Paris Is Always a Good Idea

by Nicolas Barreau

  An old villa in Le Vésinet was many people’s dream. But if you lived alone and something happened, a house like this could become a trap. The gardens were big, the houses detached—the chances of being heard by a neighbor were very slim, unless you were playing a saxophone or a trumpet, which Max had never learned to do, and at this particular moment he couldn’t have done so even if he had been able to play either of those instruments.

  Marie-Hélène would come back in ten days’ time. First she would be surprised that none of the meals she’d prepared had been touched, and then she’d find his rotting body lying beside the bookshelves.

  The first thing she would probably say would be that this proved it wasn’t good for a man to be alone in the house.

  When the doorbell rang a little later, Max Marchais thought, in spite of all reason, that his housekeeper had returned to save her “Monsieur Proust.” He needed her more than he ever had in his life.

  But no key turned in the lock, no dark voice called, “Monsieur Marchais? Are you there?” He straightened up and shouted for help with all his strength, but there was obviously no one to hear him. Then he remembered that no one who rang his bell did so right at the front door; they did so using the bell on the outside wall of the front garden, which itself was not small. The cast-iron gate could admittedly be opened relatively simply by reaching through the bars and pressing the latch—but who was aware of that?

  Oh well, thought Max with a certain degree of fatalism before he slipped back into unconsciousness. Now the only thing that can save me is a burglary.

  * * *

  THE SUN WAS ALREADY low in the sky and the gnats were dancing at the big living-room window, which was slightly open, when Max suddenly heard the sound of a lawn mower. He turned his head toward the window and peered out into the garden.

  A man in green overalls was walking up and down the lawn with the lawn mower. Max had never been so glad to see his gardener. Sebastiano—a Costa Rican, who was living proof of a study claiming that people from Costa Rica were the happiest in the world—had his own key to the back gate of the garden and to the shed behind the wall where the gardening tools were stored. Among them the lawn mower.

  For years Max had refused to acquire an electric lawn mower. It wasn’t because of avarice—Marchais had always been an extremely generous man, even in the days when he had been a freelance journalist and was only just making ends meet. It was just that he somehow liked the smell and the loud rattle of the gasoline motor. It reminded him of his childhood in the country near Montpellier, where every Saturday his father had with shouts, curses, and bitter pulling of the starting cord set the mower in motion: its contented puttering then rang in the weekend.

  So you could see that nostalgia was of little use; quite the opposite—in many cases it could even be life threatening. He lay on the parquet floor, shouting in vain against the crazy clatter of the mower which came and went in rhythmic waves, as the evening air filled with the smell of newly mown grass.

  And then suddenly it was still.

  “Help! Help!” shouted Max as loudly as he could in the direction of the living-room window. “I’m here … here in the library!”

  He twisted his neck and saw Sebastiano stopping and looking over toward the house. Hesitantly, he came nearer, looking with surprise at the table on the terrace, where the breakfast dishes had not been cleared.

  “Hola? Señor Marchais? Hola? Hola?”

  A few hours later Max Marchais was lying on a smooth green operating table in the nearby private clinic in Marly, slipping into the gentle, pain-free embrace of a general anesthetic. As well as a minor concussion and a big wound on the back of his head, which had been stitched up straight away, he had bruises on his hip and leg and a compound fracture of the thigh.

  “You’ve been very lucky indeed, Monsieur Marchais. This could all have ended very differently. How old are you? It would be best if we fit you with a new hip at once,” the surgeon in the emergency room had said. “Otherwise you’ll be lying in hospital too long. And then—bang!—pneumonia.” He gave him a knowing look. “In the old days elderly people died by the dozens after a fracture like this. Of pneumonia. But today it’s not such a big deal. A new hip and—bang!—you’ll be able to walk around again very soon, Monsieur Marchais. Should we let anyone know? The man who found you said you live alone. Do you have any next of kin?”

  “My sister. But she lives in Montpellier,” groaned Max, still dazed with the pain. “Am I really in such a bad state?”

  The thought that Thérèse—always disappointed with her life—and her know-it-all husband and their appallingly spoiled son might turn up in the hospital turned him even paler.

  Monsieur Bang, who actually answered to the name of Professeur Pasquale, smiled. “Not at all! Don’t worry, Monsieur Marchais. It’s a routine operation. Not life threatening at all. In a few hours you’ll be as good as new—and that’s a promise.”

  * * *

  WELL, MAX WASN’T EXACTLY feeling like new. The operation had been three days ago, but there was still a hellish pain in his skull and his hip and his leg hurt as well. But thanks to the drug that was patiently dripping from the thin tube over his bed, ending in a needle in the back of his hand, things were getting steadily better.

  Everyday life in the hospital was not exactly designed to help a sick person recover. He had less peace here than on the days when Marie-Hélène was whirling through the house. Even at night the door was opened every two hours, blood pressure was taken, the drip was changed, his arm was pulled about so that they could take blood—they seemed to take pleasure in doing the latter as often as possible—and if this didn’t wake him up they would shine a glaring flashlight in their patient’s face to make sure he was still alive.

  Well, Max Marchais was still alive, but he wasn’t getting any sleep. At six o’clock in the morning the cleaners reached his room. A couple of delightful women from the Ivory Coast laughed and gossiped as they cleaned the floor, constantly knocking against his bed, said, “Oh, sorry! Sorry!” and then continued chatting in convoluted sentences that he couldn’t understand, giggling all the while.

  The delightful ladies from Africa had slept well, it was easy for them to be in such a good mood, thought Max grimly, wondering if he would ever be granted that privilege again.

  After the cleaners came, Julie, the trainee nurse, arrived with a smile, a frugal breakfast, and the weakest coffee he’d ever drunk. As she left, she would always point to the dish of tablets. “Don’t forget those, Monsieur Marchais!”

  Then came the ward sister. “Well, Monsieur Marchais, how are we today? Have we slept well?”

  “I don’t know how you slept, Sister Yvonne,” growled Max. “For my part, I haven’t slept at all—how could I when they keep waking me up?”

  “That’s fine. So we’ll take a little walk today, Monsieur Marchais, then we’ll feel a lot better,” said Sister Yvonne with a broad smile. “On y va?” She seemed to be relentlessly cheerful.

  Hadn’t she been listening? Was she deaf? Or was the hospital using intelligent robots that looked like women but kept on playing the same script?

  Max looked dubiously at the nurse with the short blond hair who now tightened the blood-pressure sleeve around his arm, pumping it like mad to fill it with air. She narrowed her eyes, stared at the display, and pumped again. “Hmm, your blood pressure seems a little high—but we’ll soon get it down again.”

  She nodded and smiled her relentless smile and Max was absolutely sure that no blood pressure on earth would ever dare to resist Sister Yvonne’s orders. “We’ll soon get it down again.” In spite of all her annoying familiarity, that at least was reassuring.

  He hadn’t believed his eyes when a wiry little physiotherapist had arrived to take him for a “little walk.”

  “There must be some mistake,” he had said. “I’ve only just had an operation.”

  He frowned, a vertical wrinkle appearing between his eyebrows. You were alw
ays hearing about patients being mixed up in hospital. He supposed that in that case he could be pleased that he’d been given a new hip and not a new heart valve.

  “No, Monsieur Marchais, there’s no mistake.” She looked at him pertly from under her short Jean Seberg bangs and smiled. “Nowadays we get our patients out of bed straight after the operation. You were allowed a little more rest than normal because of your concussion.” Was he imagining it, or could he discern a trace of sadism in her smile? “Come along then, Monsieur Marchais—we can do it.”

  However, only one of them walked behind the walker that she put in front of him—and it was him.

  * * *

  SO, IN BRIEF—AFTER three days in hospital Max Marchais was longing for nothing so much as his own bed and people who were not hospital personnel. When he’d had him taken to hospital, Sebastiano had shown the presence of mind to grab his employer’s trench coat—with his cell phone in the pocket. On Monday evening Max had used the last reserves of his battery to call Rosalie Laurent, who had promised to come and visit him.

  Still, Monsieur Bang aka Professeur Pasquale had held before him the prospect of returning home at the end of the next week if he did his exercises properly and his blood pressure was acceptable.

  “Our blood pressure is still a little too high, Monsieur Marchais,” he had said on his round that morning, looking with concern over the rims of his little spectacles at the chart, and Max had replied, “No wonder, if we don’t get any sleep at night, hein?”

  He noticed that he was developing an allergic reaction—to the careless way they used the word we, to doors that opened every couple of minutes, to light switches that were always turned on and never off, and more than anything to the permanent squelching of rubber soles as they walked around him, seeming to stick to the linoleum floors like Spiderman’s webs (what did they clean the place with?), only then to come unstuck with a squeaking noise.

  Squelch, squelch, squelch. Squelch, squelch, squelch.

  Squelch, squelch, squelch. Squelch, squelch, squelch.

  Trainee nurse Julie bustled around the room. She was clearing his lunch away and asked if we’d enjoyed it and if we’d remembered to take our tablets. Then she propped the window open on the latch, pulled the curtains shut so that we can have a little afternoon nap, Monsieur Marchais, and left the room. The door closed quietly behind her.

  As Max wearily let his head droop onto the pillows, closing his eyes in the hope of having that afternoon nap, the hazy dream images were penetrated by the delightful clatter of high heels, which came up the corridor and came to a halt outside his door.

  Eighteen

  “What on earth have you been up to, Max dear? How are you? What were you doing up a ladder, for heaven’s sake? And what’s happened to your head?” Rosalie put the bunch of tea roses down on the bedside table and leaned over Max Marchais with an expression of concern. Her old friend looked rather run-down, she thought, with the bandage on his head and the dark shadows beneath his eyes.

  A delighted smile flashed across his wrinkled face. “Which question should I answer first, Mademoiselle Rosalie?” he asked. “I’m an old man, you’re demanding too much of me.” He was trying to sound cheerful, but his voice was hoarse.

  “Oh, Max!” She pressed his bony hand, which was lying on the thin bedspread. “You look really terrible. Are you in pain?”

  He shook his head. “The pain is bearable. Today I even managed to take a couple of steps, thanks to a friendly drill sergeant pretending to be a nurse. It’s just that I can’t get any sleep. The door constantly opens and one of those white coats comes in for something. And they all ask the same things. I wonder if any of them ever talk to each other.”

  He sighed deeply, smoothed the bedspread, then pointed to a chair standing in the corner.

  “Get yourself a chair, Rosalie. I’m really very glad you could come. You’re the first normal person I’ve seen for days.”

  Rosalie laughed. “You shouldn’t be so impatient, Max. You’ve only been here a few days, and the doctors and nurses are only doing their job.” She pulled the chair over to the bed, sat down, and crossed her legs.

  “Yes, I’m afraid I’m a very impatient patient.” His gaze followed her every movement, finally coming to rest on the graceful, light-blue sandals that clothed her feet with their painted toenails. “Pretty sandals,” he said unexpectedly.

  Rosalie raised her eyebrows in surprise. “Oh, thanks. They’re just ordinary summer sandals.”

  “Oh, well … you know, you get to appreciate normal things when you’ve spent a couple of days on the other side of the river,” he replied philosophically. “I hope I can get out of this joint soon.”

  “I hope so, too. You really had me scared. I’d been trying to call you all weekend without success, but I never reckoned we’d meet up again in hospital.”

  “Yes, I heard all my phones ringing. Foolishly enough, I was in no position to pick up,” he joked. “What was it that was so important?”

  Rats! Rosalie gnawed her lower lip. This really wasn’t the right moment to bring the book up again and ask about the mysterious dedication. That would have to wait until Max had recovered a bit more.

  “Oh … I just wanted to see if you could come to Paris next week and have lunch with me,” she said deceitfully. “I’ve got help in the store for three afternoons every week, and René’s off to a training seminar in San Diego at the end of the week. I thought we could help the time to pass together.”

  At least the last two statements corresponded to the truth. A pity Madame Morel couldn’t have started work that day. Rosalie had hung a sign on the shop door that morning: CLOSED DUE TO A FAMILY EMERGENCY.

  She smiled. It may not have been a family emergency in the strictest sense, but it felt like one. She stared at the tall man with the bushy eyebrows. All of a sudden he seemed so helpless and frail. There was only a thin veneer covering the signs of mortality. How quickly an old person’s facade crumbled when they were catapulted out of their normal routine and no longer able to look after themselves, she thought. She looked at his thin hospital gown and his pale face, noting that he was unshaven, moved by the sparse gray stubble that was visible in the reflected light. Strange, this old man seemed as close to her as a grandfather. And at that moment he actually looked like a grandfather. Rosalie was happy he was still alive, relieved that no worse had happened to him. There was no way she was going to bother him with the business about Sherman. It was clear that he was not in very good condition.

  “Well, I’m afraid the lunch in Paris is off the menu for the immediate future, my dear Mademoiselle Rosalie, no matter how tempting the idea might be,” said Max, as if he had read her thoughts. “You can see for yourself the state I’m in. And if it weren’t for my artificial hip I’d be spending several weeks in bed.” He pointed at the outline of his legs under the bedspread. His right foot was sticking out at the bottom of the bed.

  “My goodness, did you break your toe as well?” asked Rosalie, pointing at Max Marchais’s little toe, which was quite a dark color.

  “What? No!” Max wriggled his toes. “I’ve got several things wrong with me, but my little toe is completely in order. It’s always been that brown—it’s a mole.” He grinned. “My dark spot, if you like.”

  “You’re really full of surprises, Max,” responded Rosalie, leaning back in her chair. “And now tell me, please, what you were doing up a ladder? Were you picking cherries or what?”

  “Picking cherries?” His eyebrows shot up in surprise. “What on earth gave you that idea? No, no, I was standing on my library ladder putting a book back on the shelf. Do you know Blaise Pascal, Mademoiselle Rosalie?”

  She shook her head. “No, but it seems to be a dangerous book!”

  * * *

  AFTER MAX MARCHAIS HAD told his story, in which the thoughts of a philosopher, an old ladder, a Costa Rican gardener, and a gasoline lawn mower provided the requisite drama, he gave Rosalie the key to his hous
e in Le Vésinet and asked her to bring him some things that he needed.

  “I’m sorry to trouble you, Rosalie, but Marie-Hélène is away, as you know. Sebastiano has already informed her, and I think she’s coming back earlier than she had planned—if only to say ‘I told you so’—but I don’t know exactly when.” He shrugged his shoulders with a sigh. “Sebastiano did admittedly save my life, for which I’m eternally grateful, but he’s not particularly good when it comes to packing. And he doesn’t really know his way around the house.” He smiled. “I don’t want to seem ungrateful—and he did remember my coat and my cell phone. Otherwise I wouldn’t have been able to call you—that’s the result of the fact that no one writes down telephone numbers these days. Fortunately, yours was stored in my contacts. So I hope you won’t mind collecting a few things for me.”

  Rosalie shook her head. “No problem at all,” she said. “I’m here in the car—just tell me what you need and where I’ll find it. Then I’ll bring it all over later. I imagine your departure in the ambulance was a little hasty.”

  “It was indeed. I don’t think I’ve ever left the house so quickly. I don’t even have my pajamas or my dressing gown here—you can see what a stupid nightshirt they’ve stuck me in.”

  He pulled a comic grimace as the door opened and a nurse with short blond hair and softly squelching shoes came in with a kidney dish in her hand.

  “Time for your thrombosis jab, Monsieur Marchais,” she trumpeted. “Oh! We have a visitor, do we?” She looked busily at Rosalie as she filled the syringe. “She’ll have to leave us for a moment. Your granddaughter?”

  “No, my girlfriend,” riposted Max, winking at Rosalie as she stood up. “And, Sister Yvonne—could you put the flowers in water?”

  Sister Yvonne was audibly gasping for breath as Rosalie left the room while suppressing a laugh.

  * * *

  IT WAS EARLY IN the afternoon when she stood outside Max Marchais’s villa and pressed the latch of the garden gate. The sun was shining warmly on the narrow gravel path that led between hydrangea bushes, lavender, and sweet-smelling heliotrope.