Gilbert obeyed.
And the same ceremony took place every time. The bus stopped at the address on the list, a cottage or little house with a garden in front. The family was waiting outside: mother and children on the stoop, father on the sidewalk in front of the open garden gate, all standing at attention, so to speak. Axter stepped out of the bus with the boy or girl from the group, whom he introduced to the father. Gilbert followed behind them, carrying the student’s suitcase. Then the father, Axter, and the youth exchange student walked over to the stoop, where a short conversation took place with the members of the family, while Gilbert put the suitcase down. Then the father walked Axter and Gilbert back to the bus. The exchange student stayed on the stoop with the mother and children, and they all stiffly watched the bus, again, as it left.
There was no one left in the bus except Axter, Gilbert, Odile, and Louis. Gilbert was getting more and more anxious.
“I’ll take you to Cross Road, the same family as last year,” Axter said.
“Thank you. That way I’m very near you…” He paused. Then he blurted out: “And them? What family are they staying with?”
“They’re staying with me, at the school.”
Gilbert stared wide-eyed. “With you?”
He looked like he had just been punched in the stomach. He face crumpled and his lips were bigger than ever, as though pumped full of air, pneumatically somehow, and about to burst.
“Why with you?”
“Just because. Does that surprise you?”
The bus stopped at Cross Road, in front of a tidy little cottage with a white picket fence around the garden.
“Here you are, Gilbert.”
Gilbert didn’t move, trying to delay the moment of parting. Axter picked up his suitcase. Gilbert had no choice but to stand up sadly.
“They’re lucky they get to stay with you,” he said in a wheezing voice.
Axter put Gilbert’s suitcase down at the garden gate and shook his hand, then rejoined Odile and Louis in the bus.
Gilbert stayed unmoving, in front of the cottage, ignoring his suitcase. His face was alarmingly pale and he eyed Odile and Louis hungrily, lips curled, until the moment the bus started. Louis was amazed at the envy and hate in Gilbert’s eyes.
“He’s not a bad kid, but he is a bit clingy,” Axter said.
•
A sandy lane snaking past a closely mowed lawn and masses of rhododendrons led to the house, a big Norman-style mansion with a bell tower soaring overhead. A white marble plaque above the entrance bore the inscription: BOSCOMBE COLLEGE.
“Here we are,” Axter said. “Let me show you to your room.”
They walked down a hallway with classrooms visible through the open doors.
“The classes are held here,” Axter said. “Every morning. Of course, it’s not required that you attend.”
He winked at Odile and Louis, which came as a surprise from this Englishman.
They walked upstairs to the fourth floor. Axter opened a door. They went down another hallway that ended in an attic room with white walls and not a single piece of furniture. There was a mattress on the floor, covered in pink sheets and a Scottish wool blanket.
“Here you have the bathroom,” Axter said.
A frosted glass booth with a sink and shower.
“I think you’ll be fine here. I’ve just renovated this floor of the building.”
He took Odile’s suitcase and Louis’s backpack, opened the room’s closet, and began putting their clothes on the shelves. Louis wanted to stop him.
“No, please…”
Odile and Louis exchanged a shocked look. Axter arranged their shirts, sweaters, dresses, and pants, in impeccable order.
“This is fun. It reminds me of when I was back at Trinity College.”
When everything was in its place, he took the bundles of banknotes out of the backpack and suitcase with the most natural-looking gesture imaginable.
He slipped them one by one into a large green plastic bag he had taken out of his pocket and unfolded like a handkerchief. Then he turned to Odile and Louis.
“Now you can call Roland de Bejardy and tell him that everything went well.”
The telephone was in the hall, attached to the wall. Axter spoke in English. He nodded his head to the instructions that Bejardy must have been giving him.
“Cheerio, Roland. Give my regards to Nicole.”
Then he passed the phone to Louis.
“Study hard and learn English well,” Bejardy told him. “It will serve you well in life.”
•
They were woken up around nine in the morning by the voices of the students walking across the lawn. There were more than fifty young men and women attending Boscombe College and Louis saw Gilbert among them, with his pipe and his clenched jaw. He went from group to group, wearing a Scottish kilt and a turtleneck sweater.
Odile and Louis had wanted to take the classes but they would have had to get up early, and besides, the students taking English at Boscombe College, although close to them in age, seemed like strangers. What could they talk about? Nothing. They did not share the same worries. The bell rang three times to indicate a break, and the young people scattered across the grass. Pairs were always kissing, assiduously, as though timing their sessions. A happy, unspoiled adolescence, perfectly sure of itself. Axter charged a lot of money for the classes at Boscombe and recruited customers from the families of the seventh or sixteenth arrondissements, or in a pinch from among the rich French Algerians.
The two of them stayed in bed, pressed against each other, and listened to the serious voice of the professor dictating a text in English. Later, the murmuring of a mysterious chorus reached them, tirelessly repeating the same song over and over again.
•
It was sunny every day they were there, and Odile and Louis often had lunch with Axter in the Boscombe College dining hall. Axter cooked, set the table, and served the food himself, delighted to be performing these domestic tasks while his wife was away, spending some time in London. Boscombe was the country house of his parents, now deceased, and when he went down from Cambridge he turned the villa into a college, the only way he could keep the house, which had so many childhood memories for him.
Where had he met Bejardy? Oh, it was purely by chance, on a trip to France when he was twenty-five. An American friend had introduced him to “Roland,” who was running a floating restaurant on a boat in the Seine, in Neuilly. It’s true. It certainly was funny, this “boat-restaurant.” But Louis noticed a certain awkwardness in Axter whenever Bejardy was brought up.
In the afternoons, he and Odile would go out and walk down the avenue of Boscombe College, lined with white-fenced houses and bushes so dark green they were almost black. Here and there a pine tree. They would stroll to Fisherman’s Walk, an intersection with several stores around it. There was a teashop there, with a high ceiling, large plate-glass windows, and tables so tiny they looked lost in an orangery. At the end of a sloping street was the sea.
A telephone booth, red and solitary, stood in the middle of a roundabout overlooking the beach, and inside it you stood on a carpet of sand several centimeters thick, but the phone worked and the phone book was current. One afternoon, Louis called Brossier collect. He had to give the operator the phone booth’s number and they would call him back within half an hour. When the phone rang in the empty landscape, Louis and Odile jumped. A woman’s voice: Jacqueline Boivin, Brossier’s fiancée.
“Here’s Jean-Claude.”
Louis asked Brossier how long they had to stay at Bournemouth. Until next week, Brossier said. He was getting ready for his own holidays, with Jacqueline. Where? At Cité Universitaire, of course, in the Deutsch de la Meurthe area. That was better than all the spas and resorts in Europe.