Authors: Antoine Laurain
For the last four days Laure’s seat in the workshop had been vacant. When she had not arrived on Thursday morning, he had known something was wrong. At eleven o’clock he left her
a message. At midday he left another. At one o’clock he rang her landline. After lunch, during which Laure’s absence was the main subject of conversation with Agathe, Pierre, François, Jeanne and Amandine – the other gilders who had completed their apprenticeships – he agreed with Sébastien Gardhier (the fourth generation to run the family business) that it would be sensible if he went round to see her.
‘It’s William again. I’ve left work. I’ll just go home and pick up Belphégor’s keys and then I’m coming round’ was the last message he had left on Laure’s mobile. This was how they referred to the spare set of keys to her apartment; William only used them to go in and feed the cat when she was away.
When he had rung the bell twice and no one had come to the door, he made up his mind to let himself in. As soon as the door opened, the cat slipped out onto the landing, as he had a habit of doing. He looked at William, arched his back and started moving crabwise, his ears pointing backwards. ‘He does that when he’s scared – it’s an attacking position.’ Laure’s words came into his head, and if the cat was scared it must mean something had happened.
‘Laure?’ he called out. ‘Are you home?’
As soon as he stepped inside, he had a strong sense of déjà vu. The scene in front of him was merging with one he had seen before, as he suddenly remembered the afternoon he had let himself into his grandmother’s house when she had not come to the door. That afternoon, ten years ago, when she had not responded to him asking if she was there, as he was doing now. He had gone round opening doors and found every room empty until he reached the kitchen. She was lying on the tiled floor. Lifeless.
‘Laure?’ he shouted, opening the door to her bedroom and
then the study, the bathroom, the toilet and finally, at the end of the corridor, the kitchen. This time the apartment really was empty, and William sat himself down on the sofa in the sitting room. He concentrated on his breathing; his chest felt tight and wheezy and the telltale itch was creeping up his back. He took out his inhaler, held it to his mouth and pressed twice. Belphégor slid between William’s legs, brushing him with his tail.
‘Where is Laure? Do you know?’ asked William. But the animal remained silent.
Having stroked the cat and established that nothing in the flat appeared untoward, William made one last call to Laure’s mobile and got her voicemail again. He left a brief message before closing the door behind him and heading back downstairs. On the face of it, no, nothing untoward, but something must have happened, something big, for her to have failed to turn up for work and not be answering her phone. If he hadn’t heard from her by the end of the day, he would call the police. When he reached the lobby, he saw that a white envelope had been pushed under the main door. He was sure it had not been there when he arrived. He leant down and read the delicate handwriting: Mademoiselle Laure Valadier and family.
Hotel Paris Bellevue ***
Madame, Monsieur,
Should you require any information about Laure Valadier, who stayed with us on the night of 15 January and was taken ill, please contact reception.
Kind regards,
The management
That evening, they had let him see her through a window. She was lying in a room shared with several others. The patient next to her was hooked up to a ventilator. Laure seemed just to be asleep with a drip in her arm. When he returned the next day he was allowed to sit at her bedside. Her face was relaxed, her eyelids closed. Her breathing was barely perceptible, in and out at regular intervals. The hushed room was bathed in weak artificial light. There were six beds he now counted, and the men and women lying in them were all deep in the kind of sleep that goes on for days, weeks, years, or even until the end of their lives, leaving loved ones to wonder: was he aware he was dying, or was he already long gone? The only sound was the quiet pumping of the ventilator by the neighbouring bed, which went on continuously as if it had a life of its own which would never end. The human race could die out, mortal bodies turn to dust, and this pump would go on gently rising and falling until the end of time.
‘It’s William,’ he finally murmured. ‘I’m here. Apparently people in comas can still hear. I don’t know if that’s true. Don’t worry, I’m looking after Belphégor. He’s eating his Virbac biscuits, the duck ones. Amandine and Pierre took over your work today; they’ll finish restoring the Virgin Mary for you.’
He placed his hand over hers. It didn’t move.
‘I have to go to Berlin soon to do the ceiling for the German guy – Schmidt or Schmirt, is it? – you know, the gold mouldings.’
I’m scared of storms.
‘I’ll think of a plan for the cat. I’ll think of something, don’t worry.’
I’m scared of zoos. I’m scared because the animals are in cages.
‘You have to wake up. You have to come back, Laure.’
I’m scared of boats.
‘All this for a bag. I told you not to buy it, it was too nice.’
I’m scared when I don’t understand. I don’t understand why I’m here.
I’m scared when I don’t know where I am, and I don’t know where I am. I don’t know ‘when’ I am.
I’m scared when William talks to me and I can’t say anything back.
The days had passed between visits to Laure in the morning and Belphégor at night. Professor Baulieu had taken him into his office.
‘Your sister … She is your sister, isn’t she?’
The doctor had a sweep of white hair, a rather round face and kind, laughing eyes. The ability to keep a degree of detachment and a sense of humour must be essential in this job, William thought to himself.
‘What do you think?’ he replied, smiling ruefully.
‘I think … you’re not her brother,’ the doctor said with a knowing smile. ‘But that’s really neither here nor there. What matters is that you’re here, which is great, and you’re the only one able to speak for her.’
William replied as best he could to the doctor’s questions. Yes, he was effectively Laure’s next of kin; she had lost her husband and parents and had no children – only a sister who lived a long way away, in Moscow, from whom she heard only once or twice a year.
‘She has a lot of friends, though,’ William began explaining.
‘Including you,’ the doctor cut in, ‘the best of them, the only one who’s here. You must talk to her when you come. That’s very important. She can hear you.’
‘I do talk to her.’
‘That’s good,’ the doctor said, nodding approvingly. ‘Right, let me tell you where we are. Laure is in a mild form of coma caused by the head injury and the subdural haematoma that developed during the night. This sometimes happens to people involved in car crashes – they go home feeling a bit dazed and collapse an hour later. The signs are encouraging. I see no cause for concern – she should wake up within days. It seems she was mugged,’ he said, consulting the notes on his desk.
‘She had her bag stolen. I guess she must have tried to fight back,’ replied William.
The doctor shook his head with a sigh. ‘All for a handful of euros, and I’ve seen far worse,’ he muttered.
William went on to answer a series of questions about Laure: Was he aware of any previous operations? Was she on any medication? Had she ever been involved in an accident? Any drug or alcohol addictions? If at all possible, he should also get hold of her social security number and a few other bits of paperwork. William said yes, he could supply that information – the ateliers would provide the necessary documents.
‘Profession?’ asked the doctor.
‘Gilder,’ replied William.
Baulieu looked up.
‘Applying gold leaf to wood, metal or plaster,’ William elaborated. ‘Anything from an old picture frame to the dome of Les Invalides.’
‘I take it you work together?’
‘Correct,’ mumbled William.
‘That’s interesting work. How many gold leaves does it take to do the dome of Les Invalides?’ asked the doctor without looking up from his notes.
‘Five hundred and fifty-five thousand.’
William let his gaze wander about the room. As in all surgeries, there were a handful of perplexing ‘personal touches’ that made you wonder why the doctor had chosen them as a back-drop to his consultations. They were usually blandly inoffensive, with vaguely artistic connotations: paperweights, statuettes, antique inkwells, mortars … William’s eye was drawn to a white marble head mounted on a plinth on the doctor’s desk.
‘That’s a Cycladic head on your desk.’
‘Yes,’ Baulieu replied, keeping his head down.
‘Is it linked to your work?’
‘Follow that thought,’ the doctor said softly.
‘It has no eyes, because your patients can’t see. No mouth, because they can’t talk. Just the nose to breathe through.’
The doctor looked up at William and ran his hand over the marble.
‘Four thousand years of silence,’ he murmured. ‘You’ll get your friend back, try not to worry.
‘And get some rest – you look done in,’ Baulieu said, before seeing him out.
Biscuits for Belphégor and a Martini Rosso for him. William stood in the kitchen in silence. He was leaving for Berlin the next morning and still had not managed to find anyone to feed the cat. There was no one he could really trust to take care of the keys and, more importantly, the pet. None of his friends would bother trekking across Paris to feed a cat. He would just have to leave bowls of food scattered about the flat and let Belphégor feed himself while he was gone. He knew Laure considered this something to be avoided at all costs because the cat was liable to eat everything in one go and then sick it all up. But he could see no other option. After draining another glass of Martini, he lined up the bowls on the worktop and was preparing to fill them under Belphégor’s watchful gaze, when the doorbell rang.
Brown hair. Jeans and black loafers. White shirt. The man in the dark coat and blue scarf looked very surprised to find him there.
‘Hello …’ said William.
‘Hello …’ replied Laurent. There was a pause and then he cautiously continued. ‘I’ve come to see Laure … Laure Valadier.’
The cat came out onto the landing to greet him. Laurent knelt down. ‘Hello, Belphégor,’ he said, smiling and stroking the cat. The animal turned gracefully to wrap his tail around Laurent’s hand.
‘Are you a friend of Laure’s?’
Laurent looked up at William. ‘Not a friend exactly. I’m not sure how to put it …’ he said, looking embarrassed.
He was about to launch into a lengthy explanation but William stopped him.
‘It’s OK, I won’t ask. I think I know who you are. She mentioned she’d met someone … Come in. You’ve met the cat, so you must know your way around. I’m William, a friend of Laure’s – we work together.’
‘Laurent.’
The two men shook hands and the door closed behind them.
He had planned for everything, except this. A man with cropped bleached hair and a mildly eccentric dress sense opening the door and inviting him in. Since he had learnt her name, Laurent had called Laure’s home number several times. She was in the phone book and he had located the only Laure Valadier in town with a few clicks online. As he suspected, she lived only a few streets away from where he had found the bag. The first time he dialled the number he anticipated various potential outcomes: that she would pick up, that a man would pick up – her husband, perhaps – that it would be engaged, that a child would pick up, that it would go through to her voice on an answer phone, that it would go through to a pre-recorded computer voice on an answer phone. Which is what happened. Laurent left no message. He repeated the process several days in a row. With false jollity, the computer voice told him over and over he could leave his message after the tone and save it with the hash key. No one ever picked up. So he composed a carefully worded letter instead. He settled down to write it after shutting the bookshop, and as he did so it struck him it had been a very long time since he last wrote a letter. After three pages of description detailing
how he had found the bag, including apologies for looking inside it, explanations of the many paths his search had led him down, and ending on the story of how the mystery of the key ring had been solved by a French author doing a signing at his bookshop, Laurent felt totally spent. The work that had gone into producing three pages he was satisfied with – writing, rereading, revising, choosing every word and turn of phrase, crossing sections out, going back to change a verb and then an adjective further on – only increased his respect for writers.
It was a Haussmann-era six-storey building with the traditional golden stone façade and zinc roof. Laurent had come armed with Laure’s keys to get through the heavy glass and black-iron door. So he would use the security fob and leave his envelope in the letter box marked Laure Valadier, which he knew he would find somewhere near the entrance. He looked for it among the wall of brushed-steel boxes, probably dating from the 1970s, on which the names of all the building’s occupants were displayed. Larnier, Jean-Pierre – ground floor, right. Françon, Marc and Eugénie – 2nd floor, left (no junk mail please). C. Bonniot – 3rd floor, right. Dirkina Communications – 2nd floor, right. Dental surgery – 1st floor, left. Lecharnier-Kaplan – 4th floor, right. Laure Valadier – 5th floor, left.
As he went to slide the envelope through the opening, he hesitated. Had he come all this way, and gone to quite a lot of trouble, just to put a letter in a slot? There was an aroma of pot-au-feu floating in the air. By this time of the evening just about everyone was home from work. Through the door of the ground-floor flat he could hear a television tuned to a 24-hour news station. He heard laughter coming through the wall upstairs. This was ridiculous. Was he really going to head back out into the dark on his own and wait around for the phone to ring? Five
floors up, Laure might be at home tonight. With shoulder-length brown hair, fair skin, light-coloured eyes – grey, perhaps – and a beauty spot to the right of her upper lip. Laurent was too close to stop now. He put the envelope back in his coat pocket and called the lift. The kind of museum piece found only in old Parisian apartment blocks rattled down. It had little wooden swing doors and the panel recording the floors dating from the 1930s. He pressed the black Bakelite button marked ‘5’. The cabin clattered shut and carried Laurent upwards to the sound of screeching pulleys. The entrance to the fifth-floor, left-hand apartment was dimly lit by a tulip-shaped lamp on the landing. There was no name on the door, just a little braided silver doorbell. So here he was. He would ring the bell and she would come to the door. Laurent ran his hand through his hair, cleared his throat and rang the bell.