The Red Notebook (12 page)

Damien and the professor were still debating and were now airing their opinions on the plurality of the universe, quoting from the hypotheses of researchers with Russian-sounding names. Laurent wondered if there were booksellers in these other universes, who also had to heft boxes, take stock, and what’s more, find handbags. At that thought he leant back in his chair and looked out at the square. The reality he saw there was perhaps only a mathematical formula in his mind’s eye, since his eye did not take in the railings, the trees or the statue. His spirit was elsewhere. At Laure’s. On her landing to be precise, advancing towards her door, turning the key in the lock. And there was Belphégor who had immediately come out on the landing to roll around. Laurent entered the apartment and saw the little paintings, the dish with the golden keys, the weeping
fig in the light from the window … He went on into the kitchen, poured himself a Jack Daniel’s and went through to the sitting room where Laure, seated on the sofa, turned to smile at him.

When they reached her door, William handed her the spare keys and cleared his throat.

‘Before you go in, there’s something I need to tell you … I lied to you because I didn’t want to upset you.’

Laure’s gaze darted towards him.

‘Has something happened to my cat?’

‘No, no,’ said William.

He had been making a real mess of things lately. First he had inadvertently made it sound as if Laure was dead, and now the cat. He took a moment to tell himself he needed a holiday. Thailand, maybe, or Bali. Anywhere, so long as it was far away.

‘Your cat’s fine. Everything’s fine,’ he said emphatically.

There was a pause.

‘It’s about your bag … it’s here, it’s back.’

‘What?’ asked Laure, then, since William didn’t respond, she turned the key in the door and Belphégor came running out.

‘Oh, my treasure, I’m home!’ she cried.

She scooped the cat up in her arms and carried him into the apartment. As soon as she stepped inside the door, she was hit by that feeling of coming home after a long time away, when the dust seems to have been blown off things you had become so used to looking at you had stopped seeing them. Everything suddenly seems more intense, like a photograph restored to its original colour and contrast.

Sunlight was pouring into the living room and the cat leapt from his mistress’s arms to roll on the parquet floor. Laure turned to William.

‘In your room …’ he said.

She made her way to the bedroom door and pushed it open. The bag was sitting on top of the white bed cover and her strappy dress had been laid out on a hanger beside it. Propped against the mauve leather handles, there was an envelope addressed by hand in black fountain pen: For Laure Valadier. William shut his eyes and bit his bottom lip.

After Laurent had returned the keys, William had gone back to the flat that same evening to feed the cat. As he turned the key, he noticed something different: the door had not been
double-locked
, only pulled shut. He sensed something was up and yet everything else seemed so normal that it was several minutes before he went into the bedroom and found the bag, the dress and the letter. Of course he could not resist the temptation to read it. He had played a part in the events leading up to the reappearance of the bag on the bed, after all. He took the shade off the living-room lamp and held the sealed envelope over the bulb in order to read through the paper.

Laurent the bookseller was not Laure’s latest squeeze after all. He was simply a passer-by who had chanced upon the mauve bag in the street. William sat down on the sofa and took the decision not to tell Laure for fear of unsettling her. She was lying in a hospital bed having just come out of a coma. Leading her to believe that the stranger was a do-gooding neighbour seemed the best option in the short term. And it worked.

As soon as he returned to the ward, she bombarded him with questions: Who was this bookseller called Laurent who had come to her flat to look after the cat? How did she know him?
What did he look like? What had he said? William stripped his account of Laurent’s arrival down to the bare minimum: he had come to the door asking to speak to Laure. He was very polite. William told him Laure was not at home but in hospital, adding that he had to go away for two days and didn’t know who was going to feed the cat. Laurent had kindly volunteered to step in, and William had seen no reason to turn him down. Having laid the groundwork, he could claim with some confidence, ‘He’s one of your neighbours, Laure. Who else could it be?’

‘Yes …’ she eventually conceded, ‘you must be right. A few new people have moved into the building. There’s a guy on the second floor who seems really nice – it sounds like it could have been him. I thought he was something to do with graphic novels.’

‘That’s it, then,’ William agreed. ‘He must run a bookshop that specialises in comics.’

At the time, he had breathed an internal sigh of relief. But not now. It was time to own up: he had left the keys to Laure’s flat and the care of her treasured pet in the hands of a complete stranger. Now Laure was sitting on the edge of the bed, she had opened the envelope and was reading the short letter that William knew by heart.

Dear Laure Valadier,

I’m sorry to have intruded so far into your life. It wasn’t my intention. I found your bag one morning in the street, and got caught up in trying to find the owner so that I could return it. Things then ran a little out of control.

I now know that you are recovered. I know also that I have given up on the idea of meeting you. I went too far. To quote Patrick Modiano, whom you seem to like, in
Villa Triste,
‘There are mysterious beings, always the same, who watch over us at each crossroads in our lives.’ Let’s just say that, unintentionally, I have been one of those beings.

Best wishes

Laurent

The objects lay scattered silently over the bed. The cat had jumped onto the covers and was sniffing each item carefully. Everything she had grieved for and believed lost for ever had just reappeared.

The first thing she had touched as she felt inside the bag was the brass compact mirror with birds on, given to her by her grandmother on her eighth birthday. ‘It’s about time this mirror reflected a pretty young girl’s face again,’ she had joked. It was the first ‘beautiful’ gift Laure had ever received, and she had carried it with her ever since.

Next came her keys and the Egyptian pendant bearing her name, a reward for her work in Cairo. The chain it originally hung on had broken six months earlier and she had fixed it to her key ring instead, using a pair of jeweller’s pliers borrowed from the Ateliers Gardhier. Her fingers brushed the guilloche ornamentation on her mother’s gold cigarette lighter which she kept in her bag in case friends who smoked needed a light. She took it out and rolled the wheel; it produced a flame.

Right at the bottom of the bag, she found the three pebbles: the small white one she and Xavier had picked up on Antìparos in the Cyclades in 2002; the long grey one collected on a walk in a park in Edinburgh four years ago; and the round black one from Brittany or the Midi, she couldn’t remember which … Her diary
was there, along with Xavier’s Montblanc pen. The hair clip with the blue fabric flower she had owned since she was fifteen, having coveted it in the shop window for weeks. The plastic had never broken, proof that the accessories on offer at Candice Beauté must be of the highest order. Her lucky pair of red craps dice bought in London five years ago in a specialist games shop, which she sometimes used to help her make decisions. Her Chanel Coco Shine lipstick in a corally shade of red; the
ris de veau
recipe she had torn out of
Elle
at the dentist’s two weeks ago, just as he walked in – he must have seen her do it but said nothing.
Accident Nocturne
by Patrick Modiano, which she opened on the flyleaf.
Excuse me … I’m sorry to come up to you in the street like this; I don’t normally do this kind of thing, honestly, but … You’re Patrick Modiano, aren’t you? … Yes … Well … Yes, I … I am.

No mobile phone, just the charger. No purse either, but the red Moleskine notebook was there. Laure opened it and read over her own thoughts, scribbled down on Métro journeys or while sitting on café terraces. The lists of things she liked or was scared of. A reminder to buy food for Belphégor. A dream, another dream. Then she pulled out the envelope with the photos and found the picture of her parents taken on a road in the Midi sometime in the late 1970s, and the one of Xavier standing in her parents’ garden by the apple tree. She had taken it just before one of those summer lunches she had revisited in her dreams that week. The third picture was of the house, taken from the bottom of the garden; if you looked carefully, you could spot Sarbacane hiding up in the weeping willow.

Laure reached for Belphégor, closing her eyes and running her fingers through his fur. She had thought she would never see these pictures again, having kept them safe in her bag for years; the negatives were long since lost. The receipt from the
dry-cleaner’s was no longer inside the little pocket, but the dress was there, spotless in its plastic wrapping. She took a hairgrip out of her bag and pinned back the strands falling into her face. Next to her make-up bag and the Modiano she placed the half-full bottle of Evian she had sipped from in the taxi minutes before the mugging. The bag seemed to contain even more than she remembered, and as she took out forgotten belongings, she felt like a child sitting under the Christmas tree, unwrapping the gifts from her red cotton stocking. Her sister had had the same stocking and the exact same number of presents, but always finished opening them more quickly so that she could claim Laure had more than her. She sprayed her wrist with perfume, brought it slowly to her nose and closed her eyes.

‘William …’ she said.

Frozen in the doorway, William replied with a faint ‘Yes?’

‘Tell me about this Laurent.’

I like the way this man has slipped away without leaving an address.

I like his letter.

I like the fact that he works in a bookshop.

I’m scared he might be a bit nuts.

I’m scared I’ll never meet him.

I find the idea of a stranger coming into my flat terrifying, but I like the idea that Belphégor wasn’t scared of him. Which proves the man is not terrifying (paradox).

I like the idea of a man going to so much trouble to find me (no one has ever gone to so much trouble for me before).

How many booksellers in Paris are called Laurent? 

She was almost certain she had not lit a fire, but she could not have sworn to it. Perhaps he had burnt a few logs one night when it was chilly, perhaps not. Apart from this one detail, there was no trace of Laurent in the flat. The man had passed in and out again like a draught. The only one who could remember him being there was the cat, who had watched him coming and going but refused to say a word about it. Laurent, as this man was called, must have let his eyes wander over her things, the paintings on the walls, and certainly the books on the shelves. Given what he did for a living, might her reading tastes have played a hand in convincing him to carry on his search? Had his interest been piqued by her signed copy of
Accident Nocturne
, making him want to know more about the person who had mustered the courage to stop Patrick Modiano in the street?

It was late, and by now Laure knew Laurent’s letter off by heart. He had apparently found her bag in the street – but which street? He had probably taken it home with him and emptied out its contents, examining each item like a detective looking for clues. He must be slightly crazy. Or very romantic. Or have too much time on his hands. Or a bit of all three, Laure thought. He had combed through her diary and, what was more, her red Moleskine notebook. That meant he knew everything she liked or was afraid of, even the contents of her dreams. None of her
lovers had ever known as much about her. Only Xavier had been allowed to hear a few of her lists of ‘likes’ and ‘fears’, and even then Laure had filtered them carefully. Never before nor after Xavier had she allowed any man to know what lay between those pages. She had lost count of the number of notebooks she had filled since adolescence. They were all carefully stored inside four shoe boxes in the cellar.

And now there was a man in the city who knew almost all there was to know about her. A man whom she had never met yet who was familiar with the decor of her home, had studied her belongings at leisure and stroked her cat, knew exactly what was inside her bag, what she liked to read, what her bedroom looked like. Other men besides Xavier had been allowed access to her body, but no one else had really stepped inside her mind. It was not for want of trying: Laure simply refused to open up. It was more than she was capable of.

Franck, the man she had most recently been seeing, had discovered this to his cost. He had insisted on coming back to her place. As soon as he walked in, Belphégor scurried under the sofa. Franck took it upon himself to pass judgement on Laure’s belongings. The collection of dice in the study struck him as ‘bizarre’. As soon as he left the room, Laure took the opportunity to throw a pair – she got a one and a two. ‘You’ve got Sophie Calle’s books? Bit bonkers, that woman, isn’t she?’ Laure said nothing. As the minutes ticked by, she could feel herself stiffen. She knew she had to be mindful of her pale eyes narrowing wolf-like in anger. When he made a comment about William, expounding what he thought was a very clever theory about ‘gay best friends’ seeing their female friends as substitute sisters or mothers, Laure knew she would not be sleeping with him that night. Besides, Franck was a pretty average lover. She played the
sudden headache card and sent him home. The cat came back out from under the sofa, visibly furious at having had to spend over an hour under there, and took himself off to bed without deigning to look at his mistress.