One Saturday morning at the end of summer, when Mercier was fourteen and Albertine sixteen, Uncle Gerard and his family had come to visit. The adults and the other children had gone off somewhere-to a livestock auction in a distant village, as Mercier remembered it-and he and Albertine were left alone in the house. The servants downstairs were preparing midday dinner; they would be twelve at table, for various other family members would be joining them.
In his room, Mercier was dressing for dinner, in underpants and his best shirt, in front of a wall mirror, working at tying his tie. First the bottom part came out absurdly short, then too long. On his third attempt, the door opened and, in the mirror, Cousin Albertine appeared. She watched him for a moment, then, with a strange look on her face, at once shy and determined, came up behind him. “Can I try it?” she said.
“I can do it,” he said.
“I want to try,” she said. “To see if I can.”
“How do you know about ties?”
“I watch my brothers do it.”
“Oh.”
This was intended to mean, oh, I see, but came out as more of an oh! because, as Albertine reached around him, her heavy breasts, in a thin summer dress, rested lightly against his back.
“Now,” she said, “we cross it around and loop it through.”
In the mirror, Albertine’s face was dreamy, her eyes half closed, mouth slightly open. Also in the mirror, the front of his underpants highly distended. For a few seconds, they stood like statues, then she whispered, “I want to see it,” hooked her thumbs in the waistband of his underpants, and pulled them down.
“Alber-tine!”
“What?”
She reached out and closed her hand around it, her skin warm and damp. He leaned back against her, then moved away. “We’re not supposed-”
“Oh foo,” she said. So much for family morals. “You like it,” she said firmly, and ran her finger along the underside, back and forth. “Don’t you?”
He could only nod.
She pressed against him, above and below, and he reached back, hands on her bottom, and pulled her closer. She now stroked him with index finger and thumb: where had she learned to do this? He was very excited and, a few seconds later, came the inevitable conclusion, accompanied, from deep within him, by a sound somewhere between a sigh and a gasp.
“There,” she said softly, taking her hand away.
“Well, that’s what happens.”
“I know that.”
He started to move away from her, but she wrapped her arms around his shoulders and held him tight. Close to his ear, she whispered, “Now it’s my turn.”
“What?” His heart quaked.
She raised her dress, revealing white cotton underdrawers, and bunched it around her waist, then took his hand and placed it between her legs. He’d never touched a girl there and had no idea what was expected of him, but immediately found out, as she pressed his hand against herself and began to move it. In the mirror, he could see her face: eyes closed, lower lip held delicately between her teeth. With his free hand, he again reached around her, where, in slow rhythm, her bottom tensed, relaxed, and tensed again. After what seemed to him like a long time-he began to wonder what he was doing wrong-she exhaled hard, her breath audible, and held on to him as though she might fall down. Astonishing! It had never occurred to him that this happened to a girl; his friends at school had a completely different version of things.
He pulled up his underpants, then sat down hard on the edge of his bed. Albertine resettled her dress, then came and sat beside him, brushing her long hair off her face. “Did you like it, Jean-Francois?”
“Yes, of course.”
“Both things?”
“Yes, both.”
She kissed him, a dry kiss on the cheek. “I think you’re sweet,” she said and, for a moment, rested her head on his shoulder.
This was not the only time, for the Mercier cousins; it happened once more before they went north to their schools. The following week, the cook baked grand brioches, as big as cakes, and his mother asked him to take two of them over to Uncle Gerard’s. Mercier, already a cavalry officer in his daydreams, climbed on his bicycle and pedaled like a fury over the tiny dirt lanes that wound through the hills to his uncle’s house. Once there, amid the usual disorder, he set the brioches down on the table in the kitchen, then waited while his aunt wrote a thank you note. Albertine appeared, as he was retrieving his bicycle from the steps that led to the terrace, and told her mother she would ride with him part of the way back home. Halfway there, they walked their bicycles away from the lane and found a grove of cork oaks, and, this time, Albertine suggested that they take off all their clothes.
Mercier hesitated, uncertain of what lay ahead. “I don’t want you to have a baby,” he said.
She laughed, brushing her hair aside. “I’m not going to do that. Cousins mustn’t do that, but we can play. Playing is always allowed.”
What rules she was following he did not know, but in the days after their first encounter, before he went to sleep and when he woke in the morning, he had ravished his gawky cousin in every way his imagination offered and was now more than ready for anything she might think up. And so, her skin white in the hot sun, Albertine posed prettily for him and then, at their leisure on a summer’s day, as the cicadas whirred away in the high grass, they played twice.
True to her word, Albertine returned to the apartment at six-thirty. Her hair was darker now, styled short, falling just to her jawline. She wore a quiet tweed suit with big buttons, skirt well below the knee, and a fancy silk scarf from one of the fashion houses, wound around her neck and tucked into the vee of her suit jacket. With pearl earrings and fine leather gloves, she was very much an aristocrat of the Seventh. As in all their meetings over the years, he could find the Albertine he’d known that summer; she was, as he put it to himself, still in there; he could find her if he tried.
She made them drinks, vermouth with lemon, and showed him the latest additions to her collection-onyx cameos and intaglios on small wooden stands, filling the shelves of two glass-fronted bookcases. Some of the new ones were ancient, Greek and Roman, others from tsarist Russia and the Austro-Hungarian empire. “They are exceptional,” he said, taking time to study them, appreciating what she’d achieved. Then they walked out to the boulevard and over to a busy brasserie on the rue Saint-Dominique. A compromise: she didn’t want to cook, it was too early to go to a proper restaurant, and neither of them cared that much. So they ordered omelettes and frites and a bottle of Saint-Estephe.
“It is so good to see you, Jean-Francois,” she said, taking the first sip of her wine. “Is life going well? I expect you miss Annemarie.”
“Every day.”
“And do you see anyone?”
I wish I could, he thought, Anna Szarbek’s image smiling up at him on a nightclub dance floor. “No,” he said. “I would like to, but it isn’t easy, meeting somebody-who’s available.”
“Oh you will, dear,” she said, looking at him fondly. “People do find each other, somehow.”
“Let’s hope so. And you?” Years earlier, there had been a fiance, then another, but, after that, silence.
“Oh, I’ve settled into my life,” she said. “How are the girls?”
“Thriving, but passionately busy. Beatrice is in Cairo, her sister, Gabrielle, in Copenhagen-I haven’t seen them for a long time. At Christmas, perhaps. I might see if Gabrielle will come down to the house in Boutillon. That is, if I can get there myself.”