doesn’t want to talk about it. Not now. Nor does she want to visit her parents, calling them the worst option after bad news, a view he can only endorse.
He doesn’t understand why she wants to keep him out of this, so he asks her to explain. They’ve shared plenty of misery in the past. But she insists: no need to cancel his appointment with his new client, she’d like to stay here alone for a while in the wind and sea air. ‘There’s no way I’m going to do myself any harm,’ she says finally, irritated.
Everything has a heaviness about it when he reaches the van. It doesn’t feel right to drive off and leave her at this point. Being unwanted gnaws at him. THE LAST STRAWBERRIES! he reads—a message chalked on a sign beside the road, a metaphor, the title of a song about this day on which things turned their back on him after all, completely unexpectedly. He mustn’t have such melodramatic thoughts. He stops at the side of the road, close to a muddy ditch, to allow a monstrous agricultural vehicle to thunder past. Everyone is eager to share their distress with him except the woman he loves. It seems a reprehensible thought, but he’s unable to shake it off.
The woman is transplanting a hydrangea in her front garden, between a small model windmill and a low holly hedge. She’s about sixty and her head is down. The pinafore she’s wearing makes her as timeless as this district, on the boundary between fairy tale and destitution. He loves the old houses, especially the small ones, slightly lopsided, with their postage-stamp gardens filled with kitsch and the glories of nature, every sundial so polished, every calyx so diligently propped that even the most cynical guardian of good taste couldn’t help but be moved by it. The care this woman devotes to her little garden certainly moves Alphonse. Perhaps he’s more receptive to it now that his mood has sunk so low.
Then she looks up at him and he’s startled by his own sorrow, which he sees magnified and stretched like a reflection in a fairground mirror. She smiles, the woman, but inside her deep eye sockets lie heaps and heaps of something else.
He introduces himself, reminds her of the room he’s agreed to take in hand. It’s just one room and she’s called Madeleine Claeys—it all comes back to him now.
‘Yes, thank you,’ she says, or rather sighs, in a hoarse monotone; she must be deeply tired. ‘I’ll show you the room.’
He walks inside behind her and up a narrow flight of stairs. Unlike the front garden, the house is badly neglected. The wallpaper in the stairwell cries out for replacement—it might well be older than he is—but he never makes suggestions.
Oh, so it’s one of those stories, he thinks as she pushes the door open for him. The silenced child’s room from another era, radiant with weekly cleansed disuse, the smooth patchwork quilt over the narrow mattress, washed every year, the ancient teddy bear and scary clown on the pillow gazing at the stains on the wallpaper, the only interruption to which is a black-and-white photo of a sweet little boy of about two years old. A beautiful child, it goes without saying. An old one, though, thinks Alphonse.
‘My brother. He’s dead.’ The woman’s rasping voice sounds decisive.
He nods, doesn’t wait for any further information, not after this morning. ‘Do you want it to look the way it does now or to be unrecognizable?’
‘The latter,’ she says. ‘The walls, ceiling, floor, skirting board, door, and door frame. All of it. The furniture can go into the next room for now. If you see anything you can use, just take it with you.’ She stiffly descends the stairs.
After he’s emptied the room he calls Cat, who to his exasperation and sickening concern doesn’t answer. Thirst plagues him. After the day’s emotional start he forgot to bring a bottle of water. Since leaving him in the dead child’s room, the woman has not shown her face.
His large feet diagonal on the narrow stairs, he cautiously goes down. He knocks on the door and opens it on receiving her feeble permission. She’s sitting at a window looking out on the front garden, in a rattan chair with a tall back to it, smoking a cigarette. She glances round at him and waves at the cupboard above the sink when he asks for a glass of water. His thank-you doesn’t seem to get through to her. She’s staring at a blackbird on the window ledge, then she looks at her fingers, holding the burning stub of the cigarette, which she puts out amid the pile in the ashtray.
Still no one who feels like talking to me, he thinks. Perhaps it was something I used to have that’s gone. The blackbird flaps wildly against the glass.
In the room he looks again at the portrait of the little brother.
Insufficient daylight comes into the room and the chandelier is feeble. His hands are clumsier than normal and the results messy. When he tries to check whether a skirting board is firmly fixed to the wall it breaks in two without the slightest resistance, emitting a rotten burp.
He looks at the piece still attached to the wall by clusters of bent nails and curses the generations of DIY enthusiasts who make his work more difficult, and not just in this house. They hide the pipes of a defective floor-heating system but forget to release the pressure. They concrete over television cables, saw through supporting beams, brick up drains. Here the floor isn’t level, an imperfection that the unequal skirting boards are intended to resolve by means of an optical illusion but in fact only emphasize. And what have the weekend dabblers stuffed into the gap between wall and floor? Paper?
They’re letters, or at least full envelopes. He pulls them out of the groove one by one, all the way from the corner where two walls and the floor come together to a point where the skirting board is still clinging on. Perhaps there are more; he could wrench all the skirting loose. First he wants to see what’s inside. If it’s money, this may be a means of testing him, to see whether he’ll pocket it. Something like that happened to him once, at a previous job.
When he opens a letter, the graph paper tears in half. There’s a number at the top—‘1972’—the year perhaps. Then writing, in an irregular hand, switching from blue to black ballpoint halfway. People who manage to overcome dyslexia develop their brains more thoroughly than people who don’t suffer from the disorder, a teacher once impressed upon him. In his case the letters continue to jump over one another like playful lambs. Handwriting demands more effort than print, and Madeleine doesn’t seem to care about punctuation. It’s only when he reads the sentences for the fourth time that their meaning starts to come through.
‘i still see him every day after school i have to mum not any better dad no news and hes older than i was then no one can ever get used to it my Moustaki record broken in two dix-sept ans et vivre à chaque instant ses caprices d’enfant ses désirs exigeants but i am seventeen that doesnt matter itll stay the way it is tough luck’
He opens a second envelope, also unmarked. On the paper, ruled this time, is a neat ‘1987’ and the message: ‘everything the same without that shouting it would be different try to enjoy nature’.
It must be her abbreviated diary. In 1990 she writes: ‘he would have a deficiency something remarkable but it wouldnt show colour blindness for example i would always be the only one who could calm him the parents of his last girlfriend would have a riding school and after the relationship was over because she cheated on him i would say that i always thought she stank of the stables i would also inspect his clothes tennis hed have a talent for that but not enough ambition because he also benefitted from his youth and his trainer would have a hard time with that we would always like looking a lot at certain television programmes he and i but he less and less so we would slowly discuss less and less about them but talk a lot about the garden and sometimes about cooking and we wouldnt mind that’
His telephone fishes him out from among
