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GILBERT
PARIS, 1987
She was a scribble of a woman with curly blonde hair, bunched on top of her head, huddled in a red-and-black-check coat, several sizes too big. Curiously, she had on two different shoes, one green, one black.
Monsieur Géroux frowned as he considered if it was some new fashion. It didn’t seem like fashion. More like she had got dressed in the dark, but who was he to say? Perhaps that was fashionable now.
When she straightened up, though, Monsieur Géroux forgot all about her attire, he forgot every word he’d ever learned. Her eyes were the blue of a paraffin flame. It was like seeing a ghost. Except he was the one who turned pale.
‘I’m Sabine – Sabine Dupris,’ she said, small, red lips stretching into a disarming smile, taking a hesitant step forward and holding out a small hand, only to wince and try rid it of what appeared to be a smudge of white paint. ‘We – we spoke on the phone,’ she continued, becoming more hesitant, when he didn’t say anything, but continuing to stare without blinking and making no move to take her hand.
It took some time for the sand to leave his throat and for him to find the words, like dregs at the bottom of a jam jar that he scraped out. He went to shake her hand but she’d already withdrawn it. ‘Yes. Um, welcome,’ he added, hastily, though he wasn’t sure that she actually was. As he continued to stare he realised her eyes weren’t exactly the same as Marianne’s. They were slightly darker and the gaze was not quite as piercing. But the shape of them, combined with the lines of her face, was achingly similar. It was a gut punch and he swallowed.
‘You have a sweet dog,’ she said, like an offering.
‘He isn’t really mine.’ She frowned and he explained. ‘He’s his own creature.’
She smiled as if she liked the thought of that.
‘Thank you for seeing me,’ she said. ‘I can’t tell you how much I appreciate it.’
‘You look like her,’ he said, the words tumbling out of him, like runaway coins.
‘I do?’ she breathed.
He nodded, then bit his bottom lip. ‘What I have to say – well, it isn’t going to be easy.’
‘I didn’t think it would.’ She nodded, running a hand over her messy top knot, wincing as she felt how much it teetered to the side like the leaning tower of Pisa. ‘Ever since I found out that my mother was adopted, my head has been in a spin. It’s like I haven’t been able to find firm ground,’ she admitted. ‘Especially considering the reason why she was given away. I mean, I suppose, no one wanted her to know what her real mother had done.’
It took a moment for her words to sink in.
His spine turned to glass.
He had of course seen the resemblance but he assumed the girl was some distant relation, a great niece perhaps.
‘Marianne had no children,’ he breathed.
Sabine frowned. ‘She did. My mother, Marguerite. That’s how they tracked me down. Like I said, I had no idea she was adopted.’
He stared at her, while his stomach dived. ‘I had no idea, either. She never s—’ He stopped himself; since when had Marianne ever told him the full facts? Everything with her was a collection of half truths and puzzles. Even back then it had tormented him. It was just like her, he thought, even now, to keep surprising him, even in death.
Sabine frowned, finding herself blushing. A small thought seemed to flit across her face and she began to ask, rather clumsily, ‘Um. Are you – erm, implying that you and ah, her… were in a relationship?’
Monsieur Géroux started to change colour starting with his neck, and spreading to his ears; a bright pink. His eyes widened and to her surprise he let out a short bark of laughter. ‘Oh no.’
At her frown, he half laughed, half smiled. ‘I would have liked that… back then,’ he admitted. ‘Most would have, she was beautiful. But I was much younger than her at the time. I was barely fifteen, and she was in her mid-twenties. All I meant really was that I knew her in the years when my brother, Henri, and I worked in her restaurant and we were very close. Or at least I thought we were. Perhaps she was pregnant and she didn’t say anything, maybe she gave birth after—’
‘After she fled the restaurant you mean? I assumed, well, that the authorities would have found her quite quickly afterwards … and killed her.’
‘Perhaps, it’s just a thought, and I don’t know how long exactly it took for them to find her – all I know is that it wasn’t immediate, it took a few weeks, or months even, before they tracked her down… she could have given birth during that time.’
She nodded, then frowned. ‘Was she involved with anyone before then?’
A shadow passed over his eyes and he said, ‘Not that I knew of.’
Sabine wondered if there was something else to that. Something he wasn’t saying.
He went to put the closed sign on the store door, then invited her to take a seat at his desk, pulling out a chair for her.
