and inspected my scratch in the mirror. To my surprise it was very thin yet rather deep, like a hairline fissure in a bed of rock. I washed it with soap and water and patted it dry with a rough paper towel. Only after a few minutes of inspection did I realise it was in nearly the same spot as the chatelain’s own scar, a long line bisecting his right cheek, starting from below the eye down to somewhere beneath his beard.
That night in bed I must’ve changed position twenty times, switching from right side to left and then back to right. I got up to open the window and then got up to close it, tried two pillows, then none. Despite these attempts I couldn’t rest, my mind captive to one image, hovering there at the centre in great magnification as if an enormous hand kept readjusting the lens: the face of the chatelain. Polished objects reflect the light, unpolished objects trap it.
One thing was clear. I did not feel anger or indignation. I had intruded, he had defended. Every few minutes I’d run my fingers over the scratch that burnt its fine way down my cheek and feel some sort of communion with this chatelain who was at that moment most likely curled up in a shabby mattress in a fireplace, and with a strange flutter I envisioned, how else to put it, the solitude of a man in his architecture.
The following morning I rose late to more silence, and an empty flat. A cafetière and two mugs in the sink. The lingering trace of one of Pierre’s cigarettes in the air. Three stubs in the saucer. A few more hours, I told myself, only a few more hours.
These hours passed vacantly. Without structure or purpose, my sense of time had weakened. Just as I’d finally motivated myself to get up from the sofa and put on my coat, a heavy rain started to fall, aborting all thoughts of a walk, and I remained indoors watching the curtain of water thick as a double window. Through the parallel panes of glass and water I looked out on to the street, the refracted lights from cars like abrasions in the tarmac, and listened to what sounded like church bells in the distance, as if something greater were trying to assert itself over the weather.
At 4.35 they returned, Daniel carrying an enormous dark blue umbrella that he placed open in the bath to dry. Pierre was wearing a pink flower, possibly from the Luxembourg Gardens, and upon seeing me he plucked it from his lapel and extended it in my direction.
‘Did you see the rain?’ Daniel asked.
‘From indoors,’ I said, tucking the flower behind my ear for want of a better idea, then feeling foolish and removing it.
Pierre folded his three suits into his suitcase, emptied the saucer of cigarette stubs into the kitchen bin, and drank a glass of water.
‘I’ll be back in an hour,’ Daniel said, ‘I’m taking Pierre to the station.’
‘Is he heading back to Stockholm?’
No, Daniel explained, first he would go to Amsterdam to visit a sick friend, a Dutch poet he’d been translating since the seventies, who was now dying of emphysema. From there Pierre would go to Ljubljana to see Gregor and only after that back to Stockholm, where he lived, Daniel added, with his mother in a two-bedroom flat in a sixties tower block.
At the door Pierre extended a hand. ‘Nice to see you,’ he said. ‘Meet you again.’
Daniel picked up the suitcase and Pierre reached for his briefcase. He bowed in my direction, a second more formal farewell. The door clacked behind them.
Shortly after they left I spotted Daniel’s keys lying on the kitchen table. Caught up in his friend’s departure, he had forgotten his set.
I made myself a sandwich and ate it while wandering slowly through the flat, fending off a growing sense of despondency. Once I’d finished eating I was seized by a desire for company, three-dimensional or two, and walked over to Daniel’s desk. But the book was no longer there. Hesitantly at first and then more boldly, I searched the drawers, beneath papers and folders, then his room, his suitcase, even lifted the mattress, but the women seemed to have left the premises, retreated into their silent black and white thicket.
Perhaps Daniel had given the book to Pierre, though it scarcely seemed like something that would interest him. Where had they gone, the women?
Ten, twenty, thirty minutes later — I had no idea — the doorbell rang. A second time. A third. I remained on the sofa, where I’d been sitting, thinking.
Loud knocks, followed by exclamations of a fist that pounded out a phrase, sentence, paragraph.
‘Marie, it’s me,’ his voice reached me as if from a distant peak.
From my position on the sofa facing the entrance, I observed the vibrating wooden rectangle attached to three hinges that separated me from Daniel, and Daniel from the interior of our ephemeral home. Minutes later, a woman’s voice. The concierge.
I had no choice. I walked to the door and opened.
He was not smiling.
‘I was asleep,’ I said.
‘And you didn’t hear a thing?’