‘I saw her last week. We had fun. Better that last week was
the last time.’
‘I would have wanted whatever extra time I could have
gotten.’
‘It was always going to be an arbitrary date,’ I said. ‘I could
have gone yesterday, in the afternoon, maybe. Now I’d be
wishing I had stayed for the evening. If I had stayed for the
evening, I’d be wishing I had stayed until midnight.’
‘You were in here with me at midnight. I feel bad about that,
tOO.’
‘Don’t,’ I said. ‘I don’t feel bad about it. My mother wouldn’t,
either. She was French, after all. If she’d known those were my
options, she’d have insisted.’
‘You’re just saying that.’
Nell, I guess she wasn’t very broadminded. But she always
wanted whatever made us happy.’
314
‘Did she give up because she was left alone?’
I shook my head. ‘She wanted to be left alone so she could
give up.’
Summer said nothing.
‘We’re leaving,’ I said. ‘We’ll get a night flight back.’
‘California?’
‘East coast first,’ I said. ‘There are things I need to check.’
‘What things?’ she said.
I didn’t tell her. She would have laughed, and right then I
couldn’t have handled laughter.
Summer packed her bag and came back to my room with
me. I sat on the bed and played with the string on Monsieur
Lamonnier’s box.
%Vhat’s that?’ she said.
‘Something some old guy brought around. He said it’s some
thing that should be found with my mother’s stuff.’
‘What’s in it?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘So open it.’
I shoved it across the counterpane. ‘You open it.’
I watched her small neat fingers work on the tight old knot.
Her clear nail varnish flashed in the light. She got the string off
and lifted the lid. It was a shallow box made out of the kind of
thick sturdy cardboard you don’t see much any more. Inside
were three things. There was a smaller box, like a jewel case. It
was made of cardboard faced with dark blue watermarked
paper. There was a book. And there was a cheese cutter. It was
a simple length of wire with a handle on each end. The handles
were turned from dark old wood. You could see a similar thing
in any picerie in France. Except this one had been restrung.
The wire was too thick for cheese. It looked like piano wire. It
was curled and corroded, like it had been stored for a very long
time.
‘What is it?’ Summer said.
‘Looks like a garrotte,’ I said.
‘The book is in French,’ she said. ‘I can’t read it:’
She passed it to me. It was a printed book with a thin paper
dust jacket. Not a novel. Some kind of a non-fiction memoir.
315
The corners of the pages were foxed and stained with age. The
whole thing smelled musty. The title was something to do with
railroads. I opened it up and took a look. After the title page was
a map of the French railroad system in the 1930s. The opening
chapter seemed to be about how all the lines in the north
squeezed down through Paris and then fanned out again to
points south. You couldn’t travel anywhere without transiting
the capital. It made sense to me. France was a relatively small
country with a very big city in it. Most nations did it the same
way. The capital city was always the centre of the spiderweb.
I flipped to the end of the book. There was a photograph of
the author on the back flap of the dust jacket. The photograph
was of a forty-years-younger Monsieur Lamonnier. I recognized
him with no difficulty. The blurb underneath the picture said he
had lost both legs in the battles of May 1940. I recalled the stiff
way he had sat on my mother’s sofa. And his walking sticks.
He must have been using prosthetics. Wooden legs. What I
had assumed were bony knees must have been complicated
mechanical joints. The blurb went on to say he had built Le
Chemin de Fer Hurnain. The Human Railroad. He had been
awarded the Resistance Medal by President Charles de Gaulle,