Lovers on All Saints' Day Read Online Free

In the photographs, the little girl plays wearing nothing but a necklace made of flowers or she appears with Baskerville, her German shepherd. It is in fact an altar arranged by George for the adoration of his daughter. There is one thing lonelier than abandoned clothing, and it’s a child’s room abandoned by the child.” As I was writing, I was thinking of Philippe’s sister’s dead son.
    One spring Sunday, three or four weeks after that night, Claire came to Aywaille to talk to Monsieur Gibert. I was pleased to see her, and to see her lightness as she stepped out of the car and the casual air with which we all chatted, standing in the narrow kitchen, warmed by the steam pouring out of the pans and hitting the tiles.
    After lunch, Claire and I stayed downstairs. When quite a long time had passed in silence, Claire said:
    “Let’s go outside. It’s hot in here, the windows are all steamed up. Let’s go for a little walk.”
    It was cloudy and the sky looked like rain. We took the path toward the woods, walking on tiptoes between the puddles and fresh mud.
    “What a change,” said Claire. “I’d never live here, but it’s really good to come out here once in a while.”
    “Nice to breathe fresh air.”
    “It’s so quiet,” said Claire. “No parties next door.”
    “There aren’t any people, just animals.”
    “Philippe’s seeing someone,” said Claire. “I don’t know if my father’s told you.”
    He hadn’t told me. But in some obscure way, I’d deduced it after a series of random comments, and had rejected the idea, and soon the idea had come back to worry me. The strange thing was how Claire told me, as if she were talking not about a potential marital disaster but of help found, as if Philippe, rather than going out with another woman—her name was Natasha, she was English and worked for the European Economic Community—were seeing a psychologist.
    “She called the house the other day,” said Claire. “She didn’t even know Philippe was married.”
    At a fork in the path, where you have to decide whether to go up the hill until you can see Hamoir in the distance or turn right toward the road to Ferrières, we stopped. Claire had gotten distracted as she walked and her tights were soaked and dirty.
    “What are you going to do?” I asked.
    “Well, I’m going to wait. This is a phase, you know.”
    And then, as if resuming a conversation we’d interrupted earlier, as if the change of topic wasn’t sudden or abrupt:
    “When she embraced me, I didn’t think about her. I didn’t think that hugging me might make her feel better. I thought this embrace was happening to Philippe and me, and we would be the beneficiaries.”
    She rubbed her hand across her face, looked at it as if her features had become entangled in her palm.
    “Maybe all this is a punishment, no? Someone’s punishing me for being so egotistical.”
    We got to the little stone church, a construction the size of a doll’s house, where Claire, as a child, used to come and play. It had a rusted iron gate that would no longer budge. It had no Christ, no cross or altar. The interior was nothing but a damp rectangle, the walls devoured by lichen, the concrete floor covered in pine needles. “And what if we prayed?” said Claire; but before I had time to be surprised (Claire was an atheist, as were her parents), she burst out with a short dry laugh. She didn’t say anything more until we reached the place where smoke from the chimneys of Hamoir began to come into view. The grass beside the path was too wet for us to sit down, so we stood there, looking at the green carpet that rolled down toward the first buildings. I put my arm around Claire and said:
    “When you want to come back, let me know.”
    “Come back, ah,” she sighed. “If it were up to me, I’d stay right here till Judgment Day.”
    —
    C LAIRE DECIDED NOT TO STAY for dinner: at five in the afternoon the sky was already black, and the prospect of driving