They saw the day dawning as they arrived in Vézelay. The sky above Église de la Madeleine was the colour of a milky oyster. Martine stopped at the entrance to the still-deserted little town.
‘I’d like some coffee.’
‘So would I.’
They were the first words they had exchanged since their departure and were entirely suitable for the situation, banal, concrete, the same words they would have spoken upon waking up in bed. Now they were at home wherever they went.
‘That hotel is open. Do you think you can manage?’
‘I think so, yes.’
The waitress in the white apron still had pillow marks on her cheek. They ordered coffee and croissants. A German or an English couple of about sixty were speaking in low voices as they buttered their toast. The man had shaving foam behind his ear.
‘I feel grubby. I’d really like to change out of these clothes. I want to buy new ones.’
‘We can stop in a big town.’
‘The next one we come to.’
He was also hungry and in a hurry for his leg to heal. He wished he were German or English, about sixty, fresh from a hot bath.
‘We don’t have to go to Amsterdam.’
‘No.’
‘We just have to go somewhere.’
‘That’s right.’
They breakfasted looking out of the bay window at the shadow the hills cast over the valley. The tourist couple smiled at them as they rose from their table.
Martine had adopted a leisurely pace and was sticking to B-roads. Sometimes Fabien made her stop so that he could talk to a cow. He would lower the window and whistle between his teeth until one of the herd lumbered over from the pasture.
‘You see! I told you, they understand me; I have a rapport with these beasts.’
In a department store in Troyes they bought a sweater, jeans, a jacket and shoes. Fabien came out exhausted but delighted. About ten kilometres on from Troyes they found a little hotel buried in the country and decided to stop there for the night. It was a modest establishment, but clean, a far cry from the inns with fake timbering that featured on the tourist circuit. Situated curiously far from any other habitation it seemed to exist just for them. The Hôtel du Lys. At reception a lady of a certain age, with hair almost as blue as her eyes, offered them room 7 which overlooked the garden. Noticing that Fabien had difficulty walking, she helped Martine get the luggage from the car then led them to their room and discreetly made herself scarce, having agreed with them that they could dine at seven thirty. Fabien stretched out on the bed. Martine went to rest her head against the window.
‘What do you see?’
‘An old-lady garden, a bench, flowerbeds with no flowers, fruit trees, a vegetable patch with lettuces, cauliflowers … perhaps a rabbit hutch at the end.’
‘I feel as if I’m wearing paper. New clothes are so stiff.’
‘You’re looking better.’
‘You’ve seen my leg; it’s incredible how it’s gone down. The bandage is perhaps a little too tight.’
‘I’ll redo it before we go to bed.’
‘It seems as if we’re the only guests.’
Of the five tables in the dining room only two were laid, one over by the window, and the other near the kitchen from where the sound of saucepans and the smell of stew emanated. The lady with blue hair brought them a basket of bread.
‘We didn’t think we would have any guests today. I can offer you a plate of charcuterie as a starter followed by hare stew. It’s my husband who does the cooking; you can rely on him. We’ll be eating the same thing.’
‘That’s perfect.’
‘Apologies again. At this time of year we don’t get many people, a few hunters on Saturdays and Sundays.’
The patron came out of the kitchen with two plates. He greeted them, smiling from afar. Apart from the blue hair he looked exactly, feature for feature, like his wife, who brought them the charcuterie and a bottle of wine.
‘Bon appétit.’
Then she sat down opposite her husband and all four began to eat.
‘Martine, it’s weird …’
‘What is?’
‘Those two over there, they’re like us in twenty years’ time.’
‘Perhaps they’re thinking the same but the other way round about us.’
‘Do you think we’ll have the same face, like they do? It’s unbelievable how alike they look.’
‘He has a limp.’
‘The patron?’
‘Yes, he limps with the same leg as you.’
‘That’s freaky!’
Fabien didn’t dare look at them any more. He thought he might find that they were making the same gestures as them at the same moment. It was like a mime performance in front of a mirror. Their hosts must have felt a similar embarrassment because after the starters were finished, the patron conferred briefly with his wife, then rose and came limping over to Martine and Fabien’s table.
‘Excuse me but … you’re dining at one end of the room and we’re at the other … Since there’s no one else here, would you like to join us? Of course, it’ll be our treat!’
‘Well … yes, with pleasure, that’s very kind.’
She was called Elsa and he was Ulysse (thus Hôtel du Lys). She was a local, he was from Marseille. They had met when they were twenty on holiday in Cassis. The war had come between them; Elsa had married a mine engineer from Sens, now dead, and Ulysse had enlisted as a cook in the merchant navy. They had found each other twenty-five years later by one of those incredible coincidences life sometimes throws up, the derailment of a train near Lyon, and hadn’t been apart since. They’d had the Hôtel du Lys for eight years now. Truth be told, hardly anyone came, but that had been one of the attractions. They had both wanted to retire; the hotel was just a hobby.
Ulysse concluded by saying, ‘It’s as if we’ve been blessed with two lives in a way.’
Martine and Fabien exchanged an envious look as Elsa rose to clear away.
‘What a chatterbox he is; you can tell he’s from Marseille.’
But it was obvious they were proud of their story, and that this was not the first time Ulysse had told it. He probably served it up to every new guest, a slice of life, a speciality of the house. Fabien’s head was aching, too full of emotions, like his stomach was too full of food. Martine also seemed exhausted.
‘A little liqueur?’
‘No thanks. I think we’ll go up to bed. I’ve just got out of hospital.’
‘Oh yes, so what happened to your leg?’
‘It was a motorcycle accident.’
‘With me it was an exploding shell, in the war, but, you know, it doesn’t stop me living! Ah well, good night. Are you leaving tomorrow morning?’
‘Um … yes, not too early.’
‘Take your time. Till tomorrow then.’
Lying in the dark, neither Fabien nor Martine could get to sleep in spite of their fatigue. The radiant faces of the two old people filled their thoughts. Fabien stubbed out his cigarette.
‘I don’t know whether I love them or hate them.’
‘He’s the annoying one.’
‘No, she is too; they both are. But hell, they’re not that bad. Why don’t we stay on tomorrow?’
‘If you like.’
They stayed the next day and the next as well. Elsa and Ulysse were amazed but delighted. They fussed over them as if they were their children. Ulysse was voluble, but Elsa took it upon herself to rein him in.
‘You’re getting on the young people’s nerves with your tales of your round-the-world tour. Leave them alone.’
So Martine and Fabien would go up to their room or else sit on the bench in the garden. The weather had been amazingly beautiful and warm since their arrival, a little bit of Indian summer. Fabien’s leg was healing. It was an ideal place to convalesce. Martine had become beige again, almost transparent. She expressed herself only by smiling wanly and nodding her head, which saved her from having to
reveal herself in any way.
‘She’s shy, your wife!’
‘Very.’
At those moments Fabien remembered her pointing the revolver at Gilles’s head. The detonation that provided the sound track to that image brought him sharply back to the reality of the situation. It was like being sucked down a funnel: he was suffocating and owed his salvation entirely to clinging on desperately to the reassuring reality of Elsa and Ulysse. ‘Last station before the great void, my old friend; those two there are your only chance.’ But even as he thought that, he was aware that Martine was not fooled, that she knew perfectly well what he was thinking, even if she gave no other sign than the merest blink. ‘What’s to stop me turning you in and getting Ulysse to call the police?’ He couldn’t reply any more than he would have been able to say that they each had the other on a leash.
‘Do you like fishing, Fabien?’
‘I don’t know, I’ve never tried.’
‘Shame! Right, listen, if you’re still planning to stay tomorrow, I’ll take you fishing. I know a perfect little spot, on the banks of a lake, very peaceful. We can spend the day with the ladies, have a picnic and in the evening we’ll have a lovely fry-up. What do you say to that?’
‘What do you think, Martine?’
‘Why not? Please excuse me but I’m going to bed, I’ve a bit of a headache.’
‘Of course, Martine, you’ll feel much better tomorrow. Good night!’
When Fabien joined her, she was filing her nails, sitting up in bed. Her hair was hanging down on either side of her face.
‘Can’t you sleep? Are you ill?’
‘No, no. Are you planning on being adopted?’
‘Why do you say that? Are you worried I’m slipping away from you?’
‘To go where? No, it’s just that you’re going back to your old-slipper ways.’
‘What does that mean, “old-slipper”? We’re good here, it’s peaceful. Elsa and Ulysse …’
‘Don’t talk to me about those two old imbeciles! I can’t stand having them hanging around us morning, noon and night.’
‘Happiness bores you, is that it?’
‘I don’t give a toss about happiness! Especially that sort. What do you think, how long have they got? Five years, ten years maximum, watching each other getting older and more shaky and waiting for one of them to pop their clogs. So no, strangely enough I don’t hanker after that kind of happiness.’
‘And what about us? All we have between us is death; it’s the only thing that binds us together!’
‘Rubbish!’
‘No, it’s not! You think you control me, but actually it’s me who controls you. I haven’t killed anyone and I’m no longer shut up in that bedroom. I can leave!’
‘You’ve nowhere to go any more. It’s because of you your friend is dead, because of you Madeleine is dead, because of you your wife is dead and thanks to me you’re still alive. It’s people like you who are dangerous, people who throw stones and turn away so as not to see where they land. You have nothing left but me and you know it.’
Martine fell asleep a short while later. For Fabien the night was long, very long.
Ulysse and Elsa’s good humour could not be dented by Martine and Fabien’s sullen mood. They had not said a word since they had woken up.
‘Come, my children, this is no time for a lovers’ tiff. You’ll frighten the fish away with faces like that! Breathe that air … It feels like spring!’
It was barely nine o’clock and they had already finished breakfast. The sun flowed like honey over the russet trees. Ulysse, bristling with fishing rods, beat his chest, while Elsa filled a basket with pâtés, sausage and bottles of white wine. Everything was beautiful and as inaccessible as the window of a luxury shop to a homeless person. After what Martine had thrown at him the night before, Fabien no longer felt he had any right to be happy, barely any right to exist, and then only if he touched nothing, since everything fell apart in his hands.
They decided only to take one car, Martine’s, since it was more comfortable than Ulysse’s Renault 5.
‘You’ll see, it’s a magnificent spot and … it’s a private lake. No one else but us! It belongs to a friend of mine; he’s loaded. But very nice. He’s almost never here. At the moment he’s in Martinique. I can go there whenever I like. You take that little road on the right, Martine, yes, that one.’
The car set off down a dirt track that led to a wooded valley. Fabien had lowered his window, and the car filled with the odour of undergrowth.
‘Smell that? The ladies are going to be able to collect mushrooms. Last year we brought home a few kilos of ceps. Here it is; we’ve arrived. I’ll open the gate.’
They parked in a vast clearing carpeted with soft grass which sloped gently down to a lake fringed with trees. Behind, there appeared to be the roof of a house.
‘Isn’t it paradise here?’
It could be described as paradise; you just had to believe that it was. The two men went over to the edge of the water. In places the water lilies seemed to form scales with bubbles bursting through the interstices.
Ulysse whispered in Fabien’s ear, ‘We’re going to get a good catch today, I can feel it. We’ll set up over there where the trees are more widely spaced – there’ll be less chance of getting the lines caught in the branches. I’ll prepare your line for you.’
The two women had settled on blankets, full in the sun. They were chatting and laughing. Elsa was knitting something in red wool. Ulysse spread all his paraphernalia of lines, hooks and floats out on the grass. Fabien was fascinated by the box of wriggling red and white maggots. Ulysse picked one up between thumb and forefinger and secured it on the hook.
‘There you are, Fabien, you’re all set. You’ll feel the fish biting. As soon as you see the float disappear completely, give a flick of the wrist, and that’s it.’
For the first time in his life Fabien found himself with a fishing rod in his hands. He cast the line awkwardly two metres from the bank and waited upright, as stiff as a poker. He felt ridiculous, as if he were disguised as a fisherman. The reflections of the sun off the water hurt his eyes. He could hardly make out the little red float. The silence was broken by tweeting, splashing and flapping of wings in the undergrowth. He would have liked to throw everything into the lake and take off. But then he received a jolt to his wrists like an electric charge that spread from his head to his feet. The float had disappeared in the middle of a neat little circle. He pulled with all his strength, certain he had caught a barracuda. The roach described a long arc in the sky before landing wriggling on the grass.
‘Ulysse! Ulysse! I’ve caught one. What do I do?’
‘Don’t shout! You unhook it and put it in the keepnet.’
The fish was looking at him. Fabien didn’t dare touch it.
‘It’s not going to bite you! Pick it up and very gently take the hook out.’
It was disgusting. Those five centimetres of life fought in his hand with surprising vigour. It was a veritable carnage getting the hook out of the fish’s mouth. He had blood on his hand and a fishy smell he was sure he would never be able to get rid of ever again.
‘There. Now you put another maggot on.’
So there would be no end to it? Now he was going to have to skewer the obscene little parasite. ‘It’s because of you your friend is dead, because of you! It’s people like you who are dangerous.’ He put his line back in the water but minus a maggot at the end, to be sure of not catching anything.
He was bored stiff for the next two hours. The incandescent ripples ruffling the surface of the lake burnt his eyeballs. Since he didn’t care about the fish, he could have looked elsewhere, but he continued to stare at the float until he was cross-eyed. Ulysse was astonished that he failed to catch anything else.
‘Perhaps it’s not the best position here … I’ll spread some bait – that’ll lure them in while we have lunch.’
He threw in a handful of some sticky substance
that smelt a bit like gingerbread, then joined the women.
It could not have been more Déjeuner sur l’herbe, from the tablecloth of dazzling whiteness, the wicker basket, the terrines, the bottles still streaming with water from the lake where they’d been set to cool, to Martine, who was smiling. Ulysse began to tease Fabien a little and told some tales of heroic fishing success, interspersed with ‘It’s paradise here, paradise!’ Perhaps it was the sun, or the wine, but gradually Fabien felt the ice that had formed in him during the night begin to melt. He got up to fetch some cigarettes from the car.
He was about twenty metres from the others when two shots rang out. Martine was sitting on her haunches, her chin resting on her knees, her outstretched arm holding the revolver. The figures of Ulysse and Elsa lay, one on its back, arms spread wide, the other on its side, curled up. Nothing was moving; even nature seemed to be holding its breath. Like a photograph. A plane passed high in the sky, leaving behind it a white trail and, as if awaiting this signal, one by one the birds began to sing, the fish to leap in the water, and the wind to ruffle the foliage. As Fabien approached the picnic spot, he repeated to himself louder and louder, ‘I don’t believe it, I don’t believe it …’ Yet Ulysse could not have been any more dead, a napkin round his neck, his mouth still full of food and nor could Elsa, her cheek crushing a slice of pâté.
‘But why? Why?’
‘It’s paradise here.’
Martine threw him the revolver.
‘Here, there’s one bullet left.’
Fabien picked up the gun. It was still warm. He aimed it at Martine.
‘You’re insane, completely insane!’
She looked at him impassively, rocking gently backwards and forwards.
‘No … No, Martine, I’m not playing. Go to hell.’
He flung the revolver with great force into the middle of the lake.
‘Now, I’m leaving you, disappearing – you no longer exist.’
She didn’t reply, and didn’t move. Fabien turned on his heel and left, dragging his leg.
The Front Seat Passenger Page 9