“Run?” said Georgine. “But Docteur, my shoes …”
“Oh come on Georgine, it’ll be fun,” said Molineu. “You can have an old pair of Jeannette’s. All right, everyone ready? Get on your feet Jojo. Don’t be morose.”
They could not help laughing as their linens turned transparent, and at the parasols, which did not function as umbrellas at all but were completely useless against the downpour. Midhat tried not to look at Jeannette’s dress which, going grey, was sticking to her waist, revealing the socket of her navel. He increased his pace to catch up with Docteur Molineu and left the women shrieking behind. They reached the house out of breath and dispersed to change.
When Midhat came back downstairs, the door to the cream salon was open; he could see Jeannette inside, standing with her back to him. Courage flashed. He stepped in and, after bolting the door, turned and jumped to find her already right behind him. She laughed, then he laughed, and he took her body in his hands, and to the soft wet of her parted lips his heart reacted violently.
Grief excused intimacy, but was also real and demanded it. Even their spasms of guilt, felt on occasion over the next few days, could only be assuaged with further closeness. It was a miracle they kept it a secret. Their colour was always rising in company, they could not help smiling at each other across full rooms, and clasping fingers just out of sight, under the skirt of a tablecloth or behind backs as they filed through a doorway. And yet the most Docteur Molineu seemed to notice were the shadows and red fever spots that appeared beneath Midhat’s eyes.
“Nothing is worth losing sleep over,” he said, saluting Midhat and wishing him good luck before class. “Remember they are only exams. It will turn out fine in the end. And if the worst comes to the worst and you do need to repeat the year,” he opened his arms, “we will still be here. Provided we are not bombed, of course. All right, off you go.”
All day long Midhat’s insomniac brain vaulted between euphoria and fear, and Docteur Molineu’s sympathetic speeches only doubled the terror of confronting him. He would postpone the proposal to Jeannette, at least until the end of the academic year, and yet the prospect remained an agony even at that distance. The rules of guest and host were so ingrained, he knew the shame of trespass in his bones. From this again he sought refuge in Jeannette’s lips and whispers, and her head resting softly on his shoulder.
It was also during this period that he discovered a side of the Molineu house that was entirely new to him. For the first time he understood just how limited his experience of the building had been, confined, as a guest, to his bedroom and the ground floor, and that single glimpse he once stole of Docteur Molineu’s study. The house was far larger than he had imagined and most rooms were, like the cream salon, closed off with sheets thrown over the furniture, turning them into secret white ranges, labyrinths of approximating silhouettes that evoked a past with imprecision, more pungent, somehow, for how they forced the imagination to carve and colour and populate. Midhat’s soared off, conjuring ghosts of inhabited rooms, always projecting this imagined past onto an imagined future. In the corners, dust collected in spirals. When Georgine creaked along the corridors the pair of lovers hid beneath the dusty sheets, biting their fingers and stifling their breath under the tinkle of Georgine’s quarter bar of soap dipping into the bucket.
Only with hands and lips did he and Jeannette touch, and their restraint became an exquisite torment. Fingers on palms, fingers on faces. They deliberately avoided their bedrooms: at most one would teeter on the threshold while the other retrieved something, but even that felt dangerously close. Sometimes in a frenzy Midhat did pull her to him, and bruised her lips so that the skin around her mouth turned pink, and seeing the mark he had made he would pull her to him again, and she responded easily. But mostly they delighted in the agony of resisted desire, which being resisted was sustained, and in this mutual abnegation they colluded like thieves.
Further along the upstairs corridor, beyond Georgine’s door and a dim bathroom full of brass, a narrow set of stairs led to an entire third floor. Midhat was amazed. The windows up there were so small they did not from the outside even suggest a space tall enough to stand up in. Yet two unused rooms of full height held a miscellany of objects, and a third was a slope-roofed attic of boxes and abandoned furniture, much of it rickety and broken, and a little alcove with a velvet chair where Jeannette spent her time searching, “among my mother’s things,” she said, pointing at a glass-fronted cabinet through whose windows, smoky with dust, loomed shelves of trinkets, porcelain ornaments, printed books, a candlestick with a bare stub of old wax, and something made of lace bundled in the corner.
It was a morning love. They were forced to leave the house before noon, he to go to the Faculty, she to the convent or to stand in line for the bread ration. And so it was a love with morning’s freshness, and they never saw the shadows of evening seep through those unclean windows. Midhat often woke before dawn, and in that hour before the sun rose caught Jeannette in the corridor, and they whispered in the dark unselfconscious with sleep. Then the day began in earnest, and with a thumping heart Midhat staggered until evening on a precipice of exhaustion.
Aside from confronting Docteur Molineu, the other terror, of course, was his own father. That reckoning too must be postponed, at least until after he had spoken to Molineu, perhaps even until the end of the war. He fantasised about spurning his inheritance and striking out on his own. Each of these thoughts rippled with fear. At least Teta would love Jeannette, he could be certain of that. In the afternoons over his textbooks he pushed a finger into his soft cheek and felt his teeth between his eye socket and jaw. All of it must be postponed, all of it: June was upon them now, the holiday was in sight, and regardless of whatever Docteur Molineu said about staying on longer the examinations required serious work if he were to pass into the second year.
A physics practice paper he completed in the library one afternoon was returned the next day with a 45 scrawled on the first page. The pass grade was 70. He entered the lecture theatre in a trance, and sitting at the back heard the lesson only intermittently, as though the lecturer’s voice were carried to him on a fitful wind. When he emerged an hour later he felt someone tap him on the arm. It was Samuel Cogolati.
“Hello, Midhat.” He smiled, grimly. “I just want to say how sorry I am. I am very, very sorry. Unexpected but, I mean, these things …”
Midhat looked down at the 45 on his physics paper. “How on earth did you know?”
“Pardon?”
“I only received it this morning,” said Midhat. “Oh,” he caught himself, “you are talking about Laurent. Oh yes! It is really terrible. We are in despair. Thank you, Samuel. I, I really appreciate it.”
“But there’s another thing, wait. Would you consider, I was wondering, would you like to study together?”
“Study together?”
“I enjoyed our time in the library when we were researching psychiatry. And I was impressed by your interest, your curiosity in these different areas of medical science. I think that you and I, we could make revision for the examinations rather pleasurable.”
Cogolati’s large nostrils spread open with his smile. Midhat hesitated. Then, he held out his hand, and as he shook Cogolati’s the thought warmed up in his brain that this man had been sent to save him, and Cogolati began to chortle at this eagerness, now shaking his entire arm, saying I’m so pleased, I’m so pleased.