Ladivine (29 page)

Cagnac smugly clicked his tongue against his palate.

A table had been laid in the vast marble-tiled dining room, and two servants were standing against the wall waiting to serve lunch, two boys dressed in white short-sleeved shirts and black slacks, hands clasped over their belts.

They’d brought out a special wine for the aperitif, yellow and strong, shipped in by the Cagnacs from the Haute-Savoie. Unbidden, the Cagnac woman poured a little into each glass, Daniel’s excepted.

Ladivine snatched up Annika’s glass, spilling a few drops on the table.

“She’s not old enough to be drinking wine,” she said, not looking at the Cagnac woman.

She was so angry she could have smashed the glass on the ground.

Even more swiftly, Annika took back the glass and swallowed the wine in one gulp.

She banged it down on the table, wiped her lips with one hand, and gave a little laugh, pretending she’d played a prank on her mother.

But there was no laughter in her eyes, only a coldness and a despair that wrenched Ladivine’s heart.

Marko broke into a half-amused, half-irritated grimace, as he often did when the children wouldn’t go to bed and insisted on acting up.

“Really, Annika,” he said, ruffling her hair.

“A little good wine never killed anyone,” Cagnac said jovially.

The servants next brought out an array of dishes, all of them, Ladivine noted, exceptionally heavy: pork cutlets covered with melted cheese, potatoes sautéed in goose fat, salad drenched in walnut oil, and for dessert thick crêpes stuffed with chocolate cream.

The children ate greedily, and far more than Ladivine would have thought possible, they who usually ate like birds, as she liked to say.

She herself was struggling to fend off revulsion. She ate a little piece of meat, a potato, then pushed away her almost untouched plate.

The Cagnacs ate energetically, saying nothing, the better to concentrate on their pleasure. Now and then they let out satisfied little grunts.

Ladivine saw them eyeing Marko and the children, as if to be sure they, too, were enjoying the food, clearly willing, she thought, to do whatever it took, perhaps have still other dishes brought out from the kitchen, so vital did they seem to find it that Marko be like them in every way.

Lowly and sorrowful, impotent, unhappy, she looked at them and felt the awful bond between the Cagnacs and her children and husband growing ever stronger, thanks to the repellent meal they were sharing.

How can you like such food? she wondered.

Although she wasn’t eating, she was the only one sweating. Her hair stuck to her forehead, lay clammily against her neck.

Marko was serenely stuffing himself.

We know what you did to Wellington—and what about the Cagnacs, what’s their crime?

What vile act is illuminating their faces with that hard, white, triumphant light, so intense that they don’t want to be alone in it?

Which is why, seeing Marko and the children giving off that same radiant glow, perhaps still a bit dim and flickering, they’re drawing them close to expose them to the full light of wickedness.

Oh, it must wear them down, having to endure that incandescence day after day with no company but each other.

And she thought: Well, not me, I won’t be a part of it, my darkness keeps me…Not me, I won’t…

She wasn’t far from feeling a genuine hatred for Richard Rivière.

Because were it not for his advice they wouldn’t now be at the Cagnacs’, ensnared in their vile web; they wouldn’t even be in this country.

No, not the country, she wasn’t sorry to be in this country, and she never would be—not for anything, come what may.

She’d made a very precious friend in the big brown dog. She’d never had such a friend.

Where they shouldn’t have come was the heart of this forest, it was the Cagnacs’, it was into this forest that Richard Rivière never should have sent them.

What was he after?

Above all, what did he want to come of his daughter Ladivine’s meeting these immoral people, and what was he trying to tell her?

That here she was seeing everything he loved, everything he most prized?

That this world, so utterly alien to Clarisse Rivière’s, hostile to that world on principle, was now his world, in his new Annecy existence, filled with a joy unknown in Langon?

Was he trying to show Ladivine, his one precious daughter, just what sort of man he’d become?

Did he want his daughter Ladivine to be so charmed by the Cagnacs that she would finally allow herself to choose Annecy over Langon, that her allegiance would finally desert Clarisse Rivière?

She’d remained ever faithful to Clarisse Rivière’s spirit, which he might have seen as a condemnation of his running away from it, from Clarisse Rivière’s intolerable innocence.

Well, thought Ladivine, scoffing to herself, if the Cagnacs had been sent to this outpost for the purpose of enchanting her, if their mission was to deliver her into Annecy’s loving, treacherous arms, then clearly Richard Rivière didn’t know his dear daughter so well.

Because nothing could possibly disgust her more than these old faces aglow with their crimes, these fatty foods, this sweet yellow wine.

And they were no more taken with her. It was Marko they wanted on their side, flanked by his children, ripe for the plucking.

She leaped up and hurried out, her nausea peaking.

Her broken sandal dragged over the tiles.

“No coffee?” asked one of the servants, coming back from the kitchen with a cup-laden platter.

Ladivine thought she heard something insolent and contemptuous in his voice, and she had the distinct impression that he was deliberately barring her way to the front door.

She sidestepped him, giving him a brusque bump with one shoulder, and walked out into the white-graveled courtyard.

The heat hit her in the face, throat, and arms, like so many blows aiming to knock her off her feet or drive her back into the air-conditioned entryway.

But she held her ground, tottering, resolute, took a few uncertain steps forward, searching for a shady spot.

The forest started up close by on all sides, and yet no tree shaded the Cagnacs’ property, not so much as a parasol sheltered the table and three metal chairs in the middle of the courtyard.

If the Cagnacs could tolerate this blast furnace, didn’t that mean they were made of that same metal, which could burn but remain unchanged inside?

Suddenly emerging from the forest, a couple came walking toward Ladivine.

Young, handsome, both dressed in white cotton, they greeted her pleasantly as they passed, then stopped, as if struck by something they hadn’t first seen, and walked back to face her.

“I’m sorry, we didn’t recognize you,” said the young woman, taking her in her arms.

Ladivine felt a pair of firm little breasts against her chest, a delicate rib cage, a heart full of sincere affection beating inside.

Perfumed with a renowned, high-priced scent, the woman’s neck bore a dark down, like the cheek of a newborn.

The young man embraced her, maintaining a slight distance, respectfully, thought Ladivine, so his chest and her breasts wouldn’t touch.

They smiled at her in such simple, obvious friendship that tears came to her eyes.

After a quick glance at Ladivine’s feet, the young woman took a pair of sandals from the big leather purse she had over her shoulder.

“I brought these for the test drive, but here, take them, you need them more than I do.”

She bent down and waited for Ladivine to hold out one foot, then the other, which she did, not even embarrassed.

Though her feet were wider than the young woman’s, the sandals fit wonderfully.

They were pretty, flat heeled, made of natural leather.

In one quick, nimble move the young woman slipped Ladivine’s old sandals into her bag, as if to put right a mistake or expunge a lapse in taste, then stood up again, pleased and pink cheeked.

Just then Cagnac came out.

He hurried toward the young couple, his back slightly bowed, smiling obsequiously.

“So you know each other?” he couldn’t help asking, more curious than he wanted to seem, Ladivine told herself.

“Why yes, she came to our wedding,” said the young woman.

“Oh, I didn’t know, I didn’t know.”

And the young woman gazed thoughtfully at Ladivine. Her large, dark, expertly made-up eyes closed halfway.

In a quiet, distant, melancholy voice she said:

“That yellow dress you had on, it was so pretty…I’d love to have one just like it.”

“And I’d be so happy to give it to you, if only I still had it!” cried Ladivine.

At that moment she would have given her her very life.

While the young couple tried out the car Cagnac had brought them, slowly circling the grounds at the forest’s edge, Ladivine went back inside, overcome by the heat.

The absurdly vast, high-ceilinged entryway, imitating a French château with its broad, flaring stone staircase, was empty but echoing with lively voices that Ladivine thought must be coming from the kitchen, and among them she thought she heard Wellington’s, which she put down to the shock of her encounter with the newlyweds, still coursing through her trembling, drained body.

She could not, she told herself, have been at that wedding.

Who looked so like her that people might mistake them?

And why did she feel it would be an outrageous lie to deny she was there, why did she feel she wasn’t lying at all when she confirmed that she’d gone to that wedding in a little yellow gingham dress bought three years before at the Galeries Lafayette in Bordeaux?

Just three weeks ago she was laying it in her suitcase, fully aware that it was too dressy for a trip such as this and would surely go unworn, and even then she had yet to put it on.

Oh, Ladivine knew why, even if she’d tried hard to convince herself that she was only waiting for the proper occasion, because in its plainness it was a very elegant dress.

No, it wasn’t that.

She’d never found the strength to put on that dress because she’d bought it the last time she went to see Clarisse Rivière, with Clarisse Rivière at her side, and two weeks later Clarisse Rivière would be killed, not in a yellow gingham dress but in the beige Karstadt cardigan Ladivine had sent for her birthday, because Clarisse Rivière had gently but stubbornly refused to be given anything at the Galeries Lafayette in Bordeaux, even with her birthday so near, and even though a peeved Ladivine thought it would be only polite of her mother not to make such a fuss and simply accept a present that Ladivine would otherwise have to go out of her way to send from Berlin the next week.

But Clarisse Rivière wouldn’t be moved, smiling in her vague, cautious, uninvolved way.

“No, thanks, I don’t want anything,” she would say each time Ladivine showed her some potentially suitable garment.

“But it’s for your birthday, I want to give you something,” Ladivine answered in mounting irritation.

I have to give you something, and it would make my life easier if I could just do it now—that’s what she was thinking, slightly ashamed of herself, as she briskly slid the hangers along the rods, inspecting the clothes with a vexed and critical eye.

She was still angry from the day before, when she’d first met the man who was sleeping with Clarisse Rivière.

And, seeing Ladivine’s deep disapproval of Freddy Moliger, her mother had turned distant and cold, as if consenting to a gift might authorize Ladivine to speak of her horrified misgivings about that man.

But Ladivine had no intention of bringing up Moliger.

She found this whole affair so incongruous, so shocking, that she couldn’t have spoken of it without disgust and dismay, and the last thing she wanted was to hurt Clarisse Rivière’s feelings, even if she suspected her mother was not quite as happy as she claimed.

In truth, she wouldn’t have known how to begin.

She didn’t want to think about that man, about her mother’s relations with him, and yet a quiet foreboding was forcing her to do just that.

And so she said nothing.

She’d taken Clarisse Rivière to the Galeries Lafayette in Bordeaux so together they could pick out her fifty-fourth birthday present, and now Clarisse Rivière was saying no thanks in her closed, quiet way, telling her there was nothing she wanted, now Clarisse Rivière was leaving Ladivine no choice but to face her own anger.

And Ladivine savagely shoved the hangers aside, one after another, confessing to herself that Clarisse Rivière’s desires and motivations were completely beyond her, and that this angered and upset and even disappointed her.

And she also admitted that, given the way things were, she had no real wish to please Clarisse Rivière, that this would be a purely pro forma present, because her anger was heavy with spite and frustration, and Clarisse Rivière had seen it and was now gracefully, somewhat frostily, choosing not to take part in that joyless game.

She was there, but she wasn’t alone, because her lover was with her, even though he’d stayed behind in Langon.

Both felt his presence beside Clarisse Rivière, and both knew that man’s existence was turning them against each other or, rather, since Clarisse Rivière wanted nothing more than to see Ladivine one day approve of Freddy Moliger, turning Ladivine against her mother, fueling an anger born with her first glimpse of Moliger’s sly, uncouth, stupidly cunning face, his way of sizing her up as he held out one clammy, evasive hand.

Ladivine couldn’t say a word about Freddy Moliger, because the simple fact of his being there was unthinkable, his being there between them, with his snickering half smile, his perpetually furious, outraged, wary face.

It’s degrading to criticize someone like that, she was thinking.

It was simply unacceptable that she and her mother were having to deal with Moliger.

How, then, could she possibly imagine Clarisse Rivière offering him the vulnerability of her naked body, her undisguised, trusting face, perhaps her words of love?

That idea, those images, were more than Ladivine could bear.