Consolation

  ‘Oh really? And what does that make us, then? A zoo? Some kind of boarding house or . . . a hippy camp?’

  ‘No. You are . . . I don’t know quite how to put it, yet . . . I’m looking. I’ll tell you. Go on. I’m waiting for Yacine.’

  Kate rubbed her neck. She was tired.

  ‘A few weeks later, I got a phone call from the nice one, the one who liked my standards . . . She told me again how sorry she was, and began to rail against the administration and its stupid rules and . . . I interrupted her. No problem. I’d got over it.

  ‘And, by the way. She had a little boy who really needed a holiday. He was living with one of his aunts but things weren’t going well at all. Could we, perhaps, do without the blessing of the Board? It would just be for a few days. To give him a chance to see something different. She wouldn’t have dared “fiddle” like this if it had been someone else, but this little boy, well, I’d see, he was really something else . . . And she added with a laugh, “I think he deserves to come and see your mice!”

  ‘It was for the Easter holidays, I think . . . One morning, she “smuggled” him over here, so to speak, and . . . You can see what he’s like . . . We adored him from the start.

  ‘He was irresistible, asking loads of questions, was interested in everything, was constantly helping out, developed a passion for Hideous, would get up very early in the morning to help René in the garden, knew what my name meant and told all sorts of epic stories to my little bumpkins who’d never been out of their village.

  ‘When she came to fetch him at the end of the holidays, it was . . . awful.

  ‘He was sobbing, tears running down his face . . . I remember I took him by the hand and we went down to the end of the garden. I said, “A few weeks from now it’ll be the summer holidays, and then you’ll be able to come for two months.” But, he hiccupped, he wanted to stay for-for-foreh-eh-ver. I promised him that I’d write often, so there, yes, if I could prove to him that I wouldn’t forget him, all right. He’d agree to get back into Nathalie’s car . . .

  ‘In the time it took for him to give a big cuddle to his favourite dog, well, Nathalie, a civil servant who served straight from the heart, confessed to me that the boy’s father had beaten his mother to death before his eyes.

  ‘I came down with a bump. That would teach me to play the fine charitable society lady, wouldn’t it . . . I wanted to open a holiday camp, not find myself with a whole slew of problems staring me in the face all over again . . .

  ‘Anyway. It was already too late. Yacine was gone, but not the images. Not the obsession with a man destroying his children’s mother in a corner of the living room . . . I thought I’d got tough . . . but I guess not. Life always has plenty more nasty surprises up its sleeve . . .

  ‘So, I wrote to Yacine. We all wrote to him. I took lots of pictures of the dogs, the hens, René, and I’d include one or two with each letter. And he came back, at the end of June.

  ‘Summer went by. My parents came for a visit. He soon had my mother wound round his little finger, and he’d repeat after her all the Latin names of all the flowers, then he’d ask my father to translate them all for him. My father would be there reading below the tall locust tree, and he’d be declaiming, “Tityre, tu patulae recubans sub tegmine fagi,” teaching Yacine to sing the name of the lovely Amaryllis.

  ‘I was the only one who knew his story, and it was a marvel to see how a little boy who’d witnessed so much could have such a restful effect on everyone . . .

  ‘The children made fun of him all the time because he was constantly afraid of everything, but he never got cross. He would say, “I’m looking at you because I’m thinking about what you’re doing.” I myself knew that he didn’t want to run the slightest risk of being hurt ever again. He let the other kids get on with their “Indian torture” games, and he went off to see Granny among her roses.

  ‘By mid-August I was beginning to dread his departure.

  ‘Nathalie had planned to come and fetch him on the 28th. On the 27th in the evening, he disappeared.

  ‘The next morning, we organized a huge game of hide and seek. In vain. And Nathalie went away again, rather annoyed. This business could get her into a lot of trouble. I promised her that I’d bring him to her myself as soon as I found him. But by the following evening we still couldn’t find him. She was in a panic. We had to call the police. Perhaps he’d drowned? And while I was trying to reassure her, I saw the oddest thing in the kitchen, so I said, Give me a bit more time, I’ll call the police, I promise.

  ‘The children were completely stressed out, they ate their dinner in total silence and went to bed, calling his name as they went along the corridors.

  ‘In the middle of the night, I came down to make a cup of tea. I didn’t switch on the light, I sat at the end of the table and I spoke to him. “Yacine, I know where you are. You have to come out now. You don’t want the police to have to come and get you, now do you?”

  ‘No answer.

  ‘Obviously.

  ‘I would have done the same thing in his place, so I did what I would have wanted someone to do with me, if I had been in his place.

  ‘“Yacine, listen. If you come out now, I’ll work something out with your uncle and aunt and I promise you that you’ll be able to stay with us.”

  ‘Naturally, I was taking a risk, but anyway . . . according to various things Nathalie had let drop, I’d figured that the uncle in question was not all that eager to have an umpteenth mouth to feed . . .

  ‘“Yacine, please. You’re going to catch all the fleas on that dog! Have I ever lied to you, ever, even once, since you’ve known me?”

  ‘And then I heard, “Oh, all right . . . you’ve no idea how hungry I am!”’

  ‘Where was he?’ asked Charles.

  Kate turned round: ‘That bench over there against the wall, the one that looks like a huge chest . . . I don’t know if you can see them, but there are two openings in the front. It’s a dog kennel bench I found at an antique shop when we were moving in . . . I thought it was a grand idea, but, naturally, the dogs never used it. They prefer Ellen’s sofas. And what a coincidence, suddenly Hideous was in there all the time, and never once came out to drool over our plates during dinner . . .’

  ‘Elementary, my dear Watson,’ smiled Charles.

  ‘I fed him, I called the uncle, and I enrolled Yacine in school. That’s Yacine’s story . . . As for Nedra, she came through the same channel, smuggled in, but her circumstances were far more tragic. No one knew a thing about her except that she’d been found in some sort of squat and her face was broken. That was two years ago, she must have been about three, maybe . . . well, we’ve never been very sure. And it was another of Nathalie’s schemes.

  ‘And in her case, too, it was supposed to be temporary. Just time enough for her jaw to heal – a heavy-handed slap had knocked it out of place – and for her to recover properly while they tried to find some family member somewhere . . .

  ‘And believe me, Charles, when you have all your baby teeth but no papers, life becomes very complicated. We found a doctor who agreed to operate on her on the quiet but everything else was appalling. They wouldn’t let me enrol her in school, and I’ve been teaching her myself. Anyway, I do what I can, since she doesn’t speak.’

  ‘Not at all?’

  ‘Yes, well, a little . . . When she’s alone with Alice. But she has a dog’s life. No. Sorry. Nothing to do with my dogs. She’s not stupid at all, and she understands her situation perfectly well. She knows that someone can come and fetch her from one day to the next, and that I won’t be able to do a thing for her.’

  Now Charles understood why the little girl had run off into the woods the night before.

  ‘She can always hide under the bench . . .’

  ‘No . . . It’s not the same . . . Yacine had the right to be here, he’s boarding. I simply switched the dates round and I make him go to stay with his family during the holidays. Whereas Nedra . . . I don’
t know . . . I’m trying to put together an adoption application, but it’s absolute hell. Always the same old problem with standards . . . I ought to find myself a nice little husband who works as a civil servant,’ she smiled, ‘some sort of school teacher or something . . .’

  She arched her back and stretched her arms out towards the fire.

  ‘There,’ she yawned, ‘you know it all.’

  ‘And the three others?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You could adopt them as well.’

  ‘Yes. I’ve thought about it. To get my surrogates off my back, for a start, but . . .’

  ‘But?’

  ‘I’d get the feeling I was killing their parents a second time round.’

  ‘Don’t they ever talk about it?’

  ‘They do. Of course. It’s even become a sort of gimmick. “Yeah, yeah, I’ll tidy my room . . . When you adopt me.” And that’s fine.’

  Long silence.

  ‘I didn’t know they existed,’ murmured Charles.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘People like you.’

  ‘And you’re right. They don’t exist. Or at least I don’t feel like I exist.’

  ‘I don’t believe that.’

  ‘Well, still . . . We haven’t been out much in nine years. I always try to put a bit of money aside to take them on a long trip, but I can’t manage it. Especially as I bought the house last year. It was an obsession. I wanted us to be in our own home. I wanted the children to have a place that they’re from, for later. I’ll force them to leave, at some point, but I wanted them to have this as a base . . . I bugged René about it every day until finally he gave in. “Oh, I don’t know,” he whinged, “it’s been in my family since the Great War . . .” Why should it change . . . And then there were his nephews in Guéret . . .

  ‘I stopped drinking my morning coffee with him on the way back from the school and, five days later, he relented.

  ‘“You idiot, you know perfectly well that we’re your nephews,” I scolded, gently.

  ‘Of course I had to run it by the judge and my beloved surrogate, and they all began to make a big fuss. What? Is that really wise? And why such a tumbledown place? How will you keep it up, then?

  ‘Oh fuck. They hadn’t spent a winter here, had they . . . Eventually I said, it’s quite simple, either you let me sell the flat so that I can buy this house, or I’ll give the children back to you. The new judge had other fish to fry and the two others are such idiots that they actually thought I was serious.

  ‘So I went to the notary with René and his sister, and I swapped a bloody awful Résidence des Mimosas for this magnificent kingdom. What a party we had, that night . . . I invited the entire village. Even Corinne Le Men . . .

  ‘That’s how happy I was . . .’

  ‘Now I live off the rent of two flats with very zealous managing agents . . . There’s always some sort of bloody maintenance work to do . . . Well . . . Perhaps it’s just as well, the way things are . . . Who’d look after the wild animals if we went away?’

  Silence.

  ‘Living? Surviving? Maybe. But existing, no. I may have more muscle tone to show for it, but my poor brain has abandoned me along the way. Now I make cakes and sell them at the school fair . . .’

  ‘I still don’t believe you.’

  ‘No?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘And you’re right again. Of course, from a distance, I look a bit like a saint, right? But you mustn’t believe in the kindness of generous people. In reality they’re the most selfish . . .

  ‘I confessed as much when I was talking about Ellen, earlier, that I was an ambitious young woman . . .

  ‘Ambitious and very proud! I was ridiculous, but I wasn’t really joking when I said I wanted to eradicate global hunger. My father brought us up speaking dead languages and my mother thought that Mrs Thatcher had a lovely hairdo or that the Queen Mum’s latest hat did not go at all well with her dress. So . . . it was hardly a surprise that I would want something more . . . a somewhat larger life, no?

  ‘Yes, I was ambitious. And here we are. This destiny that I never would have been able to aspire to all on my own, because the people I admired were head and shoulders above me – well, these children have given it to me. It’s an itty-bitty sort of destiny,’ she winced, ‘but at any rate . . . it’s entertaining enough to keep you awake until three in the morning . . .’

  She had turned around, and was smiling into his eyes.

  And at that very moment, Charles knew.

  His goose was cooked.

  ‘I know you’re in a hurry, but you can’t leave now? You can have Samuel’s room, if you like . . .’

  Because she had crossed her arms and put the matter to him like that, and because he wasn’t in a hurry at all any more, he added, ‘One last thing . . .’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘You haven’t told me the story behind your ring.’

  ‘Of course! What was I thinking!’

  She looked at her hand: ‘Well . . .’

  She leaned towards him and placed her index finger above her right cheek: ‘Do you see that little star, there? In the middle of the crow’s feet?’

  ‘Of course I can see it,’ Charles assured her, blind as a bat.

  ‘The first and last smack my father ever gave me. I must have been sixteen, and his ring got me. Poor man, he was just sick . . . So sick about it that he never wore it again.’

  ‘But what had you done, to make him . . .’ Charles asked, indignant.

  ‘I don’t remember . . . I must have told Plutarch to put it up his . . .’ ‘

  ‘And why?’

  ‘Plutarch wrote a treatise on the upbringing of children that really got on my nerves, you can imagine! No, I’m joking, I think it must have been something to do with going out on the town . . . It hardly matters . . . I was bleeding. Naturally, I went on and on about it so I never saw the ring again.

  ‘Although I liked it a great deal. As a little girl I used to dream about it. The stone was so blue . . . I can’t remember . . . I think it’s called a nicolo . . . And the image . . . Well, it’s really dirty just now, but look at the young man striding along with a hare on his shoulder . . . I loved him . . . He’s got such a lovely derrière . . . I often asked my father what had become of the ring, but he said he couldn’t remember. Perhaps he’d sold it . . .

  ‘And then ten years later, when we were leaving the judge’s office and the die had been cast, we went to have tea on the Place Saint-Sulpice. My old dad rummaged around pretending to look for his glasses and then out came the ring, wrapped in a handkerchief. “We’re proud of you,” he said, and gave it to me. “Here, you’ll need it too when you’re looking for respect . . .” At first it was far too big and would slide around my middle finger, but with all the wood I’ve been chopping, it stays very nicely on these big paws of mine.

  ‘My father died two years ago. That was another sadness but at least it came about naturally.

  ‘When he used to come, in the summer, I would put him in charge of watching the jam cooking on the stove . . . It was just the right sort of job for him . . . He’d take his book, sit by the Aga, turn the pages with one hand and the wooden spoon with the other . . . It was during one of those long apricot afternoons that he gave me my final lesson in ancient civilization.

  ‘He’d hesitated for a long time, he confessed, before giving me the ring, because according to his friend Herbert Boardman, the little image was part of a recurring theme in the repertory of ancient gemmology, that of the “Rural Sacrifice”.

  ‘He went into a long theory on the notion of sacrifice with the Elegies of Tibullus and the whole lot of them as background music, but I wasn’t listening any more. I was looking at his reflection in the copper cauldron and thinking how lucky I’d been to grow up with such a thoughtful man watching over me.

  ‘Because, you see, that notion of sacrifice is quite relative and . . .

  ‘“Take it easy, Dad,” I reassured him
, “you know perfectly well that there is no sacrifice at all in all this . . . Go on. Concentrate, or else it will burn.”’

  Kate got up with a sigh: ‘There. That’s it. You can do what you like but I’m going to turn in.’

  He took the tray from her hands and headed for the pantry.

  ‘What’s incredible,’ he called out, ‘is that with you, everything is a story and all the stories are beautiful . . .’

  ‘But everything is a story, Charles. Absolutely everything, and for everyone. The thing is, you usually never find anyone to listen to them . . .’

  *

  Last room at the end of the corridor, she had said. It was a little garret room, and Charles, as if he were in Mathilde’s room, spent a long time gazing at its adolescent walls. One photo in particular held his attention. It was tacked above the bed, in the place where a crucifix would go, and the couple who stood there smiling gently delivered the last deep bruise of the day.

  Ellen was exactly as Kate had described her: radiant. Pierre was kissing her on the cheek, and in the crook of his elbow he held a little boy, fast asleep.

  Charles sat on the edge of the bed with his head down and his hands together.

  What a trip . . .

  In his entire life he had not felt so jet-lagged. But this time he wasn’t complaining, it was just that he was a bit . . . lost.

  Anouk . . .

  What in hell’s name was the meaning of this mess?

  And why did you clear out, when all these people whom you would have loved have gone to so much trouble to carry on?

  Why didn’t you come to see her more often? You always told us that one’s true family are the people one meets along the way.

  And so? You were at home here . . . And you’d have found a daughter in this lovely girl. She would have been a consolation to you, for Alexis . . .

  And why did I never call you back? I’ve worked so hard all these years, and yet I won’t leave anything behind. The only important foundations, the ones that have led me to this little room and that would have deserved my full attention, well, I filled them with selfishness and ambition. And for the most part, I lost out. No, this isn’t self-flagellation, you would have hated that, it’s just that . . .