She seemed embarrassed. I didn’t venture to ask what it was exactly that constituted my strangeness in the eyes of this Solière.
‘I came to see you two or three times at the clinic. Unfortunately, it was always when you were asleep.’
I hadn’t been told about these visits. Suddenly, a doubt crossed my mind.
‘Did I stay long at the clinic?’
‘About ten days. It was Mr Solière’s idea to have you taken there. They wouldn’t have been able to keep you at the Hôtel-Dieu in the state you were in.’
‘That bad?’
‘They thought you had taken toxic substances.’
She said these last words very carefully. I don’t believe I had ever heard anyone speak to me so calmly, with such a soft voice. Listening to her produced the same soothing effect as reading The Wonders of the Heavens. I couldn’t take my eyes off the large graze across her forehead, just above her eyebrows. Her clear eyes, her shoulder-length chestnut hair, the upturned collar of her coat…Because of the late hour and the darkness around us, she looked just as she had in the police van the other night.
She ran her index finger along the graze above her eyebrows and, again, she gave her wry smile.
‘For a first meeting,’ she said, ‘it was a bit of a shock.’
She stared straight into my eyes in silence, as if she was trying to read my thoughts — I had never before experienced such attentiveness.
‘I thought you purposely chose that moment to cross Place des Pyramides…’
That’s not what I thought. I had always resisted the pull of vertigo. I would never have been capable of throwing myself into the void from the top of a bridge or from a window. Or even under a car, as she seemed to believe. For me, at the last moment, life was always the stronger force.
‘I don’t think you were quite yourself…’
She glanced again at my sheepskin jacket and the split moccasin on my left foot. I had tried my best to reapply the bandage, but I mustn’t have looked very prepossessing. I apologised for my appearance. Yes, I was quite keen to look human again.
She said in a quiet voice, ‘All you have to do is change your sheepskin jacket. And perhaps your shoes, too.’
I felt more and more at ease. I confessed that I had spent the last few weeks trying to find her. It wasn’t easy with a street name but no number. So I had looked all over the neighbourhood for her sea-green Fiat.
‘Sea-green?’
She seemed intrigued by this adjective, but that was how it had been described on the report that Solière made me sign. A report? She wasn’t aware of any report. It was still in the inside pocket of my sheepskin jacket, so I showed it to her. She read it, frowning.
‘I’m not surprised. He’s always been wary.’
‘He also gave me some money.’
‘He’s a generous man,’ she said.
I wanted to know what the link was between her and Solière. ‘Do you live on Square de l’Alboni?’
‘No. It’s the address of one of Monsieur Solière’s offices.’
Whenever she said his name, it was inflected with a certain respect.
‘And Avenue Albert-de-Mun?’ To my great shame, I sounded like a cop who throws in an unexpected question to unnerve a suspect.
‘It’s one of Monsieur Solière’s apartments.’ She wasn’t fazed in the slightest. ‘How do you know about this address?’ she asked.
I told her that I had met Solière the other day in a café and that he had pretended not to recognise me.
‘He’s very distrustful, you know. He always thinks people are after him. He has a lot of lawyers.’
‘He’s your boss?’
I immediately regretted asking the question.
‘I’ve worked for him for two years.’ She answered calmly, as if it were an entirely ordinary question. And it was, surely. Why search for mystery where there is none?
‘That night, I was meeting Monsieur Solière at Place des Pyramides in the lobby of the Hôtel Régina. And then, just as I arrived, we had our…accident.’ She hesitated before saying the word. She looked at my left hand. When the car knocked me down, I grazed the back of it. But it was almost healed. I hadn’t put a dressing on it.
‘Then if I’ve understood correctly, Monsieur Solière arrived at the right moment?’
He had walked towards us slowly that night, in his dark coat. I even wonder if he had a cigarette at the corner of his mouth. And this girl had a meeting with him in the lobby of the hotel…I also had meetings with my father in hotel lobbies, which all looked the same and where the marble, the chandeliers, the wood engravings and the sofas were all fake. It’s the same precarious situation as being in a railway station waiting room between catching two trains, or in a police station before an interrogation.
‘It seems he’s no choirboy,’ I said.
‘Who?’
‘Solière.’
For the first time, she seemed embarrassed.
‘What does he do for a living?’
‘Business.’
She lowered her head as if I might be shocked by this response.
‘And you’re his secretary?’
‘Sort of, I suppose…But only part-time.’
There under the light of the wall lamp, she seemed younger than in the police van. It must have been the fur coat that made her seem older the other night. And besides, after the shock, I didn’t have my wits about me. That night, I thought she was blonde.
‘And the work isn’t too complicated?’
I really wanted to know everything. Time was running out. At that hour, they were perhaps about to close the restaurant.
‘When I came to Paris, I studied nursing,’ she said, and started speaking more and more quickly as if she was in a hurry to explain it all to me. ‘And then I started work… home nursing…I met Monsieur Solière…’
I wasn’t listening anymore. I asked her how old she was. Twenty-six. So she was a few years older than me. But it was unlikely that she was the woman from Fossombronne-la-Forêt. I tried to remember the face of the woman or girl who had climbed into the van and held my hand.
‘During my childhood, I had an accident that was similar to the one the other night. I was leaving school…’
As I told her the story, I spoke more and more quickly, too, the words tumbling out. We were like two people allowed a few minutes together in the visiting room of a prison and who wouldn’t have enough time to tell each other everything.
‘I thought the girl in the van was you.’
She burst out laughing.
‘But that’s impossible. I was twelve years old then.’
An entire episode of my life, the face of someone who must have loved me, a house, all of it tipped into oblivion, into the unknown, forever.
‘A place called Fossombronne-la-Forêt…A Dr Divoire.’ I thought I had said it under my breath, to myself.
‘I know that name,’ she said. ‘It’s in Sologne. I was born around there.’
I took the Michelin map of the Loir-et-Cher from the pocket of my sheepskin jacket, where I had kept it for several days. I unfolded it on the tablecloth. She seemed apprehensive.
‘Where were you born?’ I asked.
‘La Versanne.’
I leaned over the map. The light from the wall lamp wasn’t strong enough for me to make out all the names of the villages in such tiny print.
She craned her neck to look, too. Our foreheads were almost touching.
‘Try to find Blois,’ she said. ‘Slightly to the right you have Chambord. Below there’s the Boulogne forest. And Bracieux…and, to the right, La Versanne.’
It was easy to find my bearings with the forest marked in green. There it was. I’d found La Versanne.
‘Do you think it’s far from Fossombronne?’
‘About twenty kilometres.’
The first time I’d discovered it on the map, I should have underlined the name Fossombronne-la-Forêt in red ink. Now I’d lost it.