As she was about to leave, Mrs. Dalloway declared an internal message from Jim Perrier had just arrived.

  “Dear Clarissa, I read Topography of Intimacy with great pleasure. The part in Virginia Woolf’s bedroom at Monk’s House is remarkable and most original. I read it several times. Did you ever consider adapting your novel into a TV show? I’d be happy to discuss it with you. See you soon, Jim. Do you wish to answer him now, Clarissa?”

  “I’ll do it when I come back. Thank you, Mrs. Dalloway.”

  “You’re welcome.”

  So, Jim Perrier had gotten in touch. This meant he had information for her concerning the powder, and, no doubt, C.A.S.A. According to what they had set up, she was to go to Café Iris at 8:00 A.M.

  She therefore had to stay put until tomorrow morning. It seemed to her an endless wait.

  * * *

  At eight o’clock sharp, as it poured with rain, Clarissa was at Café Iris, on time. The terrace was closed due to the bad weather. She took shelter inside. Jim Perrier had not arrived yet. Last night, she’d sent a quick answer, thanking him for his nice message and saying she’d be happy to discuss a TV adaptation with him. He hadn’t responded, but she’d been expecting that.

  Other clients ate their breakfasts around her. The place was animated and nosy. She ordered more tea, as hers had gone tepid. Time ticked by. No sign of Jim. Had he been held up? She had no way of contacting him. She waited a little longer. At nine o’clock, she decided to go home. It was odd, his not showing up. She rushed along under the downpour.

  There was no new message from him when she got to the residence. He must have run into a problem and had not known how to reach her. No reason for her to worry. She’d bide her time until he got hold of her again.

  This afternoon, she was meeting Mia White, in a tearoom near the Bastille. Because of the rain, they’d decided to meet indoors. Clarissa suggested a place she knew well, on rue de la Roquette. She often caught up with her daughter there, as Jordan lived nearby. When she got there, she saw Mia White was already installed at a table.

  The young woman had been in touch recently, suggesting they get together, and Clarissa had agreed to see her again, despite her misgivings. This time, she’d be careful not to disclose anything too personal. She was looking forward to conversing with her young reader. Getting out of the residence, taking a break, trying not to think about her husband, these had all become essential to her. This morning, as she had waited for Jim Perrier in vain, she’d received a pitiful text message from François. He wrote to say he was at the end of his rope. Totally desperate. He wanted to do himself in. He must see her, peacefully. He suggested she come to their apartment, so that she might pack her things, talk about the future. For a brief moment, she felt pity. Had she been too hard on him, perhaps? Did he deserve a second chance? Should she go talk to him? While she had been thinking it over, the little voice she knew well had whispered to her: Hey, hang on, look at you! Talk to him? You’re delusional. You’re going to sit here nicely and say you understand, yes, you understand because you always understood? So marvelously comprehensive. So wonderfully patient. Cut the crap. Clarissa ended up not answering François’s text.

  Mia White observed her with the same benign yet penetrating gaze, which became unsettling after a while. She looked young and pretty, with her disarming smile. She was reading A Room of One’s Own, her oversize glasses perched on the tip of her adorable nose. Wasn’t she overdoing it? As if she wanted above all to please Clarissa. Was this just inept eagerness from a zealous devotee? Or something else? Perhaps Clarissa was asking herself too many questions, and so couldn’t even relax enough to enjoy the moment.

  The young girl bent over to pick an object out of her bag. It was a frayed copy of Topography of Intimacy.

  “I’d really like you to sign this,” she said.

  “With pleasure,” replied Clarissa.

  As she opened the book, she noticed there were notes in nearly every margin. Entire paragraphs had been underlined.

  “I read it thoroughly,” admitted Mia White with a smile. “And I often read it all over again.”

  The date written on the flyleaf was the same one as the publication of the book.

  “This is my mother’s copy. Your book was published the year I was born.”

  “So your mother read it, too?” asked Clarissa as she signed it.

  “She did, but I pinched it from her and never gave it back.”

  A delightful impish grin.

  “I think you mentioned your mother’s from Nantes?”

  “That’s right.” Mia White nodded. “I grew up there.”

  They switched effortlessly from one language to another, like they had during their previous encounter.

  The waitress came to take their orders. There were some delicious cakes to succumb to. The place was not full; it was quiet and comfortable. Outside, the rain splashed merrily. Glistening umbrellas bobbed up and down along the sidewalk.

  For a fleeting moment, Clarissa wondered if she should tell Mia White about the night the alarm went off in the residence, and that she thought she had seen her there, wearing a dressing gown, her hair braided down her back. But Mia White spoke up before she did.

  “Would you mind telling me about what happened in Virginia Woolf’s house? That’s also one of my favorite parts. Unless you’d rather not, of course. I know you’ve been asked about it repeatedly, and I’m sure it’s tedious for you to have to go over it again.”

  Mia White used the same method as last time, those wide, beseeching, respectful eyes. It was impossible to resist them. Clarissa felt she was in no danger. She had often described that crucial scene to journalists, to readers. It wasn’t as if she had anything new to add. She felt in control.

  She said she had been spending time with her father in Brighton. This happened about twenty years ago. Her father was doing very well then; he was in his late seventies and still energetic. He enjoyed traveling with his daughter, discovering new places with her. He was the one who suggested visiting Monk’s House, the cottage Virginia and Leonard Woolf had bought in 1919, at Rodmell, in East Sussex. It was only thirty minutes or so from Brighton. He had heard there was a lovely garden. They could visit it on their way back to London.

  Clarissa articulated her story calmly, as if she had switched on automatic pilot. The words she had so often used wrought their way around her tale, and she did not think twice about them. Mia White listened assiduously, her tiny fingers cupping her mug. The rain hissed outside. Clarissa described the drive from Brighton, her father’s long, knobby hands on the wheel, the lush greenery of the English countryside. What she didn’t tell Mia White was her state of mind at that point in her life, the sadness she had been carrying around for so many years. With the passing of time, the weight of the sadness felt like a huge boulder she had to drag along behind her. It was like coping with a shameful disease. She had learned to live with lugging it everywhere, hauling it up stairs, pushing it into rooms that were always too small.

  Clarissa went on with what she had to say, discarding the boulder of agony. But it was still there, lurking in the back of her mind. She found it perturbing to pursue two trains of thought: a spoken and unclouded one describing Virginia Woolf’s house, and the other, inner and murky, hovering over an obscure zone she did not wish to return to. She had to concentrate in order to stop the shadow from overtaking the light; she threw herself into her story, describing their arrival at the quaint village of Rodmell, which had preserved its original features. Her father had parked near a pub, where they each enjoyed a ploughman’s lunch, a plate of cheddar with ham, pickles, and bread. While she evoked their meal, she clearly and precisely recalled the conversation she’d had with her father. Should she repress it? Or, on the contrary, let it out? She dithered, swallowed her tea. Mia White waited, devotedly.

  “That’s funny, I’ve just remembered what my dad and I talked about that day. I had forgotten it, and it came back to me.”

  “Would you mind sharing it with me?”

  Her father had asked her if she felt more French than English, now that she’d been living in France for a long span of years. She had given it a thought. It was a tricky matter. Deep down, she had no idea. And she still hadn’t. She was aware of her distinctive status, a crossbreed one, powerless to choose one country over the other—a discomfort she had perceived her entire life, the sensation of not belonging to a nation, of being unable to claim an origin. She was twofold. She had two mother tongues, two worlds, two homelands. With Brexit, it had become even more intricate. But that afternoon at Rodmell, on that sunny spring day, neither her father nor she could have predicted the calamitous chain of events following Great Britain’s choice.

  “Let’s get back to Virginia Woolf, if you will,” said Clarissa.

  “With pleasure.” Mia White nodded.

  Clarissa had followed her father along a quiet little street dotted with pretty, traditional houses. The Woolf cottage was much smaller than she had anticipated. There was nothing luxurious there. Her father, like her, knew little about the life of the writer who had lived here. He was not an avid reader. Golf, tennis, and tournaments were more his sort of thing. As he grew older, he spent time looking after the garden behind his London home in Hackney. He enjoyed tending to the plants and flowers Clarissa’s mother, Solange, had planted with such care.

  Their guide’s name was Margaret, a slender young woman with protruding teeth and milky skin. She welcomed them as if they were entering her own home, and pronounced the name Virginia with hushed adoration. She told them in a whisper, as if not wanting to disturb the owners, who still lived there, that Virginia wrote in a small lodge, where she liked to be alone, while her husband, Leonard, toiled outside; he planted cherry, apple, prune, and fig trees, and garnered his own fruit and vegetables with the help of his faithful gardener, Percy, as well as his own honey.

  Their visit began with the garden. It was magnificent. Her father gasped with joy, overcome; he pointed out gladioli, clematises, roses, zinnias, geum, dahlias, agapanthus. Margaret remained silent, smiling, no doubt heartened by the fervor of this old gentleman’s eagerness. Never would Clarissa forget this enchanted orchard, the sensational exuberance of the colors bursting around them. They walked along the thin redbrick path cutting through dazzling blazes of orange, purple, red, pink. Margaret pointed out a fishpond, installed by the Woolfs, where dragonflies skimmed the water, while bees hummed actively, butterflies spun here and there, birds twittered. The glory of a garden in spring.

  “I have a few memories of gardens in Nantes,” said Mia White gently. “But I haven’t seen a real one, like the one you are describing, for a long time.”

  “I wonder what Leonard Woolf would say if he came back now and saw what his beloved garden has become,” said Clarissa.

  “Is it completely dried out?” asked Mia White, horror-struck.

  Clarissa said she hadn’t been back there since. But she had seen upsetting photos. Yes, most of it was a parched mess, like the majority of gardens nowadays. The perpetual heat waves, scorching summers, scarcity of water, brutal storms, end of natural pollination, and slow extinction of insects had taken a deathly toll on beautiful gardens.

  “That’s so sad,” said Mia White in the same soft voice.

  “But the house is still standing,” said Clarissa. “Houses do last. Thank God.”

  “Why do you love houses so much?”

  Clarissa said she had thought about that often; she supposed her obsession with houses came from her profession, her penchant for measuring spaces, for needing to define them geographically.

  “I imagine there are houses you loved?”

  “Yes. Several.”

  She described her French grandparents’ country home in Burgundy, near Sens, razed in her childhood in order to give way to a highway. A trauma. And a place in Tuscany, up in the hills overlooking Florence, where she had spent a long summer with her husband. She told Mia White about the simplicity of the rustic white house, called colonica in Italian, and how she had felt at home there. She still remembered the sensation of the cool ancient stone tiles under her naked feet, and the particular shape of the doorknob, which had left an emotional imprint in the hollow of her hand.

  But there was also what walls whispered to her. What she had experienced in Romain Gary’s apartment, all those years ago, had been extraordinarily powerful. She had wondered how she would feel when she got to Monk’s House. She had listened to Margaret tell them more about how the Woolfs bought and transformed the long and low weather-boarded cottage with a slate roof. It had been rudimentary in the beginning. No hot water, no bath, no indoor toilets; small, damp rooms, but great promise: a wild, generous garden, with the steeple of the nearby church peeking out over the greenery, and beyond, the view of the smooth, rolling stretch of the South Downs.

  Clarissa had not yet read anything by Virginia Woolf. Over the years, she had stuck to Romain Gary, Maupassant, Zola, Baudelaire, Modiano. She had not started to write, either. When they visited the premises, she was still working as a property surveyor. The large black boulder of her suffering lingered persistently. She didn’t tell Mia White that she suspected her father had taken her on this trip because he was aware of how unhappy she was. And it was true to say that the beauty of the garden had given her some peace.

  Margaret had opened up the door to the house, and they had followed her in. Clarissa remembered there were few other visitors that day. They were practically alone. In the little entrance hung the particular odor of an old countryside home, one that was loved and looked after, kept spick-and-span, with nothing dusty and neglected about it. The house was alive. It breathed. Margaret had explained that everything had been preserved to look exactly as it had in the Woolfs’ day. A person lived here year-round, even during the winter, when the premises were closed to the public. The living room walls were green, a color Virginia loved, said Margaret. A radiant green called “viridian,” which Vanessa Bell, Virginia’s sister, who was a painter, had gently mocked. The ceilings were low, garnished with rafters. Under their steps, the waxed floorboards creaked. Clarissa felt as if Virginia Woolf might turn up any minute. She’d stride in, carrying the flowers she’d just cut, her shears still in hand. She’d arrange them into a pretty vase. She’d sit in the large chintz armchair near the high fireplace, and she’d pick up a book. Later, she’d look at her correspondence, placed in the open secretary chest.

  There were books everywhere, on the shelves, on the small low tables, but also on the steps of the stairs. The true home of a writer and an editor. As of 1929, Margaret said, the couple had gradually started renovating the house, thanks to Virginia’s increasing royalties, from Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, and especially Orlando. The kitchen was entirely redone, a dining room was created, and a bathroom with a toilet was installed on the first floor. Margaret said Virginia adored spending time in her bath. She would stay there for hours, and their maid could hear her talking to herself, trying out scenes from her books. Another link to Romain Gary, who had also worked from his bath, and Clarissa acknowledged the unexpected connection between the two writers, which pleased her. She could now put her finger on it; what she relished here, what she hungered for was the private story spinning behind the public figures, linked to the homes they lived in, slept in, and wrote in.

  Margaret told them that later the house was added on to. A room was built in the attic, and it became Leonard’s office; then a square brick extension formed a first-floor bedroom giving directly on to the garden by a flight of stairs, Virginia’s room, where she slept. Clarissa had asked to see that room, and Margaret had answered, courteously, that it was rarely open to visitors. Clarissa had been disappointed. She had insisted. With a firmer tone, Margaret had said it was impossible, and to change the subject, she led them to the writing lodge at the end of the orchard, where Virginia worked. With her finger, Clarissa had gently touched the chair, the inkpot, the reading glasses. She knew full well these objects had not belonged to Virginia, but the literary staging was a pleasant one. Virginia had written Mrs. Dalloway within these walls, and while a bee droned against the windowpane, it seemed to Clarissa that the writer’s shadow, an angular sentinel, loomed behind each garden rose.

  This writer, whose books she had never read, whom she knew little about, inhabited this place with a singular intensity. Unlike Romain Gary’s flat, where Clarissa had perceived vestiges of the past, something else was at stake for her here and now, a fork in the road, a turning point, but what, exactly? She couldn’t tell. Her father had asked her if she was feeling all right. She looked odd, he said. How could she explain there was a density here pulling at her, reeling her in, like a fish caught on a hook?

  Had she uttered those sentences out loud to Mia White? She hadn’t meant to. It had been part of the darker, inner stream she hadn’t planned on mentioning. She carried on swiftly, going back to what Margaret was telling them about the house, that it was a private place of intense creation and work. Friends did come to stay occasionally, but for the Woolfs, this was their intimate shelter, their little haven. The villagers had gotten used to seeing Mrs. Woolf walk quickly along the Downs with her dog, in all sorts of weather, muttering to herself. Here was where Virginia felt closest to her own life, Margaret had pointed out. In her letters, in her diary, Virginia had described the treasured hours at Monk’s House, no talking, diving deep into reading, into writing, into pure, translucent slumber, into the green of the Downs and the trees, with no one around to disrupt it all, no noise, only the sovereignty of silence.

  And then Margaret had said cheerily, “Monk’s House is such a happy house; don’t you feel it?”

  Her father and Clarissa had both said that yes, they felt it.

  “That’s how we want to think about it. A happy house. All of us who work here, we don’t often mention Virginia’s death. We like to think more about her life.”