The Islanders Page 3

  ‘Right, OK, well, you can stay the night, but that’s all. Theoretically …’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Tomorrow I’ll give you some addresses, some names of people who can help you.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You’re lucky I came by with my … Can I trust you?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Good. Well, good night then.’

  ‘Yes.’

  There is such a thing as a full ‘yes’, like full nudity. The night was full too, dreamless, heavy, leaden, like nights of old.

  Someone entered the church. The sound of footsteps preceded by a tap-tap. Someone with a stick.

  That old fossil Madeleine was right. The burial could not take place before the 27th; the undertaker had just told him so. The dead just kept coming and the ground was rock-hard.

  ‘What if we had her cremated?’

  ‘Monsieur! We must respect the deceased’s last wishes. Your mother had planned for everything.’

  ‘Except dying at Christmas. So there’s nothing we can do?’

  ‘I’m afraid not.’

  However careful the undertaker was to disguise his true feelings, Olivier was sure that he too took him for an ungrateful child. He followed the man to the coffin in which his mother lay, as woefully small and insignificant in death as she had been in life, clothed in a violet dress and plastered in ridiculous make-up with a fixed smile, a fungal tangle of white hair on her scalp and bony hands crossed over her belly as though trying to abort herself.

  He went straight from the undertaker’s to the train station to check the timetable. He was prepared to leave and come back again two days later, anything to avoid hanging around in this shithole. There was an unusual amount of kerfuffle, people gesticulating at ticket counters or spinning disoriented on the spot like mechanical toys. He was told there were no trains running on any of the main lines because of the icy conditions, and he had no chance of catching a plane either.

  ‘So I have to wait until it thaws?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  For a brief moment he felt like hanging himself. The whole thing was so absurd, trapped in the ice fields of Versailles! He didn’t know where to start: phone Odile to pass on all this good news? Make an appointment with the lawyer? With Emmaus?

  What was the point? He was sure whatever he did would end in disaster.

  On Rue Carnot a bulb had blown on one of the stars in the Christmas lights, making it appear to be squinting. People emerged from shops transformed into porters carrying trees, bags, enormous boxes tied with string, gift-wrapped parcels with ribbon around them which would be clogging up dustbins within days, the contents tumbling noisily down the rubbish chute. Freshly trussed turkeys, bloodstained boar’s legs, fat geese, pyramids of snails and monstrous turds of white pudding came spewing out of butchers and charcuteries – the sight of it was enough to give you indigestion. People bought any old rubbish at any old price, committing a kind of budgetary suicide with the most tenuous of links to the birth of the baby Jesus. There was a general desire to end it all, drowning in bad champagne and foie gras from Monoprix.

  Olivier let himself be jostled this way and that, feeling dazed and detached from his body. During the festive season, Versailles sparkled with inevitability. On Avenue de Saint-Cloud the crowd began to thin out. Unconsciously, his feet were leading him towards Lycée Hoche where he had gone to school between the ages of eleven and fourteen. As he got closer, he tried to recall the names of his teachers and classmates. Some of them came back to him: Monsieur Mauduit, Madame Le Breton, Vidal, Joly, Langlois … He saw himself too, satchel bulging with heavy textbooks, exercise books and gym kit, waiting for bus B … His mind was warming up but he felt as if he was delving into someone else’s memories.

  His first death had come the year he turned fourteen and he had not stopped dying and being reborn ever since. Amazing – only in Versailles could you see the words ‘Long Live the King!’ graffitied on the school walls. The front gates were locked but he could see through them to the dome of the chapel across the main courtyard, where pupils and teachers gathered to lift the flag every 11 November. The cassowary feathers of the Saint-Cyrien cadets hung limply in the inevitable rain. He was sorry not to feel anything at all. Funny the lengths the brain goes to in order to protect the body.

  He began walking back into town by way of Rue de la Paroisse and stopped to warm up in a café on Place du Marché. Since giving up drink, he never knew what to order. He didn’t feel like a coffee, and couldn’t make up his mind between a Viandox and a tomato juice. With a dash of Tabasco, tomato juice was the beverage that most resembled alcohol. For the first time in ages, he really fancied a drink. He put too much Tabasco in and made himself choke. All around him, people were talking too loudly, laughing annoyingly. Since his teens, he had never loved anyone. Since then, he had never been anything but a pleasant yet indifferent passenger through life. Odile didn’t ask for more, which explained why they got on so well. In conversation, he played his cards close to his chest. People either took him for a snob or a harmless idiot, or both. It was all the same to him.

  Was it the incongruity of the situation, or had he spent too long outside Lycée Hoche? He felt ill at ease, on edge, as if haunted by something he could not control. He struggled to get a grip on himself. The transition from the arctic conditions outside to the warmth of the café had been abrupt … Was he coming down with a fever? That was all he needed. He gritted his teeth, mentally shook himself and left the café.

  Jeanne had spent all day lying around in her dressing gown and slippers with a cigarette hanging from her mouth, grazing on fruit, keeping one eye on the TV and the other on a trashy detective novel. She loved duvet days. Rodolphe had left early that morning and not been back since. Around four o’clock, she finally decided it was time for a bath. Standing in front of the mirror with wet hair slicked either side of her sharp-featured face, she thought she bore a resemblance to Cruella De Vil, who would soon be making her annual onscreen appearance as the Christmas holidays loomed. She was not troubled by the likeness to a baddie. In fact she felt a certain degree of pride in belonging to the family of reprobates denounced in films and novels. They alone carried the misery of the world on their shoulders, and in her eyes they were a hundred times more worthy of respect than the fresh-faced heroes who moulded God in their own image. She, however, was not cruel. Her pupils judged her strict but fair, and her colleagues courteous but cold.

  She had gone from being slim to skinny, as others went from chubby to fat. And yet she denied herself nothing, had a healthy appetite and was rarely ill – the odd cold, nothing serious. Food just went straight through her. She asked herself how long it had been since she last had sex, but could not answer. Years … Sometimes in dreams. Her belly had always been flat and would remain so, her bony hips sticking out either side. People said men preferred women with a bit of meat on them. That was rubbish; they liked whatever they could get. She didn’t hold it against them, not that she had been with many: three, including a teenager and a woman she spent almost a year with. Fanchon was headmistress of the secondary school in Melun, the man a BNP bank clerk in the same town, and the teenager, the first …

  The hairbrush fell out of her hands. The stale whiff of the past wafted back to her only very rarely. She made do with living in an eternal present, odourless, colourless and tasteless. The hairdryer put her thoughts back in order, a great gust of wind blasting through her head.

  ‘A drowned rat’, that was how the twins used to describe her. They had no more weight on them than she did; lean and tough, like their father – and their mother. Rodolphe was the odd one out. He had gone from being a fat baby to a fat little boy and grew up to become obese. Was it linked to his blindness? That was a mystery to chew over. Like all children, he first started exploring the world with his mouth, and had never stopped. As soon as he was introduced to someone, he would smack his flabby, sugar-coated lips against their cheek like a suction
cup, hoovering them into his wide-open mouth. Children were afraid of him. But Rodolphe was not an intrinsically bad person. It was only repeated rejection that had made him that way. Sometimes she wished he would die, for his own good. Unlike her, he could not bear the solitude nature had inflicted on him. But despite the layer of fat strangling it, his heart carried on mercilessly beating.

  Jeanne had just put on a jumper and a pair of black trousers when the doorbell rang.

  ‘Hi, I’m your neighbour, or rather, your neighbour’s son, and I …’

  Olivier shrank back. The black pupils in the eyes of the woman who had just opened the door to him looked like two great lead wrecking balls. An entire wall of his past went crashing to the ground, leaving nothing behind it.

  ‘Have we met?’

  No matter how prepared you are, there are some things you cannot see coming. Jeanne was face to face with Olivier. An Olivier disguised as a respectable gentleman with salt and pepper hair, dressed in a suit and tie, but Olivier all the same. She could not speak or make a sound, but two beads of salt water began welling beneath her eyelids. The man standing before her wobbled as if gripped with vertigo.

  ‘I don’t believe it … Jeanne?’

  ‘Come in.’

  This was not real life in the everyday world where you could come and go as you pleased; Olivier knew what a massive step he was taking. This was not a matter of chance. What it was a matter of, he did not know. He had set foot on a slippery slope and he was sliding, yes, sliding. He had come round to ask his neighbour for the phone book and found himself face to face with his past, with Jeanne, his Jeanne, the Jeanne of his youth, with whom his life had turned upside down, and again he felt knocked off balance. It was scary and wonderful all at once.

  ‘Sit down.’

  Olivier fell back onto a sofa. He couldn’t take anything in. The smell of soap and shampoo wafted from Jeanne, who had hardly changed after all these years. He felt the urge to laugh; the whole thing was so unlikely, it was as if he had dreamed it.

  ‘I … I don’t know what to say.’

  ‘Don’t say anything.’

  There he was, in front of her. He was there. He wasn’t dead. He was crossing and uncrossing his legs. He had wrinkles, white hair, a tic that made the corner of his mouth twitch, but he was there. The past lay ahead of her, opening its closets to reveal the resident skeletons …

  ‘Do you want something to drink?’

  ‘No, thank you. It’s so … What are you doing here?’

  ‘What are you doing here?’

  He could have told her his mother had died and he had come up for the funeral, but he settled for raising his eyebrows as if to say, ‘Beats me.’ There clearly was a reason for his being here, but putting it into words was beyond him. It was the same for Jeanne: the whys and wherefores seemed superfluous, they were there, after …

  ‘How long has it been?’

  ‘A long time.’

  Jeanne had settled into an armchair opposite Olivier and sat facing him, hugging her knees. They stayed looking at one another like two mirrors eternally returning the other’s reflection.

  They had overcome their initial shock. Now they were facing reality. The child was still intact in both of them, dazzling like a pure diamond. Time had stood still and they were holding their breath as if underwater. Olivier felt his heart implode. He closed his eyes and threw his head back, clutching his brow.

  ‘Fuck! … Fuck me!’

  They were not so much words as a sort of rattle.

  ‘I’ll make some coffee.’

  Jeanne was no longer sitting in the armchair but he could hear her moving utensils about in the kitchen. She would soon return to sit in front of him. What would he say to her? ‘So, what do you do these days? … You haven’t changed a bit … Can you believe this cold? … What’s for dinner? … Did you see whatsit’s last film? … Oh yes please, I will have a bit more mash …’ Maybe not, but he was going to have to say something. The room looked like any other lounge: sofa, armchair, table, chairs, rug and lamp. No mirror. It was all a bit dull and unimaginative, clean and functional, just what was needed and no more. Only a print of The Raft of the Medusa on one wall. The curtains were drawn. The room probably didn’t see daylight very often. Jeanne must have inherited the furniture; it wasn’t what you would choose. She returned carrying a tray.

  ‘You live on your own?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Ah …’

  ‘I live with Rodolphe.’

  ‘Your brother?’

  ‘Yes. My mother and the twins died in a car accident. Rodolphe can’t manage on his own. Do you take sugar?’

  ‘No, thanks. My mother has just died, that’s why I’m here.’

  ‘The old lady across the hall?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘That’s funny, I’d noticed her surname on the letter box but I thought it must be a coincidence. I didn’t recognise her. To tell the truth, I only bumped into her once or twice. She hardly ever went out.’

  ‘So you left Le Chesnay?’

  ‘Yes. It suits us better here. We’ve got two of everything – two toilets, two bathrooms – it’s a bit like two separate flats. Having said that, Rodolphe spends most of his time in my half. What about you, where do you live?’

  ‘On the coast, in Nice.’

  ‘Are you married?’

  ‘Yes, I got married two years ago.’

  He blushed, as if caught doing something wrong, as if he were cheating.

  ‘So you’ve come back for the funeral.’

  ‘That’s right. But it’s been put back because of the holidays … because of the weather … Long and short of it, I’m stuck here until the 27th. The reason I came round was to borrow a phone book. I need to call Emmaus to clear the flat.’

  ‘I’ll dig one out.’

  There, everything was back to normal, life had resumed its ordinary course. They drank coffee and chatted, sharing minor gripes and moans. The marionettes were once again jiggling on their strings. Olivier put his cup down on the tray a little too hard and clasped his face in his hands.

  ‘Jeanne! Jeanne, do you know what this means?’

  He had said the same thing twenty-five years earlier and, just like then, she could only reply, ‘That’s the way it is. There’s nothing we can do.’

  ‘What have you been doing all these years?’

  ‘The same as always, I think. The days, months and years followed on smoothly from one another. After you left, I was sent to boarding school and then I took an English degree. I’m a teacher. That’s all there is to say.’

  ‘Did you never try to trace me?’

  ‘No. You neither?’

  ‘No. I wanted to wipe it all out, forget, pretend nothing ever … but I never really managed it. After I came back from Réunion, I went to live in the south. I did some journalism, then some drinking … I gave up two years ago. I just can’t believe this. It’s been twenty years, but it feels like yesterday.’

  ‘In that case it must have been a bad night’s sleep. You look so tired.’

  ‘I guess so. As for you … How have you stayed so … smooth? It’s crazy, I recognised you straight away.’

  ‘I don’t know, I must have refused to get old.’

  ‘Have you … have you never thought about it since?’

  ‘About what?’

  ‘You know.’

  ‘Sometimes, at the beginning.’

  ‘And when the guy died. You know he died in prison, five years later?’

  ‘Yes, I saw it in the paper.’

  ‘And you thought nothing of it?’

  ‘Is that all you remember?’

  ‘No, of course not, but …’

  It really was as if they had only spent a day apart. She nearly started doing the goat and sheep impressions she was so good at, or pulling faces to make him laugh. Laughing. When they were alone together, it was all they did. Never in front of other people. Everyone thought they were terribly serio
us for their age; they all remarked on it. It was how they protected themselves. There were other people, and there was them: two worlds which never converged. ‘Aren’t they good! … A real little couple! … They’re like two peas in a pod!’ And here they were again twenty-five years later, unscathed, with the death of a child and an unfortunate tramp behind them.

  With her legs tucked underneath her and her cheek resting on her palm, Jeanne sat smiling at him.

  ‘It’s good to see you.’

  That was exactly the right thing to say, and Olivier kicked himself for not getting in there first.

  ‘I could murder a drink.’

  The man was a total nutter but he had paid for everything since that morning. The role of guide dog was just another job. ‘Mind the step, go left, right …’ Some kind of miracle had brought them together. Of course, churches were designed for that sort of thing.

  The blind man had come and sat next to Roland. Like all fat people, he was breathing heavily and sweating in spite of the cold. Mid-puff he whispered, ‘Do you believe in this stuff?’

  ‘What stuff?’

  ‘Oh, you know, the good Lord, the baby Jesus, the whole lot of them!’

  ‘I don’t know. I’m just waiting for the priest.’

  The blind man let out a burst of laughter which ended in a coughing fit. He was clearly not in the habit of laughing; the mechanism sounded rusty and false.

  ‘And what do you think the priest’s going to do for you?’

  ‘Give me some clothes, maybe a bit of money.’

  ‘Clothes? No problem, they’ve got bins overflowing with them, but money’s another story. Priests don’t hand out money, they take handouts. What do you think of priests? Do you like them?’

  ‘Huh … They’re no different to anybody else.’

  ‘Don’t believe that for a second! Everyone else says no straight off. Priests say maybe, and that’s the last you see of them.’

  ‘Some of them are all right.’

  ‘They’re the worst!’