39

SOLANGE BONNEFOY LAY CURLED AND warm in her bed and listened to her lover move around the darkened room. In a few more moments he would be dressed, ready to leave, and he would come to the bed, lean over and kiss her. He would not tarry. Maybe he would whisper something if he suspected she was awake. If he thought her still asleep, the brush of his lips on her cheek or forehead would suffice.

She had felt him leave her bed an hour before and had opened an eye to see the green digital read-out of her bedside radio flicking to 5.02. Two or three minutes either side of five in the morning and Hervé Montclos, curator of the Balon Gallery in Marseilles, woke without any sound from an alarm and left their bed. Only when he stayed at her apartment on a Friday or Saturday night would the following mornings begin in a different manner.

As she lay there, listening to the fall of the shower – always put on first to cover the sound of the lavatory flush – Solange marvelled at the good fortune that had brought this man into her life. She had met him just six months earlier, at a Christmas dinner party held at a friend’s house. Of all the guests – most of them fellow lawyers and their wives – Hervé was the only one she hadn’t recognised, and as such, she well knew, the man who had been brought to the table to partner her and balance the numbers. As a single woman of a certain age, never married, Solange was used to such arrangements, accepted them with good grace, though always felt a particular elation when her better, closer friends didn’t bother with such a caring, considerate, if clumsy, convention.

Sure enough, within five minutes of her arrival, she was steered towards the man and gently introduced. She was struck first by his eyes which bunched up in a web of wrinkles when he smiled, warm and brown, filled with a bright and sharp intelligence, but also shadowed by a deep sadness. He had just arrived in Marseilles, he told her, from Montpellier, to take over as curator of the Balon Gallery on rue Grignan. Though he had lived so close to Marseilles, he was ashamed to admit that he had never before visited the city.

‘And do you like what you have found?’ she had asked.

‘Now I do,’ he’d replied, more gallantly than flirtatiously she had mistakenly decided.

Hervé Montclos, she later discovered, was also Visiting Professor of Antiquities at Aix University, a fellow of the Académie Française, and the author of more than a dozen scholarly works on the history of Abyssinian sculpture. He was fifty-nine, recently widowed and the father of three daughters all of whom had now flown the coop. Finding himself alone in the sprawling family home outside Montpellier, he had, six months earlier, resigned his position at the city’s celebrated Fabre Museum, sold the house and accepted the curatorship of the Balon.

It was in the Balon Gallery just a few days after that Christmas dinner party, giving Solange a private, after-hours tour of the exhibits, that he had kissed her for the first time, pressing her gently against an Aksumite stone plaque. On the lips, softly; his hand placed just a centimetre or two below the rise of her right breast. She had experienced a certain breathlessness at this unexpected move, which had been interrupted, sadly, by the arrival of a security guard. Two days later they were lovers.

There was no doubt in Solange Bonnefoy’s mind that Hervé was the most important man in her life. The most important man ever. There had never been anyone like him. Not that she had a particularly wide range of experience on which to base such a judgement. There had in fact been few other men in her life, few men to share her bed. She was too tall, she knew; too awkward in her skin to be a natural lover; too intelligent to suffer fools; and, increasingly, too set in her own ways. She also felt a clumsiness in intimacy – always had – as though her tall, gangling frame was somehow not suitably equipped for the delicate manoeuvrings of love-making. Height, shape, intelligence, and now age had determined the course of her love life.

Until now. Until Hervé.

‘Are you awake?’ she heard him whisper.

‘Dreaming,’ she whispered back.

She felt him lean down, one hand gently pushing back her hair, lips brushing her cheek.

‘I’ll call you later. Dinner?’

‘Miramar. My treat,’ he replied.

‘Shall I meet you there?’

‘I’ll pick you up at the office.’

Another light kiss, the warm fresh smell of him.

And then he was gone.

The apartment door closing.

With a sigh, now that she was alone, Solange swung herself from their bed and padded through to the bathroom. The room was warm from him, the mirror frosted with condensation, but otherwise there was no sign that the bathroom had been used before her. Everything in its place – no towel on the floor, no rumpled shower mat, no bristles in the sink, the lavatory seat lowered, everything gleaming, untouched. What a find, she thought, wiping a hand through the condensation and smiling at herself.

Taking a gown from the back of the bathroom door she went through to the kitchen and put on some coffee. Three floors below she heard his footsteps clatter down the steps of her apartment building and start up the road to where he had parked his car the night before. She leant forward over the sink, found the right angle and watched him stride away. Slim, tall, a long loping pace, briefcase swinging, one hand holding down his hat against an early morning breeze coming off the harbour. A moment later he was out of sight, and a moment after that she heard his car door slam shut with a hefty clunk. If she stayed where she was, she’d see him drive past. Just one more look. To keep her going till this evening and their dinner at Miramar.

But there was no ‘one more look’.

He did not drive past.

And nor would there be any dinner that night at Miramar.