as we reached a nearly invisible door in the white wall, a tiny latch barely discernible in the center molding. A boy eyed us as Marcelle leaned against it, and she quickly reached into her little purse and slipped a few coins into his hand.
With only a few workers at the end of the hallway, she hissed, “Don’t just gawk at them! Come on!” and pulled me through.
My pulse rising, I stood close to her as she shut the door behind us, trying to adjust my eyes to the dark.
“They use this corridor for formal functions, the types of to-dos where the staff are supposed to look as if they emerge from the walls,” she explained.
“Do they have to carry trays of champagne in the dark?” I asked, holding on to her shoulder.
“They do, but they’re used to it. They’ve got black eyes that can see in the dark.”
“How convenient.”
“The bedrooms are farther down, but the billiard room is just a few paces from here. It’s the first room in the men’s wing. Come, let’s see if our husbands are up to no good.”
Despite what that wretched Caroline had said, Victor hadn’t been “up to no good” since before we were married. He had changed. Marriage had changed him. Becoming a father even more so. And I doubted that an hour in a billiard room would reverse that.
Marcelle paused and put her ear to the wall. “Yes,” she said, reaching down to feel for a latch. “It’s just here.”
She placed her ear to the wall again, and when there was laughter loud enough for both of us to hear it, she flicked the latch and pressed the door the tiniest bit open.
I peeked in over her shoulder, staying back far enough so that if one of us tumbled in, it would be her. The room was beautiful, done out in a tropical dark wood that resembled mahogany. There were bookshelves lined with books, but all had light gray dust jackets on them, the titles written in cursive on the spines in brown ink. There was a large billiard table in the middle, and rattan chairs and couches with cream-colored cushions lined the walls. The table might have looked out of place if the felt was green, but it had been covered in gray instead, a light, handsome gray that matched the soft surroundings. It all had the look of an eternal summer, which, compared to Paris, Indochine was. I spotted Victor, cue in hand, waiting to take his shot. In his other hand was a tall glass of water, which meant that he definitely wanted to win.
I looked for Arnaud, but before I could spot him, I saw a young native woman perched on one of the couches in the far corner. She was leaning against a man at least twice her age who looked like so many of the men in the room—tan and utterly carefree. He seemed far more interested in her than in the billiards.
“That’s the girl from the bar,” I whispered, taking a step back. “Is she allowed in here?”
“Allowed?” Marcelle said, pulling the door shut again as we spoke. “I’m sure she’s encouraged. Didn’t the women in Paris warn you about anything?”
I thought of my friends in Paris, all the right kind of women who said and did the correct things. They were, in Victor’s eyes, my close friends, but because I started life as a girl not saying or doing the right things, I never allowed myself to become truly close to any, growing even warier of them when I learned that they’d all been handpicked as companions for me by his mother. Perhaps with someone like Marcelle, someone who clearly did not care about etiquette or rules, I could find true friendship.
“The women I knew in Paris?” I replied. “They warned me about malaria.”
“Right, malaria…” she said, her voice trailing off. “It is a bothersome infection. But not as bothersome as syphilis. Come, our husbands seem focused on the game. How boring. Let’s go to the bedrooms. If you think this is scandalous, I’m sure worse is going on there. And it’s not even midnight.”
We crept farther down the hidden passage and turned a corner. In this section, a bare bulb hung from the ceiling, illuminating the numbers written on the unpainted walls.
“Now, you push one of the doors open. It won’t bite. Just be sure to do it slowly, and as soon as you see a sliver of light, stop.”