it easy for a bit. My back hurts. Leave all that, I’ll do the washing up this evening.’
‘No, no, I don’t mind doing it. You go and rest.’
It doesn’t take long to do the washing up for two. A pity – he wouldn’t have minded doing the washing up until it was time to leave. He didn’t like the house and the house had never liked him. His father had bought it and moved in after his retirement. Fabien always felt as if he were in a waiting room. He never knew where to put himself. Everything was square, angular, clean and functional. For want of anywhere better he sat back down in the chair he’d had lunch in. His father was snoozing on one of the vile armchairs that immediately made you think of hospitals and death. His glasses were pushed up on his forehead, his book, How to Survive Tragedy, open on his stomach. He had only ever read books like that, self-help books about survival: surviving the war, the cold, the heat, pollution, epidemics, atomic radiation. He read them with the zeal that others devoted to imagining life after death. What tragedy had he survived? Charlotte? No, it was something before that. Charlotte had only been confirmation of the dangers of living. In this hostile world, you could only ever count on yourself. When Fabien had lived with him it was like living underwater. Each time he left him, he felt stifled, experienced the need to breathe as after an attack of apnoea. When his father died, Fabien would inherit from him a mountain of silence.
Once, in order to get him to talk, he’d taken his father to a restaurant. His father hated restaurants, and cafés, and hotels, and anywhere there were other people. Fabien had hoped to talk to him man to man, like friends. He was a little old to believe in miracles, but he had decided to force his father to tell him a little bit, anything at all, about his youth, about Fabien’s youth, before Charlotte, after Charlotte. Had he had mistresses? Did he still have them? Just something to give Fabien a clue. To encourage him, Fabien had opened up about the more intimate details of his own life, and to give himself some Dutch courage had swallowed a few large glasses of white wine. He was comprehensively drunk before the meal was half finished, and was starting to talk nonsense, whilst his father had said no more than ‘Eat up, it will get cold.’
As he paid the bill, and his father carefully folded his napkin, Fabien had felt horribly humiliated. Instead of encouraging his father to confide in him, he had spilt his own guts in the most obscene way. When he got home he was desperate to take a shower.
That had been a good fifteen years ago. Today it was different. He knew that his father would never talk to him for the very good reason that he had nothing to say, and that was just fine. Fabien was the child of two phantoms, with the absence of one and the silence of the other providing his only experience of family. They had each carved out their own isolated little existence, that was all.
For over thirty years, Charlotte had lain against his father’s right buttock between his social security card and his identity card in the name of ‘Fernand Delorme’ (the desiccated photo showed a young dark-haired woman in short white socks and sandals, smiling like mad against the backdrop of a forest path), and there had never been any room for him between those two.
‘For the love of God! How can you live with the ticking of that grandfather clock?’
It was his father’s pride and joy, a Comtoise. An upright coffin. Exactly the right size for Charlotte.
‘Papa, it’s time to go.’
‘What? … Oh yes, right. When you got to go, you got to go.’
The bright-yellow Renault 4 bought second-hand by his father from the post office (such a bargain!) gave two or three alarming splutters before coming to a halt outside the station.
‘We’re early. You’ve a good quarter of an hour still.’
‘Don’t wait, Papa, you go home.’
‘It’s strange that you can’t drive. You’d be more independent.’
‘What would I do that I don’t do now?’
‘Whatever you like. Well now, give my love to Sylvie and don’t forget the lilac. Tell her to put it straight into water as soon as you get there.’
‘I will, Papa. Goodbye. I’ll ring you next week.’
‘Speak to you then.’
*
Fabien was not the only one on the platform bearing lilac. The damp newspaper wrapped round the stems was slowly disintegrating between his fingers.
He had never noticed that his father had such long hairs growing out of his ears. That was the only thing he retained from three days spent in his company.
It’s always a little disappointing when you walk into an empty house expecting someone to be there, but actually, Sylvie’s absence suited him. He would have had to talk to her, to tell her about his trip, and he had absolutely nothing to say either to Sylvie or anyone else. He couldn’t even be bothered to listen to the messages on the answer machine. He was coming back from a world of silence, the great paternal depths, and he needed to decompress. Sylvie must have gone to the cinema with Laure. She always did that when he wasn’t there. Fabien didn’t like going to the cinema, especially not in the evening.
She must have left in a hurry because there was no note on the kitchen table. Sylvie was often late; it reassured her to know that someone was waiting for her. The lilac had gone a bit limp, the newspaper now little more than grey mush. He looked around for the blue vase but couldn’t find it. He never knew where Sylvie kept things. Things were not his domain. It was she who made them appear and disappear at will. He couldn’t do that; he was too clumsy, he broke everything. When he was alone in the house, he spent ages playing hunt the thimble, or rather the tin-opener, or the socks or the extension lead. Turning away to avoid the smell, he thrust the lilac into the bin.
In the fridge he found four eggs, a slightly green slice of ham and three beers. He did not investigate any further for fear of encountering a wizened old lettuce or a carrot gone soft in the bottom of the vegetable drawer. He just had a beer. For the first two years of their life together the fridge had overflowed with calf’s liver, entrecôtes, spare ribs, poultry, fish, fresh vegetables, cream, desserts, and the cellar had always been full of Sancerre, burgundy and champagne. Half their time was spent in bed, the other half at table. They contemplated their rolls of fat with the complacent delight of a pregnant woman in front of the bathroom mirror. They were insatiable to the point of excess.
Then one day she had decided that they were too happy, that it could not last, that it wasn’t normal. So they had let time elapse between them, slow but inexorable, like the advancing desert. They didn’t do anything or say anything about it. They didn’t have children or get a dog or a cat. They did nothing and their relationship withered.
The beer tasted of metal, like his hands, gripping the balcony railing, and the stars up there in the sky, and the whole city spread out at his feet. Metal.
‘How many of us are there, looking out of our windows, holding a can of beer, asking ourselves if we could still make something of ourselves? What would that something be? Fame? Fortune? Love? All that remains from childhood is an indefinable vertigo, a slight regret.’
The other day, on a café terrace, someone behind him had said, ‘I wonder if I could still fall in love?’ It had been a man his own age. On the pavement, girls went past, light as cigarettes, haloed by the June sun, and inaccessible.
A few years ago, the sirocco had blown through Paris. The cars were covered
