The Rest of Their Lives

by Jean-Paul Didierlaurent

  ‘Madeleine, how many times must I tell you to wait for me? You’re really very naughty.’

  The elderly lady was able to melt her home help’s heart with her puppy eyes whenever Manelle scolded her. Once again, Manelle found it impossible to resist her client’s contrite expression. Despite her advanced age, her obesity and her rheumatism, come wind, snow or rain like today, Madeleine Collot made it a point of honour to pay a daily visit to the local grocery store which was less than five hundred metres from her home. As stubborn as she was kind and reserved, nothing and nobody could dissuade her from this sacrosanct mission: going to Maxini’s – ‘Max choice, Mini prices’. Madeleine always took the same pleasure in entering the shop accompanied by her home help, whose job was to follow her like her shadow, the shopping basket within reach. It took fifteen minutes for her to buy a few things to keep her going until the next day’s shopping expedition. ‘I don’t know how to explain it,’ she once confessed to Manelle, who was asking her about this strange addiction. ‘I find it helpful, you see. Before, I used to go to church, to morning mass, but there’s no mass any more in the neighbourhood and no priest. So I make do with Maxini’s. It’s on the way to the church and it’s always open. I don’t know why but I find it comforting to see all those orderly, well-stocked shelves. I know it sounds silly, but it gives me a purpose for the next day. On Sundays, when it’s closed, I don’t feel right. I get anxious and the day seems much longer. I know a lot of widows who go and visit their husbands’ graves at the cemetery on that day but me, my Dédé, I don’t need to go and witter to a piece of polished granite for him to talk to me. I don’t like cemeteries and I don’t like Sundays,’ she concluded.

  Maxini’s exuded abundance. The narrowness of the aisles added to this impression and every inch of shelf space was crammed to capacity. Intriguingly, Madeleine Collot’s limp tended to disappear as she wandered up and down the laden aisles. Still today, the old lady’s pace quickened as she plunged into the depths of the shop. Madeleine’s purchases were confined to a veal escalope, a tub of celeriac remoulade, a litre of orange juice and four plain yoghurts. There was only one checkout at Maxini’s, a till manned either by Bussuf, a young student who was always smiling and who loved joking, or by the manageress, a crabby, cold, ageless woman who always wore faded pink overalls. At Maxini’s roulette, you could only bet on two options: Bussuf’s smile or the manageress’s pink. Today, it was the pink that won.

  ‘Thirteen euros, twenty-eight cents,’ snapped the boss, perched on her stool on casters.

  The total rang out like a court sentence. After rummaging frantically in her handbag, Madeleine had to face up to the fact: she’d left her purse at home. Manelle was moved by the panic in her eyes.

  ‘Never mind, Madeleine, don’t worry – you can pay me back later,’ she reassured her as she held her credit card out to the cashier.

  ‘I’m sorry, we don’t take credit card payments for less than fifteen euros.’

  The woman had spoken in a tone that brooked no argument. The till screen showed the total in luminous figures. One three point two eight. Manelle sighed.

  ‘Madame Collot comes here every day, can’t you make an exception?’

  The lady tapped with her bony finger the little notice Sellotaped to the top of the till: Credit cards accepted only for purchases over fifteen euros. The adhesive had turned yellow with time and the felt tip had run in places. Manelle looked at the woman’s name silk-screen-printed onto her overall before urging her again.

  ‘Look, Ghislaine, I haven’t got any cash on me, can you really not make an exception?’

  No, Ghislaine clearly couldn’t. Her head shook from right to left while her mouth emitted a string of tut-tut-tuts. Like an automatic sprinkler, thought Manelle.

  ‘It doesn’t matter,’ stammered a shaken Madeleine to whom it mattered a great deal. She had never come back from Maxini’s with an empty shopping basket.

  ‘Yes, it does matter,’ fumed Manelle.

  The weekend hadn’t soothed away her tiredness and she was in no mood to have her existence complicated by this skinny shrew. At the last team meeting, the section manager had once again drummed into them that individual initiatives weren’t prohibited, provided the situation required it, of course. The situation required it. Madame Adding Machine wanted a minimum of fifteen euros, Manelle was going to give it to her. She spotted the sweet jar and the lollipop display by the till. There were treats of all colours and all shapes. Jelly beans, sherbet lemons, sugar-coated sweets, marshmallows, sweets to chew, sweets to suck, sweets that melt on the tongue. Sweets at two, three, four or five euro cents for the most expensive ones.

  ‘How was your blood sugar last time you were tested, Madeleine?’ asked Manelle.

  ‘Good. It’s my cholesterol that’s a bit high, but my blood sugar’s OK.’

  ‘Right, you’re going to give us one euro seventy-two’s worth of sweets, please, Ghislaine. Thank you. A present from me,’ she said to Madeleine, whose eyes began to light up.

  The cashier had already plunged her claw into the first jar to extract a handful of liquorice wheels at five cents each. Manelle stopped her.

  ‘Hold on, no, not those. Give us ten Haribo strawberries, four bananas . . . um . . . three bubble gums. We’ll also have a handful of liquorice allsorts, five cola sweets, there . . . oh yes, some gummy crocodiles, they’re yummy, crocodiles, give us eight crocodiles.’

  The shopkeeper’s hand flew from one jar to another, unscrewing the tops and screwing them back on following Manelle’s instructions. Manelle paused for a moment.

  ‘How much are we up to?’ she simpered. ‘We’re not finished but we mustn’t go over.’

  After tapping nervously on her calculator, the manageress announced the score.

  ‘That comes to ninety-five cents.’

  Some of the other customers were starting to grow impatient and were muttering behind Manelle’s back, to her great delight.

  ‘Give us four chewy fruits, six Smurfs, two liquorice sweets, a cola Pasta Basta and two fried eggs. No, wait, just one fried egg and give us Dracula teeth instead. How much is that now?’

  The keys clicked madly. The queue had grown even longer. There were rumblings of discontent.

  ‘Has the till packed up?’

  ‘What’s going on?’

  ‘What the hell’s happening?’

  Manelle turned around and offered the irritated customers a shrug to show her helplessness.

  ‘One euro eighty-eight,’ screeched Madame Adding Machine hysterically.

  ‘It’s too much,’ replied Manelle, making her exchange one liquorice sweet and two crocodiles for a bubble gum, to ensure the total came to exactly fifteen euros.

  The bony hand snatched the credit card and inserted it into the reader. On leaving, Manelle plonked the gummy Dracula teeth down in front of the cashier and flashed her most charming smile.

  ‘For you. It will suit you perfectly.’

  Madeleine walked down the street beside her home help clutching the precious bag of sweets. Reaching her safe haven, she limped over to her armchair and sank into it, sighing with contentment. From the kitchen where she was putting away the shopping, Manelle was rewarded by the childlike grin that lit up the old woman’s face as she fished out a Haribo strawberry.

  8

  Again that evening, Beth had lectured him after dinner. ‘If that’s not a sorry sight, seeing a piece of furniture just sitting there gathering dust,’ she’d scolded, jerking her chin in the direction of the bookcase. Ambroise recalled the entire afternoon he’d spent assembling the three flat-pack elements from Ikea. An afternoon unpacking and methodically sorting the various components and then meticulously following the assembly instructions. Almost three months had gone by since the brand-new white Hemnes bookcase had been installed against the sitting room wall. Not a week had gone by since without Beth complaining about the empty shelves which she found so sad. ‘A bookcase without books is as ugly as a mo
uth without teeth,’ she’d repeat. ‘And makes no more sense than a graveyard without graves,’ she’d add, with the utmost seriousness. ‘You know where the books are, Ambroise. You have the key, all you need to do is go and get them,’ she’d urge. Of course he knew where his books were. And of course he’d kept the set of keys his mother had given him when he’d moved out of his parents’ home four years earlier. Only this was the thing: between the books and him was his father, Professor Henri Larnier.

  Since his mother had passed away, Ambroise had never returned to the house in the upper part of the town. His mother, who had spent her entire life in the shadow of the great man, living vicariously in her gilded cage. Attentive to his every wish, anticipating his needs, she had ended up finding something resembling fulfilment in her boundless devotion to her illustrious husband. Wherever she was – at the baker’s, the library, the theatre, the market, her hairdresser’s – she was only ever known as Professor Henri Larnier’s wife. And when he won the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 2005 for his work on the treatment of postoperative complications, Cécile Dumoulin, Larnier’s spouse, had immediately been dubbed the-wife-of-Nobel-laureate-Henri-Larnier. That had become her name, for eternity. ‘Whatever you do, don’t tell Papa,’ she’d murmured fearfully as she’d slipped the keys into her son’s hand. For his mother, that gesture had been a real act of defiance, possibly the only one in her entire existence as an obedient wife. It was to remain their little secret, between a mother and her son. Ambroise had never needed to use the precious door key. Once a week, having ascertained that the great man was at work, Ambroise would park his car in a neighbouring street, walk anxiously up to the iron gates of number eight Rue Fenouillet, and steal in like a lover visiting his mistress. At the top of the steps, all he generally needed to do was push open the door left ajar for him and find his mother, hair freshly done and all dressed up. She would hug him tight for a long time then step back and give him that long, searching look common to all mothers when they are reunited with their child after too long an absence. The following hour would be spent chatting about this and that, reinventing the world over an orangeade or a glass of wine, and laughing while drinking each other in with their eyes. Neither ever mentioned his father during that hour. An hour that was theirs, and theirs alone. Being apart made them avid for each other’s news. She wanted to know everything about his life, his work, his friends, his loves, about what Beth had lovingly cooked for him that week. He asked her about her health, her worries, the most recent film she’d seen or book she’d read. During those sixty minutes, the-wife-of-Nobel-laureate-Henri-Larnier was a woman like any other, with her desires, her joys and her sorrows. Each of these clandestine visits revitalized her. But she had kept from her son the disease that had surreptitiously come and lodged deep inside her one April day. Not wanting, perhaps, to mar that sacrosanct hour by telling him about the dull pain that had started to the left of her stomach and would not loosen its grip. She hadn’t said anything to her husband either. Afraid of bothering the great man, perhaps; afraid, too, most likely of uttering the taboo word under that roof since Henri Larnier had banned all mention of medicine since his son’s departure. She had also kept the signs of the cancer secret for as long as possible, putting her weight loss down to an imaginary diet, but by the time the symptoms had visibly erupted, it was too late. Metastasized into stage-four cancer, the beast had devoured her in less than two months. His father hadn’t noticed anything. The Nobel laureate in Medicine, the eminent surgeon who spent his days among tumours both malignant and benign, had not at any point troubled himself to detect the abomination that was eating up his own wife from within. On the day of the funeral, the father and son found themselves standing dazed on either side of the grave, contemplating without understanding the chasm that separated them and which contained a lot more than the remains of a mother and wife. The idea of returning to that house repulsed Ambroise, but he had to. He had promised Beth. Tomorrow, he’d go and fetch his books.

  9

  Dividing his time between his oncology department at the hospital and being on call at the WHO in Geneva at the beginning of every week, his father was often away from home. Ambroise opened the gates and parked his car on the gravel driveway, in full view. He didn’t want to sneak into the house like a thief. After all, he was Ambroise Larnier, the-son-of-Nobel-laureate-Henri-Larnier, and this was his home. As soon as he was inside, he flipped up the cover of the keypad on the wall and punched in the security code to deactivate the alarm, 12102005. The twelfth of October 2005, the date his father had been awarded the Nobel Prize. The code had remained unchanged all those years – the sin of pride. Ambroise walked through the sitting room and half opened the bay window that looked out onto the terrace. The pleasant fragrance of freshly mown grass wafted up from the lawn. Beyond it, the turquoise water in the swimming pool glinted in the sunlight. Water where no one swam any more, he was certain. As far back as he could remember, he could not recall a day when he hadn’t seen his father in his swimming trunks. ‘A swimming pool without bathers is like a car park without cars, it’s sad and useless!’ Beth would have said. The house looked as if it had just undergone a massive spring clean. Cold and immaculate were the two adjectives that came into Ambroise’s mind as he contemplated the living room. It lacked the warmth his mother had brought to the home when she was alive. A vase of flowers on a sideboard, cushions scattered on a couch with deliberate casualness, a half-open book on an armrest, magazines on the coffee table, an incense stick slowly burning, a fruit basket, a half-completed crossword – so many signs of a human presence that were no longer there. On all the walls there were photos of his father. His father posing with a minister, his father shaking hands with a president, his father being honoured by his peers, his father and his Nobel Prize, his father in a white coat at the opening of a new oncology department. And everywhere, carefully framed or placed on shelves, certificates, awards and press cuttings singing his praises. No trace of his mother or of Ambroise in this temple to the glory of the man of science. He paused for a moment by the kitchen and smiled ruefully at the sight of the round table that had witnessed so much shouting, so many words hurled in each other’s faces, where so many unspoken things between a father and a son had been held back as they tore each other apart at mealtimes in front of a helpless mother and wife.

  Saddling your child with the same name as the famous father of modern surgery, Ambroise Paré, spoke volumes about the father’s aspirations for his son. But the boy, then the adolescent and later the young man, had never lived up to his illustrious genitor’s ambitions. At fifteen, to his father’s great displeasure, Ambroise gave up learning the piano for the guitar, the electric guitar to boot, ditching Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart for Angus Young without any qualms. At eighteen, he passed his baccalaureate but didn’t gain the distinction or merit expected by Henri Larnier. After repeating his first year of medicine, the young man dashed his father’s hopes once and for all by enrolling at the regional nursing school. The final blow came a little later when, after two hospital placements, Ambroise informed his parents one December evening that he couldn’t bear the suffering of the living but considered on the other hand that taking care of the bodies of the deceased was among the noblest of professions. ‘Embalmer!’ his father had spluttered, beside himself. How could Ambroise Larnier, his own son, stoop to practise the second oldest profession in the world after that of prostitute? ‘If you’re interested in the dead, go and join them but don’t you dare set foot in this house ever again!’ the Nobel laureate had yelled, verging on apoplexy. Ambroise had packed his bags, embraced his sobbing mother and left the house without a glance at the man with whom he had never shared anything other than shouting or disappointment. Beth had taken him in without bombarding him with questions, had let him move into the back bedroom and made him a kouign-amann to cheer him up.

  Ambroise climbed the stairs and went into his old bedroom. Nothing had changed since his departure. Same posters on the
walls, the furniture all in the same place. Post-it notes that had been there for four years were plastered over the blotter on the desk. A museum, he thought. My museum. His mother had kept the room as it had been, with the secret hope that one day he would come back and live in the family home again. The shelves on the wall were sagging under the weight of the books. All his comic album series were there. Trolls of Troy, Asterix, the complete set of Tintin. Below them, the writers who had been his nocturnal companions during his adolescence. Stephen King, J. K. Rowling, Tolkien. Airport novels, in his father’s view. Ambroise opened the two large bags he had brought with him and gently placed the books inside. After two journeys to the boot of his car, he checked that he hadn’t left any tell-tale clues and locked the front door. A prison, he thought as he reset the alarm. My father lives in a prison.

  10

  Obsessed with hygiene, Ghislaine de Montfaucon had elevated the art of cleanliness to a religion and was intransigent when it came to such matters. It wasn’t enough to wipe your feet when you entered the affluent home located in the heart of the old town. A basket full of disposable blue plastic overshoes awaited the visitor next to the doormat. Manelle grabbed a pair and slipped them on before going any further.

  ‘I’m in here, Mademoiselle Flandin. Leave the washing-up, we can see to that later.’

  As usual, thought Manelle, gliding to the dining room on the polished parquet floor. The elderly lady was waiting for her, already seated at the table in front of the Scrabble board, impatient to continue the game they had begun three days earlier. In truth, Ghislaine de Montfaucon asked nothing more of her home helps than to be her Scrabble partner for an hour. Some of Manelle’s colleagues had complained about it. But not her – she far preferred an hour of Scrabble, draughts or Ludo to an hour of ironing or housework. Once again Ghislaine de Montfaucon was about to win the game hands down because, as well as being neurotic, she was the queen of cheats. A mistress in the art of making up words, she invented their definitions which eventually became real to her, and only to her. Each time her powers of self-persuasion left Manelle gobsmacked. A GRIJAK? Of course, you know, a grijak is a primitive bear with very thick fur that roamed the northern regions of America during the Ice Age. TORQAD? Torqad is a dish based on corn and goat that is eaten on the Tibetan Plateau. Very flavoursome, apparently. Some words spawned other words. To HEXUFF: an action consisting of polishing steel with a hexuffer, a spatula-shaped tool. Manelle had long been closing her eyes to these neologisms that were pure invention. Just as she no longer mentioned the disappearance of certain letters from her stand, often vowels replaced by consonants, or the addition of fictitious double-word-score squares in favour of the old lady when it was time to count their points. Today again, Ghislaine de Montfaucon was unable to stop herself from indulging in her tricks, not even waiting until Manelle had sat down to place a new word on the board.