Apocalypse Baby (8 page)

‘Well, anyway, OK, tomorrow when you go and see the parents, do me a favour and observe the father's reactions when you mention her real mother. And the stepmother's reactions too. The stepmother, a priori we're suspicious of her, right?'

‘Why?'

‘Basic principle. All stepmothers are suspect. Don't you know your fairy tales?'

I burst out laughing, and she looks at me sideways. It must be the first time I've laughed at one of her jokes. I ask, ‘But why don't we just go straight to the mother right away?'

‘Because we're allowing some time for Rafik to find out where she is.'

‘Oh. You know Rafik?'

Rafik is the cornerstone of the Reldanch agency, the guy who runs our IT systems. Everything goes through him, so much so that it's difficult to ask him anything.

‘Of course I know Rafik. How would I survive without Rafik?'

In the Buttes-Chaumont park in north Paris, there's a little sunshine and a lot of dogs. We wait, sitting on a bench, for the famous Antonella to arrive. She's a good twenty minutes late. The Hyena is in a chatty mood.

‘Antonella is wicked, but funny. Everyone who met her when she first got to Paris knows she's only a shadow of her former self. She
was
a diva. She was working for the newspapers, Italian correspondent. In those days, if you were a journalist at that level, your address book filled up quickly, and if anything happened in town, it wasn't hard to get to the spot. I don't know when she started being an informer, I guess she had some relationship with a politician – her speciality was culture, but the two worlds often met. When I met her, she was consulted all the time and very protected. With all the internal in-fighting in the main parties, there was a huge demand for information for a few years. Antonella was in her element. But times change, the media empire collapsed, her protectors fell into disgrace. Now she does this and that. Same as everyone else, more or less, you'll say. She comes pretty expensive though. The other journalists will trade information, but Antonella has no problem about sources, she only wants cash. I asked her to get hold of the contents of all the computers in the apartment, she's got a sidekick who's good at that. Her own interest is that it allows her to peep around. You never know, she might pick up some interesting titbit of information, just by chance…'

‘How did she manage to get into his apartment so easily?'

‘All artists like to give interviews to the press.'

You can't miss her when she does turn up: she's wearing enormous fuchsia-pink après-ski boots. I suppose they must be the in thing, something which never ceases to surprise me. Without apologizing for being late, she throws a large
envelope into the Hyena's bag. She has an attractive husky voice which doesn't fit her look of an ethereal slut.

‘Wow, he comes on strong, your client. Still at his age, they're all more or less nymphomaniac.'

‘Don't fish for compliments, Antonella, you know you just knock them out.'

‘Ah, don't talk about the past. How are you?'

She hasn't said hello to me, not even a glance. Humiliating but I'm starting to get used to it. It's like when you're a teenager and you go out with the school prom queen, after a while being in the shadows is restful. We all start walking towards the park gates and the Hyena asks, ‘Do you know the stuff he writes?'

‘Domestic dramas among the bourgeoisie. Catholic, right-wing, but in a traditional way, not aggressive or racist or antisemitic. So nobody much is interested in him. He'd do better to write a blockbuster about the camps, if he wants to be taken seriously, that would make a change…'

‘Is he successful?'

‘Not so much now. He still has a bit of a profile. A little TV, state radio, does a few signing sessions in bookshops. He publishes a lot of articles here and there, wherever they'll let him, he's the right age and CV to get on the jury for literary prizes, and I couldn't quite see why he's so isolated. He's not very aggressive, that always reduces your credibility. Publishers have fallen into the habit of looking after him, I've been told he gets an advance of fifteen thousand per book. He doesn't sell more than five thousand. So you can see why he writes a lot.'

‘He'll be disappointed when he sees there's no article.'

‘No, it's OK, I really was asked to put together a file for a book by this journalist on
The Times
who discovers every year that French culture doesn't have any international influence any more. Big deal, eh? I'll pick up on this one malicious and well-aimed remark he made about Sollers and his importance, and that'll do the trick. He'll be cross at having chatted to me for a couple of hours, making eyes at me all the time, and finding I've only included that one little jab, but basically he'll be glad he's quoted at all. If it wasn't for you, he wouldn't even get that.'

Antonella is flirting outrageously with the Hyena. I wonder whether they've slept together.

‘Did he mention his daughter at all?'

‘No. His father, yes, his mother a bit, his daughter not at all.'

‘Protecting his privacy?'

‘Men his age don't often talk about their children. They are their parents' children, but nobody's parents. Unless there's some drama, children aren't very good subjects for novels, at least for men. If his kid were to die, then yes, there might be a novel in it… then again, a father's grief isn't bestseller material. But if she comes back home now and slags him off for being an old fusspot, what's he going to do? He prefers to think of something else.'

WHEN CLAIRE LETS HERSELF SLIDE BACK IN THE
bath, plunging her head under the warm water, she can hear sounds from the flat below. As so often, the neighbours are having a row. Amplified by the water, the sounds become strange, muffled, low. Often, the husband is violent. Claire hears the woman yelp two or three words, then she hears him retorting from another room, before he finally goes striding through the flat, and that's when he hits her. She screams and protests, sometimes trying to run away from him. Then the scene is punctuated by some louder sounds than the others, hard to identify, not necessarily blows. Followed by silence. The first few times, Claire was afraid he'd killed her, but in time she realized that it was the calm after the row. You wouldn't think, to look at them, that they were that kind of couple. Him, she often sees in the lift, he's an examining magistrate. Reddish face, rather puffy, a nose swollen by alcohol, but always well-dressed, polite, and smelling of aftershave. He was probably good-looking in his youth. He still acts the gentleman towards women. He has two children, a boy and a girl, two years apart. When Claire moved in with François, she used to see them often, playing with the concierge's little girl on the pavement out in front.
They're big now, no more scooters and marbles until they have children of their own. She never hears them intervene when their father raises his hand against their mother. Like all people this kind of thing doesn't happen to, Claire is sure, or so she thinks every time she meets someone from that family in the lift, that she would never have put up with what the woman downstairs endures. If only for her two daughters' sake, she'd have found the courage to leave, to pack her bags, whatever it cost, she'd have protected them from a violent father. Christophe had never laid a finger on Claire, nor on his daughters, come to that.

He left her just before the older girl's sixth birthday. Claire had loved him unreservedly and obstinately for ten years. He'd come into her life when she was twenty-two, one New Year's Eve at a friend's house. She'd felt his eyes on her, trying to locate her wherever she was in the room, and then his large figure had kept appearing within a few feet from her, following her round from group to group. A mild form of stalking, which he hadn't tried to conceal. He wanted her. It attracted Claire. She waited. That evening he was wearing a black sweater and three-day stubble, which suited him. She was young, still unsurprised that life revolved round her, pursuing her and offering her the choicest gifts. After spending a few nights with him, she'd begged him to shave. Claire's face was burning, her fine skin irritated and painful. He was her first serious boyfriend. She had met Christophe the same year her mother had marched her off to a dietician – and it had worked, she had lost weight, had to buy new clothes, and had become attractive again. She managed to stay slim for two years, but after the birth of the older girl,
Mathilde, she'd put on five kilos and never succeeeded in losing them. It was distressing, but it hadn't dragged her down into the depths of depression, as it would have done before she had given birth. Something had happened to her with motherhood, it had given her calm and confidence. The presence of this baby in her life had transformed the way she looked at things.

Before Mathilde, there had been holidays abroad: Egypt, New York, Ireland, Sweden, friends, dinner parties, evenings at the cinema, their first flat, family parties, and plenty of long mornings in bed. Then there'd been the enchantment of declaring her pregnancy, decisions to take together, the nursery to be furnished, the first scan, thinking of a name. Her parents had completely changed their attitude when she'd told them the news. Claire had a sister three years younger, who had always been her mother's favourite. Claire had been the child who was a bit too fat, a bit too placid, never managing to engage her parents' attention. When they divorced, she had been twelve years old, and once more, her mother had devoted herself to her little sister, everything revolved round her. Claire didn't get up to any pranks, she didn't worry her mother. And she wasn't as pretty. She couldn't do anything without attracting blame. Nobody around her had taken the trouble to notice that she had been deeply upset by the divorce. It's true that she hadn't done anything outrageous to alert anyone. She had just started putting on a few kilos, slowly, and become more withdrawn. In her childhood bedroom, for years she had secretly pinned the holiday postcards sent by her mother next to the ones from her father, so that the blue hills of the Vosges were up against the mountains of Peru,
the Mediterranean jostled the Pacific. With a little Sellotape to stick them together. That was back when the children of divorced parents used to have to explain to their school-friends what it was like to have two homes, in the days when that was still unusual. Her sister Aline hadn't needed a year's mourning in order to start boasting in the playground of two lots of Christmas and birthday presents and all the special permissions to be absent or to extract more pocket money through parental guilt or bargaining: ‘Mummy said yes,' or ‘Daddy promised me.' Claire often wished she could strangle her sister. But once she was pregnant with Mathilde, everything changed. Both parents got into the habit of calling her up all the time, and she had to schedule their visits so that they didn't coincide too often. The day of the birth, they had both been with her in her hospital room, without their new partners, and she had seen the joy on their faces: shared emotion, the first grandchild. And it had lasted until the birth of the second daughter, Elisabeth. Then, wouldn't you know, Aline had become pregnant just afterwards, from some one-night stand, not that that made the coming child less welcome. On the contrary, as usual, she had managed to spoil everything, demanding the maximum of attention. One day, Aline had turned up at her mother's house, declaring firmly that she couldn't go through with it, she wanted an abortion at six months. Next day she turned up at her father's, saying she would have the baby but give it up for adoption, she couldn't take care of a child on her own. A week later, heavily pregnant, she was snivelling in her mother's kitchen, drinking her fifth beer and chain-smoking, claiming that she was sure the baby would be stillborn, and of course that she
would never get over it. Poor little dead baby, she spent the whole evening torturing her mother. And it worked. She got all their attention. The parents started telephoning each other every day, telling each other what they'd had to endure from her, and making frantic efforts to rescue their daughter from the brink of madness. Aline had always done whatever she liked, and her tactics were spectacularly successful. She had given birth to her son. It
would
be a son, of course. For three months, she'd gone into ecstasies over the bliss of motherhood, then her figure had come back, she'd put on a dress, left the baby with her mother, and continued her life as before: plenty of affairs, too much alcohol, and hefty overdrafts.

Mathilde was just five then, the age when children stop being little angels and become little people, they're not quite so cute, adults find them less entrancing. Her grandmother went on looking after her with pleasure, but her real pride and joy was Thibaut, the first male child. The adorable, extraordinary, reckless, wilful, insufferable Thibaut. Claire was already in therapy at that stage: she was getting the feeling that at last she could take control of her life and would be capable of going forward alone, without her parents' support. She had everything she wanted. A husband, two daughters, a very nice apartment. She'd spent ages studying interior design magazines, so that within the limits of their budget, their flat would look stylish. So that Christophe would be proud to invite his colleagues back, and be happy himself to return home in the evenings. She had thought how grateful she was for what life had given her in the nine years with him, every time she found herself chatting to a friend whose husband was unfaithful, or having problems with his career,
or being difficult to live with. She had thought how grateful she was, every time she met former schoolfriends who still had no children and thought they could fill their lives with something else. As if you could do without that kind of love and not miss out on what life was all about. In return, she tried her best to take care of everything properly, writing herself long to-do lists that she never completely dealt with. She saw to all the family medical appointments, sorted out clothes for the different seasons, organized their holidays, supervised the children's homework, thought of interesting activities for them, had plates that matched the tablecloth, found a good dentist, arranged fun birthday parties, paid the bills, drove the children to the swimming pool, bought new shirts for her husband before the old ones wore out, recruited a cleaning woman, located the best car insurance. She had never imagined that Christophe would underestimate the happiness they enjoyed, and his good fortune in having a wife like her at home. A wife who would help his children grow up, who wasn't a big spender, who was always cheerful and took care of everything without complaint.