The nearby forest of Fontainebleau was a dark ribbon below the night sky. Cowering on the plain were little hamlets in which only a scattering of lights still burned late that evening. In the Relais du Midi, which stood beside the road between two nameless villages, long-distance lorry drivers and travelling salesmen were drinking beer in the stifling heat given out by the stove in the middle of the taproom.
Léon and Louise were sitting close together beside the window in the corner. He had his right arm round her waist. She was leaning against his shoulder with his right hand in her left. A cold draught coming through the cracks in the window was blowing the smoke of her cigarette horizontally towards the stove.
‘We still haven’t talked,’ he said.
‘Do you want to talk?’
‘No,’ he said. ‘Do you?’
‘We have talked a bit.’
‘But not about that.’
‘No.’
‘Only about cars.’
‘And Metropolis.’
‘And Kellogg and Fitzmaurice.’
‘And Chanel dresses and stupid cloche hats. And about your concierge and your mangled tartes aux fraises.’
‘And about inflation and the Banque de France.’
‘And elephants. How did that joke about elephants go again?’
‘Do you still read Colette’s novels?’
‘Oh, that silly cow. I’ve never been so disappointed by anyone. I’m out of cigarettes.’
‘Are there some left upstairs?’
‘In the car.’
‘I’ll get them for you.’
‘Stay here,’ she said, squeezing his hand. ‘Don’t leave me. Not yet.’
He drew her closer and kissed her.
‘I’m hungry,’ she said. ‘Let’s order before the kitchen shuts.’
‘I’ll have steak and frites,’ he said.
‘Me too.’
Léon beckoned the landlord over and ordered, then told Louise a story to make her laugh.
It was the story of the tramp who sat outside the Musée Cluny day in day out, year after year. Léon used to drop a coin in his hat every morning on the way to work. The man smelt of red wine but was usually clean-shaven, and one could tell that he tried to keep his shabby clothes clean. They always said a friendly good morning and sometimes exchanged a few words, wishing each other a nice day before Léon walked on.
Every few months, the museum gateway would be deserted when Léon went to work. When that happened he would anxiously wonder whether something had happened to the tramp overnight and wave to him in relief when he saw him sitting in his usual place at lunchtime. Having grown attached to the man over the years, he worried about him as he would have worried about a distant uncle – one with whom he wasn’t on very intimate terms but who was somehow ‘family’.
Léon didn’t know the man’s name nor did he want to, nor did he want to know where he spent the night and whether he had some relations somewhere. Over the years, however, he had gleaned a few scraps of information about him. He knew, for instance, that the tramp had a predilection for foie gras and suffered from an arthritic hip in the winter, and that he had once had a wife named Virginie and a job as verger at a church somewhere in the suburbs, plus a flat to go with it, before his own or other people’s debts had deprived him first of his wife or his job or his flat, and that he had subsequently lost the rest of this petty bourgeois trinity because you had to have them all or not at all.
Conversely, the tramp had built up a picture of Léon. When a flu epidemic was going round he enquired after the health of Léon’s offspring and his lady wife, and when a poisoning was making headlines in the press he wished him success at the laboratory.
The tramp had become one of the most important people in Léon’s life as years went by, because there weren’t very many other individuals with whom he daily exchanged a few words in the confident assumption that they were well disposed towards him for no ulterior reason. He had become Léon’s personal tramp in the course of time – so much so that Léon felt almost jealous when he chanced to see another passer-by put some money in his hat.
In October of the previous year the tramp had not been sitting in his usual place for three days in succession. On the fourth day he was back, however, and Léon was so relieved that he’d invited him to the nearest bistro for a coffee. There the man told him that four nights earlier, when a vicious north wind was driving sleet through the streets of the Latin Quarter and he was dead drunk and looking for a place to sleep, he had found an unlocked, empty cattle wagon in the vicinity of the Gare de Lyon. Sliding the door open, he climbed into the agreeably windless interior, shut the door again, wrapped himself in his blanket in the straw, and fell asleep within seconds.
So soundly had he slept that he didn’t wake up when the cattle wagon jolted into motion, and he slept on at dawn, when the train complete with locomotive and twenty empty cattle wagons pulled out of the Gare de Lyon and headed southwards out of the city. Anaesthetized as he was by several litres of cheap red wine, the incessant rocking and lurching kept him profoundly asleep throughout the day like an infant in a cradle. Meantime, the train continued on its way through the French provinces. The tramp slept on while traversing Burgundy from north to south, and he slept on in the vineyards of the Côte de Rhône, and he slept on at dusk, when the train was steaming past the wild horses of Provence, and he slept on in Languedoc and Roussillon and at the foot of the Pyrenees. It wasn’t until the next morning, when his wagon had been stationary for quite a while and was becoming ovenlike in the southern sun, that he awoke with a furry tongue and a head like a block of wood.
The tramp crawled out of the straw and wiped his sweaty face on his sleeve. Sliding the door open, he saw – when his eyes had grown accustomed to the dazzling sunlight – a deserted cattle-loading station and beyond it, stretching away to the horizon, a shimmering plain completely bare except for a few isolated cacti. It was a while before he grasped that he wasn’t in Paris any longer, nor even in the north of France, but somewhere very far to the south. He had no money, no papers, and presumably no knowledge of the local language.
Impelled by agonizing thirst and a raging headache, he climbed down on to the permanent way and trudged north-east along the track for an hour-and-a-half until he came to the nearest railway station, where a level-crossing keeper in an operetta uniform disclosed in broken French that he was on the banks of a river named Arga, not far from Pamplona.
Louise laughed. Then the food came.
They didn’t talk about their weekend together at Le Tréport ten years earlier, nor about their night on the beach and the shellfire next morning, nor about the years they’d been apart.
Earlier that evening, when they were still lying in bed, mutually exploring the scars left on their bodies by shrapnel, machine-gun bullets and surgeons’ scalpels, Louise had told him that a wine merchant from Metz, who had also got mixed up in the bombardment, had picked her up and driven her in his van to the women’s hospital at Amiens. There, after undergoing an emergency operation, she had lain among the hopeless cases for a whole month, contracted pneumonia and Spanish flu, and not been discharged until six months after the war ended, only semi-recovered even then.
She went straight back to Saint-Luc-sur-Marne and called on the mayor, who gave her a rapturous welcome and told her straight out that Léon had also paid him a visit a few months earlier, looking gratifyingly restored to health. Seated on the very chair on which Louise was sitting now, he said, Léon had described his own misfortunes, then suddenly jumped up and walked out. No one had seen him since.
When Louise asked the mayor if he knew Léon’s address, he gave a regretful shrug, and when she overcame her embarrassment and asked if Léon had enquired about her, he patted her hand, shook his head sadly, and made some profound remark about the capriciousness of young people in general and the fickleness of young men in particular.
When Léon ordered two coffees after the meal, the landlord ostentatiously squinted at the clock on the wall. After bringing the cups he toured the taproom with his purse and put the unoccupied chairs upside down on the tables. Léon and Louise talked in low voices, eyeing one another as intently as if they were engaged in difficult negotiations about decisions of the greatest moment, when they were really only talking of trivia and carefully avoiding anything weighty and important.
Léon began by describing the gigantic airship that had recently floated past his laboratory window, almost close enough to touch. Then Louise told how her Torpedo had conked out on the way back from Le Tréport and refused to start until she had rid the air filter of dust with a drop or two of petrol from her spare can. After that they discussed the advantages and disadvantages of asphalted and paved roads, and Louise went on to mention that her route to work took her past the Place de Clichy, which had been freshly paved, and that nearly all the prostitutes there had worn mourning since the war. She wanted to know if Léon thought they were really all war widows. Probably, was his rather bemused response, whereupon Louise said she hoped so, because if the only other possible explanation were true – namely, that the whores affected widows’ bonnets as a business-boosting form of costume because homecoming soldiers relished the idea of screwing their fallen comrades’ wives – if that were true, she wanted nothing more to do with men for the rest of her days. He couldn’t judge, said Léon, because he had no statistically relevant information about the Place de Clichy’s whores or the emotional state of homecoming poilus. All he knew for sure was that the idea wouldn’t appeal to him personally.
‘I know it wouldn’t,’ said Louise, and she quickly described how she had once skidded in freezing rain in the Place de l‘Étoile, almost glissading under the Arc de Triomphe and over the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier.
The Torpedo was back on the road shortly after midnight. Louise was now driving slowly while Léon stroked the nape of her neck and gazed at the headlights’ twin yellow beams on the road ahead. They didn’t speak for a long time. Then Louise cleared her throat.
‘Listen, Léon,’ she said, harshly all of a sudden, ‘we’ll be back in Paris an hour from now. You must promise me something.’
‘What’s that?’
‘I don’t want you stalking me.’
‘Stalking you?’
‘You know what I mean. We won’t see each other again, it would be pointless – it would get us nowhere. You don’t know where I live and I’m not going to tell you, but you know where I work.’
‘So?’
‘Don’t act dumb, it doesn’t suit you. I don’t want you hanging around outside the Banque de France in the hope of seeing me. You’re not to loiter in the Rue de Rivoli or the Place de la Victoire either, or set some detective on me, or bump into me by chance when I’m buying a pound of potatoes in the vegetable market, or happen to sit down beside me in the cinema. Will you promise never to do that?’
‘Coincidences happen,’ said Léon. ‘Paris isn’t as big as people think, you know. It’s always possible our paths will cross. In the Métro, in the street, at the butcher’s...’
‘Don’t talk nonsense,’ she said sharply. ‘We don’t have the time. You must promise not to do anything silly. Never, not once. If our paths ever do happen to cross, we can say hello in passing if you like, but we won’t stop. For my part, I promise I’ll never set foot in the Rue des Écoles or the Quai des Orfèvres. I can’t leave the Boulevard Saint-Michel to you entirely – I have to go that way from time to time.’
‘So do I. Twice a day at least.’
‘Be a man, Léon. Promise me.’ She took her right hand from the steering wheel and held it out. ‘Do you promise?’
He turned to her and smiled as if to say, ‘Give me a break!’ Then he took her hand, looked out of the side window, and said, ‘No.’
For a few seconds Louise drove through the darkness in silence. Then she braked and put the car into neutral. As soon as it was stationary she applied the handbrake, got out, and walked round the bonnet to the passenger door.
‘Move over. You’re going to drive now.’
‘Louise, I’ve never – ’
‘Go on, move!’
‘I can’t drive.’
‘Then you’re going to learn. You’re driving from now on, otherwise we’ll beat about the bush for ever and – who knows? – maybe burst into tears. This is the accelerator and this is the brake. I’ll handle the gear changes to start with. Now depress the accelerator a little – only a little, that’s right. Now take your foot off the pedal and depress the clutch. That’s first gear, see? I’ll release the handbrake and you slowly release the clutch and, at the same time, gently depress the accelerator, gently, gently...’
Once they were in third, Léon maintained a speed of fifty k.p.h. Keeping to the middle of the road, he drove northwards through the darkness and headed for the city. He tried turning the headlights off and on, blew the horn, and let his left arm dangle in the airflow outside the window. Louise helped him to steer only on very tight bends, and when the road ran uphill she took the gear lever and changed down. As they breasted one of the last hills before the outskirts of the city, the strings of lights on the Eiffel Tower came into view in the north-west. The moon was visible above a dark strip of forest to the north-east.
‘Look,’ said Léon, ‘the moon is exactly half-full. Know what that means?’
‘No, what?’
‘It means the moon is precisely in the same place in the solar system as we were four hours ago.’
‘What?’
‘Four hours ago, the earth was where the moon is now.’
‘We were up there four hours ago?’
‘That...’ – he glanced at his watch – ‘...is precisely where I tore the last button off your blouse four hours ago.’
They drove on in silence for a while, looking at the moon through the windscreen.
‘It’s moved on a bit now,’ he said. ‘Now it’s reached the place where your knickers – ’
‘Leave my knickers out of it,’ she broke in.
Léon explained that when the moon was half-full, the earth, the moon and the sun formed a perfect right angle, which meant that the moon, on its orbit around the sun, followed in the earth’s wake, so to speak, at a mean distance of three hundred and eighty thousand kilometres and a speed of a hundred thousand kilometres per hour. ‘That means that we were there just short of four hours ago, and that the moon will be here in four hours’ time.’
‘Four hours?’ said Louise. ‘Hang on, let me check.’ She put her head back and looked up at the sky while the Torpedo puttered peacefully through the darkness. After a while she said, ‘You’re right. Three hours, fifty-two minutes and a few seconds. But is the moon waxing or waning?’
Léon laughed in surprise, then hung his head. ‘No idea,’ he said ruefully. ‘Perhaps it depends whether you’re looking at it from north or south of the equator.’
‘Nonsense. All men are the same – astronomically speaking, at least.’
‘Anyway, there are two possibilities: the moon is either four hours behind us or four hours ahead.’
‘If it’s ahead of us, it’s now where we’ll be in four hours’ time.’
‘I don’t want to know that,’ said Léon. ‘Let’s assume it’s trailing after us.’
‘The odds are fifty-fifty,’ said Louise. ‘So where would the moon be now?’
‘At the place where I carried you from the table to the bed.’
‘And we stopped beside the wardrobe on the way.’
‘Beside the coat hooks, you mean.’
‘Which weren’t properly screwed to the wall.’
For a while they silently regarded the moon, which was lifting above the skyline at a surprising rate.
‘Actually,’ said Louise, ‘you wouldn’t need a rocket to get to the moon. You’d simply have to stay put for four hours.’
‘Just jump into the air, hover there, and let the earth sail on.’
‘And wait for the moon.’
‘And then climb on.’
‘Tell me, Léon, where has the moon got to now?’
‘Where the bedside light fell over and smashed. And you started moaning my name.’
‘You’re a conceited ass.’
‘I can still hear you,’ he said. ‘I’ve got you in my nose, too. I can smell the two of us. Here, smell.’
She sniffed his neck, his shoulder and her own forearm. ‘We smell exactly the same.’
‘Our smells have mingled.’
‘I wish they could stay that way.’
‘For evermore.’
Louise laughed. ‘That’s ambitious of you.’ She undid the bottom button of his shirt and slid her hand beneath it. ‘You’re feeling very smug – you think you’re a hell of a fellow, don’t you?’
He nodded.
‘But do you also know, master of the universe, where a car’s footbrake is?’
‘I can accelerate, turn the lights on and off and sound the horn. I don’t want to be able to brake.’
‘But I do. Apply the brake, you lord of creation. Now, right away, go on. Take your foot off the accelerator, then depress the clutch and put the car into neutral. No, that’s the handbrake, not the gear lever. Now the footbrake, just next to the accelerator. Pull over to the right, go on, quick.’
While Léon was still busy with the steering wheel, clutch and brake, she kissed him and tugged at his clothing until the car bucked and lurched to a halt. The engine hissed softly under the bonnet. An owl hooted in the distance. The valley between them and the outskirts of Paris was wreathed in mist. They fetched two blankets from the boot and, closely entwined, made their way to the edge of the woods, where they lay down on the soft turf between two bushes and made love until dawn by moonlight.