Monsieur Monde Vanishes (17 page)

“Anything wrong?”

“It's all right. She's asleep. Only I think it'd be better not to leave her alone.”

“All right. Should I get dressed?”

“It doesn't matter.”

She put on no underclothes, no stockings or panties. She merely slipped a short woolen dress over her body, and thrust her bare feet into high-heeled shoes. However, she peered into the mirror to powder her shiny face and put on some rouge, and passed a comb through her hair.

“What am I to tell her if she wakes up?”

“That I'm coming back.”

She went up the stairs, docile and indifferent, while he went down and entered the brasserie. This morning he was not wearing his drab, night-worker's suit, but the more elegant outfit, the flannel trousers and double-breasted blue jacket that Julie had made him buy on the first day.

He had a call put through to Paris and went to wait for it in the brasserie where the proprietor was doing his accounts.

“Are you leaving?”

It seemed self-evident to him, as it had to Julie.

The telephone conversation was a long one. At the end of the line Doctor Boucard uttered profuse and interminable exclamations. Monsieur Monde, who knew that he was rather scatterbrained, repeated each of his injunctions several times.

Then he made his way to the shop where he had bought the suit he was now wearing. He found another, more formal, more suitable for Monsieur Monde, and they promised to have the alterations finished by the afternoon.

When he returned to the hotel he found the two women sitting amicably on the bed together. They fell silent as he came in. Curiously enough, Julie's expression had now become more respectful and more subdued.

“Am I to get dressed?” Thérèse asked almost gaily. And she added, pouting: “Couldn't we all three have lunch together?”

It was all of little consequence now. He acquiesced to all their whims, including the choice of a rather luxurious restaurant and a somewhat oversplendid menu. From time to time Thérèse's eyes betrayed anxiety and her features grew tense. At last she asked him, tremblingly:

“Could you get any?”

He had some in his pocket and, with their coffee, he slipped her an ampule; she knew what he held in his closed hand, took her bag, and rushed off to the toilet.

Julie gazed after her and stated with conviction: “She's lucky!”

“Oh?”

“If you knew how happy she is! The things she said about you this morning …”

He neither smiled nor frowned. At Gerly's Hotel a money order, telegraphed by Boucard, awaited him. Leaving the two women together again, he went back to the tailor's and then to the station to reserve his seats. The train left at eight o'clock. Julie, at the station, was torn between laughter and tears.

“Funny how it makes me feel,” she said. “Will you think of me from time to time?”

Monsieur Monde and Thérèse got on the train, had a meal in the dining car, and then went off to their compartment in the sleeping car.

“You'll give me another tonight, won't you?”

He went out into the corridor so as not to see the gesture that he anticipated, the sharp, almost professional jab of the needle into the thigh. He still mistrusted her, and gave her the top berth. He himself slept very little, and kept waking with a start.

He was very calm and clearheaded. He had thought of everything. He had even informed the Superintendent, before he left, that he was taking Thérèse to Paris.

At the station a new morning, a new town awaited them, and Doctor Boucard was waving to them from the end of the platform.

Monsieur Monde and Thérèse walked the length of the train, jostled by other travelers. She dared not cling to his arm. She was surprised to see that someone had come to meet them.

“Will you excuse me for a moment?”

He watched her out of the corner of his eye while he exchanged a few words with his friend, who could not conceal his amazement.

“Come here, Thérèse. Let me introduce one of my very good friends, Doctor Boucard.”

She looked suspicious.

“Let's get out of this crowd first.…”

Once outside, he sought a taxi and made her get in; the doctor followed.

“I'll see you presently. You can trust him. He's not taking you where you might suppose.”

The taxi moved away just as Thérèse began to struggle, protesting loudly at her betrayal.

“Don't be afraid,” Boucard said with some embarrassment. “Norbert telephoned me to rent a comfortable apartment for you. I was lucky enough to find one right away, in Passy. You'll be at home; you'll be quite free. I think you'll have
everything
you want.…”

Thérèse's pointed features expressed surprise mingled with a kind of fury.

“Did he promise you anything different?”

“No …”

“What did he tell you?”

“Nothing … I don't know.…”

She bit her lips, vexed with herself for having been so stupid. Only a short while before, in the train, when the smell of Paris was already in the air, she had laid a hand on Monde's arm and had been on the point of bursting into tears, perhaps of prostrating herself in gratitude. They had been standing in the corridor and only the arrival of a fellow traveler had prevented her from doing so.

“I'm such a fool!” she spat out in a tone of contempt.

For she had believed that it was for her sake that he was coming back!

At ten o'clock Monsieur Monde, before making his way to Rue Ballu, got out of his taxi near Les Halles and walked the short distance to Rue Montorgueil. The weather was dull this morning. Perhaps it had been dull in Paris all the time he had been in the South? The absence of sunlight only made things sharper and clearer. Their outlines showed up starkly.

A truck came out of the shed, and he stepped back to let it pass. He went into the covered courtyard, turned left, and entered the office that he used to share with Monsieur Lorisse. The latter, overcome with emotion, began trembling and repeating in an excited stutter: “Monsieur Norbert! … Monsieur Norbert! …” Then, suddenly embarrassed, he introduced a personage whom Monsieur Monde had not noticed and who was sitting at his own desk.

“Monsieur Dubourdieu … An administrator whom the bank …”

“I understand.”

“If you knew in what a fix …”

He listened. He looked. The whole thing, including Lorisse, including the administrator in his funereal black, made him think of a stiffly posed photograph. He went out of the room in the middle of their conversation, leaving the astonished Lorisse with his sentence unfinished, and made his way to the other offices.

When he reached the last of the row, he looked through the glazed door and saw his son. The boy happened to look up, saw him too, opened his mouth, and sprang up.

As he opened the door Monsieur Monde saw him turn pale, sway, and topple over. By the time he stood at his son's side, the boy was stretched out on the dusty floor and they were slapping his hands to revive him.

Later on, in the lunch break, two clerks who had witnessed the scene discussed it with a warehouseman, and one of them asserted, almost indignantly:

“He didn't turn a hair. He was completely unmoved. He just looked him up and down and waited for him to come to. You'd almost have said he was annoyed about it. When the kid opened his eyes and stood up at last, in fear and trembling, the boss merely gave him a kiss on the forehead and said: ‘Good morning, son!' A man that everyone had believed dead for the past three months and more!”

However, when Monsieur Monde went for lunch at his usual restaurant in Les Halles, his son was his sole companion. He had not telephoned to Rue Ballu, and he had forbidden Monsieur Lorisse to do so.

“So you really believed I'd never come back? … How's your sister?”

“I see her from time to time, secretly. Things are going very badly. They're up to their ears in debt and they're suing mother.”

Alain seemed reluctant to meet his eyes, yet Monsieur Monde had the feeling that in time he would succeed in making friends with his son. At one point he involuntarily fixed his gaze on the lace-edged handkerchief, and the boy noticed this and blushed. A few minutes later he left the room to visit the toilet, and when he returned the handkerchief had disappeared.

“I don't know very much about it, but I think all the trouble was about the safe.…”

“Your mother had the key.…”

“Apparently that's not enough.…”

Monsieur Monde wasted no time. By three o'clock he was with his bank manager. At five, and not before, he stepped out of a taxi in front of the house on Rue Ballu. The concierge gave vent to exclamations. Monsieur Monde, however, was simply coming home, not even like a returning traveler, since he had no luggage; he just rang and went in, as he had done every day for years and years.

“Is madame up there?”

“She's just gone out in the car. I heard her giving Joseph the address of her lawyer.”

Nothing had changed. On the staircase he met the maid—his wife's personal maid—who gave such a start that she nearly dropped the tray she was carrying.

“Look here, Rosalie …”

“Yes, monsieur?”

“I don't want you to telephone to madame.”

“But, monsieur …”

“I tell you I don't want you to telephone to madame. That's all!”

“Has monsieur had a good journey?”

“Very good.”

“Madame's going to be …”

He did not listen to any more, but went up into his own room, where with evident satisfaction he put on one of his own jackets. Then he went down into his study, the old study with the stained-glass windows that had been his father's and his grandfather's.

Nothing was obviously changed there, and yet he knit his brows. He tried to find out what was wrong. Then he saw that the ash tray was missing from the desk, as were the two pipes which he smoked only in private, in this room. In their place he saw a pair of spectacles, his wife's, and on the blotter a file of unfamiliar business papers.

He rang, and handed it all to Rosalie.

“Take these up to madame's room.”

“Yes, monsieur.”

“Do you know where my pipes are?”

“I think they've been put away in the bottom of the bureau.”

“Thank you.”

He was trying out the room, as one might try out a new suit of clothes, or rather, as one tries oneself out in a suit one has not worn for a long time. Not once did he look at himself in the glass. On the other hand, he went to press his face against the windowpane, in his usual place, and beheld once again the same bit of sidewalk below him, the same windows across the way. At one of these, on the third floor, a little old woman who hadn't left her room for many years was staring at him through her curtains.

He had just lit a pipe, and the smoke was drifting cozily through the room, when he recognized the sound of his own car drawing up in front of the house, and the creak of the door as Joseph opened it.

At the same moment the telephone bell rang and he lifted the receiver.

“Hello? Yes, speaking … What? … Did it go all right? … Poor woman! I expected that.…”

Steps on the stair. The door opened. He saw his wife framed in the doorway. But he went on listening to Boucard.

“Yes, yes, she'll get used to it.… No, I won't go.… What's that? … What's the use? … So long as she's got what she needs …”

Madame Monde stood there motionless. He looked at her calmly and saw her little black eyes lose some of their hardness, and betray, possibly for the first time, a certain confusion.

“Right … Tomorrow … See you tomorrow, Paul.… Thanks … Yes, yes … Thank you!”

He hung up, quite calmly. His wife came forward. Her throat was so constricted that she could scarcely speak.

“You've come back,” she said.

“As you see.”

“If you knew how I've suffered …”

She was sniffling, and wondering whether she ought to fling herself into his arms. He merely brushed her forehead with his lips and clasped both her wrists for a second, in an affectionate gesture.

She had noticed everything, he was well aware: the pipes and the ash tray, the absence of the spectacles and the file. She felt impelled to remark: “You haven't changed.”

He replied, with that composure which he had brought back with him, and under which could be glimpsed a terrifying abyss: “Yes, I have.”

That was all. He was relaxed. He was part of life, as flexible and fluid as life itself.

Without irony, he went on to say: “I know you had some trouble about the safe. I'm very sorry. I never thought for one moment about that formula which I've signed so many times: “
I certify that my spouse
… ' ”

“Don't say it!” she begged.

“Why not? I'm alive, as you see. I shall presumably have to go and make a statement to that effect before the police, whom you must have notified of my disappearance.…”

He spoke of it without a trace of embarrassment or shame. He said no more, however, gave no explanation.

Every week, or almost, Julie would write to him on notepaper with a letterhead from Gerly's or the Monico. She gave him news of Monsieur René, of Charlotte, of all his acquaintances. And he would answer her.

Boucard, meanwhile, talked to him every evening at the Cintra about Thérèse, who longed to see him again.

“You ought to go there once, at least.”

“What's the use?”

“Just imagine, she believed that it was for her sake that you …”

Monsieur Monde looked him quite calmly in the eyes. “And so?”

“She was dreadfully disappointed.”

“Oh.”

And Boucard desisted, probably because like everyone else he was deeply impressed by this man who had laid all ghosts, who had lost all shadows, and who stared you in the eyes with cold serenity.