Yolande hummed to herself, to the accompaniment of mice scrabbling and Bernard’s laboured breathing in the room next door.
He was asleep or pretending to be. He was fiddling with a sparkling pendant on a gilt chain: ‘More than yesterday and much less than tomorrow.’ He wouldn’t be going back to the doctor’s. Even before setting foot in the consulting room he had known it was his final visit, almost a matter of courtesy. As usual, Machon had adopted specially for him the jovial manner which he found so irritating. But yesterday evening he’d struck more false notes than usual, stumbling over his words while looking in vain for the prompt. In short, when he’d sent Bernard away, his eyes had belied what his lips were saying.
‘It’s a question of attitude, Monsieur Bonnet, and of willpower. You’ve got to fight, and keep on fighting. In any case, you’ll see, two or three days from now and you’ll be feeling much better. Don’t forget now, take three in the morning, three at noon and three in the evening.’
It was true, on leaving Bernard had felt relief, but that had had nothing to do with the medication. These regular appointments with the doctor, for months now, had been eating away at him as much as his illness, a never-ending chore. He who had never had a day’s illness in his life had experienced something like profound humiliation at handing himself over body and soul to Dr Machon, despite knowing him well. Every Wednesday for years now, the doctor had caught the train to Lille to see his mother. They had ended up exchanging greetings and passing the time of day until there had grown up between them not a friendship exactly, but a very pleasant acquaintanceship. As soon as he’d begun to feel ill Bernard had quite naturally turned to him. He’d soon regretted it, he had become his patient. Behind the large Empire-style desk he’d always felt like a suspect stripped for questioning, one of life’s miscreants. These days whenever he met the doctor at the station he felt naked in front of him, completely at a loss.
Bernard had crumpled up the prescription and got behind the wheel of his car. There had been no puncture beside the building site.
Spurts of water added whiskers to each side of his Renault 5. Bernard was discovering life in its most infinitesimal of guises. It was there, rounding out with yellow light each of the tiny raindrops starring the windscreen, million upon million of miniature light bulbs to illuminate so long a night. It was there too in the vibrations of the steering wheel in his hands, and in the dance of the windscreen wipers, which reminded him of the finale of a musical comedy. The anguish of doubt gave way to the strange nirvana of certainty. It was a matter of weeks, days, then. He had known for ages that he was dying, of course, but this evening he felt he had crossed a line. Deep down, these last months, it was hope which had made him suffer the most. ‘Bernard Bonnet, your appeal has been refused.’ He felt liberated, he had nothing more to lose.
Then in the beam of the headlamps, he had seen the redhead, thumbing a lift, caught in a mesh of rain and dark.
‘What an awful night!’
‘Three months at the most,’ he had thought. She smelt of wet dog. She wasn’t even twenty, surely.
‘I’ve missed the bus to Brissy. Are you going that way?’
‘I’m going nearby, I can drop you off there.’
She had a big nose, big bust and big thighs and smelt of wide open spaces, the impetuousness of youth. Bernard’s uniform must have made her feel safe, as she was making herself at home, undoing her parka and shaking out her mop of red hair.
‘The next one’s not for half an hour, and I don’t want to wait. I’ll be eighteen in a month, and sitting my test. I’ve been saving up, and for a car as well. My brother-in-law’s going to sell me his – it’s a Renault 5, like yours.’
‘That’s nice.’
‘Don’t I know you? D’you work at the station?’
‘Yes.’
The stripes on her trousers looked like scratches. She had sturdy thighs, and the same smell as Yolande when she came home late from the factory. Their father would thump his fist on the table.
‘Have you seen the time?’
‘Well, how d’you expect me to get home? There isn’t a bus any more. There’s a war on, haven’t you heard? What are we having to eat?’
They always had the same, and she would always have some boyfriend waiting in the wings.
‘Why are you smiling?’
‘It’s you. You remind me of my sister when she was your age.’
‘Oh. What’s she called, your sister?’
‘Yolande.’
‘I’m Maryse. And what about you, what’s your first name?’
‘Bernard.’
‘Like my brother-in-law!’
She was practically family. Nothing for it but … He had stopped thinking about his death. This girl was like his life, a huge gift which he hadn’t dared even begin to unwrap.
‘What does your sister do?’
‘Nothing.’
‘Housewife and mother, then?’
‘Something like that.’
On each side of the road the houses dissolved in a wash of brown ink. A triangular yellow sign had appeared right in the middle of the road, forcing a diversion.
‘I’ve had it up to here with their ruddy motorway! We don’t need it, do we?’
‘The march of progress. If you’ll excuse me, I just have to stop for a few minutes, a call of —’
‘Got you!’
The girl’s laughter had sounded in his ear like the tinkling of the doorbell when you’re not expecting a visitor. The rain had slowed to barely a drizzle, the tears of a star freshening his face. Standing squarely in the mud, he had urinated against a concrete block bristling with metal rods. Work on the motorway had begun at the same time as his pain. With a wry smile, he noted how fast it was progressing. The arched back of the unfinished A26 soared like a diving board into the violet sky. A star had appeared between two banks of cloud. His hard-on was so big that he hadn’t been able to do up his flies again. On the way back to the car his feet made a squelching sound with every step.
‘I’m sorry, I seem to have knocked my watch down. There’s a torch in the glove compartment.’
‘Would you like some help?’
‘That would be good. Thank you.’
The pair of them had been wading about in the mud, Maryse’s backside just a few centimetres from Bernard’s nose. A whole life kept on a leash. The girl had made no more noise than the air escaping from a punctured balloon when he had jumped on her. Lying on top of her wildly flailing body, he held her head down in a puddle. It had gone on for quite some time, the girl was sturdy. But the grip of Bernard’s hand on the back of her neck had finally proved too much for Maryse’s ‘nearly’ eighteen years. ‘Strong as death! I’m as strong as death!’ His eyes were like a hound’s when it bays at the moon. The movement in the water of the puddle became still. Soon it reflected nothing but a sky empty save for one quivering star. Bernard had loosened his grip. A slender gilt chain had got twisted round his wrist, at its end a small disc inscribed ‘More than yesterday and much less than tomorrow’.
The hardest part had been dragging her to the far side of the building site. There he had heaved the body into one of the holes which would be filled in with vast quantities of concrete the next day, and covered her with earth. Maryse no longer existed, had never existed perhaps.
Bernard let the chain drop back on to his belly. It was unbelievably heavy. He had