There’s a murmuration of starlings, like a moving tableau, above the blaze. Manuel has gathered dry leaves in the middle of the garden and is using them to burn the legs of the Voltaire armchair. An opaque, grey smoke is rising in the approaching night. The racket the birds are making with every shift in position is deafening, an elegant swish while they’re flying and then the loud squawking when they land, like thousands of pairs of scissors slashing through the air, cutting up the sky.
Another building job has started for Manuel. The swimming pool is done on the old one, the tiles laid so that bitch couldn’t complain. By the time she came back, the work was finished, and the newly filled pond was lapping near the enlarged swimming pool. He pictured glasses of champagne and arms resting on the edge. He pictured the bitch’s body under the concrete. He’s been working on a new villa in Ménerbes for the past two weeks. He misses Patrick. He had no friend closer than him. But he understands why Patrick left, and he, too, sometimes wishes he could leave and forget what he’s done. He wishes he wouldn’t bump into his neighbour every morning and see her inconsolable mother’s expression. He also wishes he didn’t wake up every night drenched in sweat, his heart pounding. When that happens, he gets up and goes to watch the little one sleeping; it’s the only thing that calms him down.
The police haven’t been back. Social services have, on the other hand. Séverine keeps lashing out at the social worker. But, when all’s said and done, she loves hating her and doesn’t hate having a cup of tea with her once or twice a month and complaining about her working conditions and about how hard it is to be a mother and a grandmother before she’s even turned forty. She’s helped them get benefits and that’s very useful, although Manuel doesn’t like to think about that. There’s never been a question of taking the child into care, so Séverine has relaxed a little, even though she doesn’t like the way this bitch looks at their lives, and her smile whenever Séverine tells her about Jo’s good marks at the lycée, that smug smile as if it’s thanks to her.
The smoke is stinging Manuel’s throat; he pokes the pieces of wood with the tip of a metal spade.
Séverine can smell the leaves and the wood all the way from the kitchen. When she goes to the girls’ room – there are three of them now – to check everything’s all right, she comes across her own reflection in the corridor mirror. She stops for a second and studies her beauty, pushing forty, the wrinkles in the corners of her eyes, the lines around her mouth from laughter and bitterness. The skin under her chin, smooth but already too soft. An internal lamentation starts inside her head, at once coarse and elegiac – time is giving her a kind of poetry she never knew before. She suddenly jumps because a door opens abruptly: Jo appears, holding a large bag, and hurtles down the stairs without looking at her. When Séverine glances into the bedroom, she stands leaning against the doorjamb for a moment, watching her daughter asleep, the child curled up against her.
Johanna joins her father in the garden. Without a word, she opens the bag, takes out a blouse and throws it into the fire.
“What are you doing?” Manuel protests.
But Jo responds with that strange look of hers, and since he doesn’t know what it’s all about, he decides to keep quiet. He watches as she drops the garments among the burning leaves, one by one. After a while, he hands her the spade and she thanks him with a smile before pushing the pair of shoes into the middle of the flames.
“Wait, you’ll see,” he says with boyish enthusiasm, and goes to fetch a small can of gasoline from the back of his pick-up truck.
Triumphant, he pours it over the blaze, which explodes and rekindles a dangerously powerful fire. Its flames turn their faces orange and warm them up at the start of this damp, freezing night. The middle of the blaze pops and hisses.
She laughs softly, so her father is quite pleased with his trick. He hasn’t made anybody laugh about anything for a long time. He tries to think of the last time he did but can’t remember; perhaps when he played at being a monster with his daughters and pretended to slide into the cement mixer as if it was an ogre’s pantry. They would have been six and seven at most. He can’t recall anything past that. In any case, it’s been a while since he’s also laughed, and now it doesn’t feel like he’s about to any time soon. Besides, he doesn’t really want to.
Manuel is relieved to see the remnants of the armchair disappear at the same time as the pretty blouses he knows nothing about. She hasn’t asked him any questions, so he respects her silence.
After a little while, the bag is empty, or almost. Jo crouches by the fire, grabs a few books with fine covers, brings them close to the fire, then moves away. She puts them back in the bag. “Spoils of war,” she mutters to herself.
Crying rings out upstairs, a sign that the baby is awake and that Céline is going to start an exhausted to-ing and fro-ing down the corridor to get her back to sleep, trying to do the right thing, alternating gentleness and panic, angry shouting and nursery rhymes. Jo has trouble doing her schoolwork when the baby cries, and when her mother and her sister start screaming at each other over the child’s wailing, but she never complains; she knows the time will come when she leaves.
She’s waiting.
Manuel’s phone suddenly rings, an incongruous tune playing over the crackling of the fire.
Johanna looks at her father, moving in the patterns of the fire, as he answers and listens. She sees him close his eyes and rub the back of his neck with his large hand. He listens for a long time, mutters a thanks and shakes his head like a child. When he hangs up, his hand is trembling and he takes a breath as if he’s been holding it for a long time. He lets out a sob.
“What’s the matter?” Jo asks.
“It’s my father. He’s just died.”