The Silent Hours by Cesca Major Read Free Book Online Page B

him. I turn in the direction of Limoges, look out across the fields. The tram lines below me twist out of sight, a row of trees weighed down with leaves blocking my view, a fence, another field, green, but I still know it is snaking its way there.
    I couldn’t believe my own boldness, the suggestion to meet and the incredible moment when I crossed the street and realized that he was waiting for me. I felt heady and reckless walking along the street with him. We went to a café, shared a chocolate éclair, the price now extortionate but entirely worth it. I told him more about the village, my childhood, giggled at a memory I hadn’t thought of for years: Paul and I building a fort in the garden, pretending the chickens were on sentry duty. I stopped then to watch him, his eyes sparkling as he laughed. I’d wanted to reach across and put my fingers through his hair, felt myself blush with the thought. Something shifted then, as if he had seen inside my head at that moment. The room seemed too small for the feelings I was having. He asked for the bill, paid in silence, looking at me quickly, a hand on the small of my back as we left.
    We walked back to the tram in a sort of wordless bliss, the memory of his touch leaving me with nothing to say. He bought me a bag of marron glacés which I ate on the tram home, furtively, filling myself up with their syrupy loveliness. Scrunching the bag into my pocket I left the tram, feeling my stomach warm with the sugar, couldn’t eat Maman’s dinner. She protested – the veal was expensive, such a waste. Papa had looked at me, like he’d known. I’d smiled at him across the table, dabbed at my mouth with my napkin as if I still had sugar sticking to my lips, as if my new secret would spill out onto the dinner table.
    I couldn’t tell them, they would only worry. Papa seems to have more lines on his face since Paul left, spends more time behind closed doors. Up here I can think again, recall Sebastien’s expression, feel the same calm that seems to descend when I am with him. The wind whistles around me, blowing my whole body back so that I take a step to balance, laugh into the emptiness, my body light enough to lift right off the ground.

PAUL
    Dear Isabelle,
    You do write good, long letters. Two arrived on the same day a while back and one a week or so later that nearly made me cry. Will you make this letter sound a bit better when you read it to Maman? I don’t have a way with words and I know you will add what I want to it. I can picture you all now crowded into the kitchen, Father with one eye on the newspaper, one giant hand holdinga drink, Maman stirring something on the stove as she asks you questions aboutyour day. You flatly refusing to answer them sensibly, and making Father look up from his paper and do that enormous rumbling laugh, like the tram has come into the village early.
    I know you want a better picture of things but I can’t talk about details really, and you mustn’t worry if you haven’t heard from me – I seem to write these things to myself. All I can say is the last few weeks have been a whirlwind of new experiences. I continue to learn things all the time, it is physical and you know I amalways happier when I am outside. I was never any good in the fusty classrooms at home. We march and we clean and we eat and talk. I’m glad to have some of the other men from the village with me; we play marjolet and I am getting much better at lying. You laugh but it’s true. Looking back it is clear you had some kind of supernatural power and all those wins were therefore completely unjust. You tricked me, quite literally, and on return I shall prove it by roundly beating you.
    Now, on a serious note, you cannot call Claudette a startled duck – that ismy future fiancée you are mocking and I won’t have it … Oh, I can’t be serious with you and you’re not ever here to laugh with, and I know half these letters don’t arrive anyway.
    At the moment, in