The Red Notebook (7 page)

After the starter of organic salmon with fair-trade red fruits, they moved on to steamed chicken fillets with vegetables (organic obviously) in a spicy sauce made from an ancestral Peruvian recipe brought back from a trip taken by one of the graphic designers-turned-restaurateurs. It was all very of the moment, very on trend, very
boho
. As Dominique talked about an article on the economic crisis she wanted to put together for
Le Monde
, Laurent fell to dreaming of those Relais et Châteaux hotels in the provinces where, in the dining rooms with crackling fires, they said ‘Enjoy the rest of your meal’ at every course.

‘What’s happened to your pretty handbag?’ Dominique’s question had involuntarily coincided with a lull in the conversation and Laurent was obliged to explain the saga of the handbag to the group.

‘I would love it if a man searched for me like that,’ declared the press officer, finishing off her third glass of wine. ‘Perhaps it would end in a beautiful relationship. I’m so bored, stuck with Mark and the children.’ Her remark struck a sour note. ‘What?’ she went on. ‘It’s the truth. After twenty-two years of marriage, you get tired of each other. I’m sorry but that’s the way it is.’

Dominique asked her neighbour, the junior minister, if he would kindly refill her glass. Laurent reached for the bottle, but the other man beat him to it.

‘Have you had a book signing with Jean Echenoz?’ the wood anniversary wife asked, showing a sudden interest in his bookshop.

‘Yes,’ replied Laurent. ‘For
Ravel
.’

‘What was the name of his book that won the Goncourt?’

‘I’m Leaving,’
replied Laurent

‘You also know Amélie Nothomb, Dominique tells me.’

‘Yes, I know Amélie.’

The press officer asked him if the story she always told about eating rotten fruit was true. Laurent was at a loss. He had never discussed food with Amélie Nothomb. After that, everyone stopped asking him questions and the conversation took a different turn, ranging over relationships, family and children in no particular order. The voices round the table seemed to blend into one, dissolving into a gentle hubbub that Laurent was no longer listening to.

His gaze drifted to the architect’s empty chair. He poured himself some more wine and smiled slightly, still looking at the
chair. It seemed to him that by concentrating a little he could see a figure sketching itself in the air. Yes, as he emptied his glass, the figure became clearer. Purely by willpower he had conjured up a person sitting in that chair. He was the only one who could see her; she had shoulder-length brown hair, a pale complexion, very light eyes, a beauty spot to the right of her upper lip, lipstick, red of course but tending to the coral. She was as bored by this dinner as he was and now – there was no doubt about it – she was smiling at him. No one had noticed and their complicity was complete. If he were to concentrate even harder he would see her get up and come over to him. She would lean over and say into his ear, ‘Come on, Laurent, let’s go.’

‘Are you coming with me?’

Laurent turned to look at Dominique.

‘I’m going to smoke a cigarette – will you join me?’

Outside the cold took him by surprise as Dominique lit her cigarette, shielding herself from the wind. She took her first drag.

‘I think we’re drifting apart,’ she said, after a silence.

‘I agree,’ replied Laurent quietly.

‘I think you’re seeing someone else.’

Laurent said nothing.

‘You’ve been thinking about her all evening. It’s obvious … I think this is the parting of the ways.’

Laurent thought, She should make a list of all her ‘I thinks’.

Dominique moved towards him and ran her hand through his hair, with a disillusioned smile. ‘Happy hunting, Laurent.’ Then she added coldly, ‘Don’t ever call me again.’ And she threw away her barely started cigarette and went back into the restaurant.

There, it was over. How was it so easy to disappear from someone else’s life? Perhaps it was with the same ease that you enter it. A chance meeting, a few words exchanged, and a
relationship begins. A chance falling out, a few words exchanged and that same relationship is over.

He had gone back in a few minutes later, but he longed to quietly pay his share and leave. How many things do we feel obliged to do for the sake of it, or for appearances, or because we are trained to do them, but which weigh us down and don’t in fact achieve anything? Dominique wouldn’t look at him any more. She was deep in conversation with the junior minister, who was smiling at her. Laurent wondered if he was looking at his replacement. He waited a good quarter of an hour without anyone talking to him, and it was certain now, the junior minister was making good progress, and, judging by her charming smiles, Dominique was responding to his advances. The title of Jean Echenoz’s book was now an invitation he could no longer refuse.

Laurent rose and said, ‘I’m leaving.’

As he walked away towards the till, he heard Dominique say, ‘Ignore him. That would also make a good title for a book.’

On the stroke of seven Frédéric Pichier arrived at the bookshop where readers were already waiting. He took off his scarf and padded jacket, shook hands with each of the bookshop staff, said that he was ‘really very touched’ by Laurent’s compliments on his book and let himself be led to the little table set up for him. He settled down behind the piles of
The Sky is our Frame
and some of his earlier books. Maryse brought him a glass of vin chaud and some savoury biscuits. There were at least forty people in the shop already and more were pushing through the door. Laurent sat down beside Pichier, smiled at the assembled customers, which immediately hushed the low murmuring amongst them and then raised his voice to thank both the author for kindly accepting the invitation from Le Cahier Rouge and the customers for coming out on this cold evening. He then introduced Frédéric Pichier, talking briefly about his work, his life and his latest book. The writer answered the questions about the book from his host, who had annotated the text with care. The session ended with applause from the audience and Laurent left the author to his signing. Damien served the customers with glasses of vin chaud and they obediently queued up in front of the author’s table.

Laurent grabbed a glass of wine and went over to Maryse. ‘It’s good that so many people have turned up,’ he murmured to her.

‘And they’re still coming,’ she replied, looking over at the door. ‘Isn’t your friend Dominique joining us?’

‘Dominique won’t be coming any more, Maryse,’ replied Laurent, staring at the cinnamon stick floating in his wine.

‘I’m sorry, Laurent. I shouldn’t have said anything.’

‘No, it doesn’t matter, really it doesn’t,’ he told her, taking her hand. ‘I’ve met someone else,’ he added, wondering in the next instant what had come over him.

Pichier was listening with a smile to the compliments of one of the customers, Françoise, and replying to the usual questions: ‘How did you get the idea?’ ‘How long did it take you to write?’ ‘You must have had to do a huge amount of research.’ Then, as he was finishing off his dedication, ‘For Françoise, my loyal reader …’ she reluctantly asked him the ritual question, ‘Are you working on a new novel?’ ‘Yes, yes, I’m working on something …’ replied Pichier laconically.

The truth was that for the last two and a half months he had been adrift in a plot he himself described as crap to his friends and family, and which he had avoided relaying to his editor. It was the story of a young maid in the 1900s set against a wide backdrop that ranged from rural French society to the upper classes in Paris. And it depicted the purest souls as well as the slightly depraved elite of the Belle Époque. He was stuck on page 40. Marie, the young serving girl, was having an affair with a brutish but romantic butcher’s boy, while the son of the family, a timid aesthete who collected beetles, was secretly fantasising about her. Sometimes in his giddier moments, Pichier told himself he was going to give birth to a monster, that he would be the first to produce a novel that was part J.-K. Huysmans and part Marc Levy. Some afternoons, he wished that his heroine would end up at the hands of the knackers of Les Halles. As for the well-born young virgin, many a time had he itched to send him off to the Trappist monks. Sometimes, when he was in
real trouble, he wrote barely three sentences before spending the rest of the day in front of his screen, surfing the web, especially eBay, looking for objects that, of course, could not be found. He also spent time, like all his fellow writers, typing his name and the title of his books into search engines, looking for reviews on blogs and literary sites, smiling when he came across a good review and cursing when he came across a mixed one that ended with the insulting phrase, ‘This book did not make much of an impression on me.’ Sometimes, using a pseudonym, he would write a review himself on Fnac.com or Amazon.com, praising himself and hailing the great talent of Frédéric Pichier. Recently he had even gone as far as to write, under the identity ‘Mitsi’, on Babelio.com, ‘Pichier, a future Goncourt winner?’

Like many writers, Pichier had another job. He was a year eleven and twelve French teacher. At the Lycée Pablo-Neruda in the outer suburbs, which was next door to the Robespierre nursery school. After twenty-one years’ teaching, he had felt a sense of exhaustion creeping in. Nervous exhaustion. Encouraged by his nearest and dearest and by his editor, he had taken a year’s ‘sabbatical’, so that he could devote himself exclusively to his writing. Now, suffering from writer’s block, alone every day at home, he regretted the decision that had deprived him of his pupils. They might have been rowdy, sly, complicated, and lacking in culture, sometimes appallingly so, but he had to admit that his days with them had been vastly more entertaining than those he now spent in front of his screen. Their concept of literature was frequently disconcerting. To them the Marquise de Merteuil was a sort of ‘cougar’ and Valmont ‘too sick’. They had spent a month going through the text as if it were a TV series. He had chopped it into extracts: season one, season two … of
Les Liaisons Dangereuses
. They had really liked the title; they thought
it sounded sexy and subversive, both attributes that aroused their curiosity. In their own fashion, they had actually followed the thoughts of the eighteenth-century author.
Madame Bovary
had just been, for most of the boys, ‘lame’ with a totally desperate heroine. The girls, however, seemed to understand the woes of Emma a bit better. As for the mining community in
Germinal
, the entire class might as well have been reading science fiction.
Un Amour de Swann
with its ending, ‘To think that I’ve wasted years of my life, that I’ve longed to die, that I’ve experienced my greatest love, for a woman who didn’t appeal to me, who wasn’t even my type!’ awakened more interest. Some of the boys seemed to find a connection between Proust’s thoughts and their personal experience of disappointment in love. ‘The hero was really into a top bird who just wasn’t right for him. He finally realised it and that made him think a lot about himself and his life’ was Hugo’s brilliant summing up – fourteen out of twenty – ‘Good comprehension of the text, but your analysis is underdeveloped and watch your spelling, Hugo.’ Some pupils, mainly girls, had read
The Sky is our Frame
. Djamila had even asked him to sign her copy and asked him lots of pertinent questions about the structure of the book, which had both touched him and made him feel optimistic.

The author signed and smiled politely at his readers, drinking down several vins chauds. Laurent went over to ask if everything was all right.

‘Yes, excellent,’ replied Pichier.

‘We’ve sold thirty copies,’ Laurent murmured to him.

Pichier nodded.

‘Hello,’ he said to a new customer as she approached. ‘Hello … Nathalie,’ he added with a friendly smile, looking at her neckline.

‘How do you know my name?’ exclaimed the customer.

Pichier smiled, pleased with the effect he had produced.
‘You’re wearing it round your neck,’ he said, narrowing his eyes.

She put her hand up to a gold pendant. ‘You read hieroglyphics?’ she said admiringly.

‘I wrote
Tears of Sand
,’ responded Pichier, laying his hand on a copy. ‘There’s a lot about Egypt in it. I learnt as I was doing research for the book.’

‘I’ll be right back,’ said Laurent quickly and he made his way through the customers to the internal door of the bookshop that led to the lobby of the apartment building. He took the stairs four at a time up to his flat, opened the door, turned the light on, quickly grabbed the keys from the card table, and looked breathlessly at the fob with the hieroglyphics. Now he understood: it had never been meant for keys, it was a pendant just like the customer’s; it was simply that she had attached it to her key ring. He left the apartment, slamming the door behind him and rushed back down the stairs.

The customer was having two books signed:
Tears of Sand
for her husband and the latest novel for herself. Pichier was polishing off the dedication as Laurent approached. He had to wait while the customer related a colourful family anecdote, something that had happened to her great-grandmother during the Great War which was very like an episode in the novel. At last she said goodbye to the author and Laurent slipped in front of the next customer.

‘Can I just interrupt a moment,’ he said to Pichier. ‘Do you know what this says?’ And he laid the bunch of keys on the cover of one of the books.

Pichier picked it up, adjusted his glasses and looked closely at the Egyptian characters. ‘Yes …’ he murmured. ‘It says Laure …’ Then he turned the little rectangle over. ‘…Va … Vala … Valadier.’

Laure Valadier.

Silence is golden
. The phrase inscribed above the entrance of the ateliers and gold-plated by Alfred Gardhier (1878–1949) himself had taken on a new significance for William. It had been four days now, and Laure had still not woken up. No matter what Professor Baulieu said to reassure him – the brain scan had not shown any damage – the fact that she was still in a coma surely did not bode well. He picked up the leaf with the flat of his knife, placed it on the calfskin cushion and blew very gently; it unfurled into a perfect rectangle. With the sharp edge of the knife, he divided it in two, rubbed the sable brush against his cheek and picked up the first half in one smooth movement. The static electricity lifted the leaf above the layer of wetted Armenian bole covering the woodwork. With a flick of the wrist he dropped it into place. In a fraction of a second, the gold leaf moulded perfectly to the contours of the wood, blending in with the seventy-five others he had already positioned that day. Two more and the restoration of the pier glass bearing the coat of arms of the Counts of Rivaille would be all but complete. The only thing left was to burnish the surface with an agate stone until the gold shone as it had in its glory days.