For a brief moment he felt like hanging himself. The whole thing was so absurd, trapped in the ice fields of Versailles! He didn’t know where to start: phone Odile to pass on all this good news? Make an appointment with the lawyer? With Emmaus?
What was the point? He was sure whatever he did would end in disaster.
On Rue Carnot a bulb had blown on one of the stars in the Christmas lights, making it appear to be squinting. People emerged from shops transformed into porters carrying trees, bags, enormous boxes tied with string, gift-wrapped parcels with ribbon around them which would be clogging up dustbins within days, the contents tumbling noisily down the rubbish chute. Freshly trussed turkeys, bloodstained boar’s legs, fat geese, pyramids of snails and monstrous turds of white pudding came spewing out of butchers and charcuteries – the sight of it was enough to give you indigestion. People bought any old rubbish at any old price, committing a kind of budgetary suicide with the most tenuous of links to the birth of the baby Jesus. There was a general desire to end it all, drowning in bad champagne and foie gras from Monoprix.
Olivier let himself be jostled this way and that, feeling dazed and detached from his body. During the festive season, Versailles sparkled with inevitability. On Avenue de Saint-Cloud the crowd began to thin out. Unconsciously, his feet were leading him towards Lycée Hoche where he had gone to school between the ages of eleven and fourteen. As he got closer, he tried to recall the names of his teachers and classmates. Some of them came back to him: Monsieur Mauduit, Madame Le Breton, Vidal, Joly, Langlois … He saw himself too, satchel bulging with heavy textbooks, exercise books and gym kit, waiting for bus B … His mind was warming up but he felt as if he was delving into someone else’s memories.
His first death had come the year he turned fourteen and he had not stopped dying and being reborn ever since. Amazing – only in Versailles could you see the words ‘Long Live the King!’ graffitied on the school walls. The front gates were locked but he could see through them to the dome of the chapel across the main courtyard, where pupils and teachers gathered to lift the flag every 11 November. The cassowary feathers of the Saint-Cyrien cadets hung limply in the inevitable rain. He was sorry not to feel anything at all. Funny the lengths the brain goes to in order to protect the body.
He began walking back into town by way of Rue de la Paroisse and stopped to warm up in a café on Place du Marché. Since giving up drink, he never knew what to order. He didn’t feel like a coffee, and couldn’t make up his mind between a Viandox and a tomato juice. With a dash of Tabasco, tomato juice was the beverage that most resembled alcohol. For the first time in ages, he really fancied a drink. He put too much Tabasco in and made himself choke. All around him, people were talking too loudly, laughing annoyingly. Since his teens, he had never loved anyone. Since then, he had never been anything but a pleasant yet indifferent passenger through life. Odile didn’t ask for more, which explained why they got on so well. In conversation, he played his cards close to his chest. People either took him for a snob or a harmless idiot, or both. It was all the same to him.
Was it the incongruity of the situation, or had he spent too long outside Lycée Hoche? He felt ill at ease, on edge, as if haunted by something he could not control. He struggled to get a grip on himself. The transition from the arctic conditions outside to the warmth of the café had been abrupt … Was he coming down with a fever? That was all he needed. He gritted his teeth, mentally shook himself and left the café.
Jeanne had spent all day lying around in her dressing gown and slippers with a cigarette hanging from her mouth, grazing on fruit, keeping one eye on the TV and the other on a trashy detective novel. She loved duvet days. Rodolphe had left early that morning and not been back since. Around four o’clock, she finally decided it was time for a bath. Standing in front of the mirror with wet hair slicked either side of her sharp-featured face, she thought she bore a resemblance to Cruella De Vil, who would soon be making her annual onscreen appearance as the Christmas holidays loomed. She was not troubled by the likeness to a baddie. In fact she felt a certain degree of pride in belonging to the family of reprobates denounced in films and novels. They alone carried the misery of the world on their shoulders, and in her eyes they were a hundred times more worthy of respect than the fresh-faced heroes who moulded God in their own image. She, however, was not cruel. Her pupils judged her strict but fair, and her colleagues courteous but cold.
She had gone from being slim to skinny, as others went from chubby to fat. And yet she denied herself nothing, had a healthy appetite and was rarely ill – the odd cold, nothing serious. Food just went straight through her. She asked herself how long it had been since she last had sex, but could not answer. Years … Sometimes in dreams. Her belly had always been flat and would remain so, her bony hips sticking out either side. People said men preferred women with a bit of meat on them. That was rubbish; they liked whatever they could get. She didn’t hold it against them, not that she had been with many: three, including a teenager and a woman she spent almost a year with. Fanchon was headmistress of the secondary school in Melun, the man a BNP bank clerk in the same town, and the teenager, the first …
The hairbrush fell out of her hands. The stale whiff of the past wafted back to her only very rarely. She made do with living in an eternal present, odourless, colourless and tasteless. The hairdryer put her thoughts back in order, a great gust of wind blasting through her head.
‘A drowned rat’, that was how the twins used to describe her. They had no more weight on them than she did; lean and tough, like their father – and their mother. Rodolphe was the odd one out. He had gone from being a fat baby to a fat little boy and grew up to become obese. Was it linked to his blindness? That was a mystery to chew over. Like all children, he first started exploring the world with his mouth, and had never stopped. As soon as he was introduced to someone, he would smack his flabby, sugar-coated lips against their cheek like a suction cup, hoovering them into his wide-open mouth. Children were afraid of him. But Rodolphe was not an intrinsically bad person. It was only repeated rejection that had made him that way. Sometimes she wished he would die, for his own good. Unlike her, he could not bear the solitude nature had inflicted on him. But despite the layer of fat strangling it, his heart carried on mercilessly beating.
Jeanne had just put on a jumper and a pair of black trousers when the doorbell rang.
‘Hi, I’m your neighbour, or rather, your neighbour’s son, and I …’
Olivier shrank back. The black pupils in the eyes of the woman who had just opened the door to him looked like two great lead wrecking balls. An entire wall of his past went crashing to the ground, leaving nothing behind it.
‘Have we met?’
No matter how prepared you are, there are some things you cannot see coming. Jeanne was face to face with Olivier. An Olivier disguised as a respectable gentleman with salt and pepper hair, dressed in a suit and tie, but Olivier all the same. She could not speak or make a sound, but two beads of salt water began welling beneath her eyelids. The man standing before her wobbled as if gripped with vertigo.
‘I don’t believe it … Jeanne?’
‘Come in.’
This was not real life in the everyday world where you could come and go as you pleased; Olivier knew what a massive step he was taking. This was not a matter of chance. What it was a matter of, he did not know. He had set foot on a slippery slope and he was sliding, yes, sliding. He had come round to ask his neighbour for the phone book and found himself face to face with his past, with Jeanne, his Jeanne, the Jeanne of his youth, with whom his life had turned upside down, and again he felt knocked off balance. It was scary and wonderful all at once.
‘Sit down.’
Olivier fell back onto a sofa. He couldn’t take anything in. The smell of soap and shampoo wafted from Jeanne, who had hardly changed after all these years. He felt the urge to laugh; the whole thing was so unlikely, it was as if he had dreamed it.
‘I … I don’t know what to say.’
‘Don’t say anything.’
There he was, in front of her. He was there. He wasn’t dead. He was crossing and uncrossing his