The rain had stopped by the time I entered the metro at Place Blanche. I got out at Porte Maillot and was filled with dread. I knew this neighbourhood. I told myself that I must have dreamed about visiting these people for the first time. So now I was living what I had dreamed: the metro and the walk to their house, and that was why I had the sensation of déjà vu. Boulevard Maurice-Barrès ran alongside the Bois de Boulogne and, as I continued walking, the sensation grew stronger and stronger until I became alarmed. But then I wondered if I wasn’t in fact dreaming. I pinched my arm, I hit my forehead with the palm of my hand in an effort to wake up. Sometimes I knew I was in a dream, that I was in danger, but that none of it was really serious because I could wake myself up at any moment. One night, I’d been condemned to death — it was in England and I was to be hanged the following morning — and they’d taken me to my cell, but I was completely calm, I smiled at them, I knew I was going to give them the slip and wake up in the bedroom on Rue Coustou.
I had to go through a metal gate and down a gravel path. I rang the doorbell at number 70, which looked like a mansion. A blonde woman greeted me and told me that her name was Madame Valadier. She seemed embarrassed to say ‘madame’, as if the word didn’t apply to her but she was obliged by circumstances to use it. Later, when the fellow from the Taylor Agency asked me, ‘So, how did you find Monsieur and Madame Valadier?’ I said, ‘They’re a nice couple.’ He seemed surprised by my response.
They were both about thirty-five. He was tall, dark-haired, with a gentle voice, and quite elegant; his wife was ash-blonde. They sat next to each other on the couch, as self-conscious as I was. It was as if they were camping out in the huge living room on the first floor where — apart from the couch and an armchair — there was not a stick of furniture. Nor were there any paintings on the white walls.
That afternoon, the little girl and I went for a short walk on the other side of the avenue, along the paths near the Jardin d’Acclimatation amusement park. She was silent the whole time, but she seemed to trust me, as if this were not the first time we had gone walking together. I, too, had the feeling that I knew her well and that we had been down these paths together before.
Back at the house, she wanted to show me her bedroom, a large room on the second floor that looked out over the trees of the Jardin d’Acclimatation. From the wood panelling and the two built-in glass cabinets on either side of the fireplace, I assumed that it had once been a living room or a study, but never a child’s bedroom. Her bed wasn’t a child’s bed, either, but was broad with upholstered surrounds. Ivory chess pieces were displayed in one of the glass cabinets. No doubt the upholstered bed and the chess pieces were in the house when the Valadiers moved in, along with other items the previous tenants had forgotten or didn’t have time to pack up.
The little girl did not take her eyes off me. Perhaps she wanted to know what I thought. Finally, I said, ‘You’ve got plenty of room here,’ and she nodded without much conviction. Her mother came in. She said they’d only been living in the house for a few months, but she didn’t say where they’d been before that. The little girl went to a school close by, in Rue de la Ferme, and I was to collect her every afternoon at half past four. I must have said, ‘Yes, Madame.’ At once, a wry smile lit up her face. ‘Don’t call me Madame. Call me…Véra.’ She hesitated, as if she had invented the name. Earlier, when she greeted me, I had taken her to be English or American; I now realised she had a Parisian accent, one that, in old novels, is described as working class.
‘Véra is a very nice name,’ I said.
‘Do you think so?’
She switched on the lamp on the bedside table and said, ‘There’s not enough light in this room.’
The little girl, lying on the parquet floor, at the base of one of the cabinets, was leaning on her elbows and solemnly turning the pages of a school exercise book.
‘It’s not very convenient,’ she explained. ‘We need to find her a study so she can do her homework.’
I had the same impression as I had earlier, when they talked to me in the living room: the Valadiers were camping out in this house.
She clearly noticed my surprise, because she continued, ‘I don’t know whether we’ll be staying here for long. As a matter of fact, my husband doesn’t like the furniture.’
She offered that wry smile again and asked where I lived. I told her that I had found a room in what had once been a hotel.
‘Oh yes…we lived in a hotel, too, for a long time.’
She wanted to know what area I lived in.
‘Near Place Blanche.’
‘Oh, that’s where I grew up,’ she said, with a slight frown. ‘I lived on Rue de Douai.’
At that instant, she resembled one of those aloof, blonde American women who star in thrillers; I thought her voice was dubbed — exactly like being at the cinema — and was surprised to hear her speaking French.
‘On my way home from the Lycée Jules-Ferry, I used to walk around the block and go through Place Blanche.’ She hadn’t been back to the neighbourhood for a long time. For many years, she had lived in London. That’s where she had met her husband.
The little girl was no longer taking any notice of us. She was still lying on the floor, writing in a different exercise book, without faltering, completely absorbed by her task. ‘She’s doing her homework,’ said Madame Valadier. ‘You’ll see…at seven, her handwriting is almost that of an adult.’
It was dark, and yet it was barely five o’clock. Silence everywhere, the same silence I had known at Fossombronne-la-Forêt, at the same time of day and at the same age as the little girl. I suspect that, at that age, I, too, had an adult’s handwriting. I got into trouble because I stopped using a fountain pen, and wrote with a ballpoint instead. Out of curiosity, I checked what the little girl was using: a ballpoint. At her school, in Rue de la Ferme, they probably allowed students to use Bic pens with transparent tips and black, red or green lids. Did she know how to do capital letters? In any case, I doubted they still taught edged-pen lettering.
They took me back to the ground floor. On the left, a double door opened onto a large empty room, at the end of which was a desk. Monsieur Valadier was sitting on the corner of the desk, talking on the telephone. A chandelier cast a harsh light over him. He was speaking in a strange-sounding language that only Moreau-Badmaev could have understood: perhaps Persian of the plains. A cigarette was stuck in the corner of his mouth. He waved to me.
‘Say hello to the Moulin Rouge for me,’ Madame Valadier whispered, staring at me with a sad look as if she envied me going back to that neighbourhood.
‘Goodbye, Madame.’
It had slipped out but still she corrected me. ‘No. Goodbye, Véra.’
So I repeated it: ‘Goodbye, Véra.’ Was that actually her name or had she chosen it, one day at Lycée Jules-Ferry when she was feeling sad, because she didn’t like her real name?
She proceeded towards the door with the lithe gait of aloof, unfathomable blonde women.
‘Walk with mademoiselle for a bit,’ she said to her daughter. ‘There’s a good girl.’
The little girl nodded and gave me an anxious look.