Fresh Water for Flowers

by Valérie Perrin

  “Dear Violette,

  My garden has become sadder than my cemetery. As the days go by, they feel like little funerals.

  What can I do to see you again? Do you want me to organize your abduction, over there, where the trains are?

  Two Sundays a month, it was hardly excessive. No big deal.

  But why do you actually obey him? Are you aware that, sometimes, one must be a rebel? And anyhow, who’s going to look after my new tomato plants?

  Yesterday, Madame Gordon came for me to heal her shingles. She left smiling. When she asked me, “What can I do to thank you?” I almost replied, “Go and get Violette for me.”

  I’m in the middle of doing my carrot seedlings. I put the seeds in pottery cups. I’ve spread my seedlings around my sitting room, beside the tea caddies, just behind the windows. That way, when the sun hits, it’s directly on them. When it’s hot, they grow well. Nothing works like the heat. The ideal would be to put them in front of a fireplace, but my little house doesn’t have one. That’s why Father Christmas never visits me. Next, when they have grown well, I’ll put them under glass. Onions, shallots, and beans you can put straight into the soil. But not carrots. Never forget the ice saints, on May 11th, 12th, and 13th every year. That’s when it’s make or break, that’s when you have to prick them out. In theory. If you want to protect your young shoots, place pots over them at night, or some light clingwrap.

  Come back soon. Don’t be like Father Christmas.

  With all my best wishes,

  Sasha.”

  Elvis knocks on the door and comes in with his vanilla cream puffs wrapped in white paper. I fold up Sasha’s letter and put it back in its place, to forget it, and come across it another time, by chance.

  “Everything O.K., Elvis?”

  “Violette, someone’s looking for you. She said, ‘I’m looking for Philippe Toussaint’s wife.’”

  My blood freezes. A shadow follows Elvis. She comes in. She stares at me without saying a word. Next, her eyes sweep around the inside of the house, and then return to me. I can see that she’s cried a lot—I’m used to seeing people who have cried a lot, even if it was several days before.

  Elvis calls Eliane by slapping both thighs, and takes her outside, as if wanting to protect her. The dog cheerfully follows him. She’s used to going off on walks with him.

  Now there’s only her and me in the house.

  “You know who I am?”

  “Yes. Françoise Pelletier.”

  “You know why I’m here?”

  “No.”

  She takes a deep breath to hold back her tears.

  “You saw Philippe, on that day?”

  “Yes.”

  She reels from the blow.

  “What did he come here for?”

  “To return a letter to me.”

  She feels unwell, she changes color, her forehead is beaded with sweat. She doesn’t move an inch, and yet, in her midnight-blue eyes, I see cyclones passing. Her hands are clenched. Her nails digging into the skin.

  “Have a seat.”

  She musters a faint smile of gratitude and pulls over a chair. I serve her a large glass of water.

  “What letter?”

  “I’d sent him a request for a divorce, to your place, in Bron.”

  My reply seems to come as a relief to her.

  “He wanted to hear nothing more of you.”

  “Me neither.”

  “He said he’d gone crazy because of you. He hated this place, this cemetery.”

  “ . . . ”

  “Why did you stay here once he’d left? Why didn’t you move? Make a new life for yourself?”

  “ . . . ”

  “You’re a pretty woman.”

  “ . . . ”

  Françoise Pelletier downs her glass of water in one go. She’s shaking a lot. The death of the other slows down the movement of the one left behind. Her every movement seemed held back by that slowness. I serve her more water. She gives me a pained smile.

  “The first time I saw Philippe, it was in Charleville-Mézières in 1970, the day of his First Communion. He was twelve and I was nineteen. He was wearing a white surplice, and a wooden cross hung from his neck. I’ve never seen anyone look so wrong in an outfit. I remember saying to myself: ‘Doesn’t ring true, this kid dressed up as a choirboy.’ The sort that drinks the Communion wine and smokes cigarettes in secret. I’d just got engaged to Luc Pelletier, the brother of Chantal Toussaint, Philippe’s mother. Luc had insisted that we go to Mass in the morning and have lunch with them. He didn’t get on at all with his sister and brother-in-law, he called them ‘the stuck-ups,’ but he adored his nephew. We had a pretty tedious day. We waited for Philippe to open his presents, and by 3 P.M. we’d already left. Philippe’s mother gave me dirty looks all day; we could tell that it infuriated her that her brother had got himself a young girl. I was thirty years younger than Luc.

  “That same year, we got married in Lyons, Luc and I; Philippe and his parents came to our wedding, oozing resentment. Philippe got drunk by downing all the dregs in the adults’ glasses. He was so drunk that, at the start of the dancing, he kissed me on the lips and hollered, ‘I love you, auntie.’ He made all the guests laugh. He spent the rest of the evening vomiting in the bathroom, while his mother guarded the door, saying, ‘Poor boy, he’s had indigestion on and off all week.’ She stuck up for him, no matter what. Philippe greatly amused me, I adored his lovely little face.

  “After our wedding, Luc and I opened a garage in Bron. At first, we did basic repairs, oil changing, maintenance, bodywork, and then we became dealers. The business was always profitable. We worked hard but never struggled. Never. Two years went by and Luc invited ‘little Philippe,’ as he called him, to come and stay with us during the summer holidays. We lived in a house in the country, about twenty minutes from our garage. Philippe celebrated his fourteenth birthday with us, and as a present, Luc gave him a motorbike, a 50cc. Philippe cried tears of joy. That’s when Luc and his sister had a falling out. Chantal insulted her brother over the phone, calling him every name under the sun, asking him what made him think he could give a motorbike to her son, it was too dangerous, he wanted Philippe to kill himself; him, the good-for-nothing who’d never managed to have children. Which was true. He’d never had any. Neither with his first wife nor with me.

  “That day, Chantal had touched a nerve. Luc never spoke to his sister again. But despite his parents’ disapproval, Philippe returned to our house every summer. And he never wanted to leave. He said he wanted to live with us all year round. He begged us to keep him, but Luc explained that it wasn’t possible, that if he did so, it would be his death warrant, his sister would kill him. He was a nice kid, chaotic but nice. Seeing him gave Luc pleasure, he’d transferred his affection to his nephew. Philippe was his surrogate son for a long time. I got on well with him. I spoke to him like I would to a child—he often reproached me for that, saying, ‘I’m not a kid.’

  “For the summer of his seventeenth birthday, he came on holiday with us to Biot, near Cannes. We’d rented a villa with a sea view. And we went to the beach every day. We set off in the morning, had lunch in a straw-hut café, and went home in the evening. Philippe went out with girls, a different one every day. Sometimes, one of them would join us on the beach during the day. He would kiss them on his towel, and I found him disturbingly mature and disconcertingly laid-back. He always appeared not to give a damn about anything. He went dancing every evening, came back in the middle of the night. Before setting off, he monopolized the bathroom, and left the caps of his aftershaves lying around. He stole his uncle’s razors, always left shaving foam around the edge of the basin, and never closed the toothpaste tube, left bath towels on the floor. That all succeeded in annoying Luc. It annoyed him, but it amused him, too. As for me, I picked up and washed the clothes of the kid that
Luc and I would never have together. We liked having Philippe, he brought us youth, a carefreeness. There were just seven years between Philippe and me. They matter, those first twenty years, one’s living on two different planets, but with time, the difference becomes less marked, the planets draw closer: a liking for the same films, the same TV series, the same music. One ends up laughing at the same things.

  “During this stay in Biot, I had a fling with a bartender, nothing original or particularly risky. Luc and I loved each other. We were always crazy about each other. Luc often said to me, ‘I’m an old fool, if you want to have fun with younger men, go for it, as long as I know nothing about it. And above all, you don’t fall in love—that I couldn’t handle.’ With hindsight, I’m convinced that, by almost pushing me into the arms of other men, he hoped I’d end up pregnant. It was subconscious, of course, but I think he hoped for a long time that I’d come home one day with a bun in the oven. A little one he could have stamped with his name. Anyhow, during that summer holiday, we were having a party at the villa, around twenty people, and we’d all had a few drinks, and Philippe caught me with my handsome lover in the swimming pool. I’ll never forget the look he gave me. In his eyes, I saw a mix of astonishment and pleasure, a sort of satisfaction. I think that night, he saw me as a woman for the first time. A woman and, therefore, prey. Philippe was a formidable predator. So beautiful, he would tempt a saint in heaven. But I don’t need to tell you that . . .

  “Of course, he said nothing to Luc, didn’t tell on me, but whenever I passed him in the villa, he’d smile at me in a knowing way. A smile that meant: ‘We’re accomplices.’ And I hated that. I could have slapped his face all day long. He became unbearably smug. We stopped laughing together, from one day to the next. I started to find his presence intolerable, the smell of his aftershave, the mess he left everywhere, the noise he made coming in at five in the morning. When I told him to get lost, Luc would say to me, ‘Be nice to the boy, he gets enough from his mother to do his head in.’ At the table, as soon as Luc had his back turned, Philippe would stare at me, faintly smiling. I’d look down, but I could feel his eyes on me, burning with arrogance.

  “On the final evening, he got back earlier than usual, and without a girl. I was on the terrace, alone, lying on a sun-lounger, and I’d dozed off. He placed his lips on mine, I woke up, and I slapped his face, saying to him, ‘Listen to me carefully, you jerk, do that once more and you’ll never set foot in our home again.’ He went off to bed without batting an eyelid. The following day, we left the villa. We accompanied him to the station. He was getting a train to Charleville-Mézières. On the platform, he kissed us goodbye, hugging us both, Luc and me, one with each arm. I didn’t want his affection, but had no choice. Luc couldn’t bear the fact that I couldn’t stand his nephew anymore. It made him very unhappy. I was trapped. Philippe thanked us a hundred times. While he was hugging us, he slid his hand down my back and placed it on my bottom, pressing me firmly against his thigh. I couldn’t react, Luc was right there with us. Philippe’s action chilled me. I thought what an outrageous cheek he had, and the ways of such a cocksure man. Finally, he let us go, ‘Bye-bye auntie, bye-bye uncle.’ He got on the train, throwing his bag over his shoulder, waved at us, with his angelic smile. And while I was glaring at him, he was smirking, as if to say, ‘Got you.’

  “We went home to Bron, and got back to work. The following spring, Philippe phoned us to say he wouldn’t be with us that summer, he was going away to celebrate his eighteenth birthday in Spain with friends. I admit that it was a relief. I wouldn’t have to be near him, or avoid his looks and inappropriate gestures. Luc was very disappointed, but as he hung up, he said, ‘It’s normal, at his age.’ We returned to Biot, spent a month with friends we’d joined there, but Luc missed Philippe being around. He often said to me, ‘The house is too tidy, there’s not enough noise here.’ Actually, it wasn’t Philippe himself he was missing, even though Luc was very attached to him, but a child of our own. I remember that, coming home from the holiday, on the return journey, I suggested adopting a child. He said no. Doubtless because he’d thought about it at length. He just told me that we were good together, us two, so good.

  “In January of the following year, Luc and Chantal’s mother died. We went to the funeral, and despite the circumstances, Luc and his sister didn’t say a word to each other. Philippe was there. We hadn’t seen him for a year and a half. He had changed a lot. Luc gave him a long hug, pointing out that now, Philippe was a head taller than him. Philippe pretended not to see me for the entire ceremony. Just before getting into the car, while Luc was off saying goodbye to family, he trapped me against the door, looking down at me from his full one-meter-eighty-eight, and saying, ‘So, auntie, you were here, didn’t see you.’ And he kissed me on the mouth before I had time to react, and whispered to me, ‘See you next summer.’

  “And next summer arrived. The summer of his twentieth birthday. Before he’d even reached his bedroom at the villa, I grabbed him by the collar. He stared wide-eyed, amused; I must have been a funny sight. Me, measuring one meter sixty on tiptoe; him, huge, back to the corridor wall; and my small, shaking hands gripping him with all their might. ‘I warn you,’ I said to him, ‘if you want to have a nice holiday, you give it a rest. You don’t come near me, don’t look at me, don’t even hint at anything, and all will go smoothly.’ He replied, sarcastically, ‘O.K., auntie, promise, I’ll keep my nose clean.’

  “From then on, he behaved as if I didn’t exist. He remained polite, good morning, good night, thank you, see you later, but our exchanges were limited to those four niceties. We set off for the beach together in the morning, him in the back seat, us two in front. He still went out late, scattered his things around the house. Girls came to find him during the night, or on his beach towel in the afternoon; sometimes, he went off to screw one behind a rock; it was an endless parade of boobs. And furtive giggling wherever we went. It cracked Luc up. Philippe was so handsome, with his angelic face, blond curls, and tanned skin. He had a man’s body, neat and muscular; on the beach, all the girls ogled him, the women, too, even the other men envied him. It gave him so much confidence, all those eyes turned to him. Sometimes, Luc would whisper in my ear, ‘My sister must have cheated on Father Toussaint, it’s not possible that those two horrors could have produced such a beautiful kid.’ It made me laugh so much. Luc always made me laugh. I really had a lovely life with him. I was spoiled with love. We were the best friends in the world, I couldn’t have survived being apart. He was a friend, a father, a brother. Not much action in our bed anymore, but I made up for that elsewhere, now and then.

  “I know what you’re thinking: When did Philippe finally get her?”

  A lengthy silence ensues before Françoise continues her monologue. She removes an imaginary stain from her jeans with the back of her hand. Time has stopped. We’re alone, face to face. It’s as if Philippe had changed his scent. As if Françoise was introducing a stranger into my kitchen.

  “On the evening of his twentieth birthday, Luc and I organized a party for Philippe at the villa. His young friends came. There was music, alcohol, and a buffet set up beside the small swimming pool. It was warm, we all danced together, I don’t know what came over me, but I started flirting with one of Philippe’s friends, a certain Roland, a young dimwit Philippe hung out with. We went off to make out. We finally rejoined the others for the birthday cake and presents. When we reappeared, Philippe stared daggers at me. I thought he was going to let me have it. He blew out his twenty candles, eyes full of rage. Meanwhile, Luc had his present, festooned with red ribbon, rolled out to his nephew: a gray Honda CB100, and a check for a thousand francs in an envelope, attached to the full-face helmet. There were hugs, champagne glasses raised aloft, cries of joy and amazement. I could see that Philippe was pretending to be relaxed, smiling at everyone, showing off as usual, but his jaw remained clenched. He was seriously annoyed. When the music started up again,
and we were all dancing, Roland was all over me again, so Philippe grabbed him by the shoulder, said something in his ear, to which Roland replied, ‘Are you serious, man?’ And the punches started flying. Luc, who had retired to bed, got up when he heard the racket, and threw Roland out the door, with several kicks up the backside. When it came to his nephew, Luc reacted like his sister: nothing was his fault. Luc asked Philippe what had gone on, Philippe, already pretty tipsy, replied, ‘Roland’s hunting on my territory . . . my territory is my territory!!!’

  “The party just carried on as if nothing had happened. That night, I didn’t sleep. Philippe undressed one of his girlfriends and stuck her on the ledge of our bedroom window. I could make out their silhouettes writhing in all directions. I heard the girl groaning and Philippe telling her all sorts of salacious and smutty things, which were very clearly aimed at me. He spoke loud enough for me to hear, but not to wake up Luc. He knew his uncle took sleeping pills at night. He also knew that I was there, close to them, eyes wide open, head on pillow, and could hear everything. He was getting his revenge. In the days that followed, we barely glimpsed him. He went off to ride his motorbike, from morning to night. Even during the day, he no longer joined us on the beach. His towel stayed dry and unoccupied. Sometimes, I’d doze off, and I’d dream that he was standing beside me, and then lying down, fully stretched out, on my back. I would wake up suffocating.

  “About a fortnight after his birthday, he made an appearance on the beach. I’d gone for a swim, far from the shore. I saw him approaching Luc, just as a distant figure. His blondness and his bearing. He embraced him warmly, and sat beside him. Luc ended up pointing me out. Philippe spotted me and got undressed. He dived in the water to join me. He came toward me, swimming the crawl. I couldn’t escape. I was trapped, cornered. As he was nearing me, I started to panic, I couldn’t swim anymore, I was treading water. I don’t know why, but I convinced myself that he was coming to drown me, to harm me. I panicked so much that I started to sob. I started to cry out. But from where I was, no one heard me. I’d passed the lifebelts a while back. In a few minutes, he reached me. He instantly saw that I was in a state. I carried on calling for help, but without looking at him. He tried to help me, but I hit him, screaming, ‘Don’t touch me!’ And gulped a mouthful of water. He heaved me, forcibly, onto his back and brought me, as best he could, as far as a floating buoy. While he was swimming, I was hitting him, and he hit me back to make me calm me down. We finally made it. I clung to the buoy. He was exhausted, too. We got our breath back. He said, ‘Now just calm down! Catch your breath, and we’ll get back to the beach!’ I shouted, ‘Don’t you touch me!’—‘I can’t touch you, but all of my friends can screw you, is that it?!’—‘You, you’re my nephew!’—‘No, I’m Luc’s nephew.’—‘You’re just a spoiled brat!’—‘I love you!’—‘Stop that right now!’—‘No, I’ll never stop!’ I started to feel cold, to shiver. I looked toward the beach, it seemed so far to me. I saw Luc. I longed for his heavy, protective, reassuring arms. I asked Philippe to take me to the shore. He again heaved me onto his back, I put my hands around his neck, and he started to swim the breaststroke, and I let myself be carried. I sensed his muscles under my body, but I felt nothing but fear and loathing.