‘It’s like a sauna in there!’
‘Unbearable.’
‘Did you like it?’
‘What?’
‘The show.’
‘Oh … In this heat I’m not overly keen on goulash.’
She laughed. A nose just sufficiently bent to miss perfection, dark eyes spangled with green, a perfectly ripe mouth, hardly any bust and unusually long, narrow feet which reminded him of pointed slippers.
‘Well, it’s given me an appetite. I could eat a raw elephant.’
‘Luckily I know a restaurant where that’s the speciality.’
She hesitated for a moment, dangling one of her mules from her toes, before turning to him with a serious expression. ‘Are you sure their elephants are fresh?’
‘I can guarantee it; they’re picked every morning.’
‘Good. Is it a long way?’
‘No, in Africa. There’s a bush-taxi rank on the corner.’
‘I’d prefer to take my car.’
‘Where is it?’
‘We’re sitting on it.’
The yellow Fiat took them to a pleasant restaurant in La Croix-Rousse, where, in the absence of elephants, they tucked into grilled king prawns under an arbour festooned with multicoloured lanterns. Once they had got the small talk out of the way, they spent a wonderful night in Emma’s bed. Three months later Brice Casadamont, illustrator, made Emma Loewen, journalist, his lawfully wedded wife at the town hall in Lyon’s sixth arrondissement. It was as simple as ABC. It was time. Puffed out from fast living, Brice was limping painfully towards his fifties, while Emma was frolicking through her thirties, as lithe as a gazelle. He spent months trying to understand how this young gilded adventurer could have fallen for an old creature like him. She was beautiful, healthy, passionate about her work, made more money than him – what did he have to offer her but memories of a time when perhaps he had been someone, and promises of a glorious future in which he had obviously long since stopped believing? But women’s hearts are as unfathomable and full of oddities as the bottom of their handbags. Occasionally he would ask her, ‘Why me, Emma?’ She would smile and, with a kiss, call him an old fool, pack her case and go off to report from Togo, or Tanzania, or somewhere else. At first, with every trip he was afraid he would never see her again but, strangely, she always came back. He had to get used to the idea that she loved him. This was their life, no matter that it raised a few eyebrows. She came and went. He stayed put, persisting in painting unsaleable canvases more out of habit than enjoyment, and earning derisory sums from illustrating deadly dull children’s books.
Once more the timer plunged him into darkness, but now that he was used to it, he nimbly dodged the obstacles. Giving up on the tin-opener, he got hold of a sharp knife and went back up to the kitchen.
It seemed to him that a hint of warmth was beginning to spread through the space. The radiators were tepid. That said, it would have been unwise to discard his reefer jacket and woolly hat just yet. After a battle with the tin of quenelles, a process in which he almost gashed his hand at least ten times, he ate dinner at the corner of the table, half listening to the news on France Inter. Bombs were going off almost everywhere in the world.
On the pretext of fighting the cold, but chiefly to take the edge off the emptiness surrounding him, he had finished the bottle of wine, and it was when his forehead touched the table that he took the wise decision to go to bed still fully dressed, rolled up in a dust cover the removal men had left behind. The church clock hammered eleven times, using his head as an anvil.
‘That’s not too hot, is it?’
‘No, it’s fine.’
Martine’s strong fingers were not only massaging his scalp, they were giving his brain a good kneading, and Brice was thoroughly enjoying it. The thousand and one domestic worries which had in recent days sprung forth from his skull like water through the holes in a colander were now merging into a soft paste not dissimilar to the origin of the world, when every embryo was unaware even of its own existence.
‘Right, if you’d like to follow me …’
He let himself be shown to the swivel chair and draped in a huge black nylon robe which completely obscured the lines of his body.
‘Short?’
‘Er … Yes, well, not too short.’
‘It’s strange. I feel I know you.’
‘But it’s the first time I’ve been here.’
‘Yes, you said. It must be from seeing all those faces go past. In the end they merge into one.’
He surrendered himself to Martine’s hands while his upturned eyes sneaked a good look at her in the mirror facing him. She had reached the age when a woman’s sugar turns to honey. An inviting bosom in a tight black T-shirt with a spangled Pierrot embroidered on it formed the base to a neckless doll-like face plastered with make-up which gave her plump cheeks the shiny satin look of artificial fruit. The features were brought to life by two obsidian pupils shaded by extravagant false lashes, with a piercing gaze that went straight to your wallet. Two-tone hair, platinum blonde and Day-Glo pink, crowned a forehead crossed by a worry line which no face cream could shift. A garlic-tinged accent emerged from lips picked out with a thick garnet line.
‘Well now, so you’re the one who’s taken the Loriol house?’
‘Yes.’
‘It’s a beautiful house, and renovated top to bottom. I must say, a builder like Loriol knows how to go about it. And he’s a shrewd one, knows all the tricks. If you’d seen how it was before, a real wreck. I have to say, old Janin, the previous owner, was no good for anything after his wife died, let everything go to rack and ruin. He spent more time in the cellar than he did in the rest of the house, if you take my meaning. Poor old thing … Loriol must have got it for a song.’
The cellar. He had been down there for the first time the day before. A lovely vaulted cellar with walls covered in saltpetre and a trodden earth floor. He had stayed there for some time, sitting on a crate, looking at the double ceiling hook which in olden days had been used for hanging the pig. By concentrating hard enough he had ended up seeing the pig, head downwards, split open, offering up the unfathomable mystery of its entrails as in a Soutine painting. Seized by an irresistible force, he had grasped the iron hooks and, with knees bent, had swung there until his hands lost their grip. For three days he had been putting off the countless administrative procedures entailed by a house move: electricity, telephone, change of address, gas, water, bank … Normally it was Emma who took care of these chores. She would have had it all sorted in two shakes of a lamb’s tail, whereas he broke into a sweat, eyes watering, ears buzzing, if faced with the simplest form to fill in. No way out but to go and hang from a hookin a cellar ceiling. Old Janin must have felt this same deep distress after his wife died.
‘Did he hang himself?’
‘No, his liver gave out on him.’
‘Oh. What was his wife’s name?’
‘Marthe, I think.’
‘And were they very much in love?’
‘No, they used to row the whole time, but that’s normal. There you are, all nice and handsome.’
In the mirror Martine was holding up behind him, he noticed the skin on his neck reddened by shaving burn. The neck of a hanged man.
‘That’s perfect, thank you.’
A