‘I’m leaving with them.’
‘But . . . and . . .’
Charles didn’t have the courage to listen to the end of his sentence. He had a site meeting the next morning at seven, and the night would not be long enough to prepare it properly.
He squeezed in next to the two vultures, and just as the Les Marzeray road sign with its red diagonal stripe disappeared behind them on the right, he felt – he suffered – his only sorrow of the day.
He had been so close to her, and to go away again without having kissed her – it was . . . mortifying.
Fortunately, his travelling companions turned out to be regular bricks.
They began by wiping off their graveyard expressions, loosened their ties, took off their jackets and finally let their hair down completely. They told their passenger a whole slew of stories, each one more macabre and salacious than the next.
Dead bodies farting, mobile phones ringing in the satin, secret mistresses showing up with the holy water sprinkler, the last will and testament of certain late merrymakers which, as the undertakers put it, were ‘literally killing them’, survivors so off their rocker that you ended up with enough bloody anecdotes to carry you through retirement, and any other thing you could think of that was mortally hilarious.
When the source of the stories had run dry, the Grosses Têtes quiz show on the radio took over.
Bollocks. Just in time.
Charles, who’d accepted their offer of a cigarette, took the opportunity as he tossed the butt out the window to offload his black armband at the same time.
He laughed, asked Jean-Claude to turn up the volume, left behind his mourning, and concentrated on the next question from Madame Titi.
From Brest.
16
MID-SEPTEMBER. LAST WEEKEND Charles picked two kilos of blackberries, put paper dust jackets on twenty-four schoolbooks (twenty-four!), and helped Kate to trim the goat’s hooves. Claire had come with him and took Dad’s place by the copper cauldrons, where she chatted for hours with Yacine.
The day before, she’d gone completely crackers over the blacksmith, and decided she would change professions and go into the Lady Chatterley line.
‘Did you see that torso under his leather apron?’ she pined, all day long and well into the evening. ‘Kate? Have you seen him?’
‘Forget it. He has a hammer in his head.’
‘How do you know? Have you tried him out?’
She waited until Claire’s brother had gone into the other room, then winced, yes, she had played the, er, anvil a while back . . . ‘Yeah but still,’ sighed Claire, drooling, ‘that torso . . .’
A few hours later, on happy pillows, Kate would ask Charles if he thought he would last the winter.
‘I don’t understand the meaning of your question . . .’
‘Okay, forget it,’ she murmured, turning over and giving him back his arm so she could lie on her stomach.
‘Kate?’
‘Yes?’
‘What did you mean?’
She didn’t know what to say.
‘What are you afraid of, my love? Me? The cold? Or time?’
‘Everything.’
The only answer he would give was to caress her, for a long time.
Her hair, her back, her bottom.
He wouldn’t struggle with words any more.
There was nothing to say.
Make her moan, once more.
And lull her to sleep.
Now he was in his office and trying to understand the graphs for the analysis of the arches subjected to unequal weights provok—
‘What is this bloody shit?’ Philippe burst into his office like a jack-in-a box, shaking a wad of papers at him.
‘I don’t know,’ answered Charles without looking up from his screen, ‘but you’re going to tell me.’
‘Confirmation of an application for a design contest for a shitty village hall in Back-of-Beyond-on-Bullshit! That’s what it is!’
‘It won’t be shitty at all, my village hall,’ he answered calmly, leaning over his table of graphs.
‘Charles . . . what is this insanity? I just found out you were in Denmark last week, and that you might start working for old Siza again, and now this –’
Caught in the line of fire, Charles switched off his screen, rolled back and reached for his jacket: ‘Have you got time for a coffee?’
‘No.’
‘Well, make time.’
And as Philippe started heading towards the kitchenette, he added, ‘No, not here. Let’s go out. I’ve got two or three things to tell you . . .’
‘So what do you want to talk to me about this time?’ sighed his associate in the stairway.
‘About our marriage contract.’
*
Five empty cups sat between them now.
Naturally, Charles hadn’t filled him in on the details about how dicey it could be, holding the horns of a terrified goat having a pedicure, but he’d said enough for his team-mate to realize that he’d embarked on one hell of a strange ark.
Silence.
‘But . . . but how on earth did you ever get involved in such a set-up?’
‘I needed a place to shelter from the flood,’ smiled Charles.
Silence.
‘You know what they say about the country?’
‘Go ahead . . .’
‘“During the day, you’re bored, and at night you’re scared.”’
Charles was still smiling. He found it very hard to imagine how you could be bored for an instant in that house – and what could you possibly be scared of, when you were lucky enough to sleep in the arms of a superheroine.
With beautiful breasts . . .
‘So you have nothing to say,’ continued Philippe, despondent, ‘you just sit there, smiling like a daft bugger . . .’
Silence.
‘You’re going to be bored out of your mind.’
‘No.’
‘Of course you are. Just now you’re on your little cloud because you’re in love, but . . . well, shit! You know what life’s like, don’t you?’
(Philippe was in the process of consummating his third divorce.)
‘Well, no . . . I think I didn’t know what life’s like, actually.’
Silence.
‘Hey!’ said Charles, slapping him on the shoulder, ‘I’m not giving you notice or anything, I’m just making you aware that I’ll be working differently . . .’
Silence.
‘And all this turning everything upside down for some woman you hardly know, who lives five hundred kilometres away, who already has five kids, each more knocked about than the other, and who wears socks hand knitted from nanny-goat yarn, is that it?’
‘I can’t think of a better description of the situation.’
Longer silence than ever.
‘You want my opinion, Balanda?’
(Ah . . . That paternalistic little tone of voice . . . sucking up to him . . . Odious.)
His associate had turned round to get the waiter’s attention, and now he came back to his question mark and said, ‘It’s a fine project.’
And while he was holding the door for him: ‘Hey . . . Do I detect a faint odour of cow manure about your person, by any chance?’
17
FOR THE FIRST time, his father had not come to greet them at the gate.
Charles found him in the cellar, at a loss because he could not remember why he had gone down there.
He gave him a kiss and helped him back upstairs.
He was even more dismayed when he saw him in the bright light. His features, his skin had changed.
His skin seemed thicker. Yellowish.
And the . . . the elderly gentleman had cut himself so badly with his razor, in their honour . . .
‘Next time I come, I’ll bring you an electric razor, Papa . . .’
‘Oh, my boy . . . Keep your money, now.’
He walked him over to his armchair, sat down across from him an
d gazed at that face full of gashes until he thought he found something else there, something more encouraging.
Henri Balanda, a prince among men, could sense this, and made a huge effort to distract his only son.
But as he was entertaining him with news about the garden and the latest great events in the kitchen, Charles could not help but drift away still further.
His father too would die soon . . .
So it would never end?
Not tomorrow. With a bit of luck, not the day after, either, but in any case . . .
Anouk’s words continued to echo in his brain.
He’d given Mistinguett to Alexis; and the only keepsake he had of her, her legacy to him, was simply this: life.
A privilege.
His mother’s whinging roused him from his third-rate philosophizing:
‘What about me? Aren’t you coming to give me a kiss? Is it only the old men in this house who get any attention?’
Then, shaking her chignon, ‘Oh dear Lord. Your hair. I shall never get used to it . . . You had such lovely hair . . . And why are you laughing like an idiot now?’
‘Because that’s the sort of remark that’s worth all the DNA tests on the planet! Such lovely hair . . . You really cannot be anyone but my mother to come out with such utter rubbish.’
‘If I really were your mother,’ she winced, ‘you would surely realize that you should not be so vulgar at your age.’
And he let her embrace him round his neck, now so clean and smooth behind his ears . . .
No sooner had they finished the meal than the kids went upstairs to watch the end of their film, while Charles helped his mother to clear away, and his father to organize his papers.
He promised that he’d come back one evening the following week to help him fill out his tax return.
Having said that, he promised himself that he’d come back to see him every week of the current fiscal year . . .
‘Don’t you want a little brandy?’
‘Thanks, Papa, but you know I’m driving . . . Where are the keys to your car, anyway?’
‘On the console.’
‘Charles, it’s not a good idea to head off at this time of night.’ His mother sighed.
‘Don’t worry. I’ve got two chatterboxes in the glove compartment.’
The keys . . . the console . . .
‘Well!’ he exclaimed. ‘What have you done with the mirror?’
‘We gave it to your older sister,’ answered his mother from the depths of her dishwasher. ‘She wanted it so badly . . . It’s her advance share of the inheritance . . .’
Charles looked at the mark which the removal of the mirror had left on the wall.
It was here, he mused, I mused, that I lost sight of myself, almost a year ago.
It was there, on that tray, that the letter from Alexis was waiting for me.
It’s no longer the absent stare of a bloke who’s been devastated by four syllables that meets my gaze, but a big white rectangle set almost incongruously against a greyish, dirty background.
Never has my reflection resembled me more.
‘Sam! Mathilde!’ I shout, ‘do what you want, but I’m out of here!’
I kiss my parents and hurry down the front steps with the same feverishness as when I was sixteen, when I’d go over the wall to meet Alexis Le Men.
To get into bebop, and nicotine, and anything that remained in the bottom of those bottles belonging to the woman who, that night, was on duty, and the girls who never stayed for very long because jazz was ‘dullsville’, then I’d listen to him belt out Charlie Parker at me until I couldn’t take it any more, to console ourselves for the fact that our giggling prey had left . . .
I blow the horn.
The neighbours . . .
My mother must be cursing me . . .
I’ll wait two more minutes, but after that, too bad for them.
No, really! They’re going too far, those two! I’ve taken on a double load of maths, a triple one of physics, photos of Ramon in my kitchen, knife blades smeared with Nutella, and even a literary essay on The Sufferings of the Young Werther at quarter past midnight last Thursday!
I bring them a fresh baguette every evening, and I try to give them a balanced diet of vegetables, protein, and starch, I empty out their pockets and rescue a pile of rubbish every time I wash their jeans, I put up with them when doors slam and they don’t talk to each other for days on end, I put up with them when they close the doors and giggle half the night, I tolerate their shit music then get told off because I can’t bloody see the subtle differences between techno and tecktonik, I . . . None of all that really weighs too heavily on me, but they had better not try and make me lose a single second more when it’s time to go and be with Kate.
Not one.
They’ve got their whole life ahead of them, those two.
And because I’ve been bloody soft enough to drive very slowly, they’ve caught up with me, out of breath, hopping mad, at the traffic light.
The never-ending refrain: they squabble over whose turn it is to sit in front.
It’s my turn.
Nah, it’s mine.
I edge forward a few more centimetres to settle the matter once and for all. They kick the car, and couldn’t care less now about where they sit, they’re too busy hurling insults and abuse at me, and they leave me on my own with an empty passenger seat.
‘Fuck, Charles, you’re such a bore!’
‘Yeah, that’s right . . . you’re a major mega-bore . . .’
‘You in love, or what!’
I smile. I search for something to say to put them in their place, these two little cretins, and then I figure, let it be . . . that’s youth . . .
Behind me.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Lines from ‘. . . If’ by the Divine Comedy. Lyrics by Neil Hannon © BMG/Universal
Extract from War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy, translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, published by Vintage. Reprinted by permission of The Random House Group Ltd.
Extract from ‘The Wasteland’ by T.S. Eliot © The Estate of T.S. Eliot and reproduced by permission of Faber and Faber Ltd.
Every effort has been made to trace the copyright holders published in this book. The editor and publisher apologise for any material included without the appropriate acknowledgement, and would be grateful to be notified of any inadvertent mistakes or omissions that should be incorporated in future editions.
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Copyright le dilettante 2008
English translation copyright © Alison Anderson 2010
Originally published in French as La Consolante
Anna Gavalda has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition, including this condition, being imposed on the subsequent purchaser
First published in Great Britain in 2010 by
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ISBN 9780099531920
Anna Gavalda, Consolation
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