‘Voilà!’ the waiter murmured, producing the key of the couple’s room from one of the man’s pockets. A moment before there had been consternation when it could not be found.
Love was conversation: Gérard had said that, and Guy had never understood until tonight. They would sit on the rocks and their conversation would spread itself around them, their two lives tangling, as in a different way they had already begun to. Club 14, Gérard, Jean-Claude, Jean-Pierre, Colette, Michelle, Dominique, Adrien, the walk from the rue Marceau to the Café de la Paix after a badminton game, his mother, and all the rest of what there was: tomorrow and Saturday were not enough. Well, of course they did not have to be.
She gave the waiter a hundred-franc note when the man had been dumped on the bed. The waiter put the room key on the writing-table. When he went he did not seem surprised that Guy did not go also, perhaps sensing something of what had come about. Only once in a whole lifetime, Guy thought, fate offered two people this. ‘How much a visitor you are!’ Michelle said once, and truth to tell he had always felt so, not quite belonging in the group, not even with his mother. And with the Buissonnets, of course, he was a visitor too. All that would come into the conversation; everything would in the end.
‘Thank you,’ she said, speaking in English, and then in French in case he had not understood. But he could manage a little English, and wondered if these were Americans or English people. On the bed the man was snoring.
‘Please,’ she said, opening the minibar and gesturing toward its array of little bottles. ‘Please have something.’
He wanted to say she mustn’t feel embarrassed. He wanted to reassure her absolutely, to say that what had occurred downstairs was of no possible consequence. He wanted to talk of all the other matters immediately, to tell her that years ago he had guessed that Monsieur Buissonnet was his father, that he was certain he owed his position in the Crédit Lyonnais to Monsieur Buissonnet’s influence. He wanted to tell her that nothing was ever said – not a word – by Madame Buissonnet about his mother, or by his mother about Madame Buissonnet, that he had long ago guessed his mother had been a woman in Monsieur Buissonnet’s life before his marriage. It would have been before his marriage; it was not Monsieur Buissonnet’s style to be unfaithful.
‘Oh, then, a cognac,’ he said.
It was not ever said that the farm would one day be his. That was why Monsieur Buissonnet talked so often and so much about it, why Madame Buissonnet asked if this was right, or that, when she chose the colours for a room she wanted to have repainted.
Guy took the glass that was held out to him and for a second his fingers brushed the fingers of the girl he had fallen in love with. He had not known until tonight that it was something you could tell in minutes, even seconds, when you first loved somebody.
‘You have been kind,’ she said. She sat in a low armchair beside the minibar and Guy sat by the writing-table. She flattened the skirt of her white dress over her knees. So much about her was like a child, he thought: her hands as they passed over the white material, the outline of her knees, her feet in high-heeled shoes. Her fair hair fell tidily, framing an image of features in which he believed he could still detect the lingering of the hurt she’d suffered. Her eyes were blue, as pale as the sky there’d been that day.
‘Are you American?’ he asked, carefully speaking English, translating the question from the French.
‘Yes, American.’
It was awkward, the man being there, even though he was asleep. His mood might not be pleasant if he woke up, yet it did not seem to matter; it was only awkward. Guy said:
‘I have only been in the restaurant of the hotel before. Not in a room.’
‘You are not staying here?’
‘No, no.’
She went to the bed and pushed the man on to his side, exerting herself to do so. The snoring ceased.
‘I come every year to the island,’ Guy said. ‘The Buissonnets have a farm.’
‘The people you were with?’
‘Yes.’
‘I have never been here before.’
‘People find it tranquil.’
‘Yes, it’s that.’
When she sat down again the gaze they held one another in was as bold as for each of them it had been downstairs, as open and as confident. Guy hadn’t realized then that this confidence had been there, and the openness. He wondered if – until she smiled – he had assumed that in the unobtrusive lighting of the restaurant she had failed to notice his obsessive interest. He couldn’t remember what he had assumed and it didn’t seem to be important. He wondered what she was thinking.
‘We came by chance here,’ she said. ‘To the island.’
‘Yes.’
‘Please don’t get up and go.’
He shook his head. She smiled and he smiled back. He would show her everything on the island, and when the moment for it came he would tell her that he loved her. He would tell her that never before had he loved a girl like this, had only been attracted in the more ordinary way. That could be because he was what Michelle had called a visitor, always a little on his own. It could have to do with the circumstances of his birth, so little being said, nothing whatsoever really. Who can tell? Guy wondered. Who can tell what makes a person what he is?
‘May I ask your name?’
‘It’s Guy.’
She didn’t give hers. Guy was nice, she said, especially as it was said in France. It suited him, the French way of saying it.
‘Some more?’ she offered.
He had hardly drunk a drop. He shook his head. She reached out to close the door of the minibar, shutting away the light that through its array of bottles had been falling on the thin calves of her legs. They would have a marriage like the Buissonnets’; in the farmhouse it would be like that. Slowly she reached down and took her shoes off.
The jaw of the man on the bed had fallen open. An arm hung down, fingers trailing the carpet quite close to where they were.
‘Guy,’ she whispered, her white dress in a bundle on the floor, one of her shoes on its side. ‘My dear,’ she whispered.
There was an urgency in her resistance to his drawing back from the act that was pressed upon him. There were no whispers now, and no caresses. Instinctively Guy knew there was no pleasure for her. She laughed when it was over, a soundless laugh, different from her husband’s yet it echoed that.
The room was stifling, the air gone stale, infected by the rank breath of the man who slept. Naked, she stood above him, looking down at his slumbering features, at the stubble that was beginning on his chin and neck, a dribble running from a corner of his mouth. She touched his shoulder, and for an instant his eyes opened. She said nothing, and he slept again. For all this – for what had happened, for what was happening still – she had returned a stranger’s gaze. Destruction was present in the room; Guy was aware of that.
She turned away, from the bed where her husband lay, from Guy. The drink she’d poured herself had not been touched. Guy watched her cross the room and close a door behind her. He heard the running of her bath.
He dressed, separating his clothes from hers. He might go to her, now that these minutes had elapsed. Tomorrow, he might say. In the Café Vert at half past ten, ten if it suited better. He would show her the island, he would show her the farm; she would tell him about herself. It could not be forgotten, what had happened, there could be no pretence; yet when they talked, when their conversation began, what had happened would not belong in it.
He laid her dress, with her underclothes, on a chair, arranged her shoes one beside the other on the floor. He drank the cognac, leaving none of it, wanting it because she’d poured it for him. Then he tapped on the door she’d closed.
Her voice came at once, harsh and loud, as it had not been before.
‘I’m having a bath. You’ll have to wait.’