This
Little
Family
Inès Bayard

translated from the French by Adriana Hunter

Copyright

4th Estate

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.4thEstate.co.uk

This eBook first published in Great Britain by 4th Estate in 2020

First published in the United States by Other Press in 2020

Originally published in French as Le malheur du bas in 2018 by Éditions Albin Michel, Paris

Copyright © Éditions Albin Michel, 2018

English translation copyright © Other Press, 2020

Cover image © Peter Chadwick / Trevillion Images

Inès Bayard asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

This book is supported by the Institut français (Royaume-Uni) as part of the Burgess programme

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins

Source ISBN: 9780008332884

Ebook Edition © April 2020 ISBN: 9780008332907

Version: 2020-04-20

Dedication

To

Geneviève Combas Boteilla

Epigraph

You cannot live in a frenzy for very long. In a world which promised so much and delivered nothing, the tension was too great.

— GEORGES PEREC, THINGS

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Epigraph

Little Thomas didn’t have time to …

As on every Monday, Marie will …

The decision to have a baby with …

Marie got up several times in the …

This dinner is a bad idea. On the …

Bois-le-Roi is a delightful place. …

A section of boulevard Voltaire …

Marie has never been particularly …

I don’t know how but I knew it. …

Marie’s mother always greets them …

Marie wishes she would never …

Feeling whitish liquid trickling …

We were really scared, you know …

Thomas is celebrating his two-month …

The baby is in terrible pain. He …

On the last Saturday before Marie …

Marie likes dropping off her son …

Marie doesn’t want to pick little …

You need to step on the gas, …

Laurent has been gone two days. …

Dear Laurent, …

The shrill bell on the intercom …

Marie is rested. She goes to pick …

The child-care worker eyes her …

This Tuesday morning Mathilde …

Relations between Marie and Laurent …

Marie’s nerves are sorely tested …

Laurent is in a deep sleep. Marie …

Mathilde has stopped making …

Two weeks off work. That’s what …

I found this in the mailbox. What …

Marie acknowledges that it’s never …

Roxane does not intend to leave …

Hey look, Thomas, Daddy came …

Paul doesn’t understand: “A test? …

It’s Marie’s father’s birthday and …

Marie finds the nights go on forever …

She’ll never go back to the bank. …

The osso buco needs to simmer …

Today seemed to go on forever. As he closes …

About the Author

About the Publisher

Little Thomas didn’t have time to finish his stewed apple. His mother hadn’t given him the slightest chance. The speed with which the poison circulated through his blood simply meant he didn’t suffer when he died. Only Marie’s body was still upright, securely wedged against the back of her chair, her head tipped back. She must have struggled to ensure this was noticed. Laurent had been served first. Few people stumbling across these three ashen bodies could have imagined the warm laughter filling the room just moments before the tragedy occurred.

Marie felt absolutely no remorse and, apart from her final gesture, there was no sign of a struggle. Every object was in its usual place, the strong flavorsome smell of the meal still hung in the air in the kitchen, paper napkins hardly marked, a water jug placed squarely in the middle of the table. The child was still in his booster seat, his face pitched forward onto his plate and the last morsels he hadn’t wanted to eat. His dimpled little fingers hung limply. Marie’s fists, meanwhile, rested squarely on the table. There had been only one tragic event in her life, but one powerful enough to goad her to action. Her face looked peaceful, at last. Her features relaxed, her body utterly freed of all pointless suffering. She had finally become the woman in the picture, the sort of woman who succeeds in controlling her own destiny.

Her husband had suffered terribly. He’d felt his lungs fill with blood, his breathing slow, and his throat constrict as his moist flesh convulsed. He had fallen from his chair and crawled for many a long minute, spitting liters of blood and vomit over the kitchen’s white-tiled floor. But he wasn’t dead. He was the only survivor, and was hastily evacuated a few hours later, still hovering between life and death. In the first seconds of this hellish chaos, his wife, who hadn’t yet touched her own food, had watched him slump to the floor before giving the first poisoned mouthfuls to her son. She hadn’t wanted gushing blood. There’d been enough blood already. Poisoning had struck her as the most judicious option. Laurent’s phone had kept vibrating on the console table in the hall. Perhaps he might have found out the truth before taking his first taste.

The Charonne district was cordoned off by the police. Just a precaution. The investigators soon grasped what she’d done. The two corpses were extricated from their chairs. The stiffness in their limbs meant the medical examiner had to relax them by injection before sealing them in body bags under the stunned gaze of their neighbors across the landing.

Marie had contemplated killing her son before, several times and in different ways. She was very determined. Day after day, the false innocence in the child’s eyes had driven her to murder. But until now, circumstances had stopped her seeing it through, mostly for practical reasons. She had killed her little boy and it was simply justice being done.

Before any revelations that might invite the first verdicts, let’s take a moment to appreciate the figure of this dead woman surrounded by her loved ones, the only one of the three to have remained upright.

As on every Monday, Marie will arrive at work five minutes late. She’s known for six years that this will never change. It has simply become another part of her daily routine. Laurent is fussing in the kitchen, nursing a lukewarm cup of coffee. Marie watches him just as tenderly as she did ten years ago. Things weren’t so different back then. They met at a student party organized by a mutual friend. Marie was a shy, reserved young woman and didn’t immediately respond to Laurent’s advances. It took considerable perseverance on his part before she granted him a first date. They were married three years later in Bois-le-Roi, with the affectionate support of both of their families and their friends.

From the very start theirs was a straightforward happiness, their love enough to give each of them more than him- or herself to think about. She takes care of him, encourages his plans, reassures him when he doubts himself, and helps him find his files every morning so he isn’t late for work. Laurent’s love for Marie is genuine and deep, but he is not as attentive to her as she to him. They’re not a couple who instantly understand each other. They need to discuss, expand, explain. Four years ago, Laurent was taken on by a big law firm that specializes in probate and divorce. His workday begins at nine and often goes on till late. Marie understands his ambition and does not judge him for it. She earns less than he does but enjoys her job at the bank. When she arrives at the branch on the place de la République in the morning, she feels useful and enjoys her commitment to helping other people, giving them advice and suggesting options to them. Money has never stirred her to great plans, but she’s happy that she and Laurent have a comfortable life.

Shortly after they were married, Laurent and Marie decided to move to a large apartment on the boulevard Voltaire in the Eleventh Arrondissement of Paris. They were immediately taken with the neighborhood’s friendly atmosphere. The arcades that run from the place de la Nation up to the place de la République are filled with little shops and businesses, at lunchtime their apartment is often pervaded by the smell of chicken from the local rotisserie, and on Sundays they can hear the bell ring on buses that stop at every crossroad through the busy bustling market. They’ve always loved Paris, and over the years have accumulated a good many friends and developed a varied, interesting social life. Laurent moves in more sophisticated circles than Marie. Thanks to a highly publicized divorce case between a former soccer star and a well-loved actress, he has already forged himself a solid reputation in certain journalistic circles. He and Marie are frequently invited to private parties where intellectual Paris rubs shoulders with business Paris. Marie never feels awkward. She’s proud to be there with her husband and makes the most of her own discreet charms to captivate those around him. Immersed in the contentment of her day-to-day existence, she quietly ensures everything is under control without drawing any attention to the fact. She is the one who runs the household. Her upbringing and her parents’ unconditional love protected her from the boundless torments of childhood and adolescence. Of course, she has often had to confront complex or difficult situations, but she has never for a moment felt she was losing her grip on her life.

Autumn is Marie’s favorite time of year. A poetic season. The plane trees on the boulevard Voltaire are dropping their orangey leaves on the pavement, the air is cool but mostly dry, and the sky azure blue. Sunbeams light up part of the kitchen. Marie gazes serenely out the window. “Look how pretty it is! Did you see all these colors?” Laurent doesn’t reply. He’s frantically looking for his file from yesterday. Marie smiles when she sees that it’s staring right at him on the kitchen counter. She steps over to hand it to him, a knowing smile on her lips. Laurent looks at her, amused, then kisses her before racing out to work. Marie finds routine reassuring. She knows what she needs to do before even thinking about it, and although some might feel disenfranchised by this, it has never bothered her. Marie finishes her coffee and leaves at eight forty-five.

Almost before she is in the street she can feel the morning hustle, the whirl of France at work, keeping it together. Marie acknowledges that she’s never had to struggle to make ends meet. Born into a middle-class family with traditional values, pampered at every turn, encouraged and steered by her parents in her every choice, she is in no position to understand how people get into a downward spiral. It’s not that she lacks compassion. She often puts herself in someone else’s position, in her clients’, for example, to understand what’s really at stake in their lives, what their risks are, what they stand to gain or lose.

As she emerges from the République Métro station she has only a few minutes’ walk to reach the bank at 9:05. Her colleagues are always friendly, greeting her with a smile, offering her a coffee before her meetings and asking for her well-considered opinion. Marie is a financial consultant, a privileged position, well up in the bank’s hierarchy. Her clients like her very much and her drawers are filled with all sorts of gifts: boxes of chocolates, bottles of wine, homemade preserves, scarves … When she arrives home from work in the evening, Marie likes to tell her husband about the day’s amusing little events or the disagreements she occasionally needs to address. Money lies at the heart of everything in her work. Her standard clients are people with enough income to contemplate lucrative investments. On Monday mornings Marie always has to check her best clients’ accounts to familiarize herself with any new transactions. On her huge desk there are framed photographs of Laurent and herself on vacation, her family, her sister and her nephew, and her late grandmother. It suddenly occurs to her that she doesn’t see enough of her family. Since she was born her parents have lived in a large house in Bois-le-Roi, just a few miles from Paris. Her sister lives with her husband and son in the Ninth Arrondissement, in the Saint-Georges neighborhood. The sisters are very close and are due to have lunch together today.

Her telephone starts to ring. Monsieur Collard doesn’t understand why a payment he asked to have made has still not gone through; Madame Siris would like to know whether she can use the money from her life insurance to give her son a new car for his birthday; Madame Frousard wonders whether her husband will still agree to pay her the lump sum he promised when they divorced. Each client has a problem, and Marie knows exactly how to solve it. The hours spool by, meetings come one after the other. In the distance there is chanting from demonstrations against a law allowing homosexuals to marry, it reverberates all over Paris. Through her office window, Marie watches hundreds of thousands of people tramping the streets and brandishing enormous pink-and-blue banners around the place de la République. Her parents told her they considered joining the demonstration but in the end they weren’t able to reach the location in time. Laurent is against this law too. Like many French children, Laurent and Marie were baptized, went to Bible study classes, and occasionally attended Mass with their parents on Sunday mornings or for religious festivals. Marie feels that this law is a question of religion and principle. “Well, they’re right, aren’t they?” her client exclaims. “Marriage is for a man and a woman, it always has been. Even some homosexuals are against this law.” Marie looks at her client and smiles. She thinks her comment vapid but is more comfortable concentrating on the woman’s home insurance contract.

It’s lunchtime. Marie slips out of the office to join her sister Roxane in a brasserie on the rue de Bretagne. All the streets that lead to the place de la République are still barricaded by the police. When they watched the news last night, Laurent admitted he was finding it increasingly difficult to cope with the endless demonstrations in Paris. Marie, on the other hand, finds it refreshing. She certainly won’t participate in any sort of protest movement but is happy other people do it for her.

Roxane is sitting at an outside table with her baby in his buggy. It’s her day off. Marie is happy to see her, kisses her and sits next to her. The child whimpers a little before Roxane gives him his bottle. Marie watches him fondly, strokes him, and showers him with affectionate pet names. Roxane tells her about her recent holiday with Julien in Rome. While they were away, the baby went to his grandparents, who couldn’t wait to look after him. Everyone in the family wants to know what Laurent and Marie are waiting for before having their first child. She is thirty-one, he thirty-three. There couldn’t be a better time to start a family. She just hasn’t had the opportunity to think about it. Their respective careers needed a while to take shape and so far their ambitions have been focused on work. “Watch out, you’ll be too old soon! You don’t want them calling you Grandma!” Roxane had her first child at twenty-four. She looks happy but tired. Yes, people talk about the tiredness but they don’t make a big thing of it. The joys of parenthood are enough to make other people understand that they too should throw themselves into the adventure. An hour has gone by. Marie and Roxane leave the restaurant and say goodbye with a long hug, promising they’ll call each other very soon.

It’s the end of the day. The sun is only just starting to set. Marie walks up the rue du Temple to buy a few things at the Monoprix supermarket. She’d like to cook something nice for Laurent this evening, there might be time to make a blanquette of veal. The autumn wind is pleasantly bracing on her face. People hurry through shop entrances. No one seems to dawdle in any one place, as if everyone has made a deliberate effort to go in different directions. There’s no such thing as stasis in Paris. She collects her bicycle, which she left near the bank yesterday because of the rain, puts her shopping in the small basket at the front, and sets off toward boulevard Voltaire.

Laurent isn’t home yet so she has a couple of hours left to prepare the meal. She knows he’ll be very happy to have his favorite dish when he comes home. As she peels the vegetables on the kitchen counter Marie thinks over what her sister said at lunchtime. She contemplates motherhood. As a child she already knew she’d be a mother and spent hours looking after the baby dolls her parents gave her for Christmas. She now feels ready to have a baby with Laurent, and maybe that’s why she thought of making this particular dish this evening. She’d like to stop taking the pill and start a family.

It’s eight thirty, time seems to be going so quickly. The blanquette is simmering and the table’s set. Marie recognizes Laurent’s ritual as he comes through the door. He lobs his keys onto the sideboard in the hall, hangs his coat on the hook, takes three steps before realizing he hasn’t closed the door, closes it, then calls her name—“Marie!”—to check that she’s there.

She can tell from his smile and how quickly he moves that he has good news to tell her. “I got the Lancarde case!” he announces. She’s thrilled and throws her arms around him to congratulate him. They hug tenderly, kiss, and look into each other’s eyes. He lifts her up, sits her gently on the sideboard, and kisses her again. Gérard Lancarde is a wealthy industrialist who specializes in the plastics market in Europe. His father, who founded the Calcum consortium fifty years ago, was meant to hand over more than half the ventures within the company when he officially took retirement. Except that a few years before the cession he married a Russian singer with a huge following in her own country, and, against his son’s advice, bequeathed to her a substantial proportion of his shares. Laurent is still reeling from receiving the news himself. “I don’t know if you have any idea, honey. This contract deals with an inheritance worth hundreds of millions of euros and he chose me, personally! I can’t believe it.” Marie is genuinely happy for him. Laurent goes over to the still-steaming casserole dish and she watches him affectionately, his childish pleasure, the way he slowly lifts the lid and closes his eyes as he smells the meat. But she suddenly remembers wanting a baby. With this new contract maybe Laurent won’t have time for that. A slight cramping feeling ripples through her stomach.

After explaining his new case in detail for an hour, Laurent doesn’t seem to have noticed her turmoil at all.

“You know I saw my sister today, darling. That little Guillaume is so adorable. Wait till you see him, he’s grown again!” Laurent is receptive but makes no connection with their own circumstances and keeps eating. Confronted with this dead end, Marie decides to state her case openly. “I want a baby. I think it’s the right time, I think we can start our family now. I can feel it, I’m ready.”

Laurent lets a piece of veal fall from his mouth. He’s stunned by the news, his face drains of color. It hadn’t occurred to him. Or he hadn’t had time to think about it, at least. Silence settles over the room. Marie holds her breath, waiting for his reply before she can breathe again. Laurent smiles, gets up from his chair and kisses her full on the mouth. “My darling. I want to! Of course I want to have a baby with you!” Marie’s body relaxes, flooded with intense relief and happiness. She thinks she’s never felt so weightless, every corner of her being is intoxicated, blissfully shaking off all tension. She feels like screaming from the rooftops of Paris, calling her parents, her sister, her colleagues and clients to tell them the big news before she’s even pregnant.

After their blanquette of veal this evening, Laurent and Marie will lie in bed arm in arm, pressed up close in the elation of their plans.

The decision to have a baby with Laurent has put Marie in a permanent good mood. As she pedals along the boulevard du Temple she has a sudden realization how very lucky she is to be this person. She loves her work, lives with a husband she adores, wants for nothing, and will soon be welcoming her first child into the world. She can picture family meals at Bois-le-Roi with Laurent and the baby. The new photos she’ll be able to put on her desk and show off to her clients. The long walks in the Luxembourg Gardens, the pride she’ll feel pushing her buggy toward the large central pond. She’ll be a loving, attentive mother like her own mother. All at once she notices she’s seeing more children than usual. There’s a constant to-and-fro of buggies and little figures everywhere around her. Hurrying and alert, mothers resolutely perform the first stage of their marathon: taking their children to school, kissing them goodbye, and waiting to check that they get inside the building.

Marie arrives at the bank on time. She knows that this Tuesday will be harder than usual because there’s the quarterly sales results meeting. She’s not a very good salesperson and during these committee meetings her immediate boss always opts to praise her understanding and analytical abilities rather than her head for business. This afternoon she’ll be introduced to the Paris-based company’s new CEO for the Tenth Arrondissement. He’s made a point of attending such meetings to encourage his teams. Everyone at the bank is fretting at the thought of being reprimanded for poor results.

Hervé, the other asset management adviser, is particularly anxious. He knows he hasn’t made the grade during this first trimester and Marie feels bad for him. She can tell that this man, pushing fifty and coming toward the end of his career, is especially despondent about his work, his clients, and the pace imposed by the company’s new diktats. He’d like to give up but has no choice. He needs to pay the mortgage, provide pocket money for his thankless teenage daughter, support the wife with whom he hasn’t been able to picture a loving future for years, and keep a little money for his passion, ornithology. Hervé is fascinated by wild pigeon species, turtledoves in particular. In a drawer of his desk he keeps a secret file of all the articles he’s found on the subject. He’s very proud of it. After a difficult appointment with a client or sometimes simply for the pleasure of it, he takes out his file and spends the rare moments of peace in his life leafing through these yellowed photographs of birds gliding through the air. Hervé is endearing but deeply unhappy.

Marie sits herself at the meeting table, laden with a pile of files that she hopes will be adequate in her defense. There’s a deathly silence in the large room except for the crackling of a fluorescent light with a loose connection. The branch manager gets up to switch it off. Marie has always been awed by her crisp manner and authoritative stride. When the two of them are alone in her office, Marie keeps her head down, trying to avoid eye contact. Colette Sirmont is a strong, willful, demanding, and almost oppressive career woman. Marie sees nothing of herself in any of her characteristics, either in her professional or her personal life. When Marie has meetings with her clients alone she’s relaxed, at her ease, and sometimes even surprisingly amusing. Her work at the bank allows her to play the part of someone else. With Laurent she can’t seem to establish her identity as anything other than gentle and restrained, just as she already was with him and his friends ten years ago. All around the room people eye their colleagues, studying them in an effort to determine who’s in the worst position.

The CEO arrives and slams the door. Faces screw up, hands don’t know where to put themselves, throats constrict politely. He’s tall, imposing, a rather attractive man. The women have noticed. With the sharp eyes of someone accustomed to managing other people, he quickly takes up his position at the head of the table. And is happier staying on his feet.

Marie watches him from afar. While his assistant starts up the overhead projector, he begins his talk, saying that he won’t have time to discuss things case by case and would prefer to analyze individual results in one-on-one meetings over the coming week. There’s a ripple of relief around the room. Marie is asked to speak about her experience selling the new life insurance package. She stands up, eyes lowered, and walks over to join the CEO. He stares at her intently, appraising her. Marie can smell his scent. A powerful combination of eau de cologne, leather, and sandalwood. She never wears perfume, Laurent doesn’t like it. When Marie has finished her report she walks back to her seat, under the satisfied gaze of the CEO. A colleague congratulates her, saying she argued her case well for her marketing methods. After an hour the CEO brings the meeting to a close and everyone leaves the room to return to work. Hervé is relieved but he knows it won’t last and that he has only a few days’ respite before receiving his sentence. As she leaves, Marie catches the CEO’s eye, and he smiles and nods at her. She has three more meetings this afternoon. She gets on with her day.

It’s six thirty. Marie has finished helping the day’s clients understand financial codes of practice and can leave at last. Once outside, she finds to her surprise that she still has that effervescent feeling. She’s so calm, level, moderate, and patient, Paris gives her a buzz, brings her alive. She always felt slightly wrong living out of town as a teenager. Granted, Bois-le-Roi isn’t far from Paris, but she was frustrated by the journey she had to make on the transilien train every weekend to meet up with her friends in the city. She always knew she’d live in Paris later.

The October night is closing in and she thinks the rue Meslay feels darker than usual, perhaps one of the streetlights isn’t working. Marie doesn’t remember exactly where she left her bike. Maybe outside the little Turkish restaurant where she likes to have lunch on Thursdays. The street is as good as deserted, with just a few pedestrians hurrying home. The tall buildings are lit up with warm lights. She’s always liked looking into apartment windows when she walks through the city’s streets. Discovering people’s intimate lives, their taste in interior design, seeing children playing and parents chatting on the balcony or cooking. She suddenly wonders whether other people do this too, whether anyone watches her walking around her apartment. Under the weak glow of the streetlights she can make out her bicycle in the distance. It’s tipped onto the ground, the front wheel horribly twisted, one tire gone, and the frame broken. Horrified, she runs over, tries pointlessly to stand it back up against the pillar, but quickly realizes she won’t be able to ride it. She feels helpless. This is the first time in her life she’s been the victim of an act of vandalism. She casts around for some form of help and reaches into her bag for her phone to call Laurent. She knows that he won’t come over for such a small thing and is bound to tell her to catch the Métro home, but she needs to hear his voice, to be reassured. He picks up on the second ring.

“You’ll never believe this, someone tried to steal my bike. I don’t even have a front wheel now, they trashed the whole thing.” Laurent is on edge, he’s about to go into a meeting to set up Gérard Lancarde’s defense. He tells her to take the Métro and leave her bike where it is. While she’s still talking to Laurent she notices a familiar-looking silhouette on the same side of the pavement as she is. The company’s CEO recognizes her.

“Well, well, what happened to you?” Marie hangs up. She’s slightly ashamed, feels stupid with her beaten-up bike. She explains the situation, doing her best to disguise her distress. The CEO smiles and tries to calm her with a friendly pat on the shoulder. “Look, my car isn’t far at all. I could drive you home if you like. Where do you live?” Marie looks at him for a moment, embarrassed. Then, not keen to take the Métro, which will be packed with rush-hour commuters, she decides to accept his offer.

On the way to his car they fall in step together, the clipped rhythm of their footsteps resonating on the pavement. He hardly says a word but smiles at her from time to time, turning to face her. She’s awed by him. He’s the CEO. He takes his car keys from his coat to open the Mercedes that’s perfectly parked by the curb. The headlights flash. He seems somehow proud of this flourish while still careful to remain strangely modest. Marie settles into the passenger seat. The smell of leather mingles with a strong blast of the scent she smelled on him during the afternoon’s meeting. He throws his coat onto the rear seat and then sits down and starts up the car; the engine purrs. Marie is relieved it’s not a very long journey. Her phone chimes in her bag. It’s a message from Laurent, asking if everything’s okay. He’ll be home late because he’s agreed to have dinner with his client, and tells her not to wait up. Marie’s disappointed, she would have liked him to be with her this evening to comfort her.

The CEO turns on the radio and Marie recognizes the opening notes of Erik Satie’s Third Gnossienne, her father’s favorite. In an instant this composition with its ambiguous melodies darkens her interpretation of Paris. The darkness feels stifling, the heady smell of sandalwood and the lights reflecting on the windshield giddying. The end of boulevard Voltaire appears at last. The man doesn’t move a muscle, his hands clamped firmly to the steering wheel, his eyes staring ahead, his lips motionless. She doesn’t dare turn to look at him. Time slows, freezes, chokes the space. Everything stagnates. She wants to get out. A car stops on a level with them at a red light and a woman smiles at her briefly before looking away. The car sets off again. There are only a few buildings left before they reach her apartment but there are no parking spaces and the boulevard is full of traffic. Marie wants to be let off onto the street but he chooses instead to drive around into rue Richard-Lenoir to find a better place. “This city really is impossible for cars.”

Marie feels the engine slow at last and the radio snaps off. They now enter a private car park where he pulls into a space. Silence settles into the darkness, against which she can make out the man’s tall silhouette. There are no passersby. “Thank you so much for driving me home, it was very kind of you. I mean, you really didn’t have to. I’m sorry but I need to go now, my husband’s expecting me and he’ll be worried.” She doesn’t know exactly why she came up with this lie. A subtle discomfort grips her stomach like the protracted suspense a viewer feels watching a film, before everything becomes clear at the end.

“Wouldn’t you like to stay here with me for a while?” the man asks, still looking dead ahead, his hands resting loosely on the steering wheel.

Marie starts to feel the first inklings of panic. She curses whoever destroyed her bike this evening, cornering her in this uncomfortable situation. “I really think you should stay awhile,” he insists. Marie hears the sudden clunk of the lock on her door. He’s locking her in. His shadow—an imposing, frightening presence—moves slowly closer, approaching her with implied intimacy. She feels something cold and smooth slide over her thighs. A shudder runs through her whole body, which is still secured to the seat by her seat belt. She struggles and asks him firmly to stop and let her out. She wants to scream but, strangely, doesn’t dare to. She wonders why this is … Maybe she doesn’t want to disturb the whole neighborhood, draw attention to herself for nothing. She doesn’t want to embarrass herself in front of her CEO for seeing an assault in what might simply be a rather clumsy attempt at seduction.

He anticipates her every reaction and swiftly flattens one hand over her mouth while his other hand insinuates itself inside her blouse and works progressively down toward her knickers. He drives his fingers inside her. Marie’s body shakes, sweating from every pore, her flesh frozen into the thick leather of her seat. She starts to fight, pushing against his chest that’s pinning her down. He’s too strong, much too strong. She now knows she won’t be able to escape. Marie is going to be raped here in this car. Like those women on TV who describe how they were attacked, she’ll have to go through that too. She struggles with all her might. Her wrists are bruised, her legs pinioned, her voice silenced, her stomach crushed. She can hear the man’s moans, his little gasps of pleasure in the crook of her neck. He unhooks her seat belt and presses firmly on the lever to lower her backrest. She jolts down and back. He spreads himself over her, mounts onto her. Marie can feel his erection through his trousers. She keeps fighting, screaming. No one will hear. Her thin arms are gripped by just one of the man’s hands while his other hand labors to undo his belt and the fly buttons on his suit. She feels her phone fall onto the car floor mat, vibrating and ringing under her feet, and is overwhelmed with frustration that she can’t reach it. The silk knickers that Laurent bought her for Valentine’s Day last year are torn in a fraction of a second. He scratches her at the same time. One last surge of energy convulses her, twisting her body in every direction, her feet stretching as far as they can to get away from him. She’s very soon exhausted, drained of strength. All her limbs ache for failing to help her. He penetrates her. The to-and-fro starts up, slowly at first, then harder. It hurts. Her vagina is dry, its walls rasped until they bleed. She remembers the slight burning sensations she had a few years ago because of genital herpes, and how much that hurt.

The man suddenly stops. With a single confident hand he grabs her hair and forces her over onto her stomach. Marie hears him mutter a few words, but can’t give the sounds any meaning. Reality distorts, nothing exists anymore. She’s going to wake up. Maybe she’s just in the bank’s staff rest area. Maybe her mind misinterpreted the look the man gave her before he left the meeting. She’s fallen asleep. Hervé’s going to wake her. His penis is hard as a weapon. He strikes deep inside her belly with violent thrusts. The pain makes her throw up over the rear seat. He doesn’t stop. His breathing accelerates. “Come here!” he says, lifting his heavy body toward Marie’s face. His hard penis hovers expectantly under her mouth. “Go on, put it in your mouth.” She twists her head in every direction, begs him to stop, tries to free herself from his hold. He stills her face with his hands, and his knees restrict her movements, then he rams his penis into her mouth, right to the back of her throat. It smells slightly of urine. She’s going to choke. She bites into it with her teeth. He pulls out and slaps her. “Filthy bitch! So that’s what you want!” He still has an erection. He comes back into her from behind, sodomizing her. She’s never done this with anyone. Marie can feel liquid trickling over her legs. The pain is intolerable. He switches back to her vagina and eventually comes inside her with a groan of pleasure. It’s over. His penis is limp, soaked in semen, vomit, blood, excrement, and vaginal fluid. He’s satisfied and clambers furtively back to his seat to button up his trousers. “That’s it, you can go.”

Marie sits up painfully, her body burning, swollen, weighed down with the agony of her slack muscles and her taut compressed skin. The locks click open. She steps out of the car, her trousers still hanging down over the tops of her thighs. He grabs her arm firmly and pulls her back onto the seat. “If you talk to anyone about what happened, you, your husband and your career are all finished. No one’ll believe you, so you keep your mouth shut and everything can go on like before.” In the feeble yellow glow of a streetlight Marie surreptitiously notices the gleam of a wedding ring on the man’s finger. The car engine starts up. She climbs out and stumbles a few steps out of the car park. The door slams behind her and the car pulls away.

Marie doesn’t tell herself it’s over. She knows this is just the beginning. The entrance to her building is a little farther up the street, on the corner of the boulevard Voltaire. It’s not quite eight o’clock; Laurent is most likely having his dinner. He must have been on the way to the restaurant, joking with his colleagues and his new client while his wife was being raped by her boss, penetrated in every orifice on the seat of a car. She goes into the building and meets the caretaker wheeling out the rubbish bins. “Hello, Madame Campan, how are you?” Marie keeps her head down and slips away into the shadows in the corridor, answering with “A little tired, but I’m fine! Good night” as she goes up in the lift. She hopes he didn’t notice anything unusual. She knows already that she’s in the process of hiding the evil event, that she won’t say anything, that no one will ever know about the assault.

The apartment is shrouded in darkness partially diluted by the open curtains allowing light from the boulevard into the living room. There’s no one there. She’d like to call her husband to reassure him. Every step toward the kitchen is painful. The central corridor that leads to all the rooms in the apartment seems never-ending, almost ridiculous. She picks up the handset that she left on the sideboard this morning and dials Laurent’s number. She hopes he doesn’t pick up so she can leave a controlled message with no fluctuations or lurching in her breathing. He doesn’t answer. “Yes, it’s me. So I finally got home, one of the Métro lines was blocked … I’m going to take a shower and go to bed, I’m exhausted. I hope everything’s going well with your client. I love you.”

She hangs up, feeling absent, empty. She thinks this is best, and anyway, if she wanted to admit anything to him she wouldn’t find the right way to do it. He would always look at her differently, not only as his wife but as the victim, the woman who was raped, sodomized for the first time by another penis than his. Marie is suddenly aware of the smell of vomit on her. She doesn’t have the strength to take a shower but she still needs to. If she were single she would just take some sleeping pills and go to bed, but if she doesn’t wash now Laurent will notice this aftershave that isn’t his on his wife’s body, the sheets will be impregnated with the smell, and everything will fall apart all over again.

Standing in the middle of the bathroom she slowly unbuttons her blouse and painfully lowers her trousers with the shreds of her torn trousers still clinging to them. Blood has dried on her thighs. Foul-smelling brownish marks trail over her stomach. Now completely naked, she catches her reflection in the mirror above the basin. She moves closer and makes out traces of dried semen at the corner of her mouth. One eye is slightly swollen where he slapped her, but that will almost certainly have disappeared by tomorrow. This vision of herself floods her with unbounded sadness. The anger is sure to come later. The scalding water runs between her breasts, washes over her stomach, flows down the nape of her neck and relaxes her muscles. She collapses against the wall, hunches over, limply holding the showerhead above her. Everything she does becomes an ordeal, as if she’s never previously noticed how difficult it is to perform on a daily basis—stepping out of the shower, wrapping herself in a towel, putting on her pajamas. She knows she won’t be able to get to sleep tonight, nor perhaps for days to come. She needs sleeping pills, but in a flash it comes back to her: after Laurent had a bad reaction to a drug past its use-by date, she decided to have a clean-out. She clearly remembers throwing out the last sleeping tablets. The clock in the corridor says it’s ten o’clock. The pharmacy will be closed and she would never be able to go out again anyway.

The bedroom is a mess. Laurent was looking all over the apartment for his files again this morning and he thought that maybe they were hiding under the sheets. Everything is upside down. Marie never berates him for anything but right now a diffuse anger spreads through her whole body. She was raped this evening, assaulted, attacked, and she can’t even have sleeping pills or her husband by her side or a tidy bed. She buries herself under the cold sheets, turns out the small bedside light, and waits with her eyes open for sleep to be so good as to take her.

She thinks it’s about midnight when she hears Laurent come home. She recognizes his footsteps, his stride, his rhythm. From the way he lumbers around the hall she can tell he’s had a little too much to drink. That’s good, he’s sure to sleep. Every creak of the wooden floor stresses her. She wishes she could open the windows and jump into thin air before her husband reaches the bedroom. He sidles up close to her, his body hot and naked. “Are you asleep, honey?” She immediately closes her eyes, relaxes the muscles of her face, slightly slows her breathing and gives a few soft grunts. Laurent eventually turns away. His body rolls to the other side of the bed, far away from her. He’s a happy, healthy, well-fed man full of drink and plans for the future, he can fall asleep in a matter of minutes. His wife on the other hand knows she’ll have to pretend to live and sleep for many days to come. Marie opens her eyes. The silence is interrupted by the sound of scooters on the boulevard. Her eyes don’t move, staring straight ahead. Deep in the night, facing the wall that she’s previously looked at while bowled over by pleasure, the trouble down below feels to her like fate’s revenge on a life it deems too easy.

Marie got up several times in the night; Laurent didn’t notice a thing. She thought he’d be very tired this morning after his long evening but he clearly isn’t. She watches in silence as he paces around the kitchen. “I’m sure I put it here when I came home.” Marie doesn’t react. “I’ll end up putting tracking devices on all my files so I can find them. I’m super-late!” Marie can’t remember a single day when she hasn’t helped him find his stuff. Her husband notices something different this morning. “You okay, honey? You seem miles away.” She spots Laurent’s green folder on the fruit dish. She doesn’t tell him, waits for him to fret a little as he watches the minutes trickle by. She’s just about to tell him when he sees it. “Ah, there it is. I knew it was in the kitchen! Okay, I’m off to work, Jean’s waiting for me. And don’t forget we’re going to Paul and Sophia’s for dinner this evening. They’re expecting us at eight. Love you!” He drops his cup in the sink, kisses his wife, and runs out of the kitchen.

Obviously, Marie had forgotten this dinner. The stigmata of last night’s attack materialize again. Her vagina hurts, it’s burning and painfully swollen. All her joints are stiff, her knees and wrists ache. Maybe she should see a doctor. It’s eight thirty, time to go to work.

When she’s downstairs she looks for her bicycle in the building’s small inner courtyard. Gripped with sudden panic, she rings the caretaker’s doorbell. “Hi, sorry to disturb you, but did you see my bicycle?” As she asks the question she remembers: the remains of her bike are still at République. And then she was raped. She backs away slowly. “I’m so sorry, I remember now. I left it at work.” The caretaker smiles at her, thinking she must be working too hard and is tired this morning.

The day seems to go on forever. She wishes she could slip away and lie down, sleep for a lifetime. She sits facing her elderly customer with a rigid smile on her face. And yet the woman is promising a handsome investment, more than three hundred thousand euros of life insurance. With this contract Marie could make her grand entrance into the top three of the sales team for this quarter. Her colleagues will be full of admiration and the CEO will congratulate her personally. He raped her yesterday evening. Marie can’t stay upright on her chair any longer. Her lower back hurts, the pain in her vagina is radiating up to her stomach, wracking her guts with sharp spasms, swelling and subsiding, making it difficult for her to concentrate. “Is that your husband in the photo?” It was four years ago when Laurent arranged a romantic trip to Venice for their anniversary. They were happy. Marie had asked a tourist to take their picture in the Piazza San Marco. At the last minute the ice cream Laurent was holding fell right down the front of his shirt, making his wife and all the witnesses in the background laugh. Marie thinks about the dinner this evening. She doesn’t know how she’s going to hide everything from start to finish without arousing suspicion.

She’s having lunch with Hervé today. He tells her how helpless he feels with his wife and daughter. Yesterday they had the nerve to open the cage that housed a turtledove he found six years ago in the woods in Orne. When he came home at the end of his day’s work he found the cage empty but for a few feathers, and his wife and daughter laughed in his face at his despair. Marie finds this unbearably sad and wonders just how much pain you can cause another person without suffering any physical consequences. The two women are being so cruel, surely Hervé’s distress will eventually spill over into violence. A good gunshot in the head to each.

Laurent comes home earlier than usual so he has time to get ready for dinner. Marie is rummaging frantically through her walk-in closet, she has no idea which dress to wear for dinner. Too dark an outfit would only emphasize her mood. Something too colorful might be misinterpreted as a sign of happiness. Trousers are out of the question, her vulva can’t tolerate the pressure of thick fabric. She can’t wear knickers, just very fine tights. Laurent notices this when she takes off a dress for the tenth time. He comes over to her from behind, strokes her breasts, and plants a kiss in the crook of her neck. “You’re very sexy in your tights … We could get to work already, you know … We still have a little time.” She’s forgotten about the baby. The plan that so thrilled her only two days ago now seems laughable, stupid, disgusting.

Laurent is turned on, she can feel him hardening against her buttocks. She lets him have his way, can’t see any alternative. She’s never rejected him, he’d think it was odd if she did now for no obvious reason. Being tired won’t always be an excuse for escaping her conjugal duty, especially if they’re still planning to have a baby. Laurent lowers her tights, turns his wife around in his arms and lays her down on the bed. His hand slips inside her, strokes her with slow circular movements. He kisses her, explores her mouth with his tongue, takes a handful of her hair, pinches her nipples between thumb and forefinger. Marie is frightened it will hurt. She prepares for the pain she will feel when he penetrates her, taking a breath in and letting it out slowly. He drives into her. Her body tears on the inside as if a great heated file were being inserted into her vagina. Her mouth twists and she groans in pain. Laurent pushes harder. Every thrust of his hips, the least undulation is torture. She suddenly feels as if she is being drained of all her blood, she can feel her organs sliding downward inside her, a gaping wound opening up in her stomach. Laurent plunges a finger into her anus and she screams. He pulls it out. She feels raped all over again, by her husband. He’s not noticing her, is tormenting her body, inflicting superficial pain to escape the confines of an excitement that’s become all too familiar. Now there’s no distinguishing between the two situations. Her rapist’s sadism feels to her just like Laurent’s, the husband who doesn’t notice her suffering. “I’m coming … Wait, I’m coming …” He comes inside her. She’s going to throw up, represses it. A few vestiges of her lunch come into her mouth. She smiles at him, puts her arms around him, breaks away. He watches in silence as she gets up. He can’t possibly know that this second ordeal endured by his wife marks the end of any compromising on her part.

This dinner is a bad idea. On the way there Marie thinks about how she’s going to say hello to her friends, about the moment when she has to sit down at the table, evading certain questions, certain forms of eye contact. Paul and his wife Sophia live in the Monge neighborhood. Marie and Laurent had hesitated for a long time before settling on their apartment in Charonne; they’d been offered an exceptional property on the rue Daubenton but didn’t yet have the funds to afford it, much to the disappointment of Marie and Sophia, who’d been friends for years and liked to go to the Sunday market together on the rue Mouffetard.

“Are you staying in the car, or what?” Agreeing to make love with Laurent before the meal was also a bad idea. Her body had begged her to stop but it was too late and now she must simply wait for the pain to subside a little. Marie finds it hard to get out of the car. Her husband slams the door, doesn’t notice the trouble she’s having. “I do like Charonne but you gotta admit this neighborhood’s quieter. It’s better for kids.” He still hasn’t given up.

Paul and Sophia have a three-year-old son and live in a large duplex apartment. He’s a gynecologist and she a dental surgeon. Marie has always found it practical having friends with a medical bent, but this evening she’s wary of Paul’s experience. After the rape she thought of the sexual diseases she might pass on to Laurent and the psychological trauma of abused women, but she hopes she can forget, erase all the suffering of this period. She’s going to take refuge in her work and her marriage. Perhaps the longing to have a child with her husband will resurface in a few days, stronger than before.

Sophia appears on the landing looking radiant in a loose-fitting orange tunic. She takes Marie warmly in her arms. A delicious smell of Middle Eastern spices hangs in the air in their living room. “I made a couscous—Granny Zara’s recipe!” Sophia was born in Morocco. She’s proud of her roots and makes a point of passing on a few words of Arabic to her son so that he’s familiar with his second culture. Paul is not very enthusiastic about this and thinks it will end up giving the child identity issues. “There she goes again! We’re not in the medina now, baby!” They tease each other, laugh about it, understand each other. Marie envies their natural intimacy. Maybe Paul would have known straightaway, unlike Laurent.

Every subject they broach around the table strikes her as dull. She’s distracted, far removed from the dinner, aware of the sounds without really hearing or understanding them. She stares blankly in one direction and then turns and alights on another. A few words ring out: “She was covered in bruises. Her body swollen and bleeding. She was most likely raped several times.” Marie’s eyes light up, her body is electrified, she wakes up at last. Paul is talking about one of his patients, a girl of seventeen who was beaten by her father for years and probably raped by him, and who came to see Paul in his office after a violent altercation. “When I examined her everything was confirmed. I didn’t even need a speculum.” There’s a brief silence. The subject is disturbing, a bit disgusting. Sophia gets up to fetch the couscous from the kitchen while Paul continues to give details of the story.

Laurent doesn’t seem put out, continues to chew absentmindedly on his piece of bread, as if to pass the time. “But are you sure it’s the father? No, it’s just these days it seems like everyone’s been raped and the perpetrators are named before anyone can be sure it’s really them.” Marie doesn’t say anything, this contribution smacks her full in the face. She feels dirty and ashamed before her husband, suddenly guilty for what she may have provoked the night before. Paul is used to this sort of discussion and tries to present a different argument. Good, evil, men accused of rape turning out to be victims of spite, the public lynching of some men, the Dominique Strauss-Kahn case, Polanski …

Sophia comes back into the dining room and puts a large colorful earthenware dish on the table. The couscous is almost overflowing. “Maybe we could talk about something else? I mean we could do without your work stories about rape when we’re trying to eat.” Marie wants them to talk about it. She wants to get up and scream that she too has been raped, by her boss, and she understands this young girl. She wants to announce loud and clear to her husband and friends that she was forced to take a penis in her mouth, in her ass and in her vagina, that her body was butchered, she had blood on her thighs, semen in the corner of her mouth, puke all over her breasts, and shit spread over her stomach. She could do it. Her mind fights to speak out. But she doesn’t have the courage. She’s afraid she’ll destroy everything, lose her husband and friends, be judged, be suspected of lying or exaggerating. She decides against it.

They move on to something else. The subject is changed. “So, Laurent told us the good news. Enjoy yourselves while you can because they don’t leave you in peace for a single night in the first year!” The baby again. Marie doesn’t think she can keep this up. Her vagina feels stretched, torn between her thighs. She slips away to the bathroom, as natural as can be. Her breathing accelerates, on the verge of a panic attack. The walls close in, the paintings hanging along the corridor talk to her, criticizing her weakness. Uncontrollable tears spill down her cheeks, distorting her face, smudging her makeup. Her reflection appears. She looks like a whore. A raped whore. A few smears of blood seep into the toilet paper.

When she joins the others again, there are North African gazelle horn pastries proudly displayed on the table. “Is everything okay? You look a little tired this evening.” Marie smiles, claims she hasn’t been feeling too good since yesterday. Her husband puts his arms around her, cuddles her, and says they’ll leave soon. Marie drains her coffee as she listens to Sophia’s ideas for their next winter vacation. The four of them could go to Switzerland together. Her mother will look after their son. Skiing in the glorious alpine landscapes around Geneva, nothing better just before Christmas. Marie is mortified, she realizes just how much the future means to people. No one ever talks about the present, and not much about the past. The evening when she was raped is already long ago, almost forgotten, obsolete. Even if she spoke about it publicly, she couldn’t be sure how people would react. She’ll have to see her attacker in the workplace, maybe even accept his congratulations for the contract she will soon have signed, walking beside him, smiling at him and smelling his aftershave. He will have forgotten, time will pass, and justice will too. The facts will have lapsed.

It’s time to go home. Paul hands Marie her coat and wants to help her put it on. She refuses his offer, not wanting him to touch her. She thinks about his penis, about how he might take Sophia. She pictures him examining his young patient, imagines her tortured, abused vagina, its flesh and nerves raw. Sophia hears her son crying and kisses Marie before hurrying upstairs to soothe him.

“I’ve always thought it odd for a man to be a gynecologist. Seriously, it’s kind of weird looking at vaginas all day long, isn’t it?” The walls of the arcades by the Louvre Museum are so old, rising out of the ground since forever, solid as rocks. She’d liked to turn the steering wheel, for Laurent to hurtle into them, for the two of them to die instantly together, for him to shut up at last. He puts his hand on his wife’s thigh. She automatically pushes it away as if terrified. Everything seems so easy to him. “Are you sure you’re okay? You were a little strange over dinner.” Marie gives up, puts his hand back on her leg and slides it a little way toward her crotch. Laurent smiles again. She wants him to stroke her, she thrusts his hand inside her tights and rubs his penis at the same time. He has an erection. It’s late. There’s very little traffic along the riverbank. The bright light of streetlamps intermittently illuminates the inside of the car. At night Paris is sparklingly beautiful. Laurent has taken a wrong turn. The Hôtel de Ville is deserted, its white stone illuminated by dazzling reflections from the Seine. His penis hardens as Marie rubs it backward and forward. Her hand accelerates. He sighs, moans, raises his foot from the accelerator. She makes him come in a few minutes. Her hand is sticky, cloying. She disguises her disgust, looks for a tissue in the glove compartment to wipe herself. “Oh, I think you have your period, honey.” His fingers emerge from her tights soaked in blood. She tells him it’s nothing, just the remains of her last period. Actually, no, she was raped a day ago, her insides torn in places till they bled while he was enjoying a lobster at the Coupole brasserie with his client.

He won’t try anything this evening. Marie can go to bed without worrying. She’ll let the time sift through her fingers. She knows that sometimes it will be tough, insurmountable, but she’s sure she can do it. A whole new day starts tomorrow. Laurent gets into bed, kisses her. He’s asleep already.

Bois-le-Roi is a delightful place. The Forest of Fontainebleau protects its inhabitants, nestling them in a natural, leafy cradle of calm. The reddish facades of the large buhrstone buildings peep through the impressive oak trees that edge the old properties. Below them the Seine flows past. They can hear the sound of the water, the pressure of it. This is where they’ve chosen to have their picnic. In crisp beams of autumn sunlight Marie’s mother, Irene, is busy unwrapping the picnic basket she prepared this morning. A multitude of bread rolls arranged perfectly by flavor give the finishing touch to the bucolic mood of the scene.

It’s nearly three weeks since Marie’s assault. Her vagina has stopped hurting. The pain inflicted by her rape has disappeared, taking with it the few precise recollections that clung to her memory. She has continued to make love with her husband. He still hasn’t noticed anything unusual about her behavior, just a few bad moods put down to stress and tiredness.

Laurent is unfolding the fishing rods down by the river with his father-in-law, Gérard. They’re hoping to grill their catch this evening. Marie’s father, a retired pharmacist, has always exercised a kindly authority over his family. His wife, a stay-at-home mother who attentively raised their two daughters, showed no inclination to have a career. Being a mother was enough for her. Marie has never thought to ask her whether she was truly happy, whether having a child could fill the void that she sometimes feels opening up around her. “Children are life itself,” her mother often tells her. “When life is added to life, what more could you want to give meaning to everything else?”

Marie is helping her sister change her baby’s diaper on the plaid blanket. He seems to like his aunt. She forces a smile.

“How are things at the bank? I heard it was heating up right now.” The pitiful ordinariness of the questions Marie has to answer shoots through her head at the speed of sound. Is she such a good actor? How can this loving, affectionate, attentive family, this husband who’s so close to his wife, not see anything, how come not one of them has noticed the change in her? They’re uncorking the champagne, handing around petit fours on china plates. It’s absurdly cheerful. Marie feels like taking the big knife, snatching it from her mother and, in sheer desperation, driving it straight into her heart and slicing it down into her belly.

Laurent comes back, swinging the half-full bag of fish from one hand to the other. He’s pleased. Marie finds him uglier by the minute. With his fishing rod, his blissful look of permanent happiness, and his perfect little life, she feels like spitting on him, ramming something right down his throat. Someone needs to focus on the details in this tableau that has no visible flaws. No one thinks to do that, preferring instead the smooth, supple contours of reassuring surface emotions. Whatever happens they wouldn’t want to make out the black stains, the dysfunction and the torment. Marie remembers how shocked she was when she first saw Magritte’s paintings on a trip to Brussels with Laurent. She’d always been fascinated by the precision of his work, the almost photographic mastery of his subject, his perfect grasp of the laws of perspective, but was terribly disappointed. Proximity can shatter everything in an instant. As she moved closer to her favorite work, The Castle of the Pyrenees, featuring a huge rock suspended in the sky with a small medieval town on its summit, she noticed the first imperfections. The irregular brushstrokes, the rough-hewn curves and contours, cracks in the paint … It was so disappointing, so far removed from everything she’d envisioned about this artistic perfection that she’d believed in since she first came across the painting as a child, on the glossy paper of a school book.

The sun illuminates the scene. Its gilded beams light up the damp lawn, radiate through the air. Only Marie is surrounded by gloom. In total darkness. She has the same faltering feeling as in that museum. The veil is finally being lifted on her existence, crushing the idealistic lie. She longs for silence to think over what she can do to extricate herself. They all clink their glasses. Marie feels like snapping the tablecloth out from under them as they guzzle champagne and macaroons, she wants to topple them over like glasses, break the crockery and dump everything on the ground. She never wants to feel her vagina again. Neither the suffering nor the arousal that are destroying her day after day. No one will ever touch her again.

“What’s this, then? Don’t you like champagne anymore?” her father says. “And I thought it would make you happy, it’s your favorite!” He puts his strong arms around her, squeezing her a little too tightly. Within a second she’s driven away her thoughts and buried her longings and is smiling at him. She eats and drinks, and kisses her husband, mother, and sister. She forgets the details, camouflages the flaws, ejects the pain, represses her disgust at the indifference of her loved ones. Their lunch is over. They need to go home, Roxane’s baby is getting cold.

Marie clings to her Monday morning delay like a precious undying feature. Some things mustn’t change. Laurent found his file right away, he’ll be on time. He wanted to make love to Marie last night. She couldn’t refuse, she gave herself to him with complete abandon. She lost that game long ago. The memories are gradually being quashed in her mind. She puts her cup in the sink and suddenly feels dizzy. Then it stops. She’s not sleeping well at the moment and, when Laurent’s not looking, she takes a lot of sleeping tablets before bed. Maybe the pills’ harmful side effects are making her weaker than usual.

She heads off to the bank on her new bicycle. Hervé’s happy to see her and shows her a picture on his phone of the turtledove he decided to buy on Saturday at a pet store on the banks of the Seine. “The look on Corinne’s face when she realized the cage had a new occupant! I just saw that and I knew I was going to have the best weekend of my life!”

Marie goes to her office for her nine-thirty meeting. She puts down her coffee and turns on her computer. Her stomach clenches, her eyes glaze over. Time stands still, the taste of urine comes back to her. Her vagina contracts, instinctively protecting itself. Her old phone has been placed in the middle of her desk. Marie can still feel it vibrating at her feet in that car. She remembers the configuration of the screen, the colors, the rhythm of the new message ringtone, her finger typing away on the keypad a few minutes before the attack. He has been in this office. He’s decided to come back into her life. She slowly picks up the phone. “Oh yes, the CEO’s assistant came by this morning. He found your phone after the last meeting, he wanted to give it back to you in person but you’d left already.” He’s lying to everyone too. She’s not the only one. She’s strangely reassured by this thought, it brings her closer to him in the intimacy of their shared secret. They’re in the same boat, perhaps even in the same dead end. When she’s plugged the phone in to charge it she switches it on, rereads Laurent’s messages, now finds them appallingly childish, thoughtless, almost indecent. Why did the CEO want to give her back her phone? There’s no evidence left now. He’s completely in the clear, it would be her word against his. No gynecological examination, no traces of violence, his car must have been cleaned from top to bottom the very next day, Marie threw her clothes in the bin. No one knows about it, it’s too late, the moment has passed.

Her client arrives late and she asks for him to wait in the corridor. She feels like throwing up. She runs to the bathroom, flips up the lid, and spews out her breakfast. It’s too much of a shock. Everything’s getting more and more complicated. One thing leading to another. But life just keeps on doing the opposite of what she wants, and she decides that today must go ahead without a letup.

A section of boulevard Voltaire is blocked because of a strike. The warm croissants will go cold. “You need to take rue Richard-Lenoir,” a policeman tells her, and she has an urge to retort that that was the street where she was raped and she doesn’t feel like walking along it, and, as an agent of the law, he should find another solution by way of compensation. She doesn’t say anything. The entrance to the car park isn’t all that wide, after all. It was dark, but Marie suddenly thinks it strange that no one saw anything. She pictures people turning away at the point where the deepest core of her parted company with the rest of her body, people happier to stare straight ahead than witness that disturbing sex scene. She doesn’t stop, quickens her step, gets away from the place by crossing the street. A furtive moment of suffering that stirs memories. She doesn’t remember the pain now.

Laurent is only just waking. He went to bed late last night after finishing his defense. The trial starts soon. He gets up to kiss his wife. “How lucky am I to have such a wonderful wife … She brings croissants for breakfast. I didn’t even hear you go out!” She didn’t want to wake him and run the risk of being subjected to his morning sexual enthusiasm. She sets the table meticulously, arranges the five croissants on the large silver dish her parents gave them as a wedding present, and pours freshly squeezed orange juice into a jug. Laurent starts cooking eggs and bacon, filling the room with the smell of frying. “Can you open the window a little, otherwise the whole living room smells of it.” She gets up. Her stomach churns again. How many times has she thrown up in the last few days?

Laurent looks at her. “Hey, are you okay? Are you sick?” She hurries to the bathroom and doesn’t have time to close the door. Laurent watches her through the half-open doorway and smiles.

“What are you laughing at? Watching me on all fours, puking?” Laurent comes over to her but she pushes him away. She finds the situation disgusting and asks him to go back to the kitchen and finish making breakfast. It hurts deep down in her stomach. She can’t take any more of this aching. It’s always in the same place, as if the pain has made up its mind to keep knocking at the same door, reopening the wound with the same determination. Marie has nothing left to throw up, she’s spitting bile. The green liquid dribbles down the inside of the toilet bowl. She drags herself back to join Laurent. He’s sitting on a chair, slightly offended that she banished him so harshly. He gets the picture before she does.

Marie sits at the table without a word, still wincing because of the acid that keeps rising up her throat. She can feel Laurent staring at her. She looks him right in the eye until he gives up and looks away. She doesn’t want to know what he’s thinking, doesn’t want to hear the words come out of his mouth. If she listens to his explanations she’ll scream, spit in his face, try to push him out the window at any opportunity or chuck the hot oil from the bacon in his face. “I’d rather stay at home today, I’m a little tired from the week I’ve had.” He was planning to go to an exhibition at the Musée d’Orsay, which Marie loves visiting on Saturday mornings before tourists get all overexcited about Paris. The light there soothes her; soft vaporous beams filter through the glass roof of this former train station, casting a heavenly protective halo over the large marble statues. He won’t go alone, he’ll get on with his work or go visit his parents in Melun.

Marie returns to the bedroom to get some rest, burrowing back under the unmade sheets contentedly. Some days aren’t worth the effort of being lived anywhere but in bed. She can just see herself in her pajamas, slumped on her plump comfortable mattress, receiving clients, friends, and relations. The nausea is back, stronger than before. “Do we have any medicine for this? Something to stop me throwing up?” Laurent brings a pack of small red pills and a glass of water. She’d like to tear the smile off his face, peel off his skin, blot out any trace of satisfaction in him. He needs to leave, and plants a kiss on his wife’s forehead like an encouragement for what lies ahead. She’s going to sleep all day. Sleep at last. For a few hours she just won’t be here.

Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.

Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес».

Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию на ЛитРес.

Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.