Graeme Burnet - The Disappearance of Adèle Bedeau

‘And you?’ said the girl.

‘Me?’

‘Do you live round here?’

‘I live with my grandparents on the outskirts of Saint-Louis,’ he said.

‘With your grandparents?’

‘My parents are dead.’ He had said it to gain the girl’s sympathy, so that even if she didn’t like him she might take pity on him. Perhaps she would take his hand.

‘How thrilling,’ she said, ‘to be alone and make your own way in the world.’

‘I’m not alone,’ said Manfred. ‘I’m with you.’

The girl got up and said she had to go. Her parents would be expecting her. She was not wearing a watch. Manfred felt his stomach tingle.

‘Will I see you again?’ he said.

The girl widened her eyes a little and made a little popping sound with her lips.

‘Will you come here again tomorrow?’ he asked.

‘Maybe,’ she said. ‘It depends on my parents.’

‘I’ll be here,’ said Manfred.

Then she disappeared into the forest.

Manfred returned to the clearing where he had met the girl for the next three days. He arrived ever earlier, the second and third days bringing himself a supply of water and fruit to get him through the day. He also brought books and a rug from the cupboard under the stairs. He selected the books carefully. The girl was clearly no dummy, so any pulp or policiers were out of the question. Camus, Sartre, Hemmingway were clearly too mannish to make a positive impression on a frail girl in a yellow dress. Over-familiar classics would make Manfred seem a tyro — he should surely have read such key works already. In the end he chose two novels by Zola from his grandfather’s bookshelf. He had previously, without having read a word, dismissed Zola as incurably dull and reactionary — all that stuff about fate flew in the face of his beloved existentialists — but from the very first pages of Zola’s preface to Thérèse Raquin , Manfred was enthralled. One day, he too would write a book that would scandalise society and be wilfully misunderstood, only for history to prove him right. He would fearlessly expose hypocrisy, cant and sentimentality. And through his years of vilification, the girl in the yellow dress would be by his side.

Zola’s description of his characters, trapped by temperament and lacking free will, felt like a release to Manfred. A burden was lifted from his shoulders. He too was a prisoner of the forces that had shaped him: the awkward, unsociable nature that made everyone ill at ease in his company; his dismal situation as an imposter in his grandparent’s house; his uncertainty at what path to take when he left school. He was no longer in control of his own destiny. What, after all, had lead him to meet the girl in the yellow dress? Not free will, but fate.

She appeared on the fourth day, as Manfred knew she would.

‘Hello,’ she said as she stepped into the little clearing.

‘Hello,’ said Manfred. On the rug he had laid out a brown paper bag of cherries and the flask of apple juice he had brought in his satchel. Manfred lay on his side, his head propped on his hand, his book open in front of him. The girl sat down as she had before, her arms clasped around her knees, her back to Manfred. She was wearing the same dress as before.

‘How long have you been here?’ she asked.

‘All day,’ said Manfred.

‘Were you waiting for me?’

‘Yes,’ he said. He liked the fact that the girl did not look at him when she spoke.

‘What if I hadn’t come?’

‘I’d have come back tomorrow,’ he said.

‘That’s nice.’

‘I wanted to see you again.’

‘I wanted to see you too,’ said the girl.

‘It’s strange, don’t you think that we met the way we did,’ said Manfred. ‘I mean, if I hadn’t been in this clearing at the exact moment that you came by, if you had taken a different turning, if you hadn’t been on holiday here, if I had been born somewhere else…’

The girl did not look round, but she shrugged her shoulders.

‘You might as well say that whenever two people meet it’s strange. Our meeting is no stranger than any other meeting between two people who don’t know each other.’

‘But we didn’t plan to meet, did we?’ said Manfred.

‘How could two strangers plan to meet?’ said the girl. ‘If they had intended to meet, they wouldn’t be strangers.’

Manfred was silent for a moment.

‘What I mean is,’ Manfred went on, feeling like he was leaping off a cliff without knowing how deep the water below was, ‘that neither of us has exerted any will of our own. And yet, because of this happenstance, something — maybe everything — has changed.’

The girl looked over her shoulder at Manfred for the first time. ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘I feel it too.’

That evening Manfred chatted merrily with his grandparents over the evening meal. He could see them exchanging bemused glances as he solicitously asked if they had had a pleasant day. The fug that normally surrounded him had lifted. Everything was light. Afterwards he helped clear away the dishes and joined his grandfather in his workshop and helped him bevel the edges of a chest of drawers he was making.

In bed that night, the dark, gloomy world of Zola no longer held any appeal. The desperate animal lust of Thérèse Raquin and her lover no longer attracted him. He lay instead in a reverie in which the girl was the protagonist and he her unworthy suitor. Unlike the dark fantasies he entertained about other girls, he had no lustful thoughts about the girl in the yellow dress. His love (he had no reservation about using this word) for her was on an altogether more elevated plain. When they parted, she had kissed him lightly on the cheek and they had clasped each other’s fingers for a few seconds.

The following days were the happiest of Manfred’s life. Even as he was experiencing them, he felt that it was not possible to be happier — for him or for anyone. He knew too that the girl felt the same. They had invented love. Until the moment the girl had stepped into the clearing, love had existed only as a word, an abstract concept that no other person had actually experienced.

They met every day. Manfred brought the rug to sit on and stuffed his satchel with bread, pâté and fruit from his grandparents’ larder. They ate lunch, feeling less like teenagers than a contented aging couple. Juliette came from Troyes. Her father was a lawyer who expected her to follow him into the profession. He was a taciturn man of iron will. Her mother was a docile woman whom Juliette had never once seen stand up to her father. She was a mere extension of her husband, who spent her days lunching with other such wives, shopping or having her hair done. But she was always home in time to dress for the evening meal. Juliette despised her. She had no interest in law, but she felt unable to resist her father’s strictures. She was not blessed with a rebellious nature. These illicit meetings with Manfred were the greatest transgressions of her life. She envied Manfred’s freedom and wished her own parents dead.

Yet despite her view of herself as meek and compliant, Manfred found Juliette quite unique and possessed of a self-confidence he envied. She was not at all like the superficial, giggling girls he observed at school, with their twin manias for clothes and the very stupidest boys. Juliette had a sense of herself that did not require the affirmation of others. She was beautiful without ever giving the impression of thinking twice about her appearance.

Manfred encouraged her to stand up to her father, to follow her own course in life, whatever that might be. Juliette reminded Manfred of the speech he had delivered on the subject of Zola’s preface to Thérèse Raquin . If he really believed what he had said, weren’t we all like rats on a wheel scurrying in a predetermined direction, unable to change course? But Manfred was full of plans for the two of them. They would elope to Paris, or further afield, to Amsterdam, London or New York. Manfred would write a great novel, an epic series, like Zola’s Rougon-Macquart cycle, and they would be fêted among the artists and writers of Europe. Years later, Juliette’s father would appear unexpectedly at their door. He would break down, admitting that his dictatorial ways had driven his daughter from the family and that it was only now in old age that he realised this. He would be proud that his daughter had made her own way in the world. Then Manfred and his father-in-law would sit up into the small hours, drinking whisky and reflecting on the paths their lives had taken.