Paul gave a discouraged lift of his shoulders. Ann was appealing to their old superstitions, a tactic that disarmed him since he was so little prepared to resist it: “You’ll bring me luck if you come…”
At the Dalles, he stopped in the doorway of the front room, looking for Ann. He came in out of the rain wearing his trenchcoat, with his hat in his hand, and shrank from entering: the sound of voices, laughter, exclamations, a rustling of dresses and furs, held him there on the threshold, a little intimidated, a little confused, wondering if it wasn’t already time for him to leave.
Ann, spotting him from the back of the room, waved her hand, signalling to him to wait. She came towards him, making her way with difficulty between the groups of people who blocked her path. She didn’t say sorry to the people she bumped into, and looked steadily in Paul’s direction, with a sparkling intensity in her eyes, as if she wished to cry out to him.
“Why are your hands wet? Did you get caught in the rain? You came here on foot? That’s why you’re late, is it? I didn’t think you’d come. I kept looking at the door. Paul, I was so afraid you wouldn’t come! Could it be, I said, could it be that he won’t come?”
He regarded her without replying: a hard look that asked no questions. She’s here, she’s beside me, he repeated in his mind, surprised that he wasn’t shivering. He would have liked to absorb the news of her return from far away into all his horrible memories, which, although Ann was there beside him, remained alive, like that lost outpost which, although the war has ended, continues to be alert, watchful, because it hasn’t yet received news of the truce.
Ann took him by the arm, leading him into the vestibule.
“Let’s get out of here, Paul. There are too many people. We’ll go far away in the rain. What do you say?”
“You know very well that we can’t, Ann. You’ve got to stay here. It’s your opening.”
“Oh! My opening!” she said, with a casual gesture. “What do you expect me to do here? I want to be with you, with you alone, do you understand?”
She ran out into the rain, bareheaded, as far as the edge of the sidewalk, where she stopped in front of a small blue car with a low-slung body, which she opened with a familiar, irate gesture, struggling to get the keys into the lock in the rain. She shouted to Paul from behind the wheel. He had remained on the stone steps of the entrance, his gaze following her in perplexity.
“Aren’t you coming?”
Inside, through the broad windows of the front rooms of the Dalles, a few observers were watching the scene, intrigued. It’s all too hurtful, Paul thought, imagining what people would say after they left. Within an instant he was at Ann’s side, closing the door behind him.
“What’s with this car?”
“It’s mine. An old heap.”
“Where did you get it?”
Ann turned her head towards him, without losing control of the wheel. She headed in the direction of Piaţa Romana along the boulevard, which was nearly deserted on that grim November Sunday morning.
“Is that your only question? It’s the first one you’ve asked me, Paul.”
“And the last. I have nothing to ask you.”
Ann braked abruptly. The machine came to a rough stop, skating over the damp paving stones. The right mudguard slammed into the edge of the sidewalk. Ann, crestfallen, lifted her hands from the steering wheel. She stared straight ahead through the windshield, where the raindrops were sliding into hurried little streams. For a few minutes nothing was audible between them but the rhythmic sound of the windshield wiper on the glass. At last Ann lifted her eyes towards Paul, with the return of that decisive expression she assumed in serious moments.
“Maybe I made a mistake in phoning you, Paul. Maybe everything’s really finished between us. But since you came, since you’re here, I’d like to ask you to stay and to be quiet. I want to know you’re next to me. Tomorrow, if you want, an hour from now, if you want, we can go our separate ways. But for the moment, be quiet…”
She set off again. A cold, damp wind came shivering in through the open window on the driver’s side, hurling sparse raindrops into Ann’s face; she let them trickle down her cheeks and forehead without wiping them away, without seeming to feel them. Her hands clenched the steering wheel with the exaggerated tension of a long drive. The needles of the gauges on the dashboard oscillated with restless nervousness. The speedometer slid across the dial at between 80 and 90 kilometres an hour. On the right and the left, the bare linden trees that lined the road cast out a smokey mist. Farther along, beyond Băneasa Airport, there was an odour of dishevelled fields, of sodden grass, of earth tilled right down to the roots. The rain was falling more softly here, less rushed, calmer and more patient than in the city. The noise of the engine didn’t completely block out its thin rustling sound, like the approaching voice of the forest.
They left the sleeping airport, with its shuttered hangars, the radio station, the Otopeni forest, the road to Snagov, far behind them. The gleaming road unfolded before them through the open countryside. Whitish haze floated low over the black earth like fallen cloud making a futile attempt to raise itself… On the horizon, the greyness of the November day descended into a smokey, opaque whiteness.
Paul turned his head towards Ann. He had forgotten that she was next to him. This whole drive through the rain had the savour of awaking from a troubled sleep.
Ann bit her lower lip with a strained gesture that Paul didn’t recognize. It’s a recent gesture, he thought, a driving gesture. Her cheek betrayed no tremor: her eyes, slightly dilated with attentiveness, her forehead, tilted forward, lent a feeling of intensity and yet also of absence to her pale face. Only now had he noticed that she didn’t have her overcoat; she was bareheaded, with an open collar, exactly as she had left the exhibition, in a tailored brown suit (Since when does she wear brown?) with a gauzy scarf, wet from the rain, fluttering over her shoulders.
“I’d say it’s time for us to go back, Ann.”
She reduced their speed, uncertain at first, and then she stopped. She laid her forehead against the steering wheel and stayed that way, with her arms drooping, her hair ruffled by the cold wind, which continued to blow with ebbing force now that the car was parked. Paul straightened her up with difficulty, taking her head in his hands to draw her towards him: Ann’s half-closed eyes had a dull look, her lips were blue, her hands cold.
“What’s the matter with you? Are you cold? Are you feeling bad?”
“No,” she whispered. “I’d like to cry.”
“That’s good — cry,” he encouraged her, and he pulled her closer, sheltering her against his chest and covering her with his right arm as though he were wrapping a shawl around her shoulders. “Cry if you want. Go ahead — cry.”
In the small white car, parked alone on the road in the open countryside, Ann shook with childish, hiccuping tears.
In fact, nothing had changed, and Ann’s return was not a return. A caprice, a moment’s folly, maybe even more trivial than that… “She fled on the morning of her opening, like the bride on the wedding night,” the painters would joke among themselves. The truth was that she had left behind her a room full of guests and that her sudden departure gave rise to endless fascinated comments. Two days later, in a society column, it was said that Ann’s absence from her own opening was a delightful whim of the sort that an artist confident of the public’s affection can allow herself, with the result, the columnist added maliciously, that the majority of the works exhibited sold on the spot.