The Ninth Life of Louis Drax (17 page)

     —And you’re quite sure it couldn’t have been written by the boy? By Louis?

     —He’s been in a coma for over three months. He can’t speak, let alone write letters. But it’s written in his style, apparently. So whoever wrote it knows him well.

     —Does it contain any threats?

     Briefly, I explained the content.

     —I’ll find a way of getting hold of Detective Charvillefort, said Navarra. —But until we know for sure that it’s Pierre Drax who wrote it, we have to treat it as a separate case.

     When I told Natalie that Navarra was on his way, and a
gendarme
would be keeping an eye on the clinic too, she looked relieved, but distracted. While we waited for Navarra, I tried to get Natalie to tell me more about her husband. But she recoiled from the idea. It was clear she loathed the subject; when she spoke of him, it was with a mixture of fear, revulsion and contempt. She had met him at a difficult time in her life; she had just moved to Lyon from her native Paris – she’d had to get away, something went very badly wrong in her life there. He had seemed like a good man, but he turned out to be selfish and narcissistic. He and Louis never bonded properly. He had an alcohol problem, which – being a pilot – he tried to beat, but when he couldn’t, found clever ways to control and hide. He was sometimes violent.

     I flushed, remembering the bruise. I edged my eyes towards Natalie’s bare left arm. The mark seemed bigger than before, a dark, rancid purple.

     Natalie remained distracted when Georges Navarra – a pleasant man with sharp brown eyes – turned up to look at the letter. He greeted us both, and declared it to be very hot. There was a fire burning near Cannes, he said. If you listened, you could hear the helicopters. He patted the dog and asked its name. Funny, the way it seemed to take an instant liking to him. Navarra then sat at the table and spent a long time looking at the envelope.

     —Local postmark, he murmured.

     He read the letter through, then studied it with intense concentration, in the same way I might inspect a brain scan. All the while he stroked the dog which wagged its tail enthusiastically.

     —Very strange, he said, once again holding it up to the light. —And written in ink, too. Who writes in ink nowadays?

     —Plenty of doctors do, I said.

     —Does your husband own a fountain pen? he asked Natalie. I saw him notice her bruise, and squirmed inwardly.

     —What? She sounded far away. —I don’t know. Yes, maybe. He never wrote much.

     He had more questions, which Natalie answered in the same distracted way; her mind was clearly racing off elsewhere. Yes, she suspected it was written by her missing husband, because he was the only person who could possibly have done it, or wanted to. No, it was nothing like his handwriting and nor was it anything like her son’s. Navarra slipped the letter into a plastic bag as he spoke, and then started jotting down notes. While he did this, I thought about the line that Navarra had been discreet enough not to mention.

   
Dr Dannachet would like to sex you
.

     It was as uncanny as it was excruciating. The fact was, I had indeed dared to imagine – But now the idea seemed unthinkable. Criminally inappropriate. Obscenely unethical. Could it be that Pierre Drax’s insight into my psychology (perhaps the psychology of any man, or the psychology of embarrassment) was part of his cunning? His way of stopping something from happening between his wife and other men? This made sense to me, if nothing else did. Painfully, he began to rise in my estimation. Was he manipulating me? Watching and laughing?

     Navarra finished writing, then sat silent for a moment, tapping his teeth with his biro.

     —Best not to sleep here tonight, I think, he told Natalie.

     I felt relief at this, and I could see that she did too. Of course she couldn’t be left alone if her husband was stalking her. I suggested the clinic. It has two bedrooms set aside for relatives; one was currently occupied by Isabelle’s father, but Madame Drax could have the other. We agreed that I would take her there as soon as she had packed a bag, and that she would return to the cottage the next morning to feed the dog. By which time Detective Charvillefort would have been alerted to what had happened, and be on her way from Vichy. When Georges Navarra had gone, Natalie shuddered and sighed.

     —I still can’t quite believe he did it. It doesn’t make sense. It doesn’t hang together. But if it is him ... I mean, who else could it be?

     She didn’t need to continue. He was probably here, now, in the village, or staying in Layrac. It was unsettling to realise it was a possibility. And even more unsettling to realise that I, too, was being watched. How much did Drax know about me and Natalie?

     —I’ll pack a bag, she said.

     I nearly rang Sophie to say I wouldn’t be home for dinner, but resisted because I knew she would put me in the position of making up a lie that didn’t hold water, and give me grief. So I let it go. While Natalie was upstairs, I watched the hamster doing something complex to its nest. It seemed to be moving all its bedding from one side of the cage to another. For some reason this bothered me. Why would a small creature take it into its head to rearrange the furniture like that? I glanced at the pile of books on the table. They were mostly the standard texts on coma, but there were a couple of others, of the kind Sophie bought in bulk for the library:
Les Hommes viennent de Mars, les femmes viennent de Vénus
,
Affirmez-vous!, Le Complexe de Cendrillon
. They looked well-thumbed. Clearly they mattered enough to Natalie for her to have brought them in her luggage. There were photographs of Louis everywhere. A whole wall of them. Maybe too many, I thought. Was she a little obsessional about her son? Or was it just maternal pride? There was something else too: a half-completed model aeroplane. The construction looked quite complicated for a nine-year-old boy. Perhaps it was something he’d done with his father.

     —The hamster’s called Mohammed, she said, coming back and finding me peering into the cage. —And his home’s Alcatraz. That was Pierre’s name for it. Louis liked it. She laughed. —Mohammed in Alcatraz.

     She left food for the dog, then we got into her Renault. The air was heavy; I wound down my window to try and catch a breeze. Faintly, you could smell smoke. We drove in silence for a while.

     —If he wakes up – she said suddenly.

     —It’s only an if. Don’t hope too hard.

     I watched her profile.

     —But I have to know, she said, changing gear. She drove nervously – a city driver who has found herself in the country and can’t gauge its ways. —If he wakes up and remembers what happened, what will it do to him? You must have heard of that American case a year or so ago. The man who went into a coma when he was a child, and came out of it twenty years later. He woke up, and he was able to name his attackers, and they were jailed.

     She was speaking with an unusual animation, which made her features seem to come alive.

     —But that would be a triumph surely?

     —But at what cost? Don’t you see? She glanced at me, then back at the road. —His own
father
?

     I said nothing. We reached the clinic car-park, where we pulled in. She turned off the engine and we sat in silence for a moment, looking out of the windscreen at the luminous whiteness of the clinic’s faµade. Mingled in with the evening air and the smoke and the smell of resin from the pine forest, there was the sweet scent of tobacco flowers and jasmine wafting up through the evening heat. The cicadas shrieked and the air felt oppressive with the threat of an imminent storm. You could feel it hatching in your bones, like passion, or dread.

     —Look, she said, —I know I overreacted the other day when he sat up and asked for Pierre. And I apologise. But my first thought was to protect him. How can he live with what happened?

     Secretly, I had to admit that she had a point – but I saw no use in agreeing with her openly. I looked up at the gathering clouds.

     —As I said, it’s unlikely he will emerge with his memory intact. And if he does, well, we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.

     —Let’s go in, she said abruptly. —I don’t think we should be sitting here.

     Just as Inspector Navarra had promised, there was a policeman in Reception, replacing the usual security guard who was now, he told us, patrolling the building. We went straight to the ward; Louis had not moved all evening, according to Marianne, the nurse on night duty. She said that the policeman had already looked in, and would be visiting at half-hourly intervals.

     Marianne looked anxious. —Poor Louis, she whispered. I didn’t know.

     —Pierre Drax may phone, I warned her. —But if it’s him, or if anyone calls and hangs up, or doesn’t want to give their name, ring Georges Navarra, and then me. But you’ll be quite safe.

     The guest rooms were on the fourth floor of the building; I got the key from Reception and we took the lift in silence. The room was large but bare. Seeing the kettle, she offered coffee. I hesitated, and then accepted. She went to fill the kettle from the tap in the bathroom.

     —Natalie, I said slowly, when she emerged. —I’d like you to tell me what happened on the mountain.

     She turned to me, flushed, and instantly miserable.

     —I don’t really like to talk about it, she said quietly, switching on the kettle and sitting down in the armchair opposite me. She looked up and met my eyes frankly. —It’s very painful.

     —I know. It must be. Forgive me. But – well. You’ve already told the police. Surely you can tell me? I think I should know, as his doctor. There might be more going on inside his head than we realise. If he does emerge from the coma, his state of mind could affect his recovery.

     I could see she was struggling to fight back tears. The kettle began to growl in accompaniment to the gathering wind outside. I breathed in and exhaled slowly, waiting.

     —We had an argument. Me and Pierre. Louis hated us arguing, he was trying to stop it.

     —How did it start?

     —Louis had sweets in his pocket. Pierre saw him eating one. He got furious. He didn’t like Louis eating sweets. He said I wasn’t bringing him up properly. I didn’t even know he’d brought sweets. It was a simple mistake. But Pierre wouldn’t let it drop. He went on and on. He was accusing me of all sorts of things. Being a bad mother. Louis couldn’t stand it, and he ran off towards the ravine. We both ran after him. Pierre got to him first. He’s very strong. He grabbed Louis and started dragging him to the car, saying he was taking him to Paris. Louis managed to get free and run off. But Pierre caught up with him again just by the ravine, and they struggled and ... I didn’t get there in time.

     Her eyes met mine, shocked with pain.

     —I saw his face as he was falling. His mouth was open like he wanted to tell me something but–

     She broke off, and I shut my eyes. I could picture it: the father yelling at his son; Natalie screaming; the boy panicking. But did Louis stumble in the struggle, or was he pushed by a man so angry that he simply hit out at anything that came in his way? I waited for more, but she had fallen into silence. We listened to the thunder, each lost in our own thoughts.

     —Louis always sided with me, she said eventually. —Never with Pierre. I told you, they never bonded.

     —Why not?

     The kettle came to the boil and clicked off. A crack of thunder sounded outside, drowning the cicadas. Natalie shut her eyes and kept them closed as she spoke.

     —Maybe they would have done, if Pierre were Louis’ natural father. But he isn’t.

     —What? I asked, incredulous. There was a long pause before she spoke again. Her eyes were still closed, as though she couldn’t face seeing my reaction to her words.

     —Someone else was.

     —But who?

     —Another man. Jean-Luc. Who’s out of the picture, thankfully. It wasn’t meant to happen.

     —Oh. I’m sorry. So–

     —I met Pierre when Louis was just a few weeks old, and we married and Pierre adopted him. But it didn’t work. There were problems. It was very difficult for Pierre to accept Louis as his son. He had ... well, very mixed feelings. Some very negative ones. All these accidents Louis kept having – well, I began to think they might have been Louis’ way of somehow pleasing Pierre. I think Marcel Perez was beginning to think the same thing. The therapy was a slow process. It had its ups and downs, and then – well. It got cut short.

     It was now my turn to stay silent, as I absorbed what she’d just told me. It made sense. There was no reason why she should have divulged any of this before, but now she had, a lot began to fall into place. Pierre Drax’s negative feelings towards Louis, for a start.

     —The police are aware of this? I asked eventually.

     —Of course.

     But there was still something that didn’t fit. It wasn’t just that a row that erupted over a packet of sweets –
sweets
, for goodness’ sake! – had led to such a catastrophe.