The Woman With the Bouquet (21 page)

He couldn’t see very well through the narrow slits between the closed shutters. The strip of dense, deserted scrub that he could just make out was not enough for him to conclude that the intruder had left.

Maurice stayed frozen for an hour, watching, listening. At times it seemed to him that nothing was moving, but at other times he believed it was starting up again. This vast house already made such a racket just by itself—beams cracking, floors creaking, pipes groaning, mice scampering in the attic—that it was hard to identify all these muffled activities.

But he would have to go back down. He could not possibly spend the night with the door and the shutters open! The man might come back. If he had refrained from going upstairs, it was because he knew that people were living there; but he might change his mind. He might come back later, assuming everyone was asleep, to look for what he wanted on the second floor. And anyway, what was he looking for?

“No, Maurice, don’t be stupid, don’t mix this up with the book you’re reading: unlike
The Chamber of Dark Secrets,
this house surely does not conceal a manuscript containing the list of all the children Christ and Mary Magdalene had together. You must not get worked up. However, there is something here, some unique thing that this unknown colossus wants, there’s something he’s looking for and not for the first time either, because he moves around so easily in here . . . what could it be?”

The floor in the corridor vibrated.

Was the intruder coming back?

On his knees, Maurice slid over to the door and looked through the keyhole.

Phew, it was Sylvie.

The moment he opened the door, his cousin jumped.

“Maurice, you’re not in bed? Maybe I woke you up . . .”

Maurice uttered in a toneless voice, “Why are you up? Did you see anything?”

“Excuse me?”

“Did you notice anything abnormal?”

“No . . . I . . . I couldn’t sleep, so I thought I might fix myself some herbal tea. I’m sorry. Did I frighten you?”

“No, no . . .”

“What then? Did you see something strange?”

Sylvie’s eyes grew large with fear.

Maurice hesitated about what to answer. No, best not to panic her. Play for time first. Play for time against the intruder, who might come back.

“Tell me, Sylvie,” he said, trying to make his words sound normal and come out regularly, “wouldn’t it be better to close the shutters at night? And the door, I’m sure you didn’t lock it.”

“Bah, what’s there to be afraid of, nobody wanders around up here. Just remember how hard it was even to find the road.”

Maurice thought that she was lucky to be so silly. If he told her that not even an hour ago, a stranger was going around sizing up the living room . . . It would be better if she went on wallowing in her trusting ignorance. He himself would be less afraid if he was the only one who was afraid.

She came up and looked at him.

“Have you seen something?”

“No.”

“Anything out of the ordinary?”

“No. I’m simply suggesting we close the door and the shutters. Is that really unthinkable for you? Against your principles? Is your religion opposed to it? You find it such a radical step? You won’t sleep at night if we lock ourselves in? Will you be in the throes of insomnia if we take the most basic safety precautions, which is why locks and shutters were invented?”

Sylvie noticed that her cousin was losing control over his nerves. She gave him a bracing smile.

“No, of course not. I’ll help you with it. Better still, I’ll do it for you.”

Maurice sighed: at least he wouldn’t have to go back out into the night where the colossus was prowling.

“Thank you. Here, I’ll make your tea for you in the meanwhile.”

They went downstairs. When Maurice saw how nonchalantly she took her time outside to close the shelters, he blessed her for being so utterly unaware.

After she had turned the key twice in the door, and rammed home the bolts, she joined him in the kitchen.

“Do you remember how frightened you used to be when you were little?”

Maurice was annoyed by her words, that seemed uncalled for.

“I wasn’t frightened, I was cautious.”

His answer had nothing to do with the past, and everything to do with the present situation. What did it matter! Sylvie, astonished by her cousin’s sudden authority, did not quibble.

While her lime-blossom tea was steeping, she reminisced about their childhood vacations, their boat outings while the adults were plunged deep in their siesta on the banks of the Rhône, the fish they stole from the fishermen’s pots to let them go again in the river, the cabin they had called the Lighthouse on an island that divided the waters . . .

While Sylvie followed the thread of her nostalgia, memory was leading Maurice elsewhere, to other memories of that time, when his parents began once again to go out dancing, or to the movies, being of the mind that their ten-year-old son was reasonable enough now to stay by himself in the apartment. He lived through hours of terror. Abandoned, a tiny boy beneath vast ceilings twelve feet high, he would scream, missing his mother and father, their familiar presence, their reassuring smells, the melody of their consoling words; he wept copiously, because his body knew that tears were a way to make his parents come to him. To no avail. What had worked for years to rescue him from helplessness and pain and solitude no longer had the slightest effect. He had lost all his power. He was no longer a child. And not yet an adult. Moreover, when they came back, at one o’clock in the morning—lively, joyful, drunk, their voices different, their smells different, their gestures different—he hated them and swore that he would never grow up to become an adult like them, a sensual, lascivious, cocky adult who loved the pleasures of food and wine and flesh. And while he had matured, it was in a different way, by developing his mind. Cerebral pursuits, science, culture, erudition. No food, and no sex. He may have become an adult, but by becoming a scholar, not by becoming an animal.

Is that why he had always refused to read novels? Because on those evenings when she betrayed him, his mother left the books she loved on the night table to keep him busy? Or was it because he blindly believed everything in the first one he read, and he felt humiliated when his parents, dying of laughter, informed him that it was all made up?

“Maurice . . . Maurice . . . are you listening? I’m finding you a bit strange.”

“But everything is strange, Sylvie. Everything. Strange and foreign. Look, you and me, we’ve known each other since birth, and yet are both keeping secrets from each other.”

“Are you referring to—”

“I am referring to what you are not talking about, that you might, some day, talk about.”

“I swear to you I will talk about it.”

She flung her arms around him, hugged him, then immediately felt embarrassed by her gesture.

“Goodnight, Maurice. See you in the morning.”

The following day was so strange and unexpected that neither one of them had the strength to talk about it.

Maurice had initially been tempted to go back to sleep after all the excitement then, because he didn’t manage to, he switched the light back on and went on reading
The Chamber of Dark Secrets
. His sensitive nature, already greatly tested by the intruder’s visit, did not recover its calm anywhere in the rest of the novel: Eva Simplon—how he admired this woman, you could really count on her—was being threatened by unscrupulous buyers orchestrating deadly incidents because she refused to sell Darkwell. Every time, she just barely managed to make it out alive from an assassination attempt disguised as an accident. And every time, Eva Simplon found herself up against a new problem, just as worrying: she could not find the entrance to the esoteric room where the nightly chanting was coming from. She felt her way along all the walls, inspected the cellar, and examined the attic, but found nothing. She studied the surveyors’ map at the town hall, and the analysis of successive blueprints in the archives at a notary’s led her to believe that there must be a body inside the building. How could she reach it? Who was getting in there every night? Eva refused to believe in ghosts or spirits. Fortunately, that bitch of a Josépha Katz had sent her a young architect who was trying to analyze the structure of the house—and while Josépha Katz may have been an infernal dyke who was still hitting on Eva Simplon, despite being rebuffed umpteen times, she turned out to be extremely professional—because maybe he would discover an explanation that would eliminate any supernatural hypotheses. And yet . . . in short, at eight o’clock in the morning, Maurice, who hadn’t had any rest at all, got up, tired and irritable, and furious at having to leave Eva Simplon in Darkwell and find himself abruptly in the Ardèche with his cousin. All the more so because today, Monday, he was going to have to put up with a picnic with the girlfriends from the supermarket . . . a day spent in a lesbian colony, among these women who were all more solidly built and manly than he was, no thank you!

He tried to argue that he didn’t feel well and would rather stay home and look after himself. Sylvie would not back down.

“It’s out of the question. If you’re sick and it gets serious, I have to stay here and pamper you. So either I stay here, or you come with me.”

Sorely aware that he would not manage to rescue his day for reading, he went with her.

The hours that followed were a torture. A sadistic sun beat down on the rocky path they walked along to exhaustion. When they reached a green reservoir where the Ardèche river flowed calmly after its torrential flood, Maurice found himself unable to dip any more than one little toe in the icy water. The lunch in the grass turned into a trap because Maurice started off by sitting on an anthill full of red ants and then was stung by a bee that wanted to share his apricot. He emptied his lungs until his head was spinning in order to keep the fire going to cook the sausages; the rest of the afternoon, he had difficulty digesting his hard-boiled egg.

Back at the house, the women wanted to play a party game. Thinking he was safe at last, Maurice was about to sneak off for a refreshing siesta, but when he learned it was a contest based on historical and geographical knowledge, he couldn’t resist, and joined in after all. He won every round, and this compelled him to continue, and the more victories he won, the more condescending he became toward his partners. When he became too despicable, the women got fed up, and aperitifs were served. Pastis on top of a day in the sun was all that was needed to upset his fragile balance, so that by the time he and Sylvie went back inside the villa not only was he aching all over, but he had a stubborn headache.

At nine o’clock, the moment he had taken his last bite, he locked all the shutters and the door and went up to bed.

Leaning on his pillows, he hesitated between two contradictory feelings: the delight of being with Eva Simplon once again, and the dread of a new visit from the intruder. After a few pages, he forgot his dilemma, and was trembling in unison with the heroine.

At ten thirty, he could hear Sylvie switching off the television and climbing heavily up the stairs.

At eleven o’clock, he was beginning, like Eva Simplon, to wonder whether, basically, ghosts existed or not. Otherwise, how could you explain that individuals could walk through walls? There comes a time when what is irrational ceases to be irrational, because it becomes the only rational solution.

At half past eleven, a noise roused him abruptly from his book.

Footsteps. Lights, discreet footsteps. Not at all Sylvie’s footsteps.

He switched off the light and went over to the door. Moving the comforter to one side, he turned the knob. He could sense a presence on the ground floor.

No sooner did this thought cross his mind than the man appeared in the stairway. The bald colossus, treading cautiously and silently, coming upstairs to continue his search.

Maurice closed his door and leaned against the woodwork to resist any attempt the intruder might make to come in. In the fraction of a second, his body was soaked, he was sweating thick drops that he could feel trickling down his neck and his back.

The stranger stopped by his door then continued on his way.

With his ear up against the wood, Maurice could hear a rustling noise that confirmed the man was heading down the hall.

Sylvie! He was going into Sylvie’s room!

What should he do? Run away! Rush down the stairs and get the hell out of there, into the night. But where? Maurice didn’t know the surrounding countryside, whereas the intruder knew every bend in the road. Besides, he couldn’t sacrifice his cousin like some coward and leave her to the hands of this miscreant . . .

He cracked the door and saw the shadow go into Sylvie’s room.

“If I stop to think any more, I won’t move.”

He had to hurry! Maurice knew very well that with each passing second he was losing his ability to take any initiative.

“Remember, Maurice, it’s like diving from the high board: if you don’t jump right away, you’ll never jump. Your salvation lies the way of unconsciousness.”

He took a deep breath and leapt out into the corridor. He rushed toward the bedroom.

“Sylvie, watch out! Watch out!”

As the intruder had closed the door, Maurice bashed it open.

“Get out!”

The room was empty.

Quickly! Under the bed!

Maurice went flat on the ground. No strangers were hiding under the bed.

Closet! Clothes cupboard! Quickly!

In a few seconds, he opened all the doors.

As he could not understand what was going on, he screamed, “Sylvie! Sylvie, where are you?”

The door to the bathroom opened, Sylvie came out, with a look of panic, her bathrobe hardly tied, holding a brush in her hand.

“What’s going on?”

“Are you alone in the bathroom?”

“Maurice, have you lost your mind?”

“Are you alone in the bathroom?”

Docile, she went back in, looked around, then frowned to indicate her bewilderment.

“Well, obviously, I’m alone in my bathroom. Who should I be with?”