Selected Stories

Madame Buissonnet displayed no surprise, accepting Guy’s claim without a knowing smile. A man of the world in such matters, Monsieur Buissonnet said the key to the farmhouse would be where it always was when it was left outside: in the dovecot. ‘Madame must have her beauty sleep,’ he added, tucking his wife’s arm into his.

‘It is no trouble.’

Again Guy imagined being with her in the little bay, and telling her in Le Nautic or the Café Vert why he was on the island, explaining about the Buissonnets, explaining why it was that he had been in the restaurant when first they saw one another, how he had told the Buissonnets a lie, how they had guessed it was a lie, and how that didn’t matter.

‘Madame,’ a waiter murmured, offering help, repeating what Guy had said – that it was no trouble – pretending that nothing much had happened.

The man in the blue suit was awake and on his feet, squeezing his eyes closed, as if to clear what was faulty in his vision, blinking them open again. Guy and the waiter helped him across the restaurant, across the foyer to the lift. The girl who had been humiliated whispered her gratitude, seeming not to have the confidence to raise her voice. She looked even thinner, even frailer, when she was on her feet.

On Sunday, on the last of the evening ferries, Guy would leave the island, his visit over. Even sooner she might go herself, first thing in the morning, hurrying off with her companion because of the shame they shared. In the lift there was no embarrassment when they touched, her shoulder pressed on Guy’s because the lift was small. He felt panic spreading, affecting his heartbeat, a dryness in his mouth. Yet how could she go so swiftly when she had pleaded so? Where had the pleading come from if not from their being aware of one another? Alone at her table when her boorish husband left her to fend for herself, she had been disturbed by a stranger’s gaze and had not rejected it. Why had she not unless she’d known as certainly as he? Even before they heard one another’s voices, there had been that certainty of knowing. All intuition, all just a feeling across a distance, and yet more than they had ever known before.

‘Voilà!’ the waiter murmured, producing the key of the couple’s room from one of the man’s pockets. A moment before there had been consternation when it could not be found.

Love was conversation: Gérard had said that, and Guy had never understood until tonight. They would sit on the rocks and their conversation would spread itself around them, their two lives tangling, as in a different way they had already begun to. Club 14, Gérard, Jean-Claude, Jean-Pierre, Colette, Michelle, Dominique, Adrien, the walk from the rue Marceau to the Café de la Paix after a badminton game, his mother, and all the rest of what there was: tomorrow and Saturday were not enough. Well, of course they did not have to be.

She gave the waiter a hundred-franc note when the man had been dumped on the bed. The waiter put the room key on the writing-table. When he went he did not seem surprised that Guy did not go also, perhaps sensing something of what had come about. Only once in a whole lifetime, Guy thought, fate offered two people this. ‘How much a visitor you are!’ Michelle said once, and truth to tell he had always felt so, not quite belonging in the group, not even with his mother. And with the Buissonnets, of course, he was a visitor too. All that would come into the conversation; everything would in the end.

‘Thank you,’ she said, speaking in English, and then in French in case he had not understood. But he could manage a little English, and wondered if these were Americans or English people. On the bed the man was snoring.

‘Please,’ she said, opening the minibar and gesturing toward its array of little bottles. ‘Please have something.’

He wanted to say she mustn’t feel embarrassed. He wanted to reassure her absolutely, to say that what had occurred downstairs was of no possible consequence. He wanted to talk of all the other matters immediately, to tell her that years ago he had guessed that Monsieur Buissonnet was his father, that he was certain he owed his position in the Crédit Lyonnais to Monsieur Buissonnet’s influence. He wanted to tell her that nothing was ever said – not a word – by Madame Buissonnet about his mother, or by his mother about Madame Buissonnet, that he had long ago guessed his mother had been a woman in Monsieur Buissonnet’s life before his marriage. It would have been before his marriage; it was not Monsieur Buissonnet’s style to be unfaithful.

‘Oh, then, a cognac,’ he said.

It was not ever said that the farm would one day be his. That was why Monsieur Buissonnet talked so often and so much about it, why Madame Buissonnet asked if this was right, or that, when she chose the colours for a room she wanted to have repainted.