‘I have nothing to do this afternoon.’
He spoke, this time, in French. He smiled. Like her, he said, he had hours on his hands. He had driven her to St Cerase specially, she realized then. On all previous Wednesday afternoons it had been convenient to give her a lift and, now, when it was not, he felt some kind of obligation had been established.
‘I could have caught the bus at the gates,’ she said.
He smiled again. ‘That would have been a pity, Charlotte.’
This was the first intimation of his feelings for her. She didn’t know how to reply. She felt confused, and knew that she had flushed.
‘Let me drive you some place, Charlotte. There’s nothing to do here.’
She shook her head. She had a few things to buy, she said, after which she would return to Massuery as usual, on the bus. She would be all right.
‘What will you do, Charlotte? Look at the front of the church again? The museum isn’t much. It doesn’t take long to drink a cup of coffee.’
The French her father wished her to perfect was far from perfect yet. Haltingly, she replied that she enjoyed her Wednesday afternoons. But even as she spoke she knew that what she’d come to enjoy most about them was the drive with Monsieur Langevin. Before, she hadn’t dared to allow that thought to form. Now, she could not prevent it.
‘I’ll wait,’ Monsieur Langevin said, ‘while you do your shopping.’
When she returned to the car he drove to a country hotel, almost fifty kilometres away. It was ivy-covered, by a river, with doves in the garden and a stream near by. They sat at a table beneath a beech tree, but nobody came hurrying out to ask them what they’d like. The garden was deserted; the hotel seemed so too. Everyone was sleeping, Monsieur Langevin said.
‘Are you happy at Massuery, Charlotte?’
She was three feet away from him, yet she could feel a fondness that made her faintly dizzy. Her flesh tingled, as though the tips of his fingers had touched her forearm and were sending reverberations through her body. Yet they hadn’t. She tried to think of his children, endeavouring to imagine Colette and the twins at their most tiresome. She tried to think of Madame Langevin, to hear her soft, considerate voice. But nothing happened. All there was was the presence of the man she was with, his white car drawn up in the distance, the small round table at which they sat. A deception was taking place. Already they were sharing a deception.
‘Yes, I am happy at Massuery now.’
‘You were not at first?’
‘I was a little lonely.’
Charlotte walks swiftly through the grey December streets with her port-folio. There was another print, a long time ago, of that round white table, and two faceless figures sitting at it. There was one of three women blurred by heavy rain, waiting among the dripping shrubs. There was one of Massuery caught in dappled sunlight, another of children playing, another of a white Citroen with nobody in it.
They like you, Charlotte. Guy most of all perhaps.’
‘I like them now too.’
They returned to the car when they had talked a while. Only, perhaps, an hour had passed: afterwards she calculated it was about an hour. No one had served them.
‘Everyone is still asleep,’ he said.
How had it happened that he put his arms around her? Had they stopped in their walk across the grass? Afterwards she realized they must have. But in her memory of the moment she was only aware that she had murmured protests, that the palms of both her hands had pressed against his chest. He hadn’t kissed her, but the passion of the kiss was there. Afterwards she knew that too.
‘Dear Charlotte,’ he said, and then: ‘Forgive me.’
She might have fainted and, as though he sensed it, he took her arm, his fingers lightly supporting her elbow, as a stranger on the street might have. He told her, as he drove, about his childhood at Massuery. The old gardener had been there, and nothing much had changed in the house. A forest of birches that had been sold for timber after the war had been replanted. In the fields where sunflowers were grown for their oil now there had been wheat before. He remembered carts and even oxen.
The white Citroen turned in at the gates and glided between the plane trees on the drive, its tyres disturbing the gravel. There’d been an oak close to the house, but its branches had spread too wide and it had been felled. He pointed at the place. They walked up the steps together, and into the hall.
That evening at dinner Madame Langevin’s sister tried out a new phrase. ‘My friend and I desire to attend a theatre,’ she repeated several times, seeking guidance as to emphasis and pronunciation. No one remarked upon the fact that Charlotte had returned in the car with Monsieur Langevin, when always previously on Wednesdays she had arrived back on the bus. No one had noticed; no one was interested. It had been just a moment, she told herself, just the slightest thing. She hadn’t been able to reply when he asked her to forgive him. He hadn’t even taken her hand.
When Sunday came, Monsieur Langevin’s mother brought the bearded Monsieur Oge who talked about his health, and the widow of the general was there also. The deceived husband was in particularly good spirits that day. ‘Mow
When Wednesday came Madame Langevin asked Charlotte if she’d mind taking the bus to St Cerase today because her husband was not going in that direction. And the following Wednesday, as though a precedent had been set by that, it seemed to be assumed that she would take the bus also. Had Madame Langevin somehow discovered? Her manner did not suggest it, but Charlotte remembered her philosophical tone when she’d first spoken of her sister’s relationship with the pharmacist’s assistant, her matter-of-fact acceptance of what clearly she considered to be an absurdity.
Sitting at the cafe where her solitary presence had become a Wednesday-afternoon feature, Charlotte tried to feel relieved that she’d been saved a decision. But would she really have said no if he’d offered, again, to drive her
