The Blue Room Read online

  Françoise came back upstairs in no hurry.

  ‘Well?’

  ‘He’s sitting on the terrace and he’s just ordered a lemonade.’

  ‘How does he seem?’

  He was asking the same question Andrée had.

  ‘He doesn’t seem like anything.’

  ‘Has he asked about his wife?’

  ‘No. But from where he is, he can watch both exits.’

  ‘Didn’t my brother say anything to you?’

  ‘That you should slip out the back and go through the courtyard of the garage next door.’

  He knew the way. Going over a wall a metre and a half high, he would be behind the Garage Chéron, with its petrol pumps lined up on Place de la Gare, and from there an alley led to Rue des Saules, coming out between a pharmacy and the Boulangerie Patin.

  ‘Do you know what she’s doing?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Did you hear any noise in the room?’

  ‘I didn’t listen for any.’

  Françoise didn’t much care for Andrée, perhaps because she was fond of Tony and felt jealous.

  ‘You’d better not go through the ground floor, in case he goes to the toilet.’

  Tony imagined Nicolas, with his bilious complexion and eternally sad or grumpy expression, sitting at a table on the terrace with his lemonade when he should have been behind the counter of his grocery store. He must have had to ask his mother to take his place while he was off in Triant. What reason had he given her for this unusual trip? What did he know? Who had told him?

  ‘Did you never think, Monsieur Falcone, about the possibility of an anonymous letter?’

  The question had come from the examining magistrate, Maître Diem, a man so shy it was disconcerting.

  ‘No one in Saint-Justin knew about our affair. Or in Triant, either, aside from my brother, my sister-in-law and Françoise. Andrée and I were careful. She used to enter via the little door on Rue Gambetta, which opens on to the foot of the stairs, allowing her to head up to the room without going through the café.’

  ‘You’re sure about your brother, of course?’

  Tony could only smile at that question. His brother was like another self.

  ‘And your sister-in-law as well?’

  Lucia loved him almost as much as she loved Vincent, in a different way, naturally. Like the two of them, she was of Italian parentage, and family came before everything else.

  ‘The maid?’

  Even if Françoise was in love with Tony, she would never have sent an anonymous letter.

  Diem had to look away, and the sunlight gleamed in his untidy hair.

  ‘There’s still someone …’ he murmured.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Don’t you see? Remember the words you recalled for me during our last interview. Would you like the clerk to read them back to you?’

  Tony flushed, shaking his head.

  ‘It isn’t possible that Andrée …’

  ‘Why not?’

  But that still lay far ahead. For the moment, Tony was following Françoise down the stairs, trying not to make the ancient steps creak, for the Hôtel des Voyageurs dated back to the days of the stagecoaches. He paused a moment in front of the blue room but couldn’t hear a thing. Did that mean Andrée was still lying naked on the bed?

  Françoise led him down the corridor and around a corner, pointing to a small window opening on to the sloping roof of a shed.

  ‘There’s a pile of straw, on the right. It’s quite safe to jump …’

  The hens squawked when he landed in the courtyard, and the next moment he was scaling the wall at the far end to find himself in a clutter of old vehicles and bits of machinery. A white-uniformed pump attendant was filling up a car in front of the station and never turned around.

  Tony slipped away to the alley, which smelled of stagnant water at first and further on, of freshly baked bread, thanks to a ventilator behind the baker’s oven.

  Finally, Rue des Saules, he slid behind the steering wheel of his lemon-yellow van, on which black letters spelled out:

  Antonio Falcone

  Tractors – Agricultural Machinery

  Saint-Justin-du-Loup

  A quarter of an hour earlier, he had felt at peace with the whole world. How to describe the deep uneasiness that had come over him? It wasn’t fear, for he had had no reason to suspect anything was wrong.

  ‘Weren’t you concerned to see Nicolas walk out of the station?’

  Yes … No … A little, because of the man’s nature, his habits, the way he was always worrying about his health.

  To avoid crossing Place de la Gare, Tony went the long way round to reach the road to Saint-Justin. Near a bridge over the Orneau, an entire family was fishing in the river, including a little girl of six who had just landed her catch without any idea how to get it off the hook. Parisians, no question. In the summer they were everywhere; there were some at his brother’s hotel, and a little earlier, in the blue room, he had recognized their accent on the terrace.

  The road ran past wheat fields freshly harvested two weeks back, past vines, past meadows, where the tawny cows of the region were grazing, their dark muzzles almost black.

  Some three kilometres along, Saint-Séverin was just a short street with a few farms scattered around it. Then he saw, to the right, Bois de Sarelle, a small wood named after the hamlet hidden behind the trees.

  In September of the previous year, it was here, a few metres from the unpaved road, that it had all started.

  ‘Tell me about the beginning of your liaison …’

  First the sergeant, then the lieutenant of the gendarmerie in Triant and then an inspector of the Police Judiciaire in Poitiers had asked him these same questions before he met with Diem, the thin psychiatrist, and his lawyer, Demarié, all in preparation for his interrogation by the presiding judge of the Assize Court.

  The same words were repeated for weeks and months, by other voices, in other places, while spring turned into summer and summer into autumn.

  ‘The real beginning? We first met when we were three years old, because we lived in the same village, and we went to school, then we made our First Communion together …’

  ‘I’m talking about your sexual relations with Andrée Despierre. Did they begin before?’

  ‘Before what?’

  ‘Before she married your friend.’

  ‘Nicolas was not my friend.’

  ‘Let’s say your classmate or, if you prefer, fellow student. Her last name was Formier, at the time, and she lived in the chateau with her mother …’

  It was not a real chateau. There had once been a chateau there, abutting the church, but only a few outbuildings remained. For perhaps a century and a half, doubtless ever since the Revolution, people had still been calling the place the chateau.

  ‘Did you ever, before her marriage …’

  ‘No, Your Honour.’

  ‘Not even a flirtation? Didn’t you ever kiss her?’

  ‘It would never have crossed my mind.’

  ‘Why not?’

  He almost replied, ‘Because she was too tall.’

  And it was true. He could not have imagined this tall, impassive girl who reminded him of a statue ever making love.

  Besides, she was Mademoiselle Formier, the daughter of Dr Formier, who had died during the wartime deportations. Was this explanation enough? He couldn’t think of any other reason. The two of them had not belonged to the same circles.

  When they left school each afternoon with their satchels on their backs, she had only to cross the playground to be home, in the heart of the village, whereas he and two friends walked on to La Boisselle, a tiny ‘three-hearth hamlet’ near the Orneau bridge.

  ‘When you came back to Saint-Justin four years ago, married and a father, and you built your house there, did you contact her again?’

  ‘She had married Nicolas and was running the grocery store with him. I bought something there now and then, but it wa
s more often my wife who …’

  ‘Now tell me how it began.’

  He was driving past the place right now, at the edge of Bois de Sarelle. It wasn’t the day of the monthly cattle fair in Triant or the main market. Monday was the main market day, and there was a smaller market every Friday as well. He went to them regularly, because it was a good way to meet his customers.

  Because of his health, Nicolas did not drive – the magistrate knew that. It was Andrée who drove the Citroën to Triant every Thursday to purchase goods from various wholesalers.

  Every other Thursday, she stayed in town all day, adding a visit to the hairdresser’s.

  ‘You must have run into her often, during those four years?’

  ‘A certain number of times, yes. One always meets people from Saint-Justin in Triant.’

  ‘Did you usually speak to each other?’

  ‘In greeting.’

  ‘At a distance?’

  ‘At a distance, or more personally, it depended.’

  ‘There were no other contacts between you?’

  ‘I must have asked occasionally how her husband was, or how she was doing.’

  ‘Without any designs on her?’

  ‘Excuse me?’

  ‘This inquiry has revealed that in the course of your professional comings and goings you indulged in a certain number of amorous adventures.’

  ‘Yes, like everyone else.’

  ‘Often?’

  ‘Whenever I could.’

  ‘Among others, with Françoise, your brother’s maid?’

  ‘Once. For fun. It was more like a joke.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘She’d dared me, I no longer remember the pretext, and one day when I met her on the stairs …’

  ‘It happened on the stairs?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Why did they sometimes look at him as if he were a cynical monster and at other times, freakishly naive?

  ‘Neither of us took it seriously.’

  ‘Still, you did have intercourse?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘You never felt like doing it again?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Perhaps because, right after that, there was Andrée.’

  ‘Your brother’s maid didn’t resent you for this?’

  ‘Why would she?’

  How different life is when one is living it from when one picks through it later on! In the end he was unsettled by the feelings they ascribed to him, no longer knowing how to tell the true from the false, wondering what separated right from wrong.

  That encounter in September, for example! A Thursday, probably, since Andrée had gone to Triant. She must have been delayed, at the hairdresser’s or elsewhere, because she was going home later than usual, and it was growing dark.

  As for him, he had been obliged to have a few glasses of the local wine with some clients. He tried to avoid drinking but in his job he could not always refuse a friendly round.

  He was feeling fine, light-hearted, as he had been when standing completely naked in front of the mirror in the blue room, staunching the bleeding from his lip.

  He had just turned on his headlights when he spotted Andrée’s grey Citroën by the side of the road, and Andrée, in light-coloured clothing, signalling him to stop.

  Quite naturally, he had.

  ‘It’s a lucky thing you were passing by, Tony …’

  Later they would ask him, as if it were an indictment against him: ‘You were already on familiar terms?’

  ‘Ever since school, of course.’

  ‘Continue.’

  Whatever could the magistrate have been writing on the typed sheet of paper in front of him?

  ‘She said, “I end up with a puncture the one time I haven’t room for the jack and leave it at home! You’ve got one, right?”’

  He hadn’t needed to take off his jacket because it was still so hot that he wasn’t wearing one. He remembered that his open-necked shirt had short sleeves and that his trousers were of blue twill.

  What else could he do but change the tyre?

  ‘Have you a spare?’

  While he was working night fell, and Andrée stood near him, handing him the tools.

  ‘You’ll be late for dinner.’

  ‘You know, in my line of work, that’s not unusual.’

  ‘Your wife doesn’t say anything?’

  ‘She knows it isn’t my fault.’

  ‘You met her in Paris?’

  ‘In Poitiers.’

  ‘She’s from there?’

  ‘From a village close by. She worked in Poitiers.’

  ‘You like blondes?’

  Gisèle was a blonde, with delicate, pearly skin that flushed pink at the slightest emotion.

  ‘I don’t know. I’ve never thought about it.’

  ‘I was wondering if brunettes scared you.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because years ago, you kissed almost all the girls in the village, except me.’

  ‘I probably just didn’t think of it.’

  He was kidding around, wiping his hands off with his handkerchief.

  ‘You want to try, for once, to kiss me?’

  He had looked at her in amazement, tempted to say it again: Why?

  He couldn’t see her clearly in the darkness.

  ‘You want to?’ she had repeated, in a voice he had hardly recognized.

  He remembered the little red lights at the back of the car, the scent of the chestnut trees, then the smell, the taste of Andrée’s mouth. With her lips clinging to his, she grabbed his hand and guided it to her breast, which he was astonished to find so round, so heavy and alive.

  And he had thought of her as a statue!

  A lorry was coming, and, to avoid its headlamps, they drew back, still locked together, towards the ditch by the edge of the wood, where Andrée suddenly began to tremble the way no other woman he had known had ever done, leaning on him with her whole body and saying over and over: ‘You want to?’

  They had found themselves on the ground, in the tall grass and nettles.

  He told neither the policemen nor the magistrate. Only Professor Bigot, the psychiatrist, dragged the truth out of him, bit by bit: she was the one who had pulled her skirt up over her belly and bared her breasts, commanding him in a voice as hoarse as a death rattle: ‘Fuck me, Tony!’

  In fact, it was she who had possessed him, and her eyes had gleamed with as much triumph as passion.

  ‘I’d never suspected she was like that.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I’d thought she was cold, haughty, like her mother.’

  ‘Afterwards, she wasn’t at all upset?’

  Lying still in the grass with her legs wide apart, as on that afternoon in the hotel room, she had said, ‘Thank you, Tony.’

  She had seemed to mean it. She had looked humble, almost like a little girl.

  ‘I’ve wanted to for so long, you see! Ever since school. You remember Linette Pichat, the girl with one eye a little crossed? It didn’t stop you from running after her for months!’

  Linette now taught at a school in the Vendée region and every year came home to spend her holidays with her parents.

  ‘I caught you together, once. You must have been fourteen.’

  ‘Behind the brickyard?’

  ‘You haven’t forgotten?’

  He laughed.

  ‘I haven’t forgotten because it was the first time.’

  ‘For her too?’

  ‘I haven’t a clue. I was too inexperienced to notice that.’

  ‘I hated her! For months, in bed at night, I racked my brain for ways to make her suffer.’

  ‘Did you find any?’

  ‘No. I settled for praying that she’d get sick or be disfigured in an accident.’

  ‘We’d better be getting back to Saint-Justin.’

  ‘Wait a moment, Tony. No! Don’t get up. We have to find a way to meet somew
here else. I go to Triant every Thursday.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘Maybe your brother …’

  The magistrate would later conclude: ‘In short, as of that evening, it was all settled?’

  It was hard to tell if he was being ironic.

  On 2 August, the magistrate had not yet entered his life, and Tony drove on home. Night had not yet fallen, as it had in September. The sky was only just beginning to glow red in the west, and he had to dawdle a long time behind a herd of cows before he could pass them.

  A village in a hollow: Doncœur. Then a gentle slope, more fields, meadows, a vast stretch of sky and, after a rise in the road, the sight of his brand-new house, of pink brick, with the sun reflecting off one window, his daughter Marianne sitting on the doorstep and, at the far end of the property, the silvery shed where he stored farm machinery had his name emblazoned on it, just as it was on the van, which Marianne had already spotted in the distance.

  Twisting around, she must have been announcing into the house, ‘It’s Pop!’

  She refused to say ‘papa’ like the other children and sometimes as a game (and perhaps because she was jealous of her mother) she called him Tony.

  2.

  Halfway up a hill on the left was his house, surrounded by its garden, separated by a field from the old, grey, slate-roofed house of the Molard sisters. Beyond it were the smithy and finally, a hundred metres further down, the village, with real streets, terrace houses, shops and small cafés. The local people preferred to call it a market town, however, a large one of 1,600 inhabitants, not counting the three adjoining hamlets.

  ‘You been fighting, Pop?’

  He had forgotten Andrée’s bite.

  ‘Your lip’s all swollen.’

  ‘I bumped into something.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘A lamp-post, in Triant. That’s what happens when you forget to watch where you’re going.’

  ‘Mama! Pop bumped into a lamp-post …’

  His wife came out of the kitchen in a small-checked apron and carrying a saucepan.

  ‘Is that true, Tony?’

  ‘It’s nothing, as you can see.’

  Mother and daughter looked so much alike that, when they stood side by side, it sometimes startled him.

  ‘It wasn’t too hot for you today?’

  ‘Not really. Now I have to finish some work in the office.’