Patrick Modiano: Young Once

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.

•

There were dunes with patches of grass growing on the sides. On the peak of these dunes there is sometimes a bench. They leave their clothes on one of these benches and put on the striped bathrobes Axter has lent them. They run down into the sea. The water is icy but they’ve won their bet: Axter had dared them to swim in the ocean in Bournemouth in April.

They climb back up to the road to Fisherman’s Walk, their two robes rolled up in a beach bag. The wind is blowing hard. They enter the teashop the size of an orangery to have a cup of grog.

What if they did stay here several months? Axter would find them a little hotel, or maybe he would continue to put them up. They had forgotten all about about Paris. And it made them happy to hear a foreign language at the tables next to theirs, one they would soon know, soon speak with each other, with the feeling of starting a new life.

•

At the end of the Boscombe dune road, they met a man in a navy blue raincoat, wearing a checked cap. The man said a few words to them, but they didn’t understand what he said very well. He asked them if they were “French students.” When they said yes, he waved an ID card with a purple line through it in front of them and said slowly, several times, the words “cinema detective,” no doubt trying to convey his profession. Then he offered them a dozen tickets. Free seats, for several movies. They didn’t have time to thank him — he was already gone, with his raincoat, too big for him, waving in the wind like a banner.

The cinema was in Christchurch, a neighborhood of Bournemouth near Boscombe College, and the show started every night at nine thirty. They crossed the bridge over the Stour, a river running between meadows where the grass took on a bluish tint in the twilight. On the other side, a riverside park with a bandstand, shooting galleries, stalls with rows of slot machines, and little refreshment stands on floating decks where boats were moored that you could rent during the day.

Later, this park with its attractions, the river, the sound of the slot machines would be associated in Louis’s memory with Odile’s smell of lavender — she had found a bottle of perfume at the back of the closet in their room at Boscombe College. A loudspeaker was playing songs and instrumentals. Crowded around the rowboats were groups of men in black leather jackets, who were called “teddy boys.” You could hear their arguments and laughter even before you had crossed the bridge.

A girl, also wearing a black leather jacket, would be sitting alone at a table in front of the main refreshment stand, half in shadow. She was a redhead with an upturned Irish nose, her neck adorned with a large chain strung with twenty or more charms. One night, she showed these mementos to Odile and Louis: Each was engraved with a name — Jean-Pierre, Christian, Claude, Bernard, Michel… They had belonged to the French boys she had loved in Bournemouth, at night, under the pier. The others, the teddy boys, avoided her like the plague and never spoke a word to her. But was it her fault she liked Frenchmen?