Fresh Water for Flowers

by Valérie Perrin

  Even Violette seemed to have turned her back on the past.

  He’d speak to Eloïse Petit, and then move on to something else. This meeting with the former supervisor was like a final appointment with the past.

  Eloïse Petit was waiting for him, as arranged, outside the movie theater where she worked. She was standing under the screening times. Above her hung a huge poster for The English Patient. Philippe had immediately spotted her, despite all the hustle and bustle around the ticket desk. The people streaming into or out of the various screenings. They had seen each other two years before, at the trial, and had recognized each other instantly.

  As though afraid of gossip, Eloïse had taken Philippe to a Relais H café, two streets away, not far from the Valence railway station. They had walked side by side in silence. Philippe still felt that great emptiness, that despondency. He had wondered what on earth he was doing there, on that sidewalk. He didn’t even have any questions left to ask Eloïse. What the hell did she care about a water heater? What did she know about water heaters?

  They ordered two croque-monsieurs, a small bottle of Vittel water, and a Coke. Eloïse exuded great gentleness. Philippe felt he could trust her, unlike all the others. She wouldn’t try to lie. She seemed sincere before she even opened her mouth.

  Eloïse described the children’s arrival on July 13th, 1993. The allocating of rooms, according to friendships. The children who already knew each other didn’t want to be separated. She and Lucie Lindon had tried to make everyone happy, and seemed to have succeeded. With the supervisors’ help, the girls had put away their clothes and belongings in the lockers in their rooms, beside their beds.

  Then there had been tea, and a walk in the grounds of the château, and out to the fields to see the ponies, and bring them back to the stables for the night. The children had loved hosing down the animals while splashing each other, then grooming them, leading them into their stalls, and feeding them with the adults’ help. They were happy as larks when they sat down for supper. The noisy refectory—twenty-four excited little girls, all chatting loudly. They had returned to their respective rooms at around 9:30 P.M., once they had visited the communal showers.

  “Why didn’t they wash in the bathroom in their rooms?”

  This question surprised Eloïse.

  “I don’t know now . . . The shower room was new. I remember washing there, too.”

  Eloïse thought about it while chewing her lip.

  “I remember, there was no hot water in the bathroom in my room.”

  “Why?”

  She puffed out her cheeks as though blowing up a balloon, and replied, apologetically:

  “I don’t know . . . The pipes were old. The château was falling apart, somewhat. It smelled pretty musty inside. And also, if you had to ask Fontanel to change even just a lightbulb, you’d be lucky if it got done.”

  The children came from the north and the east of France, Eloïse continued. The journey, the heat, the afternoon’s activities had exhausted them. They had gone to bed with no fuss. She and Lucie Lindon had checked on the rooms at around 9:45 P.M. to make sure all was well. Six rooms altogether, three on the ground floor, three upstairs. Four children to a room. The little girls were all in bed. Some were reading, others chatting, swapping photographs or drawings from bed to bed. Children’s conversations: “Your pajamas are nice,” “Will you lend me your dress?” “Wish I had shoes like yours.” Their cats, their homes, their parents, their brothers and sisters, school, teachers, friends. And most of all, ponies. That’s all they could think about: the following day, they were going to ride the ponies.

  Eloïse Petit hesitated before talking about Room 1 with Philippe. She didn’t named Léonine, Anaïs, Océane, and Nadège. Merely said “the children in Room 1,” briefly lowering her eyes before continuing.

  It was the last room the supervisors had been to. The girls were already half-asleep when she and Lucie Lindon had gone in to ask them if everything was O.K., give them each a little flashlight in case they needed to get up during the night, and tell them that Lucie was in the room next door, if one of them had a nightmare or a tummyache. A night-light would remain on in the corridor all night.

  Then, Eloïse had gone up to her room, and Lucie to see Swan Letellier. Geneviève Magnan was supposed to stay around the ground-floor rooms in the meantime. Before the two supervisors had gone upstairs, they had seen Geneviève sitting in the kitchen. She was cleaning copper pans, all spread out on the large table. She had said good night to them, looking sad, or maybe weary. Eloïse couldn’t have said which.

  “I went up to my room, I dozed off. At one point, I got up to close my window, because it was banging against the casing.”

  A strange light crossed Eloïse’s blue eyes. As if she were reliving that moment, looking through the window at something going by in the distance. The way one peers over the shoulder of a person one’s speaking to at the sight of a familiar silhouette or some curious, unexpected movement.

  “Did you see something?”

  “When?”

  “When you closed your window.”

  “Yes.”

  “What?”

  “Them.”

  “Who’s them?”

  “You know who.”

  “Geneviève Magnan and Alain Fontanel?”

  Eloïse Petit shrugged her shoulders. Philippe didn’t know what to make of this gesture.

  “Is it true you had a relationship with Geneviève?”

  “Who told you that?”

  “Lucie. She told me that Geneviève loved you.”

  Philippe closed his eyes for a few seconds, and then, with a heavy heart, replied to her:

  “I’ve come to talk to you about my daughter.”

  “What do you want to know?”

  “I want to know who switched on the water heater in the bathroom of Room 1. The children were asphyxiated by carbon monoxide. And yet everyone knew that those damn water heaters weren’t to be touched!”

  Philippe had shouted too loud. The customers, buried in their newspapers, and in the line at the registers turned around to stare at the two of them.

  Eloïse blushed as if it were a lovers’ quarrel. She spoke to Philippe as if he were not in his right mind. The way one speaks gently to the mad so as not to antagonize them:

  “I don’t understand what you’re saying.”

  “Someone switched on the water heater in the bathroom.”

  “What bathroom?”

  “The one in the room that burned down.”

  Philippe could see that Eloïse didn’t understand a wretched word of what he was saying. At that moment, he started to have doubts. This water heater story didn’t stack up, it was nonsense. He had to face facts: either Geneviève Magnan or Alain Fontanel had set fire to Room 1 to take revenge on him.

  “Is that what would have started the fire? The old water heater?”

  Eloïse’s question drew him away from his grim thoughts.

  “No, the fire, that would have been Fontanel . . . to make it look like a domestic accident. He would have been covering up for Magnan.”

  “But why?”

  “Because, apparently, she went off that evening. She didn’t stay close to the girls, and when she returned, she would have . . . It was too late . . . The children were asphyxiated.”

  Eloïse covered her mouth with both hands. Her big, blue eyes started to shine. Philippe remembered the day he had swum in the Mediterranean to fetch Françoise and she had struggled. Eloïse had the same panicked look as her, on the verge of drowning.

  Philippe and Eloïse said nothing more to each other for at least ten minutes. They hadn’t touched their plates. Philippe finally ordered an espresso.

  “Would you like anything else?”

  “Maybe it’s them.”

  “Fontanel and Magna
n, yes.”

  “No, those people.”

  “What people?”

  “The couple you know, that I saw leaving the courtyard when I closed my window.”

  “What couple?”

  “The people you came with the day after the fire. Your parents, well, I believe they’re your parents.”

  “I don’t understand a word you’re saying to me.”

  “But come on, you must have known that they came to the château that evening, surely?”

  “What parents?”

  Philippe felt himself losing his footing, as though falling from the top floor of a skyscraper.

  “On July 14th, you all arrived together. I thought you knew that they had been to the château the previous day. It happens all the time, families coming to visit their children, but never in the evening. That’s why it surprised me.”

  “You’re crazy. My parents live in Charleville-Mézières. They couldn’t have been in Burgundy on the night of the fire.”

  “They were there, I saw them. I swear to you. When I closed my window, I saw them leaving the château.”

  “You must be mistaken . . . ”

  “No. Your mother, her chignon, her appearance . . . I’m not mistaken. I saw them again on the last day of the trial in Mâcon. They were waiting for you outside the court.”

  Then Philippe remembered. It was like lightning, a shock, as if a tiny detail buried in his subconscious for years was appearing to him in the full light of day. Something abnormal, incoherent, which, owing to the circumstances, he hadn’t really registered, just sensed, on that July 14th, 1993.

  He had phoned his parents and said to them, “Léonine is dead.” They had come to pick him up a few hours later, and, for the first time, Philippe had sat in front, beside his father; his mother was lying on the back seat. Shattered, and dazed with grief, Philippe hadn’t opened his mouth for the entire journey. From time to time, he heard his mother moaning in the back. He knew that his father was silently reciting Hail Marys.

  When Philippe thought of his father, he thought of someone holier-than-thou who toed the line in front of his wife. Philippe had dreamt of being the son of Luc, his uncle. Mother Nature had got it wrong: he was born to the sister, when he would have liked to be born to the brother.

  Just as Eloïse had mentioned his parents, he remembered that his father hadn’t needed directions, hadn’t asked him for the address. He had gone there as if he knew the way. When you left the highway, the village of La Clayette was signposted, but nothing indicated which way to turn to reach the château. But when Philippe was a child, his parents were always arguing because his father had no sense of direction and his mother got annoyed. If he hadn’t got lost that day, maybe it was because he had already been there before.

  Eloïse was staring at him while he was replaying this grim journey in his mind. Despite the horror written all over his face, she thought him handsome. She tried to remember Léonine’s features, but couldn’t. The four children had disappeared from her memory. She was forever searching for them, but no longer found them. All that remained to her were their voices, when they had asked questions about the ponies. She hadn’t told Philippe that Léonine had lost her doudou, and that, together, they had hunted everywhere for it. Léonine had said to her, “It’s a rabbit that’s the same age as me.” Until she could find it, Eloïse had found a little forgotten bear in the storeroom for her. And she had promised Léonine that the following morning, she would search the whole castle for it, and would find it.

  Philippe brought her back down to earth:

  “I want you to swear, on Léonine’s life, that you will never speak of this to anyone.”

  Eloïse wondered whether Philippe had just heard her thoughts. She was incapable of uttering a word. He insisted:

  “The two of us, we never saw each other, never spoke . . . Swear!”

  As though in court, Eloïse raised her right hand and said, “I swear.”

  “On Léonine’s life?”

  “On Léonine’s life.”

  Philippe wrote down the landline number for the house at Brancion cemetery and handed it to her.

  “In two hours’ time, you call this number, my wife will answer. You introduce yourself and tell her that I didn’t come to the appointment, that you waited all afternoon for me.”

  “But . . . ”

  “Please.”

  Eloïse felt sorry for him, so she agreed.

  “And if she asks me questions?”

  “She won’t ask you any questions. I’ve let her down too often for her to ask any.”

  Philippe got up to pay the bill. He said a brief goodbye to Eloïse as he picked up his helmet, and then returned to his motorbike, parked outside the movie theater.

  Glancing at the people coming in and out of the various screenings, he remembered his mother’s words, “Trust no one, do you hear me? No one.”

  Almost seven hundred kilometers. It would be dark when he arrived at Charleville-Mézières.

  * * *

  Philippe watched his parents for a while through the sitting-room window. They were sitting side by side, on their ancient sofa covered in faded flowers. Like those on abandoned tombs. Those that Violette couldn’t bear, and would remove.

  The father was asleep, the mother gripped by a TV show, a rerun. Violette had already seen it. A love story between a priest and a young girl, set in Australia, or some other faraway land. Violette had secretly cried at some parts. He had sensed her wiping away her tears on her sleeve. His mother was staring at the actors, her lips pursed, as if she thought they were making wrong choices and she wanted to stick her oar in. Why had she picked this soppy program? If the circumstances hadn’t been so serious, Philippe would have laughed.

  Philippe had grown up in this house that, right now, seemed like a stage set. Over the years, the shrubs had grown, the hedges filled out. His parents had had the chain-link fence changed to a white picket fence, like in American TV shows; the façade’s roughcast resurfaced; and two lion statues installed on either side of the front door. The granite wildcats seemed bored stiff at this house stuck in the 70s. But his parents had to show the neighbors that they were public-sector management. Both retired from the PTT, the postal and telecoms service, he having started as a postman, she as an admin assistant, they had both climbed the ladder and become low-grade managers. And when there had finally been some money, they had put it aside.

  Philippe still had the house keys on him. He’d been carrying the same key ring around since childhood, a miniature rugby ball that had lost both its shape and its colors. His parents had never changed the locks. What for? Who on earth would want to go in there, to find the father lost in his prayers, the mother in resentment? Two gherkins in a jar of vinegar.

  He hadn’t set foot in this house for years. Since he had met Violette. Violette. Not once had they invited her. They had always looked down on her.

  Chantal Toussaint screamed when she saw her son standing at the door of the sitting room. Her cry woke up her husband, who jumped.

  As he was about to open his mouth, Philippe saw portraits of Léonine hanging on the walls, two taken at school. That reminded him of Geneviève Magnan, her smile in those corridors reeking of ammonia. He suddenly felt dizzy and gripped the sideboard.

  Violette had taken down the portraits of their daughter. She had put them away in a drawer, beside her bed, in her wallet, and between the pages of that big book she was forever rereading.

  His mother approached him, muttering, “Everything alright, son?” With one gesture, Philippe commanded her not to come any closer, to keep her distance. The father and mother exchanged glances. Was their son sick? Mad? He was scarily pale. He had the same look as on the morning of July 14th, 1993, when they had taken him to the scene of the tragedy. He’d aged by twenty years.

  “What the hell
were you doing at the château on the evening of the fire?”

  The father glanced at the mother, waiting for permission to reply. But as usual, it she was the one who spoke. With the voice of a victim, of the nice little girl she had never been.

  “Armelle and Jean-Louis Caussin met us in the village of La Clayette before dropping off Catherine . . . that is, Léonine, and Anaïs at the château. We said we’d meet them in a café, we did nothing wrong.”

  “But what the hell were you doing over there?”

  “We were at a wedding in the Midi, you know, your cousin Laurence . . . we made the most of the drive back to Charleville by visiting Burgundy.”

  “You have never made the most of anything, NEVER. I want the truth.”

  The mother hesitated before replying, setting her lips and breathing in deeply. Philippe stopped her immediately:

  “Do me a favor, don’t start sniveling.”

  Never had her son spoken to her like this. The polite, well brought up boy, who said: “Yes, Mommy,” “No, Mommy,” “O.K., Mommy,” was well and truly dead. He had started to disappear when he had lost his daughter. He had completely disappeared once he had buried himself with Violette. Philippe had warned them, “I forbid you from setting foot in the cemetery, I don’t want you bumping into Violette.”

  Before the tragedy, the only times he had disobeyed his mother were when he went on holiday with her brother Luc and his young wife, whose skirts were far too short. Philippe had always been drawn to lower-class women. Girls, bottom-of-the-range, the gutter.

  Chantal Toussaint’s voice regained its hard, unforgiving tone. That of a prosecutor.

  “I had arranged to meet the Caussins because I wished to see what your wife had put into the suitcase of our granddaughter. To ensure that nothing was missing. I didn’t want her to feel ashamed in front of her friends. Your wife was young and Catherine was too often neglected . . . Her long nails, dirty ears, stained or shrunken clothes . . . it made me sick.”

  “You’re talking rubbish! Violette looked after our daughter very well! Her name was Léonine! Do you hear me?! Léonine!”