In the morning, the door was open.
Émilie knew that it had not been open during the night. She had watched it, intermittently, from the little chair beside the window, while the house made its minute adjustments around her. Nothing dramatic had occurred. A change in the perspective of a corridor, a silence where there ought to have been a clock, the very faint impression that a room had been moved without disturbing its contents. She was beginning to understand how little violence was necessary to destroy a world.
The door stood at the far end of the gallery. Beyond it was the ordinary staircase, with its worn runner and its brass handrail, descending to the entrance hall. Below that, she could see a piece of daylight lying on the tiles. The front door was ajar.
She went halfway down the gallery and stopped. There was no prohibition against proceeding. There was not even the suggestion of one.
This, more than anything, disturbed her.
For weeks she had accommodated herself to the house as one accommodates oneself to an exacting institution: its appointments, its silences, its inexplicable courtesies. At first she had assumed the existence of rules, then of intentions, and finally of some intelligence which might be persuaded, offended or placated. Each assumption had made the preceding one look almost comfortable. She had expected the
final revelation to be a master.
Instead there was an open door.
Madeleine was waiting in the breakfast room, dressed in the dark grey silk that Émilie remembered from their first evening together. The table was laid for two. A third place, which had sometimes appeared without explanation, was absent. The coffee was hot; outside the long windows the garden continued into a morning whose season could not be determined.
‘You may leave,’ Madeleine said.
Émilie did not sit down. ‘May?’
‘You can leave. I thought the distinction might matter to you.’
‘Who has decided?’
‘No one.’
The words were spoken without triumph, without tenderness, almost without emphasis. They had the unadorned quality of a fact which had never required defending.
‘Then why now?’
‘I don't know.’ Madeleine touched the rim of her cup. ‘Perhaps there has never been a reason why you could not.’
Émilie looked towards the gallery. She had the absurd impulse to ask whether the street outside was real, whether the staircase would remain a staircase after she set her foot upon it, whether the woman across from her would still exist once she passed beyond the threshold. All were legitimate questions. None had an answer Madeleine could
honestly give.
‘You told me there were things the house required.’
‘I told you there were things it did.’
‘You let me imagine a difference between obedience and refusal.’
‘You brought that difference with you.’
It was neither accusation nor absolution. That was Madeleine's particular cruelty, if cruelty it was: she would not relieve another person of the responsibility for an interpretation merely by denying it.
Émilie sat. From the window she could see a narrow path among the yews, each stone perfectly familiar and yet placed a fraction differently from its position yesterday. The path led towards the old wall, past the white basin, and disappeared behind a stand of trees. For a moment she remembered the elaborate ceremonies by which she had once tried to make experience accountable to form. The proper words, the proper gestures, the gratifying conviction that a sequence performed with sufficient precision must compel a response. She had mistaken arrangement for authority before. She would not be spared that embarrassment now.
‘And if I go?’ she asked.
‘You will go.’
‘Will I return to my own life?’
‘I can't promise that it remains where you left it.’
‘And if I stay?’
Madeleine considered this. ‘You will stay.’
The answers were intolerably exact. Émilie had spent much of her life helping frightened people distinguish between the things they knew and the things they needed to believe. Now, with her hands folded on a white tablecloth, she found that the method offered no consolation at all. It had never promised to.
A little later she went to the entrance hall alone.
The front door opened upon a street that could have belonged to the town she remembered. An elderly man passed with a newspaper under his arm. Two bicycles stood against a wall. Somewhere beyond the corner, a delivery vehicle reversed with a succession of mechanical beeps. The air smelled of damp stone and petrol. There was an unremarkable cruelty in these details. She wanted them to certify one another, as though the smell of exhaust could establish the reliability of the pavement, as though the passing man had been summoned solely to testify that the world was still inhabited.
She put one hand on the doorframe.
At that instant she thought of Laurent.
She had written to him twice, or believed that she had. The second letter described the house in the language of a clinical report: the persistence of impossible spatial relations, the inconsistent duration of subjective intervals, the absence of evidence for an organising agent. It was an almost comic document, dignified by numbered observations and a scrupulous refusal to speculate beyond them. She had ended by asking him not to come.
If he had received it, he had offered no answer.
At a desk in Paris, Laurent was looking at a drawing which had arrived without a covering note.
It showed a ground floor in black ink: vestibule, gallery, breakfast room, staircase. The handwriting was Émilie's, or so close to it that the difference was beyond his unaided perception. He had examined the paper under a lamp and found nothing to distinguish it from ordinary stationery. Its edges were clean. It smelled faintly of a familiar perfume.
He had spread the plan beside a ruler and a square. The measurements were individually plausible. Each room could have been constructed. Each doorway met a wall at an intelligible angle. Yet the gallery returned to the vestibule through a route whose sum of turns made the closure impossible. The exterior of the building was smaller than two of its adjoining rooms. On the reverse side, in handwriting he did not recognise, was a single sentence: THERE IS NO ONE TO ASK.
For the better part of an hour Laurent searched for a copying error. Then he attempted to reproduce the plan. His own drawing, too, closed perfectly, until he measured it.
He sat motionless. He had never been disposed towards mysticism, and was not now. What interested him, beneath the immediate apprehension, was that the impossibility resisted his efforts to locate it. Every individual step remained correct. The contradiction belonged not to the parts but to their coexistence.
He thought of Émilie, and of the first time she had told him that an explanation might fail without the evidence failing alongside it. He had smiled then. He was not smiling now.
Back in the entrance hall, Émilie stepped onto the threshold.
Nothing prevented her. She could feel the ordinary pressure of stone through the soles of her shoes. A light breeze displaced a strand of hair. The street continued beyond her, apparently indifferent to the fact that she stood between two incompatible descriptions of reality.
She understood, suddenly, that she had wanted the door to resist.
Resistance would have restored an adversary. A locked door would have justified the search for a key; a command would have permitted disobedience; even a threat would have offered the dignity of an opposing will. But the house had ceased to provide her with the convenience of opposition. It had given her no assurance that crossing the threshold was safe, and no warning that remaining was wise. To leave would be a decision made in ignorance. To stay would be the same.
For the first time, the symmetry did not appear to her as a trap.
She withdrew her foot and shut the door. The latch made a small, domestic sound.
Madeleine was standing at the foot of the stairs. She had not approached silently; Émilie simply had not heard her. There were many ordinary explanations for that, and Émilie chose not to promote the incident into a miracle.
‘You stayed,’ Madeleine said.
‘I closed a door. I haven't made a metaphysical commitment.’
Madeleine smiled, and for a moment looked disconcertingly young. ‘No. Of course not.’
‘If you ask me why, I'll disappoint you.’
‘I wasn't going to ask.’
Émilie came towards her. She could still leave tomorrow, she supposed, or in an hour, if the door remained where it was. No declaration could settle that uncertainty. She took Madeleine's hand, feeling the warmth of the fingers and the slight roughness at the base of the thumb. This was evidence of contact, not of destiny. She was grateful for its modesty.
‘I don't know what you are,’ she said.
‘Neither do I.’
‘And I don't think you're telling me less than you know.’
‘Not today.’
It was a joke, or the beginning of one. Émilie laughed quietly. They stood with their hands joined while the distant house settled around them, without approval and without censure. Émilie had once imagined that surrender meant placing herself in the keeping of another. That fantasy had endured even after she ceased to believe in gods. Here there was no person to receive it, no great intelligence whose desires would render her own choices significant. There was only the continuing difficulty of choosing, and the presence of a woman who had never claimed the power to choose for her.
Madeleine drew nearer, but waited. Émilie kissed her first. It was not an oath, nor a petition. It offered nothing beyond itself. For once, that was sufficient.
Later they returned to the breakfast room. The coffee had gone cold. Beyond the windows the garden had changed again, though in what
particulars neither woman could say. Émilie opened her notebook and wrote a single line beneath the observations of the previous evening: I remained, without receiving permission.
She looked at it for some time, then crossed out the last three words. They suggested that permission had been withheld, and that was not quite right. She wrote instead: I remained. No one permitted it. No one forbade it.
Outside, the path between the yews led elsewhere. Somewhere in Paris Laurent was still trying to discover at which point his drawing had become impossible. Somewhere beyond the front door an elderly man would finish his newspaper, a vehicle would complete its delivery, and the world would continue its innumerable practical errands. These things might be true together. They might not. None had been arranged for her instruction.
Émilie closed the notebook.
The final permission had been given. It had not been given by anyone. There had been no voice, no ceremony, no absolution, no master concealed behind the walls. A woman had stood before an open door, unable to know what either side would demand of her, and had chosen to remain.