Léon and Louise (15 page)

‘I'm not gawping, just looking. A snappy little roadster, you've got.'

‘Four-cylinder, does sixty k.p.h. with ease.'

‘I know,' he said. ‘A Torpedo won the Coupe des Alpes a few years back.'

‘Two years running. It was a present to myself to celebrate the anniversary of my employment by the Banque de France. I got it cheap – it already had a few dents.'

‘The name doesn't really suit it, though.'

‘Why not?'

‘A torpedo's pointed at the front, not the back.'

‘I'll drive around in reverse if you like.'

‘You work for the Banque de France?'

‘Have done for five years.'

‘Congratulations.'

‘Congratulations aren't appropriate. They treat me like a serf.'

‘Why?'

‘Because that's what I am. I spend the whole day typing out tabular computations, and I have to produce five copies of each.'

‘Hence the Torpedo?'

‘Exactly.'

‘You don't ride a bike any more?'

‘If I have to go somewhere I take the car. And if I don't have to go somewhere I also take the car.'

‘And if you go to the seaside?'

‘Then I certainly take the car.'

‘So why did I see you in the Métro?'

‘The car was in for repair.'

‘You work at head office?'

‘Yes, Place de la Victoire.'

‘I've been working at the Quai des Orfèvres for the last ten years. That's only a few hundred metres away.'

‘Well, well,' said Louise, ‘so we've been polishing the seats of our chairs in pretty close proximity for quite a while. Some people would call that bad luck.'

‘Yes.'

‘Don't let's talk now. We'll drive out of town for bit, if that's all right with you. We'll talk later.'

Louise changed up from third to fourth and drove past the Luxembourg Gardens with her foot hard down, then further south past the Observatory and into the Avenue d'Orléans. She let her left arm dangle over the door and steered the car with her right hand. She overtook horse-drawn vehicles and buses on the left or right, wherever a gap presented itself, and when the street came to an intersection she shimmied between pedestrians, bicycles and cars at breakneck speed. Whenever a bus or a lorry refused to give way she thumbed her horn and cursed and swore until the startled driver pulled over, and when she shot through the gap she thrust her arm out of the window and made a gesture that would normally, if directed by one man at another, have resulted in a punch-up.

Léon stared with delighted horror at the lethal obstacles flashing past the Torpedo on either side. He also stole sidelong glances at Louise, who, now that the traffic had thinned and the road was flanked by fields, was leaning back and looking ahead with her eyes half shut.

She had removed her leather helmet and goggles. The corners of her mouth conveyed a suspicion of a smile, her chin was tilted expectantly, and her neck made a softer impression than it used to. A little furrow ran from the dip below her ear to her throat, and this, combined with the silver strands above her temple, lent her still girlish appearance a hint of womanly dignity. Léon would dearly have liked to know if the ironical twinkle in her eyes related to the other drivers on the road or her sudden togetherness with him in the cramped confines of the little sports car. Both her hands were now resting on the steering wheel, and he noted she wasn't wearing a ring.

‘Now stop staring,' she said, putting a cigarette between her lips. ‘We'll stop in half an hour, then we can talk.'

T
he nearby forest of Fontainebleau was a dark ribbon below the night sky. Cowering on the plain were little hamlets in which only a scattering of lights still burned late that evening. In the
Relais du Midi,
which stood beside the road between two nameless villages, long-distance lorry drivers and travelling salesmen were drinking beer in the stifling heat given out by the stove in the middle of the taproom.

Léon and Louise were sitting close together beside the window in the corner. He had his right arm round her waist. She was leaning against his shoulder with his right hand in her left. A cold draught coming through the cracks in the window was blowing the smoke of her cigarette horizontally towards the stove.

‘We still haven't talked,' he said.

‘Do you want to talk?'

‘No,' he said. ‘Do you?'

‘We have talked a bit.'

‘But not about that.'

‘No.'

‘Only about cars.'

‘And
Metropolis
.'

‘And Kellogg and Fitzmaurice.'

‘And Chanel dresses and stupid cloche hats. And about your concierge and your mangled
tartes aux fraises
.'

‘And about inflation and the Banque de France.'

‘And elephants. How did that joke about elephants go again?'

‘Do you still read Colette's novels?'

‘Oh, that silly cow. I've never been so disappointed by anyone. I'm out of cigarettes.'

‘Are there some left upstairs?'

‘In the car.'

‘I'll get them for you.'

‘Stay here,' she said, squeezing his hand. ‘Don't leave me. Not yet.'

He drew her closer and kissed her.

‘I'm hungry,' she said. ‘Let's order before the kitchen shuts.'

‘I'll have steak and
frites,
' he said.

‘Me too.'

Léon beckoned the landlord over and ordered, then told Louise a story to make her laugh.

It was the story of the tramp who sat outside the Musée Cluny day in day out, year after year. Léon used to drop a coin in his hat every morning on the way to work. The man smelt of red wine but was usually clean-shaven, and one could tell that he tried to keep his shabby clothes clean. They always said a friendly good morning and sometimes exchanged a few words, wishing each other a nice day before Léon walked on.

Every few months, the museum gateway would be deserted when Léon went to work. When that happened he would anxiously wonder whether something had happened to the tramp overnight and wave to him in relief when he saw him sitting in his usual place at lunchtime. Having grown attached to the man over the years, he worried about him as he would have worried about a distant uncle – one with whom he wasn't on very intimate terms but who was somehow ‘family'.

Léon didn't know the man's name nor did he want to, nor did he want to know where he spent the night and whether he had some relations somewhere. Over the years, however, he had gleaned a few scraps of information about him. He knew, for instance, that the tramp had a predilection for
foie gras
and suffered from an arthritic hip in the winter, and that he had once had a wife named Virginie and a job as verger at a church somewhere in the suburbs, plus a flat to go with it, before his own or other people's debts had deprived him first of his wife or his job or his flat, and that he had subsequently lost the rest of this petty bourgeois trinity because you had to have them all or not at all.

Conversely, the tramp had built up a picture of Léon. When a flu epidemic was going round he enquired after the health of Léon's offspring and his lady wife, and when a poisoning was making headlines in the press he wished him success at the laboratory.

The tramp had become one of the most important people in Léon's life as years went by, because there weren't very many other individuals with whom he daily exchanged a few words in the confident assumption that they were well disposed towards him for no ulterior reason. He had become Léon's personal tramp in the course of time – so much so that Léon felt almost jealous when he chanced to see another passer-by put some money in his hat.

In October of the previous year the tramp had not been sitting in his usual place for three days in succession. On the fourth day he was back, however, and Léon was so relieved that he'd invited him to the nearest bistro for a coffee. There the man told him that four nights earlier, when a vicious north wind was driving sleet through the streets of the Latin Quarter and he was dead drunk and looking for a place to sleep, he had found an unlocked, empty cattle wagon in the vicinity of the Gare de Lyon. Sliding the door open, he climbed into the agreeably windless interior, shut the door again, wrapped himself in his blanket in the straw, and fell asleep within seconds.

So soundly had he slept that he didn't wake up when the cattle wagon jolted into motion, and he slept on at dawn, when the train complete with locomotive and twenty empty cattle wagons pulled out of the Gare de Lyon and headed southwards out of the city. Anaesthetized as he was by several litres of cheap red wine, the incessant rocking and lurching kept him profoundly asleep throughout the day like an infant in a cradle. Meantime, the train continued on its way through the French provinces. The tramp slept on while traversing Burgundy from north to south, and he slept on in the vineyards of the Côte de Rhône, and he slept on at dusk, when the train was steaming past the wild horses of Provence, and he slept on in Languedoc and Roussillon and at the foot of the Pyrenees. It wasn't until the next morning, when his wagon had been stationary for quite a while and was becoming ovenlike in the southern sun, that he awoke with a furry tongue and a head like a block of wood.

The tramp crawled out of the straw and wiped his sweaty face on his sleeve. Sliding the door open, he saw – when his eyes had grown accustomed to the dazzling sunlight – a deserted cattle-loading station and beyond it, stretching away to the horizon, a shimmering plain completely bare except for a few isolated cacti. It was a while before he grasped that he wasn't in Paris any longer, nor even in the north of France, but somewhere very far to the south. He had no money, no papers, and presumably no knowledge of the local language.

Impelled by agonizing thirst and a raging headache, he climbed down on to the permanent way and trudged north-east along the track for an hour-and-a-half until he came to the nearest railway station, where a level-crossing keeper in an operetta uniform disclosed in broken French that he was on the banks of a river named Arga, not far from Pamplona.

Louise laughed. Then the food came.

They didn't talk about their weekend together at Le Tréport ten years earlier, nor about their night on the beach and the shellfire next morning, nor about the years they'd been apart.

Earlier that evening, when they were still lying in bed, mutually exploring the scars left on their bodies by shrapnel, machine-gun bullets and surgeons' scalpels, Louise had told him that a wine merchant from Metz, who had also got mixed up in the bombardment, had picked her up and driven her in his van to the women's hospital at Amiens. There, after undergoing an emergency operation, she had lain among the hopeless cases for a whole month, contracted pneumonia and Spanish flu, and not been discharged until six months after the war ended, only semi-recovered even then.

She went straight back to Saint-Luc-sur-Marne and called on the mayor, who gave her a rapturous welcome and told her straight out that Léon had also paid him a visit a few months earlier, looking gratifyingly restored to health. Seated on the very chair on which Louise was sitting now, he said, Léon had described his own misfortunes, then suddenly jumped up and walked out. No one had seen him since.

When Louise asked the mayor if he knew Léon's address, he gave a regretful shrug, and when she overcame her embarrassment and asked if Léon had enquired about her, he patted her hand, shook his head sadly, and made some profound remark about the capriciousness of young people in general and the fickleness of young men in particular.

When Léon ordered two coffees after the meal, the landlord ostentatiously squinted at the clock on the wall. After bringing the cups he toured the taproom with his purse and put the unoccupied chairs upside down on the tables. Léon and Louise talked in low voices, eyeing one another as intently as if they were engaged in difficult negotiations about decisions of the greatest moment, when they were really only talking of trivia and carefully avoiding anything weighty and important.