The room, their room – the bare globe dangling from the ceiling, the desk with their odds and ends thrown across it, the chair bearing their coats and scarves like a faithful butler – welcomes them back.
The longing, the anticipation she felt on the train, all the way from Granville to Paris, exploded from her the moment they closed the door behind them. She threw her clothes off in a frenzy and dragged him onto the bed, tugging at his belt until his trousers were off and she could sink herself down on him. She wanted nothing but to fuck and be fucked, the tension of the last few days firing every thrust, their bodies smacking against each other, her juices and their sweat mingling, until an electric jolt exploded from her, running through her body, and he too shuddered into her, and they could fuck no more. They both lay back on the bed, Jean still in his shirt and tie, the shirt drenched, their mouths tasting of each other, their hearts gradually slowing. Both of them oblivious of the world out there. Only this was real.
As Dominique, slowly, thoughtfully, rubs her belly and breasts, it seems now as if, in their frenzy, they became two other people entirely. They are lying in the bed, still and glutted, smoke like low cloud floating above them. No desire to speak, no will to. Eventually he turns to her and his voice is faintly intrusive, and part of her is wishing that their spent silence could have been sustained just a little longer.
‘Are you ready to tell me what happened?’
Is she ready? She’s not sure but she will have to summon the energy. She owes him that. She begins as if describing events and characters in a film. That is how it feels.
‘There were moments when it was terrifying: on that field just after the plane had taken off, and we knew the Germans or the police must have heard and could swoop at any moment. But there was also something magnificent about watching that little plane disappear into the night.’ She pauses, dwelling on the image of Pauline in the cockpit of the plane.
Jean looks at her, smoke rising from his ever-present cigarette. ‘They say she once doubled for Arletty.’
Dominique ponders the statement and replies vaguely, ‘Arletty is just a movie star. With movie star beauty. This woman had something else.’ She stops, struck by a thought. ‘She had what I can only call “presence”. Like knowing somebody has entered a room without looking – because the room tells you. And it was wonderful to know that I’d helped put her in that plane and fly her out to safety.’
He laughs. ‘You liked it.’
‘I loved it.’ Her tone is definitive, dramatically so. And she can tell he is not so much hit by what she has said as the way she says it. As if she has come back from a holiday outwardly the same, but changed. ‘We think we’re awake . . .’ She says, voice dreamy, wistful, removed. ‘But are we just sleepwalking?’
She could be thinking aloud, talking to herself, as if he weren’t in the room. Without realising it, she’s shut him out. It occurs to her that he looks vulnerable.
‘I’ve never felt so alive.’
‘Never?’ he asks almost imploringly.
‘No,’ she says, with that same definite, thoughtful air. ‘I’ve been down the rabbit hole, and wouldn’t you love to see what I’ve brought back?’ Suddenly teasing him, eyes and voice steady, edging closer to him, tasting the tobacco on his lips. They are too tired, too spent, for sex, but not pleasure. She reaches out and undoes his tie then unbuttons his shirt, still damp, and strokes his chest and arms, then feels his lips on the wide coronas of her nipples. All frenzy gone, their caresses have the languid intensity of a dreamy, sweet ache. And like a dream, they seem to her to have entered another dimension. For it seems to Dominique, who is both lover and observer to the caresses, that there is now a presence in the room, all the more powerful for not being there.
Then they are dozing, Dominique slipping in and out of a dreamy stupor. But the watch is never far away, and when they are rested and have come back to themselves it is the first thing he looks at. The blue hour is about to turn black. And she knows it’s not because of impatience or restlessness that he looks at his watch, but the opposite, because like all moments of deep, transporting pleasure, the blue hour is gone in what we call no time at all. That’s how it feels, this evening especially, that inside this room there is no such thing as time: at least not the time that clocks and watches keep. But all the same, the watch doesn’t stop.
As she dresses she says, ‘I can see how it could become a drug. How you get to love it too much.’
‘That’s how people die. They love it too much. They make mistakes.’ He lets that sink in. ‘Be careful.’
She knows he’s right, but at the same time there’s something curiously, disappointingly, conventional about talking like this. About the evening ending like this. Is she not a cat, after all, with a cat’s lives? Is he not an owl? Are they not wild? Are they not large? Have they not made this world-within-a-world together? One that defies time, clocks and convention? What is loving it too much other than what the world calls going too far, and are they not beyond that? For it is almost as though, for that moment, they spoke like a husband and wife.
They close the door behind them. The laughter of a prostitute in the next room with one of her regulars follows them down the hallway. On the street they kiss, a formal kiss, and part: he to the company of his wife; she to an empty apartment, where she will replay and revel in the memory of having gone down the rabbit hole, gone underground.