Véronique was brought aboard at Orly Airport after everyone else in the Caravelle had settled down. She was led by a pretty stewardess, who seemed bothered by her charge. “Do you mind having her beside you?” she asked. I at first did not see Véronique, who was behind the stewardess, held by the wrist. I placed her where she could look out, and the stewardess disappeared. This would be of more interest if Véronique were now revealed to be a baby ape or a tamed and lovable bear, but she was a child. The journey is a short one — fifty minutes. Some of the small girls in my school arrive alone from Teheran and Mexico City and are none the worse for the adventure. Mishaps occur when they think that pillows or blankets lent them were really presents, but any firm official can deal with that. The child is tossed from home to school, or from one acrobat parent to the other, and knows where it will land. I am frightened when I imagine the bright arc through space, the trusting flight without wings. Reflect on that slow drop from the cable car down the side of the mountain into the trees. The trees will not necessarily catch you like a net.
I fastened her seat belt, and she looked up at me to see what was going to happen next. She had been dressed for the trip in a blue-and-white cotton frock, white socks, and black shoes with a buttoned strap. Her hair was parted in the middle and contained countless shades of light brown, like a handful of autumn grass. There was a slight cast in one eye, but the gaze was steady. The buckle of the seat belt slid down and rested on one knee. She held on to a large bucket bag — held it tightly by its red handle. In the back of the seat before her, along with a map of the region over which we were to fly, were her return ticket and her luggage tags, and a letter that turned out to be a letter of instructions. She was to be met by a Mme. Bataille, who would accompany her to a colonie de vacances at Gsteig. I read the letter toward the end of the trip, when I realized that the air hostess had forgotten all about Véronique. I am against prying into children’s affairs — even “How do you like your school?” IS more inquisitive than one has a right to be. However, the important facts about Mme. Bataille and Gsteig were the only ones Véronique was unable to supply. She talked about herself and her family, in fits and starts, as if unaware of the limits of time — less than an hour, after all — and totally indifferent to the fact that she was unlikely ever to see me again. The place she had come from was “Orly,” her destination was called “the mountains,” and the person meeting her would be either “Béatrice” or “Catherine” or both. That came later; the first information she sweetly and generously offered was that she had twice been given injections in her right arm. I told her my name, profession, and the name of the village where I taught school. She said she was four but “not yet four and a half.” She had been visiting, in Versailles, her mother and a baby brother, whose name she affected not to know — an admirable piece of dignified lying. After a sojourn in the mountains she would be met at Orly Airport by her father and taken to the sea. When would that be? “Tomorrow.” On the promise of tomorrow, either he or the mother of the nameless brother had got her aboard the plane. The Ile-de-France receded and spread. She sucked her mint sweet, and accepted mine, wrapped, and was overjoyed when I said she might put it in her bag, as if a puzzle about the bag had now been solved. The stewardess snapped our trays into place and gave us identical meals of cold sausage, Russian salad in glue, savory pastry, canned pears, and tinned mineral water. Véronique gazed onto a plateau of food nearly at shoulder level, and picked up a knife and fork the size of gardening tools. “I can cut my meat,” she said, meaning to say she could not. The voice that had welcomed us in Paris and had implored Véronique and me to put out our cigarettes now emerged, preceded by crackling sounds, as if the air were full of invisible fissures: “If you look to your right, you will see the city of Dijon.” Véronique quite properly took no notice. “I am cold,” she stated, knowing that an announcement of one’s condition immediately brings on a change for the better. I opened the plastic bag and found a cardigan — hand-knit, light blue, with pearl buttons. I wondered when the change-over would come, when she would have to stop saying “I am cold” in order to grow up without being the kind of person who lets you know that there is a draft in the room, or the beach is too crowded, or the service in the restaurant has gone off. I have pupils who still cannot find their own cardigans, and my old aunt is something of a complainer, as her sister never was. Despite my disinheritance, I was carrying two relics — a compote spoon whose bowl was in the form of a strawberry leaf, and the confirmation photograph of my mother. They weighed heavily in my hand luggage. The weight of the picture was beyond description. I knew that they would be too heavy, yet I held out my hand greedily for more of the past; but my aunt’s ration stopped there.
The well-mannered French girl beside me would not drink the water I had poured into her glass until advised she could. She held the glass in both hands and got it back in its slot without help. Specks of parsley now floated on the water. I said she might leave the remains of the cold sausage, which she was chewing courageously. Giddy with indiscipline, she had some of the salad and all of the pear, and asked, indicating the savory pastry, “Is that something to eat?”
“You can, but it’s boring.” She had never heard food referred to in that way, and hesitated. As I had left mine, she did not know what the correct attitude ought to be, and after one bite put her spoon down. I think she liked it but, not having understood “boring,” was anxious to do the right thing. With her delicate fingers she touched the miniature salt and pepper containers and the doll’s tube of mustard, asking what they were for. I remembered that some of the small girls in the school saved them as tokens of travel, and I said, “They are for children to keep.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know. Some children keep them.”
I wondered if this was a mistake, and if she would begin taking things that did not belong to her. She curled her hand around the little mustard tube and said she would keep it for Maman. Now that she was wearing the cardigan, her purse was empty save for a mint sweet. I told her that a bag was to put things in, and she said she knew, looking comically worldly. I gave her a centime, a handkerchief, a postcard — searching my own purse to see what could be spared. The stewardess let us descend the ramp from the plane as if she had never seen Véronique before, and no one claimed her. I had great difficulty finding anyone at the terminal who knew anything about Mme. Bataille. When I caught sight of Véronique, later, hurrying desperately after a uniformed woman who did not slow her pace for a second, I feared that was Mme. Bataille; but fifteen minutes after that I saw Véronique in the bus that was to take us to the railway station. She was next to a mild, thin, harassed-looking person, who seemed exhausted at the thought of the journey to come.
Now, mark the change in Véronique: She shook out her hair and made it untidy, and stood on the seat and jumped up and down.
“You are a very lucky little girl, going to the mountains and the sea,” said Mme. Bataille, in something of a whine. Véronique took no more notice of this than she had of Dijon, except to remark that she was going to the seashore tomorrow.
“Not tomorrow. You’ve only just arrived.”
“Tomorrow!” The voice rose and trembled dangerously. “Papa is meeting me at Orly.”
“Yes,” said the stupid woman soothingly, “but not tomorrow. In August. This is June.”