Asunder (18 page)

Someone released the pause button. Daniel freed his hands and his gaze wandered from Pierre to me. It must’ve been the line of blood down my check, as he did a double take and rushed over.

‘What happened?’

‘I scraped my face against a wall.’

He frowned and said it looked like a scratch, then pulled a handkerchief from his jacket and pressed it against my broken skin, which made it sting even more. I pushed him away and said I’d be fine.

‘But where’d you go?’

‘I ran after him.’

‘And?’

‘Nothing. He disappeared up a turret.’

The guide was waiting for us in the garden. When and why he’d left the room, nobody knew. In a worn-out voice he called Daniel over to the pond to show him the family of newts that had been living at Challement for centuries.

Pierre, meanwhile, remained near the walls of the chateau. Every now and then I saw him glancing expectantly up at the windows, as if hoping for another encounter with the chatelain. And I too began to glance up, hoping that Marc Cointe would reappear there above like a Green Man carving, branches and foliage snaking out of his mouth, so that I could at least fire off a response with my eyes.

But there was to be no encore.

I felt I had admired a painting, stepped into it, and been cast out. From the looks of it, so did Pierre. For the first time I saw a glimmer of expression pass over his face, a small cloud of unease that moved across his features and dissolved. With the tail end of one cigarette he lit another and turned away, just as Daniel and the guide were returning from the pond.

We drove to the station in uncomfortable silence, Daniel in the front seat beside our guide, neither wearing a seat belt, and I in the back next to Pierre. I was anxious for water and a mirror.

On the platform, a polite
And if you ever come to
 . . . farewell. The guide avoided eye contact when shaking my hand and seemed much more concerned with whether my companions had enjoyed their trip. Once on the train, I found the nearest bathroom and inspected my scratch in the mirror. To my surprise it was very thin yet rather deep, like a hairline fissure in a bed of rock. I washed it with soap and water and patted it dry with a rough paper towel. Only after a few minutes of inspection did I realise it was in nearly the same spot as the chatelain’s own scar, a long line bisecting his right cheek, starting from below the eye down to somewhere beneath his beard.

That night in bed I must’ve changed position twenty times, switching from right side to left and then back to right. I got up to open the window and then got up to close it, tried two pillows, then none. Despite these attempts I couldn’t rest, my mind captive to one image, hovering there at the centre in great magnification as if an enormous hand kept readjusting the lens: the face of the chatelain. Polished objects reflect the light, unpolished objects trap it.

One thing was clear. I did not feel anger or indignation. I had intruded, he had defended. Every few minutes I’d run my fingers over the scratch that burnt its fine way down my cheek and feel some sort of communion with this chatelain who was at that moment most likely curled up in a shabby mattress in a fireplace, and with a strange flutter I envisioned, how else to put it, the solitude of a man in his architecture.

The following morning I rose late to more silence, and an empty flat. A cafetière and two mugs in the sink. The lingering trace of one of Pierre’s cigarettes in the air. Three stubs in the saucer. A few more hours, I told myself, only a few more hours.

These hours passed vacantly. Without structure or purpose, my sense of time had weakened. Just as I’d finally motivated myself to get up from the sofa and put on my coat, a heavy rain started to fall, aborting all thoughts of a walk, and I remained indoors watching the curtain of water thick as a double window. Through the parallel panes of glass and water I looked out on to the street, the refracted lights from cars like abrasions in the tarmac, and listened to what sounded like church bells in the distance, as if something greater were trying to assert itself over the weather.

At 4.35 they returned, Daniel carrying an enormous dark blue umbrella that he placed open in the bath to dry. Pierre was wearing a pink flower, possibly from the Luxembourg Gardens, and upon seeing me he plucked it from his lapel and extended it in my direction.

‘Did you see the rain?’ Daniel asked.

‘From indoors,’ I said, tucking the flower behind my ear for want of a better idea, then feeling foolish and removing it.

Pierre folded his three suits into his suitcase, emptied the saucer of cigarette stubs into the kitchen bin, and drank a glass of water.

‘I’ll be back in an hour,’ Daniel said, ‘I’m taking Pierre to the station.’

‘Is he heading back to Stockholm?’

No, Daniel explained, first he would go to Amsterdam to visit a sick friend, a Dutch poet he’d been translating since the seventies, who was now dying of emphysema. From there Pierre would go to Ljubljana to see Gregor and only after that back to Stockholm, where he lived, Daniel added, with his mother in a two-bedroom flat in a sixties tower block.

At the door Pierre extended a hand. ‘Nice to see you,’ he said. ‘Meet you again.’

Daniel picked up the suitcase and Pierre reached for his briefcase. He bowed in my direction, a second more formal farewell. The door clacked behind them.

Shortly after they left I spotted Daniel’s keys lying on the kitchen table. Caught up in his friend’s departure, he had forgotten his set.

I made myself a sandwich and ate it while wandering slowly through the flat, fending off a growing sense of despondency. Once I’d finished eating I was seized by a desire for company, three-dimensional or two, and walked over to Daniel’s desk. But the book was no longer there. Hesitantly at first and then more boldly, I searched the drawers, beneath papers and folders, then his room, his suitcase, even lifted the mattress, but the women seemed to have left the premises, retreated into their silent black and white thicket.

Perhaps Daniel had given the book to Pierre, though it scarcely seemed like something that would interest him. Where had they gone, the women?

Ten, twenty, thirty minutes later—I had no idea—the doorbell rang. A second time. A third. I remained on the sofa, where I’d been sitting, thinking.

Loud knocks, followed by exclamations of a fist that pounded out a phrase, sentence, paragraph.

‘Marie, it’s me,’ his voice reached me as if from a distant peak.

From my position on the sofa facing the entrance, I observed the vibrating wooden rectangle attached to three hinges that separated me from Daniel, and Daniel from the interior of our ephemeral home. Minutes later, a woman’s voice. The concierge.

I had no choice. I walked to the door and opened.

He was not smiling.

‘I was asleep,’ I said.

‘And you didn’t hear a thing?’

‘Nothing.’

The concierge mumbled a few words and started down the stairs. Daniel thanked her, said something about
demain
, and entered the flat.

For our final meal, we returned to the Italian restaurant across the street where we’d gone on our first night. After the waiter had taken our order and brought out bread and olives I thought of asking Daniel what he’d done with the book but refrained; he would know that again I’d trespassed.

We filled the minutes with talk about London, what we would do once we got back, what awaited us where. We spoke, but it was small talk.

Our food arrived quickly.

Daniel sliced his pizza in two with a sharp knife.

‘He was quite taken with you, wasn’t he, our nobleman?’

‘Only at first.’

‘Or perhaps it was more you who were taken with him.’ He tore the halves of his pizza apart, then cut each half into quarters. I reached for my knife and did the same to mine.

‘And yours, will you miss him?’ I asked.

‘Yes, but we’ll write.’

‘You really disappeared when he was around.’

‘Marie, it was a unique opportunity for me. I never meet anyone like him.’

‘But that’s your choice.’

‘Will you miss him too?’

‘Pierre? He wasn’t much more than a phantom, to be honest.’

‘I think he’s shy around women.’

‘Well, you seemed blind to them when he was here.’

He gave me a quizzical look. ‘Meaning?’

‘You know what I mean.’

‘I thought you’d understand.’

I finished off my wine and refilled the glass.

‘Your mood hasn’t exactly been jovial,’ he added.

‘Well, our trip took an odd turn.’

‘Trips often do.’

‘I guess so.’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘So, what time does our train leave tomorrow?’ I asked.

‘Ten fifteen.’

Halfway through dinner a large black spider dropped on to the table—having lowered itself, presumably, from the air vent in the ceiling directly overhead—and scurried across between the dishes, vanishing over the white drop of the tablecloth.

Daniel still had many euros left over and insisted on paying the bill. We traipsed back across the street, through the green doors that felt heavier than ever as I gave them a push, and up to the flat to prepare for our departure. Daniel tackled his desk, returning papers to folders and folders and books to bag, while I packed up my own things, my only purchases during the trip a guidebook, a scarf, some candied chestnuts, and a eucalyptus candle I’d found at a street stall.

It took us no more than an hour, albeit an active one, to divest the flat of our presence. Once we had finished all traces of our visit were withdrawn, our scenes rolled up and waiting by the door. I retired to my room, Daniel to his.

The next morning the concierge rang our bell half an hour earlier than agreed. After a brief march through the flat during which she kept wiping her hands on her apron though I’m sure they weren’t wet, she concluded it was in the same state, if not better, than when we arrived, and seemed content with Daniel’s tip. Her son, a spindly teenager we’d glimpsed only a few times during our stay, helped carry our bags.

The flat smelled as if a dozen cigarettes had been lit, smoked and half put out, the last of them still smouldering in the ashtray. A different kind of cigarette from Pierre’s—the odour suggested filterless and handrolled. Before even seeing him, I knew Lucian had spent the last few nights in our home.

I was still in the corridor with my bags when he emerged from the kitchen, a cigarette between his lips, a mug of tea in each hand. Upon seeing me he bit down on his cigarette and murmured something, arching his eyebrows in surprise. Seconds later Jane appeared in a black lace negligee. At first I thought it was Lucian’s female doppelganger. Her hair had gone from medium brown to a purple black and was so shiny it looked lacquered, as if the shadows from her face—loneliness, disappointment—had risen and receded into her hair. Over the past weeks, I could see, she had transformed herself into one of Lucian’s Goth heroines, Lucretia or Annabel Lee.

‘What happened to your cheek?’ Jane asked the moment she saw me. The line had been turning a darker crimson as it healed.

‘I was scratched by a feral cat.’

She didn’t enquire into which cat or where, yet staying on the subject of fauna began telling me about the insect invasion that had taken place in our flat while I was away, a constant hum and buzz, especially at night.

‘What sort of insects?’

‘Well, mostly moths but also some weird little purplish black ones, I’m not sure what they were.’

‘And what did you do with them?’

‘I put out loads of strips and even swatted a few.’

I looked around.

‘Where are they?’

‘Oh Marie, it was disgusting, the strips looked like bristly unshaven legs, I had to throw them out.’

‘All of them?’

She rubbed her eyes.

‘Yes, I . . . Come, we’ve just made tea, have some with us.’

I followed her to the kitchen, Lucian doing a U-turn with the mugs.

‘Did you get any painting done?’

‘Only my room and then the paint ran out,’ Jane said, pouring me some tea. ‘Maybe next month we can do the rest of the flat together?’

I reached for the jar of honey. Stuck to the inside wall were two cocoons.

‘So . . . how was Paris?’

When I entered my room and glanced over at the shelf the landscapes looked old, oxidised, depleted, as if over the past two weeks they’d been drained of their vitality. As I drew closer, I saw that most of the moths on them had disintegrated, the crumbling beige of their wings hardly distinguishable from the crumbling beige of their torsos.

At that moment a fly buzzed into sight and perched on the slope of the mountaintop, crawled a few paces, then moved on to the volcano, where it briefly circled the red crater before flying off.

I picked up an eggshell, the one with the tiny door into night, and held the doorknob between my thumb and forefinger and pulled. For the first time ever it seemed to resist so I pulled harder. All of a sudden the door was in my hand, a rectangular gash out of which night could come spilling out, yet when I peered in I saw only dull black dabbed with spots from a silver metallic marker.

Next I picked up the autumn eggshell and brought it close to the lamp. I could only focus on the clumps of glue that fastened the rough paper leaves to matchsticks. When I turned to the mountain and volcano they too seemed like something pawed at with impatience by a child. They had never appeared so crude, nothing more than coarse dioramas by an amateur, and the more I stood back and stared the more I felt the landscapes vanishing before my eyes.

But maybe all landscapes vanish after a while or one just comes to prefer others. My great-grandfather’s final years were lived out in a cottage at the bottom of a field in Yorkshire. For days on end he wouldn’t exchange a word with anyone; the silence of low ceilings and unclipped hedges was more appealing than any human voice, he said, and his eyes had taken in enough faces to fill three lifetimes.