The car is driven in total silence; it could well be stationary, just a hint of vibration betraying its motion. They travel for a long time, and the young woman who is hungry and thirsty and badly needs to pee, is now in a bad mood. They stop for a red light and she tries to get out but the doors are locked from the outside. She raps her knuckles on the glass separating her from the driver. The man’s neck doesn’t budge.
The Rolls-Royce leaves Saint Raphael and takes a small, winding road that rises above sea level and leads deep into the hinterlands. A long time. Hunger. Thirst…
At last, the car slows down as it runs parallel to a high wall that leads them to an intricate metal gate headed by a mess of white metal arrows. The door opens by itself, no doubt electrically controlled, unless there is an invisible caretaker in attendance…
Screeching across a gravel path, the car drives up to a small castle, one of the many Modern Style monstrosities that the Côte d’Azur has given birth to over the past century, and comes to a halt in front of its steps. The stylish chauffeur gets out and ceremoniously opens the door.
In a rush, the sound of the early cicadas of spring invades the Rolls Royce.
She alights, intrigued, worried, still angry. A man stands there, on the second step and, astonished, she recognizes the grey-haired stranger from the train. How in hell could he have reached this place before her?
“Please accept our apologies,” he says. “You must be quite tired?”
He ceremoniously takes her hand. He is now wearing a smoky-grey lounge suit, the same colour as his eyes.
“Come,” he says. “We’ve prepared some food for you.”
She agrees to enter the castle, although she also knows this might prove a mistake, that maybe she shouldn’t, now that the falling sun has retreated with all its elementary seduction, and the menace of night is ready to take over.
Once inside, she looks back, intuition or ultimate temptation. The moon is full, and shines over a freshly mowed lawn at the heart of which stands a white marble statue, maybe of Venus, or even Diana the Huntress without her slings and arrows, the languorous shape of the Goddess bathing in the moonlight.
The young woman turns back and, with quiet determination, enters the house.
“If you wish to freshen up,” the man says, pointing to a door.
“Yes, I’d like to spray my war paint on again,” she jokes, repressing the anxiety quickly rising inside her throat.
As she washes her hands, she gazes at the reassuring image in the mirror: she is still pretty, still looks fresh despite all those hours on the train; some would even say the darker shade below her eyes was an added bonus.
“What a face,” she says though, almost out of habit.
A snack? On a small table at the centre of the Art Deco salon with its delicate furniture, she can see all the things she likes: patisseries, fruit, finger-sized delicacies, lemonade – she is still at an age where you are allowed to enjoy sweet, sugary things. In the meantime, the stranger is busy starting a fire inside the big chimney breast, kneeling in front of the initial orange flames longer than he would normally do, exposing his slim neck to her gaze, no doubt aware she is full of questions and that he is in no hurry to supply answers.
He finally rises from his prone position, while she finishes biting into a thin slice of exquisite tarte.
“I will take you to your room,” he says. “You’ll find something you can wear for dinner. Take your time. If you want to take a bath, just tell Nora, and she will arrange it.”
With his hand, he points to a corner of the room where a young mulatto woman in a domestic’s uniform is standing, straight and silent. She has pale grey eyes, shining in the light of the nearby flames like the eyes of a cat.
She hadn’t even heard her enter the room.
“We dine at eleven,” he adds.
They walk up a wide pink marbled set of stairs, a bit too ostentatious for her liking. Then, after passing through a red vestibule, down a long corridor punctuated by doors numbered One to Nine. At the other end, there is another set of stairs probably leading up. They stop at number Seven. The maid opens, and moves back to let her go in.
The room is spacious, with tasteful furniture. Not one piece of furniture is contemporary, but every single one, from the straight geometry of the dresser, to the make up table with its crystalline mirror and the bed shrouded with delicate millinery, appears to be brand-new, although they visibly were created in the 1920s.
On the wall, a Millet-styled print: three farm labourers resting in a field, enjoying a drink, while a woman awaits them, sitting against a haystack; it’s unclear what she might be waiting for as, unlike any character in a picture by the Barbizon artist, she is fully naked and when you take a closer look, her hands though held against her knees are tied together with a thin piece of string.
This sets her thinking again of the four men who were playing cards on the train, the same sense of discontinuity between the image you would expect and the more disturbing one…
“Do you wish to take a bath?” the maid asks.
There is no trace of the Caribbean in her voice.
“Yes, please…”
The bathroom that connects to the room is huge, all green marble, all three walls covered by mirrors, as is, curiously enough, the ceiling. Exotic plants, suspended from shelves and metal stands, spread a delicate perfume of wet earth and heavy flowers throughout the the room. The bath tub, carved out of a single piece of dark marble, and held up by sphynx-like feet, is positively enormous.
The girl runs the water, pouring in perfumed oil that rises in bubbles, the strong fragrance of which blends easily with that of the green plants across the room. The perfume rising through the steam now obscuring the mirrors transports her back to that sense of dizziness she had experienced on the train, like feeling slightly drunk on an empty stomach.
The maid comes towards her, unbuttons her shirt, unhooks her bra and then the skirt. She does not remark on the fact she is wearing no knickers. The young woman allows her to do so, suddenly assaulted by tiredness, or at any rate using the tiredness as an excuse to surrender to whatever is about to happen to her.
In the water, it feels to her as if she is swimming in the immensity of the tub. Above her, she sees the shrouded reflection of a young blonde woman in the misted-up mirror, her skin ever so pale, like a white mummy floating inside a green, marble coffin, the blue grey of her eyes lost in the distance. But the steam rises and finally wipes out this lazy landscape of curves.
The maid allows her for a long period to soak in all the fragrances that the heat is now breaking up. Finally, she comes back and hands her a Japanese robe, pale green, embroidered with birds of paradise.
“Do you want me to give you a massage?” she asks. “The bath will wash the journey away, and the massage will wash the bath away. After, I shall apply your make-up. The Commander has given me very precise instructions.”
She lets herself go, agile fingers skimming across her skin with exquisite softness, slowly untwisting her nerves, polishing her muscles, effectively providing her with strength again after her energy has been sapped by the bath. The maid has her lie down over a folding table once she has slipped out of the robe. First, on her stomach, she is massaged from her neck down to her heels unavoidably feeling something stirring inside her when the long, brown fingers knead her arse and thighs. But she’d rather believe it’s just a feeling of comfort. She almost falls asleep anyway, listening to the gurgling sounds of the emptying bath.
She is then turned round. Above her, the mirror is clearing up.
The young Creole girl is working her shoulders, the birth of her neck, grazing her breasts whose tips are hardening, not that she notices as her hands lower themselves towards her midriff, before moving back to polish her nipples from time to time. Her brown hands make the extreme winter pallor of her blonde skin appear almost indecent.