L'Etoile Rose

Chapter 19

Through the living room window, Anne called me. I had risen from my chair, taking up my book, which had fallen back into the grass to join it.

"You have a ladybug in your hair," she said, laughing as she grabbed the insect gently to put it back out the window. "Let's go? I need to go to the village to buy some postcards, we can go on foot, if that suits you ... "

She was wearing her straw hat, and had donned a long, light, "little house in the meadow" dress with a square neckline and a black bow at the back; she had also forced me to iron the long skirt in Liberty fabric, which my mother had bought me on sale at a store in Biarritz. I was wearing it that day for the first time, accompanied by a dark pink T-shirt and black leather sandals and we had left, each with a wicker basket in hand, containing the picnic that Mrs. Dupeigne had handed over.

We walked across the fields, happy, I was delighted to have Anne all for myself, she was visibly amused by my pleasure. She always had that taste of staging, almost of disguise, to play the scenes of our daily life. And it was true that there was pleasure in walking nicely dressed in the countryside, skirting the bushes looking for blackberries, bowing to the horses that sometimes answered us with a lazy neigh.

I was, as always during that summer, very sensitive to the beauty of the moment, exalted by the play of light and shade of summer, the poppies on the edge of the ditch and the slow sway of the wheat fields . All this landscape of nature presented itself to me, like a secret message to be decoded, like an old book written in a foreign language that I could read and understand a little, without really touching the bottom, of grasping the whole meaning of it. There was something serious that kept escaping me, but that I would have liked to identify, and again I could only interpret, in my exaltation, as a latent and imminent danger.

"We're not going to the village with our baskets full," Anne said, oblivious to the drama that was taking place. "Let's stop here under the oak, for our picnic."

"It's a chestnut tree, not an oak tree, you really are a city girl aren't you?"

Laughing, we unfolded the tablecloth and unpacked our provisions. I didn't like Mme Dupeign that much, but one thing's sure, she cooked well, and we had cold chicken, a potatoe salad and applesauce, and, in a thermos, fresh homemade orange juice.

All the time we were walking, we had a jarring and cheerful conversation, mixing reflections on what was before us, strange flowers here, a flock of sheep there, to more personal matters. I had learned that Anne was the only daughter of a couple of Parisian doctors, that she had spent all her childhood in a flat in the 14th district, and that her experience of nature was almost limited to trees and to the ducks of Parc Montsouris where she played, being small, after school. Such a difference in comparison with me, who knew so well the seaside for having spent there all the holidays, and who lived the rest of the year in the forest of Landes in a pine house against which the deer at night came to rub their antlers!

Once seated, and the meal shared between us two, the silence had imposed itself for a moment, as if each felt that the moment of truth had come, and it was Anne, of course, who had attacked the first:

"Do you feel like I did you wrong?"

"What? But of course not," I had defended myself right away.

"That night, I couldn't help intervening! I know you're a big girl, and that doen't concern me, but Dominique's behavior has made me crazy! Fortunately, Julien was not there, they would have fought!

I waited for the rest, silent.

"You know, Dominique's adorable and Julien also likes him, don't believe the opposite, Betty, but really, he treats girls with a lot of egoism ... him coming to you, like that, drunk, well, that makes me sick! Are you not angry?"