She had poured the wine: a light, golden Tapie from Gascony. And he had drunk it, with cautious sips.
That was the most astonishing aspect of his first date since 1992: he had felt intensely safe from the moment he entered Catherine’s flat. All the thoughts that usually pursued him could not accompany him into her territory; some kind of magic threshold kept them at bay.
‘How are you spending your time at the moment?’ asked Perdu at one point after they had dealt with God, the world and the president’s tailor.
‘Me? On looking,’ she said.
She reached out for a piece of baguette.
‘I’m looking for myself. Before … before what happened, I was my husband’s assistant, secretary, agony aunt and admirer. I’m now looking for what I was capable of before I met him. Or to be more precise, I’m trying to see whether I’m still capable of it. That’s what’s keeping me busy: trying.’
She began to scrape the soft white part out of the crust and roll it between her slender fingers.
The bookseller read Catherine like a novel. She let him leaf through her and look through her story.
‘Today, at forty-eight, I feel like I did at eight. I used to hate being ignored – and yet at the same time I was distraught if someone actually found me interesting. And it had to be the “right” people who took notice of me. The glossy-haired rich girl whom I wanted to be my friend; the kind male teacher who was struck by how modestly I hid my wonderful light under a bushel. And my mother. Oh yes, my mother.’ Catherine paused. Her hands kept kneading the bit of baguette.
‘I always wanted to be noticed by the biggest egotists. I didn’t care about anyone else – my dear father; fat, sweating Olga from the ground floor – even though they were much nicer. But I was embarrassed when nice people liked me. Stupid, eh? And I was the same stupid girl during my marriage. I wanted my moronic husband to notice me, and I took no account of anyone else. But I’m ready to change that. Would you pass me the pepper?’
She had formed something out of the bread dough with her slender fingers: a sea horse, which she now decorated with two peppercorns for eyes before handing it to Perdu.
‘I was a sculptor. Somewhere along the line. I’m forty-eight, and I’m learning everything again from scratch. I don’t know how many years it’s been since I last slept with my husband. I was faithful, stupid and so awfully lonely that I’ll gobble you up if you’re nice to me. Or kill you because I can’t bear it.’
Perdu was utterly stunned to be alone with a woman like this.
He was lost in contemplation of Catherine’s face and head, as though he were allowed to crawl inside her and look around for any interesting things that were hanging about in there.
Catherine had pierced ears, but she wasn’t wearing earrings. (‘His new girlfriend wears the ones with the rubies now. Shame, really: I’d have loved to cast them at his feet.’) She sometimes touched the hollow of her throat, as though searching for something, maybe a necklace that the other woman was now wearing too.
‘And what are you up to at the moment?’ she asked.
He described the Literary Apothecary to her.
‘A boat with a low-slung belly, a galley, two sleeping berths, a bathroom and eight thousand books. It’s a world apart from our world.’ And an arrested adventure, like any moored ship – but he didn’t say this.
‘And the king of this world is Monsieur Perdu, a literary pharmacist who writes prescriptions for the lovesick.’
Catherine pointed to the parcel of books that he had brought her the previous evening. ‘It helps, by the way.’
‘What did you want to be when you were a little girl?’ he asked before his embarrassment could get the better of him.
‘Oh, I wanted to be a librarian. And a pirate. Your book barge would have been exactly what I needed. I would have solved all the world’s mysteries through reading.’
Perdu listened to her with growing affection.
‘At night I would have stolen back from evil people everything they’d tricked the good ones out of with their lies, leaving a single book that would cleanse them and force them to repent, turn them into good people and so on – of course.’ She broke into laughter.
‘Of course,’ he fell in with her ironic tone. That was the only tragic thing about books: they changed people. All except the truly evil, who did not become better fathers, nicer husbands, more loving friends. They remained tyrants, continued to torment their employees, children and dogs, were spiteful in petty matters and cowardly in important ones, and rejoiced in their victims’ shame.
‘Books were my friends,’ said Catherine, and cooled her cheek, which was red from the heat of cooking, on her wine glass. ‘I think I learned all my feelings from books. In them I loved and laughed and found out more than in my whole non-reading life.’
‘Me too,’ murmured Perdu.
They looked at each other – and then it simply clicked.