Out of the Dark (10 page)

'You probably need some spending money?'

And he held out a light blue envelope. I was about to tell him we didn't need it, but Jacqueline casually took the envelope from his hand.

'Thanks·very much,' she said, as if this were all perfectly natural. 'We'll pay you back as quickly as possible.'

'I hope so,
'
said Rachman. 'With interest … Anyway, I'm sure you'll find some way to express your gratitude ...' He laughed out loud.

Linda handed me a small key ring.

'There are two keys,' she said. 'One for the front door, the other for the apartment.'

They got into the car. And before Rachman drove off Linda lowered the window on her side:

'I'll give you the address of the apartment, in case you get lost ...'

She wrote it on the back of the light blue envelope:
22
, Chepstows Villas.

Back in the room, Jacqueline opened the envelope. It held a hundred pounds.

'We shouldn't have taken this money,' I told her.

'Yes we should have … We'll need it to go to Majorca ...' She realized I wasn't convinced.

'We'll need about twenty thousand francs to find a house and to live in Majorca ... Once we're there, we won't need anyone anymore ...'

She went into the bathroom. I heard water running in the tub.

'This is marvelous,
'
she called to me. 'It's been so long since l've had a bath ...'

I stretched out on the mattress. I was trying hard not to fall asleep. I could hear the sound of her bathing. At one point, she said to me:

'You'll see how nice it is to have hot water ...'

In the sink in our room at the Hotel Radnor we'd only had a thin stream of cold water.

The light blue envelope was sitting next to me on the mattress. A gentle torpor was coming over me, dissolving my scruples.

About seven o'clock in the evening, the sound of Jamaican music coming from Linda's room woke us up. I knocked on her door before we went downstairs. I could smell marijuana.

After a long wait, she opened the door. She was wearing a red terrycloth bathrobe. She stuck her head out.

'I'm sorry … I'm with someone ...'

'We just wanted to say good evening,' said Jacqueline.

Linda hesitated, then finally made up her mind to speak:

'Can I ask you to do me a favor? When we see Peter, you mustn't let him find out that I have someone here ... He's very jealous … Last time, he came by when I wasn't expecting him, and he was this close to smashing the place up and throwing me out the window.'

'What if he comes tonight?' I said.

'He's away for two days. He went to the seaside, to Blackpool, to buy up some more old dumps.'

'Why is he so kind to us?' Jacqueline asked.

'Peter's very fond of young people. He hardly ever sees anyone his own age. He only likes young people ….'

A man's voice was calling her, a very quiet voice, almost drowned out by the music.

'Excuse me … See you soon … And make yourselves at home … '

She smiled and closed the door. The music got louder, and we could still hear it from far away in the street.

'That Rachman seems like an odd type,' I said to Jacqueline. She shrugged.

'Oh, he's nothing to be afraid of...'

She said it as if she'd already met men of his sort, and found him completely inoffensive.

'At any rate, he likes young people ...'

I had spoken those words in a lugubrious tone that made her laugh. Night had fallen. She had taken my arm, and I no longer wanted to ask questions or worry about the future. We walked toward Kensington down quiet little streets that seemed out of place in this huge city. A taxi passed by, and Jacqueline raised her arm to make it stop. She gave the address of an Italian restaurant in the Knightsbridge area, which she had spotted during one of our walks and thought would be a good place to go for dinner when we were rich.

The apartment was quiet, and there was no light under Linda's door. We opened the window. Not a sound from the street. Across the way, under the boughs of the trees, an empty red phone booth was lit up.

That night we felt as though we had lived in this apartment for a long time. I had left Michael Savoundra's script on the floor. I began to read it. Its title was
Blackpool Sunday
. The two heroes, a boy and a girl of twenty, wandered through the suburbs of London. They went to the Lido on the Serpentine and to the beach at Blackpool in August. They came from modest families and spoke with a Cockney accent. Then they left England. We next saw them in Paris, and then on an island in the Mediterranean that might have been Majorca, where they were finally living 'the good life.' I summarized the plot for Jacqueline as I went along. According to his introduction, Savoundra hoped to film this script as if it were a documentary, casting a boy and girl who weren't professional actors.

I remembered that he'd suggested I correct the French in the part of the script that took place in Paris. There were a few mistakes, and also some very small errors in the street names of the Saint-Germain-des-Prés neighborhood. As I went further, I thought of certain details that I would add, or others that I would modify. I wanted to tell Savoundra about all this, and maybe, if he was willing, to work with him on
Blackpool Sunday
.

FOR THE NEXT FEW DAYS I didn't have a chance to see Michael Savoundra again. Reading
Blackpool Sunday
had suddenly given me the desire to write a story. One morning I woke up very early and made as little noise as possible so as not to disturb Jacqueline, who usually slept until noon.

I bought a pad of letter paper in a shop on Notting Hill Gate. Then I walked straight ahead along Holland Park Avenue in the summer morning light. Yes, during our stay in London we were at the very heart of the summer. So I remember Peter Rachman as a huge black silhouette, lit from behind, beside the Serpentine. The strong contrast of shadow and sunlight makes it impossible to distinguish his features. Bursts of laughter. Sounds of diving. And those voices from the beach with their limpid, faraway sound, under the effect of the sun and the hazy heat. Linda's voice. Michael Saroundra's voice asking Jacqueline:

'Have you been in London long?'

I sat down in a caféteria near Holland Park. I had no idea of the story I wanted to tell. I thought I should put down a few sentences at random. It would be like priming a pump or getting a seized-up engine started.

As I wrote the first words, I realized how much influence
Blackpool Sunday
had on me. But it didn't matter if Savoumdra's script served as my springboard. The two heroes arrive at the Gare du Nord one winter evening. They're in Paris for the first time in their lives. They walk through the neighborhood for some time, looking for a place to stay. On the Boulevard de Magenta they find a hotel whose concierge agrees to accept them: the Hôtel d'Angleterre et de Belgique. Next door, at the Hôtel de Londres et d'Anvers, they were turned down because they weren't adults.

They never leave the neighborhood, as if they were afraid to risk wandering any farther. At night, in a café just across from the Gare du Nord, on the corner of the Rue de Compiègne and the Rue de Dunkerque, they are sitting at a table next to a strange couple, the Charells, and it is not quite clear what they are doing here: she is a very elegant-looking blonde, he a dark-haired man with a quiet voice. The couple invites them to an apartment on the Boulevard de Magenta, not far from their hotel. The rooms are half-lit. Mme Charell pours them a drink ...

I stopped there. Three and a half pages. The two heroes of
Blackpool Sunday
, on arriving in Paris, immediately find themselves in Saint-Germain-des-Prés, at the Hôtel de la Louisiane. Whereas I prevented them from crossing the Seine, letting them sink in and lose themselves in the depths of the Gare du Nord neighborhood.

The Charells were not in the script. Another liberty I had taken. I was in a hurry to write more, but I was still too inexperienced and lazy to keep my concentration for more than an hour, or to write more than three pages a day.

EVERY MORNING I went and wrote near Holland Park, and I was no longer in London but in front of the Gare du Nord and walking along the Boulevard de Magenta. Today, thirty years later, in Paris, I am trying to escape from this month of July 1994 to that other summer, when the breeze gently caressed the boughs of the trees in Holland Park. The contrast of shadow and sun was the strongest I have ever seen.

I had managed to free myself from the influence of
Blackpool Sunday
, but I was grateful to Michael Savoundra for having given me a sort of push. I asked Linda if I could see him. We met one evening, he, Jacqueline, Linda, and I, at the Rio in Notting Hill, a popular bar among Jamaicans. We were the only white people there that evening, but Linda knew the place well. I think this was where she got the marijuana whose smell impregnated the walls of the apartment.

I told Savoundra I'd corrected the French in the section of his script that was set in Saint-Germain-des-Prés.'He was worried. He was wondering whether Rachman was going to give him the money, and whether it might not be better to get in touch with some producers in Paris. They were ready to place their faith in 'young people' ...

'But I hear Rachman likes young people as well,' I observed.

And I looked at Jacqueline, who smiled. Linda repeated pensively:

'It's true … He likes young people …'

A Jamaican in his thirties, small, with the look of a jockey, came to sit next to her. He put his arm around her shoulders. She introduced him to us:

'Edgerose …'

All these years I've remembered his name. Edgerose. He said he was pleased to meet us. I recognized the quiet voice of the man who had called to Linda from behind the door to her room.

And as Edgerose was explaining to me that he was a musician and that he'd just come back from a tour of Sweden, Peter Rachman appeared. He walked toward our table, his gaze too unwavering behind his tortoise-shell glasses. Linda made a gesture of surprise.

He came and stood before her, and struck her with the back of his hand.

Edgerose stood up and took hold of Rachman's left cheek between his thumb and index finger. Rachman pulled his head back to get free and lost his tortoise-shell glasses. Savoundra and I tried to separate them. The other Jamaican customers were already gathered around our table. Jacqueline kept her calm. She seemed completely indifferent to this scene. She had lit a cigarette.

Edgerose was holding Rachman by the cheek and pulling him toward the exit, like a teacher expelling a troublesome student from the classroom. Rachman was trying to escape, and with a sudden movement of his left arm he gave Edgerose a punch on the nose. Edgerose let go. Rachman opened the door to the café and stood motionless in the middle of the sidewalk.

I went to join him and held out his tortoise-shell glasses, which I had picked up off the floor. He was suddenly very calm. He rubbed his check.

'Thanks, old man,' he said. 'There's no point making a fuss over an English whore ...'

He had taken his white handkerchief from the pocket of his jacket and he was carefully wiping the lenses of his glasses. Then he fit them over his eyes with a ceremonious gesture, one hand on each earpiece.

He got into the Jaguar. Before driving away, he lowered the window:

'My one wish for you, old man, is that your fiancée won't turn out to be like all these English whores ...'

Sitting around the table, everyone was quiet. Linda and Michael Savoundra seemed uneasy. Edgerose was calmly smoking a cigarette. He had a drop of blood on one of his nostrils.

'Peter's going to be in a hell of a mood,' said Savoundra.

'It'll last a few days,' said Linda with a shrug. 'And then it'll pass.'

Our eyes met, Jacqueline's and mine. I had the feeling we were asking ourselves the same questions: Should we stay on at Chepstows Villas? And what exactly were we doing with these three people? Some Jamaican friends of Edgerose came to say hello to him, and the café was filling up with people and noise. Closing your eyes, you might have thought you were in the Café Dante. Michael Savoundra insisted on walking us partway home. We had left Linda, Edgerose, and their friends, who had begun to ignore us after a while, as if we were in the way.

Savoundra was walking between Jacqueline and me.

'You must miss Paris,' he said.

'Not really,' said Jacqueline.

'It's different for me,' I told him. 'Every morning, I'm in Paris.'

And I explained that I was working on a novel and that the beginning of it took place in the area of the Gare du Nord.

'My inspiration came from
Blackpool Sunday
,' I admitted to him. 'This is also the story of two young people ...'

But he didn't seem to hold it against me. He looked at us both.

'Is it about the two of you?'

'Not exactly,' I said.

He was worried. He was wondering if things would be sorted out with Rachman. Rachman was perfectly capable of giving him a suitcase with the thirty thousand pounds in cash tomorrow morning, without having read the script. Or he might tell him no, blowing a puff of cigar smoke in his face.