Fresh Water for Flowers

by Valérie Perrin

  “Yes. I never had a problem with my staff. Ever.”

  “And with a neighbor? A lover?”

  Edith Croquevieille’s face kept falling as Philippe bombarded her with questions. She couldn’t understand what he was getting at.

  “Mr. Toussaint, until July 13th, 1993, my life was like clockwork.”

  Philippe loathed that expression. His mother often used it. Philippe felt like killing Croquevieille. But what would have been the point? This woman was already dead. She was quite a sight, all buttoned up in a sad coat. Sad expression, sad eyes. Even the features of her face had hanged themselves. He turned his back on her and left without saying a word. Edith Croquevieille called out:

  “Mr. Toussaint?”

  He turned back to her, half-heartedly. Didn’t want to see her anymore.

  “What are you after?”

  He didn’t reply to her, got back on his bike, and headed, reluctantly, for Brancion-en-Chalon. He was cold, he was tired. He’d been gone for three days without contacting Violette. He felt like getting back to clean sheets. He felt like playing with his controllers, and not thinking anymore, returning to his old habits, not thinking anymore . . .

  81.

  I’m not sure you’re inside of me, or that I am inside of you,

  or that I own you. I think we’re both inside of another

  being we have created called “us.”

  Gabriel Prudent didn’t like what his wife picked. He automatically fell asleep in front of the films she rented from Vidéo Futur, the VHS temple on the corner of their street. She always rented romantic comedies. Gabriel preferred Claude Lelouch’s L’aventure c’est l’aventure, the dialogues of which he knew by heart, or Belmondo and Gabin in Un singe en hiver.

  With the exception of Robert De Niro, Yanks didn’t do much for him, on the whole. But he never did anything to annoy Karine. And also, he liked that Sunday-evening ritual, sitting on the sofa, snuggled up to his wife, eyes closed in her warmth, in her spicy perfume. The dialogues in English gradually faded away. As he fell asleep, he imagined beautiful actors with impeccably blow-dried hair meeting, tearing each other apart, separating, bumping into each other on a street corner, and finally kissing, wrapped in each other’s arms. Karine, red-eyed after the soppy film, would gently wake him up during the closing credits, and say, at once amused and annoyed, “Darling, you fell asleep again.” They would get up, stop at the room of their child, who was growing too fast, look at her with wonderment, and then make love, before he left once again, on Monday morning, for the courts, where the accused, protesting innocence, awaited him.

  On that evening in 1997, Gabriel didn’t fall asleep. As soon as Karine slotted the video into the recorder, and the first images appeared, he was gripped by the story. As though consumed by it. He didn’t see an extraordinary man and woman acting, but actually living their passion before his very eyes. As though he, Gabriel, were the privileged witness of it. As he was of all those strangers who filed onto the witness stand, whom he questioned for the prosecution or the defense. He sensed Karine silently looking at him, repeatedly, concerned that he hadn’t fallen sound asleep.

  And when, in the final minutes of the film, the heroine, seated beside her husband, didn’t open the door of his car to go to the other car, in which her lover awaited her, and when the latter switched on his turn signal to leave forever, Gabriel felt the emotional dam he’d put up over the past four years to forget Irène gradually give way to the pressure of a storm, a hurricane, a natural disaster. He felt the rain of the film’s final images running over him. He saw himself again, on the way back from Cap d’Antibes, waiting for Irène in his car. “I’ll be back in five minutes, when I’ve dropped off the car keys.” He had waited for her for hours, clutching the steering wheel. For the first few minutes, behind his windshield, he had imagined life at Irène’s side. He had dreamt of a future in which he would be two. And then the wait had gone on forever.

  He had finally let go of the steering wheel. He had got out of his car to go into the rose nursery. He had fallen on a shop assistant who hadn’t seen Irène for several days. He had searched for her in the streets, randomly, desperately, refusing to understand that she wouldn’t return, that she’d made the choice to remain in her life, that she wouldn’t change anything for him. Doubtless out of love for her husband and her son. Against her will—there was an expression he’d heard many a time in trials.

  He had got back in his car, and through his windshield, in the headlights, he had seen darkness, and nothing else.

  And then one morning, at the office, he had been told that Irène Fayolle had requested an appointment. At first, foolishly, he had thought it was just a similar sounding name. But when he had seen that phone number he knew off by heart, the number for the rose nursery he had never dared to call, he had known it was her.

  There had been Sedan, other hotels, other towns for a year, and then Paul’s illness and Cloé’s birth. On one side illness, on the other, hope.

  No news from Irène for more than four years. What had become of her? How was she? Had Paul pulled through? Did she still live in Marseilles? Did she still have her rose nursery? He remembered her smile, her look, her smell, her skin, her freckles, her body. Her hair that he had so loved to mess up. With her, it had never been like with the others, with her it had been better.

  As he watched the closing scene of the film, when the children scatter their mother’s ashes from a bridge, Gabriel cried. In Gabriel’s world, men didn’t cry. Even when hit with the craziest verdicts, the most unexpected, the most unlikely, the happiest, the saddest. The last time he had cried, he must have been eight years old. He’d had a gash in his head stitched up without anesthetic after falling off his bike.

  As for Karine, she didn’t cry. Normally, while watching such a melodrama, she would have been wringing out her handkerchief, but the attention Gabriel had paid to the film stopped her from feeling anything but fear.

  She remembered Irène in the rose nursery. The fineness of her hands, the color of her hair, her clear skin, her perfume. She remembered the morning when she had handed her Gabriel’s identity card, to convey to her that she existed, and was pregnant.

  Karine had discovered Irène’s existence when Gabriel’s office had left him a message: the concierge of the Hôtel des Loges, in Lyons, wished to return some belongings Gabriel had left behind during his recent stay. The previous week, her lawyer husband had been working in Lyons’s criminal court. Karine had called the hotel, spoken to the concierge, given their home address, and, two days later, had received a parcel containing two white silk blouses, an Hermès scarf, and a brush on which a few long, blond hairs were caught. At first, Karine had thought it must be a mistake, and then she had remembered Gabriel. His gloomy demeanor when he had returned from Lyons, even though he had won his case on appeal. She had thought he was ill, he had looked rough. She had mentioned it to him, he had brushed it aside with a flick of the hand, and said, with a weary smile, that he was just very tired.

  The following night, Gabriel had called out to someone in his sleep several times: Reine. The following morning, Karine had mentioned it to him. “Who is Reine?” Gabriel, his nose in his cup of coffee, had reddened.

  “Reine?”

  “You were saying that name all night.”

  Gabriel had laughed with that laugh she loved so much, a booming laugh, and had replied: “That’s the wife of the accused. When she realized that her husband had been acquitted, she fainted.” Bad choice. Karine knew about the case of Cédric Piolet, whose wife was called Jeanne. But she hadn’t batted an eyelid—one can change one’s name, or have two names.

  For several nights, Gabriel had continued to call out Reine in his sleep. Karine had put it down to work, pressure. Her husband took on too many cases.

  When Karine had met Gabriel, he was a widower and separated from his last partner. When she had a
sked him if there was someone in his life, he had replied, “From time to time.”

  As she held the two silk blouses that smelled of “L’Heure bleue,” she had remembered that. Karine had thrown the Guerlain-scented garments and scarf, along with the hairbrush, into the bin. These things didn’t belong to some transient tart, it was far more serious than that. In recent months, Gabriel had changed. When he came home, his mind seemed to be elsewhere. He was preoccupied with something, as though tormented. Karine had noticed that he drank more wine at the table. When she had pointed it out to him, Gabriel had quoted the screenwriter Michel Audiard, “If I were to miss anything, it wouldn’t be the wine, it would be the intoxication.” There was another woman in Gabriel’s lies.

  It hadn’t been hard to find the number that appeared regularly on the last itemized phone bills. The same number cropping up during the weeks when Gabriel was around, either at his office or working from home. Always at about 9 A.M. Conversations that rarely exceeded two minutes. Enough to wish each other a lovely day and then hang up. Karine had called that number herself. A young girl had answered:

  “The rose nursery, hello.”

  Karine had hung up. She had called the following week, and fallen on the same person:

  “The rose nursery, hello.”

  “Yes, hello, my rosebushes are diseased, they have strange yellowish marks on the edge of their petals.”

  “Which varieties?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Could you come to the nursery with one or two cuttings?”

  Karine had called a third time. Still the same voice:

  “The rose nursery, hello.”

  “Reine?”

  “Hold on, please, I’ll pass her to you. Who’s speaking?”

  “It’s personal.”

  “Irène, you’re wanted on the phone!”

  Karine had got it wrong: it wasn’t Reine that Gabriel was calling out in his sleep, but Irène. Someone had come to pick up the receiver, and this time, Karine had heard a feminine voice that was deeper, more sensual:

  “Hello?”

  “Irène?”

  “Yes.”

  Karine had hung up. That day she had cried a good deal. Gabriel’s “from time to time,” that was her.

  Finally, she had called a fourth and last time.

  “The rose nursery, hello.”

  “Hello, could I have your address, please?”

  “69 Chemin du Mauvais-Pas, in the Rose district, Marseilles 7.”

  Karine ejected the video and put it back in its cover. Gabriel was still sitting on the sofa, ashamed of having cried. It was his turn to have that guilty look he spent his life defending.

  As she put the film into her handbag, so as not to forget it on her way to work the following morning, she said to Gabriel:

  “Four and a half years ago, when I was pregnant with Cloé, I saw Irène.”

  Gabriel, although used to being confronted in court with the most complex and sordid cases, with every level of humanity, didn’t know what to say to his wife. He was flabbergasted.

  “I went to Marseilles. I bought roses and white peonies from her. When paying, I introduced myself. Those flowers, I didn’t plant them in our garden, I threw them into the sea . . . Like when someone dies.”

  That evening, they didn’t stop at the child’s bedroom before going to their own, and didn’t make love. In bed, they turned their backs on each other. She didn’t sleep at all. She imagined Gabriel, eyes wide open, not able to sleep, remembering scenes from the film he’d just seen, and those he had lived with Irène. They never broached the subject of Irène ever again. They separated a few months after that Sunday. Karine regretted for a long time having rented The Bridges of Madison County. And, unlike Gabriel, she never watched it again, despite its numerous showings on television.

  * * *

  IRÈNE FAYOLLE’S JOURNAL

  April 20th, 1997

  One year, now, that I haven’t touched this journal. But I can’t bring myself to part with it. I hide it at the bottom of a drawer, under my lingerie, like a young girl. Sometimes I open it and I’m off for a few hours. Basically, memories are summer holidays, private beaches. One doesn’t keep a journal when one has passed a certain age, and I’ve long passed it, my certain age. I suppose Gabriel will always take me back to being fifteen.

  He has lost a lot of hair. He has filled out a little. His eyes are still just as serious, beautiful, dark, deep. His voice cavernous, unique. A symphony. My favorite one.

  I met Gabriel again in a café near the rose nursery. He let me order tea without one of his “that’s a sad drink” kind of comments, and he didn’t pour calvados into it. I found him calmer, he seemed less tormented, less angry. Even though he has always been charming, Gabriel is an angry man. No doubt due to the accusations of others that he spends his life shouldering, disproving on their behalf. One evening, when we were in Cap d’Antibes, he told me that the injustice of certain verdicts would be the death of him. That certain convictions gnawed him to the bone. Before ordering coffee after coffee to tell me about the last few years of his life, his little girl, his big girl, the one who is married, his last wife, his divorce, his work, he asked me for news of Paul and Julien. Paul especially, his cancer, the remission. The days following the illness, once he knew that he had come through.

  Gabriel told me that he understood me, that he had stopped smoking, that he had seen a film that had shattered him, that he didn’t have much time, was expected in court in Lille the following day, had to take a plane, had a late-afternoon meeting with his colleagues. It’s the first time he didn’t ask me to go with him, to accompany him. We stayed together for an hour. For the last ten minutes, he held my hands in his, and before leaving, closed his eyes and kissed them.

  “I would like us to lie together in the cemetery. After this failed life, I would like us at least to make a success of our death. Do you agree to spend eternity beside me?”

  I answered yes, without thinking.

  “You won’t slip away this time?”

  “No. But you’ll only have my ashes.”

  “Even as ashes, I want you close to me for eternity. Our two names together, Gabriel Prudent and Irène Fayolle—they’re as lovely as Jacques Prévert and Alexandre Trauner. Did you know that the poet and his set designer were buried side by side? I think it’s wonderful to be buried with your set designer. You, basically, you were my set designer. You gave me the most beautiful landscapes.”

  “Are you going to die, Gabriel? Are you ill?”

  “That’s the first time you’ve said ‘tu’ to me. No, I’m not going to die, well, I don’t think so, it’s not in the cards. It’s because of the film I told you about earlier. It shook me. I have to go. Thank you, see you soon, Irène, I love you.”

  “I love you, too, Gabriel.”

  “At least that’s one thing we have in common.”

  82.

  Here lies my love.

  It happened one morning in January of 1998. I could only just make out their names. Their wretched names. Magnan, Fontanel, Letellier, Lindon, Croquevieille, Petit. They were slipped into the back pocket of a pair of Philippe Toussaint’s jeans, and were almost illegible. The list had gone through the wash, the ink had run, as if someone had cried for a long time onto the soggy paper. I had hung his trousers to dry on the bathroom radiator, and when I went to get them, had noticed something sticking out. It was a piece of paper tablecloth, folded in four, on which, once again, Philippe Toussaint had written their names.

  “Why?”

  I had sat on the edge of the bath saying this word, several times: “Why?”

  We had been living in Brancion-en-Chalon for five months. Philippe Toussaint escaped every day in two ways: on rainy days, with his video games; on fine days, on his bike. He had continued with the habits he
had in Malgrange, but his absences were lengthier.

  He avoided the cemetery visitors, the funerals, the opening and closing of the gates. He was far more afraid of the dead than of the trains. Of the bereaved visitors than of the SNCF passengers. He would meet up with fellow motorbike enthusiasts to go on rallies in the countryside. Long tours that culminated, I believe, in extramarital diversions. At the end of 1997, he had gone away for four days in a row. He had returned exhausted from his trip and, curiously, I had immediately seen, understood, sensed that he hadn’t met up with one of his mistresses like he usually did.

  On arrival, he had said to me, “Sorry, I should have called you, we went further than planned with the others, and there weren’t any phone booths on our route, it was in the sticks.” It was the first time Philippe Toussaint was explaining himself. The first time he was apologizing for not having given a sign of life.

  He had returned on the day of the exhumation of Henri Ange, killed in action aged twenty-two in 1918, at Sancy, in Aisne. On the white headstone one could still make out the words: “Eternally missed.” Henri Ange’s eternity had come to an end in January 1998, his remains thrown into the ossuary. My first exhumation. The gravediggers and I hadn’t been able to do a thing to spare his rest. His tomb was too dilapidated and eroded by decades of moss.

  As the gravediggers were opening the coffin, ravaged by the weather, the damp, and vermin, I had heard Philippe Toussaint’s motorbike. I had left them to finish their work without me. I had headed to the house out of habit. When Philippe Toussaint came home, I received him . . . Like servants when the master returns.

  He had removed his helmet slowly, he looked ill, his eyes tired. He had taken a long shower and eaten lunch in silence. Then he had gone upstairs to have a nap, and had slept until the following morning. At around 11 P.M., I had joined him in our bed. He had shifted himself right behind me.