Consolation (42 page)

‘And yet we were very different. Like in Jane Austen novels, you know . . . The sensible big sister and the sensitive little one . . . She was my Jane and my Elinor, she was calm, I was turbulent. She was sweet, I was a pain. She wanted a family, I wanted a mission. She was waiting to have children while I was waiting for visas. She was generous, I was ambitious. She listened to people; I never did. Like with you, this evening . . . And because she was perfect, that gave me the right not to be . . . She was the pillar, and the pillar was solid, so I could go and gad about, the family would survive . . .

‘She always supported me, encouraged me, helped me and loved me. We had adorable parents, but they were utterly clueless, and she’s the one who brought me up.

‘Ellen . . .

‘I haven’t said her name out loud for so long . . .’

Silence.

‘Cynical as I was at the time,’ she continued, ‘I did have to acknowledge that happy ends were not the exclusive domain of Victorian novels . . . She married her first love and her first love was worthy of her . . . Pierre Ravennes . . . A Frenchman. An adorable man. As generous as she was.
Beau-frère
came to mean a lot more than brother-in-law. I loved him dearly, and the law didn’t have anything to do with it. He was an only son and he’d suffered a lot as a result. In fact, he’d become an obstetrician . . . Yes, he was that type of man. Who knew what he wanted . . . I think he would have been delighted to see everyone round the table like we were this evening . . . He used to say he wanted seven children and you never knew if he was joking. Samuel was born; I’m his godmother. Then Alice, then Harriet. I didn’t see them very often but I was always surprised by the atmosphere at their place, it was . . . Did you ever read Roald Dahl?’

He nodded.

‘I adore that man. At the end of
Danny the Champion of the World
, there’s a message addressed to the young reader which says, more or less, When you grow up, please do not forget that children want and
deserve
parents who are
sparky
.

‘I don’t know how you’d say that in French,
sparky
. . . It’s like . . . brilliant? Funny? Dazzling? Dynamite? Champagne, perhaps . . . But what I do know is that their home was . . .
sparkyssimo
. I was filled with wonder and also a bit confused, and I said to myself that I’d never know how to do that . . . I thought I didn’t have the generosity, or the cheerfulness, or the patience required to make children as happy as their children were . . .

‘I remember it very clearly, I used to say to myself, jokingly and at the same time to reassure myself, If ever I have kids some day, I’ll leave them with Ellen, she’ll look after them . . . And then.’

A sad face.

Charles would have liked to touch her shoulder, her arm.

But he didn’t dare.

‘And there we are, now I’m the one reading them Roald Dahl stories . . .’

He took her glass out of her hand, filled it, and handed it back.

‘Thanks.’

A long silence.

Laughter and the sounds of the guitar in the distance gave her the courage to continue.

‘One day, I came to visit, unexpectedly. For my godson’s birthday, actually. At the time I was living in the US, working a great deal, and I had never even seen their youngest . . . I had been with them for a few days when Pierre’s father arrived. The famous Louis, the one on the shirt . . . He was a mad sort, funny, larger than life. Pure concentrate of sparky, absolutely. He was a wine merchant who loved to drink, eat, laugh, toss the kids up to the ceiling then hang them upside down by their feet, and crush his loved ones against his big belly.

‘He was a widower, he adored Ellen and I think she married him as much as she married his son . . . You have to bear in mind that our own father was already an elderly gentleman when we were born. A professor of Latin and Greek, at university. Very kind, but fairly . . . vague. More at ease with Pliny the Elder than with his own daughters. When Louis heard that I was staying and that I could look after the kids, he begged Pierre and Ellen to go with him to visit a cellar or some such thing in Burgundy. Oh come on, he insisted, it will do you good. You haven’t been away for such a long time! Oh go on . . . We’ll be visiting a fine estate, we’ll have a grand feast, stay in a sublime hotel and tomorrow afternoon you’ll be home again. Pierre! For Ellen’s sake! Time to get her away from the baby bottles!

‘Ellen was hesitating. I think she really didn’t want to leave me . . . And that’s where life really is a bitch, Charles, because
I’m
the one who insisted she go. I got the feeling that this little outing would be such a treat for Pierre and his father . . . Go on, I told her, go and have a grand feast and sleep in a fourposter bed with a canopy, we’ll be fine.

‘She said, all right, but I knew she was forcing herself. That once again she was putting the others first, before herself.

‘It all happened very quickly. We had decided not to say anything to the children, who were in the middle of watching a cartoon, to avoid any risk of a pointless scene. When Mowgli got back to his village, Mummy would come home tomorrow and that was that.

‘Auntie Kate felt she was up to the task. Auntie Kate hadn’t even taken all the pressies out of her travel bag . . .’

Silence.

‘It’s just that . . . Mummy never came home. Nor did Daddy. Or Grandpa.’

‘The phone rang during the night, a voice rolling his “r” s asking me whether I was related to Rrravennes Louis, Rrravennes Pierre, or Shay-rrrang-tonne Ay-lenn. I’m her sister, I replied, so they put someone else on the line, higher rank, and it’s this someone else who had to do the dirty work.

‘Had the driver drunk too much? Fallen asleep? The inquest would determine that, but what was certain was that he was driving far too fast, and the other driver, in a truck transporting farm equipment, should have pulled farther over to the side and switched on the hazard flashers before going off to take a piss.

‘By the time he buttoned his flies and turned around, there was nothing sparky left.’

Kate had got up. She moved her chair over by her dog, took off her shoes, and slipped her bare feet under the dog’s unmoving body.

Up to that point Charles had held up fairly well, but when he saw that huge animal, who could no longer even wag his tail, raise his eyes solemnly to look at her and convey the happiness he felt, to be of use to her still, Charles felt his surface cracking completely.

And he was out of cigarettes.

He placed his hand on his swollen cheek.

Why was life so careless with those who served it most loyally?

Why?

Why those very people?

He was lucky. It had taken him forty-seven years to understand what Anouk was celebrating when, on the pretext that she was alive, she said fuck-it to everything else.

Fuck-it to parking tickets, bad marks, disconnected phones, broken down cars, hideous problems with money, and the insane state of the world.

At the time, he’d found it all a bit too easy, cowardly even, as if one simple word could suffice to excuse all her failings.

‘Alive.’

Of course. What else could they be?

It was obvious.

Besides, it didn’t even count.

Frankly, she went on about it all too much.

‘Ellen and her father-in-law died instantly. Pierre, who was sitting in the rear, waited until he was in hospital in Dijon in order to bow out in the presence of his colleagues . . . I’ve often had the opportunity to . . .’ Here she winced: ‘
relate the facts
, as you might imagine. But in fact, I’ve never really said a thing . . .

‘Are you still there, Charles?’

‘Yes.’

‘Can I tell you?’

He nodded. He was too upset to risk letting her hear his voice again.

Several minutes went by. He thought she’d changed her mind.

‘In fact, you don’t believe it when people tell you, it makes
no sense whatsoever
, it’s all a bad dream. So you say, go back to bed.

‘Of course you can’t, and you spend the rest of the night in an absolute state, staring at the telephone while you wait for Captain Whatsit to call back and apologize. Look, there was an errrror in identifying the bodies . . . No. The earth keeps turning. The furniture in the living room is all where it belongs and a new day has arrived, ready to insult you.

‘It’s almost six o’clock and you tour the flat to gauge the extent of the tragedy. Samuel in a little blue room, he turned six just the day before, his forehead against his teddy bear and his palms wide open. Alice, in her little pink room, three and a half years old and already riveted to her thumb. And next to her parents’ bed, Harriet, eight months old, and she opens her big eyes when you lean over her cradle and you can tell she is
already
a bit disappointed to see your uncertain face rather than her mother’s.

‘You pick the baby up, and close the doors to the other rooms because she has started to babble and, to tell the truth, you’re not in a great hurry for them to wake up . . . You congratulate yourself for remembering how many spoonfuls of powder you have to put in the baby’s bottle, you settle into an armchair by the window because in any case you’re going to have to face this fucking new
day
, so you may as well do it lost in the eyes of a baby who’s feeding, and you . . . you don’t cry, you’re in a state of . . .’

‘Sideration,’ murmured Charles.

‘Right. Numb. You hold the baby against your shoulder for the burp and you actually hurt her, you’re clinging to her so hard, as if that little burp was the most important thing in the world. The last thing you think you can actually hang on to. Sorry, you say to her, sorry. And you lull yourself, against the back of her neck.

‘You suddenly remember that your flight is leaving the next day, that you’ve just been awarded the grant you’ve been waiting for for so long, and you have a fiancé who has just gone to sleep, thousands of kilometres from there, and you’d planned to go to the Millers’ garden party the following weekend, and your father is about to turn seventy-three, and your mother, that little birdlike creature, has never been able to look after herself, and . . . there’s no one on the horizon. But above all – and this is what you haven’t realized yet – you will never see Ellen again.

‘You know that you have to ring your parents, if only because someone has to go there. To answer questions, and wait while body bags are unzipped, and sign papers. You say to yourself, I cannot send
Dad
there, he is . . . unequipped for this type of situation, and as for Mummy . . . You look at people going by in the street with their great long strides and you are angry at them for their selfishness. Where do they think they’re going? Why are they acting as if nothing has happened? Then it is Alice who rouses you from your torpor, and the first thing she asks is, Did Mummy come back?

‘You make up a second baby bottle, you sit her in front of the telly and you bless Tweety Bird and Puddy Tat. And, you even watch them with her. Samuel comes in, he curls up next to you and says, It’s stupid, Tweety always wins. You agree. It really is utterly stupid . . . You stay with them in front of the television as long as possible but then there comes a time when there’s nothing left to watch . . . And the night before you had promised to take them to the Jardins du Luxembourg, so it’s time to get dressed, right?

‘Samuel shows you where to take the rubbish bins and how to lift the back of the pushchair. You watch him while he does it and you sense that this little boy has only just started teaching you how to live . . .

‘You walk along the street and you don’t recognize a thing, you really should ring your parents but you don’t have the courage. Not for their sake, for your own. As long as you don’t say anything, they are not dead. The policeman can still send his apologies.

‘It was Sunday. And Sunday doesn’t count. Sunday is a day when nothing ever happens. When people are with their family.

‘Sailing boats on the pond, slides, swings, puppet shows, it’s all there for the asking. A tall lad puts Samuel on the back of a donkey, and his smile gives you a wonderful moment of reprieve. You had no way of knowing, but this was the beginning of an enduring passion that would lead to the harness race at Meyrieux-sur-Lance nearly two years later . . .’

She was smiling.

Charles wasn’t.

‘And then you take them to eat chips at the Quick Burger, and you let them play all afternoon in the ball pit.

‘You sit there. You haven’t even touched the food on your tray. You watch them.

‘Two children having a lot of fun in the play area of a fast-food restaurant on an April day in Paris – and the rest isn’t important.

‘On the way home, Samuel asks if his parents will be there when you get back, and since you’re a coward, you say you don’t know. No, that’s not it, you’re not a coward, it really is that you
do not know
. You’ve never had children, you don’t know if you should break the news to them point-blank or create some sort of . . . dramatic progression to give them time to get used to the worst case scenario. Say, to begin with, that they’ve had a car accident, give them their tea, then say that they’re in hospital, give them their bath, then add that it’s really serious and . . . If it were you, you’d tell them right away, but alas it’s not you. Suddenly you’re sorry you’re not in the States, it would be easy there to find some sort of Helpline and a shrink who’d be certain sure of herself, on the other end of the line, to advise you. But you’re lost and you spend a long time staring into the window of the toy store on the corner of the Rue de Rennes, to gain some time . . .

‘When you push open the door of the flat, Samuel rushes to the flashing light on the answerphone. You haven’t realized, because you’re in the process of struggling with Harriet’s tiny little coat,
and
then, above Alice’s chirping as she unwraps her tea set in the entrance, you recognize the Captain’s voice.

‘He isn’t apologizing at all. He’s actually telling you off. He cannot understand why you didn’t call him back and he asks you to write down the number of the police station and the address of the hospital where the bodies are. He says an awkward goodbye, and offers his condolences once again.