“She had been asked to surrender nothing she possessed. Only something she had never considered herself capable of losing.”
Émilie descended the staircase at a distance she judged sufficient to avoid the appearance of pursuit.
The woman who had greeted her in the corridor had already vanished. At the foot of the stairs there was no sound except the faint movement of crockery from the breakfast room. The front door stood open upon the forecourt, and for a moment Émilie considered going outside. She wanted to see whether her car remained where she had left it. She wanted, more urgently, to discover whether she wanted to leave.
She found that she did not.
This was a fact about herself, and she recorded it mentally without attempting to justify it.
Madame Delorme was pouring coffee when Émilie entered. Clara sat near the window, reading a small book whose pages she turned with unhurried attention. There was a place laid for Émilie, though none had been assigned to her.
“Good morning,” Madame Delorme said.
Émilie looked at her before answering.
“I met myself in the corridor.”
“Did you?”
“She spoke to me.”
Clara closed her book, keeping one finger between the pages.
“What did she say?”
“She hoped I'd slept well.”
“And had you?” Clara asked.
“That isn't quite the point.”
“No,” Clara agreed. “But it's a courteous question.”
Émilie sat down. She was aware of an urge to strike the table, not in anger exactly, but to make the physical world produce a consequence beyond dispute. Instead she took the coffee Madame Delorme offered her.
“Was she another resident?”
“I don't know,” said Madame Delorme.
“Was she me?”
The older woman set down the coffee pot.
“What would you need to establish that she wasn't?”
“Different fingerprints. Different memories. A demonstrable divergence of physical history.”
“Would any of those establish that she wasn't you?”
“They would distinguish us.”
“Certainly.”
“That would be something.”
“It would,” Madame Delorme said, and passed her the bread.
Émilie felt that she was being treated with a degree of seriousness bordering upon cruelty. No one had attempted to soothe her with a poor explanation. No one had even supplied the comfort of disbelief. They were allowing her to confront the insufficiency of her question.
She buttered a slice of bread with unnecessary precision.
“Have either of you met her?”
“I've met a woman resembling you,” Clara said. “I don't know whether she's the one you encountered.”
“When?”
“I don't think I can give you a useful date.”
“Then tell me an unhelpful one.”
Clara smiled, but there was sadness in it.
“Tomorrow,” she said.
Émilie laid down the knife.
There was a silence. From outside came the sound of a bird calling, twice, with an interval sufficiently regular that she found herself counting it. The ordinary world had not withdrawn. She could hear the light contact of Madame Delorme's cup upon its saucer. The bread was warm. Nothing in the scene suggested an intention to frighten her.
“May I examine the two notebooks after breakfast?” she asked.
“Of course,” said Madame Delorme.
“And after that I'd like to know what you mean by the arrangements you mentioned last night.”
“I'd be glad to explain what I can.”
Émilie did not ask whether that would be much.
In her room the notebooks lay side by side. She had deliberately refrained from distinguishing them before leaving; now she marked their covers A and B in pencil, careful to make no assumption about which was original.
Both were manufactured by the same firm. Both had the faint indentation on the lower right corner caused by her habit of resting a hand upon the page. Both contained her earlier work, including a computational error she had corrected in September. The error appeared in precisely the same handwriting, with precisely the same impatient stroke through the offending term.
After the last page she remembered writing, the accounts diverged.
Notebook A described her arrival at the House, the encounter at the staircase window, dinner, the library, and the voice beside her bed. Its account differed from her recollection in several details, but these were not decisive. She could have been mistaken about the order of questions at dinner; she could have forgotten a remark by Belloc.
Notebook B described the same arrival and the same staircase window. Then, following her observation of the departing woman, its narrative became first-person and continuous in a different direction.
She had left. She remembered the gravel beneath her shoes, the reverse movement of the car, the narrow road through the chestnut trees. In the notebook she had written of driving back to Paris, arriving after dark and finding a stranger's clothing in her wardrobe. The apartment had belonged to someone else for years. Madame Fournier had not recognised her.
Émilie turned the pages with increasing care.
There were sketches of rooms she had never seen. A receipt from a café was copied into the margin. There was an account of a telephone conversation with Laurent Morel, in which he had asked why she was telephoning him after her funeral.
She remembered none of these events as a sequence. Yet individual details rose to recognition with the peculiar intimacy of memory. The weight of the apartment keys. A bruise on the back of her wrist. The smell of rain upon the boulevard. The sound of Laurent's voice when he said her name.
That last recollection frightened her more than the rest.
She telephoned him.
“Émilie?” he answered. “Are you all right?”
“Yes. I have a peculiar question.”
“Only one?”
“Have I spoken to you since yesterday?”
A pause.
“Not that I recall.”
“Did I telephone you in the evening?”
“No.”
“Have you heard anything concerning my death?”
The silence was longer.
“What on earth are you talking about?”
“A hypothesis I'm attempting to eliminate.”
“Then eliminate it quickly. You sound exhausted.”
She thanked him, assured him she was not in danger, and ended the call. His denial did not establish that the written account was false, but it supplied one independent fact consistent with her ordinary history. She felt grateful for it.
She read the final page of Notebook B.
I returned to the House because I could not establish that the person who had gone home was the person who had left.
Beneath it was a sentence written more heavily:
I have not come back in order to recover myself.
Émilie closed the book.
For some time she contemplated the two pencil letters on the covers. A and B. The labels were arbitrary, which was the reason she had chosen them. Nevertheless she already felt a faint preference for A, as though assigning a symbol had allowed one account to acquire a priority that the evidence did not justify.
She erased the letters.
Madame Delorme came at eleven, having knocked and waited to be invited in. She carried a folded linen garment over one arm.
“There is a room in which some of us undertake a small exercise,” she said. “You asked about our arrangements.”
“Is it a religious ceremony?”
“No.”
“An experiment?”
“Not in the sense of a controlled investigation.”
“Then what is it?”
“We call it a renunciation. The word is convenient and rather misleading.”
Émilie glanced at the linen.
“Do I have to wear that?”
“Not at all. Some people find that changing clothes helps them separate the occasion from their ordinary occupations. You may wear whatever you please. You may also decline entirely.”
“What is to be renounced?”
“The expectation that your experiences must occupy one uniquely correct order.”
Émilie looked at her.
“I'm not sure that's something one can renounce.”
“Neither am I. Not by assertion, at any rate.”
“Will it alter my memory?”
“I can't promise that it won't.”
“Will it be reversible?”
“You may stop whenever you wish. I cannot promise that you will forget what you come to understand.”
“Understanding a proposition is not the same as having one's mind altered.”
“No. But once you've established that a proposition is false, can you simply choose to believe it again?”
Émilie shook her head.
“Not sincerely.”
“Then some things cannot be undone by an act of preference.”
“That doesn't make this safe.”
“No,” said Madame Delorme. “It doesn't.”
Her candour had a disagreeable effect. Émilie wanted the older woman to offer some account of the risks, some confident distinction between what could be lost and what would remain. Instead she stood at a respectful distance, refusing to make the choice easier by pretending to know more than she did.
“Why do you do it?” Émilie asked.
“Because it has consequences. Some of us find them useful.”
“Who devised it?”
“No one I know.”
“Who gives permission?”
“You do.”
Madame Delorme unfolded the garment on the end of the bed. It was a simple linen dress, long-sleeved, pale and without fastening at the throat. Its cut was modest. There was nothing to distinguish it from ordinary clothing except the deliberate absence of ornament.
Émilie touched the fabric. It was exceptionally soft.
“I'd like to change,” she said.
“Very well. I'll wait outside.”
When the door closed, Émilie removed her jacket and dress. She was accustomed to choosing her appearance: the line of a tailored coat, the restraint of an appropriate blouse, the degree to which her clothes allowed her to disappear into professional competence. The linen had none of those intentions. It settled against her skin with a lightness that made her unusually aware of her shoulders and the movement of her arms.
She felt neither disguised nor transformed. Merely less prepared to present an account of herself.
When Madame Delorme returned, Émilie asked whether the garment was worn correctly.
“Yes. May I straighten the shoulder?”
Émilie consented.
The older woman approached and adjusted a fold of linen where it had turned beneath the collar. Her fingers touched the side of Émilie's neck briefly. The contact was practical, slight, and wholly sufficient to interrupt her train of thought.
Madame Delorme withdrew her hand.
“There.”
Émilie had the absurd wish that she would find some further defect requiring attention.
She recognised the wish instantly. She was not embarrassed by attraction as such. She had desired women before, and men, and found nothing in that fact requiring metaphysical explanation. What disturbed her was the readiness with which she had wanted this particular woman to decide something on her behalf.
“Thank you,” she said.
“You're welcome.”
The answer was so ordinary that Émilie almost laughed.
The room was on the ground floor, beyond the small sitting room. It contained two chairs, a table and a wooden box with a hinged lid. Its window looked out upon a gravel path and an unremarkable stand of trees. There was no altar, no diagram upon the floor, no inscription or emblem.
Madame Delorme closed the door but did not lock it.
“Before we begin, I should like you to understand one thing,” she said. “Nothing you do here will signify obedience to me. I can describe the exercise, but I have no authority over you.”
“You seem anxious to make that distinction.”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“Because people sometimes mistake relief from deciding for proof that someone else is entitled to decide.”
Émilie felt her cheeks warm. She disliked the possibility that her attraction had been so easily recognised.
Madame Delorme indicated the chairs.
“Choose either one.”
“Which would you prefer?”
“I have no preference.”
Émilie knew that the answer ought to satisfy her. Instead she felt a small, sharp disappointment.
“You would find it easier if I chose for you,” Madame Delorme said.
“Perhaps.”
“Then I'm afraid you'll have to tolerate the difficulty.”
Émilie chose the chair nearest the window. She sat with her hands upon her knees. Madame Delorme took the opposite chair.
“Take off your watch, if you please. You can keep it within reach.”
Émilie placed the watch on the table. The older woman did not touch it.
“Tell me something you expect to do tomorrow.”
“I intend to telephone Laurent and discuss the proof.”
“Is that a prediction or a decision?”
“An intention. Subject to revision.”
“Good. Describe the telephone call as you expect it.”
Émilie described her opening remarks, Laurent's likely impatience, and the objections she expected him to raise. She distinguished probabilities from certainties and declined to invent details merely to please the exercise.
Madame Delorme listened attentively.
“Now change chairs and describe the same conversation as a recollection. You needn't believe it has happened.”
Émilie rose. As she passed the table she caught the faint scent of Madame Delorme's soap, something clean and almost medicinal. She felt the other woman's attention follow her. She sat opposite the window and began.
“I telephoned Laurent. He complained that I was speaking too quickly. He said the proof was sound but that I had concealed the difficulty in the definition of identity. I told him that was precisely the point.”
“What was the weather?”
“I don't know.”
“Then don't supply it.”
“I remember rain against the window,” Émilie said, and immediately stopped.
She had not chosen the detail. It had arrived with the unbidden completeness of recollection: the dark line of water upon the glass, the telephone warm against her hand, a pencil broken near the point.
She could have invented all three. The mind was capable of supplying elaborate images to an expectation. But the feeling of remembering was present before she had formed any intention to produce it.
Madame Delorme watched without speaking.
Émilie repeated the account, this time carefully distinguishing what she imagined from what appeared to arise unbidden. She discovered that the distinction could be made, but not always maintained. A sentence imagined as tomorrow's speech became, a moment later, something she felt certain she had heard yesterday.
She stopped.
“I don't like this.”
“Then we can finish.”
“I didn't say I wanted to finish.”
“No.”
Émilie looked at the watch on the table. Its second hand continued moving, brisk and indifferent.
“What is in the box?”
“I don't know.”
“May I open it?”
“Yes.”
“Is that part of the exercise?”
“Only if you choose to make it so.”
Émilie left it closed.
They continued for another twenty minutes, or what her watch subsequently reported as twenty minutes. There were no incantations. She made no vow. Madame Delorme neither praised her answers nor expressed disappointment. At several points she asked whether Émilie wished to stop, and at each Émilie chose to continue.
The effect was not spectacular. She experienced no vision and heard no voices. She remained conscious of the chair beneath her, the linen moving against her wrists, and the small sounds of the grounds beyond the window.
Yet there came a point at which the effort of assigning an experience to the future or the past seemed suddenly unnecessary.
Her thoughts did not become disorderly. On the contrary, they acquired an unusual clarity. She could consider two accounts without the habitual impulse to identify one as belonging to her proper history. She was aware of her breathing, of the warmth in her face, of a gentle trembling in the muscles of her hands. There was pleasure in the release, unmistakably bodily and unexpectedly intimate.
She looked across at Madame Delorme.
She wanted the older woman to speak. Not to explain, but to tell her what to do next. The wish was so strong that she almost expressed it.
Madame Delorme remained silent.
Émilie understood the courtesy of that silence and resented it.
At last she said, “I think I would like to stop.”
“Very well.”
“Is that all?”
“That's all that was asked.”
“And the box?”
“It can remain closed.”
Émilie rose. She felt an obscure disappointment, as though an elaborate rite had been interrupted before reaching the moment that would make it worthwhile. She looked again at the table and understood that the disappointment belonged to her expectations, not to anything Madame Delorme had promised.
“Would you prefer that I told you what to do?” the older woman asked.
“No.”
“Then why do you look disappointed?”
Émilie considered longer than she wished.
“Because I'd like to know whether you wanted me to do it.”
“Would that make it easier?”
“Perhaps.”
“Then I think it would be unkind of me to tell you.”
They walked together as far as the staircase. Émilie had recovered the watch and her ordinary clothes, but she remained in the linen garment, carrying her folded dress over one arm.
“I find you attractive,” she said without preamble.
Madame Delorme stopped.
“Thank you for telling me.”
“That isn't quite what troubles me.”
“What does?”
“I should like you to tell me what to do.”
“And would you obey?”
Émilie looked at her.
“I think I might.”
“Then I must be particularly careful what I ask of you.”
It was not the answer Émilie had wanted. It was perhaps the only one she could respect.
“Does it trouble you?” she asked.
“Your attraction? No. I don't wish to encourage you to confuse it with what happened in the room.”
“I don't.”
“Then we understand one another.”
Émilie wondered whether that was true. She did not pursue it. There was something intolerably delicate about the exchange, and she feared that another question would convert it into a dispute over definitions.
Madame Delorme touched her forearm briefly, a gesture of parting rather than possession.
“Rest, if you wish.”
Émilie climbed the stairs alone.
In her room she changed into ordinary clothes. The familiar fabric and fastening of her dress restored a professional outline to her body. She felt no less herself. Yet the reassurance was oddly superficial, as though her appearance had been returned without the assumption that it identified the only person entitled to wear it.
She opened her notebook.
At the top of the page she wrote: No observable effect established.
Then, after some thought: Marked subjective relief. Strong attraction to M.D. Neither constitutes evidence of a causal mechanism.
She considered the last sentence and added: Attraction predates the exercise.
The precision pleased her.
At dinner she sat near Belloc. They discussed the theorem without reference to the afternoon's proceedings. He suggested a possible weakness in her definition of experiential equivalence, and she answered that the objection relied upon treating a remembered sequence as uniquely privileged.
He smiled.
“That's what you told me tomorrow,” he said.
Émilie stared at him.
“I'm sorry?”
He looked embarrassed.
“I beg your pardon. I meant that we may have discussed it before.”
She remembered the conversation with sudden exactness: the arrangement of the table, the wineglass by her right hand, the dull light beyond the window. Henri would shortly ask whether the room had always possessed two doors, although she could see only one. Clara would drop a spoon, and Madame Sorel would say that she'd heard it fall before it reached the floor.
Émilie looked down at her plate.
She was tempted to arrange the scene so that the recollection would not be fulfilled. She could refuse to continue speaking; she could change seats; she could simply leave.
“I'd rather not discuss it further tonight,” she said.
“Certainly.”
Belloc turned to Renaud, and the conversation moved to a discussion of an unsuccessful rose garden.
Clara did not drop her spoon.
Henri did not ask about the doors.
Émilie felt a small, fierce satisfaction. Whatever her experience in the ceremonial room, she could still choose how to act. The remembered scene had not compelled her to enact it.
After dinner she found Belloc in the library, studying a page of calculations. She had gone there to ask whether he had kept a copy of the disputed definition.
He raised his eyes.
“We need to examine your notion of equivalence,” he said. “I think you're treating a remembered sequence as uniquely privileged.”
Émilie remained beside the table.
Behind him Henri appeared in the doorway.
“Has this room always had two doors?” he asked.
Clara entered carrying a tray. A spoon slipped from its edge and struck the floor.
Madame Sorel, following her, said quietly, “I heard that before it fell.”
The words matched her recollection.
The room, however, did not. The light was artificial. There was no wineglass by Émilie's hand. The conversation had arisen from a different decision and in a different place.
She made no attempt to conceal her astonishment.
Belloc looked at her with concern.
“Are you unwell?”
“No.”
“Then shall we continue?”
“In a moment.”
She stood with one hand on the back of a chair and considered what had occurred. The apparent anticipation had not specified a unique route by which the exchange must take place. Some of its elements had failed, others had occurred. Her act of refusal had been real and had altered events; yet the central exchange had returned with a familiarity she could not explain.
It was a correlation, not a proof of predestination. She understood that. She also knew that an expectation could influence attention, memory and the selection of details. Her experience remained susceptible to ordinary errors.
But she was no longer certain that the order of remembering and observing was as secure as she had assumed.
Oddly, she did not feel frightened.
On the following afternoon she went back to the small room alone.
No one prevented her. The door was open, the chairs where she remembered them, the wooden box upon the table. Sunlight lay upon the floor in a narrow strip that reached the far wall.
She had come intending to open the box.
Before she touched it, she remembered opening it the next day. She remembered the resistance of the brass hinge, the faint smell of unfinished wood, and the absence of anything inside.
She stood looking at the lid.
It would be simple enough not to open it. She could leave, or ask someone to inspect it first. She could preserve an unresolved prediction as a prediction and refuse to furnish it with an event.
Yet she wanted to know.
She lifted the lid.
The box was empty.
There was no flash of light, no rearrangement of the room. The wood was ordinary. There was a small imperfection in the grain near the bottom, shaped rather like a narrow leaf. She touched it with one finger and discovered that its edge was rough.
She had not remembered that detail.
She closed the lid.
The satisfaction she felt was neither triumph nor reassurance. It arose from having experienced an event as a recollection and then encountered it as an
action, without finding it necessary to decide which description possessed priority.
She thought of Madame Delorme's hand upon her shoulder, of the warmth of her fingers, and of the desire she had felt for the contact to continue. Émilie had wanted that woman to confer an authority she had consistently refused to claim.
For a moment she imagined Madame Delorme entering and giving her permission to rise.
No one came.
Émilie sat in the chair from which she had spoken of tomorrow as yesterday. She listened to a bird beyond the window and watched the narrow band of sunlight withdraw from the wall.
She could rise whenever she pleased. She knew this with perfect clarity.
The knowledge was curiously pleasurable. So, too, was the absence of any requirement to act upon it.
For forty-three years she had continually arranged her experience into a history, identifying what had occurred, what remained possible, and which person had moved without interruption between them. She had done so without effort, and therefore without noticing that the arrangement was an activity at all.
Now the activity had diminished.
Her thoughts remained clear. Her body was her body, as far as any ordinary test could establish. Her plans and obligations persisted. She would still have to eat, work, answer correspondence and decide whether to stay at the House.
But the demand that every remembered event occupy one rightful place in a single personal chronology had lost something of its force.
She was no longer defending it.
The room grew dark. She did not look at her watch.
She had surrendered nothing she could name as a possession, and nothing had been taken from her by another person.
Yet when at last she rose, she knew that something which had accompanied her for forty-three years was no longer required.
She did not miss it.
End of Movement III