Loyalties

by Delphine de Vigan

  HÉLÈNE

  There was a big fuss the other day at school. Apparently some students have been going behind the cupboard that blocks off the space under the canteen stairs. A cleaner found some scraps of paper that hadn’t been there last week and she’s certain couldn’t have been thrown down from the stairs. According to what she said, this isn’t the first time. The Head immediately took steps to block access. Two bags of cement have been slid under the cupboard. Firstly, the students are not supposed to escape our vigilance and secondly, if by chance one of them got stuck, it could be dangerous. When I was shown the scene of the crime, it had been made impossible to get through. I thought that you’d have to be slim and agile to slide underneath, and have a real urge to hide.

  This is the kind of event that shakes up our small world for a few days. Everyone has their own interpretation and theories. We all need diversion.

  That day, Frédéric waited for me after school. He wanted a word. On Tuesdays we finish at the same time. He told me he thought I seemed really tense and tired. He didn’t know if it was this business that was putting me in this state or something else, something that my obsession had stirred up or that had caused it in the first place. He was the one who used the term ‘obsession’. And I know him well enough to realise that he chooses his words with care.

  A few years ago, Frédéric took me in his arms. We’d had a trying staff meeting. The two of us had clashed several times with the other Year 10 teachers. I was exhausted. Exhausted by seeing students steered towards paths which we knew full well would be dead ends for them just because places were available, or were low cost, or because we knew there was no chance that their parents would show up at school to kick up a fuss. I had said my piece several times in the meeting. I’d voiced astonishment, indignation, rebellion. I’d stuck my neck out and Frédéric had backed me up. We’d been successful in the case of three students, and avoided them having subject choices imposed on them by default, or out of laziness or resignation. When we left, Frédéric asked me for a drink. I accepted. I’d liked him for a long time, but I knew he was married. His wife has been seriously ill since the birth of their second child. That’s what people still say to this day, in hushed voices, when he’s not in the staffroom. And that he’s not the type to dump a sick woman.

  We had a few drinks to celebrate our tiny victories and after we had replayed the discussions from the meeting, with the inevitable impersonations, we began talking about our lives.

  Late in the evening, in the street that led to the metro, Frédéric put his arms around me. We stayed like that for ages. I remember him caressing my hips, my buttocks and my hair. Through the flowing material of my floral dress, I felt his erection against my thigh. He didn’t kiss me.

  It could have been the start of an affair. Too dangerous for both of us. That’s what he told me a few days later. That he didn’t want to fall in love.

  When I told friends about this, they laughed. Male excuse. Typical married man’s get-out. That would probably have been true if we’d slept together. But we hadn’t.

  We have become solid, complicit colleagues. We share the same values, the same battles. Make a stand when that’s all you can do. That’s a start.

  Frédéric knows me, it’s true, even if our saliva never mingled. But he’s wrong. I’m not the one people should be worried about.

  CÉCILE

  In view of the circumstances, I thought long and hard about going to this dinner with William. I was scared to think of standing beside him in public, letting people see us – or what’s left of us – as a couple, being party to that pantomime. But I couldn’t come up with a valid excuse to get out of it. We go out so rarely. That also happened gradually. We’re invited out less and less often. We no longer go to the cinema. We never eat in restaurants. I don’t know when the end of our social life dates from. As with many things, the fact is I’m unable to say when it began – to space out, dry up, die off – nor when it ended. Everything is happening as though I’m coming round from a strange torpor. From a general anaesthetic. And this question keeps on recurring: how could I have failed to realise sooner?

  Previously – I mean, when we still used to go out – William always found something to criticise: people talked too much, took themselves too seriously, didn’t ask questions. And he wasn’t always wrong about that. We very rarely reciprocated the invitations. William doesn’t like people coming to our home. I think he’s afraid that allowing people to see the place we live, giving them access to our interior, will reveal our deception. Or, to be accurate, mine. He’s afraid of the little detail, the faux pas that might escape his vigilance and reveal my background – a milieu where people don’t just make errors in French, but also errors of taste. Some of which he’s probably missed. It’s not (of course) for want of trying to impose his ideas. And asking me to take things he thinks unworthy of our apartment down to the cellar. Besides, William has never liked entertaining. Even in the early days. He always did it grudgingly.

  This time it was partly a work thing and my husband indicated that it was important to him. Charles, our host, also works for the group, but in another company. Anaïs, his wife, is a commercial law specialist. We’ve seen them two or three times, but they aren’t friends. They moved a few months ago and were keen to have us round to their new apartment. So we set off around 8 p.m., leaving Mathis and Théo at home. In the end, our son had won easily: as we were going out, of course he got to invite a friend round rather than stay at home alone.

  Anaïs and Charles had invited another couple we didn’t know.

  We sat around the coffee table drinking aperitifs. We swapped news and then, as always, I became invisible. I’m used to this. Give or take a few details, the scenario is always the same. I’m generally asked two or three questions, and then after I’ve said that I don’t work, the conversation shifts to someone else and never comes back to me. People don’t imagine that a housewife can have a life, interests, still less anything to say. They don’t imagine she can string together a few sensible sentences about the world around us or be up to formulating an opinion. It’s as though the housewife is by definition under house arrest and her brain, having suffered oxygen deprivation too long, operates at reduced speed. Guests discover with a certain fear that they’re going to have to put up with a person at their table who has withdrawn from the world and civilisation and who, apart from purely practical and domestic topics, won’t be able to take part in any genuine conversation. So quite quickly I’m excluded from the company. They stop talking to me and, in particular, they stop looking at me. Mostly I let myself become absorbed by the colour of the walls or the pattern on the wallpaper. I look for vanishing points and I disappear.

  In fact, for different reasons, William appreciates the fact that I’m a silent woman.

  But this Saturday, over dinner, my husband began telling an anecdote. William has always liked to be the centre of attention. He likes the moment when silence descends around the table and all eyes converge on him and everyone shows signs of interest. It’s a form of group allegiance. My mind was wandering, only vaguely following what he was saying. It was about a conference in the provinces and a very boozy dinner. They’d been hanging around outside with some colleagues, all of them pretty drunk, when a young woman they didn’t know but who had taken part in the seminar walked past. One of them called out to her, as a joke.

  The tone that William used about this woman snapped me out of the familiar, inner drifting state in which I’d taken refuge.

  ‘. . . You can take it from me that she clenched her buttocks!’ he was saying as I fully returned to the conversation.

  Everyone laughed. Including the women. I’m always surprised that women laugh at jokes like these.

  ‘Really?’ I interrupted. ‘She clenched her buttocks? Did that surprise you?’

  I didn’t give him time to reply. ‘Do you want me to explain why?’

  He was looking at the others, as if to say, Look
at the kind of woman fate has saddled me with.

  ‘Because you were four pissed blokes in a deserted business park, near some practically deserted Ibis or Campanile hotel. So yes, William, that’s probably one of the essential differences between men and women, fundamental even: women have very good reason to clench their buttocks.’

  An awkward silence had fallen. I saw William hesitate between getting me to explain exactly what I meant (at the risk that I would make a fool of myself in front of his friends if, for example, on the spur of the moment, I came out with one of the turns of phrase he cannot bear) and dismissing my remark with a wave of his hand and going on with his story. He asked me, with barely a hint of condescension, ‘What do you mean, my dear?’

  (Need I add that William uses the expression ‘my dear’ to respond to women who contradict him on social networks or get enraged by what he has written? For example, he writes, ‘My dear, look around: most men are wimps’ or, ‘My dear, go and get fucked in the ass by some Jew pharmacist. That’s their speciality.’)

  I was addressing William, but also the other two men at the table.

  ‘Do you clench your buttocks when you come across a group of young women who’re manifestly drunk in the middle of the night?’

  The silence was perceptibly deepening.

  ‘Of course not. Because no woman, even if she’s dead drunk, has ever put her hand on your penis or buttocks, or made a sexual remark when you’ve walked past. Because it’s pretty unusual for a woman to throw herself on a man in the street or under a bridge or in a hotel room in order to penetrate him or force I don’t know what into his anus. That’s why. So yes, you should realise that any normal woman clenches her buttocks when she passes a group of four men at three in the morning. Not only does she clench her buttocks, she also avoids eye contact and any behaviour that might indicate fear, challenge or invitation. She looks straight ahead, is careful not to quicken her pace, and only starts to breathe again when she’s alone in the lift.’

  William watched me, astonished. I saw his mouth become a hard line and I thought that Wilmor probably had that expression when he was at his keyboard.

  ‘My dear, don’t talk nonsense. You never go out alone, especially not at night.’

  ‘Perhaps it’s not too late to start. Thank you for an excellent dinner, but I have to say I’m finding the conversation a little tedious. That’s what you’ll say to me in the car, isn’t it? If I go home in two hours with you: “God, they’re a pain in the arse!” Isn’t it, my dear?’

  A few minutes later I was in the street, alone and laughing.

  For the first time, I had broken the rules. I had broken the pact with my husband. I have to admit that I replayed the scene in my head several times. Yes, yes, I know – talking to myself outside. Bursting out laughing, even! After all, lots of people talk to themselves. I walked for a bit before hailing a taxi. I was still laughing as I got into the back of the cab.

  I spent the journey imagining how I’d describe this scene to Dr Felsenberg, which details I’d choose.

  It’s stupid, but I was so happy at the thought of finally having something to tell him.

  I got back at half ten. They weren’t expecting me so early.

  I found them both sitting on the sofa in front of a reality TV show. At their feet were a bottle of whisky, two or three Coke cans and some plastic glasses.

  They hadn’t heard the key in the door. I came up behind them. They were completely euphoric, to the extent that Théo was virtually rolling on the floor – literally. I thought that something one of the characters in the programme had said must just have sent them into this state of competitive hilarity.

  When Mathis finally realised I was there, I saw his face change, going in a flash from uninhibited laughter as a result of the alcohol to panic. The laughing stopped. Mathis started picking up the plastic glasses, removing evidence of the crime. Théo sat down again on the sofa. He wasn’t in a fit state to do anything. Mathis seemed less drunk than his friend. That reassured me a little: on the disaster scale, we weren’t the record holders.

  I asked who had brought the alcohol.

  Without hesitation, Théo said it was him.

  He squared up to me a little defiantly, as though he was protecting Mathis, as though he had decided to take the brunt of my anger on his own, while Mathis was still fussing around, pretending to tidy up.

  I asked him where he’d bought the bottle. How he’d paid for it. How much they’d drunk. Did his parents know he was drinking at the age of twelve and a half? I’d never spoken to a child this harshly. He stopped responding. I wanted to slap him and throw him out without more ado. Or take him in a taxi back to his house, but the truth was I was afraid he’d be sick in the car. He could barely stand.

  Mathis tried to explain the fortuitous circumstances which had led them, against their will, to have this bottle of whisky, which had come into the apartment by itself, as it were, almost by breaking and entering (or some such nonsense), but I shouted, ‘Go to bed, both of you!’

  I didn’t have to say it twice.

  My son helped his friend down the hall and they disappeared.

  I sat down where they’d been. A young woman in a swimming costume, with voluminous breasts, and make-up with colours and highlights that were rather fascinating, was talking to camera. I paused to listen – maybe she knew some truth that had escaped me – but I heard her chuckle, ‘Let’s shake some booty,’ and switched off the television.

  I poured myself a generous measure of whisky in an empty glass and downed it in one. I wanted to laugh again.

  THÉO

  He wasn’t afraid when she came in, unexpectedly, right in the middle of the evening. He just thought it was much too early and that because of her, yet again, he wouldn’t be able to go all the way.

  He wasn’t afraid either when she asked him all those questions, a real police interrogation. She wanted details.

  He knows how to keep quiet. He really didn’t care that Mathis’s mother was furious or that she sent them to bed like little boys.

  But he was scared when she appeared in the room at nine o’clock the next morning and announced she was taking him home. She knew he was at his father’s this weekend and of course wanted to speak to him. She had some things to tell him. It was important for parents to keep each other informed, she said. She couldn’t say nothing about something so serious, he needed to understand that. She said she was sorry, but she didn’t look at all sorry. She looked like someone who was bored and had just found something to occupy herself. She told him to have a shower and get dressed while she made breakfast.

  Sitting in front of his bowl of hot chocolate, Théo claimed that his father worked on Sunday mornings and wouldn’t be home. But she wasn’t going to be taken in.

  ‘Give me his number so that I can confirm that with him.’

  ‘He doesn’t have a mobile and the landline isn’t working.’

  ‘In that case we’ll have to go and see him.’

  He wasn’t hungry. His whole body felt knotted. All the organs they’d drawn in biology had got tangled up and now formed a compact, painful ball.

  She wasn’t going to change her mind, he could be certain of that.

  She insisted that he finish his bowl of hot chocolate. It was very cold outside and she didn’t want him going out on an empty stomach. She was making an effort to speak nicely to him. Her voice sounded false.

  He knows that Mathis’s mother doesn’t like him.

  He doesn’t like her either. She uses weird expressions when she speaks, which she must have copied from old books. She speaks as though French were a foreign language that she had learned off by heart or had borrowed from someone.

  He forced down the hot, milky drink. Across the table, Mathis was looking at him helplessly. He was searching for a way to prevent his mother from going with him, but no ideas were coming.

  She indicated that it was time to go and went to get Théo’s jacket from the cup
board. (At Mathis’s everything is tidied away. Everything has a place that has to be respected.) As she handed it to him, she expressed surprise that he wasn’t dressed more warmly.

  She didn’t want Mathis to go with them. She knows Théo’s father lives somewhere around the place d’Italie. She looked at the metro map to check how to get there. She told Théo he’d have to show her the way when they came out of the station.

  On the way down in the lift, he retied his shoelaces so as not to have to look at himself in the mirror or meet this woman’s eye.

  Now she’s walking beside him, authoritative and brisk.

  Théo feels his heart beating in his stomach in the place where the alcohol first warms and then calms him.

  She mustn’t cross the threshold. She mustn’t enter his father’s apartment, let alone talk to him.

  If she crosses the threshold, it’s all over.

  By any means at all, he must keep her away. Prevent her from getting near.

  They’re heading towards the metro. He matches his pace to hers. She senses him following her stride. Then her vigilance relaxes for a few seconds and Théo seizes this brief moment to make a run for it.

  He pelts along the boulevard de Grenelle, runs without looking back, keeps going past the first station on Line 6 in case she catches up with him and runs even faster to the next.

  At Sèvres-Lecourbe he takes the stairs four at a time to get to the overhead metro. He’s laughing. At the last moment he leaps into a carriage just as its doors are about to shut.

  That was close!

  Rooted to the spot, she was! Didn’t know what hit her.

  HÉLÈNE

  The other day when I announced that we would start studying reproduction after the holidays, Rose interrupted me.

  ‘Do you have children, Miss?’

  I said no and went on with the lesson. Usually, with the students I extricate myself from these situations with a little joke. But not this time.