The Little Paris Bookshop (25 page)

Jean Perdu didn’t wish to leave a woman guessing about his feelings again – even if he himself could only guess at what his feelings were. He was still in the in-between zone, and any new beginning lay shrouded in mist. He couldn’t say where he would be at the same time the next year. All he knew was that he must continue along this path until he found its destination. So he’d written to Catherine, as he had begun to do while on the waterways and since he had been in Sanary – every three days in fact.

Samy had counselled him: ‘Try your phone for once. Amazing little device, I’m telling you.’

So one evening he picked up the mobile and dialled a number in Paris. Catherine needed to know who he was: a man caught between darkness and light. You become someone else when your loved ones die.

‘Number 27. Hello? Who’s there? Say something!’

‘Madame Rosalette … Had your hair dyed recently?’ he asked hesitantly.

‘Oh! Monsieur Perdu, how …’

‘Do you know Madame Catherine’s number?’

‘Of course I do. I know every number in the building, every single one. Now, Madame Gulliver upstairs …’

‘Could you give me it?’

‘Madame Gulliver’s? What on earth for?’

‘No,
chère Madame
. Catherine’s.’

‘Oh. Yes. You write to her a lot, don’t you? I know because Madame carries the letters around with her. They fell out of her bag once. I couldn’t help seeing. It was the day Monsieur Goldenberg …’

He chose not to press her to give him the number, and instead allowed Madame Rosalette’s gossip to wash over him. Gossip about Madame Gulliver, whose new coral-red mules made an awful showy clatter on the stairs. About Kofi, who had decided to study political science. About Madame Bomme, who’d had a successful eye operation and no longer needed a magnifying glass for reading. And Madame Violette’s balcony concert: wonderful! Someone had shot a – what’s it called? – a video and put it on that internet thing, and other people had clacked on it a lot or something, and now Madame Violette was famous.

‘Clicked?’

‘That’s what I said.’

And, oh yes, Madame Bernard had converted the attic and wanted to let some artist move in. And his fiancé. His fiancé! How about a sea horse while he was at it?

Perdu held the mobile away from his ear so that she wouldn’t hear his laughter. As Madame Rosalette nattered on and on, Jean could think of only one thing: Catherine kept his letters and carried them around with her. Fa-bu-lous, as the concierge would say.

After what felt like hours she finally dictated Catherine’s number to him.

‘We all miss you, Monsieur,’ Madame Rosalette said. ‘I hope you’re no longer so terribly sad?’

He clenched his fist around the phone.

‘Not any more. Thank you,’ he said.

‘Don’t mention it,’ Madame Rosalette said quietly before she hung up.

He tapped in Catherine’s number and, closing his eyes, raised the mobile phone to his ear. It rang once, twice …

‘Hello?’

‘Um … it’s me.’

It’s me? Crumbs, how was she supposed to know who ‘it’s me’ was, for goodness’ sake?
 

‘Jean?’

‘Yes.’

‘Oh my God.’

He heard Catherine gasp and put the phone down. She blew her nose and came back on the line.

‘I didn’t expect you to ring.’

‘Should I hang up?’

‘Don’t you dare!’

He smiled. From her silence he figured that she must be smiling too.

‘How …’

‘What …’

They’d spoken at the same time. They laughed.

‘What are you reading at the moment?’ he asked softly.

‘The books you gave me. For the fifth time, I think. I haven’t washed the dress I wore on our evening together either. There’s still a hint of your aftershave on it, you know, and each sentence in the books tells me something new every time, and I put the dress under my cheek at night so I can smell you.’

Then she said nothing; nor did he, surprised by the happiness that suddenly came over him.

They listened wordlessly to each other, and he felt very close to Catherine, as though Paris were directly next to his ear. All he would have to do was open his eyes and he would be sitting by her green front door, listening for her breath.

‘Jean?’

‘Yes, Catherine.’

‘It’s getting better, isn’t it?’

‘Yes. It’s getting better.’

‘And yes, being lovesick is like being in mourning. Because you die, because your future dies and you with it … There is a hurting time. It lasts for so long.’

‘But it gets better. I know that now.’

Her silence felt good.

‘I can’t stop thinking that we didn’t kiss each other on the mouth,’ she whispered hastily.

Distraught, he said nothing.

‘Talk to you tomorrow,’ she said and hung up.

That must mean he could ring her again?

He sat there in the dark kitchen, a crooked smile on his lips.

By the end of August he saw that his body had become toned. He had to tighten his belt a couple of notches, and his shirt stretched tight over his biceps.

He studied himself in the mirror as he dressed and saw in the reflection a very different man from the one he had been in Paris. Tanned, fit, erect, his dark, silver-streaked hair longer and swept casually back. The pirate beard; the loosely buttoned, washed-out linen shirt. He was fifty.

Nearly fifty-one.
 

Jean stepped up to the mirror. There were more lines on his face from exposure to the sun; more laugh lines too. He guessed that some of the freckles weren’t freckles but age spots. But it didn’t matter – he was alive. That was all that counted.

The sun had turned his body a healthy, shimmering shade of brown, which made his green eyes all the more luminous. His boss MM thought he looked like a noble rogue with his three-day beard. Only his reading glasses detracted from this impression.

 

 

MM had taken him aside one Saturday evening. Business was quiet. A fresh wave of holiday home renters had just arrived, and they were dazzled by late summer’s sweet delights; they had other things on their mind than to visit a bookshop. They would come in a week or two to buy the obligatory postcards before they left for home.

‘How about you?’ MM asked. ‘What does your favourite book taste of? Which book is your salvation in this evil world?’ She said it with a chuckle: her girlfriends found the book epicure fascinating and wanted to know more.

He never had any trouble getting to sleep in Sanary. His favourite book would have to taste of new potatoes sprinkled with rosemary – his first meal with Catherine.

But which is my salvation?
He almost burst out laughing when he realised the answer.

‘Books can do many things, but not everything. We have to live the important things, not read them. I have to … experience my book.’

MM gave him a broad, flashing smile.

‘It’s a shame that your heart is blind to women like me.’

‘And the others too, Madame.’

‘Yes, that’s some consolation,’ she said. ‘A small one.’

 

 

In the afternoons, when the heat rose to dangerous levels, Perdu would lie motionless on his bed in nothing but a pair of shorts, with wet towels on his forehead, chest and feet. The terrace door was open, and the curtains swayed listlessly in the breeze. He let the warm wind caress his body as he dozed.

It was good to be back in his body. To feel that his flesh was sensitive and alive again. Not numb, limp, unused – an adversary. Perdu had got used to thinking with his body, as though he could stroll around inside his soul and peer into every room.

Yes, the grief lived on in his chest. When it came, it constricted his lungs, cut off his breathing and the universe faded to a narrow sliver. But he wasn’t scared of it any more. When it came, he let it flow through him.

Fear occupied his throat too, but it took up less space if he breathed out slowly and calmly. With every breath he could make the fear smaller and crumple it up, and he imagined throwing it to Psst so that the cat could toy with the ball of anxiety and chase it out of the house.

Joy danced in his solar plexus, and he let it dance. He thought of Samy and Cuneo, and of Max’s hilarious letters, in which one name cropped up more and more frequently: Vic. The tractor girl. In his mind he saw Max running around the Luberon after a wine-red tractor, and he couldn’t help laughing.

Amazingly, love had settled on Jean’s tongue. It tasted of the hollow at the base of Catherine’s throat.

Jean had to smile. Here, in the light and warmth of the south, something else had returned. Vitality. Sensation. Desire.

Some days, as he sat looking out to sea or reading on a wall beside the harbour, the mere warmth of the sun was enough to fill him with a pleasant, urgent, restless tension. Down there too, his body was shaking off its sorrow.

He hadn’t slept with a woman for two decades. Now he felt an intense yearning to do so.

 

 

Jean let his thoughts wander to Catherine. He could still feel her under his hands – the familiar sensation of touching her hair, her skin, her muscles. He pictured what her thighs would feel like. Her breasts. How she would look at him, gasping. How their skin and their selves would meet, press belly against belly, joy to joy. He imagined every detail.

‘I’m back,’ he whispered.

 

 

He went about his life, eating and swimming and selling books and spinning laundry in his new washing machine. Then, all of a sudden, something inside him took a step forward.

Unexpectedly. At the end of the holidays, on 28 August.

He was eating his lunchtime salad and wondering whether he should light a candle for Manon at the Notre-Dame-de-la-Pitié chapel, or swim out from Portissol as usual. But suddenly he noticed that his inner turmoil had ceased. So had the burning sensation, and everything else that brought tears of dismay and loss to his eyes.

He stood up and went out anxiously onto the terrace. Was it possible? Was it really possible? Or was grief playing tricks on him and readying itself to rush in through the front door again?

He had reached the bottom of his soul’s sour, sad tribulations. He had dug and dug and dug. And suddenly – there was a chink of light.

He rushed inside to the sideboard, where he always kept a pen and paper. He scribbled: