White Corridor

8

The morning sky was such an impossibly deep shade of blue, it seemed as if the earth’s atmosphere was barely thick enough to protect them from the cruel infinity of space. Madeline and Ryan sat on an outside table at La Vieille Ville and enjoyed the sun’s warmth on their faces. The scent of pomegranates and jasmine blossom hung in the warm air. In the kitchen behind them, Momo the chef was stirring the bouillabaisse he prepared for the village’s housebound residents once a week.

“I think I could live here.” Madeline pushed back her book and rested her chin on her hands. “Clean air, birds singing, lots of flowers, no litter. Do you like it?”

“There’s no-one to play with. We’re stuck here without a car. There’s nowhere to go. You’re always reading.” Ryan stirred the long spoon about in his ice cream. His complaints had become a refrain the past few days. During the winter season, the trains only called at the little station once an hour, turning every outing into a day trip, and day trips became expensive.

“You would like to go somewhere?”

She looked up and saw the young man who had rescued her handbag at the parade. He was wearing the same clothes, even down to the leather satchel at his side.

“There is a very beautiful building on Cap Ferrat, the Villa Rothschild. It has many gardens and a waterfall, and is open to the public. I have a car.” He pointed back at the blue open-topped Peugeot. “We could drive there.”

She saw the boy’s face brighten and realised how much he still missed his father. Ryan had seen a lot more of his good side, and was young enough to be able to forget the bad. Jack Gilby had portrayed himself as a hero to the boy, turning her into a villain in the process.

“Can we go, Madeline?” Ryan was already pushing his ice cream aside and rising from the table.

She regarded the young man with a cool eye, but he did not move beneath her critical gaze. “That’s a pretty underhand trick, Mr. Bellocq,” she told him as Ryan began tugging at her hand.

“Please, call me Johann.” He gave a tentative smile, anxious to be accepted.

As they drove, he thought back to the first time he had seen her, standing on the empty railway platform with a map and a backpack, the boy’s hand held tightly in hers. Her floral dress was English and cheap, her trainers disproportionately large for her thin bare legs. After he had spoken to her, he’d realised that she was everything he had ever wanted in a woman. Down here, away from the mountain villages, there were only blank-eyed American tourists and pompous English couples in ridiculous straw hats. The permanent residents were elderly and sour, too rich to concern themselves with being pleasant. This one-the boy called her Madeline-was different. There was an innocence, a vulnerability about her. She had been hurt by a man and left without money or confidence. She would not sneer at him as others had done. The boy was the key-he needed male companionship; otherwise, he would get on her nerves and drive her away from the village.

He had broken into the garage of a locked-up summer home in Rocquebrune and taken the Peugeot, carefully repairing the door behind him, knowing it would be weeks, possibly months, before anyone realised it was missing. The vacation villas of the wealthy provided him with everything he needed. From Marseilles to Monte Carlo there were thousands of poorly protected properties, and each fell under a different police jurisdiction. Half the time, the prefectures failed to maintain proper contact with one another. People travelled during the winter months, and the gendarmeries were short-staffed. It was the time of le chomage, the form of unemployment that kept this part of France empty for six months of the year. The perfect time to live a little beyond the law.

He turned to smile at the boy in the passenger seat, sensing that he had already won the battle for her heart.

“I don’t know, he seems like some kind of exile. From the way he speaks English I suppose he’s French, but there’s another accent. Did I tell you he has pale green eyes? Hold on, I’m lighting a cigarette.” Madeline tucked the mobile under her right ear and dug for a throwaway lighter. Her one extravagance was a weekly phone call to her half sister in Northern Spain. The pair of them would have gone to visit, but Andrea had married a taciturn mechanic from Bilbao whose eyes had followed Madeline a little too closely when she last stayed there. “Well, he stands out, I suppose. There aren’t many people out on the streets down here, or in the houses by the look of it, and Jack’s settlement cheque hasn’t come through yet so I’m pretty much stuck here. Of course I look! I go to the bank in Beaulieu every other morning but there’s nothing.” She checked to make sure that Ryan was not within listening distance. “Well, I don’t know, he’s a typical Mediterranean type I suppose, rather good-looking, a little younger than me, and I have the feeling he’s just as lonely. Far from home. I know, of course I’ve got Ryan, but I need adult company as well. No, I don’t know if I’d go out with him, he hasn’t asked me. It’s just that-I always seem to be running into him. It’s a small village, there aren’t that many places you can go, but even so. I hardly ever see the same people twice in London. It just seems a bit odd that we keep bumping into each other.”

Perhaps he just fancies you, Andrea had suggested. You’re finally free to do what you want. Jack knows that if he comes near you again, the police will be on him. Maybe you should go on a date with this guy.

The problem was, she had forgotten how to be single. Besides, she had Ryan to look after, and the boy was already getting stir-crazy. She stepped back from the balcony into the neat little room, hemmed between the sheer granite cliffs and the glittering green sea, and wished there was someone she could ask for advice. The afternoon at the Villa Rothschild had passed like a hazy waking dream. Johann had paid the admission fee for the three of them, and they had walked through the Japanese garden beyond the pink palazzina villa that straddled the cape, watching Ryan run after iridescent dragonflies.

The exotic themed gardens-nine in all-that surrounded the former home of the Baroness Ephrussi de Rothschild were trained into the form of a vast land liner that crested the out-crop of land. To complete this illusion, they had once been crewed by twenty gardeners in white sailors’ outfits with red pompom hats. The place was absurd, vulgar, ostentatious and beautiful, filled with grottoes and pergolas, temples and waterfalls. Tall pines and cypress trees, ancient agaves and tunnels of bamboo fended off the glare of the low afternoon sun, hemming the cadenced emerald lawns in jewelled shadows that crossed the grass like a rising tide. The cicadas all ceased at the same moment, leaving only the sound of sea wind in the treetops.

She had looked across at Johann and found him staring at the pulsing fountains, lost in thought. His eyes were deep and dark, set close to his brow, as serious as a statue’s. If he realised she was studying him, he gave her no sign of it. They walked beside each other as Ryan ran ahead, but the silence between them was far from easy. “Come.” He smiled. “There is a gift shop. I will buy you some postcards of the beautiful gardens, for you to remember me whenever you look at them.”

He knew she was watching, but was careful not to show emotion. It was important to make her understand that he was a gentleman, and that meant being in control. He had not felt like this around a woman before. Madeline was unlike any of the girls he knew from the villages. He saw things in her eyes none of the others had, strength and grace and acquiescence. She had made mistakes and overcome hardships, but there was nothing of his mother about her, only kindness.

Most importantly, she was ready for him. He had never been close to anyone since he was a child, but he knew how to make himself appealing. It was as much about hiding bad traits as displaying good ones, and essentially, she could not learn of his predisposition towards breaking the law, which meant arranging their conversations in such a way that she would see nothing wrong.

If he managed to keep up the subterfuge, he wondered if there was a chance that she might become more than just a conquest. Her pale skin had tanned down, drawing out freckles, even in the days since he had been watching her. He had seen the full repertoire of her wardrobe now: one summer dress, a couple of T-shirts and a pair of faded jeans. He wanted to hold her, to reassure her that life could be good once again. In turn, he knew she would not disappoint him. He looked up into the sunswept sky and tasted salt, felt cool sea breezes in his hair. If he was to do this, to finally get close with a woman and share his life and his secrets, it meant hiding them for a while longer.

He was not sophisticated when it came to the subtleties of expressing affection, but he had seen films and watched enough television to provide passable imitations of various emotional states. The next evening, he asked her back to his room for a drink, but when she made an excuse and shied away, he realised he had made a mistake. It was too soon to exclude the boy from a meeting. Persisting, he invited the pair of them to join him for a pizza-it was a Sunday night, and there was nowhere else open in the village-and she accepted, although she insisted on paying her share of the bill. She was determined not to owe him anything.

The conversation was easier to control when Ryan was seated there between them. He could deflect her questions and ask something about the kid. The challenge would come, he knew, when they finally met a deux. He just wanted to do what was right, what she deserved.

On Monday night it rained, and Mme Funes offered to take Ryan along with her sons to see an animated movie playing in English at the little side-street cinema in Beaulieu.

It could have been the night for him to make his move, but he resisted. Instead, he took them both to Monte Carlo.