I saw Laura in college the following October and avoided contact. She was thin and sickly-looking and appeared not to socialize. It was rumoured that she was suffering from depression. Michael came to me and asked if I would talk to her. I could not refuse. I approached her one day in the library. She was standing in front of a bookshelf in the anthropology section. I greeted her and asked if she would like to come and have a coffee with me. She did not speak, but took my hand and placed it on her almost concave belly, just for a moment, and then she walked away. It was the same gesture she had made when I left her in France.
I was angry with her and wrote her a coded letter then, reassuring her that she had done the right thing but insisting she should just get over the past and get on with her life. She did not reply to my letter, but returned it. I found it in shreds, posted through the slats of my locker.
The girl was clearly unstable. Within a month or two, I heard that she dropped out of college, and then Michael rang me to say that she was dead.
I tried to have a reaction to this. I tried to cry. I expected guilt or anger but instead there was a strange emptiness, another void to add to the one already at the core of my soul, if such a thing exists. I had rejected her and hurt her, but I felt nothing, except that she was one less reminder of that summer. I am sorry that she did not think life was worth living. Another man could have loved her the way she needed. She was very beautiful, after all, and adorable, pleasant, easy company most of the time, before France. Several men I knew would have wanted nothing more than a date with the alluring and elusive Laura Condell. I regretted that she died but it was not my fault. None of this was my fault. I was supposed to be wailing and gnashing my teeth apparently, but I had really done guilt by then, and it was of no benefit whatsoever.
I left college the following year with a 2:2, a good enough degree. I would have liked to start my own business importing wine or something like that, but with no capital and no collateral, it was out of the question.
Out of financial desperation and seeking guidance, I even went to my father’s house one evening and rang the doorbell. I stepped back and waited, saw the curtain twitch, saw him seeing me, and then the curtains were drawn by an unseen hand and the door remained shut.
Eventually I got a dull job working alongside unambitious people in the offices of the Inland Revenue as a clerical assistant, the lowest form of life, but it allowed me to rent a flat on Raglan Road, a better part of Dublin. It didn’t take too long to move house. One battered suitcase and a refuse sack containing my mugs, pots, kettle and radio. And the locked wooden box, its key in my pocket.
My new home was even smaller than the one I had before, but location, location, location. I lived on beans and eggs and tea, and met up with some of the old crowd every summer to go travelling, having scrimped since the previous year. I lied about what I was doing, pretended to be rising through the ranks of the diplomatic corps. My sense of envy festered.
By early 1982, I was getting rather depressed. It had taken me seven years to move up one grade from clerical assistant to clerical officer, and that was only because someone died. I was sick of the penury, sick of the pretence and sick of myself. It seemed that I was doomed to this misery for the foreseeable future. There was no one to rescue me. Unable to control my thoughts, I recalled the hero who could have rescued me, if I hadn’t killed him. I remembered that kind old man, the boy, and a time when there were possibilities, when I was surrounded by decency. The box on top of the wardrobe in my room underneath its layer of dust called to me.
Several times in the intervening years, I had been on the point of throwing out the leather-bound books, thinking that doing so would ease my guilt. But I never did. It would have been sacrilegious. They represented something beautiful, something that I had destroyed, but which nevertheless I needed. I could not explain the need, not then. On that night, in that moment of torment, I only wanted to remember.
With shaking hands, I unlocked the box. I read the stories again. There were twenty-two of them in total, some already neatly typed up by me in the pages of the leather-bound books, some written in blotted ink by a shaky hand on loose sheets that I’d carefully placed between the pages. I did not sleep for a week thereafter, but then a few bottles of cheap wine helped me to forget the child for whom they were written and the hand that wrote the original drafts. Remembering had been a mistake. Or so I thought.
Gradually, it dawned on me that these stories could be my escape route. If they had not died, if I had become somehow part of their family, would these stories not also have become mine? I was the only one that the old man had trusted to transcribe them. Why? Why a strange Irish boy he did not know? Why not a local scholar? Why did he choose me? If Jean-Luc was no longer around to benefit from these stories, well then, why not me? The fire was just the result of a minor deception that went awry, I told myself, desperate to justify my plagiarism, and once I had made the decision, it was easy. I only needed to rewrite them in English, change any identifiable details and publish them under a pseudonym, just to be sure. If I were to publish a couple of thousand copies in an Irish print run, I might be able to secure a future for myself.
The first publisher I approached expressed interest, and that expression of interest allowed me to engage an agent who quickly negotiated a rather quick and unprecedentedly lucrative deal on the strength of the fact that I could pitch at least ten sequels on the spot. I immediately bought a good linen suit and a sports car on hire purchase from the proceeds of the advance.
A month later, I met Alice, who was to be my illustrator, at the launch of another book whose author my agent also represented. I could not believe my eyes when I saw her first drawings of Prince Felix. Without any guidance, she had captured the essence of a small French boy, nine years dead.
I invited Alice to come away with a small group of us to Paros on holidays. I planned my seduction terribly well and it was surprisingly easy, made easier by the clown that was Barney, who not only permitted his girlfriend to come travelling with me, but also arranged with her mother to look after Eugene in Alice’s absence. It wouldn’t have made a difference in the end. She was predisposed to love me because, as she later confessed, she was in awe of my stories.
By the time the first one was published, I already believed that I’d written it. The advance blurb was so positive that I immediately thought my father might change his attitude towards me if I was successful, if he had something to be proud of, so I invited him to the launch. He did not come. I made no further attempt to contact him after that.
Alice and I got married and I lived happyishly ever after. Alice was happy enough too, I suppose, once she’d resigned herself to being childless and got used to the idea of the imbecile being in a home, although my liaisons upset her from time to time, when I was careless enough to be caught, usually when Alice had done something to irritate me. But I was never careless with my darkest secret and kept it locked away in its wooden box.