“You’ll call us when you get there, right?” Brossier said.
“You really think there won’t be any problems?” Louis said.
“None. I’ll leave you now. Give me a kiss.”
The suggestion surprised him, coming from Brossier, who exchanged kisses on the cheek with Odile too. Then he left. He turned around at the top of the stairs and waved, before he disappeared.
“You’re with us?” a young man with very large lips and a crew cut asked Odile.
“Yes.”
“Great. Over here…”
They shook hands with about ten young people who introduced themselves by first name. The crew-cut guy seemed to be in charge of the group.
“Here, stick these on your luggage and the back of your jackets.”
He showed Odile and Louis little triangular labels saying YOUTH EXCHANGE, and attached them himself to their coats, backpack, and suitcase.
“If they come off, I’ll give you more.”
Most of their traveling companions already knew each other. They brought up a previous stay in Bournemouth and talked about someone named Axter, whose name Louis had heard from Bejardy.
“Who’s Axter?” Louis asked the guy he thought of as the group leader from then on.
“Mr. Axter is the head of the school where we’ll be taking courses.”
“Courses?”
“Yes, every morning.”
“Is this the first time you two are going to England with the youth exchange?” a brunette with blue eyes asked.
“Yes,” Louis said.
“It’s really great, you’ll see.”
“Well, I think it’s time,” the crew-cut guy with the big lips said.
The train to Le Havre was waiting on the platform. The crew-cut guy handed a group ticket to the ticket controller.
“How many?”
“Twelve.”
The controller distractedly counted them as they proceeded onto the platform.
“Can I go buy some magazines?” Odile asked.
“Hurry,” the crew-cut guy said. “And if you see Science and Life, buy me one?”
“I’ll go with you,” Louis said.
They walked quickly. As they left the platform, they showed the ticket controller their Youth Exchange stickers.
At the kiosk, Louis bought Elle, Candide, Match, Paris-Presse, and Science and Life. Odile waited, sitting on her suitcase, absentmindedly watching the people come and go, more and more of them since rush hour was approaching. Suddenly her heart was pounding and she was almost suffocating: She had seen the fat blond, the policeman who had used her as bait. He walked by not far from her and slowly headed for the entrance to the café.
•
The youth exchange group had reserved two compartments, and Odile and Louis sat face-to-face next to the door. She had put her suitcase up on the luggage rack and Louis kept his blue backpack in his hands. She was thinking about the fat blond and felt demoralized, caught in a trap. That deposition she had signed… They had kept it in a file somewhere. So what. But maybe the fat blond had found evidence to link her to Bellune’s apartment? She thought she might have left one of her flexi-discs there, and some photographs of her that Bellune had wanted for a record cover… But what if he wasn’t on that case? Well, she had seen him at avenue des Ternes, in front of the Hotel Rovaro.
Louis was talking to the others. Little by little, she started listening to them, and eventually forgot about the fat blond.
She was sitting next to a girl who admitted to her that she was only seventeen. She looked older because of her height, her sunglasses, and her deep voice. The brunette with blue eyes and a pleated skirt was sitting to Louis’s right. There was another girl with a chubby face, and a brown-haired boy who clearly thought he was very handsome. He wore a signet ring and never stopped running his hand through his hair.
“What about you?” he asked Odile and Louis. “You have your families’ addresses?”
They didn’t understand what he meant. Our families? Yes, the members of the youth exchange lived with families during their stay in Bournemouth. But Odile and Louis did not know their families’ addresses.
•
At Le Havre, they waited for departure at a café table on the pier. The jukebox was playing Italian songs, and the melodious sound of their words got swallowed up by the mist and concrete all around.
The boat was at the dock. The crew-cut guy told Odile and Louis that it was called the Normania and that it would travel to Southampton overnight.
The customs office was in a kind of small hangar. The crew-cut guy had collected all the passports from the group members; when Odile handed hers over, she had a fleeting memory of the fat blond policeman.
One of the customs officers stamped the passports one after the other and gave them back to the youth exchange group leader, who seemed to know him.
“Lots of passengers tonight?”
“Not bad,” the customs officer answered. “It’s Easter break. Look.”
Groups of teenagers, boys and girls between fifteen and twenty, were standing packed together on the Normania’s deck. Some were singing a song. When the youth exchange members boarded, they could hardly make their way through the crush of people. The crew-cut guy waved with one hand and held Louis’s wrist tightly with the other.
“Don’t lose sight of us. We’ll meet up in the grand salon. Make sure you keep your badges on you… Yes… Yes… Keep them on you, that’s the most important thing. I gave them to you, keep them on.”
The poor man, he was horrified at the thought that the youth exchange group might get split up in the crowd. His voice, which up until then had suggested a sheepdog’s bark, was almost a sob.
•
Night had long since fallen by the time the Normania cast off. Odile and Louis, leaning on the ship’s railing, looked out at the lights of Le Havre getting farther and farther away. Louis was still wearing his blue backpack and Odile clutched her suitcase between her legs. Nearby, ten or fifteen young people in large black velvet berets were singing an old ballad in the gentle breeze, in a language they didn’t recognize. The group alternated in halves, repeating the chorus, and Odile and Louis relaxed and let the melodious unknown language wash over them.
Before long, the deck was empty except for them. Neither one felt the cold air — this was their first time traveling by ship. They walked to the stern and then down a staircase and along gangways where small groups of people, sitting on the ground, were chatting and playing cards. A bit farther up, people were crowding around a metal counter to buy a sandwich or a warm drink. Eventually they came out into what the group leader had called the “salon,” but which looked more like a smoking lounge, with leather sofas and armchairs bolted to the floor and landscape photos on the paneled walls like the pictures in train compartments. There were two portholes, one on each side, and a bridge table in front of one of them.
As soon as they walked in, the smell of pipes and brown tobacco seized them by the throat. Here, as well, passengers were sitting around on the floor. Some were even asleep in their sleeping bags. The youth exchange group was gathered around a sofa and an armchair, and the crew-cut group leader waved Louis and Odile over. Louis carried Odile’s suitcase on his shoulder and the two of them forced their way through the outstretched bodies and the groups sitting cross-legged. Near the bridge table, three of the mysterious beret-clad strangers were still singing, in a subdued voice.
“I thought you were lost,” the group leader said. “Sit over here. Why are you still carrying your luggage? That doesn’t make sense, you should have left it with ours.”