Jean-Philippe Blondel - The 6:41 to Paris

We have to talk about the price, but I already know that I’ll come down. I’ll be so glad to get rid of that place. I really wonder why after the divorce I ended up buying Christine’s share. I said it was for the kids, so that they could always come and sleep in the place where they grew up. A grand illusion. First of all, because it was way too expensive for me on my own and I found myself up to my eyeballs in debt. And then, because they liked Jérôme’s little house better — not so cluttered with furniture, more space, a big yard. And the prospect of a swimming pool. I should have gotten rid of it sooner, but it’s like everything. I put things off. I procrastinate. The children left a long time ago and it’s only this year that I decided to put the house on the market.

I don’t know yet where I’ll go. I’ll rent something to start with. I might even, in the end, look for another job, or ask to be transferred. To the southwest, for example. What’s keeping me here? My parents? They are mainly counting on my older brother to help them in their old age.

Yes.

Sell the house and move away. Good idea. An idea that brightens up the morning train, in any case. I can’t help but smile. I almost feel like turning to Cécile Duffaut to start talking to her.

And that’s what I would do if I weren’t me.

Oh. My. God.

Philippe Leduc.

If only I had known.

I could change places. I’m one of those. The sort who can gather their belongings and stand up without saying a word, and who make sure they find peace and quiet for the rest of the trip at the other end of the train. In a restaurant, for example, I am capable of telling the waiter as he does his rounds to ask if everything is okay that, no, it’s a disgrace, the food is disgusting, and I would like to see the chef so he can taste it himself. I am the epitome of the difficult customer.

But this time I can’t. It’s impossible. It’s as if my feet were glued to the floor. I’m a tin soldier. It’s incredible. As if I were a teenager all over again. And it annoys me. Especially as I had planned to sink into the novel and enjoy the ride from Troyes to Paris as a sort of interlude, a long deep breath of fresh air before the turmoil of the week ahead.

It’s unbearable.

What I feel now is pure hatred. And that surprises me — because I’m not like that, particularly toward someone I haven’t seen in what must be at least twenty-five years. Twenty-seven, in fact. I can’t help but sneak looks at him. His profile. His build. My God. It’s incredible. He doesn’t look at all like he used to. Because although you might not think so, I still have a fairly precise memory of his features. Which is odd, because there are entire chunks of my life that I hardly remember, there are people who have mattered far more than Philippe Leduc, but I can’t remember their faces, whereas his I can see perfectly well. If I close my eyes — at the party, at the edge of the garden. Or in the loft, afterward. In a hotel room in London. They’re like snapshots. I have to get rid of them.

Then I open my eyes and turn my head slightly to the right — what a disaster. He is unrecognizable. Old, for a start. Wrinkled. Flabby. With sagging shoulders. A definite paunch. A scraggly beard. The kind of man who, above all else, inspires pity. Yes, that’s it exactly.

Well, well.

If I had known that one day I would feel pity where Philippe Leduc is concerned, I would have laughed out loud. Hatred, yes. But pity mingled with compassion, certainly not. If someone could have told me that’s how I would feel, it would have done me a world of good. When you break up with someone, you ought to be able to foresee even ever so briefly what the other person will be like years from now. In three cases out of four, you would stop weeping and feeling sorry for yourself. You’d laugh, and it would do you a world of good. Although I didn’t go around feeling sorry for myself. It was all a kind of a blank afterward. My feelings went numb. Into a fog. A redefinition of roles. And on the train taking me back to France, that sudden surge of hatred. A voracious feeling inside, the likes of which I had never known. A desire to tear everything to shreds.

And that’s what’s welling up in me now — but it’s not intact. Because it has been confronted with that slumping figure — what happened to all that brio he once had? My hatred is waning. It’s tinged with scorn.

Philippe Leduc.

If you only knew.

The last time I thought about Philippe Leduc, I had just met Luc. We were in his studio in the 18th arrondissement, at Lamarck-Caulaincourt, getting in each other’s way. We loved it. We had just spent the weekend by the Somme Bay. We were beginning to think that maybe living together, dot, dot, dot … And we’d finish the sentence in silence, each in our own fashion. Luc must have thought that I was replacing the dot, dot, dot … with a blue sky filled with white clouds, happy toddlers, and blissful motherhood — to be honest, there was some of that, but not only. There was, above all, a girl walking straight ahead and casting an ironic and somewhat cruel gaze at everything around her. Though I would never have admitted such a thing, obviously.

We were on the highway. Luc had his eyes closed. On the radio, they were playing Dionne Warwick’s “Heartbreaker” and suddenly I was back in London. Summertime London, with the windows open, the yellowed grass in the gardens and parks; it had been hot, very hot, it wasn’t like England at all, enlightened scientists were proclaiming that this was the beginning of global warming, the end of the human race, Armageddon. I walked through those London streets at night, and the paths I would take in the future were being traced. A London that Philippe Leduc had ruined forever. I knew I would never go back there because of all the sickening memories, and that’s what made me angrier than anything — to realize that a place I had liked was now off-limits. I have never been back. I have suppliers in Great Britain, of course — after all, that’s where the idea for the shops came from — but I have entrusted Amy to handle the business with them because she’s a native speaker, it’s only natural.

In the car that day I saw Luc’s profile and the shape of my life to come. Although in all that time I hadn’t given much thought to Philippe Leduc, because the images disgusted me, in the car that day I faced him, mentally. And I was neither as straight nor as sharp as I would have liked to be. Because a part of me wondered what had become of him and whether he ever looked at himself in the mirror and thought about London. And that same part of me was convinced that it had been a terrible waste. That in fact we could have gotten along. That he could have been sitting there where Luc was. That the men I met were interchangeable.

The very idea was horrifying.

I swept it away with the back of my hand, and Luc opened his eyes. He asked me what was wrong. I mumbled, “Nothing, I’m just feeling kind of sad, that’s all.” We pulled off at the next rest area and he took the wheel.

Now it makes me laugh.

I’m looking at Philippe Leduc out of the corner of my eye. I’m getting used to his new physique. The fact I recognized him right away must mean he hasn’t changed all that much. But for sure he has gone downhill. He looks drab. What was so attractive back then was that spark he had. Not just in his eyes, but in the way he moved. The way he laughed. The velvet texture of his skin. You told yourself that with a guy like that life would be one endless party. I don’t know where he got it — the absence of misfortune, perhaps. He was someone who at the age of twenty had never had any reason to complain. He was good-looking, his parents indulged his every whim, his brother was a good deal older than him and already out of his way, and he had more friends than you could ever hope for. No rough edges. No scrapes or scratches. There are people like that, who seemed to float their way through the years, and then along comes a first emotional or professional disappointment, or the death of a friend or a family member, and everything shatters.