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, castiron 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 with goulash lovers. The women’s perfumes mingled with the men’s sweat to produce a noxious mixture. Brice went outside and leant against the wing of a yellow Fiat, sipping lukewarm rosé from a plastic cup. One by one, people left the gallery, dripping with sweat like survivors of some kind of shipwreck, the men loosening their ties and the women slipping a finger into their low necklines. A tall, rangy brunette whose hair was pinned up with a pencil came to sit next to him, fanning herself with her invitation.
‘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