The Other Girl
by Ana Teresa Pereira
part 1
That afternoon, Marie wasn’t waiting for me when I arrived from London. Vince, our grey cat, had fallen asleep on the wall near the gate. It was November, the wind was swaying the last leaves of the trees, and the red twilight transformed the house, the garden, the quiet road into one of Marie’s paintings.
I had met her four years before in France. I had a room in an old, dark hotel, with a spiral staircase, near the Pont Neuf, in Paris. I had chosen it because of the prices and some verses that I remembered vaguely:
Sur le Pont Neuf j’ai rencontré
d’où sort cette chanson lointaine...
I got up early, wandered in the town, sat on street benches, went to galleries, looked for cheap editions of William Irish and John Dickson Carr books in the stalls by the river.
On a Saturday morning, I took a train and went down to a distant village, to visit the house of an Impressionist painter. It was a low house, painted dark pink, lost in a garden where the mimosa trees were starting to bloom. At the bottom of the garden there was a stone well and sitting on its border was a girl, completely still. The image had an unreal quality, a dream quality I always associated with Marie.
She was slim, her dark brown hair cut like a young boy’s, the blue cotton dress very short, the sandals with silver glittering. Small breasts, long tanned legs. And a naked, unforgettable face. She was twenty-two, but she looked seventeen or eighteen. We were alone in the garden. I remember the silence was deep, and silence is something else I always associate with Marie.
I was twenty-five, and I had just finished my first play. The first to be performed. A small theatre, a small company, two young unknown actors. It had been on for almost three months. Those days in France were well deserved. And somehow, I felt I had found Marie because of the play. I believe what we write can change reality, force reality, create encounters.
She was an art student and lived in an attic on the other side of the river. There wasn’t much space in her studio or in the bed on the corner hidden by a curtain. There wasn’t much space in my hotel room on the top of the spiral staircase. We were so close we could barely see each other, big plans, Marie’s eyes, Marie’s breasts, Marie’s breathing. Marie’s smell, the bitter smell of the mimosas that impregnated her skin.
When I came back to London, I couldn’t concentrate on my work. I thought of her all the time. I knew almost nothing about her. She was born in a city in the south of France, she had lived for a while in a trailer near an old castle; her father was a clown or a mime who was out of work from time to time. She had sold a few paintings, those reddish paintings, full of sunshine, inspired by Renoir, that I had seen in her studio.
She was terribly ignorant. I believe she knew all the paintings in the galleries, but hardly anything about the painters, the styles or Art History. She had grown up reading love stories by French female writers, and now she read thrillers. She liked cinema, especially old French movies; she was in love with Jean Louis Trintignant and Alain Delon.
One afternoon, after spending a few hours around a sentence in a play, I wore my trench coat and went out to eat something. She was on the other side of the street, near an antique shop, with one of her summer dresses and a grey raincoat and her silver sandals. The drops of rain in her head looked like diamonds.
I crossed the street and we fell into each other’s arms. “I want to stay with you.” I kissed her hair, her face. “My God, how I missed you.”
I took her to my room. I went to the station to fetch the suitcase she had left there.
We found a small cottage on the outskirts of London, with wisteria on the porch and a garden where lavender and bluebells grew. The countryside had the phantom somber beauty of the English landscape. When I arrived home from my work at a newspaper, she was waiting in the garden, with the cat I had given her, still a kitten, a little time after we got married.
That day, she was not waiting for me. I cuddled the cat, and he stayed on the wall. He liked me but he was, from the first day, Marie’s cat.
The door was not completely closed, and the foyer and the kitchen had a suspended look, as if Marie had gone out in a hurry. I took off my coat, washed my hands, and started preparing dinner. She must have gone to buy something before the shops closed.
A while later I saw her coming back, her slim figure, her dark blue coat and old jeans. She had worn her hair shoulder-length for a few years but some weeks before, without telling me, she had cut it short again.
She stopped by the wall and reached out to caress the cat. But then something happened that I couldn’t understand. He stepped back, his back arched, in a defensive movement. Marie smiled slightly and pushed the gate.
It was Marie, I recognized that face, those movements, those clothes. But for a moment I had the feeling that a stranger had just entered my house.
* * *
She was taking off her coat in the foyer. She pushed her hair behind her ears, in an automatic gesture, and came close to me. I thought her kiss was different, the lips dry, and her smell was different too, not that smell of mimosa, deeper than the cosmetics she used.
“A new perfume?”
She answered vaguely, “Yes.”
“What was that with the cat?”
She shrugged. “You know cats.”
“For a moment, it was as if he didn’t recognize you.”
In her eyes there was an amused sparkle. “Yes.”
“It’s strange.”
“I’ll make dinner.”
“It’s almost finished.”
She ate very little. I left her washing the dishes and staring at the window, the lacy white curtains a nice frame for the blooming shrub outside. I sat at the desk and started working on my play.
It was hard to believe I hadn’t written for years. I started writing when I was eight or nine, first short stories, then one-act plays... It had always been the only important thing in my life. Until I’d met Marie. But since I started again, I could hardly wait for those hours at the end of the day when I met my characters. The second act had turned out to be more difficult than the first one.
That was the problem with my plays. The first act was good, then they started to decay. Usually, I threw them off and began something new. But this time I had decided to rewrite the second and the third acts as many times as necessary. I missed the theatre. A wooden platform, some light focus, the body and the voice of two or three actors, and the world became almost understandable.
Marie always went to the bedroom after dinner and came back with her dark blue dressing gown and thick stockings and cuddled on the sofa reading, the cat sleeping on her legs. But that day she sat very tight, with the jeans and the dark green T-shirt, the black boots, her eyes fixed on the TV set, some detective series.
I hadn’t seen her work for a while. We had a pact, I never entered the shed she used as a studio, she never touched my notebooks or the printed pages on my desk.
I suddenly realized I missed her paintings, the twilight red and that light, the places where God had just passed. It was almost like seeing the world through Marie’s eyes... it made me feel closer to her, to the third secret, the one she herself didn’t know.
I had learnt that many years before, in a black and white English movie I had watched on TV. There are three secrets, the one we don’t tell anyone, the one we don’t tell even to ourselves and then the other one... I didn’t remember the story well, there was a house by the river and a little girl. Hayley Mills? No, Pamela Franklin, who wrote on a stone wall, with a piece of chalk, lines from King Lear, the reason why the seven stars are no more than seven... waiting for someone to write the following line.
We went to the bedroom at about midnight. I sat on the bed and watched her undress, the familiar movements, the long nightgown that, with her short hair, made her look like a novice. She cleaned her face with her cheap lotion that smelt of cherries and passed her fingers through her hair. It was so short she combed it only with her fingers.
Then she came to bed and opened the Charlotte Armstrong thriller that was on the bed table. She had told me the story vaguely. It was an old game: I tried to discover who the murderer was before she reached the end. But in Charlotte Armstrong books, we get to know who the criminal is in the first pages.
That night, she didn’t seem interested in the book; she read a few pages, dropped it on the rug and closed her eyes.
When I went to bed, I had again that strange feeling... With her eyes shut, she seemed different... The nightgown was closed to the neck, and that was unusual. I opened the first button, expecting to see her smile and open her arms, but she pretended to be asleep.
* * *
Copyright © 2023 by Ana Teresa Pereira
Editor’s note: Sur le Pont Neuf j’ai rencontré is the first verse in the poem of the same title in Louis Aragon’s Le Roman inachevé (1956).
