4

‘Your luggage has arrived, Madame Étamble. I’ll have it taken up to your room.’

‘I presume there’s no message?’

‘The driver didn’t say anything to me. He simply asked me to give you this.’

On catching sight of an envelope from a distance, she felt a brief pang, as if she were hoping for something, whereas she wasn’t really hoping for anything, didn’t wish for anything coming from that quarter. She felt humiliated by her reaction, especially in front of the concierge, who had carried her blind drunk up to her room the night before and today was speaking to her with exaggerated respect, perhaps being sardonic.

The envelope contained only the keys to her suitcases, as she must have anticipated. No note. Why would they have written to her? The address was in Elda’s hand.

When, a little later, Betty opened the door of number 53 and the two women saw three bulging suitcases and packages in the centre of the room, Laure turned towards the adjoining room, murmuring:

‘I’ll leave you to it. See you in a while.’

‘Do you want to go back to your room?’

‘No, but I imagine you wish to be left alone to unpack your things.’

‘Would you mind staying with me?’

‘Not at all. I was trying to keep out of your way. I’ve always loved packing and unpacking, but I’ve never really moved house and, when my husband was alive, the only travelling I did was when I occasionally went with him to a conference.’

A large, soft package sat at the foot of the bed, and Betty immediately tore open the blue paper.

‘My mink!’

She was unable to conceal her delight, because she hadn’t been certain that they would send on her fur. Her sister-in-law Marcelle, although older than her, didn’t have one yet and had to make do with an astrakhan coat. When Guy had mentioned a mink, two years earlier, he had explained:

‘It’s not so much a gift as an investment. In our social situation, you would have to have a mink sooner or later. The longer I wait to buy you one, the more expensive it will be. And since it will last your whole life …’

So he might have considered it less a personal item of clothing than an asset, a family possession. He had sent it to her all the same and, had Laure not been present, she would have slipped it on at once for the pleasure of being enveloped in it, for the comforting feeling of luxury that it gave her.

‘Is it wild mink?’

‘We were guaranteed it was.’

‘I made the stupid mistake of buying farm-raised mink and within a few years it already looked like rabbit. Shall I pour you a drink?’

Betty suddenly became considerate.

‘You’re always the one who pays.’

‘I promise I’ll let you buy the next bottle, the next two bottles if you insist. I’ll even show you the place where I stock up.’

Betty tried the keys in the locks, opened the suitcases and then the wardrobe and drawers. Laure came back with two glasses just as she was raising the lid of the last suitcase, the smallest, in blue leather, which she usually kept for toiletries.

On top of the contents, clearly visible, lay two photographs: the one of Charlotte on her fourth birthday and the one of Anne-Marie, beside her parents’ big bed, the Sunday she had taken her first steps.

Guy, still in his pyjamas, had rushed to grab his camera to photograph her. In a corner, you could see the striped pinafore of the nanny, ready to support the toddler.

‘My daughters …’ she muttered, gesturing to Laure to look at the photos.

‘The eldest looks like you. She has your eyes. She will be very sweet.’

Laure was watching her out of the corner of her eye, thinking she was emotional, perhaps expecting her to burst into tears. But Betty was calm, more restrained than downstairs when she’d spotted the envelope, or when, from the doorway, she had caught sight of the suitcases. She grabbed the drink Laure had poured, but not to give herself a boost.

‘To your health and to everything you have done for me.’

It was as if, in being reunited with her belongings, she were starting to behave in a conventional manner. True, there was irony in her voice, an irony that was at her own expense, not Laure’s. Picking up the photos again and throwing them down on the bed, she said:

‘In any case, they’re no longer my children and I wonder whether, apart from the time I carried them in my womb, they ever were mine …’

Needing to keep busy, she scooped up piles of linen which she put away in the drawers, returned to the suitcases, went back to the chest of drawers or the wardrobe, talking all the while, her voice clearer, her features sharp, without taking the trouble to glance at Laure’s face to gauge her reactions.

‘Do you believe in maternal love?’

She was expecting the silence that greeted her question and went on:

‘I was forgetting that you don’t have children. So you can’t know. I’m talking about maternal love like in books, as it’s spoken about at school and in songs. When I got married, I thought that I would have children one day, and I liked that idea. It was part of a whole: a family, a home, holidays by the sea. Then when I was told I was pregnant, I was thrown off balance that it had happened so quickly, when I was scarcely more than a little girl myself.

‘I had barely two years with my husband. Already people no longer talked about me but about the baby on the way. Or, if they did mention me, it was in connection with the child, who was more important. Before I had even given birth, I became the mother.

‘You’re going to think I was jealous. That’s almost true. Not entirely. I had hardly begun living. I’d promised myself so much happiness for the day when I would finally have a man to myself …!

‘My idea of marriage was to be two, and we were almost immediately going to be three.

‘I didn’t think like that every day, of course. At times I was moved, especially when I felt it kicking. Shortly afterwards, my health gave cause for concern, still not for me but for the unborn baby, and I was put on a strict regimen. I spent most of the time in bed.

‘In the evenings, my husband would come and spend half an hour, three-quarters of an hour with me, then, unable to sit there any longer and having nothing to say to me, he would return to his study or go and join Antoine and his wife in the drawing room.

‘He’d bring me flowers. Everyone brought me flowers and was nice to me, even Olga, the maid, who was already in Guy’s service before I arrived. She’s never stopped seeing me as an interloper.

‘My mother-in-law too was pleased with me.

‘“Very good, my girl! Above all, think of the baby, of your responsibilities, and follow the doctor’s orders.”

‘They secretly watched me to make sure I kept to my regimen. After all, I was so delicate!

‘Was it not natural that they should worry about the future Étamble? Since Antoine, the eldest, had had two sons, no one doubted that Guy would also have boys.’

She bustled about, while Laure helped her by putting the dresses on hangers. There weren’t enough in the wardrobe, and so she went and fetched some from her room.

‘I was taken to the maternity hospital too early and I stayed there waiting for forty-eight hours. I was frightened. I was convinced I was going to pay. Even now, I would find it impossible to explain what I meant by that. It was a confused notion of justice, a justice which, by the way, I didn’t recognize. In giving life to a human being, I would pay one way or another, with my pain, or with my own life, or again by remaining infertile for the rest of my days.’

‘I understand.’

That surprised Betty, who frowned.

‘I wouldn’t have thought anyone else could understand that and I’ve never talked about it to anyone, for fear of being laughed at. The baby was born, a girl; the family pretended to be pleased, especially my husband, who has never looked at me as tenderly as on that day.

‘At the time, I was thrilled; then I understood that that tenderness wasn’t for me but for the mother of his child.

‘Because it was his child. Any woman could have played my part and given him one, more easily than me, without all the little woes and anxieties of those last months; and, who knows, it might have been the son he so longed for?

‘The nanny, hired from a Swiss school, was at the hospital at the same time as me, ready to take possession of the baby.

‘“Rest, my darling. Elda is here to look after the baby.”

‘With my flat chest, breast-feeding was out of the question. The doctors, nurses, the family – everyone tiptoed in and out of my room, staying only a minute.

‘“You rest!”

‘And I heard them whispering and laughing in the next room.

‘I’m not looking to make excuses. I am trying to understand. It is possible that the outcome would have been the same if things had been different. Perhaps I am a monster. In that case, I would swear that the same applies to thousands and thousands of women.

‘I never felt the bond of blood, the bond of flesh. They showed me a little creature that I didn’t even know how to hold properly and, right away, the nanny took her back as if to return her to safety.

‘At Avenue de Wagram, I would go into the nursery several times a day, full of good intentions. But either the baby was asleep, and Elda would put a finger on her lips, or she was feeding, and Elda would signal to me not to distract her, or again she was being changed, and all I could do was watch.

‘Everything was neat and tidy, everything was clean. In the kitchen too, and in the apartment, thanks to Olga, who didn’t need me either to run a household.

‘That was four years ago. Charlotte started walking and talking, and grew. She is still not my daughter.

‘I don’t know what they’ll tell her, that I’m dead or have gone on a long journey.’

‘Will you not see her again?’

She shook her head so hard that her hair tumbled over her face.

‘They don’t want me to,’ she said in a low voice.

Then, diving into a suitcase:

‘I promised.’

She straightened up, a large yellow envelope in her hand.

‘Let’s not talk about it any more. Where’s my drink?’

‘Here.’

‘Thank you. If I go on, I’ll end up getting you down. It’s Elda who took charge of packing up my things, I recognize her ways. She thought I’d be happy to have the photos of the children and, after all, perhaps she wasn’t wrong. That belongs to my past too, like this envelope that contains old photographs. I had forgotten all about it and I wonder where she found it.’

She talked effusively and, although all the lights were on, it felt to her as if the room was dark. Dark and damp.

‘One day, when I was around twenty, I bought a lovely album for these photos. In my head, they would constitute a sort of story of my life.

‘Look! I can see the album poking out, underneath my toiletry bag. I never stuck anything in it. It’s as new as when I brought it home from the stationer’s, and yet it’s not that I didn’t have the time. If I’d had less time …’

She shook herself again. Her voice changed register again.

‘Do you want to see my father? I only knew him until I was eight years old, because the war broke out, the Germans invaded France and, once it became hard to find enough to eat, I was packed off to stay with an aunt in the Vendée. Already they were saying I wasn’t very strong. In the Vendée you could get all the food you wanted – butter, eggs, meat and even white bread.

‘Look! Here’s my father. Exactly as I always saw him. He was too proud of his filthy overalls to be photographed in his Sunday suit. His hair was always windblown.

‘“At least run a comb through your hair,” sighed my mother, embarrassed.

‘“Why? Would you have me leave a false picture of myself?”

‘He liked practical jokes, made fun of his women customers. At the table, to make me laugh, he would mimic them and was able to imitate each of their voices.

‘I have no idea what he did during the Occupation. My mother swore to me that she didn’t know either. It was only much later, when he was awarded a posthumous medal and the matter of a pension arose, that she spoke of his mysterious activities.

‘I don’t think he belonged to a Resistance network, because he was a sort of anarchist who didn’t believe in anything and had no time for either Pétain or de Gaulle, or for the Germans, the Americans or the Russians.

‘Even so, the Gestapo came and arrested him a few weeks after the liberation of Paris. We had no news of him until, two years later, my mother was officially informed that he had been shot.

‘We don’t know where exactly. Not in a camp, or in a prison but, according to some witnesses, on a railway platform where he had been made to get off a train transporting a load of prisoners to Germany.’

In a calmer voice she stated, holding out a photo taken in front of a photographer’s pearl-grey backdrop:

‘My mother.’

‘Don’t you see her?’

‘Every so often. Rarely. With my father away, she carried on the business alone for a few months, then she hired a chemist to whom, two years ago, she sold the firm, keeping for herself some rooms in the apartment above the shop.’

‘She didn’t remarry?’

Betty looked surprised, shocked. Her mother was an old woman, wasn’t she? It suddenly occurred to her that she had been widowed at forty, when she was much younger than Laure.

‘Me, at ten or twelve weeks.’

The traditional photo of a baby lying on her stomach on a bearskin.

‘The only time of my life when I was chubby!’

‘You’re not thin.’

Hadn’t Laure seen her naked?

‘Not that thin. Not as thin as I look with my clothes on.’

All the same she gave a wan smile.

‘Me again, at four, when I was sent to kindergarten. And at eight, the day before I left for La Pommeraye. It was my mother who took me there and, with the trains in those days, it was almost an expedition.’

She made no comment on the aunts, uncles, the old glossy photos mounted on card.

‘Do you know the Vendée?’

‘Not well. Only Luçon, Les Sables-d’Olonne, La Roche-sur-Yon too, having spent the night in a hotel overlooking a vast square.’

‘I’ve never been there. La Pommeraye is at the other end of the region, in the Bocage, on the boundary with Deux-Sèvres. The Sèvre Niortaise flows through the village, which is so tiny and so remote that we only saw a handful of Germans during the entire war.

‘My uncle François, who married Rachèle, my mother’s sister, is the most important person in the place because he owns the only inn. He’s also a grain merchant, fertilizer dealer and livestock trader.

‘I don’t have a photo of him. Picture a great brute of a man with a walrus moustache, shining, beady eyes that are mischievous and even a little mean, velvet breeches and leather gaiters, day in, day out, from morning till evening.

‘I remember his smell, that of the dining room at the inn, the lovely musky odour of the rooms, the feather beds you sank into …’

She was holding a photograph that seemed to surprise her and change the course of her thoughts.

‘I didn’t recall having a photo of Thérèse.’

Visibly moved, she showed it to Laure, not letting go of it or taking her eyes off it.

‘The smallest one, on the left, is me at eleven. Look at my skinny legs and my stiff plaits. My aunt always used to hurt me when she braided my hair …’

The slightly fuzzy picture was of two girls standing upright in front of the stone steps of a village church.

‘Who was Thérèse?’

‘The servant at the inn, a ward of state.

‘She was barely more than fifteen at the time and always wore the same black dress. It was the only one she owned and it was tight over her pointed little breasts. When I was ten, I already admired them, and I would have given anything to have breasts like hers.

‘Thérèse served in the restaurant when my aunt was busy. She was also the one who cleaned the rooms, peeled the vegetables and, often, was sent to bring the two cows up from the fields.

‘She never complained. Nor did she ever laugh. My aunt said she was sneaky and was on at her all day long, yelling shrilly at one door or another:

‘“Thérèse! … Thé-rè-se! …”

‘“Yes, madame,” Thérèse would mumble, popping up right beside her, whereas she was thought to be elsewhere.

‘I wished I could have been her friend, but she was too old for me and I had to be content with hanging around her. I’d heard that she was an abandoned child and those words sounded magical to me, making Thérèse someone special. I sometimes envied her, even though I loved my father …’

She grabbed her glass and took it over to an armchair, into which she lowered herself, the yellow envelope on her knees and, on top of it, the little photograph, which she glanced at every so often.

‘How Schwartz used to annoy me because of her! Schwartz was the medical student I told you about. He had an evening job in a bar where he washed the dishes to pay for his studies, and he lived in a garret room near Place des Ternes. That was how I met him, because he lived in the neighbourhood.’

She added with a hint of defiance:

‘I was already married, of course. It was even after Charlotte. A year after. Not quite. When I lay on his bed, I could see hundreds of roofs and smoking chimney stacks.’

Laure didn’t bat an eyelid.

‘From being quizzed about you-can-guess-what subjects, I ended up telling him about Thérèse and he claimed that that incident affected me more than all the rest of my childhood. He made me repeat the story so often that I ended up being obsessed by it.’

‘What happened with Thérèse?’

‘You can imagine that, at the age of eleven, I knew as much as all girls of my age, and even more, because I lived in the country. I’d seen the animals. Close to the inn, there was a bull, and all the local cows were brought to him. We used to walk past him on our way home from school.

‘I’d seen boys too. Unlike a lot of my friends, though, I’d always refused to touch them.

‘Every Saturday, my aunt would go by horse and cart to the market at Saint-Mesmin, the neighbouring big village, to sell her hens, ducks and cheeses, because she made fromage blanc with skimmed milk.

‘There, like everywhere in the countryside, I suppose, livestock is men’s business while poultry, butter and cheese are the women’s concern.

‘Was it the school holidays? Was I off school for a reason I don’t remember?

‘I can picture myself, alone in the yard, in the garden, then alone again in the square in front of the church, as if the village was deserted, probably because of the market in Saint-Mesmin.

‘The priest walked past and waved at me. It was summer. It was hot. You could see the pebbles on the riverbed, the water dividing into thin trickles.

‘At one point, I went into the café and there was no one there either. The door to the cellar was half-open. I went to close it. First of all, I glanced into the shadows, which always fascinated me, and there, just behind the door, stood my uncle, servicing Thérèse, who was leaning forward with her head against the whitewashed wall.

‘I say “servicing” because it was the only word I knew at the time, the one everyone uses in those parts.

‘I didn’t move. It didn’t occur to me to leave. I watched, fascinated, Thérèse’s thin, pale thighs which my uncle penetrated with great brutal thrusts.

‘He’d seen me, knew that I was still there, but he didn’t stop. Breathing very heavily, he barked:

‘“You, brat, if you dare tell your aunt, I’ll do the same to you!”

‘Still I didn’t run away. I stepped back slowly, leaving the cellar door wide open, still watching, absolutely enthralled.

‘I wanted to stay to the end, see Thérèse’s face afterwards, hear her voice.

‘She became more extraordinary than ever in my eyes. She didn’t cry, didn’t struggle. Her features were hidden from me by her hair and her folded arm, but I can still see her black stockings that stopped above her knees, her black dress hitched up over her shoulders, her knickers on the floor, around her ankles.

‘I didn’t dare wait for it to finish, for fear my uncle would change his mind and carry out his threat immediately, for fear he would hurt me.

‘I avoided him until the evening and, as you can imagine, I said nothing to my aunt.

‘I realized afterwards that she suspected the truth and chose not to take any notice.

‘I hung around Thérèse more and more, unable to bring myself to ask her my questions. What bothered me the most, I think, was that she was midway between being a girl like me and a grown-up.

‘I’d never considered her entirely as a grown-up and, several times, she’d asked if she could play with the doll my mother had sent me from Paris.

‘Schwartz told me a lot of things about my feelings for Thérèse, some of which are probably true, others which I think are exaggerated.

‘He claimed I envied her, and that is right. I might not have admitted it then, but I can see now that she aroused envy in me.

‘By following the clues, I found out that it didn’t happen to her just with my uncle, but that she did the same thing with other men, and I discovered too that my uncle was jealous of them.

‘He spied on her and, when she was alone in the restaurant with customers, he’d suddenly appear, coming from a shed or the stables, and plant himself near the bar, a suspicious look in his eye.

‘Me, I caught her at least twice. Once in the winter, before supper, after dark, lying in the grass by the roadside, between the inn and the grocer’s where she’d been sent to buy something or other.

‘The man was a local farmhand. I recognized him from his red rubber boots, because he was the only one with boots that colour.

‘Another time, I was passing the room where a travelling salesman was staying. The door was closed. I didn’t see anything, but I heard Thérèse saying:

‘“Get a move on. If I stay too long, he’ll come up.”

‘From the sounds I could hear, I knew they were on the bed, or on the edge of the bed.

‘So, at fifteen, Thérèse was no longer a girl, like me and my friends, but a woman. Because, to me, becoming a woman was that. I didn’t think that she could be enjoying it and that was precisely, according to Schwartz, what troubled me.

‘In short, being a woman was to suffer, to be a victim, and in my eyes there was something pathetic about that.

‘You don’t find me ridiculous? Am I boring you?’

‘Not at all.’

It seemed to Betty that Laure’s features were blurred and she let her refill their glasses and sit down again in her armchair before continuing:

‘That’s about all. My uncle never touched me, despite his threat, and even though I didn’t leave La Pommeraye until I was fourteen.

‘Because, once the war was over, it was still hard to find food supplies in Paris and because, in my father’s absence, my mother had a lot to cope with, she decided to leave me there for a while longer.

‘How would I have reacted if my uncle had dragged me behind the cellar door too? I would have been scared, for certain. I don’t know if I’d have screamed and, to be honest, I don’t think that I would have struggled.

‘I am going to go too far, perhaps scandalize you if you’re a Catholic.’

‘I am not.’

‘My parents weren’t either, my father less than anyone. Only my aunt used to go to mass, and she was the one who made me celebrate my first holy communion, unbeknown to my parents.

‘I was twelve. It was after the incident of Thérèse and the cellar. When I had to confess, I didn’t say anything to the priest about my uncle, or about what I’d seen, but I stammered that I often had sinful desires.

‘I could tell it was bad but, at the same time, I had the feeling that what had happened to Thérèse was a bit like receiving a sacrament.

‘A punishment too, just like when I gave birth, I had the vague sense I was paying for something.

‘In my mind, women were made for this. To be humiliated and physically hurt by men.

‘I couldn’t wait to be physically hurt, to receive that consecration, and I would desperately feel my breasts, which weren’t growing. I’d gaze in the mirror at my stick-thin legs and my child’s narrow, rounded stomach.’

Without knowing it, she wore the same fixed smile as in the photo of her at La Pommeraye. Laure was solemn. The radiators were on and yet they both felt as if the cold was seeping into the room.

‘Everything I have done since, I have done because I wanted to. Ultimately, that is what I wanted to say to you, out of honesty, because I have always wanted to be honest. I am not a victim. I am not to be pitied. No one has hurt me, rather I am the one who has hurt others.

‘That’s probably the reason why Schwartz left me without a word, simply moving to a new neighbourhood and new lodgings overnight.

‘I suppose he felt I was leading him on, goodness knows where.

‘As for Guy, at thirty-five there he is, wifeless, with two little girls who will grow up and, unless he remarries, be an encumbrance one day.

‘Oh! There’s a word that comes back to me, which says more or less what I am trying to explain. As I moved slowly away from the cellar door, do you know why I was so anxious to wait for Thérèse and talk to her? To ask her:

‘“Show me your wound.”

‘The word just came back to me after all these years. I wanted to have a wound too. All my life, I’ve …’

She looked Laure in the eyes, defiantly, and ended in a hard voice:

‘All my life, I’ve chased after my wound.’

She had sworn to herself that she wouldn’t cry. She couldn’t hold out any longer. Fat tears welled up behind her warm eyelids and ran down her nose, forming a salty taste in her mouth. At the same time, she was laughing.

‘I’m an idiot, aren’t I? Goodness what an idiot I am! I’ve ruined everything, sullied everything. I’ve spent my time making myself dirty and I’m telling you these stories to gain sympathy. All my life, from the age of fifteen, yes, fifteen, in imitation of Thérèse, I’ve been nothing but a whore. A whore, do you understand?’

Unable to sit still, she leaped up and began to pace up and down the room. Laure hadn’t moved from her armchair.

‘It’s not because my husband threw me out, because the Étambles excluded me from the clan, from the family, that I started drinking. Nor is it because I sold my children. I can recite the document by heart:

‘“I, the undersigned, Élisabeth Étamble, née Fayet …”

‘Because I had to write my real name. It’s an official document. Élisabeth Étamble, née Fayet, acknowledges that she is a prostitute, that she has always had lovers, before and after her marriage, that she would pick them up in bars like a professional, that she brought them into the marital home and that she was caught making love a few metres from her children’s bedroom …

‘And here I am, sounding emotional, telling you about my memories, my girlhood memories!

‘Look! When I say I sold them, I’m not lying …’

She grabbed her handbag, rummaged inside feverishly, and flung the cheque into Laure’s lap.

‘One million, an advance of course, because that would be too cheap.

‘“I don’t want you to end up in the street,” he said.

‘He, that’s Guy, you understand? Honest Guy, decent Guy, the son of General Étamble, who had the misfortune to fall in love with a girl and marry her without making inquiries as his mother had advised him to do.

‘It was Guy who laid down the law and the others just listened, making sure he hadn’t forgotten anything – Antoine, Marcelle in her dressing-gown, having been dragged out of bed for the occasion, and the General’s widow, clutching her left side with both hands while waiting for the doctor.

‘Perhaps it killed her.

‘“You will let me know your address as soon as you have one so that my lawyer can contact you. I’ll make sure you lack for nothing, whatever happens.”

‘And that’s what it became, my wound, all my wounds, my hundreds of wounds, the wounds inflicted by all the men I chased after to punish myself.’

She seized the bottle with a rapid movement, as if afraid of being stopped, raised it to her lips to drink straight from it, in a wilfully dissolute gesture.

‘I’ve been drinking in secret for years, because I couldn’t live without it, because I’m incapable of being like them and, anyway, I wouldn’t want to be. When I was expecting Charlotte, then Anne-Marie, I stopped drinking, because the doctor told me it could damage them.

‘I was happy enough to have a whore’s babies, since my husband was keen on having a family. But I had enough pride left not to bring children into the world who would be sick or deformed because of me.

‘Well, when I went into hospital, I took a bottle with me, a flat bottle, hidden under my things, and a few hours after giving birth, I was already having a sip.

‘An alcoholic and a whore, that’s what I am!’

She raised the bottle to her lips again and Laure, who was on her feet now, tried to snatch it from her. Betty struggled, suddenly furious, scratching and lashing out. Between gritted teeth, she snarled, panting:

‘You too, you’re like them and I’m going to show you …’

She tailed off mid-sentence, abruptly letting go, and stood there, arms dangling, in the centre of the room, beneath the chandelier, so stunned that her face was expressionless.

Laure had just slapped her, calmly, without anger, but so hard that it had left a red mark on her cheek.

‘And now, my dear, to bed. Get undressed.’

The strangest thing was that she obeyed, and began to remove her clothes with the gestures and eyes of a sleepwalker. A few minutes later, when she was lying between the sheets, Laure’s husky voice said:

‘You’re freezing. I’m going to make you a hot-water bottle.’

Stepping into her room, she had made a point of taking the bottle of whisky with her.