Consolation (51 page)

‘No,’ he said, shaking his head, ‘no. But I’ll text you every evening.’

‘You promise?’

‘Promise.’

‘Not in English, though?’

She was making a huge effort to seem offhand.

As was Charles.

It was the first time she was going so far away, and for so long.

The prospect of her absence distressed him terribly. One month in that flat, the two of them, and without this child . . . Oh God.

He took her backpack and went with her as far as the X-ray machines.

Because she was walking very slowly, he was sure she was looking in the shop windows. He offered to get her some newspapers.

She didn’t want any.

‘Some chewing gum, then?’

‘Charles . . .’ She stood still.

He had already lived this scene. He’d often gone with her when she left for holiday camp, and he knew how this plucky little lass could lose it altogether, the closer they got to the actual rallying point.

He took her hand, felt flattered to be her support, and began mentally preparing a few firm but reassuring phrases for her to slip into her rear pocket.

‘Yes?’

‘Mum told me you two are going to split up.’

He stumbled slightly. He’d just got an Airbus right in his temple.

‘Oh?’

A squashed little syllable that could mean, ‘Oh? So she told you?’ or ‘Oh, really? That’s the first I’ve heard of it.’

He lacked the strength to play the tough guy: ‘I wasn’t aware.’

‘I know. She’s waiting for you to feel better before she tells you.’

It’s an enormous model. The A380, perhaps?

He didn’t know what to say.

‘She says that you haven’t been yourself these last few months, but that as soon as you’re better you would split up.’

‘You . . . You have some odd conversations for your age,’ was all he managed to say.

They stood opposite the departures.

‘Charles?’

She’d turned round.

‘Mathilde?’

‘I’ll come and live with you.’

‘Pardon?’

‘If you really do split up, I’m warning you, I’ll come with you.’

Since she had the grace to spit out the last words like a cowgirl spitting a wad of tobacco, he answered in kind: ‘Oh! I see what you’re driving at! You’re just saying that so that I’ll go on doing your maths and physics homework!’

‘Damn. However did you guess?’ She forced a smile.

He couldn’t keep it up. He had the Airbus’s landing gear in his guts now.

‘And even if it were true, you know that it really isn’t possible . . . I’m never here . . .’

‘Exactly . . .’ she said, still lightly.

But just as he could no longer keep up, she added, ‘It’s your business, I don’t care, but I will leave with you. You ought to know that . . .’

Her flight was called.

‘We haven’t got that far yet,’ he whispered into her ear, giving her a hug.

She said nothing. She must have thought he was very naïve.

She went through the gate, turned round, and blew him a kiss.

The last of her childhood.

Her flight disappeared off the board.

Charles was still there. He hadn’t budged a millimetre, he was waiting for the emergency services. His pocket vibrated:
1 New Message
.

‘JE TM.’

His thumbs slipped over the touch pad and he had to wipe his hand on his heart to help it get the message across: ‘ME 2.’

He checked his watch, turned round, bashed into hordes of people, stumbled over their bags, dropped his own off at the left luggage, ran to the taxi rank, tried to jump the queue, got told off, saw a motorcyclist with an ‘all destinations’ sign, and asked him to take him back to where the straw had just broken the proverbial camel’s back.

Never again would he take a flight feeling wobbly.

Never again.

5

A HUNDRED METRES
or so from the lycée where Mathilde would be going back to school in the autumn, he pushed open the door of an estate agent’s, told them he was looking for a two-room flat as near to there as possible; they showed him photos, he added that he didn’t have time just now, chose the one with the most light, left his card, and signed a big fat cheque so that they’d take him seriously.

He’d be back in two days.

He put his helmet back on and asked his driver to take him to the other side of the Seine.

He left his briefcase with him and said he wouldn’t be long.

The famous beige carpet
chez Chanel
. . . As if he’d rewound the clock ten years; as if he were standing there once again in his big shoes, in the angry glare of the doorman on duty.

He had them page her. He added that it was urgent.

His mobile rang.

‘Did she miss her flight?’ asked Laurence.

‘No, but can you come down here, now?’

‘I’m in the middle of a meeting . . .’

‘Then don’t come down. I just wanted to tell you I’m feeling better.’

He could hear the cogs turning beneath the lovely black velvet snood that held back her hair.

‘But . . . I thought you had a flight to catch, too?’

‘I’m on my way. Don’t worry. I’m better, Laurence, I do feel better.’

‘Look, I’m delighted,’ she laughed, somewhat nervously.

‘So, now you can leave me.’

‘What . . . what on earth are you on about this time?’

‘Mathilde told me . . . what you’d told her in confidence.’

‘This is ridiculous . . . Stay there, I’m coming.’

‘I’m in a hurry.’

‘I’ll be right there.’

For the first time, in all the time he’d known her, he thought she was wearing too much make-up.

He had nothing to add.

He’d found a flat, he had to rush, had a flight to catch.

‘Charles, just stop. It was nothing . . . women’s talk. You know how it is . . .’

‘Everything’s fine,’ he smiled, ‘everything’s fine.
I’m
the one who’s leaving.
I’m
the bastard.’

‘Right . . . if you say so.’

Right up to the end, he would have to admit she had class.

She said something else, but because of his helmet he could only nod his head without knowing what.

He tapped on the young man’s thigh to urge him to slalom between the cars.

He
could not
miss this flight. He had a badger to unearth.

*

A few hours later, Laurence Vernes would go to the hairdresser’s, smile at little Jessica while putting on her smock, sit down facing the mirror while another employee prepped her colour, pick up a magazine, leaf through the gossip columns, raise her head, look at herself, and burst into tears.

What will happen after this, we do not know.

She is no longer in the story.

6

CHARLES GOT STARTED
on a huge file entitled
P. B. Tran Tower/ Exposed Structures
and picked it apart until a flight attendant asked him to store his tray.

He reread his notes, checked the name of the hotel, looked out of the window at the grid patterns of towns, and mused that he was going to sleep well. That he’d finally recovered.

He thought about a lot of other things. About the work he’d just finished, which made him pleased, work that he could do anywhere in the world. From his office, from a stranger’s two-room flat, from an aeroplane seat or from . . .

He closed his eyes and smiled.

Everything was going to be very complicated.

So much the better.

It was his job, to find solutions . . .

‘Detail of a joint between the stone modules of columns showing the insertion of the steel counterbalancing system’, said the caption on his latest sketch.

Gravity, earthquakes, cyclones, wind, snow . . . All the hassles that were part of what they called live loads and which, he had just remembered, he found very entertaining . . .

He sent a message to the Highlands and decided not to adjust his watch.

He wanted to live in the same time zone as she did.

*

He got up very early, checked with the concierge about the delivery of his hired tuxedo, drank a coffee from a paper cup on his way down Madison Avenue and, as always when he was in New York, walked around staring up at the sky. New York, for someone who
as
a child used to like playing with Meccano sets, meant one stiff neck after another.

For the first time in years, he went into boutiques and bought clothes. A jacket and four new shirts.

Four of them!

He turned round and looked behind him from time to time. Keeping a lookout, fearful of something. A hand on his shoulder, an eye in a triangle, a voice bellowing at him from a skyscraper, Hey . . . you. You have no right to feel so happy . . . What did you go and steal this time, what are you hiding there, against your heart?

No . . . but I . . . I think I have a cracked rib.

Raise your arms so I can check.

And Charles did as he was told, and was carried away on the flow of passers-by.

He shook his head, called himself an idiot, and looked at his watch to remind himself of where he was.

Almost four o’clock . . . Last day of school but one . . . The children must have emptied their cubbyholes into their worn-out schoolbags . . . She had told him that every evening she went with the dogs to wait for them at the end of the lane, at the spot where the school bus dropped them off, and they loaded all their stuff into the donkey’s saddle-pack – ‘when I manage to catch him!’

And she’d gone on to add that a hundred or more oak trees barely sufficed to give them time to tell her all the goss, and . . .

A hand had just closed on his shoulder. He turned round.

With his other hand a man in a dark suit was pointing at the traffic light: DON’T WALK. Charles thanked him and was told that he was
Welcome
.

He found the vitamin shop and made a clean sweep of the six remaining tins they had in stock. Enough to fill quite a few cracks. He left the paper bag on the counter and slipped them into his pockets.

He liked the idea.

To feel her weight, as it were.

He pushed open the door at Strand’s. ‘Eighteen miles of books’ bragged the slogan. He couldn’t go through them all, but spent a
few
hours. Ransacked the architecture section of course, but also treated himself to a selection of Oscar Wilde’s correspondence, and a short novel by Thomas Hardy,
Fellow-Townsmen
, because of the blurb: ‘Notables in the Wessex town of Port Bredy, Barnet and Downe are old friends. Yet fate has treated them differently. Barnet, a prosperous man, has been unlucky in love and now lives with the consequences of a judicious but loveless marriage. Downe, a poor solicitor, is radiantly happy, with a doting wife and adoring children. A chance meeting one night causes them to reflect on their disparate lots in life . . .’And a genial
More Than Words
by Liza Kirwin, which he read with delight while eating a sandwich on the steps, in the sun.

It was a selection of illustrated letters from the Smithsonian Archive of American Art.

Letters to spouses, lovers, friends, patrons, clients or close confidants, from painters, young artists, and total unknowns, but also Man Ray, the brilliant Gio Ponti, Calder, Warhol, and even Frida Kahlo.

Letters that were discreet or moving or purely informative, always illustrated with a drawing, a sketch, a caricature or a vignette showing a place, a landscape, a state of mind or even an emotion, when the alphabet did not suffice.

More than words
. . . This book, which our laconic Charles had found on a cart as he was headed for the till, reconciled him with a part of himself. The part he had abandoned in a drawer with his cloth-covered notebooks and his tiny box of watercolours.

And who drew for the pleasure of it, back then . . . When he didn’t just sketch to find a solution to a problem; when he couldn’t give a damn about steel counterbalancing systems and other prestressed cables . . .

He developed a soft spot for Alfred Frueh, who would go on to become one of the
New Yorker
’s great caricaturists, and who sent hundreds of truly extraordinary missives to his fiancée. He told her about his trip to Europe shortly before the First World War, describing in detail the local customs of each destination and the world he discovered around him . . . He tucked a real dried edelweiss under his arm and, by means of a lead pencil, sent it to her all the way from Switzerland; he proved his delight in reading her letters, cutting them up into bits the size of postage stamps which he then used to tell her the story of his life so far: reading those
same
letters in his bath, or in front of his easel, at his table, in the street, under a lorry driving over him, in his bed, while his house was burning down or a crazy tiger was piercing his body with a sword. He also sent her his own art gallery, a thousand little three-dimensional cut-out figures, so that he could share with her the paintings that had most touched him in Paris – and all of it adorned with texts that were tender, full of humour, and oh so elegant.

He would have liked to be that man. Jolly, confident, loving. And talented.

And then there was Joseph Lindon Smith, with his perfect pencil stroke, telling his very worried parents about his ordeal as a painter on the Grand Tour in the Old World. Drawing himself beneath a shower of coins in a Venice street, or half-dead from eating too much melon.

Dear Mother and Father, Behold Jojo eating fruit!

Saint-Exupéry disguised as the Little Prince, asking Hedda Sterne if she were free for dinner and . . . Come on, you can have another look later on . . . then leafing through one last time before closing the book, spotted the self-portrait of a lost man, with his head in his hands, bent over a photo of his beloved . . .
Oh! I wish I were with you
.

Yes. Oh.

I wish.

He took a detour to see the immense Flatiron Building, which had made such an impression on him during his first visit. Constructed in 1902, it was one of the highest edifices at the time and, above all, one of the first steel structures. Charles raised his eyes.