The Girl Who Fell From the Sky (30 page)

‘I didn’t understand what you were talking about.’

‘Neither did we.’ Still holding up the key and looking at her with that half amused, half puzzled expression he asks, ‘Who’s pig in the middle now, I wonder?’

There is no answer to that, really. It’s uncertain, like one of his particles.

She lies in bed, awake. She can hear him moving around the flat: the closing of a door, the running of water, a booming in the ancient plumbing.

She remembers. The breathless excitement of returning home for the holidays, hoping that he would be back from Paris as he had promised in his letters. But all they had were a few snatched moments, fragments of time alone when the families were together, mere minutes when she could say things to him that were otherwise unutterable. ‘A quantum particle can be in two places at once,’ he explained, and she laughed at the stupidity of it all. ‘
I
can be in two places at once,’ she retorted. ‘I can be in the dormitory at school lying alone in my bed, and I can be in your arms at the same time.’

‘He’s only leading you on,’ one of her school friends said when she told her about him. She knew that the friend was right but she also knew that she was wrong: it was possible to hold two contradictory ideas at one and the same time just as it was possible, so Clément claimed, for a particle to be in two contradictory states at the same moment. A wave and a particle both at the same time, something like that. She called her own condition Marian’s Law of Superposition, and delighted at the idea of sharing it with him.

What collapses the wave function is discovery.

She listens to him walking along the corridor and pausing for a moment outside her door. Then he moves on, and she can hear the door to his own bedroom open and close and there are no
further sounds within the apartment other than the shifts and creaking that a building makes as it cools in the night. But there are noises from outside – a car roaring down a nearby street; someone running along the road outside; a door slamming and someone shouting; and late at night she wakes from the fog of sleep to what she thinks must be distant gunfire.

Morning seems different. The threats of the day before have receded like a tide. They’ll return just as surely but for the moment there is calm and quiet, with the rough sea a long way away. Outside, the grey drab of the previous day has been replaced by a sky of peerless blue, as soft as angora.

She gathers her things and creeps down the corridor to the bathroom to wash. Back in the sanctuary of her room she is half dressed and finishing her hair when there’s a knock on the door.

‘Come in.’

He wears an expression that she remembers, part contrition, part amusement. ‘I’ve come to apologise,’ he says. ‘You were right.’

‘Right?’

‘About conversations that we’ll regret in the morning.’

‘We’d drunk too much.’

‘Or maybe, not enough.’

She shrugs, continuing with the task in hand, conscious of his eyes on her, feeling the thrill of nakedness without the fact of it. ‘I’m in a hurry and you’re putting me off.’

‘I’m only watching.’

‘That’s the trouble.’

‘Where are you going?’

‘To see this friend. I told you.’

‘But you’ll be back this afternoon, won’t you? You’re not going to run away again?’

‘Again?’

‘You ran off to school in England.’

‘I wasn’t running. I was sent.’

‘You were sent here as well, weren’t you?’

‘I could have refused. It was my decision to come.’

‘And you won’t leave without telling me?’

‘No.’ The hair is fixed. She turns back to him. ‘I’m an adult now, Clément, not your little girl.’

‘I never thought of you as a little girl. You always seemed absurdly grown-up to me.’ He comes into the room and kisses her chastely on the cheek. ‘I’ll see you when I get back from the lab. We’ll do something. We can’t stay cooped up in here. How about the theatre? I can get tickets.’

‘The theatre?’

‘What could be more Parisian than going to the theatre?’

The theatre seems dangerous, calling attention to oneself. ‘Perhaps …’

But she doesn’t finish what she is saying, and he doesn’t wait to hear it. ‘That’s all right then. I’ve got to go now but I’ll try not to be late this afternoon.’ He glances back before closing the door. ‘Be careful, won’t you? Paris is a dangerous place.’

She listens for the front door to slam. In the dining room Marie is in attendance, hovering over the table and the poor apology for breakfast – some grey bread and a yellow slime that isn’t butter. But there is coffee, real coffee from the packet Alice has handed over. It isn’t clear whether this gift has warmed Marie towards her. The woman watches her carefully, as though she expects her to steal the silver. ‘Will Mademoiselle be in for dinner? Monsieur Clément gave me to understand …’

‘I’ll be here for dinner, yes. I’ll be here for a few days.’

‘And you have no ration card?’

Alice looks helpless and makes her apologies, that she left it at home, that it was stupid of her. The woman sniffs. ‘That makes my job all the more difficult.’

‘I know it does. But I had to leave in a hurry. This girlfriend of mine I’ve got to see …’ She leaves the rest unsaid but implied: nameless female troubles – a lover, perhaps, or maybe even an errant husband; or pregnancy, unwanted and unexpected. ‘I know Monsieur Clément would never accept it, but if some money would help …’

The maid doesn’t flinch. ‘That wouldn’t be right, would it? You’re our guest.’

‘But you might be able to get some things on the black market. Some real butter, maybe. Monsieur Clément need never know.’

‘I expect you get butter in the country, don’t you?’

‘Some, yes we do. The farmers keep some back, and if you know the right people …’

The woman nods. ‘My cousin farms in Normandy. We get stuff from him but it’s more and more difficult these days.’

The nod seals the matter. The handing over of money takes place with all the discretion of an illegal street-corner transaction, as though even here the police may be watching.

From the moment she steps out of the house she assumes she is being followed. Always assume the worst, one of the instructors warned them: a pessimist makes the best agent. Around the Sorbonne she mingles with students going to lectures, walking into one of the great courts and out by a different exit to see if she can tease a follower out of the crowd. In the rue Saint-Jacques she gazes into shop windows and scans the reflection of the other side of the street, looking for loiterers, looking for anyone who might be looking for her. At the
métro
station on the boulevard Saint-Germain she descends the stairs on one side of the street and emerges on the other, watching for anyone doing the same. No one follows. She is clear and clean, a bright, free woman alone in this anxious city. She makes her way back to the
métro
and pushes among the crowd on the platform to get onto a westbound train. At Odéon she changes to the line
that goes under the Seine, going north beneath the city, away from Clément, away from Marian Sutro.

Yvette’s address is a block of flats near the cemetery in the twentieth, a grimy, four-storey building with a mansard roof and decaying mouldings on the façade, the kind of place that has come down in the world ever since the plans of Haussmann first put it there. Alice walks straight past the building, looking. There is a
clochard
going through bins; a couple sitting in the window of the café directly across the street; young lovers who stand there debating some issue with typical Parisian intensity; a woman walking her dog; a newspaper seller with copies of
Le Matin
and
Les Nouveaux Temps
. Further down is a street market with a few threadbare stalls selling old clothes and bits of hardware – sewing-machine parts, sections of plumbing, pots and pans, anything that might be of use in a world where everything is reused and nothing is new. People are rummaging through the junk. She turns over a few old sweaters and glances back at the building.

‘You’d look lovely in that one, dearie,’ the stallholder says.

Alice smiles and considers the possibility of purchase before putting the thing down and walking on up the hill towards the cemetery. People are coming and going through the gates, some with misery etched into their faces. At a stall nearby she stops to buy flowers, a meagre clutch of anemones, to give herself some kind of alibi before going in through the gates. She walks purposefully down one of the lanes between ornate epitaphs and pious weeping angels and finds a bare sepulchre on which to deposit her flowers. The inscription says
Jules Auvergne, poète
. She has never heard of him. Do flowers to the unknown dead from the unknown living have any significance in the afterlife? She returns the way she has come, back past the street market to the opposite side of Yvette’s building, watching the people in the street, trying to make an assessment, trying to answer the one question that has to be answered: is Yvette’s apartment under surveillance?

At a window seat in the café across the street she sips coffee and reads her book. Time passes. At the next table two girls are discussing a boy in low and urgent voices. He’s a bastard, apparently,
un salaud
who is going with two different girls at the same time. Should they tell the victims? The debate goes on without ever reaching a conclusion. Beyond the window the scene shifts in that casual, contingent way of the street: women meeting and talking, complaining; people coming and going at the market stalls. In an
impasse
on the opposite side of the street children are playing tag, three girls and a younger boy, quite oblivious to the world around them.
Chat!
they call and scatter across the
pavé
away from whoever is ‘it’. Whenever the door to Yvette’s apartment block opens whoever comes out has to manoeuvre through the game. It isn’t until half past ten that the figure stepping through the door is Yvette herself. Suddenly she is there, scurrying out into the daylight, wearing a drab brown dress with a fawn gilet thrown over her shoulders. She hurries past the children and disappears up the
impasse
.

Alice calls for the bill. There’s no need to rush, she tells herself. The mouse will return to its nest. And sure enough, a few minutes later, clutching a brown paper bag to her chest, Yvette reappears.

Leaving change on the table, Alice grabs her bag and goes out. Across the street Yvette is searching in her bag, then fiddling a key into the lock. Trying not to hurry, Alice reaches the entrance to the building just in time to block the door and push her way inside. Counterweighted by some kind of pulley system, the door slams shut behind her. The hallway is gloomy, illuminated by a dusty fanlight. There are two bicycles propped under the stairs and a battered pram. Yvette is already climbing the stairs, barely glancing at the stranger who has followed her in.

‘Hey!’ Alice says. ‘It’s me.’

Yvette grabs the banister and looks round. Even in the shadows Alice can see fear in her wide eyes. ‘Who’s that?’

‘Can we talk?’ Alice asks.

Recognition dawns. ‘What are you doing here? Go away. I don’t want to see you.’

Alice climbs the stairs towards the woman. Outside there are the cries of the children playing, silly, quotidian sounds. Inside, this sudden, unexpected meeting of shadows. ‘I’ve come to see how things are going.’

‘You can’t come here.’

‘Are you on your own?’

‘I’m going.’

She turns to climb the stairs. Alice grabs her arm, her fingers locking round the fragile elbow. ‘Let’s talk. There’s no one around. Let’s talk here. Like old friends. Who are you these days? I’m Anne-Marie Laroche. Who are you?’

‘Yvette,’ the woman answers dully. ‘Just Yvette.’

‘Can we go upstairs? Are you on your own?’

Yvette shrugs. ‘Of course I’m on my own. That’s it, isn’t it? We’re all of us on our own.’

‘You’re not on your own now.’

The woman stands there. It isn’t even clear if she is pondering the matter. Then, as though surrendering to the inevitable, she shrugs and goes on up, with Alice following.

Yvette has done well in the choice of flat: it is a typical pianist’s apartment right at the top of the building, with sloping ceilings and mansard windows giving out onto a parapet where you can deploy an aerial. Outside the windows, pigeons scratch and scrape on the tiles. The sound of their beating wings is like hands being clapped. In the distance Alice can see the domes of the Sacré-Coeur. Once she loved the building, but Clément had told her it was hideous so now it seems exactly that: hideous, a whited sepulchre.

‘I knew they’d come to get me,’ Yvette says. ‘I just didn’t guess it’d be you.’ She’s making coffee at a paraffin cooker in one corner of the room, the precious coffee that Alice brought.
All the time she looks round, not specifically at Alice but over her shoulder, like an animal on the watch for predators. The scent of coffee mingles with the stench of paraffin.

‘I haven’t come to get you, Yvette. I’ve come to help.’

‘I don’t need help.’

‘You went off the air. They thought your set might have a fault. I’ve brought crystals for you—’

‘I don’t need fucking crystals. I don’t need anything.’

‘What’s happened, Yvette? What’s happened to your circuit?
CINÉASTE
, isn’t it?’

‘How do you know that?’

‘It was in the signal from London.’

‘They sent you specially?’

‘I was already in the country. They didn’t know what had happened when you went off the air. Tell me what happened, Yvette. To
CINÉASTE
.’

‘They were blown. They were all meeting in a café—’

‘We were told not to do that.’

‘But that’s what happens, isn’t it? That’s what people actually
do
, whatever they said in training. What the hell do they know? Anyway, I was late. The
métro
broke down or something. So I got there just in time—’

‘In time for what?’

‘Not to get caught. To see it happen. They knew. The
Frisés
, I mean. They
knew
about the meeting. Someone must have betrayed us. I watched from down the street. There were dozens of them. Soldiers and police. They surrounded the place and grabbed them all and took them away.’