Yolande showed no surprise at hearing the three quick taps at the door and the key turning in the lock. Her brother had always knocked three times to let her know it was him. There was no point, since no one ever came. But he did it anyway.
Yolande was still sitting with an empty plate. The room was cold, the cooker was off. Bernard hung up his wet coat. Underneath he was wearing an SNCF uniform; he worked for the railways. He was around fifty, and looked like the sort of person you would ask for some small change, the time or directions in the street. He greeted his sister with a kiss on the back of the neck as he went round to take his place opposite her. Locking his fingers, he cracked his knuckles before unfolding his napkin. He had a yellowish complexion and big dark shadows under his eyes. His flattened hair showed the circular imprint of his cap.
‘Haven’t you started? You should have, it’s late.’
‘No, I was waiting for you. I was wondering when the school bus last went by.’
‘Saturday morning, I expect.’
‘You’ve got mud all over you. Is it raining?’
‘Yes.’
‘Oh.’
They were both equally still, sitting upright in their chairs. They looked at each other without really seeing, asked questions without waiting for an answer.
‘I had a puncture coming home from the station, near the building site. It’s all churned up round there. You’d think the earth was spewing up mud. That’s their machinery, excavators, rollers, all that stuff. The work’s coming along quickly, but it’s creating havoc.’
‘Have you still got a temperature?’
‘Sometimes, but it passes. I’m taking the tablets the doctor gave me. I’m a bit tired, that’s all.’
‘Shall I serve up?’
‘If you like.’
Yolande took his plate and disappeared into the shadows. The ladle clanged against the side of the pot, and there was a sound of trickling juices. Yolande came back and handed the plate to Bernard. He took it, Yolande held on.
‘Have you been scared?’
Bernard looked away and gave the plate a gentle tug. ‘Yes, but it didn’t last. Give it here, I’m feeling better now.’
Yolande went back for her own food. From the shadows she said, without knowing whether it was a question or a statement, ‘You’ll get more and more scared.’
Bernard began to eat, mechanically.
‘That may be, I don’t know. Machon’s given me some new pills.’
Yolande ate in the same way, as if scooping water out of a boat.
‘I saw the butcher this morning. He tried to see in again.’
Bernard shrugged. ‘He can’t see anything.’
‘No, he can’t see anything.’
Then they stopped talking and finished their lukewarm pot-au-feu.
Through the closed shutters, shafts of light came in from the street, illuminating the chaos cluttering the dining room. A network of narrow passages tunnelled through the heaped-up jumble of furniture, books, clothing, all kinds of things, made it possible to get from one room to another provided you walked like an Egyptian. Stacks of newspapers and magazines just about managed to prop up this rubbish tip, which threatened to collapse at any moment.
At the table, Yolande had swept the used plates, cutlery and glasses from the evening before over to one corner. She was busy cutting pictures out of a magazine and sticking them on to pieces of cardboard to make a kind of jigsaw puzzle. By day the pendant lamp still oozed the same dead light as it did by night.
‘Bernard’s not gone to work today, he wasn’t up to it. He’s getting tireder and tireder, thinner and thinner. His body’s like this house, coming apart at the seams. Where am I going to put him when he’s dead? There’s not a bit of space left anywhere. We’ll get by, we’ve always got by, ever since I can remember. Nothing has ever left this house, even the toilet’s blocked up. We keep everything. Some day, we won’t need anything else, it’ll all be here, for ever.’
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 lunch time 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 been ill 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. In front of 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 tiniest forms. It was there, rounding out with yellow light each of the droplets of rain 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