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 …”