Consolation

  He was asking for details about the bedroom. ‘Something spacious and intimate at the same time,’ he said, over and over, peering at my specifications.

  ‘Don’t you think, darling? Do you agree?’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘The bedroom!’ he whispered, with an exasperated puff on the cigar. ‘Try to keep up please.’

  She agreed. Only her lovely foot had wandered off.

  I loved her, knowing full well what she was like, and I don’t really see how I can complain now just because she wanders off with a flippant remark . . .

  She was the one overseeing the site. We began to meet more and more frequently and as the work progressed my perspective became more vague, her handshakes less energetic, the load-bearing walls less of an obsession, and the workers increasingly in the way.

  Finally one evening, on some flimsy pretext that the parquet was too dark, or too light, she hardly knew which, she demanded I meet her within the hour.

  So we were the first to inaugurate the magnificent bedroom. On a painter’s sheet, spacious and intimate, among the fag-ends and pots of white-spirit . . .

  But after she’d got dressed in silence she took a few steps, opened a door, closed it again at once, came back to me smoothing her skirt, and announced, quite simply, ‘I shall never live here.’

  There was no arrogance for once, no bitterness or aggression. She would never live there.

  We switched off the lights and went down the stairway in the semi-darkness.

  ‘I have a little girl, did you know?’ she confided between two floors, and while I was knocking on the concierge’s door to give her the keys, she added in a very low voice, for herself alone, ‘A little girl who deserves something better than this, I think.’

  Ah-hah! The seating arrangements! Always the best moment of the evening.

  ‘So . . . Laurence . . . on my right,’ declares my old dad, ‘then you, little Guy (poor Laurence . . . refrigerator department, shoplifters and havoc among the personnel coming right at you), Mado, you’re here, then Claire, then –’

  ‘No!’ protests my mother irritably, tearing the paper from his hands. ‘We said Charles, then Françoise, here . . . Oh, no, that doesn’t work . . . We’re one man short now.’

  What would become of us without our seating arrangements?

  Claire is watching me. She knows we are one man short. I smile to her and she shrugs her shoulders in a gallant sort of way to shake off my tenderness, which is making her uncomfortable.

  Our gazes are worth more than that absent man’s, after all . . .

  Without any further hesitation she grabs the chair before her, unfolds her napkin and calls out to our favourite grocer, ‘Come on, come over here, little Guy! Come and sit next to me and tell me again what I’m entitled to with my three discount points!’

  My mother sighs and throws down her weapons. ‘Oh, well, sit wherever you like, then.’

  Such talent, I muse.

  Such talent . . .

  But the intelligence of this marvellous girl, who is capable of sabotaging your seating arrangements in a split second, who can make a family gathering bearable, who can stir up a group of blasé adolescents without humiliating them, who can find favour with a woman like Laurence (needless to say, she never got along with the other two, something that gladdened my heart), and is respected by all her colleagues, who is called Our Little Vauban in the plush offices of certain elected officials (I read one day in an ultra-serious urban planning journal this paraphrase of a certain famous phrase, ‘A case fought by Balanda is a case won, a case defended by Balanda is an unwinnable case’) – all of this, all her finesse and common sense, stop short once you get anywhere near the region of her heart.

  The man who is missing this evening, and who has been missing for years now, does actually exist. Except that he too must be surrounded by his family this evening. With his wife (at his Maman’s, said Claire, her smile a bit too forced to be honest), and his napkin ring.

  Such a hero.

  And cutting such a fine figure, modern man in his well-worn slippers . . .

  The point is he very nearly came between us, the fat bastard . . . ‘No, Charles, you can’t say that . . . He’s not fat . . .’ That’s the sort of feeble rejoinder she’d come out with back in the days when I was still doing my Don Quixote act and would try to struggle against that flailing windmill of words. But I have since given up, it’s pointless. A man who, even if he is thin, can say calmly and without irony to a woman like her, ‘Be patient, I’ll leave when the girls are grown up,’ is not even worth the hay you’d feed to old Rosinante.

  He can go to hell.

  ‘But why do you stay with him?’ I have asked her, formulating the question every possible way.

  ‘I don’t know. Because he doesn’t want me, I suppose.’

  And that is all she has to say in her own defence. Yes, her defence. Our own little . . . Our lovely beacon and the terror of every court of law.

  A hopeless case.

  But I’ve given up. Out of fatigue, and from a sense of honesty, and because here am I incapable of cleaning up my own back yard.

  I’d make a lousy prosecutor, my arm isn’t long enough.

  And there are other things going on underneath all that, other renunciations and shadowy regions and slopes that are far too slippery, even for the kindred spirit of a brother like me. So we don’t talk about it any more. And she switches off her mobile. And shrugs her shoulders. So that’s life. And she laughs. And she doesn’t mind getting lumbered with the resident champion, to take her mind off things.

  There’s no point describing the rest. It’s all too drearily familiar.

  The little feast. Saturday evening dinner in the home of nicely brought-up people, where everyone valiantly follows the score. The best dishes, the dreadful knife-rests in the shape of a basset hound, the glass that gets knocked over, the kilo of salt that gets poured onto the tablecloth, the debate about televised debates, the 35-hour working week, France going down the tubes, all the taxes we pay and the police radar we didn’t see, the bad guy who says that Arabs have too many kids and the good girl who answers back that you shouldn’t generalize, the hostess who insists it’s over-cooked just for the pleasure of being told it isn’t, and the patriarch who fusses over the temperature of his wine.

  Go on then. I’ll spare you all that. You know them only too well, these interludes that are always warm and rather depressing at the same time, that are referred to as family and that remind you from time to time that you really haven’t come that far . . .

  The only thing worth saving is the laughter of those kids upstairs, and wouldn’t you know, it is Mathilde who is laughing the loudest. And her giggles take us back to the concierge’s loge on the Boulevard Beauséjour, and the whispered confidences of the superb wife of the man who’d hired me for this job, and she’s just run off with my heart and my senses wrapped up in a dirty old painter’s sheet.

  I’ll never know what it was exactly that her little girl had been spared, nor what it was she deserved, in fact, but I do know how she made my work easier. After that last ‘site meeting’ I heard nothing more from Laurence. She didn’t come any more, I couldn’t get hold of her, and what’s worse, I began to think I’d dreamt it all, and I sent off my final proposals into the void.

  And yet she haunted me. I was haunted. And since she was too beautiful for me, I had to use some cunning.

  My Trojan horse was made of wood, too. And I worked on it for weeks.

  This was the school-leaving project I had never had the courage to finish. My craftsman’s masterpiece, my dreams cobbled together with a tube of glue, my little pebble tossed into the deepest well . . .

  The less it seemed I’d ever see her again, the more time I spent on the finishing touches. I found ways to challenge the best suppliers in the Faubourg Saint-Antoine, I made my way through all the model-making shops, I even used a trip to London as an excuse to lose myself among the cats of an
astonishing old witch, Mrs Lily Lilliput, who could even fit Buckingham Palace into a thimble and to whom I paid a small fortune. Now that I recall, she even flogged me an entire set of copper cake moulds no bigger than ladybirds. ‘An essential in the kitchen, indeed’, she insisted, drawing up her . . . oversized invoice. And then one day I had to face the facts: there was nothing more to add and it was time to go looking for her.

  I knew she worked for Chanel so I took my courage in both hands, interlocking two C’s for Conquest and Concupiscence, but I left my bravado behind: it was more a case of Cold Feet and Cupid, to be honest, as I pushed open the door on the Rue Cambon. I’d shaved too closely, even nicked myself here and there, but my collar was clean and I had new shoelaces.

  They called her, she acted all surprised, fiddled with her string of pearls, was charming, casual and . . . Oh, it was cruel . . . But I didn’t get flustered and I asked her to stop by the agency the following Saturday.

  And when her little girl discovered my present, her present that is, and I showed her how to light up the loveliest doll’s house in all the world, I knew I was on the right track.

  But after the mother had made the customary exclamations, she stayed on her knees a little bit too long . . .

  At first she was full of wonder, then awkward and silent, and she must have already been asking herself what she would have to pay in exchange for so many hours of painstaking hope. It was time for me to fire my last round: ‘Look,’ I said, bending over her nape, ‘there is even some marble, just there . . .’

  And then she smiled and let me love her.

  ‘And then with a smile she loved me’ would have been snappier, no? Would have been stronger, more romantic. But I didn’t dare . . . Because I’ve never known how, I guess . . . And when I look at her now, sitting on the other side of the table, light-hearted and affable, indulgent, so magnanimous with my family, and still just as attractive, just as . . . No, I’ve never known how . . . After the carpet at the Bristol and the false charms of alcohol, perhaps Mathilde was the third misunderstanding in our relationship . . .

  It’s something new, feeling dizzy like this. Being so introspective, asking these useless questions about our relationship, and it really isn’t like me. Been travelling too much, perhaps? Too much jet lag, too many hotel ceilings and restless nights? Or too many lies . . . Too many sighs . . . Too many mobile phones snapping shut whenever I show up in silence, too many forced poses and mood swings, or . . . Too much of nothing, if truth be told.

  This wasn’t the first time Laurence had cheated on me and up to now I’d usually got off fairly lightly. Not that I particularly liked it, but as I’ve already said, I’d thrown myself to the lions, trying to pat the kitty on my way into the coliseum. It hadn’t taken me long to figure out that I was out of my league. She’d always refused to marry me, didn’t want a child with me, didn’t . . . And then . . . I was working so hard, was away so often myself . . . So I just learned to bite the bullet and sweet-talk my pride to keep it docile.

  I managed pretty well, actually. I even think that her . . . slippages often acted as a fuel for our semblance of coupledom. Our pillows, in any case, were delighted.

  She’d seduce, embrace, get bored, and come back to me.

  Come back to me and talk to me in the dark. She pushed back the sheets and lifted herself up a bit, stroked my back, my shoulders, my face, a long time, slowly, tenderly . . . and always ended up murmuring something like ‘You’re the best, you know . . .’ or ‘There’s no one else like you . . .’ I kept my mouth shut, lay there motionless, never tried to resist her wandering hand.

  Because even if the skin was mine, it often felt as if those nights of strategic withdrawal were for her scars, not mine, and that she was somehow trying to contain something, appease something, by massaging those scars, very gently.

  But this time we haven’t got that far. Nowadays she’s trusting her insomnia to homeopathy and even in the dark she won’t let me see what it is that’s beating out of synch beneath her beautiful suit of armour . . .

  Who is to blame? Mathilde, for growing up too fast, like Alice in Wonderland when she bursts her way out of her tiny house, blasting it to smithereens? She hardly needs me any more to hold her stirrup for her, and soon she’ll be speaking English much better than I do . . .

  Or Mathilde’s father, for his carelessness that once upon a time seemed downright criminal but now seems almost funny? Irony has replaced bitterness and so much the better, but as a result I suffer by comparison. Even if I never mix up the dates of the school holidays, unlike some . . .

  Or maybe the passage of time, no longer doing such a great job? I was young when I met Laurence, younger than her, I was her ‘toy boy’. Now I’ve caught up. Maybe even overtaken her.

  There are days when I feel so old.

  So old . . .

  Or could it be my profession – the constant struggle, no sooner have you persuaded them than you have to start all over again. Nothing is ever sure, and here I am nearly fifty years old and I sometimes get the feeling I’m still this frantic student high on caffeine rattling on about how ‘I’ve got to rush, I’m running late,’ to whoever will listen, and screw up with the drawings when presenting the umpteenth project to the umpteenth jury, and the only difference now is that the old sword of Damocles has lost none of its trenchancy over the years – it just cuts differently.

  Yes, that’s how things stand . . . Nothing to do with getting good marks and moving on to the next year, it’s all about money. Lots and lots of money. Money, power, and megalomania too.

  Not to mention politics, of course. No, let’s not go there.

  Or perhaps love is to blame? The way it . . .

  ‘And you, Charles? What do you think?’

  ‘Sorry, what?’

  ‘About the Museum of Primitive Mankind at the Quai Branly?’

  ‘Oh! I haven’t been there in a while . . . I went to the site a few times, but . . .’

  ‘At any rate,’ says my sister Françoise, ‘it’s the worst place to try to have a pee . . . I don’t know how much that thing cost but they definitely saved on the partition walls in the lavatory, that much I do know.’

  I can’t help but try and imagine the expression on the faces of Nouvel and his crew if they were here tonight . . .

  ‘Yeah . . . they did it on purpose,’ says her oaf of a husband, ‘you think primitive mankind had a problem with toilet partitions? They just jumped behind a bush and bingo!’

  Uh, no. Just as well they aren’t here.

  ‘Two hundred and thirty-five million,’ says my other, unfunny brother-in-law, clutching his napkin.

  And as no one at the table has reacted, he continues, ‘Euros, of course. That thing, as you so kindly describe it, my dear Françoise, will have cost the French taxpayer the trifling sum of . . . (he pulls out his glasses and his mobile, fiddles with it and closes his eyes) . . . one billion, five hundred and forty million francs.’

  ‘Old francs?’ chokes my mother.

  ‘Of course not,’ he retorts, leaning back comfortably, ‘new ones!’

  He is exultant. This time he’s got them. They’re hooked. The assembly is in an uproar.

  I try to catch Laurence’s gaze; she returns a commiserating little smile. There are some things in my life, like this, that she still respects. I go back to my dinner.

  The conversation is moving again, rumbling along in a mix of common sense and common stupidity. A few years ago they bleated on about the Opéra Bastille or the Bibliothèque Nationale, so this was just rehashing the same old stuff.

  Claire, sitting next to me, leans over. ‘How’s Russia going?’

  ‘It’s 1812 and the Berezina all over again,’ I confess, with a smile.

  ‘No way.’

  ‘Yes, I assure you. I’m waiting for the thaw to count my dead . . .’

  ‘Shit.’

  ‘Yup. Or chort, as they say.’

  ‘Is it a problem?’

  ??
?Pff . . . not for the agency, no, but for me . . .’

  ‘For you?’

  ‘I don’t know . . . I don’t function well as Napoleon . . . I am missing his vision, I suppose . . .’

  ‘Or his madness.’

  ‘Oh, that will come!’

  ‘You’re joking, aren’t you?’ she adds, worried.

  ‘Da!’ I reassure her, sliding my hand between two shirt buttons, ‘from the top of this disaster, forty centuries of architecture have not sufficed to look down on me!’

  ‘When do you have to go back?’

  ‘Monday.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Yup.’

  ‘Why so soon?’

  ‘Well, the latest is – get a load of this – the cranes are disappearing. Overnight, puff, they vanish.’

  ‘That’s impossible.’

  ‘Yeah, you’re right . . . It takes them a few more days than that to spread their long wings. Specially as they take the other machines with them, the excavators, and cement mixers, and drills. The whole lot.’

  ‘You’re having me on.’

  ‘Not at all.’

  ‘So? What are you going to do?’

  ‘What am I going to do? Good question . . . To start with, hire a security company to keep an eye on our security company, and then once that one turns corrupt too, I’ll . . .’

  ‘You’ll what?’

  ‘I don’t know . . . Send for the Cossacks, I suppose.’

  ‘What a mess.’

  ‘You said it.’

  ‘And you’re in charge of this shit?’

  ‘Not at all. You can’t be in charge. At all. You want to know what I’m doing?’

  ‘Drinking!’

  ‘Not only. I’m rereading War and Peace. And thirty years on I’m falling in love with Natasha just like the first time. That’s what I’m doing.’

  ‘Oh, Christ . . . And don’t they send you some sublimely pretty girls so you can relax a bit?’