Underground Time (13 page)

The car had rolled over ten or twelve times before hitting a tree. She found that out later.

She looked around at the trees, the fields as far as the eye could see. Her body had begun to shake, she could no longer breathe. Silently, the terror was swelling.

They were no longer driving to the hotel. They weren’t going to have dinner in a restaurant or spend hours caressing each other between the sheets. They wouldn’t linger in bed. They wouldn’t take baths and drink wine late into the night.

They were there, side by side in the middle of nowhere. Something serious had happened. Something irremediable.

She stroked his face and neck. She brushed her fingers over his mouth. His lips were dry. He smiled.

Philippe asked her to go and get help. No one could see them from the road.

Mathilde’s knees were knocking together. So were her teeth.

Her door was jammed. She had to force it. She got out of the car, walked round it and went over to his side. She looked through the window, saw his legs and his hips swallowed up and hesitated for a moment. Everything seemed so calm.

She turned around one last time and then she went off. Then the sobs came, tearing at her throat. She walked to the slope. She grabbed hold of bushes and tall grass to pull herself up. Her palms were cut until they bled. She stood on the verge and raised her arms. The first car that came along stopped.

When she went back down, Philippe had lost consciousness.

He died three days later.

Mathilde had just turned thirty.

She has few memories of the months that followed. It was an anaesthetised, amputated period that no longer belongs to her. It lies beyond her, hidden from memory.

After the funeral she and the boys moved in with her parents. She swallowed white and blue pills, arranged by dose in a transparent box. She stayed in bed for days at a time, staring at the ceiling. Or stood in her childhood bedroom with her back to the wall, unable to sit down. She spent hours curled up under the scalding shower until her mother came and helped her up.

At night she felt her way around in silence, opening the door to watch the boys sleeping. Or else she’d lie down on the floor by their beds. She’d let her hand rest on their bodies, bring her face close to their mouths until she could feel them breathing.

She was drawing strength from them.

It seemed to her then that she could spend the rest of her life there. Looked after. Sheltered from the world. With nothing to do but listen to the throb of her sorrow. And then one day she felt afraid. Of becoming a child again. Of never being able to leave.

And so little by little she relearned. Everything. To eat, to sleep, to look after the boys. She came back from a bottomless torpor, from the depths of time.

At the end of the summer she went back to the flat. She tidied, sorted, emptied. She gave Philippe’s things to charity. She kept his records, his silver ring and his Moleskine notebooks. She found a new place to live. She moved. Simon started school. She began to look for work.

A few months later, she met Jacques for the first time. After three meetings, he hired her. Her mother came every day to look after Théo and Maxime until Mathilde got them places in a nursery.

She had started work again. She took the RIVA train, she spoke to people, every morning she went somewhere where she was expected, she belonged to a team, she gave her opinion, talked about the rain or the nice weather at the coffee machine.

She was alive.

She and Philippe had been happy. They had been in love. She had been lucky that way. Those years were written on her body. Philippe’s laugh, his hands, his genitals, his eyes burning with exhaustion, the way he danced, walked, took the boys in his arms.

Today Philippe’s death doesn’t hurt any more.

Philippe’s death is an absence which she has tamed. Which she has learned to live with.

Philippe is the missing part of her, an amputated limb of which she has retained a precise sensation.

Today Philippe’s death no longer impedes her breathing.

At the age of thirty, she survived the death of her husband.

Now she is forty, and a stupid bastard in a three-piece suit is in the process of destroying her slowly, by degrees.

Mathilde drank her coffee and left the money on the table. Outside, she raised her face to the sky and remained like that for a moment, watching the clouds scudding by, swift and silent.

For a few seconds she thought about going to the station, not returning to the office. Going home, drawing the curtains and lying down on the bed.

She hesitated. She felt as though her body no longer had the strength.

However, she took the same route as that morning. She walked to the office and slipped through the revolving door. As she got another coffee from the machine, she thought that she was drinking too much of the stuff. She took the lift and walked past the large windows. In the distance she could hear Jacques’s voice, but she didn’t look. She walked along the corridor to her new office. She took off her jacket and sat down. She shook the mouse to wake the computer.

While she was out, someone had left the memory stick with her personal files on her desk.

She’s just a brave little soldier. Used up, limping, ridiculous.

She hasn’t wanted to let go. To give ground. She has wanted to be here, keeping her eyes open. From an absurd display of pride or courage, she has wanted to fight. Alone.

Now she knows that she was wrong.

On a new notepad, she makes a list of things she could do to pass the time. Phone the train company and book tickets for the holidays, explore the World of Warcraft site and expand her knowledge of the rules of the game, do some online shopping at La Redoute, send an email to the managing agent about the bike park for which no one has a key.

She’s got to make it to six o’clock.

Even if she has nothing to do. Even if it’s pointless.

Mathilde takes the Argent Defender out of her pocket and places it just in front of her.

When the computer goes into standby mode, the screen turns into an aquarium. Fish of all colours bump against the glass, and go from one side to the other endlessly.

They swim past each other, rub against each other. Fine bubbles come from their mouths. They don’t seem to suffer.

Maybe the answer is there, in their unconsciousness.

So life in a bowl is possible as long as everything slides along, as long as nothing collides and no one panics.

And then one day the water turns cloudy. At first it’s imperceptible. The merest haze. Some particles of silt settle at the bottom, invisible to the naked eye. But silently, something is decomposing. You don’t exactly know what. And then the oxygen begins to run out.

Until the day when one of the fish goes mad and starts to devour all the rest.

When Thibault got back to his car, there was a ticket fluttering on the windscreen. He went into the nearest café. The noise assailed him immediately. For a moment he almost turned back. After ordering a sandwich at the counter, he sent a text to Rose to let her know that he was taking a twenty-minute break.

Thibault sits down on a vacant stool. He’s turned off his mobile.

He’s tired. He would like a woman to take him in his arms. Without saying anything, just for a moment. To rest for a few seconds, to gain support. To feel his body relax. Sometimes he dreams about a woman who he’ll ask: ‘Could you love me?’ With all his tired life behind him. A woman who would have known dizziness, fear and joy.

Could he love another woman?

Now.

Could he desire another woman? Her voice, her skin, her perfume. Would he be ready to start over, once again? The game of meeting, the game of seduction, the first words, the first physical contact, first mouths and then genitals. Does he still have the strength?

Or has something been amputated? Is there now something he lacks, something missing?

Start over. Once again.

Is it possible? Does it have any meaning?

Beside him a man in a dark suit is eating his lunch standing up and leafing through a newspaper. He would like to close his eyes, not to hear anything any more, to absent himself for as long as it takes for something within him to grow calm, something which he cannot contain.

‘Do I know what it means to be with someone? What form that can take, at my age, what it’s like, with all the pathetic little love affairs that you drag behind you. Do you know?’

Thibault turned towards a woman sitting on his other side. For a moment he thought she was talking to herself, and then he saw the earpiece in her ear and the microphone dancing in front of her mouth. She’s speaking louder and louder, indifferent to people looking at her.

‘No, I don’t believe it any more. You’re right, yes, that’s it exactly! I don’t believe in it any more. I don’t want to be taken for a ride. Because I’m heartsick. Yes, I’m scared. Yes, if you like. So? Fear is sometimes a good counsellor. I . . . what?’

She’s sitting with her legs crossed, her back straight, perched as if by some miracle atop her stool, one heel resting on the steel bar. Her mobile is lying in front of her. She’s looking at her empty glass, absolutely unaware of what’s around her, waving her arms about as she talks.

He would like to put his right hand on this woman’s shoulder to attract her attention. To say, could you just shut up? All we can hear is you.

Behind him a dozen conversations mingle with the sounds of cutlery and chairs scraping on the floor. Behind him people are drinking, laughing, complaining.

He wants to be alone. He feels hot and cold at the same time. He’s not sure if he’s getting a migraine but thinks he may be. He’s aware of his body in a strange way. His body is a wasteland, abandoned ground, yet linked to all this disorder. His body is under pressure, ready to implode. The city is suffocating, pressing down on him. He is tired of its randomness, its shamelessness, its fake intimacies. He is tired of its feigned moods and the illusion that men and women ever really connect. The city is a deafening lie.

‘So what do you think of it?'

Laetitia has burst into her office without knocking. She twirls around, poses, moves back and forth, waiting for Mathilde's verdict.

‘It's fantastic. It really suits you. Did you get it at the weekend?'

‘Yes. It's completely crazy since I've already got it in blue and black . . . You know, the one I was wearing the other day . . . It's the same . . . When I got home I felt pathetic.'

‘You shouldn't! Just tell yourself that your buying policy follows an implacable logic. That there's coherence in the way you approach clothes, a sort of consistency.'

Laetitia laughs.

Mathilde really likes this girl. Her way of diverting her, not starting with a drama, avoiding compassion.

Laetitia hasn't come in with the overwhelmed look that anyone else would have adopted in the circumstances. She's come in with her new jacket and this apparent triviality which she has never given up.

‘And what about you? Have you made up your mind about seeing Paul Vernon? Because you need to have the union behind you now, Mathilde. You won't manage it on your own. You're not up to it. That guy is sick, and he's not finished giving you a hard time. You were his creature, his thing, and then you escaped him. That's what people are saying, you know. Among other things. It won't sort itself out by itself, Mathilde.'

Laetitia looks around.

‘But seriously, look at this, it's shameful!'

Laetitia doesn't lower her voice. She wants people to hear her. Any louder and she'd be standing in the corridor with a megaphone crying scandal.

‘Patricia Lethu called me back a little while ago. She's taken things in hand. She's really trying to find me something else. I believe that she's taking care of it.'

‘Listen, Mathilde, that's all well and good. But for your part you mustn't let anything go. You must protect yourself. Continue exactly as if the war was going to go on. You must anticipate the worst.'

And then after a silence, Laetitia adds: ‘Watch out. Promise me you'll see Paul, even if just for advice. You need to get help, Mathilde. You can't do it on your own.'

 

Laetitia has gone. She has a meeting.

Mathilde didn't manage to tell her that she called Paul Vernon. Last week. Within a few moments, Paul Vernon got the picture. He repeated to her several times that she must not resign. Whatever happens, on no account. He explained to her how to keep records of everything, to note every detail, to describe in the most factual manner possible what has changed, the objective development of the situation. He suggested that she write down a sort of chronology that traced the deterioration in her relationship with Jacques stage by stage, noting the key dates. She must compile a dossier.