Honeymoon by Patrick Modiano Read Free Book Online

imagine the silent, interminable corridors, the rooms which probably contained no more than their bed-frames. As the lift rose, the air became lighter, and they were enveloped in the coolness of the half light. On the fifth floor, the big wrought-iron gate would bang behind them, and then nothing else would break the silence.
    From their balcony they gazed down at the pine forest, and under its dark-green fringe they could make out the white patch of the casino. And along the wall round the hotel, the steep street where nobody went by. Then they closed their shutters – pale-green shutters, the same colour as Ingrid's swimming costume.
    •
    In the evenings, they would cross the square in the pine forest and go and have dinner at the only restaurant in Juan-les-Pins that ignored the restrictions. Customers came there from Nice and Cannes. At the beginning, Ingrid felt ill at ease there.
    The habitués greeted each other from table to table, the men tied their sweaters casually over their shoulders, the women showed their tanned backs and swathed their hair in creole foulards. You could overhear conversations in English. The war was so far away … The restaurant was in a wing of a building near the casino and its tables spilled over on to the pavement. It was said that the patronne – a certain Mademoiselle Cotillon – had had a brush with the law, but that these days she enjoyed "protection". She was very pleasant, and in Juan-les-Pins she was known as the Princesse de Bourbon.
    •
    They went back to the hotel, and on moonless nights a feeling of anxiety descended on them both. Not a single street lamp, not a single lighted window. The Princess de Bourbon's restaurant was still aglow, as if she was the last to dare to defy the curfew. But after a few steps this light disappeared, and they were walking in the dark. The murmur of conversation faded, too. All those people whose presence at the tables reassured them, and whom they saw on the beach during the day, now seemed unreal: walkers-on from a touring company who had got stuck in Juan-les-Pins because of the war and were compelled to play their parts of phoney holidaymakers on the beach and in the restaurant run by a phoney Princesse de Bourbon. The Provençal itself, whose white mass could just be made our in the shadows in the background, was a gigantic pasteboard set.
    And every time they crossed this dark pine forest, Ingrid was suddenly shaken by sobs.
    •
    But they went into the lobby. The glittering light of the chandelier made them blink. The porter was standing behind the reception desk in his uniform. He smiled, and gave them the key to their room. Things regained a little consistence and reality. They found themselves in a real hotel lobby with real walls and a real uniformed porter. Then they went up in the lift. And once again they became a prey to doubt and anxiety when they pressed the button for the fifth floor, as all the buttons for the other floors were covered with sticky tape to make it quite clear that they were not in use.
    At the end of their long ascent in the dark, they came to a landing and a corridor faintly lit by naked bulbs. That was the way it was. They went from light to shade and from shade to light. They had to get used to this world in which everything could fluctuate from one moment to the next.
    •
    In the mornings, when they opened the shutters, a harsh light flooded into the room. It was exactly like the summers of the past. The dark green of the pines, the blue sky, the scent of eucalyptus and oleanders from the Avenue Saramartel which goes down to the beach … In the heat haze, the Provençal's great white façade soared upwards for all eternity and you had the impression that this monument protected you, if you gazed at it from the pontoon, lying there after your swim.
    Just one very small detail was enough to blot this landscape: a dark patch Rigaud had noticed for the first time, late one afternoon, on a bench in one of