much noise then. I’m in every shot.’
‘It’s you who puts yourself in every frame. You’ve always been full of yourself.’
‘Will you let me watch the TV?’
‘You see! Self-obsessed, stuck up and snooty.’
‘I’m getting tired of this, Rodolphe.’
‘You’re tireless.’
‘Don’t believe that for a second.’
For a moment the only sound was the humming of the television, a programme presented by media whores who did nothing but talk about themselves with no regard for the people watching. That was fine because neither Jeanne nor Rodolphe nor anyone else in the world was interested in them either. Even though brother and sister had their backs to one another, a sense of an impending face-off filled the room. Rodolphe stretched his hand out above the table, found the bottle of wine and poured himself a glass, stopping as if by miracle just before it overflowed.
‘What does that mean: “Don’t believe that for a second”?’
‘You’ve had enough to drink this evening.’
Rodolphe downed the glass in one. A drip ran down his chin. He wiped it away with his finger.
‘What does that mean: “Don’t believe that for a second”?’
‘It means you’re getting more and more temperamental and demanding, and if you carry on like this, I’m going to leave.’
‘Leave? … Where?’
‘Anywhere, somewhere quiet.’
‘There’s no such place. You’d really drop me, just like that?’
‘Of course. I’d come and see you on Sundays.’
‘Sundays … My whole childhood, I only ever saw you on Sundays.’
‘Well, I was at boarding school, wasn’t I?’
‘You still are. You live in your own little world, filing your little things neatly away. You live life to the minimum, like a prisoner. Maybe I’ve become more of a pain in the arse, but you’ve put up thicker defences. Sometimes I wonder if you’re not … it shocks me to say it … happy!’
‘I’m not unhappy.’
They said nothing more. Rodolphe sat down beside her and immediately dozed off. He slept like a log. The baddie in the TV series that had come on after the talk show looked a bit like him: a smooth, pink-faced doll at a jumble sale. Rodolphe had become what he had always been, a big whingeing nuisance of a baby. Jeanne was the only one who could put up with him. She put up with everything, a caryatid holding up a sky that constantly threatened to cave in. It was a job like any other; there was no virtue in it, she just got on with it. Rodolphe was right, she was tireless, because she put no value on what she did. She lit a cigarette. She smoked too much, was smoking more and more, a little smoke machine. She looked at her hands in the glow of the Bic lighter and did not recognise them. They picked up the cigarette, brought it to her mouth, rested on her knees, drummed their fingertips. Her hands had a life of their own; they had no need of her. Only Rodolphe needed her, but she needed no one, not Rodolphe, not her hands. Just cigarettes, that was all. She wasn’t unhappy exactly, but she wasn’t happy either.
She was Jeanne, an indestructible block of Jeanne apparently able to last for ever, standing flawlessly alone, her military demeanour no doubt inherited from her father, Colonel Mangin, who had fallen in battle somewhere on the other side of the world. She was twelve when he was killed, and his death made no impact on her. All through her childhood, the man with a constant tan and a crew cut had only hung around long enough to bark a few brief orders before disappearing again once he was satisfied they had been obeyed. One morning, two gendarmes came to the door. Her mother went pale reading the letter. The twins, Xavier and Denis, her eighteen-year-old big brothers, held their mother up and told Jeanne to go and look after Rodolphe. The only thing left of all this was a yellowed photo showing the hard-edged soldier smiling in front of a tank with sand dunes in the distance, in a fake lizard-skin frame in Rodolphe’s bedroom.
‘Look after your brother!’
She had heard the same thing again and again throughout her childhood, a kind of refrain which was put on pause when the fuss happened and resumed fifteen years later, after boarding school, after the École normale, when her mother and the twins perished in a car accident on the way to Saint-Cyr military academy. She felt nothing then either. Neither the wizened vine stock of a mother nor her two idiot sons with skulls moulded by their army-issue kepis had left any kind of hole in her life.
Propelled by some instinct, she left her job as an English teacher in Melun and came back to Versailles to look after Rodolphe, who was stubbornly refusing to take responsibility for himself. They sold the flat in Le Chesnay and moved close to Gare Rive Gauche, more convenient for getting to Viroflay where she had found work at a private school. She was thirty at the time; she would be forty at the beginning of February, an age when one might wish at last to stand alone in the world. Now there was only emptiness to fill her up.
Everything had begun to go tits up the day he was born, much as it had for the scrawny Christ dying of boredom in the empty church of Notre-Dame de Versailles. Waking him around seven o’clock that morning, the priest had given Roland a bowl of coffee and a limp tartine, which he wolfed down, and then asked him to stay put and pray. He would be back with warm clothes, perhaps even a bit of money, but after that Roland really would have to leave. He was still young, he had so much to look forward to, he could build himself a proper life like other people, but he must do it somewhere else. He just had to roll up his sleeves and … Roland did not listen to the rest of this off-the-cuff sermon. The words tinkled under the rib vaults like ice cubes in the bottom of a glass. The priest just wanted to get rid of him. Preparations were afoot for midnight mass and there was no role for him in the Nativity. The scene was coloured khaki, grey, black and brown, with a few hopeful glimmers of gold here and there.
Roland thought the frescos and sculptures representing hell were a hundred times more appealing than the pale, cold depictions of heaven. He had no time for either of them anyway. The only thing he was interested in was how much cash the priest was going to give him. A hundred? He was also wondering what the podgy cherubs flitting above his head would taste like, spit-roasted like suckling pigs. The morning’s lukewarm coffee and soggy bread had filled a hole but left him unsatisfied. Did people imagine the poor could not tell the difference between a shitty tartine and a choucroute garnie, between a tatty old jumper and a cashmere sweater?
After leaving the station the previous night, he had headed to the church of Notre-Dame on Rue de la Paroisse, which was of course shut. God keeps set hours, after all. He skirted the building before hunkering down outside the presbytery door. It was a good place to die. The road was as empty as a dieting secretary’s fridge. He scrunched himself up like a letter destined for the bin – ‘Dear God, it has come to my attention …’ – and waited for the cold to set in. His brain shrank to a compact block with a vague image of his eight-year-old self suspended in the middle, like those lumps of resin with insects trapped inside that people use as paperweights. Then the priest arrived, red-faced, wrapped up in a bulky sheepskin coat and a woolly hat, his arms laden with packages.
‘What are you doing here, my child?’
Through frozen lips, Roland stuttered something like, ‘I’m dying, Monsieur, I’m dying …’
