Читать книгу Apocalypse Baby - Виржини Депант - Страница 10

François

SHOWER. SHAMPOO. MOISTURIZER. IN HIS BATHROOM, standing in front of the mirror over the basin, he practices breathing through his nose, slowly. He regrets having agreed to this interview, his calendar’s already overbooked. There are dark circles under his eyes, he’s drunk too much these last few days. He thinks his complexion looks greenish. The sleeping pills probably. He can’t get used to graying at the temples. At least he’s not losing his hair, it could be worse. But seeing himself in the mirror is still an unpleasant shock. He can’t get used to being this middle-aged man. On the radio, a minister is talking about locking up pedophiles who might reoffend. Three psychiatrists have been invited along with him, to oppose the decision. François is irritated at their cautious tone. Are they afraid the pedophile might get bored in the end? The previous day, François recorded a TV broadcast at 9:00 a.m., with the minister of labor, who had just finished doing a radio show. He arrived accompanied by a team of four advisers. You wouldn’t have thought he was well-briefed though, seeing him on set. While they were doing his makeup, someone came to tell François Galtan that he must never reply directly to the minister, he must address all his comments through the presenter. It was a bit annoying, as if they were afraid he wouldn’t know how to behave. In any case, he could have jumped on the minister’s lap and given him a kiss and it wouldn’t have mattered, nobody watches the show. The places he gets asked when he’s just published a novel have about as much public exposure as the sandbox down in the garden. Le Figaro has still not published anything about his latest book. He calls his publicist, a bimbo who thinks she’s charming. She has big thighs and thick ankles, he can’t think where she gets her confidence from. She’s not there, of course. No doubt accompanying some author who’s farther up the best-seller list. He asks her to call back, knowing full well she’ll forget to. He can’t get used to the polite indifference that greets his books when they come out—three vaguely favorable reviews, two minor TV shows, three provincial radio stations, and that’s it. He can’t complain about being besieged by autograph hunters. Yet he believes in the book sincerely every time. A huge success, his comeback on the literary scene. He affects a dignified indifference to the pointlessness of his efforts, but in a few weeks he realizes it’s true, his novel has made no impact. Once more, he feels he’s going through hell.

His first novel had been well reviewed by François Nourissier. His enthusiasm hadn’t surprised Galtan, he considered the recognition no more than he deserved. You didn’t write novels like his without people noticing. He’d been invited on to the TV book show Apostrophes when the second one had come out: Rain. It had meant something in those days. You didn’t get on TV as easily as all that, and certainly not to do some chitchat about anything other than your writings. Some good reviews, a reputation for brilliance. Even Pierre Frank, in a short paragraph at the end of one of his articles, had mentioned François’s book. He’d had a few successes, nothing vulgar, nothing over the top. He’d been noticed, but he hadn’t won any prizes. He was still under thirty then, and convinced that one day he’d get the Prix Goncourt. He didn’t have any doubts. And he didn’t suspect anything. He counted the potential jury votes as he wrote his books. He had a prominent publisher, Le Seuil, and he’d been short-listed three times. Never won, though. Always an also-ran. People told him it wasn’t good to get it too young. He took it nonchalantly. He didn’t know that he’d already had his moment of glory, that this was it. A promising beginning. Followed by not very much. He didn’t have the right contacts, he wasn’t well-enough connected. No hook to make an impression. Nothing but his books. A bit late in the day, he’d discovered this wasn’t going to be enough. He would have liked to be able to console himself by concentrating on posterity, on the generations of young Japanese readers who would be moved to tears when they discovered him too late, and who’d write many biographies, indignant at the vulgar indifference that had greeted his publications during his lifetime. But the more years went by, the less likely that seemed. He didn’t lose confidence in his work, but he had his doubts about the world of the future. He’d published the early novels convinced that one day there’d be a Pléiade edition of his collected works, that his oeuvre would be looked at as a whole: readers would admire its coherence, its stability of purpose, with its clear progression, its willingness to take risks, and its striking intuitions. He hadn’t imagined what would happen in the early 1990s. That was the first sign of decline. The scruffy, uneducated, journalistic writers who’d become the best-sellers for their generation. He was ashamed, in retrospect, that he hadn’t anticipated what publishing would turn into: an industry as stupid as any other. A resentful and antiquated street-walker. Mincing about in tattered robes. Dependent on television and trendy magazines. Enemies whose nuisance value he hadn’t spotted. Neither left nor right wing. Neither classic nor modern. TV personalities. Celebrities of the day. Pitching a line, always on the lookout for fresh flesh, greedy for readership figures. At first, he had decided to laugh them off. And he wasn’t the only one. He remembers, with bitterness today, a dinner party at which an eloquent publisher had kept them in stitches talking about the current best-sellers, forecasting that the way things were going, one day people would want to read novels by young girls going into detail about their hemorrhoids. How they had laughed. No, he hadn’t seen it coming. Authors who wrote about their eating disorders, or getting raped by their fathers, writers who were illiterate sluts, writers who boasted of screwing teenage girls in Thailand, or of being high on coke. He hadn’t seen it coming at all. Not to mention that the 1990s, compared with what followed, were in the end quite tame. He could have adjusted. But then along came the Internet. Nowadays, he had to make a constant effort not to spend all day long searching the web, haggard and depressed. Reading the comments. The anonymous load of crap. The litany of nonstop insults delivered by the incompetent. As soon as he discovered them, he realized he had entered the tenth circle of hell. Parallel little comments, deaf to each other, all in the same format, laconic and sickeningly hostile. Mediocrity had found its voice: the comments on the Internet. He wasn’t even being insulted. He would have liked to be able to rage and complain about the way he was treated. But he wasn’t even interesting enough for these sick fashionistas to launch campaigns against him. He was reduced to writing under a pseudonym, a few words of subtly critical praise for himself on the literary forums and blogs. He did have a few loyal readers, but they didn’t feel any pressing need to discuss his work on the Internet. Still, he didn’t throw in the towel. For his latest novel, The Great Paris Pyramid, he’d tried to adapt. Without betraying himself. People were talking about the return of the great French novel; he thought his moment had come at last. Times had changed but he wouldn’t. This might finally do the trick. A bit of Egyptian history, which he was knowledgeable about, a romantic plot, young characters who listened to music on their phones and talked about sex with no holds barred. But it didn’t seem to be taking off. And yet writing it had been a real pleasure, such as he hadn’t felt for a long time. He’d taken it as a sign. He’d been drafting the first few pages while suffering with a terrible toothache. The dentist had prescribed Solupred pills, which would reduce the abscess enough for the tooth to be extracted. Never having taken them before, he didn’t realize he was particularly sensitive to the effects of cortisone. He finished the packet, after the tooth had been pulled, and asked a doctor friend to prescribe some more, then more again, and so on until the book was finished. He wrote for twelve hours at a stretch, smiling over his keyboard. He’d completed it in five weeks, a record for him, since usually every page called for scrupulous rereading, second thoughts, and searching criticism. Fear of being untrue to himself had surfaced briefly, but the siren hopes of making a huge literary comeback were growing inside him, the warm welcome he’d get when he visited his publisher’s office, the endless invitations to prestigious dinners, the voicemail full of requests for interviews. It would be worth cheating on his talent if it succeeded. He went on taking cortisone while reading the proofs, and the effects didn’t wear off. When he wasn’t writing, he was talking, talking to anyone and everyone, he who was usually so reserved. It had been a sparkling season. He probably never would have stopped if he hadn’t one evening watched the transmission of a pre-recorded music program made in the ministry of culture, in which he’d taken part alongside the minister. He’d spoken well, brightly and incisively in the short interview he’d had, so he wasn’t worried as he waited to see himself. On the wide TV screen, he’d wondered with amusement who that great fat whale was in his tight gray suit, fidgeting nervously alongside the other guests. And then he’d recognized himself. His wife and daughter, the first gently, the second rudely, had pointed out to him that he’d been putting on weight these last few weeks. But seeing himself every day in the mirror, carried along on a wave of euphoria and creative energy, he hadn’t realized it. Until that evening, watching TV, he hadn’t taken in how much he’d changed. And then he had seen himself, flopping about, sweating like a pig, his red face reduced to a pair of obscenely joyous cheeks, and talking nonstop, nobody being able to curb his logorrhoea. That very night, the packets of cortisone, hitherto carefully kept in the bathroom, went into the garbage bin. Thereafter, he was to regret not having listened to the advice of the doctor friend who had warned him, as he bent over the precription pad, that he was renewing the pills for the seventh time in three months, and that he should be aware of the risk of stopping them suddenly. He hadn’t taken him by the scruff of the neck, put him up against a wall, and shouted, “Watch out for what happens if you stop taking the meds,” which would at least have been clear. The doctor friend, whom he called Dr. Drug during his season on Solupred, was rather easygoing, and like many in his profession, insensitive to other people’s pain. He had merely said in a gloomy tone, “You’ll have to come off these sometime, so let me know before you do, and I’ll tell you how to handle it.” But when François had seen himself looking so grotesque, he had felt he should give up the pills at once. He regarded himself proudly as a strong-willed character, his book was written, that was enough, no more foolishness. The first day, he’d thought it an interesting experience, if he’d had the strength he’d have taken notes, since he had never suffered so much pain. No corner of his anatomy escaped the disaster. By the end of the first week, he told himself he wanted to die, that he was an imposter, his friends were useless, his wife old and ugly, his daughter a fat little fool, he’d never have any literary reputation, his books wouldn’t survive him, everyone despised him, he’d never written a good sentence in his life. These moments of lucidity exhausted him. He came to think that suicide was the only strategy that would validate his work. Tortured by fearful hunger and early-morning cramps in all his muscles, he began the second week in a state of complete collapse. It was at that point that Claire had packed him off to see her osteopath, a woman of immense strength who had set about trying to break every bone in his body before putting him on to a vitamin diet of such complexity that simply adhering to it had monopolized all his energy: Spirulina, fermented beetroot juice, and fresh almonds . . . he endured such delights as these, plus an hour’s jogging every day. By the eighth day of this regime, which he followed religiously, the depression began to lift and leave him in peace; he no longer had the strength to feel any emotion. Progressively, he was regaining something like the physical appearance he’d had before the cortisone, and the mental capacity to pass a whole day without looking up at the ceiling of every room planning where to attach the sheets he intended to hang himself with. But just as he had kept a bit of a paunch, he had retained a vague sensation of unease. And a solid addiction to vitamin B6. And then, four weeks after the publication of the novel from which she knew he was expecting so much, his daughter Valentine had disappeared.

Valentine. The gap left by her absence. The guilty feeling of relief that followed from it. Valentine has never been easy. He has no illusions about that. It doesn’t stop him from loving her, knowing that she’s the woman of his life, the only one he has truly cherished and protected, the only one who’s truly made him laugh. But it’s never been easy. Children are women’s work really. He can see that with Claire and her two daughters, quite different. It’s all so upfront. Claire’s perfectly happy to see to the older girl’s dental braces, to check in on the younger girl’s dancing classes, their school grades interest her, she gets along well with their teachers. Even what they have to eat for tea can be a subject of conversation. He loves his daughter. But the high maintenance he’s had to do alone really pisses him off. It gets in the way of writing, going out, listening to a record in peace, reading a book in the morning, having some private time with Claire. Constant annoyance. Children are a rope around your neck, anything else is manageable. And even so, when Valentine was little, it was quite sweet, the Aristocats slippers, showing her Buster Keaton films, getting her a Cosette costume for the school party. There’d been hassle, but there’d been fun as well. But these last years she’s exhausted all the concern of which he was capable. And she knows it. He’s had enough of Valentine’s escapades. The phone calls from school, when she was caught “up to no good” with boys in the bathrooms. What kind of “no good,” how many boys, he had taken good care not to find out. Five schools in two years. The same scenario every time. An astronomical sum spent on psychologists who hadn’t the slightest idea what was the matter with her. It wasn’t rocket science, she just wanted to make as much trouble for him as possible. She wanted him to ditch Claire, like he’d ditched his other women. Valentine’s unlucky, she’s turned out to look like him. He recognizes himself in her face, her figure. She might have inherited her mother’s looks, but the older she gets, the clearer it is that she takes after him. Okay in a man. But for a woman . . . He understands why she’s unhappy. When she wears short little dresses like other girls her age, she looks like a rugby player. But that’s hardly enough reason to make him suffer as she does. She’s full of energy. Naturally, in their teens, they don’t tire easily. And she employs it full time to get on his nerves. It’s never been easy. When her mother walked out, the little girl was like a poisoned souvenir of how things had been between them. Vanessa. Vanessa had been called Louisa when he met her. She’d decided to change her name one day. Vanessa liked change. The clear memory of the years spent with her. Fourteen years later, and it seems like yesterday. The cruel illusion, when he wakes up, that she’s beside him, still tortures him with piercing sharpness. And Valentine is the living proof of that failure, of his great love story. Having been abandoned by the same woman, they were tied together forever, and by the same token separated. And Valentine had become the ideal pretext for his mother to invade their lives. Just what he needed. His mother, every day or almost, in the house. His mother who never says anything openly pejorative, never asks indiscreet questions, but who looks disparagingly on everything he does. His mother is too fond of him to admit that he’s a failure, living off her money. But at heart that’s what she thinks. A silent comparison between his father and himself. The businessman and the writer. For example, his mother cuts out every article she can find about the digital future of the book, brings it to him, and if he doesn’t read it at once, summarizes it for him. This is her way of letting him understand he’s made a mess of everything in his life. A life dedicated to books, when books will soon have vanished from the face of the earth. The same way she has just hired a private detective to find the child. The point of this is to make him see he hasn’t stirred himself enough. As if it isn’t obvious where the kid is. What’s he supposed to do? Go down there and beg her to come back? What’s the point? As if he didn’t beg hard enough fourteen years ago?

From the other end of the corridor, the cleaning woman calls that she’s finished the ironing and is going home. He glances at his watch, twenty to twelve. Of course, she’ll count it as a full hour. The timid treasure who came to work for them two years ago has changed a lot. The Italian journalist is late. And already he’s not that bothered to meet her. But his books haven’t been translated into Italian for a good while now, and a favorable interview for La Repubblica might bring him into the public eye. She’s developing a project on the French literary landscape, he’s flattered that she has contacted him. But it’s annoying that she’s late. He wonders whether she’ll be pretty, her voice on the phone sounded nice, slightly husky. And then there was the Italian accent. Because Italian women don’t just know how to dress. Anna used to slide her finger up his ass every time she gave him a blow job, just the end of her finger and slide it. Without ever referring to it when the sheets were back in place. As soon as he hears that accent, he gets a hard-on. Her sophisticated Italian look when he took her out, her way of wrapping herself up so that you could only see her dark eyes, the curve of a shapely lip. The nonchalant way she let him open doors, or would give him a package to carry. Her regal manner, but without the irritating arrogance of Parisian women. Never trying to be a brilliant conversationalist when they were out for the evening, too beautiful for that. And when they broke up, a fury. Magnificently feminine, when she was shouting insults at him and throwing his clothes out of the door. Then she had hammered him with a series of rapid and vicious little blows with her clenched fists, fists so delicate he would have sworn they could do no damage, but when used like that in repeated, regular fashion, they had left a constellation of bruises on his chest and back. He had had to resort to various subterfuges for two weeks so as not to undress in front of Clothilde, his official wife at the time, with whom he was still living. That was his second marriage. Two divorces, three marriages, a respectable average as he approached fifty. Clothilde had never wished to acknowledge that he was cheating on her. He hadn’t bothered to hide it from her anymore than from the others. But she chose not to know about it. She had invented an extremely flattering portrait of him, as being not the kind of man to cheat on his wife. She maintained it, come hell or high water. So he could say he was returning home after playing poker with his friends all night, that he was doing research in bars for his novel, that he’d had a late-night discussion with his publisher. He had only to take the trouble to invent an excuse for her to choose to believe it. Her trust had at first bothered him with remorse. A woman so affectionate and upright that she couldn’t even imagine he would lie to her. He felt guilty, but unable to stop himself being turned on by a new acquaintance, a presence, a way of moving, of standing in a room, a smile, or a voice. He couldn’t not do it. He had felt guilty for months, before he realized that Clothilde’s lack of jealousy was entirely founded on the deeply condescending idea she had of him. She put up with him because his small-scale fame gave her some kudos, but at heart she found him insignificant, lacking breeding or sophistication, slow-witted and uncharismatic. She viewed him as so far below her that he was reassuring: a little frog like him could only adore a princess like her, and be grateful that she had raised him to her level. It had taken him a while to work out how this functioned, but once he had decoded it, he began to hate her. She had come into his life only a short while after Vanessa had left him. The wound was still too raw for him to forgive Clothilde for making him feel useless and unimportant all over again. He had left her in the lousiest way possible, taking care to make plans for a holiday with friends before walking out one July morning without a word of explanation, to join another woman. Clothilde had wept for months, telling all their friends about it, exhibiting her pain as proof of his ingratitude and dangerous nature. By so doing, she had rendered him extremely desirable to all her female acquaintances. What a stroke of luck. Clothilde hadn’t made him happy, but thanks to her he had felt good, being labeled as a bastard, a seducer, and a breaker of hearts. Anything was better than the taste in his mouth of the humiliation that Vanessa had forced on him. A little boy, abused and at risk.

“So sorry to be late, it was hard to find a parking place.”

Slight disappointment: she must be in her forties. But the excitement comes back once she takes off her coat: she’s taken care with her outfit, sure of herself, flirtatious without being vulgar, available for games of seduction without looking as if she’s already conquered. Better than pretty. “Shall we do the photos first? Liam’s got another photo shoot after this.” François agrees with enthusiasm, he too would prefer to be left alone with her. The publicist had warned him there’d be photos, to which he’d replied that he’d prefer to do both together, the interview and the portrait, he’s taken care to wash his hair to destroy the ridiculous blow dry the TV makeup man had inflicted on him the previous day, in spite of his protests. The photographer accompanying the Italian woman is an ape. On the pretext of finding “a good spot,” with the right light, one that would inspire him, he was preparing to roll around on François’s bed, a move from which he had to be dissuaded practically by force. Occupied in making the acquaintance of the journalist, François has had no time to stop the photographer rushing into his bedroom, “to check what it’s like.” He keeps flashing around a black box, a light meter, he’s here, there, and everywhere, standing up against the windows, looking through every room with the air of a madman, muttering comments that are incomprehensible but not necessarily complimentary about the decor. A little ape let loose in the house, you feel like taking him by the scruff of the neck to shake him, as you would a kitten that’s peeing everywhere. Photographers are capable of anything. Earlier that week, a young idiot with acne had spent ten minutes insisting that François be shouting, with his mouth wide open, because “I only do that kind of shot.” “Glad to hear it, but I don’t shout in my photographs.” The young man had sulked, apparently convinced that anyone his magazine sent him to photograph was duty-bound to satisfy the slightest wishes of an untalented child. A year or two back, another one had wanted him to jump in the air in front of the Pyramid of the Louvre. “We need some movement, you see, otherwise it’s too static,” he’d explained in the tone of voice you might use to get a senile old man to go back to his nursing home. “We need the shot to look interesting, you see. I can’t take you sitting in a chair with your chin in your hands, we’d lose all our readers.” François couldn’t decently jump about in front of the Louvre, with all the people going past. He usually manages to hold out, but sometimes they cancel the article and his publicist scolds him. “It seems you wouldn’t play ball when it came to the photos.” He tries to check on the lunatic galloping around the house.

“We usually do the photos in my office or in the library.”

“Yeah, that’s just it,” says the imbecile, as he darts into the kitchen. “I’d like to find a fresh angle, more everyday, more human.”

François wants to shout, “I write books, you fucking moron, why should I have my picture taken in the kitchen? I’m not going to appear in La Repubblica cooking a cassoulet!” The journalist realizes the situation is getting grotesque, so she tries to mediate, succeeding fairly well. She seems taller than she is, just coming up to his shoulder, although she looks long and willowy. She smiles as she tells him about her project, he hardly listens to the list of authors she hopes to include in the series, he presses a cup of coffee on her, unable to concentrate on what she’s saying while the photographer is scampering around the twenty-five hundred square feet of the apartment. He hears him opening the french doors to the balcony and joins him, feeling infuriated. The idiot is leaning over the guard rail. “If you don’t mind, I’d prefer we stick to the library. I don’t like photo shoots and I want to get it over with.” The photographer turns around, holding the camera, and twisting himself into a ridiculous attitude, takes a picture, “from life,” while repeating, “Yeah, yeah, super, got it all, the light, need some light, turn your face a bit to the right, chin down a bit, no lower, like that, look at the camera, that’s super, face the light, yeah, yeah, got it, perfect, in the can!” All over in a minute, leaving François with the bittersweet impression that he’s being treated like some bimbo. “What do you mean, it’s in the can?” he asks, leaning across to the camera to see the result for himself. It’s all very well not liking photo shoots, he knows from experience that it normally takes longer than this. The degenerate ape shrugs, “I don’t do digital, it’s all about getting the atmosphere and the definition, sorry, can’t show you now, but I’ve got an eye for it, I felt it here, we’ve got it.” Con man. Italian. Half-wit. François’s sure he’ll end up looking like an idiot, surprised by the cretin waving his arms around on the balcony. Well, too bad, after all he isn’t there to look like a film star, he’ll concentrate on being brilliant in the interview. Just before leaving, the imbecile points to one of his bags. “You got Wi-Fi? Can I just check my email before I go?” François can’t suppress an irritable sigh. “I do have Wi-Fi, but it’s a bit of a nuisance to go and look for the code.” “No problem, I’ve got my own dongle, it’s just that it’s easier here than on my scooter.” François indicates the Mies van der Rohe chair in the vestibule—“Okay, you can sit here if you like”—and shakes hands, thanking him, in a manner that says don’t bother telling me when you’ve finished. He goes back to join the journalist in his study. She is calm, leaning forward slightly on her chair, with a carefully judged décolletage, just enough to be exciting, but too demure for one not to want to see more. He sits down opposite her. “At last we can start.”

“Photos all right?” In an irritating tone of maternal concern.

He tries to calculate how much genuine kindness there is as opposed to professionalism, and what his chances are of getting a dinner date with her.

For some time now, many things have ceased to interest him. A veil of depression has come between him and the world. He’s plain exhausted. His daughter’s flight has proved that to him. She’s abandoned him, and in the end, he couldn’t care less. Even his inability to feel anything doesn’t bother him anymore. He has the feeling he’s lived thirteen lives and no longer has the slightest energy for the one he’s living at the moment. He feels defeated on all fronts. Only women can still rouse his full consciousness, from time to time, like delightful sirens binding him to the pleasures of life. He’s gone past the age of feeling remorse at cheating on his wife. It’s part of life, Claire knows it, they don’t need to talk about it. Women, a few glasses of wine, certain evenings in good company, the kind of thing that happens less and less often. He gives his answers while looking deep into the journalist’s eyes, affecting the air of condescending tranquillity, with occasional flashes of friendliness, which he knows women adore.

SINCE I’VE BEEN WORKING FOR RELDANCH, I’VE always been careful not to take any interest in the kids I’ve been tailing. In our profession, you call the person you’re following, “the mark,” and the quicker you can forget their first name, the better it works. I have a cell phone with a Carl Zeiss lens, panoramic viewfinder, digital zoom, HD video camera, and an ultrasensitive microphone. I’m more interested in the state of the batteries for my gadgets or scratches on the lens than in the person I’m following. Asking me what Valentine’s like isn’t part of how I’ve learned to do the job. In fact that kind of thing seems unnatural.

My phone rings just before midday, and I haven’t budged from the sofa where I collapsed after my morning coffee. When I sit up to reply, I realize I’ve got a crick in my back, I must have been lying too long in an awkward position, listening to the radio. I say “Uh, yeah, hello,” in a harassed tone, intended to make the caller think they’ve interrupted me in the middle of a task that needs all my concentration.

“Hi, it’s the Hyena, where are you, kid?”

As if we’d been hanging out together every day for years. I’m already sorry I ever asked her for anything, I’m realizing that it would be wise not to succeed in our search, instead we should just wait calmly for the inevitable ghastly fallout. I continue to act evasively. “Oh, hi, yeah, um, I’m going here and there, places I saw Valentine . . . hoping something’ll come back to me.”

“You think you’re Inspector Maigret? Want me to bring you beer and sandwiches?”

I don’t really get her sense of humor and her cheerfulness sounds too loud. I wonder whether she slept with that girl yesterday. I reply more sharply: “I was just going to call her father and try to see him as soon as possible, I think he can help me locate her mother.”

“I’d rather you put the father off till tomorrow. I’ve got someone around there today. I’ll explain. Can we meet?”

This woman’s a loser. Just wants someone to spend the day with. Her reputation must be even more exaggerated than I thought, she’s so much at a loose end that she hasn’t had work for months, so she’s pounced on my case like a tiger on a monkey. Just my luck.

“Well, I was going to . . .”

“Because I called her school, and I’ve got an appointment with the headmistress at two o’clock. The kids eat outside the school, don’t they? I’m going to go around there when classes finish, to try and question a couple of them.”

I feel like reminding her that I arranged with her to do the things I can’t do, not the ones I can carry out perfectly well. I pretend to be immensely busy, checking the calendar to see when I’ve got a spare moment.

“And you want me to come with you, is that it? I was going to . . .”

“But you’re at home, aren’t you?”

“No, I already said.”

“Because I’m not far away from Pyrénées metro. If you’re ready, I can be downstairs from you in ten minutes, I’m in my car.”

“Look, I’m not at home. I just said. I can get to Belleville metro in, ooh, let’s say fifteen minutes?”

I GET THERE a little late. (It’s one stop from Pyrénées.) I look at all the drivers halting at the lights before I see her, watching me, sitting still, on the terrace of the Folies café. When she sees me coming over, she consents to get up and join me. She holds out her hand to greet me, I wonder whether she thinks I’m going to give her some infectious disease or whether at her age she doesn’t know that these days girls kiss each other hello. Or else just say hi. She’s double-parked her car, with a doctor’s permit slipped under the windshield, but that isn’t the oddest thing: she’s driving an old red Mercedes, must date from before I was born. Perfect for a private eye, eh? Nobody would ever notice a car like that, would they?

“I usually take the metro; the traffic’s so awful in Paris.” That’s all I find to say, to sound a bit sulky, to show that I’m not the sort of girl who’s going to be mollified by the luxuriously shabby beige leather of the seats. Cigarette in mouth, she pulls away without a word, stops at the lights, and smiles at two little African girls with cornrows who are holding hands to cross the road. They have identical white socks pulled up tight over their calves. The Hyena looks happy. I wonder if she’s on Prozac. That’s what I tell myself about anyone I find a bit too dynamic. A GPS is clamped to the windshield but it’s not switched on.

I can’t manage to stay silent for long, we don’t know each other well enough to sit side by side without speaking.

“You don’t bother looking for a parking place then.”

“There are plenty of parking lots, we can put it on expenses.”

“As a freelancer, do you get lots of expenses?”

“Why?”

“I dunno. Just that I’m on a wage, and they check things carefully.”

She charitably chooses not to point out that we’re not operating in the same league. “I’m hungry. We’ll stop and have a bite near the school, I know a good Italian place around there.”

We’ve left Chinatown, and drive past the high-rises of Télégraphe. The district is poorer, less commercial.

“You said you’d prefer me to wait before seeing her father?”

“Yep. I’ve got a contact going in there today. She’s going to call me, she had an appointment with him for late morning. I saw that there was a Wi-Fi code mentioned in the file but that you hadn’t copied Valentine’s hard drive. I thought it could interest us though. I asked for the hard drives of the whole family.”

“You’ve got someone who can get into their building and hack their systems?”

“Look, we have the code, we go in, we don’t hack anyone. I also asked for photos of the whole apartment. So I won’t need to go with you. I want to see what it looks like.”

“What do we do about the interviews at the school?”

“Don’t worry, I’ll take care of everything. But I’d like you to be there, you never know . . .”

“As your assistant? Great.”

“Look, kid, chill out, can’t you? You haven’t got the slightest idea how to run an inquiry, so just be a good girl, follow my lead, and do what I say. If you don’t like it, you can get out right now, and deal with your own problems. Okay? This cheapskate inquiry of yours, all right, I’ll do it. But if you’ve got self-esteem issues, just sort them out yourself.”

She says all this without getting angry. I think she’s even hiding a smile by the end, seeing the look on my face. We’re blocked by a delivery truck that’s created a small traffic jam. I sulk and look out of the window. Some morons are hooting their horns behind us. Three young girls cross the road. Parisian style on the cheap. Slim, long-legged, fashionable little furry boots, big busts, and big tote bags with fringes. Cut-price copies of authentically rich sluts from the Marais, the kind who put on a tarty look but make you think of ads for perfume, not of little working-class girls from the projects.

The Hyena leans out of her window. She gives an admiring wolf whistle. The girls turn around, looking blasé, but they can’t conceal a movement of surprise—or shock—when they see it comes from our car. The Hyena gives them a thumbs up, to show she thinks they look good, and also sees fit to insist, yelling, “Hiya girls! Love the look!”

They hurry on and don’t burst into nervous giggles until they’re about a hundred feet away. The Hyena adjusts her dark glasses in the mirror, shrugs, and notes, with magnanimity, “They weren’t that marvelous, but hey, it cheers them up, doesn’t it?”

“They were very young, that’s what struck me.”

As if that was the problem.

“I like girls. I like girls too much. Of course I prefer dykes, but I like all girls.”

“Don’t you think they might feel insulted getting whistled at in the street?

“Insulted? No, they’re hets, they’re used to being treated like dogs, they think it’s normal. But it’s a nice change to hear it from a superb specimen like me. Even if they don’t realize it, it lights up a tiny utopian candle in their poor little heads, after being smothered by heterocentrist macho awfulness.”

“How do you know they’re straight? Is it written on their faces or what?”

“Of course. I can spot a dyke from behind at five hundred feet. I’ve got radar. We all do. How do you think we’d ever find someone to have sex with if we didn’t have a sixth sense to spot each other?”

“Sorry. I didn’t know you needed a sixth sense for sexual orientation.”

Finally, we get past the delivery van, and she glances rapidly at me before pronouncing, still with a smile, “Jeez, it must be really tough being you.”

THE MINUTE YOU get inside the door of Valentine’s posh school, you’re suffocated by that typical atmosphere of factories for turning out kids. A mixture of boredom and rebelliousness. I’ve gotten used to waiting outside school gates, but I’ve never before had occasion to go inside. The headmistress comes to fetch us, and we go along the main corridor, where the classroom doors are still open. The sight of all the tables lined up, the blackboards, and the maps hanging on the walls suddenly makes me want to cry. The only memory I have of my school is looking at my watch. How long till the end of the lesson, how long till the end of the day. Even my work, which often bores me, has never made me feel so cooped up. And yet I’m pierced with nostalgia, with that sadistic and seductive pull that is so typical of it. I’d be hard put to find a rational explanation: there’s nothing about my high school years that I miss. I was an average student, I didn’t have any close friendships, I didn’t have a crush on any teacher. Blank years of deep boredom. So who knows why tears come to my eyes when I see that they’re still writing in chalk on a big blackboard.

The headmistress is obese, affable, and competent. She’s wearing a black-and-orange outfit and makes the fabric ripple every time she moves. The Hyena has put on a denim jacket to cover up the tattoos on her arms, but doesn’t take off her dark glasses during the interview. She has introduced herself as my assistant, which doesn’t stop the headmistress from addressing all remarks to her. She’s taller, thinner, more beautiful, and more confident: so she’s the one people want to talk to. I generally inspire a slight revulsion in people, I think it’s because I’m so ill at ease that they prefer not to look me in the face if they can avoid it. I’m fascinated by the vast size of the headmistress. She really takes up a lot of room. The Hyena has sat down as usual, legs apart, chin up, and is asking a series of precise questions, taking down notes on a little pad, in her tiny close-packed writing. I wonder what this lady thinks about the huge skull rings.

“. . . yes, often absent, which is a real problem for us. Apart from the last two weeks, when she’s attended all her lessons, we’ve had trouble getting her to come regularly. She doesn’t turn up for detentions either . . . I discussed her a lot with her teachers before the police came. She didn’t confide in any of them in particular. She had good grade averages on the whole. This is a private school, and we specialize in helping students who haven’t performed well elsewhere. That’s not exactly her problem. Valentine wasn’t outstanding, but she didn’t have any trouble with her school work.”

“Was she good at any subjects in particular?”

I ask myself what criteria the Hyena has in the questions she asks. As if the head is going to tell us that she was good at math and, eureka, we’d go and look for her in a chess tournament. The thing is, she puts her questions with such aplomb, and this ingratiating air of being serious and concerned, that the person facing her offers answers without realizing the absurdity of the conversation.

“No, there are some assignments she hands in, and gets reasonable grades for”—the head is turning over the records so that the Hyena can see them, she’s completely eliminated me from her field of vision—“and there are some tests or assignments she doesn’t deign to do at all. That’s why her average has gone down, you see: she has zeroes in every subject somewhere, but the grades she does get are around ten out of twenty. Which is quite good, for these students.”

The Hyena has more shock questions up her sleeve. If she carries on like this we’ll be here all afternoon. I try not to fall asleep.

“And how did she get along with her classmates?”

“Well, again, I asked her teachers, before talking to the police . . . but I didn’t gather much, I’m afraid. She’s never been scolded for mouthing off or fighting, she wasn’t a chatterbox. I saw her apparently getting along with the other students when she was here, but I’ve never noticed her making particular friends with any group or individual. Let’s say that she mostly turned up because she’d been told to, and we do insist on that, and because her grandmother kept tabs on her, but we never sensed any enthusiasm. The possibility of expelling her had come up several times, because we can’t accept a child who makes the others think school is optional, but we never took that step, because it’s equally hard to expel a child who has never caused any discipline problems.”

Blah blah blah, I’ve already noted the fees: at three thousand five hundred euros a term, I imagine that students who are expelled from this school must at the very least have tried to massacre the others with a chainsaw.

The head accompanies us to the main door, repeating to the Hyena that no, the police don’t seem to know at all what’s happened. I wait for her to go back in.

“Lucky we came, eh? Fantastically interesting. She told us piles of things she didn’t think of telling the police, so we’re way ahead of them.”

“Do you ever get fed up of being so negative?”

“I’m not being negative. I could have told you about her grades without us having to sit and sweat in this bell jar: if you would have read the file, everything’s in there. The grandmother had told me about them. And that she cut class, same thing, mega scoop. That’s why I was hired in the first place.”

“And it doesn’t strike you as interesting that precisely for the two weeks you’ve been following her, she’s been coming to school every day?”

“Yes of course it has. And it pisses me off, believe me.”

I said that for no special reason, just to say something back, but you would think I’d made the gag of the year, the Hyena bursts out laughing and looks at me almost with affection. I think perhaps she’s flirting with me, but at the same time what do I know?

“Show me where the kids eat lunch.”

The school is on the banks of the Seine, in one of those districts full of office buildings and fancy apartments where it doesn’t seem possible that anyone needs to go out for a loaf of bread or a gallon of milk. Car sales, stereo equipment, computer shops. But nothing much that’s convivial, bars, restaurants, or little boutiques. I’ve never understood why there are never any practical shops or nice coffee bars in the areas where the very rich live. Is it such poor taste to eat out? So the kids have the choice between a brasserie which is very expensive and a long way off, and a tiny shop that sells little plates of sushi and three kinds of sandwich on white bread. That was a problem for me: passing unnoticed in such a small place was difficult. Luckily, the young don’t usually bother looking at people my age. I point out to the Hyena a table where I recognize some pupils from Valentine’s class. She’s taken off her jacket now, and slung it over her shoulder, revealing the Japanese-sailor-type tattoos that crawl all over her arms. She goes up to the biggest of them, by instinct; he has the face of a mischievous child on the body of a lumberjack.

“I work for a firm of private investigators. Valentine’s parents have called us in to back up the police effort.”

A small curly-headed youth with freckled cheeks, wearing a hoodie and wide trousers, sees fit to reply. “Yeah, they’re right, the police do fuck all, look at the traffic chaos everywhere.”

Chorus: “The police didn’t even come to talk to us.”

“There wasn’t anything on the TV news, was there? So what did they care?”

“Yeah, that’s right, there was this girl last summer and she’d been gone a week, and people recognized her from the photo, so how are people going to know she’s missing?”

The Hyena hasn’t sat down yet, she’s listening to them seriously and casting an amused look over them. I’m two paces behind, and not too surprised that not one of them says, “Hey, you’re always around here.” My talent is being invisible.

“Did you know her well? Did she have many friends in school?”

“No, she wasn’t all that friendly with people in school.”

“Yeah, she could be, she sometimes ate her lunch with us. But mostly she went off on her own with her iPod.”

“Mostly she didn’t come back either.”

“She was a bit snobbish with us, if you want to know. If you said something, she’d put on this superior air and say the opposite. She was more friendly at the beginning of the year, I thought . . .”

“She’s not friends with any of us on Facebook, is she?”

“We don’t even know if she has a Facepuke page, actually . . .”

“But did she have problems with anyone at school?”

“Nah, not even. Perhaps she thought she shouldn’t be here at all. Dunno.”

“And none of you saw her outside school?”

“Yeah, I did, but it was a long time ago, oh, about three months ago. But we had words.” This is a dark-haired girl with very pale skin speaking: she looks intelligent, but so languid that you feel like shaking her to see if she’ll switch on.

“What happened?”

The girl who’d said this purses her lips and looks at the ceiling, not sure how to reply. The other kids burst out laughing.

The curly-haired one, who didn’t think the police were doing their job, intervenes. “Valentine’s a bit weird. Kind of okay, but weird. Very hot. Especially when she’s had a few.”

“She ought to be in the ads against binge drinking for teenagers. You really wouldn’t want to be her when she’s drunk.”

The brunette takes up her story again. She talks like a little girl, in an unpleasant whiny voice. “She can be funny if it’s just the two of you, she’s fine. She’s nice. But if you go out somewhere, she can be a real drag. She binge drinks. She knocks it back till she can’t stand up straight, and if you’re at a party, no prizes for guessing you’ll have no fun, you’ll end up carrying her out to the taxi, and then she’ll be sick all over it, and then you’ll have to help her get up the stairs at home. See what I mean? A drag.”

The Hyena is nodding her head all this time, looking around at them in turn, then suddenly asks, “And what about boys, what’s she like with them?”

A tall gangling youth with a long, horsey face replies.

“She can come on to you just like that, saying ‘Wanna blow job? If you want one, just tell me.’ Well, that’s what she used to do, when she first got here. Boys she liked, she’d go up to them, and, pow! Just like that, she’d come out with it. But she calmed down. In fact lately, she didn’t seem to bother with us.”

The brunette takes up the story again. “Say you go out in the evening with a few guys, well honestly, you feel ashamed for her. When she drinks, she’ll do anything with anyone. But I think in the school she was in before, the girls were all like that. Or so she said.”

“So you got fed up going out with her, that it?”

“Yeah . . . and she can be pretty wild too. She comes out with really mega awful stuff.”

“Like what?”

“Oh anything, if it can upset someone. If you’re a blonde, it’s something bad about dumb blondes, if you’re Jewish, it’s anti-Israel, if you’re black, she’ll talk about banana trees, if you’re gay, it’s about AIDS, and so on. Valentine’s always got an insult for everyone. And in the end you can’t take it anymore, you just want a quiet evening.”

THERE ARE FEW reactions around the table. Their apathy hasn’t been disturbed. A girl who was kind of okay, not too many problems. Nothing out of the ordinary. The more I see of this generation, the more I imagine how they’ll be as adults and the less I want to make old bones.

“STILL, SHE ISN’T the local clown. When she’s sober, she’s even rather quiet . . . And she’s good at classes. When she got here, we were very impressed by her level.”

“She’s good at everything, she reads books and all. But she’s good at math too. And chemistry. Yeah, everything really.”

“The teachers like her fine. But she misses too much school. That’s why she was sent here. She’s been chucked out of all her other schools.”

“She cuts class.”

“Valentine doesn’t care about grades, her dad’s this writer. When she wants to work, he’ll pull strings for her, that’s all, that’s how it goes.”

Three of them are doing the talking, the brunette and the two boys. The two other girls are holding back, laughing at the right moments, but saying nothing for now. The Hyena asks, “But the boys she was interested in, where did they come from, then?”

“When we were still friends, she liked heavy metal. She didn’t miss any concert by PUY, she was very in with them . . . Well, you know what I mean . . . she was a groupie. I didn’t want to go with her to see them, it was around the time she was giving me too much grief with all this acting like a slut.”

“PUY?” The Hyena gets out her notebook.

Amandine confirms: “Panic Up Yours, hard rock, heavy metal. I don’t know, it’s not my scene really.”

“I think I’ll remember the name.”

“I don’t know if she was still hanging around them, because she changed, Valentine did, over the year.”

“Did she talk about her parents? Her home, at all?”

“Not a lot, no.”

“I know she adores her father.”

“But the stepmother not so much, normal, isn’t it? She doesn’t have to sleep with her.”

“What did you think, when you heard the news she’d disappeared?”

“We flipped, we were worried for her.”

A blonde girl, with a nose so tiny that you wondered how she got enough oxygen, dressed like a Roma but every garment must have cost a fortune in the Marais, speaks up for the first time. “We thought something horrible had happened, of course. When a girl goes missing, you’re always afraid they’re going to find her dead in a ditch, beaten up.”

“None of you thought she might have run away?”

This option shocks them more than the dead-in-a-ditch version. “Run away?” Leaving behind the PlayStation 3, the fridge full of food, the domestic help, Daddy’s credit card . . .

“Yeah. Could be, of course. She’d changed a lot lately. She changed the way she looked, she wasn’t so much fun, more distant . . . She could have been planning something. You could tell, couldn’t you?”

The girl who said this was drop-dead gorgeous: all the time we’ve been sitting in the bar her face has been so radiant that it’s as if the sunlight was falling only on her. She has the look we used to call BCBG when I was a kid, bon chic bon genre, rich girl, good home, blue, white, and beige, which she wears just the kind of casual way that makes her look fantastic. She’s tall and slender, elegant figure, the perfect image of the kind of bitch the aristocracy turns out best. This femme fatale speaks incredibly slowly, she must have been smoking joints all day. The Hyena gives her an odd look.

“And you talked about it with her, when you thought she’d changed?”

“No. We weren’t friends, actually. But I could tell by looking at her. She looked different.”

“Yeah, it was obvious that she’d let her appearance go, these last months.”

“Perhaps she was depressed, heading for a breakdown? She wore a lot of black, but like Noir Kennedy, vintage gear, sort of I’m-giving-up-on-life black.”

“Yeah, that’s right, she stopped wearing designer stuff. But before, she used to like it fine.”

“Yeah, before, she liked to dress cool.”

“Then after a bit, not to be bitchy, but she had a bit of a punky look, like when you listen to Manu Chao?”

The drop-dead beauty shrugs. “Yeah, I think she wanted to be distinctive.”

These kids around the table are actually pretty easygoing, compared to the ones I usually meet. They tease each other, but they’re not aggressive. There’s no obvious tyrant among them, and they haven’t got that arrogant manner you generally find in rich little Parisians. When they talk about Valentine, I find they sound quite calm. Still, that kind of sex-mad girl isn’t usually so popular nowadays. These kids are resigned to never really being part of the elite. They’ve all dropped out. They don’t have that juvenile effervescence that their equivalents in a swanky suburb like Neuilly would have. They’ve already tasted failure. They have all seen in their parents’ eyes the disappointment at having to enroll them in a private school for children who are not making the grade.

WE GO BACK to the car. The Hyena is concentrating on one precise point. “The pretty girl, back there, I couldn’t work out if she was a baby dyke, or whether I just found her so stunning I mistook my desires for realities.”

“Is that all you really care about? Come back to earth, she’s way too pretty to be a dyke.”

I regret saying this the minute it’s out of my mouth, because it seems particularly insulting, but she just stares at me for a couple of moments, then bursts out laughing.

“You know, your mind is like Jurassic Park live.”

“Well anyway, she’s sixteen at most. You’re interested in her?”

“I’m interested in all girls. That’s simple, easy to remember, even you can do that. Right, now I’m off to see Antonella, the woman I sent to see the father. Are you coming, or do you want me to drop you off?”

“Whatever you like. Perhaps you want to keep your contact confidential.”

“Keep my what what? You really are weird. Lucky for you you met me, because on your own, where would you be?”

The Hyena slows down at a pedestrian crossing and with a nod of her head lets a pregnant woman go by.

“See that one’s face? Don’t tell me she couldn’t have given it a bit of thought before reproducing . . . some people, nothing stops them.”

“Do you ever, when you’re on a case like this, do you ever feel frightened, I mean of what you’re going to find?”

“Yes. It’s happened to me before.”

“And that doesn’t upset you? You don’t imagine that Valentine could be in the grip of some sadist who’s torturing her? Or who’s even killed her. And yet here we are, taking our time.”

“No, frankly, I think she’s gone to see her mother. I think we’re going to spend a few days messing about in Paris so we can say we did, then we go straight for the mother. Don’t you think? If your mother had abandoned you, you’d want to go and see her, wouldn’t you, see what she’s like?”

“I don’t know, mine didn’t abandon me, on the contrary she calls me up all the time.”

“Well, anyway, okay, tomorrow when you go and see the parents, do me a favor and observe the father’s reactions when you mention her real mother. And the stepmother’s reactions too. The stepmother, a priori we’re suspicious of her, right?”

“Why?”

“Basic principle. All stepmothers are suspect. Don’t you know your fairy tales?”

I burst out laughing, and she looks at me sideways. It must be the first time I’ve laughed at one of her jokes. I ask, “But why don’t we just go straight to the mother right away?”

“Because we’re allowing some time for Rafik to find out where she is.”

“Oh. You know Rafik?”

Rafik is the cornerstone of the Reldanch Agency, the guy who runs our IT systems. Everything goes through him, so much so that it’s difficult to ask him anything.

“Of course I know Rafik. How would I survive without Rafik?”

IN THE BUTTES-CHAUMONT park in north Paris, there’s a little sunshine and a lot of dogs. We wait, sitting on a bench, for the famous Antonella to arrive. She’s a good twenty minutes late. The Hyena is in a chatty mood.

“Antonella is wicked, but funny. Everyone who met her when she first got to Paris knows she’s only a shadow of her former self. She was a diva. She was working for the newspapers, an Italian correspondent. In those days, if you were a journalist at that level, your address book filled up quickly, and if anything happened in town, it wasn’t hard to get to the spot. I don’t know when she started being an informer, I guess she had some relationship with a politician—her speciality was culture, but the two worlds often met. When I met her, she was consulted all the time and very protected. With all the internal infighting in the main parties, there was a huge demand for information for a few years. Antonella was in her element. But times change, the media empire collapsed, her protectors fell into disgrace. Now she does this and that. Same as everyone else, more or less. She comes pretty expensive though. The other journalists will trade information, but Antonella has no problem about sources, she only wants cash. I asked her to get ahold of the contents of all the computers in the apartment; she’s got a sidekick who’s good at that. Her own interest is that it allows her to peep around. You never know, she might pick up some interesting tidbit of information, just by chance . . .”

“How did she manage to get into his apartment so easily?”

“All artists like to give interviews to the press.”

YOU CAN’T MISS her when she does turn up: she’s wearing enormous fuchsia-pink après-ski boots. I suppose they must be the “in” thing, something that never ceases to surprise me. Without apologizing for being late, she throws a large envelope into the Hyena’s bag. She has an attractive husky voice which doesn’t fit her look of an ethereal slut.

“Wow, he comes on strong, your client. Still at his age, they’re all more or less nymphomaniacs.”

“Don’t fish for compliments, Antonella, you know you just knock them out.”

“Ah, don’t talk about the past. How are you?”

She hasn’t said hello to me, not even a glance. Humiliating but I’m starting to get used to it. It’s like when you’re a teenager and you go out with the school prom queen, after a while being in the shadows is restful. We all start walking toward the park gates and the Hyena asks, “Do you know the stuff he writes?”

“Domestic dramas among the bourgeoisie. Catholic, right-wing, but in a traditional way, not aggressive or racist or antisemitic. So nobody much is interested in him. He’d do better to write a blockbuster about the camps, if he wants to be taken seriously, that would make a change . . .”

“Is he successful?”

“Not so much now. He still has a bit of a profile. A little TV, public radio, does a few signing events in bookstores. He publishes a lot of articles here and there, wherever they’ll let him, he’s the right age and CV to get on the jury for literary prizes, and I couldn’t quite see why he’s so isolated. He’s not very aggressive, that always reduces your credibility. Publishers have fallen into the habit of looking after him, I’ve been told he gets an advance of fifteen thousand per book. He doesn’t sell more than five thousand. So you can see why he writes a lot.”

“He’ll be disappointed when he sees there’s no article.”

“No, it’s okay, I really was asked to put together a file for a book by this journalist for the Times who discovers every year that French culture doesn’t have any international influence anymore. Big deal, eh? I’ll pick up on this one malicious and well-aimed remark he made about Sollers and his importance, and that’ll do the trick. He’ll be annoyed at having chatted with me for a couple of hours, making eyes at me the whole time, and finding I’ve only included that one little jab, but basically he’ll be glad he’s quoted at all. If it wasn’t for you, he wouldn’t even get that.”

Antonella is flirting outrageously with the Hyena. I wonder whether they’ve slept together.

“Did he mention his daughter at all?”

“No. His father, yes, his mother a bit, his daughter not at all.”

“Protecting his privacy?”

“Men his age don’t often talk about their children. They are their parents’ children, but nobody’s parents. Unless there’s some drama, children aren’t very good subjects for novels, at least for men. If his kid were to die, then yes, there might be a novel in it . . . then again, a father’s grief isn’t best-seller material. But if she comes back home now and tells him off for being an old fusspot, what’s he going to do? He prefers to think of something else.”