The List of My Desires (8 page)

Six bloody minutes. They don’t last long.

A
t the weekend, Jo takes me to Le Touquet.

I’ve lost more weight; he’s worried. You’re working too hard, he says. The shop, the blog, giving Mado moral support. You ought to rest.

He’s booked a room in the medium-priced Hôtel de la Forêt. We arrive at about four o’clock.

On the motorway, seven Porsche Cayennes passed us, and I noticed the way he looked at them every time. His sparkling little dreams. They shine more brightly than usual.

We refresh ourselves in the bathroom and then go down the Rue Saint-Jean to the beach. He buys me some chocolates at the Chat Bleu. You’re crazy, I whisper in his ear. You need to build your strength up, he says, smiling. There’s magnesium in chocolate – it’s good for stress. What surprising things you know, Jo.

Outside again, he takes my hand. You’re a wonderful husband, Jo, I think; a big brother, a father, you’re all the men a woman could need.

And maybe even an enemy, too. That’s what I’m afraid of.

We walk on the beach for a long time.

Sand yachts speed past close to us, their sails snapping in the wind, making me jump every time, like the clusters of swallows flying low over Grandmother’s house during my childhood summers. Out of season, Le Touquet looks like a picture postcard. Retired people, Labradors, people riding horses, and sometimes a few young women walking on the promenade with baby buggies. Out of season, Le Touquet is a place outside time. The wind whips at our faces, the salty air dries our skin; we shiver, we are at peace.

If he knew, just think of the fuss, it would be war. If he knew, wouldn’t he want islands in the sun, tangy cocktails, burning sand? A huge bedroom, fresh sheets, glasses of champagne?

We walk for another hour and then go back to our hotel. Jo stops at the little bar and orders a non-alcoholic beer. I go upstairs to have a bath.

I look at my naked body in the bathroom mirror. My spare tyre has deflated, my thighs look slimmer. I have a body in transit between two weights. A soft, blurred body. But all the same, I like the look of it. It’s touching. It suggests a blossoming to come. A new fragility.

I tell myself that if I were very rich, I’d think it ugly. I’d want a complete makeover. Breast implants. Liposuction. A tummy tuck. Cosmetic surgery, including an arm lift. And perhaps a little work on my eyelids.

Being rich means seeing all that’s ugly and having the arrogance to think you can change things. All you have to do is pay for it.

But I’m not as rich as all that. I just happen to have a cheque for eighteen million five hundred and forty-seven thousand, three hundred and one euros and twenty-eight centimes, folded eight times and hidden inside a shoe. All I have is the temptation. A possible new life. A new house. A new TV set. Lots of new things.

But nothing really different.

Later, I rejoin my husband in the hotel restaurant. He has ordered a bottle of wine. We drink to each other. Let’s hope nothing changes and we go on as we are, he says.
Nothing really different.

Thank you, whoever’s up there, for keeping me from cashing that cheque yet.

M
y wish list.

A holiday alone with Jo (and not at the Sourire campsite. Tuscany?).

Insist on a different room for Papa.

Take Romain and Nadine to see Maman’s grave. (Talk to them about her. And her currant loaf, yum yum.)

Get my hair cut.

Sexy red lingerie. (It will drive you mad, Jo!)

That coat at Caroll’s before someone else snaps it up. QUICK!!

Have the sitting room redecorated. (Flat-screen TV???)

Change the garage door for an automatic one.

Have lunch at Taillevent in Paris some day. (Read a mouth-watering article in
Elle à Table.
)

Foie gras on gingerbread with the twins and fine wine, while we talk about men all through the night.

Ask Jo to make a shelter for the bins in the yard. (I hate recycling!!!)

Go back to Étretat.

Spend a week in London with Nadine. (Share her life. Love and cuddles. Read her
The Little Prince.
My God, I must be crazy!)

Pluck up the courage to tell Romain that I thought the girlfriend he brought home at Christmas was nasty, vulgar and, well, super-nasty. (Send him some money.)

Spend time at a spa. (Massage. Esthederm skin-care products? Simone Mahler?) Take care of myself. Oh, go away, there’s nobody at home!

Eat better.

Go on a diet. (Both of the above.)

Dance with Jo to ‘Indian Summer’ on the next fourteenth of July.

Buy all the James Bond films on DVD. (???)

Ask the journalist to lunch. (Give her mother a present.)

A Chanel bag.

Louboutins.

Hermès. (Get them to unfold lots of scarves and then say, hm, I’ll think it over.)

Buy a Seiko watch.

Tell everyone I was the winner of the eighteen million jackpot. (Eighteen million five hundred and forty-seven thousand, three hundred and one euros and twenty-eight centimes, to be precise.)

Be envied. At last!

Go to the Porsche showroom (in Lille? Amiens?). Ask for brochures about the Cayenne.

Go to a Johnny Hallyday concert at least once. Before he dies.

A Peugeot 308 with a satnav. (???)

To be told I’m beautiful.

I
almost had a lover once.

It was not long after the birth of Nadège’s dead body. When Jo was breaking things around the house and had stopped drinking eight or nine beers in the evening, slumped in front of the Radiola.

That was when he turned nasty.

Drunk, he just thought he was a big vegetable. A wimp; everything a woman hates in a man: vulgarity, egotism, thoughtlessness. But he stayed calm. A wimp, set in his ways, in fact congealed in them.

No, it was sobriety that turned Jo cruel. At first I put it down to coming off the booze. He’d replaced up to a dozen full-strength beers an evening by twice the number of low-alcohol Tourtels. You might have thought he wanted to drink them all to get at the 1% of alcohol each is supposed to contain, according to the tiny wording on the label, and be back in his inebriated comfort zone. But there was nothing at the bottom of those bottles, or himself, except sheer nastiness. The hateful things he said: it was your big body that suffocated Nadège. Every time you sat down you were strangling her. My baby’s dead because you didn’t take care of yourself. Poor Jo, your body is a dustbin, a great fat disgusting dustbin. You’re a sow. A slag and a sow.

I took it all.

I didn’t reply. I told myself that he must be suffering horribly. That the death of our little girl was sending him mad, and he was turning that madness on me. It was a black year, everything about it was dark. I used to get up in the night to go and cry in Nadine’s room as she slept with her fists closed. I didn’t want him to hear me and see how much he was hurting me. I didn’t want the shame of that. I thought again and again of running away with the children, and then I told myself all this would pass. His grief would lift in the end, would simply leave us and go away. Some kinds of misery weigh so heavily that you have to let them go. You can’t keep everything inside you. I stretched out my arms in the dark; I opened them hoping that Maman would walk into them. I prayed to feel her warmth around me; I didn’t want the darkness to carry me away. But women are always alone in the face of men’s ill-will.

If I didn’t die then, it was first because of an ordinary little remark. Then because of the voice that spoke it. And then because of the mouth that voice came out of, and then the attractive face in which that mouth was smiling.

L
et me help you.

Nice, 1994.

Eight months after we had buried Nadège. A horrible glossy white coffin. Two granite doves taking flight on her tombstone. I vomited; I couldn’t bear it. Dr Caron, our present doctor’s father, prescribed something for me. And then rest, and then good fresh air.

It was June. Jo and the children stayed in Arras. The factory, the end of the school year; their evenings without me; warming up meals in the microwave, watching videos, the moronic films you can indulge in when Maman is away; evenings telling yourselves she’ll soon be back, things will get better. A little period of mourning.

I told the older Dr Caron that I couldn’t cope with Jo’s cruelty. I said things I never ought to have said. About my weaknesses, my feminine fears. I told him about my terror. I was ashamed, frozen, petrified. I wept, slobbered, held in his bony old arms, his pincers.

I wept over my husband’s disgust. I had punished my murderous body; the point of the carving knife had drawn screams on my forearms; I had smeared my face with my guilty blood. I had gone mad. Jo’s savagery had eaten me up, destroyed my strength. I could have cut out my tongue to silence him; I could have burst my eardrums so that I wouldn’t hear him any more.

So when the older Dr Caron said, in a cloud of bad breath, ‘I’m sending you away for a cure all by yourself for three weeks. I’m going to save you, Jocelyne,’ his bad breath brought a ray of light.

And I went.

Nice, the Centre Sainte-Geneviève. The Dominican nuns were lovely. To see their smiles, you’d have thought there was no human atrocity that they couldn’t imagine and yet still forgive. Their faces were luminous, like the faces of the saints on the little bookmarks in our childhood missals.

I shared a room with a woman the same age as Maman would have been now. As patients, she and I were both what the sisters called
mild
cases. We needed rest. We needed to find our way back to ourselves. Rediscover ourselves. Be reconciled to ourselves, in fact. Our status as
mild
cases meant we were allowed out.

Every afternoon, after the siesta, I walked down to the beach.

An uncomfortable beach, covered with pebbles. But for the sea, you’d have thought it a small stretch of wasteland. At the time of day when I go down there the sun is on your back as you look at the water. I’m putting on suncream. My arms are too short.