Paris Is Always a Good Idea (19 page)

Squelch, squelch, squelch. Squelch, squelch, squelch.

Squelch, squelch, squelch. Squelch, squelch, squelch.

Trainee nurse Julie bustled around the room. She was clearing his lunch away and asked if we'd enjoyed it and if we'd remembered to take our tablets. Then she propped the window open on the latch, pulled the curtains shut so that we can have a little afternoon nap, Monsieur Marchais, and left the room. The door closed quietly behind her.

As Max wearily let his head droop onto the pillows, closing his eyes in the hope of having that afternoon nap, the hazy dream images were penetrated by the delightful clatter of high heels, which came up the corridor and came to a halt outside his door.

 

Eighteen

“What on earth have you been up to, Max dear? How are you? What were you doing up a ladder, for heaven's sake? And what's happened to your head?” Rosalie put the bunch of tea roses down on the bedside table and leaned over Max Marchais with an expression of concern. Her old friend looked rather run-down, she thought, with the bandage on his head and the dark shadows beneath his eyes.

A delighted smile flashed across his wrinkled face. “Which question should I answer first, Mademoiselle Rosalie?” he asked. “I'm an old man, you're demanding too much of me.” He was trying to sound cheerful, but his voice was hoarse.

“Oh, Max!” She pressed his bony hand, which was lying on the thin bedspread. “You look really terrible. Are you in pain?”

He shook his head. “The pain is bearable. Today I even managed to take a couple of steps, thanks to a friendly drill sergeant pretending to be a nurse. It's just that I can't get any sleep. The door constantly opens and one of those white coats comes in for something. And they all ask the same things. I wonder if any of them ever talk to each other.”

He sighed deeply, smoothed the bedspread, then pointed to a chair standing in the corner.

“Get yourself a chair, Rosalie. I'm really very glad you could come. You're the first normal person I've seen for days.”

Rosalie laughed. “You shouldn't be so impatient, Max. You've only been here a few days, and the doctors and nurses are only doing their job.” She pulled the chair over to the bed, sat down, and crossed her legs.

“Yes, I'm afraid I'm a very impatient patient.” His gaze followed her every movement, finally coming to rest on the graceful, light-blue sandals that clothed her feet with their painted toenails. “Pretty sandals,” he said unexpectedly.

Rosalie raised her eyebrows in surprise. “Oh, thanks. They're just ordinary summer sandals.”

“Oh, well … you know, you get to appreciate normal things when you've spent a couple of days on the other side of the river,” he replied philosophically. “I hope I can get out of this joint soon.”

“I hope so, too. You really had me scared. I'd been trying to call you all weekend without success, but I never reckoned we'd meet up again in hospital.”

“Yes, I heard all my phones ringing. Foolishly enough, I was in no position to pick up,” he joked. “What was it that was so important?”

Rats!
Rosalie gnawed her lower lip. This really wasn't the right moment to bring the book up again and ask about the mysterious dedication. That would have to wait until Max had recovered a bit more.

“Oh … I just wanted to see if you could come to Paris next week and have lunch with me,” she said deceitfully. “I've got help in the store for three afternoons every week, and René's off to a training seminar in San Diego at the end of the week. I thought we could help the time to pass together.”

At least the last two statements corresponded to the truth. A pity Madame Morel couldn't have started work that day. Rosalie had hung a sign on the shop door that morning:
CLOSED DUE TO A FAMILY EMERGENCY.

She smiled. It may not have been a family emergency in the strictest sense, but it felt like one. She stared at the tall man with the bushy eyebrows. All of a sudden he seemed so helpless and frail. There was only a thin veneer covering the signs of mortality. How quickly an old person's facade crumbled when they were catapulted out of their normal routine and no longer able to look after themselves, she thought. She looked at his thin hospital gown and his pale face, noting that he was unshaven, moved by the sparse gray stubble that was visible in the reflected light. Strange, this old man seemed as close to her as a grandfather. And at that moment he actually looked like a grandfather. Rosalie was happy he was still alive, relieved that no worse had happened to him. There was no way she was going to bother him with the business about Sherman. It was clear that he was not in very good condition.

“Well, I'm afraid the lunch in Paris is off the menu for the immediate future, my dear Mademoiselle Rosalie, no matter how tempting the idea might be,” said Max, as if he had read her thoughts. “You can see for yourself the state I'm in. And if it weren't for my artificial hip I'd be spending several weeks in bed.” He pointed at the outline of his legs under the bedspread. His right foot was sticking out at the bottom of the bed.

“My goodness, did you break your toe as well?” asked Rosalie, pointing at Max Marchais's little toe, which was quite a dark color.

“What? No!” Max wriggled his toes. “I've got several things wrong with me, but my little toe is completely in order. It's always been that brown—it's a mole.” He grinned. “My dark spot, if you like.”

“You're really full of surprises, Max,” responded Rosalie, leaning back in her chair. “And now tell me, please, what you were doing up a ladder? Were you picking cherries or what?”

“Picking cherries?” His eyebrows shot up in surprise. “What on earth gave you that idea? No, no, I was standing on my library ladder putting a book back on the shelf. Do you know Blaise Pascal, Mademoiselle Rosalie?”

She shook her head. “No, but it seems to be a dangerous book!”

*   *   *

AFTER MAX MARCHAIS HAD
told his story, in which the thoughts of a philosopher, an old ladder, a Costa Rican gardener, and a gasoline lawn mower provided the requisite drama, he gave Rosalie the key to his house in Le Vésinet and asked her to bring him some things that he needed.

“I'm sorry to trouble you, Rosalie, but Marie-Hélène is away, as you know. Sebastiano has already informed her, and I think she's coming back earlier than she had planned—if only to say ‘I told you so'—but I don't know exactly when.” He shrugged his shoulders with a sigh. “Sebastiano did admittedly save my life, for which I'm eternally grateful, but he's not particularly good when it comes to packing. And he doesn't really know his way around the house.” He smiled. “I don't want to seem ungrateful—and he did remember my coat and my cell phone. Otherwise I wouldn't have been able to call you—that's the result of the fact that no one writes down telephone numbers these days. Fortunately, yours was stored in my contacts. So I hope you won't mind collecting a few things for me.”

Rosalie shook her head. “No problem at all,” she said. “I'm here in the car—just tell me what you need and where I'll find it. Then I'll bring it all over later. I imagine your departure in the ambulance was a little hasty.”

“It was indeed. I don't think I've ever left the house so quickly. I don't even have my pajamas or my dressing gown here—you can see what a stupid nightshirt they've stuck me in.”

He pulled a comic grimace as the door opened and a nurse with short blond hair and softly squelching shoes came in with a kidney dish in her hand.

“Time for your thrombosis jab, Monsieur Marchais,” she trumpeted. “Oh! We have a visitor, do we?” She looked busily at Rosalie as she filled the syringe. “She'll have to leave us for a moment. Your granddaughter?”

“No, my girlfriend,” riposted Max, winking at Rosalie as she stood up. “And, Sister Yvonne—could you put the flowers in water?”

Sister Yvonne was audibly gasping for breath as Rosalie left the room while suppressing a laugh.

*   *   *

IT WAS EARLY IN
the afternoon when she stood outside Max Marchais's villa and pressed the latch of the garden gate. The sun was shining warmly on the narrow gravel path that led between hydrangea bushes, lavender, and sweet-smelling heliotrope.

The rectangular white house with the red-tiled roof stood there peacefully, as if painted by a child, and as Rosalie unlocked the front door she was in no way prepared for what was awaiting her there.

 

Nineteen

There was always something eerie about coming into an empty house. It was as quiet as a museum, and only the click of Rosalie's summer sandals on the parquet floor disturbed the solitude as she walked carefully through the rooms and looked around a little. Although she had already visited Max several times, she really only knew the library with its big fireplace and two massive sofas, and the terrace with its reddish round tiles, which was directly outside the library and led to the garden. The traces of his hasty exit were still apparent all around her.

In the kitchen with its milky stone floor the used breakfast dishes were standing on a tray next to a white sink. The gardener must have brought them in before he closed and locked the big living-room window. Rosalie found the dishwasher and put in the dishes. In the library, the book that had caused the fall was still lying on the floor beside the tall wooden ladder. She picked it up and put it on the rectangular coffee table between the two sofas.

The afternoon sun shone brightly between the opened drapes. A squirrel was sitting on the terrace nibbling at something until, scared off by the movement behind the window, it ran across the lawn and scampered up a tree.

There was a single men's leather slipper on the floor next to one of the two wide, light-colored sofas that stood opposite each other between old-fashioned saffron-yellow floor lamps. Rosalie had already found the other one in the hall, almost tripping over it.

She walked past the book-lined wall and turned right where the library opened into a study. In front of the window, which also had a view of the garden, stood a desk with a dark-green leather surface. Next to the desk lamp was a framed picture of a smiling woman with friendly eyes. That must be Marchais's late wife. Rosalie looked around on the desk, quickly finding the little book Max had asked for. Raymond Radiguet,
Le diable au corps
. Then she opened the right-hand desk drawer where the cell phone charger was kept.

She glanced at the list they had just made in the hospital. Toiletry bag and aftershave—upstairs in the bathroom, on the right in the little closet. Before she left the study, she noticed an old, black Remington typewriter standing on a cabinet beside a five-armed silver candelabrum and a round silver tray with a water carafe and matching glasses. Above it, between two antiquated wine-red floor lamps, hung a large oil painting of a southern French landscape in shades of blue and ochre, just as Bonnard might have painted.

Rosalie leaned forward with interest, but she couldn't decipher the artist's signature. She took a step back and stood for a while, absorbed in the painting, which captured the bushes and the soft fall of the cliffs over a gleaming summer bay so well that you almost felt you could hear the chirp of the crickets.

When her cell phone rang, she started with fright as if she'd been a burglar.
“Oui? Allô?”
she asked as she pulled herself away from the picture.

It was Robert Sherman, calling her from a café. The manuscript had arrived, and he wanted to meet her and show it to her.

“Where are you, Mademoiselle Laurent? I've already been to the store, but it was closed. Due to a family emergency. Has something happened?” He sounded concerned.

“I'll say it has! I'm in Max Marchais's house at the moment. He's had an accident.”

She quickly told Sherman about the writer's unfortunate fall from the library ladder and ended with: “I'd actually intended to ask Max about the tiger story again, and about the dedication, but I'm afraid we'll have to postpone that until he's better. I wouldn't want to press him or possibly upset him. You do understand, don't you?”

“Yes … of course.” His voice sounded disappointed.

“It's only a couple of days, Robert. Then we'll know more. Listen, I have to pick up a few more things here, and I don't have much time. I'll call you later when I'm back in Paris. Then we can meet and you can show me your manuscript, okay?”

“Okay,” he said.

It was only when Rosalie was putting her phone back in her purse that it dawned on her that that was the first time she'd called him Robert.

*   *   *

HALF AN HOUR LATER
she had collected all the things that were on the list. Toiletry bag, Aramis aftershave (which she'd finally found on the bedside table in the bedroom), blue-and-white-striped pajamas, a thin dark-blue dressing gown with a little Paisley pattern, underwear, socks, a pair of light leather moccasins, slippers, some other clothes, and some books. The only thing she hadn't found was the dark-green cloth travel bag, which according to Max was somewhere right at the back of the wardrobe. She took another dive into the three-doored, polished, dark-wood wardrobe and rummaged around among shoe boxes and other cardboard boxes.

Finally she gave up and swept the room with her gaze. Where else could the bag be? She looked in the other drawers in the wardrobe, she looked under the wide bed, carelessly covered with a bright quilt with a rose pattern, she looked in the little storeroom next to the bathroom where the cleaning things were kept. Hopefully she wouldn't have to search the whole basement!

She looked at her watch and tried to call Max, but he'd switched his cell phone off. He was obviously trying to have his much postponed afternoon nap. With a sigh she went back into the bedroom. She thought about where she herself might put a bag, and looked instinctively up to the top of the wardrobe.