The List of My Desires (3 page)

In summer, the children go to stay with friends and Jo and I have three weeks in the south of the country at Villeneuve-Loubet. We stay on the Sourire campsite, and we get together with JJ and Marielle Roussel. We met them there by chance five years ago – they’re from Dainville, only four kilometres from Arras! – and Michèle Henrion from Villeneuve-sur-Lot, the Agen prunes place, she’s older than us, still an old maid. Jo claims it’s because she sucks the prune stones when she should be sucking pricks. Pastis, barbecues, sardines; the beach at Cagnes opposite the hippodrome when it’s very hot, Marineland once or twice, dolphins, seals, and then water-tobogganing, our screams of alarm that always turn to laughter, childish pleasures.

I’m happy with Jo.

It’s not the life I dreamed of in my diary, when my mother was alive. My life isn’t as perfect as the one she wished for me when she came to sit on the side of my bed in the evenings, when she stroked my hair gently, murmuring: You’re an intelligent girl, Jo, you’ll have a good life.

Even mothers tell lies. Because mothers are frightened too.

I
t’s only in books that you can change your life. Wipe out everything at a stroke. Do away with the weight of things. Delete the nasty parts, and then at the end of a sentence suddenly find yourself on the far side of the world.

Danièle and Françoise have been playing the lottery for eighteen years. Every week they stake ten euros and dream of twenty million. A villa on the Côte d’Azur. A cruise round the world. Even just a trip to Tuscany. An island. A facelift. A diamond, a Santos Dumont ladies watch from Cartier. A hundred pairs of Louboutins and Jimmy Choos. A pink Chanel suit. Pearls, real pearls, the kind Jackie Kennedy wore, oh, wasn’t she just lovely? They wait for the end of the week the way other people wait for the Messiah. Every Saturday their hearts are in their mouth as the balls go round. They hold their breath, they can’t breathe. We could die at any moment! they cry in chorus.

Twelve years ago they won enough to open Coiff’Esthétique. They sent me a bunch of flowers every day while the building works went on, and we’ve been friends ever since, although I’ve developed a terrible allergy to flowers. They occupy the ground floor of a house that looks out over the Governor’s garden in the Avenue des Fusillés. Françoise has almost been engaged several times, but the idea of abandoning her sister has always made her decide to abandon the idea of love instead; on the other hand, in 2003 Danièle went to live with a rep for L’Oréal shampoos, hair colours and other haircare products, a tall handsome man with raven-black hair and a baritone voice, very exotic. She had fallen for the wild odour of his skin, she’d been bowled over by the black hairs on the backs of his long fingers; Danièle had dreamed of animal lovemaking, of struggles and sexy wrestling, their flesh merging, but although the great ape had well-stocked balls, you couldn’t deny that, he turned out to have a totally empty head – his ignorance was vast and positively tragic. The screwing was fine, she told me when she came back a month later, carrying her suitcase, it was screwing to die for, but after the screwing, that was it, the rep went to sleep and snored, then he was off again first thing in the morning on his hairy rounds, cultural level nil, and, said Danièle, whatever anyone says I do need to talk, I need to exchange ideas, we’re not brute beasts, are we, no, we have souls!

The evening she came back we all went to have dinner at La Coupole, prawns on a bed of chicory for Françoise and me, Arras andouillettes for Danièle – there’s no denying it, as far as I’m concerned making a break leaves a hole in me, Danièle said, a yawning gap, I have to fill it somehow – and after a bottle of wine the twins were in fits of laughter, promising never to leave each other again, or if one of them did meet Mr Right she would share him with the other.

Then they wanted to go dancing at the Copacabana club; they might find a couple of good-looking guys there, said one twin. Two Mr Rights, said the other, laughing. I didn’t go with them.

I haven’t gone dancing since that thirteenth birthday of mine when I danced to ‘Indian Summer’ with my budding breasts.

The twins disappeared into the night, taking their laughter and the slightly vulgar click-clack of their heels on the pavement with them, and I went home. I crossed the Boulevard de Strasbourg, I went up the Rue Gambetta to the Palais de Justice. A taxi passed, my hand trembled; I saw myself hailing it, climbing on board. I heard myself saying: Far away, please, as far away as possible. I saw the taxi drive off with me in the back, not turning round, not waving, not making any last gesture at all, with no regrets; I saw myself leaving, disappearing without a trace.

That was seven years ago.

But I went home instead.

Jo was asleep with his mouth open in front of the Radiola; a trickle of saliva shone on his chin. I switched off the TV. I put a blanket over his sprawled body. In his room Romain was fighting in the virtual world of Freelancer. In hers, Nadine was reading the conversations between Hitchcock and Truffaut; she was thirteen years old.

She raised her head when I opened the door of her room, she smiled at me and I thought how beautiful, how very beautiful she was. I loved her big blue eyes, I called them eyes full of the sky. I loved her clear skin, on which no injury had yet left any mark. I loved her silence and the smell of her skin. She moved up to the wall and said nothing when I lay down beside her. Then she gently stroked my hair as my mother used to, and went on reading, out loud in a low voice this time, as grown-ups do to calm a small child’s fears.

A
journalist from
L’Observateur de l’Arrageois
came to the haberdashery shop this morning. She wanted to interview me about my
tengoldfingers
blog.

It’s only a modest little thing.

I write every morning about the pleasures of knitting, embroidery and dressmaking. I’ve helped people to choose fabrics and wools; sequinned ribbons, velvet, satin and organdie; cotton lace and elastic; rat-tail cord, waxed shoelaces, braided rayon cord, anorak cords. I sometimes write about the shop, a delivery of Velcro for sewing or tapes of press fasteners. I also send waves of nostalgia flowing out through the air to the embroiderers, lacemakers and weavers: their souls are the souls of women who wait. We are all like one of the Nathalies of
Eternal Return
, the Isolde figure in that film.

You already have over one thousand two hundred hits a day on your site, cries the journalist, one thousand two hundred, and that’s just here, in the local area.

She’s the age of a child you’d be proud of. She’s pretty, with her freckles, her pink gums and white teeth.

Your blog is so unexpected. I have masses of questions to ask you. Why do one thousand two hundred women visit your site every day to talk about clothes? Why this sudden passion for knitting, dressmaking . . . the sense of touch? Do you think we suffer from a lack of physical contact these days? Has the virtual world killed off eroticism? I stop her. I don’t know, I say, I don’t know. Once people would have kept a private diary, now they write a blog. She tries again. Did you ever keep a diary? I smile. No. No, I never kept a diary, and I don’t know the answers to any of your questions. I’m terribly sorry.

Then she puts down her notebook, her pencil, her bag.

She looks deep into my eyes. She puts her hand on mine, squeezes it and says: My mother’s been living alone for over ten years. She gets up at six every morning. She makes herself a coffee. She waters her plants. She listens to the news on the radio. She drinks her coffee. She has a quick wash. An hour later, at seven, her day is over. Two months ago a neighbour told her about your blog, and she asked me to buy her
one of those thingummyjigs
– by a thingummyjig she meant a computer. And since then, thanks to your trimmings, your ribbon bows, your tie-backs for curtains, she’s rediscovered the joys of life. So don’t tell me you don’t know any answers.

The journalist picked up her things, saying, I’ll be back, and then you’ll have the answers.

It was eleven-twenty that morning when she left. My hands were trembling, my palms damp.

I shut the shop and went home.

I
smiled when I looked at my teenage handwriting again.

The dots over the letter
i
were circles, the letter
a
looked printed and the dots over the first
i
and the second
i
in the name of a boy called Philippe de Gouverne were tiny hearts.

Philippe de Gouverne. I remember him. He was the class intellectual. He was the funniest in the class, too. We teased him about the posh
de
in his name. We nicknamed him the Guvnor. I was madly in love with him. I thought he was so seductive, with a scarf that went twice round his neck and fell to his waist. When he was telling you something he used the ordinary past tense, and the music of his conjugation of verbs bewitched me. He used to say he was going to be a writer. Or a poet. He planned to write songs. In any case, he’d make the girls’ hearts beat faster. Everyone laughed. Except for me.

But I never dared to approach him.

I turn the pages of my diary. Cinema tickets are stuck into it. A photograph of my first taste of flying on my seventh birthday, taken at Amiens-Glisy airport with Papa. He wouldn’t remember it now. Since his stroke he’s been living in the present. He has no past and no future. He lives in a present that lasts six minutes, and every six minutes the meter of his memory resets itself to zero. Every six minutes he asks me my name. Every six minutes he asks what day it is. Every six minutes he asks if Maman is coming to see him.

And then I find a sentence in violet ink near the end of my diary, written before Maman collapsed on the pavement.

I’d like to have the chance to decide what my life will be like, I think that’s the best present anyone can get.

The chance to decide what your life will be like.

I close the diary. I’m grown-up now, so I don’t cry. I’m forty-seven years old with a faithful, kind, sober husband; two grown-up children and a little dead baby – I miss her sometimes. I have a shop that, together with Jo’s salary, brings in enough each year for us to live a pleasant life, nice holidays at Villeneuve-Loubet, and – why not? – may yet allow us to make Jo’s wish for his dream car come true (I’ve seen a second-hand one that struck me as good value at thirty-six thousand euros). I write a blog that makes the mother of a journalist on
L’Observateur de l’Arrageois
happy every day, and probably one thousand one hundred and ninety-nine other ladies as well. And in view of the good figures for my blog, the host site recently suggested selling advertising space on it.

Jo makes me happy, and I’ve never wanted any other man, but all the same, you couldn’t say I ever decided what my life would be like.

On my way back to the shop I’m crossing the Place des Héros when I hear my name being called. It’s the twins. They’re drinking coffee and filling in lottery tickets. Why don’t you have a go for once, Françoise begs. You’re not going to be a haberdasher all your life, are you? I tell her I like my shop. Don’t you ever want to do something else? Danièle asks, backing up her sister. Have a go, come on!