‘I’ll wait,’ Monsieur Langevin said, ‘while you do your shopping.’
When she returned to the car he drove to a country hotel, almost fifty kilometres away. It was ivy-covered, by a river, with doves in the garden and a stream near by. They sat at a table beneath a beech tree, but nobody came hurrying out to ask them what they’d like. The garden was deserted; the hotel seemed so too. Everyone was sleeping, Monsieur Langevin said.
‘Are you happy at Massuery, Charlotte?’
She was three feet away from him, yet she could feel a fondness that made her faintly dizzy. Her flesh tingled, as though the tips of his fingers had touched her forearm and were sending reverberations through her body. Yet they hadn’t. She tried to think of his children, endeavouring to imagine Colette and the twins at their most tiresome. She tried to think of Madame Langevin, to hear her soft, considerate voice. But nothing happened. All there was was the presence of the man she was with, his white car drawn up in the distance, the small round table at which they sat. A deception was taking place. Already they were sharing a deception.
‘Yes, I am happy at Massuery now.’
‘You were not at first?’
‘I was a little lonely.’
Charlotte walks swiftly through the grey December streets with her port-folio. There was another print, a long time ago, of that round white table, and two faceless figures sitting at it. There was one of three women blurred by heavy rain, waiting among the dripping shrubs. There was one of Massuery caught in dappled sunlight, another of children playing, another of a white Citroën with nobody in it.
They like you, Charlotte. Guy most of all perhaps.’
‘I like them now too.’
They returned to the car when they had talked a while. Only, perhaps, an hour had passed: afterwards she calculated it was about an hour. No one had served them.
‘Everyone is still asleep,’ he said.
How had it happened that he put his arms around her? Had they stopped in their walk across the grass? Afterwards she realized they must have. But in her memory of the moment she was only aware that she had murmured protests, that the palms of both her hands had pressed against his chest. He hadn’t kissed her, but the passion of the kiss was there. Afterwards she knew that too.
‘Dear Charlotte,’ he said, and then: ‘Forgive me.’
She might have fainted and, as though he sensed it, he took her arm, his fingers lightly supporting her elbow, as a stranger on the street might have. He told her, as he drove, about his childhood at Massuery. The old gardener had been there, and nothing much had changed in the house. A forest of birches that had been sold for timber after the war had been replanted. In the fields where sunflowers were grown for their oil now there had been wheat before. He remembered carts and even oxen.
The white Citroën turned in at the gates and glided between the plane trees on the drive, its tyres disturbing the gravel. There’d been an oak close to the house, but its branches had spread too wide and it had been felled. He pointed at the place. They walked up the steps together, and into the hall.
That evening at dinner Madame Langevin’s sister tried out a new phrase. ‘My friend and I desire to attend a theatre,’ she repeated several times, seeking guidance as to emphasis and pronunciation. No one remarked upon the fact that Charlotte had returned in the car with Monsieur Langevin, when always previously on Wednesdays she had arrived back on the bus. No one had noticed; no one was interested. It had been just a moment, she told herself, just the slightest thing. She hadn’t been able to reply when he asked her to forgive him. He hadn’t even taken her hand.
When Sunday came, Monsieur Langevin’s mother brought the bearded Monsieur Ogé who talked about his health, and the widow of the general was there also. The deceived husband was in particularly good spirits that day. ‘Mow chéri,’ Madame Langevin’s sister murmured on the telephone after he’d left for the railway station in the evening. ‘C’est trop cruel.’
When Wednesday came Madame Langevin asked Charlotte if she’d mind taking the bus to St Cérase today because her husband was not going in that direction. And the following Wednesday, as though a precedent had been set by that, it seemed to be assumed that she would take the bus also. Had Madame Langevin somehow discovered? Her manner did not suggest it, but Charlotte remembered her philosophical tone when she’d first spoken of her sister’s relationship with the pharmacist’s assistant, her matter-of-fact acceptance of what clearly she considered to be an absurdity.
Sitting at the café where her solitary presence had become a Wednesday-afternoon feature, Charlotte tried to feel relieved that she’d been saved a decision. But would she really have said no if he’d offered, again, to drive her somewhere pleasant, or would her courage have failed her? Alone at the café, Charlotte shook her head. If he’d asked her, her longing to be with him would have quenched her conventional protests: courage did not come into it.
That day, she went again to the museum and sat in the dusty park. She sketched a hobby-horse that lay abandoned by a seat. The deception was still there, even though he’d changed his mind. Nothing could take it from them.
‘Tu es triste,’ Guy said when she bade him good-night that evening. ‘Pourquoi es-tu triste, Charlotte?’ Only three weeks were left of her time at Massuery: that was why she was sad, she replied, which was the truth in part. ‘Mais tu reviendras,’ Guy comforted, and she believed she would. It was impossible to accept that she would not see Massuery again.
The man nods appreciatively. He knows what he wants and what his clients like. The décor he supplies is enhanced by a pale-framed pleasantry above a minibar or a television set. In the bedrooms of fashionable hotels –and in boardrooms and directors’ dining-rooms and the offices of industrial magnates – Charlotte’s summer at Massuery hangs.
While her patron examines what she has brought him today, she sees herself walking in the Massuery woods, a lone, slight figure among the trees. What was it about her that had made a man of the world love her? She’d not been without a kind of beauty, she supposes, but often she’d been awkward in her manner and certainly ill-informed in conversation, naïve and credulous, an English schoolgirl whose clothes weren’t smart, who hardly knew how to make up her face and sometimes didn’t bother. Was it her very artlessness that had attracted his attention? Had he somehow delighted in the alarmed unease that must have been displayed in her face when he said he’d wait for her to finish her shopping? With long hindsight, Charlotte believes she had noticed his attention from the very first day she arrived at Massuery. There was a fondness in the amused glances he cast at her, which she had not understood and had not sought to. Yet as soon as he permitted the frisson between them, as soon as his manner and his words created it, she knew that being in his company was in every way different from being in Madame Langevin’s, though, before, she had assumed she liked them equally. With that same long hindsight, Charlotte believes she came to love Monsieur Langevin because of his sense of honour and his strength, yet she knows as well that before she was aware of these qualities in him her own first stirrings of emotion had surfaced and, with unconscious propriety, been buried.
Madame Langevin’s sister embraced her warmly the day Charlotte left Massuery. ‘Farewell,’ she wished her, and inquired if that was what was said on such occasions in England. The children gave her presents. Monsieur Langevin thanked her. He stood with his hands on Colette’s shoulders, removing one briefly to shake one of Charlotte’s. It was Madame Langevin who drove her to the railway station, and when Charlotte looked back from the car she saw in Monsieur Langevin’s eyes what had not been there a moment before: the anguish of the sadness that already claimed their clandestine afternoon. His hands remained on his daughter’s shoulders but even so it was as if, again, he’d spoken. At the railway station Madame Langevin embraced her, as her sister had.