Consolation (27 page)

‘Did he, uh –’

‘No, no,’ she said, her face lighting up, ‘he’s still around! But you won’t see him, he thought it was better to leave us alone . . . Shall I go on? Do you want something more to eat?’

‘No, no . . . I’m listening.’

‘So, she believed this man, as I was saying, and after that I saw, really
saw
with my own eyes, d’you hear? what people call “the
power
of love”. She pulled herself together, stopped drinking, lost weight, looked younger again, and from under that layer of . . . sorrow, as you called it earlier, out came her old face. The same features, the same smile, the same cheerfulness in her expression. You remember how she used to behave if there was an opportunity for mischief? She was lively, irresistible, crazy. Like a saucy schoolgirl who ends up in the wrong dormitory and doesn’t get caught . . . And she was lovely, Charles, so lovely . . .’

Charles remembered.

‘Well, it was him. That Paul. You cannot imagine how happy I was to see her like that. I said to myself, Right. Life has finally understood what it owes her. Life is thanking her at last . . . It was at about that time that I quit the profession. Because of my husband, in fact. He’d had a really close call, and if we tightened our belts, we could do without my salary. And then our daughter was expecting a baby, and Anouk had come back, so . . . It was time to retire, and look after my own loved ones. The baby was born, little Guillaume, and I went back to living the way normal people do. No stress, no shifts, no need to go hunting for a calendar whenever anyone suggested a day off, and I could forget all those smells . . . The meal trays, the disinfectant, the coffee brewing, the blood platelets . . . I swapped all that for afternoons in the park and packets of biscuits . . . At that point I lost sight of Anouk a bit, but we called each other from time to time. Everything was fine.

‘And then one day, one night rather, she called and I couldn’t understand what on earth she was on about. The only thing I did know was that she’d been drinking. So I went to see her the next day.

‘He’d written her a letter that she couldn’t understand. I was the one who had to read it to her, now, and explain it. What was he saying? What was he driving at? Was he leaving her or wasn’t he? She was . . . devastated. So I read it, that . . .’

She shook her head.

‘. . . that piece of shit, full of bullshit psychobabble . . . Oh, it was eloquent enough and all tangled up with lovely words. It was meant to be dignified and generous, but all it amounted to was . . . the most cowardly thing you’ve ever seen . . .

‘“Well, well?” she was pleading. “What does it mean, do you think? What does it mean for me?”

‘What was I supposed to say? That it meant she was nowhere? Look . . . You no longer even exist. He despises you so much that he can’t even be bothered to explain himself clearly . . . No. I couldn’t say that. Instead, I took her in my arms, and then, of course, she understood.

‘You see, Charles, it’s something I’ve often seen with my own eyes, something I’ll never manage to understand . . . why people who are so exceptional in their profession, people who, objectively, are able to do good on earth, turn out to be despicable bastards in real life? Huh? How can such a thing be possible? In the end, where did it go, all their fine humanity?

‘So I stayed with her all day. I was afraid to leave her. I was sure that at best she would drown herself in booze, and at worst . . . I begged her to come and stay a few days at our place; she could have the girls’ room, we’d keep out of her way and . . . She blew her nose, tied her hair back, rubbed her eyelids, lifted her chin and smiled. The most heartbreaking smile I’ve ever seen on her face.

‘Oh, and God knows that . . . Well. Never mind. She tried to make it last as long as possible, big show-off that she was, and she assured me, as she was walking me to the door, that I could leave now, that she wouldn’t
do
anything, that she’d been through rougher times than this and so, thanks to that, she had a thick skin.

‘I agreed, on condition I could ring her any time of the day or night. She laughed. She said okay. She added that one hassle more or less would hardly make any difference. And in fact, she held up. I couldn’t get over it. I saw her a bit more often at that point, and try as I might to find warning signs – scrutinizing the whites of her eyes, or sniffing her coat when I went to hang it up – there . . . no . . . she was sober.’

Silence.

‘With hindsight, I can see that, on the contrary, I should have been worried. It’s horrid what I’m about to say, but in the end, as long as she was drinking, it was proof that she was alive and, in a certain way, it meant that she was
reacting
. . . Well . . . all these thoughts come to me nowadays . . . And then one day she told me that she was going to hand in her resignation. I was utterly flabbergasted. I remember it very well, we’d just come out of a tea room and were walking along the Tuileries. The weather
was
fine, we were arm in arm, and that’s when she told me: it’s over. I’m quitting. I slowed down and didn’t say anything for a long time, hoping there’d be some explanation: I’m quitting because . . . or this is why I’m quitting . . . No. Nothing. I eventually managed to say, Why, Anouk, why? You’re only fifty-five . . . How will you live? What will you live on? What I was really thinking was
who
or
what
will you live for, but I didn’t dare put it to her like that. She didn’t reply. Okay.

‘And then she murmured, “All of them. They all abandoned me. One after the other . . . But
not the hospital
, do you understand? That’s why I have to leave first, otherwise I know I’d never get over it. This way, at least one thing in my bitch of a life won’t leave me stranded . . . Can you imagine me on the day of my farewell party?” she scoffed, “thanks for the present, kiss on the cheek to everybody, and then? Where do I go from there? What do I do? When is it time to die?”

‘I didn’t know what to say but it didn’t really matter: she was already climbing onto her bus, waving goodbye through the window.’

She put her glass down and didn’t say anything.

‘And then?’ ventured Charles. ‘Is . . . is that it?’

‘No. Well yes, in fact. Yes . . .’

She apologized, removed her glasses, tore off a paper towel and ruined her make-up.

Charles got up, went over to the window, and with his back to her this time, held onto the railing of the balcony as if he were on board a ship.

He wanted a smoke. Didn’t dare. There’d been cancer in this house . . . Perhaps it had had nothing to do with tobacco but how could he know? He looked at the tower blocks in the distance and thought about that family of hers . . .

The ones who had never loved her. Who had never called her by her real name. Who had filled her blood with addiction and affliction and alcoholism. Who had never held their hand out to her other than to take her money. The money she earned by forbidding her patients to die, while Alexis buckled his schoolbag all on his own and put the key around his neck. But to give them their due, those people were the ones who – one evening when they
were
all a bit down – had given Nana the chance to improvise a marvellous illusionist’s act.

‘Stop it, treasure, stop wasting your time with those useless dregs . . . What is it you want from them, anyway? Tell me?’

Digging around here and there in the kitchen to find his props, he had imitated them all.

Incarnated, rather.

The scolding dad. The consoling mum. The needling brother. The stammering little sister. The waffling granddad. And the old aunt who prickled beneath her suction-cup kisses. And the farting great-uncle. And the dog, and the cat, and the postman, and the priest, and even the gamekeeper, for whom he borrowed Alexis’s trumpet . . . And it was as cheery as any real family dinner, and . . .

Charles inhaled a good lungful of ring road air and – God knows what an ugly word this is –
verbalized
what it was that had been haunting him these last six months. No, twenty years:

‘I – I’m one of them.’

‘One what?’

‘One of those who abandoned her . . .’

‘Yes, but you cared for her very much . . .’

He turned around and she added, with a mocking dimple, ‘No, I don’t think
care for
is the right expression now, is it?’

‘Was it that obvious?’ asked the old little boy, anxiously.

‘No, no, don’t worry. You could hardly tell. It was every bit as discreet as . . . Nana’s outfits . . .’

Charles looked down. Her smile was tickling his ears.

‘You know, I didn’t want to interrupt you earlier on when you were saying that he had been her only love story, but when I went to the cemetery the other day and I saw those orange letters going off like a huge fireworks display in the middle of all that . . . desolation, well, there I was, and I’d sworn to myself no more crying, but I confess that . . . And then this horrid woman from the next plot came over to me going tsk tsk. She had seen him, too, the shameless fool who’d done that, and wasn’t it a crime . . . I didn’t say anything. How could you expect an old bag like her to understand anything? But I did think to myself, that shameless fool you’re referring to was the love of Anouk’s life.

‘Don’t look at me like that, Charles, I just told you I didn’t want
any
more crying. I’m up to here with it, really I am. And besides, she wouldn’t want to see us like this, it’s . . .’

Paper towel.

‘She had a photo of you in her wallet, she talked about you all the time, she never said a single unkind thing about you. She said that you were the only man in the world – and this means that poor Nana wasn’t even in the running – who ever behaved like a gentleman with her . . .

‘She said, Good job I met him, he absolved all the others . . . She said too that if Alexis had made it in the end, it was thanks to you, because when you were little you used to look after him better than she did . . . She said you’d always helped him with his homework and his auditions, and that without you he’d have turned out a lot worse . . . She said that you had been the backbone of a house full of crazy people . . .

‘The only thing that . . .’ she added.

‘That what?’

‘That really made her lose hope, was the fact that you two had fallen out . . .’

Silence.

‘Come on, now, Sylvie,’ he finally managed to say, ‘let’s get it over with . . .’

‘You’re right. It won’t take long. So she left the hospital, discreetly. She’d fixed it with management so that the others would think that she was leaving on holiday, and she never came back. They were all terribly disappointed not to have been able to show her their admiration and affection, but since that’s the way she’d chosen to do things, then . . . She got letters from them, instead. The first ones she read, and then after that she confessed to me that she couldn’t read any more. If you could have seen . . . It was impressive. After that our phone calls were further and further apart, and didn’t last as long . . . First of all because she no longer had much to tell me, and then my daughter had twins and I was
very
busy! And finally because she told me that she and Alexis had had a reconciliation and at that point, subconsciously I suppose, I assumed Alexis had taken over from me. That it was his turn now. You know how it is with people you’ve worried about a lot . . . When the situation seems to improve a bit, you’re really pleased just to be able to have
a
break. So I did the same as you. Sort of the bare minimum for politeness. Her birthday, holiday greetings, birth announcements, postcards. Time went by and gradually she became a memory from my former life. A wonderful memory.

‘And then one day one of my letters was returned. I wanted to ring her but the line had been disconnected. Right. She must have gone to join her son somewhere outside Paris and she surely had masses of grandchildren on her lap . . . She’d call some day or other and we’d exchange all our senile old lady chit-chat . . .

‘She never called. Huh. That’s life. And then . . . it must have been about three years ago, I think, I was in the train and there was a very upright old lady at the end of the carriage. I remember my first reflex was to think, I’d like to be like her when I’m that age. You know, the way you say to yourself, “A fine-looking old person.” A lovely mass of white hair, no make-up, skin like a nun’s, very wrinkly but still fresh, a slender shape and . . . she moved over, a bit closer to me, to let someone get off and that’s when I got such a shock.

‘She recognized me too and gave me a gentle smile as if we’d met only the day before. I suggested we get out at the next station and go for a coffee. I could sense she wasn’t terribly keen on the idea but, oh well . . . if it would please me . . .

‘She used to be so talkative, so voluble in the old days, but now I had to worm it out of her to get her to tell me the least little thing about herself. Yes, her rent had gone up and she’d had to move. Yes, it was a tough estate she was living in, but there was a sense of solidarity she’d never encountered elsewhere. She was working in an infirmary in the morning and doing volunteer work the rest of the time. People came to her place or she’d go to their homes . . . She didn’t really need much money, anyway . . . Everyone used the barter system: a bandage for a dish of couscous or a shot for some plumbing work . . . She seemed strangely calm but not unhappy either. She said she’d never done a better job at her profession. She had the feeling she was still useful, and she got mad whenever anyone called her “doctor”, and she nicked prescription drugs on the sly from the dispensary. The medication that had expired . . . Yes, she was living alone and . . . And you? she asked. And you?

‘So I told her my boring little life, but at a certain point I could see she wasn’t listening. She had to go. They were expecting her.

‘And Alexis? Oh . . . There she seemed to cloud over . . . He lived far away and she could tell her daughter-in-law didn’t like her very much . . . She always felt like she was in the way . . . But anyway he had two lovely children, a big girl and a little boy who was three, and that was the main thing . . . They were all fine . . .