She nodded. A pause.
Then she whispered, “I miss her.”
He heard the stifled sob in her voice and reached over to grasp her hand.
“Coming back here is like coming back to her,” she said.
He squeezed her hand, relieved that she couldn’t see his eyes behind his dark glasses.
“I know. I’m sorry. I didn’t think about that when I thought of this trip.”
She smiled at him. “Don’t be sorry. On the contrary. It’s a lovely present. It’s bringing her back to me. Thank you.”
He wanted to let tears run down his cheeks, but he held them back in silence, reining in his emotions, the way he’d done all his life, the way he’d been taught to do.
They lay back again, their pale Parisian faces turned to the sun. She was right. Their mother was coming back to them slowly, like the seawater gliding over the Gois. Fragments of memories, like butterflies escaping from a net. Nothing chronological, nothing precise, but more like a nebulous, lazy dream. Images of her on the beach in her orange bathing suit, her smile, her pale green eyes.
He remembered that Blanche was adamant about the children having to wait at least two hours after lunch before they could swim. It was terribly bad to swim right after a meal, she said over and over again. So they would build endless sand castles and wait. Such a long wait. But sometimes Blanche fell asleep. There she was, openmouthed under her parasol, sweltering in her long skirt and tricot vest, her city shoes dusty with sand, her knitting askew in her lap. Solange was off on one of her shopping sprees and would later come back to the hotel laden with goodies for everyone. Robert had strolled back to the hotel, smoking his Gitanes, his straw hat tilted far back over his head. Clarisse would whistle to the children, jerk her chin toward the sea. “But we’ve got to wait another half hour!” Antoine would whisper. And Clarisse would flaunt a devilish smile at him. “Oh yes? Who says?” And they would all three of them tear off silently to the water, leaving Blanche snoring in the shade.
“Do you have any photos of her?” asked Antoine. “I only have a couple.”
“Very few,” said Mélanie.
“I can’t believe we don’t have more photos of our mother.”
“We don’t,” she said.
A toddler next to them wailed as it was dragged out of the water by a red-faced woman.
“There are no photographs of her anymore in the avenue Kléber apartment.”
“But there used to be,” he replied, getting agitated. “The one of you, me, and her at the Jardin d’Acclimatation, on the little train. What happened to that one? And the one of their wedding?”
“I don’t remember those.”
“They were in the entrance and on Father’s desk. But they all disappeared after her death. The albums as well.”
He wondered where those photos and albums were now. What could their father have done with them?
There was nothing to prove that Clarisse had lived at avenue Kléber for ten years, that this had been her home.
Régine, their stepmother, had taken over, had redesigned the place and erased every single trace of François Rey’s first wife, Clarisse. And it was only now that Antoine fully realized all this.
I sometimes wonder, when I lie in your arms, if I was ever happy before. I mean, before I met you, a year ago. I must have felt happy, seemed happy, always considered myself a happy person, and yet everything I have experienced before you seems stale and flat. I can imagine your perfect left eyebrow riding up the way it does when you flash that ironic smile. I don’t care, these letters will be destroyed anyway, torn to a thousand pieces, so I can write what I want.
I was a happy child in my village overlooking the river, and we spoke with that coarse southern accent that my husband’s family disapprove of because it is not Parisian, not chic. I am not stupid, you know. If I didn’t look the way I do, they would never have accepted me. They put up with the accent because I look pretty in a cocktail dress. Because I am pretty. No, I am not vain, and you know that. You know soon enough that you are pretty. You can tell by the way people look at you. That will happen to my daughter. She is so young still, only six, but she will be beautiful. Why am I telling you all this? You don’t care if I come from the south and if I have the wrong accent. You love me the way I am.
They had dinner in the pink dining room. Antoine had wanted to reserve “their” table, but they were told by the buxom young lady that the table was for large familles. The room filled up with children, couples, old people. Mélanie and Antoine sat back and watched. Nothing had changed. They smiled as they looked over the menu.
“Remember the Grand Marnier soufflé?” whispered Antoine. “We had it once, only once.”
Mélanie laughed. “How could I ever forget the Grand Marnier soufflé?”
The waiter bringing it, solemn, ceremonious, the other diners mesmerized by the orange and blue flames. A hush falling over the room. The dish was placed in front of the children. Everybody holding their breath.
“We were such a perfect family,” said Mélanie ironically. “Perfect in every way.”
“Too perfect, you think?” he said.
She nodded. “Yes. Boringly perfect. Look at your family. That’s what I call a real family—kids with personalities, tempers, kids who are sometimes outspoken—but that’s what I like about them. Your family is what I call perfect.”
He felt his face sag and tried to smile. “Mel, I’m no longer a family.”
She put a hand in front of her mouth.
“Tonio, I’m so sorry. I guess I still can’t quite accept the divorce.”
“Neither can I,” he said.
“How are you bearing up?”
“Let’s talk about something else.”
“Sorry.”
She hurriedly patted his sleeve. They ordered and ate in silence. Antoine felt the emptiness of his life taking over again. He wondered whether this void was the onslaught of a midlife crisis. Probably. A man with just about everything in his life gone to pot. A wife who had left him for another guy. A job as an architect that he no longer found any pleasure in. How did that happen? he thought. He had fought so hard to create his own company. It had taken him so long to get his foot in the door, had demanded such relentless effort. And now it was as if all his juices had dried up. It all seemed stale, flat. He no longer even wanted to work with his team, give the orders, get on with the building sites, do all the stuff that his position demanded. He no longer had the energy. It had withered away.
He remembered that party he had gone to last month where he had been confronted with the friends of his past, people he hadn’t seen since he was fifteen years old, all from his old school, the rigorous Collège Stanislas, notorious for the excellence of its results, its grueling religious education, and the inhumanity of its professors (“French without fear and Christian without reproach” was the grim school motto). He had been found on the Internet by Jean-Charles de Rodon, a greasy teacher’s pet he had never liked, and had meant to turn down the invitation to a dinner party with “all the gang,” but the sight of his forlorn living room had coerced him into saying yes. And he found himself seated at a round table in an overheated apartment near the Parc Monceau, surrounded by long-married couples who appeared to be steadfastly producing heirs and had raised pitying eyebrows at the mention of his divorce. Never had he felt more left out. His school friends had turned into balding, self-satisfied well-to-do bores, all in finance, insurance, and banking, and their high-maintenance wives were perhaps even worse, ensconced in Parisian finery and engrossed in detailed conversations that invariably concerned the upbringing of children.
How he had missed Astrid that evening, Astrid and her unconventional clothes: her dark red velvet redingote that made her look like a Brontë heroine, her flea market trinkets, her leggings. How he missed her jokes, her earthy laugh. In order to get away as fast as possible, he had mumbled something about an early start. Relief swamped him as he drove through the
deserted streets of the seventeenth arrondissement. He far preferred his empty rooms to another half hour with Monsieur de Rodon and his crowd.
As he had drawn near Montparnasse, an old Stones song that he loved was played on Radio Nostalgie. “Angie.” He sang along.
He had almost felt happy.
Antoine had trouble falling asleep that first night at the Hotel Saint-Pierre. Yet there was no noise. The old place was silent, calm. His first night here since 1973. The last time he slept under this very roof, he thought, he was nine years old and his mother was still alive. There was something disquieting about that.
The rooms had changed very little. The same thick, mossy carpet, blue wallpaper, old-fashioned photographs of bathing beauties. The bathroom had been refurbished, he noticed. The bidet had been replaced by a toilet. In the old days, one had to go pee in the toilet on the landing. He peered out from behind the faded blue curtains to the dark garden below. No one was about. It was late. The boisterous children had at last been put to bed.
He had been in front of her old room, on the first floor. He remembered it well, the one facing the stairs. Number 9. He had only a hazy recollection of his father in that room. His father rarely came to the island. Too busy. For the entire two weeks of the Rey family’s stay, he probably made one or two brief appearances.
But when his father did turn up, it was like an emperor returning to his kingdom. Blanche made sure fresh flowers were sent to her son’s room, and she drove the hotel staff frantic with fastidious details concerning François’s preferred wines and desserts. Robert checked his watch every five minutes, puffing away at his Gitanes with impatience and making continuous comments on where François should most probably be at that very moment on his drive over. Papa is coming, Papa is coming, Mélanie would chant feverishly, hopping from room to room. And Clarisse would wear the black dress he preferred, the short one, the one that showed off her knees. Only Solange, sunbathing on the terrace, seemed impervious to the return of the prodigal son, her parents’ favorite child. Antoine loved watching his father get out of the Triumph with a victorious roar and stretch his arms and legs. The first person he reached out for was always Clarisse. There was something about the way his father looked at his mother at that very moment that made Antoine want to glance away. There was raw, naked love in his father’s eyes, and his father’s lingering hands on his mother’s hips embarrassed the boy.
On his way up, Antoine had stopped in front of Blanche’s room as well. His grandmother never showed herself before at least ten o’clock. She had breakfast in bed while he, Solange, Mélanie, and Clarisse had breakfast with Robert on the veranda, near the mangrove plant. Later, Blanche would make her grand appearance, her little parasol hooked over her arm, heady wafts of Heure Bleue preceding her down the stairs.
When Antoine got up the next morning, tired after a restless night, it was still early and Mélanie wasn’t awake yet. The hotel seemed vacant. He enjoyed his coffee, marveling that the little round pains were the same ones he used to gulp down thirty-odd years ago. What a slow, tidy life they had led. Those endless, lazy summers.
The highlight of the season was the fireworks on the Plage des Dames for August 15, a national holiday, which also coincided with Mélanie’s birthday. When she was very small, she used to think the fireworks were for her, that all those people on the beach were gathered specially for her birthday. He recalled a miserably wet August 15 one year when the fireworks were canceled and everybody stayed in, sullenly cramping the hotel. There had been a violent storm. He wondered if Mélanie remembered. She had been frightened. But then so had Clarisse. Yes, Clarisse was frightened of storms—it was all coming back to him—she would cower down and bury her head in her arms and tremble. Like a little girl.
He finished his breakfast and waited a little while for Mélanie. A lady in her fifties was seated behind the reception desk. She put down the telephone and beamed at him as he walked past.
“You don’t remember me, do you?” she cooed.
He looked at her closely. There was something vaguely familiar about her eyes.
“I’m Bernadette.”
Bernadette! Bernadette had been such a pretty wisp of a girl, dark and fetching, a far cry from the matronly woman facing him. When he was a boy, he had a crush on Bernadette and her long, glossy braids. She knew it, and she always gave him the best piece of meat or an extra bread roll or more tarte Tatin.
“I recognized you right away, Monsieur Antoine. And Mademoiselle Mélanie too!”
Bernadette and her white teeth and her lissome figure. Her cheerful smile.
“How wonderful to see you,” he mumbled, embarrassed that he hadn’t recognized her.
“You haven’t changed,” she gushed, clasping her hands together. “What a family you made. Your grandparents, your aunt, your mother.”
“You remember them?” he asked, smiling.
“Well, of course, Monsieur Antoine. Your grandmother gave us the biggest tips of the season! Your aunt too! How could a little waitress forget that? And your mother, so lovely and kind. Believe me, we were all crushed when your family never came back.”
Antoine looked down at her. She did have the same eyes, black and glowing.
“Never came back?” he echoed.
“Well, yes,” she said, nodding. “Your family had come here several summers running, and then suddenly, one summer, none of you returned. The owner, old Madame Jacquot, do you remember her, she was most upset. She wondered whether your grandparents were unhappy about the hotel, if there was something they were displeased with. Year after year we waited, but the Rey family never came back. Until you, today.”
Antoine swallowed. “The last summer we came, I think it was 1973.”
Bernadette nodded, and leaning down, after a moment’s hesitation, she pulled an old black book from a large drawer. She opened it, turned a couple of yellowed pages. Her finger halted over a penciled name in a column.
“Yes, that’s right, 1973. The last summer.”
“Well, you see”—he faltered—“our mother died the following year. That’s why no one came back.”
Bernadette’s face flushed bright red. She gasped, pressed a fluttering hand to her collarbone.
There was an awkward silence.
“Your mother died? I did not know, we did not know . . . I’m so sorry . . .”
“It’s all right,” murmured Antoine. “You didn’t know. It happened a long time ago.”
“I can’t believe it,” she whispered. “Such a lovely young woman . . .”
He wished Mélanie would hurry up. He could not bear the idea of Bernadette’s asking him about his mother’s death. He waited in stony silence, his hand on the reception desk, his eyes cast down.
But Bernadette said nothing. She remained motionless, the crimson slowly ebbing from her cheeks, her eyes mournful.
I love our secret. I love our secret love. But for how long? How long will we let our secret last? It has already been a year. I run my hand along your silken skin and I wonder if I really want this to come out into the open. I can guess what this will bring. It is like smelling rain on the incoming wind. I know what this entails, what this means for you, what this means for me. But I know too, so deeply, so intimately that it hurts me, that I need you. You are the one. It frightens me so, but you are the one.
How will this ever work out? What about my children? What will this do to them? How will we find a way to live together, you and I, and the little ones? Where? When? You say you are not afraid to tell the world. But surely you see how this is easier for you. You are independent, you earn your own money, you are your own boss. You are not married. You have no children. You are free. Look at me. The housewife from the Cévennes. The one who looks the part in a little black dress.
I have not been back to my native town for so long now. To the old stone house tucked away in the hills. Memories of the bleating goats in the parched yard, the olive trees, my mother hanging the sheets out to dry.
The view of Mont Aigoual. The peaches and apricots my father used to fondle with his callused hands. If they were still alive now, if they knew, or my sister, who has become a stranger since I went north to marry a Parisian, I wonder what they’d have to say. If they could ever understand.
Love you and love you and love you.
Mélanie had slept well and late. Her eyes were puffy, he noticed, but her face was glowing, smoothed out by a good night’s rest and pink from yesterday’s sun. He decided not to tell her about Bernadette. Why mention that conversation? It was useless. It would pain her, as it had pained him. She had breakfast in peaceful silence while he read the local newspaper and drank fresh coffee. The weather was going to hold, he announced. She smiled.
“I slept like a log,” she said, putting her napkin down. “That hasn’t happened for a long time. How about you?”
“Slept very well,” he lied. For some reason he didn’t want to tell her that he had been kept awake just thinking about their last summer here. Again and again, images from the past had imprinted themselves upon his closed eyelids.
A young woman and her small boy came in and sat at a nearby table. The child’s voice was whiny and high, his entire being hermetically closed to his mother’s admonishing.
“Aren’t you glad your kids are over that age?” Mélanie whispered.
He raised his eyebrows. “At the moment, I feel like my children are strangers.”
“What do you mean?”
“They have their own separate lives I know nothing about. When they come and spend time with me, they are either in front of the computer or the TV or sending text messages.”
“I can’t believe that,” she said.
“It’s true. We meet at meals, and these take place in silence. Sometimes Margaux even comes to the table with her iPod. Thank God Lucas isn’t at that stage yet. But he soon will be.”