The Disappearance of Adèle Bedeau

Eight

DURING THE SUMMER AFTER the death of his mother, Manfred’s principle activity was to walk in the woods behind the Paliard house. He had never enjoyed hot weather and even on the warmest days it remained tolerably cool on the forest floor.

One day Manfred was lying on his back in a small clearing, his head resting on a soft mound of moss at the base of a tree. His shirt lay in a crumpled heap by his side. His eyes were closed but he was not asleep. He was listening to the papery rustle of the leaves in the breeze. It sounded like a distant stream. He breathed evenly and deliberately. The ground was bone dry and scattered with twigs that smelled like kindling. Manfred imagined a fire raging across the forest floor like a tidal wave. He pictured his body engulfed by flames and turned to blackened cinders which would float high on currents of air above the tree-tops.

Manfred opened his eyes suddenly. A girl was standing a few feet from where he lay. He had not heard her approach.

‘How long have you been there?’ he said.

‘A while,’ said the girl.

She was wearing a yellow cotton dress printed with orange flowers. She had leather sandals on her feet. Her hair was blonde and secured with a yellow bandana. She had large blue eyes, which she kept fixed on Manfred. She did not appear in the least embarrassed. She had a boyish figure and stick-thin arms. She was perhaps fifteen years old, although her childish outfit suggested she might be younger.

‘Who are you?’ Manfred asked as if he was a landowner discovering a trespasser.

The girl shrugged and smiled a little. ‘No one,’ she said. ‘Just a girl. Who are you?’

Manfred was impressed by the girl’s reply. He could think of no better response.

‘Just a boy,’ he said. But he had a sudden urge to tell her everything about himself, how his father had run the Restaurant de la Cloche, how his mother had died, how he now lived with his grandparents, how he sometimes stared at his bedroom ceiling for a whole day without noticing the time pass.

The girl sat down next to Manfred, smoothing her dress underneath her as she did so. She sat with her arms around her knees, not saying anything. She was the most beautiful girl Manfred had ever seen. Right there and then he wanted to marry her and be with her every moment of his life until he died. He was suddenly embarrassed by his skinny, naked torso. He untangled his shirt and put it on.

The girl just sat there. Manfred couldn’t think of anything to say that wouldn’t sound stilted or phoney. The hem of the girl’s dress fluttered slightly in the breeze. Downy blonde hair grew down the nape of her neck. Eventually she turned her head and looked at him.

‘Not much of a talker, are you?’

Manfred felt himself blushing. If he didn’t say something now, she would get up and leave and he would never see her again.

‘I…’ He hoped that if he started a sentence, something would tumble out, the way that when he recited a poem under his breath, the words just came. But nothing followed. He started again.

‘Do you live near here?’ It was so banal he wished he’d kept quiet. ‘I’ve never seen you before,’ he added by way of explanation.

‘My parents have rented a house on the other side of the woods,’ she said.

‘You’re on holiday?’

‘I suppose,’ said the girl.

Manfred knew that he should now ask where she was from. But he didn’t want to know. All that mattered was that they were both here at this place at this moment. He didn’t want to think of her in some far-off town or city where he didn’t live, going to a school he didn’t attend, talking to boys that weren’t him.

‘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.

Juliette smiled indulgently at Manfred’s fantasy. ‘You haven’t met my father,’ she said. ‘In any case, would I not then just be following your dream instead of my father’s?’

On the final day of Juliette’s holiday, the lovers met in the clearing as usual. Manfred felt melancholy. The thought of not seeing his beloved for days or weeks was too much to bear. He could not, knowing now that there was an alternative, return to his old life of torpor.

Juliette had brought two bottles of rough cider from the cellar of the cottage.

‘If my father finds out, he’ll kill me,’ she laughed.

Manfred was disturbed that she could be so light-hearted on this black day, but he determined not to spoil their last hours together by reverting to his gloomy ways. They popped the stone stopper of the first bottle and passed it back and forth. They talked animatedly of how they would write to each other every day, sending their letters poste restante under outrageous pseudonyms. At weekends Manfred would travel to Troyes and sleep rough in the railway station just for the chance to snatch a few minutes with his beloved. They would smuggle notes to each other with dramatic entreaties: Do not fail me! I am forever yours! My love, I am pining for you!

Yet Manfred was preoccupied. Thus far their relationship had been consummated by no more than goodbye kisses and holding hands. As they sat side by side now on the blanket, Juliette held Manfred’s fingers gently between her hands. But with the prospect of days or weeks without seeing one another, Manfred felt that they must mark the time they had spent together in some way. They must give their bodies to each other as a statement that they now belonged together and that their lives would from that moment be intertwined. As Manfred had contemplated this the previous evening, he had not thought of it as a sexual act (the practicalities of such a thing terrified him), but rather, although he considered himself an atheist, as something spiritual. He could think of no other way to describe it.

As they sat, blithely wittering about their future together, Manfred’s stomach was churning. He had no idea how to initiate such a thing. Thus, he had decided that he would trust to fate — if it happened, it was because it was meant to happen. If it didn’t, so be it. He also placed his faith in the fact that ever since he had met Juliette, their thoughts and feelings had wholly coincided. Was it not almost certain therefore that she had lain alone on her bed the previous night having entirely the same thoughts as he had? Was it, moreover, not inevitable that she had shared the same thoughts? Perhaps she had brought the cider along with the intention of easing their passage into adulthood.

They finished the first bottle. Manfred felt it go to his head. He broke off a chunk of bread and chewed on it to alleviate the mild nausea he felt. Juliette, seemingly oblivious to the effects, flipped open the stopper of the second bottle and handed it to Manfred. A little sun filtered down to the forest floor. The soft blonde hairs on Juliette’s arm shone as she passed the bottle to him. She let out a small hiccup and covered her mouth with her free hand, giggling a little. This display of tipsiness reassured Manfred.

The time came for Juliette to leave. Manfred was gripped by fear. It was now or never. He grasped Juliette’s wrist gently and said her name. She moved her face towards his as if she had been waiting for this invitation. Their mouths met, clumsily at first. Juliette manoeuvred her body so that her face was perpendicular to his. She pushed the tip of her tongue between Manfred’s lips. Her hand clasped his neck. Manfred’s mind soared off into the trees. He had no idea that such intensity was possible. Soon they were lying next to each other. Manfred’s left hand rested on Juliette’s hip. Did he dare to slide it down and feel the curve of her buttock under her dress? He did so, his fingertips alive to the grain of the cotton.

Emboldened, Manfred drew his lips down to her neck. Juliette held his head tightly there, her breath quickening. Manfred ran his tongue to the junction of her neck and shoulder. With her free hand, Juliette unbuttoned the top buttons of her dress, took Manfred’s hand in hers and pressed it onto her breast. Manfred cupped the soft flesh in his palm. Her nipple was firm between his fingers.

Manfred had not counted on such a rapid progress. He had only the sketchiest idea of what was expected of him. The thought of disappointing Juliette appalled him, but they were on the brink of something momentous. There was no choice but to go through with it. Juliette moaned softly as he caressed her breast. Her eyes were closed. Manfred manoeuvred himself on top of her and continued to kiss her on the neck. Then as quickly as it had begun, Juliette gripped his wrist and said, ‘Let’s not. Not now.’

Manfred simultaneously felt a wave of relief and a feeling that it was too late to stop, as if he was the driver of a locomotive spotting a car on a level crossing only a few metres ahead.

‘Yes, of course,’ he heard himself saying, but as he said it he ground his groin against her. He recalled how his mother had described her feeling of being overpowered by her father as he kissed against a tree in this same forest all these years before. He had his hands on Juliette’s neck. He could not now prevent himself from coming and as he did so he raised himself to see Juliette’s face. Her eyes were bulging. Her body convulsed beneath him, heightening his passion. Then they both went limp. Manfred felt suddenly ashamed. He rolled off and lay next to Juliette waiting for his breathing to settle, staring at the branches of the trees shimmering above them.

He took Juliette’s hand in his.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said, ‘I couldn’t stop myself.’

She didn’t reply. Manfred raised himself onto his elbow. Juliette’s head lay slackly to one side. Her mouth and eyes were open. She was not breathing.

Manfred stared at her blankly for a few long moments. Then he nudged her arm. She didn’t react. He placed his hand on her heart. It was not beating. Manfred leapt to his feet, his hand over his mouth. He felt himself gasping for breath then he threw up, turning his head away from the rug. He retched until there was nothing more in his stomach. He sat there on his knees for a long time, or what seemed like a long time. Perhaps it was no more than a minute. What he remembered most was the horrible look of disbelief and betrayal frozen on Juliette’s face.

Manfred got up from his knees. He surveyed the surrounding trees. Nobody had seen them and there had been nothing to hear. If Juliette had only cried out, he would have stopped. He had not been aware of what he was doing. Manfred realised that what he was about to do was dreadful, but he braced himself to go through with it. He cleared the two bottles off the rug and put them in his knapsack. Then he picked up the apple cores they had left on the ground, the end of a baguette, the wax paper wrapper of the pâté and the knife they had used to spread it. Next he grasped the corner of the rug and tugged it hard. Juliette’s body rolled slowly off it into an ungainly heap. Her face was pressed against the ground and her dress was rumpled around her waist. Manfred pulled it down over her buttocks. Tears were streaming down his face, but he surveyed the clearing for any other debris. He scuffed the thin pool of his vomit into the earth and slowly backed out, unable to take his eyes off the wreckage of Juliette’s body. Then he turned and ran through the trees.