Léon and Louise (16 page)

Léon began by describing the gigantic airship that had recently floated past his laboratory window, almost close enough to touch. Then Louise told how her Torpedo had conked out on the way back from Le Tréport and refused to start until she had rid the air filter of dust with a drop or two of petrol from her spare can. After that they discussed the advantages and disadvantages of asphalted and paved roads, and Louise went on to mention that her route to work took her past the Place de Clichy, which had been freshly paved, and that nearly all the prostitutes there had worn mourning since the war. She wanted to know if Léon thought they were really all war widows. Probably, was his rather bemused response, whereupon Louise said she hoped so, because if the only other possible explanation were true – namely, that the whores affected widows' bonnets as a business-boosting form of costume because homecoming soldiers relished the idea of screwing their fallen comrades' wives – if that were true, she wanted nothing more to do with men for the rest of her days. He couldn't judge, said Léon, because he had no statistically relevant information about the Place de Clichy's whores or the emotional state of homecoming
poilus
. All he knew for sure was that the idea wouldn't appeal to him personally.

‘I know it wouldn't,' said Louise, and she quickly described how she had once skidded in freezing rain in the Place de l‘Étoile, almost glissading under the Arc de Triomphe and over the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier.

The Torpedo was back on the road shortly after midnight. Louise was now driving slowly while Léon stroked the nape of her neck and gazed at the headlights' twin yellow beams on the road ahead. They didn't speak for a long time. Then Louise cleared her throat.

‘Listen, Léon,' she said, harshly all of a sudden, ‘we'll be back in Paris an hour from now. You must promise me something.'

‘What's that?'

‘I don't want you stalking me.'

‘Stalking you?'

‘You know what I mean. We won't see each other again, it would be pointless – it would get us nowhere. You don't know where I live and I'm not going to tell you, but you know where I work.'

‘So?'

‘Don't act dumb, it doesn't suit you. I don't want you hanging around outside the Banque de France in the hope of seeing me. You're not to loiter in the Rue de Rivoli or the Place de la Victoire either, or set some detective on me, or bump into me by chance when I'm buying a pound of potatoes in the vegetable market, or happen to sit down beside me in the cinema. Will you promise never to do that?'

‘Coincidences happen,' said Léon. ‘Paris isn't as big as people think, you know. It's always possible our paths will cross. In the Métro, in the street, at the butcher's...'

‘Don't talk nonsense,' she said sharply. ‘We don't have the time. You must promise not to do anything silly. Never, not once. If our paths ever do happen to cross, we can say hello in passing if you like, but we won't stop. For my part, I promise I'll never set foot in the Rue des Écoles or the Quai des Orfèvres. I can't leave the Boulevard Saint-Michel to you entirely – I have to go that way from time to time.'

‘So do I. Twice a day at least.'

‘Be a man, Léon. Promise me.' She took her right hand from the steering wheel and held it out. ‘Do you promise?'

He turned to her and smiled as if to say, ‘Give me a break!' Then he took her hand, looked out of the side window, and said, ‘No.'

For a few seconds Louise drove through the darkness in silence. Then she braked and put the car into neutral. As soon as it was stationary she applied the handbrake, got out, and walked round the bonnet to the passenger door.

‘Move over. You're going to drive now.'

‘Louise, I've never – '

‘Go on, move!'

‘I can't drive.'

‘Then you're going to learn. You're driving from now on, otherwise we'll beat about the bush for ever and – who knows? – maybe burst into tears. This is the accelerator and this is the brake. I'll handle the gear changes to start with. Now depress the accelerator a little – only a little, that's right. Now take your foot off the pedal and depress the clutch. That's first gear, see? I'll release the handbrake and you slowly release the clutch and, at the same time, gently depress the accelerator, gently, gently...'

Once they were in third, Léon maintained a speed of fifty k.p.h. Keeping to the middle of the road, he drove northwards through the darkness and headed for the city. He tried turning the headlights off and on, blew the horn, and let his left arm dangle in the airflow outside the window. Louise helped him to steer only on very tight bends, and when the road ran uphill she took the gear lever and changed down. As they breasted one of the last hills before the outskirts of the city, the strings of lights on the Eiffel Tower came into view in the north-west. The moon was visible above a dark strip of forest to the north-east.

‘Look,' said Léon, ‘the moon is exactly half-full. Know what that means?'

‘No, what?'

‘It means the moon is precisely in the same place in the solar system as we were four hours ago.'

‘What?'

‘Four hours ago, the earth was where the moon is now.'

‘We were up there four hours ago?'

‘That...' – he glanced at his watch – ‘...is precisely where I tore the last button off your blouse four hours ago.'

They drove on in silence for a while, looking at the moon through the windscreen.

‘It's moved on a bit now,' he said. ‘Now it's reached the place where your knickers – '

‘Leave my knickers out of it,' she broke in.

Léon explained that when the moon was half-full, the earth, the moon and the sun formed a perfect right angle, which meant that the moon, on its orbit around the sun, followed in the earth's wake, so to speak, at a mean distance of three hundred and eighty thousand kilometres and a speed of a hundred thousand kilometres per hour. ‘That means that we were there just short of four hours ago, and that the moon will be here in four hours' time.'

‘Four hours?' said Louise. ‘Hang on, let me check.' She put her head back and looked up at the sky while the Torpedo puttered peacefully through the darkness. After a while she said, ‘You're right. Three hours, fifty-two minutes and a few seconds. But is the moon waxing or waning?'

Léon laughed in surprise, then hung his head. ‘No idea,' he said ruefully. ‘Perhaps it depends whether you're looking at it from north or south of the equator.'

‘Nonsense. All men are the same – astronomically speaking, at least.'

‘Anyway, there are two possibilities: the moon is either four hours behind us or four hours ahead.'

‘If it's ahead of us, it's now where we'll be in four hours' time.'

‘I don't want to know that,' said Léon. ‘Let's assume it's trailing after us.'

‘The odds are fifty-fifty,' said Louise. ‘So where would the moon be now?'

‘At the place where I carried you from the table to the bed.'

‘And we stopped beside the wardrobe on the way.'

‘Beside the coat hooks, you mean.'

‘Which weren't properly screwed to the wall.'

For a while they silently regarded the moon, which was lifting above the skyline at a surprising rate.

‘Actually,' said Louise, ‘you wouldn't need a rocket to get to the moon. You'd simply have to stay put for four hours.'

‘Just jump into the air, hover there, and let the earth sail on.'

‘And wait for the moon.'

‘And then climb on.'

‘Tell me, Léon, where has the moon got to now?'

‘Where the bedside light fell over and smashed. And you started moaning my name.'

‘You're a conceited ass.'

‘I can still hear you,' he said. ‘I've got you in my nose, too. I can smell the two of us. Here, smell.'

She sniffed his neck, his shoulder and her own forearm. ‘We smell exactly the same.'

‘Our smells have mingled.'

‘I wish they could stay that way.'

‘For evermore.'

Louise laughed. ‘That's ambitious of you.' She undid the bottom button of his shirt and slid her hand beneath it. ‘You're feeling very smug – you think you're a hell of a fellow, don't you?'

He nodded.

‘But do you also know, master of the universe, where a car's footbrake is?'

‘I can accelerate, turn the lights on and off and sound the horn. I don't want to be able to brake.'

‘But I do. Apply the brake, you lord of creation. Now, right away, go on. Take your foot off the accelerator, then depress the clutch and put the car into neutral. No, that's the handbrake, not the gear lever. Now the footbrake, just next to the accelerator. Pull over to the right, go on, quick.'

While Léon was still busy with the steering wheel, clutch and brake, she kissed him and tugged at his clothing until the car bucked and lurched to a halt. The engine hissed softly under the bonnet. An owl hooted in the distance. The valley between them and the outskirts of Paris was wreathed in mist. They fetched two blankets from the boot and, closely entwined, made their way to the edge of the woods, where they lay down on the soft turf between two bushes and made love until dawn by moonlight.

L
éon and Louise never saw or heard from each other again in the ensuing eleven years, eight months, twenty-three days, fourteen hours and eighteen minutes. Léon kept the promise he'd refused to give and never, not once, went near the Banque de France, nor did he undertake any pointless Métro rides or loiter in the Boulevard Saint-Michel for no good reason.

It was inevitable, however, that he went to work in the morning and came home in the evening. He couldn't keep his eyes shut en route but had to keep them open, so there were bound to be occasions when his heart beat faster at the sight of a pair of green eyes in the Boulevard Saint-Michel or the back of a neck surmounted by dark hair bobbed from one earlobe to the other. Even after years had gone by, he would still give a start when a Renault Torpedo rounded a bend, or when, in the corner of a Métro carriage, he sighted a woman in a raincoat smoking.

He once left the laboratory during working hours, climbed to the top of the Palais de Justice, and located a north-west-facing window among the roof beams. Opening this window, which was black with the dust of centuries and white with cobwebs, he found to his relief that, although he could look across the Seine towards the Banque de France, the bank itself was obscured by several rows of buildings.

Another time, while he was on his way home on a Thursday evening, a vague figure disappeared behind the circular bookstall in the Place Saint-Michel. Instantly convinced that it must be Louise, he dashed over to the bookstall and circled it twice, scanned the people hurrying past, then circled the bookstall once more in the opposite direction. But the figure had vanished as mysteriously as if it had soared into the sky or been swallowed up by a trapdoor.

Before going to sleep at night Léon continually relived his ride in the Torpedo, being with Louise at the
Relais du Midi,
and those last few hours before dawn on the edge of that wood within sight of the Eiffel Tower. He was surprised to discover that his memories didn't fade as the weeks, months and years went by; on the contrary, they became stronger and more vivid. The touch of her lips on his neck seemed ever warmer from year to year, the thrill that ran through him at the thought of her whispered ‘Touch me there – yes, there!' ever more powerful, the scent of her ever sweeter. He could actually feel his hands on her supple and wiry but unyielding and demanding body, which was so different from that of his soft, warm, yielding wife. In his heart he preserved the feeling he had only ever known with Louise – the sense of being completely at one with himself and the world and the little time allotted him.