Hélène threw some gravel at the seagull so it would go, so it would return to Lucien, but it didn’t move. The seagull was hers. It wouldn’t be leaving anymore.
She finished sewing the clothes that Lucien would wear in the beyond. Summer clothes, in white linen. Front-pleated trousers and a short-sleeved shirt with a pocket to tuck a packet of Gitanes and his baptism certificate into. She picked his favorite shoes, his brown leather sandals.
Hélène turned the café’s key in the lock and handed it to young Claude, saying to him: I’m selling you our café for a symbolic 1 franc. Get all the papers prepared at the notary’s: I’ll sign them on my return, and in any case, since I won’t be able to read them, you can take care of them.
For the first time in thirty years, she took out the money she’d saved in a box. The money from her sewing, around twenty thousand francs.
And then she got herself ready. She certainly didn’t want to wear a funeral dress. She wanted to celebrate Lucien. She put on her finest outfit, a white silk dress lined with organdy, with little pearl buttons down the back. It was always Lucien who did them up for her. On Sunday mornings, she would present her bare back to him, lifting up her hair and leaning slightly forward. As he did each button up—eighteen in all—he’d say to her, I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you, never stopping until the eighteenth was done. When he’d finished, he would plant a kiss on the nape of her neck.
On Sunday evenings, when he would unbutton her, he always started with the top button, at the neck, and then went down, very slowly, to the small of the back, all the while blowing warm air on the roots of her hair. And as he unbuttoned, he would murmur, Madly, madly, madly.
This morning, she didn’t want to ask Rose to do them up. She dragged her standing mirror in front of the wardrobe mirror so she could see her back. She stretched her arms backwards, leaned forward, twisted her wrists, couldn’t reach the buttons in the middle. She thought, Now, I am alone. Next, she put on a dab of lipstick, but not too red, to do justice to her sorrow.
Finally, she got up onto a stool, grabbed hold of the blue suitcase, and joined Rose, already waiting for her in the car. It was impressive, a woman having her driving license.
Lucien had never taken his driving test. And yet he’d still bought a Citroën Ami 6, in which the three of them would go on little jaunts on Sundays to amuse Rose. They would set off early in the morning and return at dusk, to avoid being spotted by the police. The car had packed up in the early Seventies, and Lucien hadn’t replaced it. He’d said to Hélène, We’ll take the train. But they never did.
They had always closed the café on Sundays.
During the journey from the café to the crematorium, Rose told her mother that her ailment was called dyslexia, and that specialist doctors could cure her. It wasn’t her eyes that were ailing, but something in her brain that could be re-educated, just like someone with a broken leg who is helped to walk again.
Hélène thought her ailment had a pretty tricky name, and maybe she’d had to wait for Lucien’s death to be cured.
Lucien wouldn’t be buried in Milly, or anywhere else. A few years earlier, in front of Baudelaire’s weed-covered grave in the cemetery, he had asked Hélène to have him cremated, to send him off on a journey for all eternity. Hélène had promised.
At the crematorium, classical music was the only option. Hélène would have liked some Brassens, Brel, or Ferré. She chose some Bach preludes for the period of reflection. She kissed the coffin several times. Not to kiss Lucien through the wood, but to check that he really wasn’t moving anymore. That he wasn’t calling out to her. That this time, neither Edna, nor any other woman would bring him back to her.
Two men in dark suits took away the coffin. Inside it there was Lucien in summer clothes, and Simon’s hat and violin, Simon who hadn’t been entitled to a funeral. And since Lucien had been a kind of Simon in Edna’s life, Hélène had thought it only right.
On that day, Rose didn’t call her Hélène, she just whispered Mommy as she stroked her hair.
Hélène waited in the crematorium garden. It was a sad place, with poorly trimmed and, in places, jaundiced box trees. As if the earth were keeping to the bare minimum so as not to offend the bereaved with pretty flowers. And then there was Rose. She was much taller than Hélène, who sometimes wondered why, and then remembered that she hadn’t brought her into the world.
“Being sterile doesn’t surprise me,” Hélène had said to Lucien on her return from the doctor’s after the thousandth attempt to have a second child. “A woman whose eyes can’t read can’t have children. In humans, the stomach functions along with the head. If my stomach is like my eyes, it must do everything all wrong.” Lucien hadn’t responded because, when Hélène was certain, she was certain. He couldn’t teach Braille to Hélène’s stomach so she’d give him a son.
One of the dark-suited men handed her the urn containing Lucien’s ashes. Hélène thanked him and put the urn into the blue suitcase. Rose said nothing. Asked no questions. She watched Hélène putting her father into the suitcase, and just wanted to get back on the road to take it back to Milly. Hélène refused. She told her that she was setting off on a journey with Lucien. That from now on, old Louis’s café belonged to young Claude.
I dozed off over the blue notebook. I still have my pen in my hand. Jules has just got back from the Paradise. He stinks of alcohol and smoke, and collapses down beside me. I’m almost ousted from my own bed.
“Fuck’s sake, Jules, you’re a pain in the butt!”
I was just dreaming. I was walking on Hélène’s beach. She wasn’t there. I’d come across Roman, in a white coat, and he was telling me that Lucien had come to collect her. Above our heads, a seagull was wheeling as Roman took me in his arms. He was going to kiss me . . .
Jules puts a wrapped gift on my tummy.
“A guy gave me this present for you. At the Paradise.”
“Who?”
“Your guy.”
“I don’t have a guy.”
“Well, yes . . . Your guy, you know, the doctor.”
“How d’you know he’s a doctor?”
“Well, he told me.”
“You were dancing and he just told you that? Hi, I’m a doctor.”
“No. He was waiting for you in the car park.”
“He was waiting for me?”
“He actually gave me a lift home, I was wasted. He’s into you, for sure.”
Jules lets out a kind of groan. Turns on his side and is instantly snoring. I try to rouse him with a shake, but nothing doing.
I feel the weight of the package. Carefully, I tear open the wrapping paper. It’s very pretty, looks like velvet. It’s covering a square box, much larger than a ring box, about thirty centimeters. I lift the lid and discover a little seagull of white gold, hanging on a chain.
No one has ever given me such a lovely present. After all his questions, What’s-his-name knows a lot about me. I race down the stairs four at a time, barefooted. I must find my phone to call him, thank him, understand. It’s about time that I, in turn, ask him some questions.
In the dining room, the clock tells me it’s 7:00 A.M. Gramps and Gran are still sleeping. That’s rare at this hour, but last night they went to bed at midnight, since it was Christmas Eve. No leftovers on the table. In the kitchen, everything’s spick and span. Gran has never gone to bed thinking she’ll clear up tomorrow. The first time I discovered that you could clear up the following morning was at Jo’s place. And I was nineteen.
Last night, it was just the four of us celebrating, as usual. We’ve never had friends round. Gramps and Gran, because of their sadness, no doubt, their whiff of tragedy. Me, because no friend wants to hang out with an old-fashioned girl who never lets go of her little brother.
Jules and Gran were waiting for us in front of the small, artificial Christmas tree, which we fetch from the cellar every year. We no longer even bother to remove the decorations from one year to the next. We shroud the tree in a kind of fishing net, one that’s never been near the sea, before putting it on a shelf. Then, on the morning of December 22, Gramps brings it up from the cellar and unfolds it. From time to time, we change some tired tinsel. Gran wipes the baubles with a sponge, brushes down the plastic branches, and then sprays the lot with air freshener. The magic of Christmas like in the movies? Not at ours.
When we’d got home from the hospital, Gran was watching a variety show with all the participants dressed as Santa, and Jules was playing solitaire on his phone. Gran immediately clocked that Gramps wasn’t his normal self. That he was in a state. She must have put it down to me and Hélène, and the afternoon spent at the hospital, and all those bad memories.
The canapés she offered us had almost melted, the house was so warm. The thermostat was pushed to the max. As was the sparkling wine I forced myself to drink in large gulps. Jules told me I seemed strange. I said no. But I thought to myself that, now, I would always seem strange. I knew things that everyone else didn’t. I felt as if I were ahead of the years, of time. Jules resembled Annette who resembled Magnus. That resemblance had doubtless saved his life. Had prevented him from asking the wrong questions, or the right ones. Daddy and Uncle Alain had kept their resemblance for themselves, without passing it on. To the great displeasure of Gran, who had waited so long to see it on our faces. Especially on Jules’s. And now I understood why.
Did Mom know this secret? Had Annette told her about it? What would have happened if Annette hadn’t been killed? The answers of recent weeks have prompted new questions. It will never end.
Gran handed me my present as though she could read my thoughts—a gift voucher for the Fnac bookstore. The same thing for Jules, and a Carrefour gift voucher for Gramps. Since Gran discovered electronic gift cards, she’s in seventh heaven. This twenty-first-century invention must have speeded up her recovery.
I drank another glass of sparkling wine and felt a little drunk. It did me good. I even started to chuckle at Jules’s slightest dumb joke. Next, we had a hot meal. Even though what was on our plates was supposed to be cold . . .
I rummage in every drawer of the dresser. I finally find my phone, tidied away by Gran on top of a leaflet in Chinese or Japanese dating back to 1975. Why do my grandparents throw away absolutely NOTHING?
I close the drawer, which is just under the Neige brothers’ wedding photo. How does Gramps feel when he passes it? Does he pass it, or does he do a detour, via the kitchen, to avoid it?
While my phone is recharging, I take a shower. This early, I can relax. At ours, there are two bathrooms—well, bathroom is a grand word. An old shower stall downstairs, in the laundry room, and a bathroom upstairs. If you’re unlucky and turn on the hot tap downstairs while someone’s having a wash upstairs, all you’ll get is a trickle of water.
I come out of the shower, pull on some clothes, and listen to my messages. What’s-his-name didn’t lie to me. He left me forty messages. And he never says his first name—now I’m sure of it: he’s doing it on purpose.
What’s-his-name called me every day, several times a day. His messages are funny. Sometimes he sings, sometimes just tells me that he’s having a coffee, that it’s raining, that it’s cold, that he’s put on a red sweater that I’d hate, that he passed a florist and thought of me, that he, too, has a brother, that he’d like me to meet him, that he’s on duty, that if I catch a cold he’ll look after me.
He left the last message three hours ago:
“Justine, I was on duty tonight. I’m off to the Paradise. Shit . . . I’m hoping to end the night in your arms . . . If not . . . Merry Christmas.”