Clack-slap, clack-slap.
Perdu raised his hand involuntarily to his hair, to the spot on the back of the head where many men developed a humiliating bald patch. He didn’t have one – yet. Yes, he was fifty. Not thirty. His dark hair had grown silvery, his face heavily shadowed. His tummy … he pulled it in. Not bad. His hips bothered him: every year a thin extra layer. And he couldn’t carry two crates of books at once any more, dammit. But all of that was irrelevant. Women no longer eyed him – with the exception of Madame Gulliver, but then she viewed every man as a potential lover.
He squinted up at the landing where Madame Bomme would be lurking to snare him in conversation. About Ana?s Nin and her sexual obsessions – at top volume since she had mislaid her hearing aid in a box of chocolates.
Perdu had organised a book club for Madame Bomme and the widows of Rue Montagnard, who hardly ever received a visit from their children and grandchildren, and were withering away in front of their televisions. They loved books, but more than that, literature was an excuse to get out of their flats and hand around colourful ladies’ liqueurs for close examination and tasting.
The ladies generally voted for erotic books. Perdu delivered this kind of literature inside more discreet jackets: Alpine Flora wrapped around Millet’s The Sexual Life of Catherine M.; Proven?al Knitting Patterns for Duras’s The Lover; Jam Recipes from York for Ana?s Nin’s The Delta of Venus. The liqueur researchers were grateful for the disguises; they were wary of their relatives who thought that reading was an eccentric hobby for people who were too snobbish to watch television and that eroticism was unnatural in women over sixty.
This time, however, no Zimmer frame blocked his path.
On the second floor lived the pianist Clara Violette. Perdu heard her practising Czerny runs. Even scales sounded brilliant under her fingers.
She was considered one of the five best pianists in the world. Yet fame was denied her because she couldn’t stand to have anyone in the room when she played. In the summer she gave balcony concerts. She would open all the windows, and Perdu would push her Pleyel grand piano over to the balcony door and place a microphone beneath the instrument. Then Clara would play for two hours. The residents of number 27 sat out on the steps in front of the house or set up folding chairs on the pavement. Strangers would crowd the tables at the Ti Breizh. When Clara came out onto her balcony after the concert and bowed with a shy nod, she reaped the applause of nearly half the population of a small town.
Perdu managed to make it the rest of the way upstairs without further interruptions. When he reached the fourth floor, he saw that his table had disappeared; maybe Kofi had lent Catherine a hand.
He knocked on her green door and realised that he had been looking forward to this moment.
‘Hello,’ he whispered. ‘I’ve brought some books.’
He put down the paper bag against the door.
As Perdu stood up, Catherine opened it.
Short, blond hair; mistrustful, but with soft, pearl-grey eyes beneath delicate eyebrows. Her feet were bare and she was wearing a dress with a neckline that gave a faint glimpse of her collarbone. She was holding an envelope.
‘Monsieur. I found the letter.’
8
Too many impressions at the same time: Catherine – her eyes – the envelope with the pale-green writing on it – Catherine’s closeness – her scent – the collarbone – life – the …
Letter?
‘An unopened letter. It was in your kitchen table, in the drawer, which was completely sealed with white paint. I opened it. The letter was lying under the corkscrew.’
‘No,’ said Perdu politely, ‘there wasn’t a corkscrew.’
‘But I found …’
‘No you didn’t!’
He didn’t mean to be so loud, but neither could he bring himself to look at the letter she was holding up.
‘Forgive me for shouting at you.’
She held out the envelope.
‘But that’s not mine.’
Monsieur Perdu retreated backwards to his flat.
‘It’d be better if you burned it.’
Catherine followed him across the landing. She looked him in the eye, and a searing flush burned across his face.
‘Or throw it away.’
‘But then I might as well read it,’ she said.
‘I don’t care. It’s not mine.’
Catherine continued to stare at him as he pushed his door shut, leaving her standing outside with the letter.
‘Monsieur? Monsieur Perdu!’ Catherine knocked. ‘Monsieur, it’s got your name on it.’
‘Go away. Please!’
He had recognised the letter. The handwriting.
Something shattered inside him.