Five

MANFRED HAD BEEN WATCHING his grandfather struggle to fill his pipe for fully ten minutes. The old man’s hands shook violently these days, but Manfred knew any offer of assistance would be gruffly spurned. They were sitting on the patio overlooking the garden, awaiting the summons for Sunday lunch. After a few more minutes Bertrand Paliard succeeded in lighting the pipe. A momentary expression of satisfaction passed across his face as he took his first draw, but this was swiftly overtaken by a fierce fit of coughing. His nurse, who had been standing in attendance by the French windows, took a couple of steps towards him. There was an oxygen mask to hand, but she merely stood by as he struggled for breath. She did not approve of him smoking. The tobacco had a warm nutty aroma, a smell which always reminded Manfred of his miserable teenage years.

After his mother died, Manfred felt like a lodger in the Paliard house. In his early teens he had grown quickly. He was ill at ease with his newfound height and the unwelcome attention it attracted. Consequently he developed a stoop. His grandfather nicknamed him Nosferatu on account of the way he crept around the house, keeping close to the walls. At school he kept himself to himself. He was not picked on. He had on one or two occasions proved capable of standing up for himself, so despite his physical and social awkwardness, bullying was reserved for softer targets. He was aware, too, that the death of both his parents cast a kind of barrier around him. It made him unapproachable both to those kids who wanted to ridicule him and to those, if any, who might have wished to befriend him.

Manfred began to long for companionship, for a pal to discuss the merits of the girls at school, or to sit with into the small hours in his room listening to records and discussing their favourite authors. This pal would invite him over and he would be welcomed into a surrogate family, in which the mother cooked lavish Sunday spreads and the father took the boys on Sunday fishing or hiking trips. There were candidates for such friendship at school. Manfred could spot the other awkward cases at a hundred metres, by the way they hovered on the fringes of the crowd, by the books they slyly fished out of their satchels at break, by their ability to disappear into the background. But Manfred was incapable of breaching the silent understanding he had – or thought he had – with his fellow maladroits.

As for a girlfriend, it was not for the want of carnal thoughts that Manfred did not countenance the possibility of so much as a friendship with a girl. He could barely utter a word to a member of the opposite sex without his face breaking into a deep crimson blush. So he avoided girls altogether. Still, they occupied most of his waking thoughts. He observed them surreptitiously at school, and walked, unnoticed, a few metres behind them on the way home, listening to their laughter, noting the minutiae of how they dressed, admiring the smooth curve of their suntanned legs. He entertained elaborate sexual fantasies, but he also daydreamed of being introduced to a girl’s parents. He would behave in a polite and respectful manner and be regarded as a nice young man with good prospects. Most of all Manfred longed to walk through the woods hand in hand with a girl who would call him Mani, just as his mother had.

During the summer holiday before his baccalauréat year, Manfred was more isolated than ever. In term-time, there was at least an illusion of being among people, of a routine to get him out of bed and out of his grandparents’ house. Manfred spent entire days in his room with the shutters closed, lying on his bed staring at the ceiling. His grandparents seemed to care little how he passed his time. He read voraciously, devouring Camus and Sartre and wallowing in the horrors of de Sade. The darker the work, the more he relished it. Sometimes he wrote passages in a notebook, but he invariably tore out the pages and destroyed what he had written, frustrated at the triteness of his efforts. If his grandmother suggested that he accompany her to Strasbourg for the day or asked him to carry out a chore in the garden, Manfred would most likely comply, but with such a sullen demeanour that she soon gave up and left him to his own devices. Meals in the household were generally eaten in silence.

Manfred began to take his grandfather’s nickname to heart. He convinced himself he was most at home in the dark. He stole around the house as quietly as possible, keeping to the cool shadows of the old house, taking pleasure in startling the maids. He entertained fantasies of stealing into girls’ rooms and sinking his teeth into their necks as they slept. They would awake in an erotic reverie, addicted, like him, to a life in the shadows.

Manfred’s grandfather stared into the middle distance. His pale blue eyes were watery from his coughing fit. He looked terribly sad. His pipe had gone out. The garden was overgrown. When he retired from practice fifteen years previously, he had got rid of the gardener, insisting that he could take care of the grounds himself, but ill health had rendered this impossible. Ivy had spread its tentacles across the pale yellow brick wall at the back of the garden. The wooden door that led to the woods was now inaccessible. The jamb was rotten and the pale blue paint had mostly flaked off, leaving the wood exposed to the elements.

Manfred offered to relight his grandfather’s pipe and, to his surprise, he handed to it to him. Manfred ignored the filthy look from the nurse, got it going and handed it back to him. M. Paliard nodded a curt thank you, but did not put it to his lips. Manfred had always loathed the old man, just as the old man loathed him. Now he seemed to be clinging onto life only out of spite. Even his pipe no longer seemed to provide him with any pleasure. But there was no question of discontinuing the ritual of Sunday lunch. Such a thing would upset his grandmother.

The maid appeared at the patio door and, to Manfred’s relief, announced that lunch would be served. He left the nurse to manoeuvre his grandfather and his medical apparatus into the dining room. Manfred had never got used to sitting there at the table, waited on by maids. His grandmother complained constantly about the difficulty of finding suitable staff. The current maid was Spanish. During lunch Mme Paliard constantly corrected her, addressing her in exaggeratedly childish French and then talking to Manfred about her as if she wasn’t there. Manfred kept his eyes on the food that was placed in front of him and nursed a glass of mineral water. He craved a glass of wine, but alcohol was not served at lunchtime in the Paliard household. Bertrand did not approve of drinking during the day, as he did not approve of many things. Despite this, Mme Paliard chattered breezily through lunch. Manfred suspected that she tippled in the kitchen. He did his best to contribute to the conversation, if only to prevent the meal being passed in silence. As soon as the dessert plates were cleared, he took his leave.

Later that afternoon, Manfred took his sack of washing down to the laundry room in the basement of his building. Someone had left a blouse in one of the dryers. He held it up in front of him. It was pale blue and translucent. The fabric had a pleasing grain between his fingers. It felt expensive. He could smell conditioner, lavender perhaps, a scent an older woman might favour. Manfred felt a strong desire to bury his face in the garment and inhale the aroma, but resisted for fear that its owner might come in and catch him doing so. Instead he folded the garment neatly and placed it on top of the machine.

Manfred transferred his clothes from the washing machine and set the dryer to the highest temperature. He sat down on the wooden chair next to the door and opened his book, but he was unable to concentrate. Perhaps he should go up to his apartment and fetch a hanger for the blouse. Its owner might appreciate such a gesture. But Manfred did not like to leave his clothes in the basement. It was not that he thought someone would steal them, rather that if a cycle finished, another resident might need to unload the machine, and Manfred did not like the idea of a stranger going through his clothing. It was for this reason that Manfred did his washing on Sunday afternoons when the laundry room was always deserted. Other residents presumably had better things to do with their weekends and did their washing at times more traditionally set aside for drudgery. Even so, Manfred always made sure his underwear was in a presentable condition, in case he had to unload the machine in the presence of another person.

Manfred decided against fetching a hanger. It was not as if he had carelessly discarded the blouse. He had folded it neatly and if its owner came to retrieve it while he was upstairs, he would not get credit for this act of kindness. The woman might even admire the skill with which he had folded the blouse. Manfred craned his head into the stairwell that led to the laundry room. No one was coming. He got up and folded the blouse more carefully, gently smoothing it with the palms of his hands. Then he re-took his seat and picked up his book, the same detective novel he had been reading when Gorski called.

The spin cycle ended. Manfred removed his clothes from the machine and folded them into his laundry sack. There was not room to dry clothes in his apartment and he disliked the slovenly appearance of clothes hanging on radiators. He wondered if he should wait for the woman to return to retrieve her blouse, but perhaps she had not yet noticed it was missing. Manfred decided that he would take the blouse to his apartment and leave a note on the dryer saying that he had done so. He was pleased with this plan. He bundled the remaining clothes into his sack without folding them, laid the blouse on top and, not wishing to meet the woman coming out of the lift, took the back stairs to his apartment. Manfred found a piece of paper and pencil and sat down at the kitchen table to compose the note. He must make it sound casual. There was no need for an elaborate explanation. Rather he should make it sound as if his decision to take the blouse to his apartment had been made without thinking, as if it was the most natural thing in the world. After three or four false starts, he settled for the most neutral wording he could think of: Blouse found in dryer. Please contact Apartment 4F. Then he signed it, Manfred Baumann.

Manfred took the stairs back to the basement. The light was on in the basement stairwell. He could hear someone moving around in the scullery. There was a woman bending over the dryer. She was wearing jeans, a faded blue T-shirt and baseball boots. She had yellow blonde hair, tied in a ponytail. She did not hear Manfred approach.