Max was still lying there when Elaia waltzed out of the room into the kitchen in a long T-shirt. Perdu saw her take a seat on the bench next to her father.
Max soon stumbled into the kitchen too. He lent a hand setting the table and opened the wine. From his hiding-place Perdu could see how Elaia looked at Max when his back was turned. She pulled a mischievous face as she did so, as though it were all some big prank. He cast her a shy, doe-eyed smile when she wasn’t looking.
‘Please don’t fall in love with a dying woman, Max. It’s almost unbearable,’ whispered Jean.
He felt something constrict in his chest. It wormed its way up his throat and spilled out of his mouth.
A deep, shuddering sob.
How it screamed. How the deer screamed! Oh, Manon.
And then they came: the tears. He just about managed to lean against the beech tree and press his hands against the sides of the trunk for support.
He whimpered, he wept. Jean Perdu wept like never before. He clung to the tree. He broke out in a sweat. He heard the sounds coming from his mouth, and it was as if a dam had ruptured. He had no idea how long it lasted. Minutes? Quarter of an hour? Longer?
He wept into his hands with deep, desperate sobs until suddenly they stopped; it was as though he had cut open a sore and pressed out the infection inside. All that was left was an exhausted emptiness – and warmth, an unknown warmth that might have been produced by an engine fuelled by tears. It was this that made Perdu stand up and stride across the garden, faster and faster until he was running, straight into the large kitchen.
They hadn’t started eating yet, and this caused him a strange, fleeting sense of joy, because these strangers had waited for him, because he wasn’t superfluous.
‘And of course, like a painting, good paté can—’ Cuneo was raving. Halfway through his sentence, he and his audience looked up in amazement.
‘There you are!’ Max said. ‘Where were you hiding?’
‘Max. Salvo. I’ve got to tell you something,’ Jean blurted.
28
Saying those words. Actually saying them and listening to how they sounded. How the sentence hung there in Zelda and Javier’s kitchen, among the salad bowls and glasses of red wine. And what it meant.
‘She’s dead.’
It meant that he was alone.
It meant that death made no exceptions.
He felt a small hand grip his.
Elaia.
She drew him down onto the bench. His knees were trembling. Jean looked first at Cuneo and then at Max, right in the eye.
‘I don’t need to hurry,’ he said, ‘because Manon’s been dead for twenty-one years already.’
‘Dio mio,’ Cuneo gasped.
Max took an audible breath, then reached into his shirt pocket. He pulled out a twice-folded newspaper cutting, and slid it across the table to Jean.
‘I found it back in Briare. It was in Proust.’
Jean opened the slip of paper.
The death announcement.
He had pushed it into the first available book at the Literary Apothecary, put it back on the shelf at random and then, after a while, forgotten which it was and where it might have ended up among the thousands of books.
He flattened the piece of paper, folded it again and put it in his pocket.
‘But you didn’t say anything. You knew I’d left you in the dark. No, let’s call a spade a spade: you knew I’d lied to you. But you didn’t say that you knew I was lying to you. And to myself. Until …’
Until I was ready.
Jordan shrugged his shoulders slightly.
‘Of course,’ he said quietly. ‘What else.’
The grandfather clock ticked in the hallway.
‘Thank you … Max,’ whispered Perdu. ‘Thank you. You’re a good friend.’
He got to his feet, as did Max, and they fell into each other’s arms across the table. It was awkward and uncomfortable, but as Jean embraced Max he felt relief at last.
They had found each other again.
Jean felt fresh tears welling up.
‘She’s dead, Max. Oh, God!’ he said in a choked whisper to Max’s neck, and the young man gripped Perdu even more firmly. He put his knee on the table and moved the plates, glasses and dishes carefully aside to give Jean a very strong, very tight hug.
Jean Perdu wept again.
Zelda stifled a quiet sob before it left her mouth.
Elaia looked at Max with infinite tenderness as she wiped away her own rolling tears. Her father had leaned back to follow the drama, fiddling with his beard with one hand and twiddling his cigarette between the fingers of his other.
Cuneo kept his eyes riveted to his plate.
‘All right,’ Perdu whispered after his violent sobbing fit, ‘all right. It’s fine. Really. I need a drink.’
He breathed out loudly. Bizarrely he felt like laughing first, kissing Zelda next, and then dancing with Elaia.
He had barred himself from mourning because … because he had never officially been part of Manon’s life. Because there was nobody to mourn with him. Because he was alone, totally alone, with the burden of his love.