The Front Seat Passenger (11 page)

Ulysse concluded by saying, ‘It’s as if we’ve been blessed with two lives in a way.’

Martine and Fabien exchanged an envious look as Elsa rose to clear away.

‘What a chatterbox he is; you can tell he’s from Marseille.’

But it was obvious they were proud of their story, and that this was not the first time Ulysse had told it. He probably served it up to every new guest, a slice of life, a speciality of the house. Fabien’s head was aching, too full of emotions, like his stomach was too full of food. Martine also seemed exhausted.

‘A little liqueur?’

‘No thanks. I think we’ll go up to bed. I’ve just got out of hospital.’

‘Oh yes, so what happened to your leg?’

‘It was a motorcycle accident.’

‘With me it was an exploding shell, in the war, but, you know, it doesn’t stop me living! Ah well, good night. Are you leaving tomorrow morning?’

‘Um … yes, not too early.’

‘Take your time. Till tomorrow then.’

Lying in the dark, neither Fabien nor Martine could get to sleep in spite of their fatigue. The radiant faces of the two old people
filled their thoughts. Fabien stubbed out his cigarette.

‘I don’t know whether I love them or hate them.’

‘He’s the annoying one.’

‘No, she is too; they both are. But hell, they’re not that bad. Why don’t we stay on tomorrow?’

‘If you like.’

They stayed the next day and the next as well. Elsa and Ulysse were amazed but delighted. They fussed over them as if they were their children. Ulysse was voluble, but Elsa took it upon herself to rein him in.

‘You’re getting on the young people’s nerves with your tales of your round-the-world tour. Leave them alone.’

So Martine and Fabien would go up to their room or else sit on the bench in the garden. The weather had been amazingly beautiful and warm since their arrival, a little bit of Indian summer. Fabien’s leg was healing. It was an ideal place to convalesce. Martine had become beige again, almost transparent. She expressed herself only by smiling wanly and nodding her head, which saved her from having to reveal herself in any way.

‘She’s shy, your wife!’

‘Very.’

At those moments Fabien remembered her pointing the revolver at Gilles’s head. The detonation that provided the sound track to that image brought him sharply back to the reality of the situation. It was like being sucked down a funnel: he was suffocating and owed his salvation entirely to clinging on desperately to the reassuring reality of Elsa and Ulysse. ‘Last
station before the great void, my old friend; those two there are your only chance.’ But even as he thought that, he was aware that Martine was not fooled, that she knew perfectly well what he was thinking, even if she gave no other sign than the merest blink. ‘What’s to stop me turning you in and getting Ulysse to call the police?’ He couldn’t reply any more than he would have been able to say that they each had the other on a leash.

‘Do you like fishing, Fabien?’

‘I don’t know, I’ve never tried.’

‘Shame! Right, listen, if you’re still planning to stay tomorrow, I’ll take you fishing. I know a perfect little spot, on the banks of a lake, very peaceful. We can spend the day with the ladies, have a picnic and in the evening we’ll have a lovely fry-up. What do you say to that?’

‘What do you think, Martine?’

‘Why not? Please excuse me but I’m going to bed, I’ve a bit of a headache.’

‘Of course, Martine, you’ll feel much better tomorrow. Good night!’

When Fabien joined her, she was filing her nails, sitting up in bed. Her hair was hanging down on either side of her face.

‘Can’t you sleep? Are you ill?’

‘No, no. Are you planning on being adopted?’

‘Why do you say that? Are you worried I’m slipping away from you?’

‘To go where? No, it’s just that you’re going back to your old-slipper ways.’

‘What does that mean, “old-slipper”? We’re good here, it’s peaceful. Elsa and Ulysse …’

‘Don’t talk to me about those two old imbeciles! I can’t stand having them hanging around us morning, noon and night.’

‘Happiness bores you, is that it?’

‘I don’t give a toss about happiness! Especially that sort. What do you think, how long have they got? Five years, ten years maximum, watching each other getting older and more shaky and waiting for one of them to pop their clogs. So no, strangely enough I don’t hanker after that kind of happiness.’

‘And what about us? All we have between us is death; it’s the only thing that binds us together!’

‘Rubbish!’

‘No, it’s not! You think you control me, but actually it’s me who controls you. I haven’t killed anyone and I’m no longer shut up in that bedroom. I can leave!’

‘You’ve nowhere to go any more. It’s because of you your friend is dead, because of you Madeleine is dead, because of you your wife is dead and thanks to me you’re still alive. It’s people like you who are dangerous, people who throw stones and turn away so as not to see where they land. You have nothing left but me and you know it.’

Martine fell asleep a short while later. For Fabien the night was long, very long.

Ulysse and Elsa’s good humour could not be dented by Martine and Fabien’s sullen mood. They had not said a word since they had woken up.

‘Come, my children, this is no time for a lovers’ tiff. You’ll frighten the fish away with faces like that! Breathe that air … It feels like spring!’

It was barely nine o’clock and they had already finished breakfast. The sun flowed like honey over the russet trees. Ulysse, bristling with fishing rods, beat his chest, while Elsa filled a basket with pâtés, sausage and bottles of white wine. Everything was beautiful and as inaccessible as the window of a luxury shop to a homeless person. After what Martine had thrown at him the night before, Fabien no longer felt he had any right to be happy, barely any right to exist, and then only if he touched nothing, since everything fell apart in his hands.

They decided only to take one car, Martine’s, since it was more comfortable than Ulysse’s Renault 5.

‘You’ll see, it’s a magnificent spot and … it’s a private lake. No one else but us! It belongs to a friend of mine; he’s loaded. But very nice. He’s almost never here. At the moment he’s in Martinique. I can go there whenever I like. You take that little road on the right, Martine, yes, that one.’

The car set off down a dirt track that led to a wooded valley. Fabien had lowered his window, and the car filled with the odour of undergrowth.

‘Smell that? The ladies are going to be able to collect mushrooms. Last year we brought home a few kilos of ceps. Here it is; we’ve arrived. I’ll open the gate.’

They parked in a vast clearing carpeted with soft grass which sloped gently down to a lake fringed with trees. Behind, there appeared to be the roof of a house.

‘Isn’t it paradise here?’

It could be described as paradise; you just had to believe that it was. The two men went over to the edge of the water. In places the water lilies seemed to form scales with bubbles bursting through the interstices.

Ulysse whispered in Fabien’s ear, ‘We’re going to get a good catch today, I can feel it. We’ll set up over there where the trees are more widely spaced – there’ll be less chance of getting the lines caught in the branches. I’ll prepare your line for you.’

The two women had settled on blankets, full in the sun. They were chatting and laughing. Elsa was knitting something in red wool. Ulysse spread all his paraphernalia of lines, hooks and floats out on the grass. Fabien was fascinated by the box of
wriggling red and white maggots. Ulysse picked one up between thumb and forefinger and secured it on the hook.

‘There you are, Fabien, you’re all set. You’ll feel the fish biting. As soon as you see the float disappear completely, give a flick of the wrist, and that’s it.’

For the first time in his life Fabien found himself with a fishing rod in his hands. He cast the line awkwardly two metres from the bank and waited upright, as stiff as a poker. He felt ridiculous, as if he were disguised as a fisherman. The reflections of the sun off the water hurt his eyes. He could hardly make out the little red float. The silence was broken by tweeting, splashing and flapping of wings in the undergrowth. He would have liked to throw everything into the lake and take off. But then he received a jolt to his wrists like an electric charge that spread from his head to his feet. The float had disappeared in the middle of a neat little circle. He pulled with all his strength, certain he had caught a barracuda. The roach described a long arc in the sky before landing wriggling on the grass.

‘Ulysse! Ulysse! I’ve caught one. What do I do?’

‘Don’t shout! You unhook it and put it in the keepnet.’

The fish was looking at him. Fabien didn’t dare touch it.

‘It’s not going to bite you! Pick it up and very gently take the hook out.’

It was disgusting. Those five centimetres of life fought in his hand with surprising vigour. It was a veritable carnage getting the hook out of the fish’s mouth. He had blood on his hand and a fishy smell he was sure he would never be able to get rid of ever again.

‘There. Now you put another maggot on.’

So there would be no end to it? Now he was going to have to skewer the obscene little parasite. ‘It’s because of you your friend is dead, because of you! It’s people like you who are dangerous.’ He put his line back in the water but minus a maggot at the end, to be sure of not catching anything.

He was bored stiff for the next two hours. The incandescent ripples ruffling the surface of the lake burnt his eyeballs. Since he didn’t care about the fish, he could have looked elsewhere, but he continued to stare at the float until he was cross-eyed. Ulysse was astonished that he failed to catch anything else.

‘Perhaps it’s not the best position here … I’ll spread some bait – that’ll lure them in while we have lunch.’

He threw in a handful of some sticky substance that smelt a bit like gingerbread, then joined the women.

It could not have been more
Déjeuner sur l’herbe
, from the tablecloth of dazzling whiteness, the wicker basket, the terrines, the bottles still streaming with water from the lake where they’d been set to cool, to Martine, who was smiling. Ulysse began to tease Fabien a little and told some tales of heroic fishing success, interspersed with ‘It’s paradise here, paradise!’ Perhaps it was the sun, or the wine, but gradually Fabien felt the ice that had formed in him during the night begin to melt. He got up to fetch some cigarettes from the car.

He was about twenty metres from the others when two shots rang out. Martine was sitting on her haunches, her chin resting on her knees, her outstretched arm holding the revolver. The figures of Ulysse and Elsa lay, one on its back, arms spread wide, the other on its side, curled up. Nothing was moving; even nature seemed to be holding its breath. Like a photograph. A
plane passed high in the sky, leaving behind it a white trail and, as if awaiting this signal, one by one the birds began to sing, the fish to leap in the water, and the wind to ruffle the foliage. As Fabien approached the picnic spot, he repeated to himself louder and louder, ‘I don’t believe it, I don’t believe it …’ Yet Ulysse could not have been any more dead, a napkin round his neck, his mouth still full of food and nor could Elsa, her cheek crushing a slice of pâté.

‘But why? Why?’

‘It’s paradise here.’

Martine threw him the revolver.

‘Here, there’s one bullet left.’

Fabien picked up the gun. It was still warm. He aimed it at Martine.

‘You’re insane, completely insane!’

She looked at him impassively, rocking gently backwards and forwards.

‘No … No, Martine, I’m not playing. Go to hell.’

He flung the revolver with great force into the middle of the lake.

‘Now, I’m leaving you, disappearing – you no longer exist.’

She didn’t reply, and didn’t move. Fabien turned on his heel and left, dragging his leg.

At the gate, just before going into the woods, he turned round. She hadn’t moved and her gaze was still fixed on him, would probably always be fixed on him.

The side of the road was littered with greasy papers, crushed beer cans, crumpled cigarette packets and banana skins. Lots of banana skins. It was unbelievable how many bananas motorists could consume. Understandably – they were cheap, practical, no stones. After two kilometres he had to stop; his leg was too painful. Until then cars had ignored the thumb he was holding out but now a blue van started braking and stopped when it reached him. He was a repairman, the kind who would help out with anything – boilers, electricity meters, hitch-hikers.

‘It’s not a job, you know, it’s a gift. Ever since I was little, I’ve just had to know how things worked.’

He did in fact look rather like an angel: plump, curly-haired, pink. He serviced an amazing number of clients, all over the country and any time including Saturdays, Sundays, even holidays!

‘Say what you like, there’s work to be found as long as you’re not too lazy to look for it.’

He left Fabien at Troyes station, giving him his card: ‘Gilbert Bedel, electrician, plumber, general handyman, gardener.’ Just in case.

He only had quarter of an hour to wait for the next train to Paris. He went and hid in a corner, right at the end of the platform in case Martine came to find him. She would probably guess that he would take a train. In spite of his brand-new clothes, he felt like the worst sort of tramp, hunted by his own shadow. Follow her and she flees from you, try to flee her and she follows you. But Martine did not appear. The train was almost empty. He fell deeply asleep and didn’t wake up until he got to Paris.

It was then that he realised he had nowhere to go, nowhere to put his nonexistent possessions; all the cupboards he knew were rattling with skeletons.

‘Please, Charlotte …’

He took the metro to Saint-Lazare and from there a train to Normandy. The rails followed by more rails, the metallic din in his ears, the lights clawing the night went on and on. The dulling effect of this and the fact that everything looked the same meant that he nearly missed his stop. The station was deserted, but there was a café open on the square. He ordered a beer and asked where the telephone was. The booth smelt of old dog, Gauloises and Ricard. It took a long time. As the ringing tone reverberated again and again, Fabien tried to decipher the graffiti, something about Monique, Arabs and Hitler.