Your Father's Room by Michel Déon

Author:Michel Déon [Michel Deon]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781910477472
Publisher: Gallic Books
Published: 2017-02-25T16:00:00+00:00

Next day the storm broke. Madame H. knew everything and had phoned Blanche to tell her that Katie might well be a wanton hussy, but Teddy was a peeping Tom. How had she found out what had happened, and from whom? They had been alone in the apartment. No one, absolutely no one could see them, and of course neither of them had said anything. So how? There was nothing magic about it. In the building opposite, on the same floor, lived an elderly gossip who kept watch on everything that happened in the street and in the neighbouring apartments. She loathed Katie, who, each time she found herself being spied on, stood a big piece of cardboard on the windowsill with the word ‘Bitch’ (she wrote it ‘Bich’) on it in capital letters. Lately she had varied her choice of words and started writing, imperatively, ‘Die’. The culprits had not closed the curtains because they had not planned any of it. Punishments came thick and fast: no more cinema, no more swimming at Larvotto, no more games of belote. They would meet in the street, and as they left the Cours or the lycée, and sometimes at friends’ houses, but their mothers kept watch. They had discovered at a young age that no crime – was it a crime? – goes unpunished, especially if you’re innocent. They would see each other again, infrequently, in Paris. But the magic had gone for ever.

Katie was married at eighteen, divorced at twenty. Wartime doesn’t suit reunions. And time passes: fifteen years, twenty perhaps. One day, or rather one night, very nearly one morning, in Rue du Bac in that smoky bar where, standing proudly behind her counter Madame Blanche, her eyelashes black with kohl, Cupid’s bow of a mouth pouting, welcomes the cream of Paris’s nightlife, among them more often than not those writers Blondin, Vidalie, Marvier, Déon and from time to time Jean-Louis Curtis, all night owls terrified by the prospect of going home before dawn, a woman of around forty, dressed a bit carelessly but with an elegance that is not easily learnt, and perched on a stool that teeters along with her, is drinking a glass of white wine and repelling the wandering hand of a long-haired young man in overalls. The hard neon light accentuates a fatigue in her face that is not far from complete collapse; she is a stranger, a foreigner, adrift among the workers at L’Officiel, the journalists downing their last glass after the paper is put to bed, and Édouard, who, as he habitually does, lingers to get the better of an anxiety that on some evenings he is hard put to articulate.

‘Teddy! Let me buy you a drink!’

Without the little blemish by her left eyebrow he would not have recognised her, much fatter as she is now, with her lovely green eyes clouded by alcohol and her voice husky from cigarette smoke. He is ashamed of himself and ashamed of a world that can wrong-foot his stubbornly boyish dreams and riddle them with nightmares.

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