Century Rain Part 10

not going to make it. If I stayed with them, I wasn't going to make it either."

"Is that how you felt when you walked out on me and Custine?"

"Yes," she answered, without a moment's hesitation.

Floyd eased the car past the broken-down lorry, touching a finger to the rim of his hat as the guards

pointed the barrels of their guns in the vague direction of the Mathis. "Well, at least you're honest."

"I find it helps," Greta replied.

They had their papers ready. Floyd watched the guard at the checkpoint grunt through his doc.u.ments,

then pa.s.s them back with a look of pursed disapproval, as if Floyd had committed an error of detail but was being let off with a caution. They were always like that, no matter how spick and span the paperwork. He supposed it was what got them through the day.

"Here," Greta said, pa.s.sing her doc.u.ments over Floyd.

The guard took the papers, examining them under torchlight. He moved to hand them back, then

hesitated, taking a closer look. He licked a finger and paged through Greta's pa.s.sport, pausing here and there like someone examining a collection of rare stamps or moths.

"Been travelling a lot for a German girl," he said in heavily accented French.

"That's what a pa.s.sport's for," Greta replied, her Parisian accent flawless.

Floyd felt ice run through his veins and reached for Greta's knee, squeezing it gently, willing her to

silence.

"A mouth on you, too," the guard said.

"It comes in handy. I'm a singer."

"You should learn some manners, in that case." The guard handed the papers back, making a show of giving them to Floyd rather than Greta. "This pa.s.sport expires next year," he said. "Under the new arrangements, not everyone will find it easy to obtain a replacement. Especially mouthy German girls. Perhaps you should reconsider your att.i.tude."

"I doubt it'll be a problem for me," Greta said.

"We'll see." The guard nodded at his colleague and slapped a hand on the window pillar. "Move on, and learn your girlfriend some manners."

Floyd did not breathe normally until they had crossed the Seine, putting the river between them and the checkpoint. "That was...interesting," he said.

"Buffoons."

"Buffoons we have to live with," Floyd snapped. Nervous, he crunched the gears. "Anyway, what did you mean, that it won't be a problem for you?"

Greta shook her head. "It meant nothing."

"Sounded like it meant something to you."

"Just drive, Floyd. I'm tired, all right? I'm tired and I'm not looking forward to any of this."

Floyd aimed the car towards Montparna.s.se. It started raining, first a light drizzle that softened the city lights into pastel smudges and then a harder rain that had people scurrying for the shelter of restaurants and bars. Floyd tried finding something on the car wireless, sliding past a momentary burst of Gershwin, but when he reversed the dial and tried to find the station again all he heard was static.

Floyd helped Greta carry her things up the stairs, into the spare room next to the small kitchen on the first floor of her aunt's house. The entire place was cold and smelled faintly of mildew. The light fittings either emitted a feeble, stuttering glow, or failed to work at all. The telephone was dead, as Greta had claimed. The floorboards sagged beneath Floyd's feet, sodden with damp and beginning to rot. The broken skylight above the stairwell had been repaired with a piece of corrugated iron against which the rain drummed sharp-nailed, impatient fingers.

"Put my things on the bed," Greta said, indicating the tiny bunk-sized cot squeezed into one corner of the room. "I'll go and see how Aunt Marguerite's doing."

"You want me to come along?"

"No," she said, after thinking about it. "No, but thanks anyway. From now on I think it's best if she only sees familiar faces."

"I thought I counted as a familiar face."

She looked at him, but said nothing.

"I'll see if I can sc.r.a.pe up something to eat," Floyd said.

"You don't have to wait if you don't want to."

Floyd placed her things on the bed, along with the tin box containing Susan White's papers. "I'm not going anywhere. At least not until this weather clears up."

They had been let into the house by a young woman who rented a small room on the third floor. She was a French girl called Sophie, a stenographer by profession, with prescription gla.s.ses and a nervous, braying laugh that culminated in a nasal snort. Floyd filed her under "perpetual spinster," and then felt immediately guilty when Greta told him about the girl.

"She's been an angel," Greta said, when Sophie was out of earshot. "Buying food, cleaning, writing letters, generally taking care of my aunt's affairs...all the while still paying her rent. But she's been offered a job in Nancy, and she can't delay taking it up any longer. It's been good of her to stay this long."

"And that's it? No other relatives but yourself?"

"No one who can be bothered," Greta said.

While Greta was upstairs with Marguerite, Sophie showed Floyd around the enamelled metal cabinets in the kitchen. The place was spotlessly clean, but most of the shelves were bare. Abandoning any thoughts of eating, Floyd made himself tea and waited in the spare room, taking in the cracks in the plaster and the tears and stains in the fifty-year-old wallpaper. From somewhere else in the old building he heard very low voices, or rather one very low voice holding up one end of a conversation.

Sophie poked her head around the door and said she was going out to see a film with her boyfriend. Floyd wished her well and then listened to her footsteps descend the creaking old staircase, followed by the click as she closed the front door without slamming it.

As quietly as he dared, he left the spare room and climbed the stairs to the next floor. The door to Marguerite's bedroom was slightly ajar and he could hear Greta's voice more clearly now, reading aloud from the local pages of a newspaper, bringing Marguerite up to date on Paris life. Floyd edged closer to the door, freezing as he stepped on a creaking floorboard. Greta paused in her monologue, then turned the page over before continuing.

Floyd reached the door. He looked through the gap and saw Greta sitting on a bedside chair, one leg hooked over the other, the paper spread across her lap. Behind her, he could just make out the bedridden form of her aunt. She was so frail, so drained of life, that at first glance the bed just looked as if it had yet to be made, the bunching of the blankets only accidentally suggestive of a human form. He couldn't see Marguerite's head from the doorway; it was hidden behind Greta's back. But he could see one of her arms, poking like a thin, dry stick from the sleeve of her nightgown. Greta held her aunt's hand in her own as she read from the newspaper, stroking the old woman's fingers with infinite kindness. It made something catch in Floyd's throat, and for the second time that evening he felt ashamed of himself.

He stepped back across the hallway, avoiding the bad floorboard, and returned to Greta's room. This couldn't be Marguerite: not the lively woman he had known only a handful of years ago. So little time couldn't have done so much harm to her.

She had been suspicious when he had first started dating her niece; even more suspicious when it turned out that he wanted her for his band. But by turns the two of them had come to a grudging state of mutual understanding, and that chill had thawed into an unlikely friendship. Oftentimes, when Greta had gone to bed, Floyd had stayed up playing chequers with Marguerite, or talking about the old films from the twenties and thirties that both of them loved so much. He had lost touch with her during the last couple of years, especially once Greta had moved into a flat of her own on the other side of town, and now he felt a wave of sadness pa.s.s through him like a sudden chemical change in his own blood.

Looking for a distraction, he opened the tin again and took out the postcard, noting once more the deliberate way in which the words "silver" and "rain" had been underlined. If "silver rain" was indeed a message-and he had no real evidence that it was-what did it mean to the mysterious Caliskan, to whom the postcard was addressed?

He put the card aside as Greta came into the bedroom.

"I told you not to wait," she said.

"It's still raining," Floyd replied. "Anyway, I was just going through this stuff again." He looked into Greta's face, noticing that her eyes were wet with tears and fatigue. "How is she?" he asked.

"She's still alive, which is something."

Floyd smiled politely, although privately he wondered if the kindest thing would not have been for the woman to have died before Greta arrived. "I made some tea," he said. "The kettle's still warm."

Greta sat down next to him on the bed. "Do you mind if I smoke instead?"

Floyd stuffed the postcard back into the tin. "Go right ahead."

Greta lit her cigarette and smoked it wordlessly for at least a minute before speaking again. "The doctors

call it a respiratory obstruction," she said, then took another drag on the cigarette. "They mean lung cancer, although they won't come out and say it. The doctors say there's nothing anyone can do for her. It's just a question of time." She laughed hollowly. "She says it's all the cigarettes she smoked. She told me I should stop. I told her I already had, for the sake of my singing voice."

"I think we can allow you one or two white lies," Floyd said.

"Anyway, maybe it wasn't the cigarettes. Twenty years ago they had her working on the armament

production lines. A lot of women her age are unwell now, because of all the asbestos they had to work with."

"I can believe it," Floyd said.

"Sophie spoke to the doctor yesterday. They say a week now, maybe ten days."

Floyd took her hand and squeezed it. "I'm sorry. I can't imagine what this is like for you. If there was

anything I could do-"

"There isn't anything anyone can do," Greta said bitterly. "That's the point." She took another hit from

the cigarette. "Every morning the doctor comes around and gives her some morphine. That's all they can do."

Floyd looked around the dismal little room. "Are you going to be all right here? You don't sound as if

you're in the best state of mind to be cooped up in here. If you've said goodnight to your aunt, she won't know if you leave and come back first thing in the-"

She cut him off. "I'm staying here. It's where I told her I'd be."

"It was just an offer."

"I know." Greta waved her cigarette distractedly. "I didn't mean to sound ungrateful. But even if I hadn't promised to stay here, I don't need any more complications in my life at the moment."

"And I count as a complication?"

"Right now, yes."

Without wanting to sound confrontational, Floyd said, "Greta, there must have been a reason for that letter. It wasn't just because you needed a ride to Montparna.s.se, surely?"

"No, it wasn't just that."

"What, then? Something to do with the way you spoke to that jacka.s.s at the checkpoint?"

"You noticed?"

"I couldn't help it."

Greta smiled thinly, perhaps remembering the way she had spoken: that small, meaningless instant of triumph. "He said that mouthy German girls might have trouble with their pa.s.sports in a year or two.

Well, he's right-I'm sure of that. But it won't matter to me."

"Why not?"

"Because I won't be here. I'm taking the flying boat to America as soon as I'm finished here with my aunt."

"America?" Floyd echoed, as if he might have misheard her.

"I knew it wasn't happening with you and Custine. As I said, that's why I left Paris. But what I didn't