The next morning, Émilie found a letter on the breakfast table.
It was addressed to her in Laurent's handwriting. The envelope bore a Paris postmark and a date three days in the future. She examined these details carefully, then put them aside. There was a limit to what could usefully be learned from asking a piece of paper to defend its existence.
Madeleine had already poured the coffee. She did not ask about the letter, although Émilie could see that she had noticed it. There was a familiar arrangement of pastries on the silver tray, the same bowl of pale fruit, the same view of the garden in which the path had acquired an additional turn during the night. The morning contained every customary courtesy. It would have been easy to mistake that continuity for a promise.
Émilie opened the envelope.
Laurent wrote that he had received her plan, that its measurements could not be reconciled, and that he had considered showing it to a colleague. He had not done so. In the final paragraph he asked her to telephone him, not because he believed the telephone could settle anything, but because it would be good to hear her voice. Beneath his signature he had added: You were right about explanations. I should have preferred you to be wrong.
She read the sentence twice.
‘He is frightened,’ Madeleine said.
‘He has reason to be.’
‘Will you answer?’
‘I think so.’
It surprised her how little the answer cost. Until yesterday every decision had seemed to commit her to one of two entire worlds. To remain was to abandon the street; to leave was to betray what she had learned inside. Now the alternatives seemed less monumental. She could remain for breakfast and answer a letter. She could love Madeleine and wish to see Laurent. The house had altered the scale of her questions, but perhaps it had never required her to abandon the ordinary ones.
The telephone was in the study, where it had been on the evening of her arrival. It was an old black instrument, heavy enough to suggest that its principal purpose was to remain in place. The cord disappeared into the wall. Émilie dialled Laurent's number from memory.
He answered on the fourth ring.
For several seconds neither of them spoke. She could hear traffic behind him and the small, enclosed sounds of a room in which someone had been sitting too long.
‘Émilie?’
‘Yes.’
‘Are you all right?’
‘I can't answer that in the sense you mean.’
He gave a brief, helpless laugh. ‘You might have tried.’
‘I am well. I'm not being held. I'm speaking to you because I wanted to.’
‘Where are you?’
She looked around the study. The books had not changed position, so far as she could tell. The clock above the mantelpiece showed eleven seventeen. Her watch showed eight forty-six.
‘In a room with a telephone.’
‘Émilie.’
‘I'm not being evasive for pleasure. I don't have a better answer.’
She told him what she could: that she had been able to reach the front door, that the world beyond it appeared entirely ordinary, that there was a woman called Madeleine, and that nothing she had observed justified attributing the anomalies to a will. She did not attempt to persuade him. He had his drawing and his instruments and, perhaps, a dawning understanding of the inadequate comfort offered by the word impossible.
‘Come back,’ he said at last.
There was no command in it. He was asking her to return to the particular world in which he knew how to care for her. The request had a modest authority, acquired through affection rather than power.
‘I will come and see you,’ she said.
‘When?’
‘Today, if today is what I think it is.’
After she had replaced the receiver, Émilie waited for some change in the house. None came. The clock continued to disagree with her watch. A book, left open on the desk, displayed a page number larger than the number of pages in the volume. Somewhere below, Madeleine was moving crockery. The absence of a response was not evidence that the house had approved of her decision. She was learning not to seek approval from silence.
She packed a small case. There was almost nothing she wanted to take: her clothes, her notebook, the fountain pen Laurent had given her, a folded handkerchief of Madeleine's which had found its way into her drawer. She considered returning the handkerchief, then placed it in the case. Affection was under no obligation to masquerade as an experiment.
Madeleine met her in the gallery.
‘You are going.’
‘For a while.’
‘You needn't promise to return.’
‘I wasn't going to.’
Madeleine looked at the case, then at Émilie. ‘You have changed.’
‘People do.’
‘Not always in this house.’
That was the nearest Madeleine had ever come to describing a danger in personal terms. Émilie wanted to ask what had become of those who had not changed, of the occasions when the third place had been laid, of
the former inhabitants whose traces seemed to persist in objects without ever gathering into biographies. She had asked such questions before. Their unanswered state had become part of the house's furniture.
‘Have you ever left?’ she asked instead.
‘I have been elsewhere.’
‘Is that the same thing?’
‘I don't know.’
Émilie could see that Madeleine was uncomfortable, and was not sure whether the discomfort belonged to the question or to the possibility of being parted. She had once taken pride in discerning what other people wanted from the smallest alteration of expression. The habit had often served her well, but it contained a presumption. To imagine that one knew another person completely was simply a more intimate version of imagining a master behind the walls.
‘You could come with me,’ Émilie said.
Madeleine's eyes moved towards the staircase. For an instant the gallery appeared to extend beyond her, not by moving its walls but by offering a distance in which the eye could find no satisfactory ending.
‘I could try.’
‘Would you like to?’
Madeleine did not answer immediately. Émilie waited, resisting the desire to spare her the difficulty by withdrawing the invitation.
‘Yes,’ Madeleine said.
They went downstairs together.
The entrance hall was smaller than Émilie remembered. Morning light fell across the tiles. The brass latch, which she had closed the day before, stood within easy reach. Madeleine took a step towards it and stopped, her fingers moving almost imperceptibly at her side.
‘What's wrong?’
‘For a moment I thought someone would tell me no.’
‘Who?’
Madeleine shook her head. ‘No one I can name.’
Émilie recognised the impulse without imagining that their experiences were identical. She put down her case, opened the door, and waited. Beyond the threshold an elderly man was attempting to persuade a reluctant terrier to turn a corner. A cyclist passed. From an upper window came the practised scales of a piano student. There was nothing ceremonial about the street.
Madeleine stood beside her. The woman who had seemed to belong so perfectly to the rooms behind them looked suddenly uncertain of her own hands, as though they might prove unsuitable for carrying the simplest object into daylight.
‘I don't know what happens if I cross,’ she said.
‘Neither do I.’
‘You could go first.’
‘I could.’
Émilie did not move.
After a little while Madeleine smiled, not happily, but with the fatigue of someone recognising a pattern she could no longer mistake for necessity. She stepped into the street.
Nothing happened that would have satisfied an audience. The terrier sniffed at her shoes. The piano student missed a note. Madeleine lifted her face to the pale light and looked back at Émilie, who picked up the case and followed her.
They reached the corner without difficulty. When Émilie turned around, the house stood in its accustomed place, its upper windows reflecting an unremarkable sky. From this angle the exterior was a narrow eighteenth-century frontage, its dimensions insufficient for the gallery in which they had just stood. She was almost pleased to find that the contradiction had survived their departure. It would have been disappointing to discover that terror was merely a consequence of poor lighting.
The town possessed a railway station. They found it after walking for twenty minutes, following signs that did not always agree about the direction. The stationmaster sold them two tickets to Paris. He asked no questions about their address and seemed wholly uninterested in the extraordinary cost of an ordinary journey.
In the carriage Madeleine studied the passing fields with an attentiveness Émilie had not seen in her before. She touched the upholstery, read the safety notice, watched the pale reflection of her own face in the glass. These could have been the gestures of a woman travelling after a long confinement, or of one who had never encountered a train at all. Émilie had no reason to choose between the
explanations.
‘Do you miss it?’ she asked.
‘The house?’
‘Yes.’
‘I am afraid it may not miss me.’
‘That seems likely.’
‘You make it sound bearable.’
‘It isn't necessarily bearable. But it may be true.’
They sat in silence. A conductor inspected their tickets and returned them without remark. The train crossed a river whose name Émilie could not recall. Beyond a series of warehouses, telephone wires followed the tracks in a straight line. She found herself counting the poles, not to test anything, but for the entirely human pleasure of being occupied.
Laurent met them at the station.
He embraced Émilie with an awkward force that brought her case against his leg. Then he stepped back and studied her face. She saw him make the familiar professional effort not to appear to be making an assessment.
‘You look tired,’ he said.
‘I am.’
‘And this is?’
‘Madeleine.’
Madeleine held out her hand. Laurent took it, and Émilie watched the relief that passed over him at the contact. It embarrassed her a little. He had wanted evidence, and human warmth had momentarily supplied it. She could hardly reproach him for that.
They went to his apartment, where the plan of the house remained spread across the desk. Laurent had pinned tracing paper over parts of it and added measurements in red ink. He had made a conscientious record of a problem no technique available to him could repair.
Madeleine approached the drawing and looked at it for a long time.
‘Is it accurate?’ Laurent asked.
‘In places.’
‘Which places?’
‘All of them, I think.’
He rubbed his forehead. ‘That is precisely the difficulty.’
Émilie took the plan from beneath his hand and laid it flat. She saw now that the supposed impossible turn in the gallery had no special status. It was only where the arithmetic first made the failure visible. The trouble was not a secret passage, not a hidden door, not a malicious alteration to the building. It was the demand that every local truth should fit within a single arrangement that could be surveyed from nowhere in particular.
‘Could we publish this?’ Laurent asked.
‘We could describe it,’ Émilie said. ‘Whether anyone would be able to reproduce it is another matter.’
‘And if they couldn't?’
‘Then we would have an interesting report and very limited grounds for inference.’
He regarded her with an exasperation she knew well. ‘You have come back from an impossible house with your caution intact.’
‘Something had to survive.’
He laughed. It was a welcome sound.
They ate supper at a small restaurant near the apartment. Laurent spoke of work and of mutual acquaintances; Madeleine listened, occasionally asking questions so literal that they revealed how much ordinary speech depended upon conventions nobody thought to explain. Émilie watched them negotiate one another with increasing ease. There was something merciful in the commonplace difficulty of becoming acquainted.
Later, when Laurent had gone to buy bread for the following morning, Madeleine stood beside the window and looked at the lights of Paris. The room behind her was modest and perfectly stable, or at least had given no reason to think otherwise.
‘Will we go back?’ she asked.
‘I don't know.’
‘It might not be there.’
‘No.’
‘And if it is?’
‘We can decide then.’
Madeleine turned. ‘You make decisions sound very small.’
‘Sometimes they are. I think we've been too eager to make them eternal.’
Émilie went to her and put a hand against her cheek. Madeleine leaned into it. Neither woman treated the gesture as the fulfilment of an unseen design. They had learned, in different ways, how easily tenderness could be converted into evidence for something it had never claimed to demonstrate.
That night Émilie slept in Laurent's spare room. She dreamed of an empty dining table, laid with a third place. She woke before dawn with a feeling of loss so strong that she could not immediately say what had been lost. She sat on the bed until the sensation diminished. She did not write it down as a message.
In the morning Laurent found the plan altered.
Not dramatically. The vestibule had acquired a window. Its new position was plainly marked in his own red ink, though he had no memory of drawing it. More troublingly, from where the window stood, the plan indicated that it should overlook the interior of his apartment. He went to the wall behind his desk and found nothing but plaster.
Émilie joined him, examined the drawing, and made a note of the alteration. She checked the wall herself. She did not suggest that the house had followed them. She did not deny it either. There were too many possible descriptions and too few observations to warrant the comfort of a story.
‘Does it frighten you?’ Laurent asked.
‘Yes.’
‘What do we do?’
‘Have breakfast. Then we work out how to investigate it.’
He looked towards the wall. ‘And if something is looking back?’
‘We have no evidence of that.’
‘You know that isn't the same as evidence that nothing is.’
‘I do.’
The acknowledgement appeared to comfort him more than an assurance would have done.
Madeleine was already in the kitchen, attempting to discover the correct setting on an unfamiliar coffee machine. It made an affronted mechanical noise and deposited a small quantity of water beside the cup. She looked up at Émilie with an expression of such frank irritation that both women began to laugh.
There was no final revelation. The universe had not withdrawn its contradictions, and the house had not furnished an account of itself. The women had not escaped into an innocent world, nor had they carried a curse away from a haunted one. There was a drawing that could not be made consistent, a telephone that had connected two places, a letter dated tomorrow, and three people whose knowledge remained inadequate to the circumstances in which they found themselves.
These facts were not negligible. They were simply not a theology.
Émilie took her notebook to the kitchen table and opened it at the last page. Beneath the sentence she had written in the house, she added: We
left. No one permitted it. No one forbade it.
She hesitated, then wrote another line.
We may return. We may not.
Laurent called from the study that the measurements still refused to agree. Madeleine asked whether coffee was meant to smell quite so unpleasant. Outside the window a delivery van stopped, its driver descended, and a woman in a blue coat crossed the street without looking up. Paris continued its business with the magnificent indifference of a city that had never been created for the benefit of its inhabitants.
Émilie closed the notebook and went to help with the coffee.
Whatever waited beyond the walls, if waiting was even a word that could apply to it, had offered no judgement. No observer stood outside the whole arrangement to declare that she had chosen correctly. She had spent so long searching for the source of permission that the simpler fact had almost escaped her: one could act without it, care without guarantee, and remain responsible without being watched.
The house had never had a master.
Neither, so far as she could tell, had anything else.