Jeanne knew he was watching her, but she assumed the distracted air of a woman who had been too busy all day to attend to herself and was now attempting to settle into a mood of relaxation.
For a moment, she touched things: the table, her purse; she touched her sleeve, touched the glass of red wine that he had poured for her.
But she knew he watched her gestures and that pleased her. So she was smiling at him when she finally looked up.
Manning merely stared in return. Her eyes, he thought; they were really wonderful. He had tried to recall them exactly at night, alone, sleeping in the darkness of his hotel room. Her eyes were light blue and yet deep and yet not always blue at all; sometimes there were elements of green in them, and they seemed to change colors in the changing light of day and evening like colors in a clear pool or colors in a storm at sea. Her pale face was wide, calm, even peaceful, even at moments when she was hurried or distracted; her eyes arbitrated her moods as though her soul, hidden by the gentle reserve of her face, flashed to life only in her eyes.
She suddenly reached across the table and let her red-tipped nails touch his hand. He opened his hand and received hers.
“William. This is so nice, I’m glad you thought of it. You came early to take the table by the walk.”
Now he smiled in return. “Yes. Do you remember when we were first here?”
For a moment, her eyes seemed sad, as though all memories were tinged with bitterness. But it was only a moment. “We had a glass of wine, wasn’t it? We really couldn’t afford to eat here, but the owner understood; he thought we were in love.”
“Even radicals like us,” Manning said.
“Oh, not you, William.” She removed her hand from his and picked up the glass of red wine and tasted it. “You were never a radical; you only loved me, and you put up with my friends and my little speeches to you.”
Manning shook his head. “Everyone is a radical when they’re young.”
“Are we so old?”
“Not you, Jeanne. Not you, ever.”
“Are you so old, William, then?”
He saw her smile, but the question bothered him; he wanted to turn it away. “No. Not now. Every moment I see you, I am young.”
“But when you go away, are you old then?”
Manning didn’t understand her. Silence lay between them for a moment. Then she put down her glass and touched his hand again across the white tablecloth.
“Don’t be solemn, William. It is spring and we’re together and that’s enough. You have too much romance in you.”
“And you, Jeanne?”
“This is enough for me,” she said.
But the puzzled look remained on his face. He thought to speak, but Henri came to the table. Henri was a large man with a white shirt and tie and a large, round face like a harvest moon, fringed with yellow clouds of hair.
“Madame,” he said.
“Monsieur,” she replied in the formal manner of Parisians greeting each other. “I don’t want very much tonight, Henri. William? Will you order?”
“Trout. Fresh and the best I’ve seen for months, it must be a harbinger of the new season.”
“And lemon sauce?” she said.
“With shallots this time.”
“That sounds wonderful. What do you think, William?”
He gave in and smiled and joined her in ordering. She ordered food with a sensualist’s delight, always starting with a pro forma “not too much” and ending with special orders of potatoes and salads.
It had been warm all day. The sky was filled with fast-moving cumulus clouds that made the sun dart in and out like a schoolboy playing a game.
“Oh, there he is, William,” she said, pointing one elegant finger at the old man who was now returning to the restaurant across the park. “He’ll play for us.”
The old man began a sentimental song, playing the melody with nimble fingers but dragging out the chords to wring the last bit of nostalgia from them. It was a melancholy song, like the last gay song of an evening or the last music of Christmas, fading in the new year. The sweet notes carried clearly on the little breeze that rippled through the trees in the oasis of quiet formed by the phalanx of apartment buildings along two sides of the triangular park. The place Dauphine was baffled against the city’s evening roar; here, on the Île de la Cité, in the middle of the Seine, they might have been at a country inn or picnicking on Sunday afternoon in the gardens of Versailles.
“After all these years,” he said. “I didn’t expect to share the first day of spring with you again.”
She glanced up quickly to see his eyes, and they were waiting for her. She looked away, at the old man playing in the park.
“Your romance, William,” she said softly, not looking at him, gazing at the old man and gazing at something in memory. “It has lasted now into our middle age.”
“Each moment now is only a reflection of the past.”
She turned to him. “Is that Proust?”
“No. Only William Manning.”
She laughed then and it was all right, he realized. For a moment, he felt he had gone too far, that he had betrayed something to her. Or she had warned him away from her.
He could not explain it to anyone, not to Quizon or Hanley; it could not be put in a report back to Section. He had been successful. He had reestablished contact with her. He had lied successfully to her. He had let the liaison progress as Hanley had wanted. What he could not say was that he had found he still loved her; but then, love was not the province of an intelligence agency.
Yet this second loving had brought guilt, etched so deeply by what he had done to her and by what he would do again that the love seemed more intense, in the way a picture will be intensified in the eye of the beholder by a dark border. He did not love Jeanne now out of pity for what he had done or would do again; he did not sentimentalize his longing for her; and yet this love was much more terrifying to him than anything that had happened to him in his fifteen years in the Section. Perhaps it was because they had grown older; perhaps all the winters apart made this spring seem so fragile.
“William? What did you do today?”
He was startled; the music had ended. She stared at him.
“Not much. It’s been slow; I went around to the palace to see what your leader had nationalized today, but he had rested from his labors.”
She frowned. “You don’t understand.”
“I’m sorry, I don’t want to fight with you about Mitterand. I’m in the habit of being too cynical. I got a telex from the editor, he said he wants an assessment of the peace movement. It’ll be the second in two years.” He made a face. “Same peace movement, same dreary leaders, same—”
“Yes,” she said. “The same dreary subject. Peace is such a bore, isn’t it?”
“Tedious, I think; at best, it’s tedious.” He smiled, but she would not return it.
“Nothing excites like war,” she said. “Nothing makes one so alive as the thought of killing.”
“Death makes life seem more precious.” He kept smiling, but her look was bitter, and he realized he had stumbled.
“Anyone’s death. Vicarious thrills are not enough for you.”
“Jeanne. The peace movement is a sham, a coward’s way.”
“People are cowards if they do not want to die?”
“Everyone dies,” Manning said.
“Yes. But to be burned or bombed. Or I forget, William, you are an American, you have not suffered occupation or death from planes or heard the sound of cannons beyond your own building.”
“I saw death enough.”
“Yes. Correspondent in Vietnam. But then, they were not your people, your home.”