Читать книгу Apocalypse Baby - Виржини Депант - Страница 11

Claire

WHEN CLAIRE LETS HERSELF SLIDE BACK IN THE bath, plunging her head under the warm water, she can hear sounds from the apartment below. As so often, the neighbors are having a fight. Amplified by the water, the sounds become strange, muffled, low. Often, the husband is violent. Claire hears the woman yelp two or three words, then she hears him retorting from another room, before he finally goes striding through the apartment, and that’s when he hits her. She screams and protests, sometimes trying to run away from him. Then the scene is punctuated by some louder sounds than the others, hard to identify, not necessarily blows. Followed by silence. The first few times, Claire was afraid he’d killed her, but in time she realized that it was the calm after the fight. You wouldn’t think, to look at them, that they were that kind of couple. Him, she often sees in the elevator, he’s an examining magistrate. Reddish face, rather puffy, a nose swollen by alcohol, but always well-dressed, polite, and smelling of aftershave. He was probably good-looking in his youth. He still acts like a gentleman toward women. He has two children, a boy and a girl, two years apart. When Claire moved in with François, she used to see them often, playing with the concierge’s little girl on the pavement out in front. They’re big now, no more scooters and marbles until they have children of their own. She never hears them intervene when their father raises his hand against their mother. Like all people this kind of thing doesn’t happen to, Claire is sure, (or so she thinks every time she meets someone from that family in the elevator) that she never would have put up with what the woman downstairs endures. If only for her two daughters’ sake, she’d have found the courage to leave, to pack her bags, whatever it cost, she’d have protected them from a violent father. Christophe had never laid a finger on Claire, nor on his daughters.

He left her just before the older girl’s sixth birthday. Claire had loved him unreservedly and obstinately for ten years. He’d come into her life when she was twenty-two, one New Year’s Eve at a friend’s house. She’d felt his eyes on her, trying to locate her wherever she was in the room, and then his large figure had kept appearing within a few feet from her, following her around from group to group. A mild form of stalking, which he hadn’t tried to conceal. He wanted her. It attracted Claire. She waited. That evening he was wearing a black sweater and three-day stubble, which suited him. She was young, still unsurprised that life revolved around her, pursuing her and offering her the choicest gifts. After spending a few nights with him, she’d begged him to shave. Claire’s face was burning, her fine skin irritated and painful. He was her first serious boyfriend. She had met Christophe the same year her mother had marched her off to a dietician—and it had worked. Claire had lost weight, had to buy new clothes, and had become attractive again. She managed to stay slim for two years, but after the birth of the older girl, Mathilde, she’d put on ten pounds and never succeeeded in losing them. It was distressing, but it hadn’t dragged her down into the depths of depression, as it would have done before she had given birth. Something had happened to her with motherhood, it had given her calm and confidence. The presence of this baby in her life had transformed the way she looked at things.

Before Mathilde, there had been holidays abroad: Egypt, New York, Ireland, Sweden, friends, dinner parties, evenings at the cinema, their first apartment, family parties, and plenty of long mornings in bed. Then there’d been the enchantment of declaring her pregnancy, decisions to make together, the nursery to be furnished, the first scan, thinking of a name. Her parents had completely changed their attitude when she’d told them the news. Claire had a sister three years younger, who had always been her mother’s favorite. Claire had been the child who was a bit too fat, a bit too placid, never managing to engage her parents’ attention. When they divorced, she had been twelve years old, and once more, her mother had devoted herself to her little sister, everything revolved around her. Claire didn’t engage in any pranks, she didn’t worry her mother. And she wasn’t as pretty. She couldn’t do anything without attracting blame. Nobody around her had taken the trouble to notice that she had been deeply upset by the divorce. It’s true that she hadn’t done anything outrageous to alert anyone. She had just started putting on a few pounds, slowly, and become more withdrawn. In her childhood bedroom, for years she had secretly pinned the holiday postcards sent by her mother next to the ones from her father, so that the blue hills of the Vosges were up against the mountains of Peru, the Mediterranean jostled the Pacific. With a little Scotch tape to stick them together. That was back when the children of divorced parents used to have to explain to their schoolfriends what it was like to have two homes, in the days when that was still unusual. Her sister Aline hadn’t needed a year’s mourning in order to start boasting in the playground of two piles of Christmas and birthday presents and all the special permissions to be absent or to extract more pocket money through parental guilt or bargaining: “Mummy said yes,” or “Daddy promised me.” Claire often wished she could strangle her sister. But once she was pregnant with Mathilde, everything changed. Both parents got into the habit of calling her up all the time, and she had to schedule their visits so that they didn’t coincide too often. The day of the birth, they had both been with her in her hospital room, without their new partners, and she had seen the joy on their faces: shared emotion, the first grandchild. And it had lasted until the birth of the second daughter, Elisabeth. Then, wouldn’t you know, Aline had become pregnant just afterward, from some one-night stand, not that that made the coming child less welcome. On the contrary, as usual, she had managed to spoil everything, demanding maximum attention. One day, Aline had turned up at her mother’s house, declaring firmly that she couldn’t go through with it, she wanted an abortion at six months. Next day she turned up at her father’s, saying she would have the baby but give it up for adoption, she couldn’t take care of a child on her own. A week later, heavily pregnant, she was snivelling in her mother’s kitchen, drinking her fifth beer and chain smoking, claiming that she was sure the baby would be stillborn, and of course she would never get over it. Poor little dead baby, she spent the whole evening torturing her mother. And it worked. She got all their attention. The parents started telephoning each other every day, telling each other what they’d had to endure from her, and making frantic efforts to rescue their daughter from the brink of madness. Aline had always done whatever she liked, and her tactics were spectacularly successful. She had given birth to her son. It would be a son, of course. For three months, she’d gone into ecstasies over the bliss of motherhood, then her figure had come back, she’d put on a dress, left the baby with her mother, and continued her life as before: plenty of affairs, too much alcohol, and hefty overdrafts.

Mathilde was just five then, the age when children stop being little angels and become little people, they’re not quite so cute, adults find them less entrancing. Her grandmother went on looking after her with pleasure, but her real pride and joy was Thibaut, the first male child. The adorable, extraordinary, reckless, willful, insufferable Thibaut. Claire was already in therapy at that stage: she was getting the feeling that at last she could take control of her life and would be capable of going forward alone, without her parents’ support. She had everything she wanted. A husband, two daughters, a very nice apartment. She’d spent ages studying interior design magazines, so that within the limits of their budget, their apartment would look stylish. So that Christophe would be proud to invite his colleagues back, and be happy himself to return home in the evenings. She had thought how grateful she was for what life had given her in the nine years with him, every time she found herself chatting to a friend whose husband was unfaithful, or having problems with his career, or being difficult to live with. She had thought how grateful she was, every time she met former schoolfriends who still had no children and thought they could fill their lives with something else. As if you could do without that kind of love and not miss out on what life was all about. In return, she tried her best to take care of everything properly, writing herself long to-do lists that she never completely dealt with. She saw to all the family medical appointments, sorted out clothes for the different seasons, organized their holidays, supervised the children’s homework, thought of interesting activities for them, had plates that matched the tablecloth, found a good dentist, arranged fun birthday parties, paid the bills, drove the children to the swimming pool, bought new shirts for her husband before the old ones wore out, recruited a cleaning woman, located the best car insurance. She had never imagined that Christophe would underestimate the happiness they enjoyed, and his good fortune in having a wife like her at home. A wife who would help his children grow up, who wasn’t a big spender, who was always cheerful and took care of everything without complaint.

One Friday evening, he had called at eight o’clock to warn her he had to work over the whole weekend and wouldn’t be home. Mathilde was watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer on television and the little one was in the bath surrounded by Barbie dolls. A lump had suddenly formed in Claire’s throat. The previous times, no doubts had occurred to her, but a list had been building up, in her reason’s blind spot, of all the occasions recently when he had gotten home at two in the morning, of the out-of-town conferences, and of the weekend meetings. And that evening, despite her unwillingness to understand, the pieces had come together. There’d been a lot of absences recently. He didn’t call home all weekend and on the Monday night when he got in, he wasn’t his usual self. Claire had started talking, an unconscious mechanism. Her mouth opened and words spilled out endlessly, because she sensed that as soon as she paused, he’d say what he had to say. It had worked before, she knew that without admitting it to herself. She just had to play for time, for him to give up trying, and say nothing. But that evening, almost as soon as the girls were in bed, he’d interrupted her. “I’ve met someone, another woman. And I’m moving out.” It was ridiculous. She wanted to wipe out the words. It was a cliché. It couldn’t happen to them, it wasn’t like them. Before believing he was capable of leaving her, she was angry with him for saying the words. Their love would never again be intact. It would take her a few more years to admit that he had not said something he would later regret. Her great perfect love, he’d smashed it to pieces. And then, rapidly, she’d lost everything.

Her mother’s pained tone when she telephoned, and the awful feeling that apart from her, everyone else had suspected it. The humiliating pity of other people. The ten years when she had been convinced that everyone she met was impressed by her happy marriage. And perhaps even jealous, since many people were unlucky in love, or had no children, or had to bring them up as single parents. Having to endure their so-called understanding, their self-satisfied pity, and their humiliating encouragement. People had all been very quick to expect her to get over it. As if their story had been one you put behind you, a love like any other. For a long time, Claire had hoped that life would prove them all wrong, that Christophe would come back and she’d be able to show them all what kind of love they had. A rock-solid love, invincible, a couple that nothing could separate. She had never been angry with him, not once. She had waited for him. Nothing that happened after he left could satisfy her, she just wanted her old life back, she didn’t want to take any aspect of the new situation seriously. Her friends’ unwelcome remarks, the hints uttered in falsely friendly tones to the effect that she should have realized long ago that he was unfaithful, that he was tired of her, and that he’d made the right decision.

She’d distanced herself from her former girlfriends. She didn’t want to be thought of as “a single mother” of her two daughters, or as “unattached,” still less as “remaking her life.” She had nothing in common with all those losers, so they were wrong thinking she was like them. Even her relations with the girls were affected. At heart, she thought that the children ought to have made Christophe come back home. She felt they weren’t trying hard enough. They could have fallen ill, refused to see their father, been hostile to his new partners, failed to enjoy holidays with him, they could have insisted, taken their mother’s side, and found a way to get what she wanted for all of them: their old life back. Instead of which they’d grown up, immersed themselves in things at school. Mathilde had become coquettish, by nine years old she was wanting nail polish, brand label clothes, and lip gloss. Other things didn’t seem to matter to her. Elisabeth had begun learning the piano and liked gym. They didn’t apparently realize that all three of them had been badly hurt, cheated of the life they were owed.

And now as they were growing up, Claire started feeling that her daughters were judging her. Not saying anything openly. But perhaps behind her back, when they were alone. As time went by, they looked more shifty. They seemed to be scornful of their mother. This woman abandoned by her husband, obliged to count her pennies, living on a derisory sum of alimony, since she hadn’t even managed the divorce successfully, having failed to select a ruthless lawyer who would have gotten the maximum for her. At the end of every session, the therapist would explain to Claire that if her daughters listened to her less, it was simply because they were growing up, they weren’t judging her. There too she wanted her old life back: to be the idol of her children, the center of their world. She wanted to feel their soft little bodies and their arms around her neck. For them to be little girls again, when she had always known how to make them happy and when she had had an answer for everything.

Claire had also become distanced from her mother, who scarcely four months after the breakup was saying, “Come on, sweetie, get over it. And anyway between us, he wasn’t God’s gift was he, your man, I know he’s the girls’ father, but let’s not kid ourselves, he was pretty much a philistine and very selfish.” Claire hadn’t been able to hang up on her, or tell her how hurtful these words were. Long knives plunged into her heart. To realize that, for other people, their love hadn’t been stunning, her good fortune hadn’t been amazing. Just an ordinary couple, an ordinary breakup, life, like everyone else. She was shattered, flayed alive, and her shrink prescribed a course of antidepressants. She lost thirty pounds. Her weight started to obsess her, as it had in the past, and the transformation had been enough to make her feel better. Claire wanted people to think she was just fine. In the end, what she really felt didn’t matter. She was watching for signs of how other people saw her, interpreting their looks; and if she could convince herself that they thought she was on top of things and lucky in life, she felt better.

She’d found a part-time job as secretary in an upscale sports club, the girls were doing well at school, and she paraded them as if they were living proof that she was well-balanced; she brandished them in the world’s face, they were her grade A in the great exam of wordly success. Women whose husbands have left for a younger model after the age of fifty will often say, “I wish he’d gone earlier, then I could have rebuilt my life.” They don’t know what they’re saying. There’s nothing worse than being left before you’re even thirty-five. You’re being left for what you are, nothing to do with age, and it deprives the children of a whole life with both parents, it means being left lying on your back like some stupid insect that’ll never be able to right itself again.

The only female friends Claire could tolerate now were unmarried women her own age with no children. These were the only ones on whom she could look down, the only ones she could meet without fearing that the comparison would be unfavorable to her. But even women like that ended up making her feel nervous. Elise, her best friend for the last two years, was forty. Poor thing, she claimed she didn’t miss having children. Claire listened to her lying through her teeth, with the maternal patience of one who knows that the other dare not admit her sorrows. What it could be like, living your life as a woman without giving birth, without that basic center around which all life is organized, Claire preferred not even to think about it, and she listened to Elise’s rants without reacting, displaying considerable benevolence. But even Elise wasn’t unfortunate enough to her taste. Last heard of, she was planning to go off sailing the world for several months with her latest lover, a user ten years younger than she, who was obviously using his older mistress to help pay the bills on his boat. And Elise was convinced that this was the call of love, she’d decided to give notice at work, rent her apartment, and go to sea. In her head, over and over, Claire mentally rehearsed all the points against this decision, for her friend’s own good. She realized that she was obsessing about it and admitted as much on the therapist’s couch, acknowledging that there was some jealousy at the bottom of this anxiety. Forty wasn’t even too old for Elise to get pregnant. She didn’t want Elise to suffer. Just that she should remain in a situation slightly less desirable than her own.

And then, after all, François had come along. Encountered in a first-class compartment of the Train à Grande Vitesse, on the way back from Lyon, where she had dropped Elisabeth off for a pony-riding vacation. Claire had been reading a book by Paul Morand, which she found boring, but since she had nothing else with her, she had opened it and tried to find some interest in it. The man sitting next to her had hesitated for a while before speaking to her. At first, the only thing that she’d found attractive about him was that he was interested in her. He’d managed to extract her cell phone number from her before saying goodbye at the station, and had called next day with a pressing invitaton to have dinner.

She found him on the plump side, a bit old for her, with tired features: his stumpy reddish hands had something of the peasant about them. More full of himself than charismatic. But she had liked it when he paid her compliments throughout the three-hour train journey, even if she was well aware of something a bit pathetic about the situation: chatting up your neighbor on a train wasn’t exactly high romance. He had said he was a writer, and had repeated his name on the message he left on her voicemail. When she had googled him though, her feelings had changed. Inwardly, she had mocked herself: “All it took was three good reviews and you find he’s worth seeing after all . . . at your age, acting like a groupie, you ought to be ashamed of yourself.” Then she had called Lucette, her manicurist, who was a great reader—she and Lucette had become quite friendly, the manicurist stayed for a cup of tea after doing her nails and they gossiped about this and that. Lucette had a son and a daughter, but neither father had recognized the children or even stayed around long enough to see them. She had money problems, a family that gobbled up all she earned, and what with everything it was entirely relaxing to be friends with her, especially since she had a sense of humor and was quite witty. Lucette read a lot, trying to drown her sorrows by escaping into books. When she heard the name of this new man on the horizon, she’d reacted very satisfactorily: “Mata Hari in My Dreams—fabulous novel, haven’t you read it? Oh, I’ll lend you it if you like. You actually met him? No!” Her reaction had made Claire feel like accepting the dinner date.