He had not washed or changed his clothes for three days. The fact that he smelled didn’t bother him. On several occasions someone had rung the doorbell, but he had not answered. Blanche, probably, come to watch ‘things’ on TV. He was slightly cross with himself, but he couldn’t help it, he wasn’t able to speak to anyone. After the release of the pheasants he had been seized by a kind of torpor. He slept as much as the cat, waking only to open a tin of food which he shared with it, before plunging once more into a deep coma. His sleeping bag was covered with cracker crumbs, and tins were piling up at the foot of the camp bed. He had run out of clean clothes, and his hair and beard were itchy. When he ran his hand through them, flakes of dandruff fell on to his knees like the scales of a snake sloughing off its skin. He had no tobacco left and nothing edible in the fridge. The situation was approaching a question of life or death, which can be a hard one to answer.
It took him a great effort of will to reach the bathroom. The scalding water hit his body like a jet cleaner hosing a crusty wall. It was like a suicide in reverse; he was coming back to life without really knowing why. It was not unpleasant, if a little violent. The eau de toilette smelled of spring. In a box which was starting to develop mould, he found things to wear. The ecru linen suit, cotton shirt and soft slip-on shoes were inappropriate for the time of year perhaps, but they had the merit of being clean.
The ringing of the telephone made the walls vibrate. It took him a certain time to locate the machine, which he had forgotten existed.
‘Hello?’
Amid a chorus of crackling, he thought he could make out a woman’s voice.
‘It’s very difficult to hear you …’
The voice, almost inaudible and stammering out incoherent syllables, ‘… rice … come … early … ed … ery,’ seemed familiar nonetheless.
‘Who is this? Hello? Hello? Emma!’
Emma. It was Emma! She was calling from a distance and the line was bad, but it was her, of course it was!
‘Emma! Darling, where are you? Emma!’
Then … click. The dialling tone. No more. Bells began pealing wildly in his empty skull. Without understanding what he was doing, he began running around the house from cellar to attic like a lab rat. Really, it wasn’t as big as all that, the house – it even had some pieces missing like an unfinished jigsaw puzzle.
At last, out of breath, he caught the cat which was following him in his mad chase and threw it up in the air. ‘I knew it! I knew it! Emma’s immortal. She’ll come back, this evening, tomorrow or the day after, but she’ll come back. She has to!’
At the wheel of his little car he carried on laughing fit to burst. He was off to fill the fridge with salmon, caviar, champagne, foie gras, all the finest things, to celebrate her return in due style. At a red light he could contain himself no longer and gestured to a lady driving a Ford to wind down her window.
‘Yes?’
‘Emma’s not dead, have you heard?’
‘I’m sorry?’
‘My wife, Emma. She’s alive!’
‘Ah. That’s good. Have a good day, Monsieur.’
The lights turned green and the lady roared off.
He had broken down not far from his house, three kilometres perhaps, a distance he covered in driving rain with a bag of provisions in each hand. The fine cream linen suit was reduced to a sopping rag when he reached home, and as for the supple slip-ons, now clarted with mud, they might have been mistaken for common clogs. But what did it matter, since Emma would be back any time now?
When he had put the foodstuffs in the fridge, he got back into his grubby but dry clothes. Recognising his protector’s usual scent, the cat came and snuggled up to him, clawing at the holey sweater and purring. The radio had little to impart, only that a hunter had shot the last she-bear in the Pyrenees ‘in legitimate self-defence’, and in a nursery school three five-year-old kids had battered a little girl of three to death after a sorry incident on the slide. The parents were asking themselves questions. Life, in other words. Brice felt feverish, his head heavy with a doubt which had newly occurred to him. What if he’d dreamed that phone call? It wouldn’t have been the first time he’d imagined something. Blurry-eyed, he looked at the table set for two, with candles which cast dancing shadows on the wall. To calm his nerves he had downed four vodkas. He went out like a light with his forehead resting on the tablecloth. He had bizarre dreams in which embryos kicked and punched one another, and meteorites bombarded the Great Bear in a great disturbance of the stars.
He was woken with a start by the two notes of the doorbell. His teeth were chattering, a bumblebee in his head was trying desperately to get out, and his muscles were stretched taut like cords. Waves of shivers ran through him from head to toe. Nonetheless, powered by some unknown energy, he went to open the door, draped in a tartan rug like an old Indian man. Beneath her umbrella, Blanche seemed to have been parachuted out of the depths of the night on to his doorstep.
‘Good evening. I hope I’m not disturbing you?’
‘Er, no.’
‘I was worried. I’ve come round several times. You don’t look well.’
‘My car broke down. The rain. I must have caught a cold. Please, do come in.’
Blanche was astonished to see the table set for two, the candles melted halfway down.
‘Are you expecting someone?’
‘Er … yes. That’s to say, no … Well, one’s always expecting someone. What can I get you? Tea? No, it’s too late. Champagne then!’
His every action was clumsy; the rising fever made him tremble. The room had no right angles in it any more. His nose was running. He popped the cork.
‘What shall we drink to?’
‘I don’t know. To those who are here.’
‘To us, then?’
‘That’s right, to us.’
They clinked glasses. Blanche was looking at him out of the corner of her eye, a weak smile on her lips.
‘How did you know I would come?’
‘I don’t know. Intuition, I should think.’
‘No, you were expecting someone else. Someone who won’t come.’
‘Not at all!’
‘Your wife?’
‘No … It’s just that I had a phone call and … Oh God, I don’t know. I think I’m going mad.’
Fever and alcohol pearled his brow with sweat. He knocked over his glass – his hands no longer belonged to him. From the other side of the table, Blanche was looking at him, without a word. Her outlines had gone, she was dissolving into the cigarette smoke. He could see nothing now, or only distorted objects, things, stuff he would have been hard put to name. It was like the time before the end of the world, when everything was still just plans, drafts, rough sketches. Brice took off his glasses and rubbed the lenses vigorously, but it made no improvement.
‘Emma went off on an assignment more than two months ago. She was in the hotel in Egypt where they had that awful terrorist attack. They found her papers, and her things, but not her body. Everyone’s convinced she’s dead.’
‘Except you.’
‘Yes … Well, to begin with … but for some time now I’ve had doubts. So that phone call this morning … I don’t know what to think any more. I’m beginning to wonder whether I wasn’t dreaming.’
‘What did she say?’
‘It was a bad