From within the stone church tower, which stood out against the grey-green wash of sky, the bell struck one with a deafening clang as Brice was drawing up outside the house, his house. Round one could begin.
‘What the hell am I doing here? What on earth possessed us to buy this dump? I must have been drunk. That’s it, I was drunk.’
The house seemed enormous, far bigger than when he had visited it two months earlier with Emma.
‘So, dining room and kitchen there, sitting room here, opening on to the terrace. On the first floor the bedrooms, bathroom (with a bath and two washbasins), study, and then, in the attic, your studio. Aren’t the beams magnificent? You’ll be able to work so well here!’
All Brice could recall of that visit were fragments, like those which come back to you from a long-gone dream. It was dark, and he was hungry and tired. The estate agent, squeezed into his cheap little pinstriped suit, had followed them round like a poodle and, since he had no sales pitch, turned on all the electric light switches – clickety click – to prove that everything had been redone.
‘Well, darling?’
To make the question go away, and with no thought for the consequences, he had said yes. In the car, Emma had taken him through in endless and minute detail the innumerable plans she had in mind for decorating, to turn the cavern into a veritable palace.
‘And did you see it’s all been completely redone? The electricity …’
‘That’s right. Clickety click.’
Now stone walls and ceilings weighed down by enormous beams were leaning in on him, menacingly. It was extremely cold, and dim like in a cave. He opened the blinds in the dining room and living room, but the dishwater-coloured light which poured in did nothing to warm the atmosphere. It was like being in an aquarium without the fish.
‘A burial plot for life, that’s what we’ve bought ourselves.’
He went from room to room, forming a cross with his body at each window as his outspread arms flung the shutters wide. From outside he might have been taken for a Swiss cuckoo clock. Bong, the church clock struck the half-hour on his head.
He set the electricity meter going, turned on the water heater and put on all the lights. Then, as there was no chair, he sat down on the stairs. There was something suspicious: the house had no smell, not even of damp, as is usual in houses which have been empty for months on end. Apart from some arachnid presences among the beams – and not many, at that – there was no sign of life. For the first time in his existence he was an owner. But an owner of what? Of an empty universe, round which the crackling of the match struck for his cigarette echoed in a semblance of the Big Bang.
The removal men were on time. At exactly half past two – the church clock testified to that – the giant lorry occupied the Grande Rue. The four Atlases were in a cheerful mood.
‘Your little village is nice. It makes a change for us from estates and high-rises in Vénissieux or Villeurbanne. There it is, then. Wow, your house is big!’
‘Yes, it is rather on the large side.’
‘And you’ll be living here all on your own?’
‘No, my wife’s joining me.’
‘Even for two, it’s really big. Right … Let’s get on with it, lads, shall we?’
Brice felt quite emotional at seeing them again. It was as if a boat had made landfall on his desert island. The man who had always been too proud to join a band, a group, any association whatsoever, found himself savouring the unquantifiable joy of merging into this mass of humans, one atom among many.
After taking the men on a quick tour of the house, Brice stationed himself at the entrance to the garage and, as each of the large items appeared before him, pronounced with the confidence of a man who knows what he’s about: ‘Dining room’, ‘Living room’, ‘Yellow bedroom’, ‘Blue bedroom’, ‘Study’, ‘Studio’ and so on. As for the countless boxes marked ‘Kitchen’, ‘Bathroom’, ‘Clothes’, ‘Books’ and particularly those which, as their contents were unknown, were labelled vaguely ‘Misc.’, he had them piled up in the garage. They could be dealt with later. It took only a couple of hours. Once the essentials – beds, wardrobes, chests of drawers, tables, armchairs and sofas – had found appropriate places, it began to look like a real house. That is to say, you could sit in different parts of it, eat and maybe even sleep there.
‘There you are, home.’
‘Is that it?’
‘Well, yes.’
Brice was struggling to get used to the idea that they were going, leaving him on his own. He was gripped by a sort of panic.
‘There’s a café on the main road. Can I buy you a drink?’
‘That’s kind, but we need to get back. We’ve a life outside the job.’
‘Of course, I quite understand.’
Raymond proudly refused the tip Brice proffered, but consented to shake his hand. With the fifty-euro note still in his hand, and a tear in his eye, he watched the lorry manoeuvre then disappear round the corner of the road. A few drops of rain splashed down at his feet, and spread like ink on blotting paper. No two fell in the same spot.
That evening he had to eat, not out of greed or pleasure, but simply because unless a human being takes nourishment, he dies. In the garage he counted no fewer than eleven boxes which belonged in the kitchen and – surprise, surprise – most of them were behind the ones filled with books, which he had to move at the risk of hurting his back. Emma was unreasonably fond of kitchenware. There was enough to fit out a restaurant: plates of all sizes, soup tureens, sauce boats, fruit bowls, tea and coffee services; dishes for tarts, fish and asparagus; dishes made of silver, porcelain and earthenware; water glasses, wine glasses, whisky glasses; canteens of cutlery both antique and contemporary; sets of saucepans, cast-iron casserole dishes, a wok, a rice cooker, a tagine … and all in pristine condition for the good reason that Emma never cooked, and preferred to invite friends to a restaurant rather than entertain them at home. The yoghurt maker, blender and various other gadgets had not even made it out of their original packaging. When it was just the two of them, something frozen went into the microwave and … ping!
Box after box was slashed open with a Stanley knife in his search for a tin of food. Every five minutes, the light switch would time out and he would have to feel his way back across the garage to put it on again, bumping his foot or his shin against the scattered boxes. At last he found a tin, pike quenelles in ‘Nantua sauce’, only a few weeks past their use-by date. Sadly the tin was lacking the handy little ring which would have allowed him to free the contents without the aid of a tin-opener. The search through the boxes resumed, increasingly frantic now. Aside from a bottle of Bordeaux, he found virtually everything he did not need: pastry wheel, ice-cream scoop, nutcrackers, cake slice, olive pitter, snail tongs – but the tin-opener still evaded detection. Yet they did have one, he was sure of it, a fancy streamlined model which was the work of a famous designer, and not in fact terribly practical. They had bought it at vast expense in a specialist shop across from Les Halles in Lyon.
Brice had first met Emma at a gallery during the private view of a Hungarian artist whose ‘thing’ was using varnish to fossilise the remains of goulash on plates. His work wasn’t bad, it just all looked the same. It was like an oven in the gallery packed