The bunch of keys jingled. Martin turned the handle of the front gate and pulled the suitcase across the paving stones in the garden up to the stone steps at the front door of the house. Madame Préau stopped for a moment on the driveway, as if suspended from the umbrella, contemplating the desiccated shrubbery and flower beds that ran along the base of the house. She wondered how her son had managed to kill established plants that she had planted well before she left. Madame Préau looked up, eyeing the roof. It hadn’t suffered too much in the recent storms. The valleys below the slope of the roof were in good condition and were casting rainwater away from the façade of the house, making up for the lack of gutters. Madame Préau’s vision became clouded; raindrops beaded on the surface of her glasses. She joined her son at the top of the steps.
9
What struck Madame Préau was the smell. You never forget how a house smells. Hers smelled stale, of wax, and of shit. An explanation wasn’t long in coming. With a handkerchief over his nose, Martin tried in vain to flush the toilets. One of the movers must have relieved himself before heading home for the night.
“Bastard. One of them shat in the toilet!”
He left his mother, crossed the hallway that was crowded with a dozen stacked boxes, and headed for the stairs that led down into the basement. Madame Préau guessed that her son meant to turn on the water and electricity mains. She folded her umbrella and leaned it against a cast-iron radiator to dry. The radiator was cold. Like the rest of the house. It would take several hours to get it warm again. Martin hadn’t lived here in years. Madame Préau didn’t wait for her son to come back up from the basement, and took a few steps into the kitchen.
The place was strange to her. All of the furniture had been changed. It was the same in each room in the house. Louis XVI chests of drawers, art deco pedestal tables and plant stands, enamelware boxes, Regency mirrors and clocks, Louis-Philippe sideboards, porcelaine de Paris vases—their bourgeois family heirlooms left the house two years after Madame Préau had moved to the south. At that time, her son had chosen to move closer to his surgery in Pavillons-sous-Bois, pronouncing the family home too vast for him. One Friday afternoon, men had come in a removals lorry and made a clean sweep of the place, ripping out everything down to the light fittings and the pink marble mantelpieces. All that was left was the upright piano on the first-floor landing, the piano on which Madame Préau had learned to play herself, and then given musical theory lessons to a few students. It was daylight robbery. Madame Préau’s fine walnut dressing table now would belong to rich Americans who had paid too much for the antique. Some people stuff the sumptuous interior of their villa with authentic pieces like so much pocket change.
Madame Préau put the flowers on the dining-room table and set about opening the shutters to air out the disgusting smell emanating from the bathroom. To her surprise, it was easy to fold back the metal shutters against the windowsills; this side of the house was less exposed to the elements. The variegated oleaster hedge had tripled in size and was turning yellow against the horizon, shielding the ground floor from the view of passersby. A few red berries hung like baubles—little bayberries that tempted children, and that Bastien would put have put to his lips when he was little under his granny’s horrified gaze.
Madame Préau went into the living room to open the other shutters. Devoid of its leaves, the chestnut tree no longer hid the view.
Madame Préau was horrified by what she discovered.
When she got out of the taxi, she had only been able to see the left side of the street, where her house was. There was nothing left of the immense woodland that stood opposite. Its owner had sold it off piecemeal, like the rest. A fox had once lived there, and the neighborhood children would go there every summer to pilfer as many plums, cherries, and gooseberries as they could hold in their bundled shirts. They would stick their scratched hands into the blackberry bushes, where a crucifix had been brightened up by a fountain from the turn of the last century. Two bungalows had appeared there, covered in outdated pebbledash. One was situated immediately in front of Madame Préau’s house, twenty or so meters away. A concrete wall, openwork at the top, marked out the plot. Though a weeping birch partly hid the house, from the living room windows Madame Préau could see part of the garage and a garden swing.
“They built them two years ago. A couple with children.”
Martin stood a few steps back from his mother. Trying to appear more relaxed, he spat into his handkerchief before putting it back in his pocket. “When the chestnut is in leaf, it’ll all be like it was before.”
Madame Préau shook her head slowly.
No.
It will never be like it was before.
She said in a small voice, “I feel like this is the first time I’ve ever been here, Martin.”
Madame Préau raised a hand to caress her son’s cheek. His skin was soft, soothing. She preferred Martin clean-shaven.
10
Madame Préau received a visit from her son once a week, on Thursday. They regularly ate at Le Bistrot du Boucher restaurant in Villemomble. The menu hardly ever changed, which Madame Préau rather liked. This evening they were celebrating her seventy-first birthday. She ordered the usual set menu: beef, green beans, wine, and dessert. They brought her an île flottante covered in toasted almonds that was as heavy as a dictionary. Madame Préau felt almost jubilant. It was a shame that Bastien wasn’t there to distract her with his shenanigans, upending his juice across the tablecloth, pinching chips from his daddy’s plate and sticking them up his nose.
As a matter of unshakable habit, Madame Préau would ask her son a disagreeable question over dessert. She didn’t miss her chance.
“Have you had any news from your father?”
Martin folded his napkin and pushed back his plate.
“No. But you could call him, you know.”
“I don’t like the telephone, Martin. There’s too much static on the line. I’m not sure that I even want to keep the phone in the house, for that matter. I think it’s a needless expense.”
“I don’t think so, Mum. You have to be able to reach me if there’s a problem. And I want to be able to call you. You’re not in an apartment building anymore; you’re alone in the house.”
“I was born in that house. What do you think could possibly happen to me?”
Madame Préau grabbed her spoon. She furrowed her brow. Martin knew this expression well: the martyred mother.
“And besides,” she sighed, “my son could easily come over from time to time for a chat instead of leaving me with some idiot nurse underfoot.”
“Mum, you know full well that we’re understaffed—between being on call and being at the surgery, I’m overwhelmed with work.”
“It’s lovely to write, too. It hones your spelling and grammar.”
“That’s it, Mum. Get me some writing paper.”
“Oh no! I can’t read a word of your chicken scratch. It’s worse than your father’s.”
Madame Préau plunged her spoon into her dessert.
“I don’t know how you did it, forgiving him for abandoning you,” she blurted as soon as she’d swallowed her first mouthful.
The man turned his napkin over to hide a stain.
“Mum, we’re not going to talk about that again. It’s you who told him to leave. Not the other way around.”
“Mmm. All the same, I was hardly in a position to feed my child and cover living expenses on my teacher’s salary. Your father was well aware of that.”
Madame Préau saw her son pull a familiar face. Her mouth was full of egg white and caramelized sugar, and Martin couldn’t bear to listen to her speak with her mouth full. When he was a child, it would make him sick to his stomach. His parents’ past troubles as a couple triggered a similar response; he had grown up with nausea. She knew how dearly Dr. Martin Préau paid for dinner every Thursday with his mother—it was his cross to bear. He kept her company, stuck a fork into a piece of meat to put on a goo
d show, but he didn’t have the appetite for it. If he had indigestion once he got back to his apartment, Madame Préau wouldn’t have been the least bit surprised. She hurried to empty her mouth.
Martin leaned toward his mother’s île flottante.
“All right, listen. I don’t want to talk about Dad. Besides, it’s been thirty years. And you were already a headmistress.”
“Hmm. I’m not so sure about that. Still, do you remember how they ‘thanked’ me when I was three years from retirement age?”
“You’re confusing things. That was in ’ninety-seven. Be quiet and finish your dessert.”
“Fired for gross negligence—hah! It was slander, obviously. I didn’t write a single letter to the County Council. That’s not my style. They never had a thing on me.”
“You’ve already told me this a hundred times.”
“What’s that in your pocket?”
Martin readjusted his jacket by the shoulders.
“It’s nothing, Mum.”
“Because you’re putting your hand in your inside jacket pocket a lot.’
“It’s my wallet, that’s all.”
“This île flottante is delicious.”
“Are you having a coffee?”
“No, thank you. It’s your father who drinks coffee in the evening. Not me.”
Martin asked for the bill with the weariness particular to the children of divorced parents. He regretted feeling like he had to get a gift for his mother, again, and it was as obvious as a garden gnome in a flower bed. He had unearthed on the Internet a little inlaid Louis XVI table in rosewood and sycamore with a pull-out writing desk. It was similar to the one that Madame Préau had got from her great-grandmother, which had been stolen in the course of the famous burglary. It was an expensive present for Madame Préau, who had refrained from sending anything to her son for his birthday for these last eight years, convinced that the package would be stolen by a postal worker before reaching its destination.
“Do you know that they don’t need to open letters any more to read them? They use scanners; it’s more practical. That’s progress for you.”
Martin drove his mother back home without venturing a word. He was hiding something from her, something that he was ashamed of or that embarrassed him greatly. Something that probably had something to do with the fact that his mobile hadn’t stopped vibrating in his inside jacket pocket throughout the meal.
He’d have to bring it up sooner or later.
It saddened Madame Préau that her son could keep such secrets.
A close-knit family is built on honesty, not unspoken troubles.
11
The alarm clock rang at six forty-five. At seven thirty, Madame Préau opened the shutters in her bedroom. Next, twenty minutes of morning gymnastics. Isabelle, the housekeeper, who lived around the corner, rang the doorbell at nine o’clock on the dot. She took off her shoes, stepped into her slippers, tied an apron around her hips, and consistently refused the coffee offered to her by Madame Préau. For an hour, Isabelle would dust or run the vacuum cleaner, make the bed or take care of the laundry while the old woman would read in the living room, drinking a Nescafé. She belonged to the library and would take out two or three books per week. She took notes on each work, notes that she transcribed in large notebooks, to do with errors of style, implausibility, or philosophical and historical details of interest to her, in addition to all biblical references. At eleven o’clock on Tuesdays and Thursdays, Madame Préau had an appointment in the city center with a physiotherapist, Mr. Apeldoorn, to treat arthritis in her neck. Sessions in traction or with electrostimulation meant that she could go without the foam brace that she was obliged to wrap around her neck while she gardened. On Wednesdays, after her nap, Madame Préau would walk to Dr. Mamnoue, in Raincy. On the way back, she would stop in the new square along the railway line and look for Bastien’s face among the children. There, if time permitted, she would unwrap her snack (homemade biscuits or even an overly sweet pastry from Didier’s in the Place du Général de Gaulle, accompanied by a flask of fruit juice), which she would eat on the bench, offering any crumbs from her little meal to the cheeky sparrows. On Fridays, Madame Préau would devote the morning to writing a few letters, and the afternoon would be dedicated to shopping. She would do her shopping at the supermarket, pulling her wheeled caddy behind her, buying nothing without having first consulted the ingredients of each product. Colorings, preservatives, thickening agents, sweeteners—she banished any product that could potentially cause cancer or cardiovascular disease from her diet. She selected her meat, fish, fruit, and vegetables at the Saturday morning market, finding out about their country of origin, and always refusing tomatoes, oranges, and strawberries from Spain. Once a month, she would stock up at the health food shop on Avenue Jean Jaurès, where she would get herself some Indian soap nuts, margarine, dried fruit, and evening primrose oil capsules. She only ate bread from the boulangerie-pâtisserie at Gagny station, where she had taken to going again. She inevitably chose a type of baguette called a festive, with a very well-baked, crunchy crust that was like biting into a firecracker on Bastille Day.
At seven, the same time that she had her dinner, Madame Préau would prepare a tin bowl of food for the neighborhood stray cats, which she would leave near the shed at the end of the garden. The shutters were closed at seven thirty. Madame Préau had a light dinner in the dining room while watching the news on France 3, and then did some more reading before getting ready for bed. The bedside lamp was turned off at ten thirty. If she couldn’t sleep, she’d count high-speed trains. The echo of their infernal race would reach her with reassuring regularity from the railway platform a hundred meters away.
On Saturdays between nine and noon, a nurse, Ms. Briche, would visit to check her blood pressure. If she picked up on the slightest agitation or sign of an anxiety attack in her patient, she informed Dr. Martin Préau—which she had never had to do until now.
Sunday was the hardest day. On Sundays, Madame Préau would fast, drinking vegetable soup and organic herbal teas concocted by Madame Budin, the chemist. No one ever came to Madame Préau on Sunday, and Madame Préau had no one to visit. She didn’t keep up any particular acquaintances among the neighbors, who kept to themselves. They were content to say hello as they passed each other on the footpath every other day when the bins went out. Only one of her former students, who lived in number four, sometimes stopped to smile or exchange pleasantries in front of Madame Préau’s house. Though she was in her fifties, Ms. Blanche seemed twenty years older. The poor woman had lost her mind years ago. She filled her days by hoarding anything recyclable in her house, in her garden, and even in the trunk of her car. Cardboard boxes, bottles, corks, plastic wrappers, newspapers—fragile structures heaped like peaks of whipped cream were visible behind the outer fence where a tangle of shrubs clung, forming random snares. Having scaled the front wall, a clematis had meandered inside the house via the first-floor window that Ms. Blanche left open throughout the year, and through which other piles of reusable materials were visible. The mind of the young woman who had once studied the piano at Madame Préau’s house had clearly meandered, too, and her clothes were impregnated by the smell of mold.
Sunday was a terrible day. The children weren’t coming back from school, singing along the path; the postman wasn’t doing his rounds, dinging his bicycle bell; the ballet of dumper trucks and JCBs working on nearby building sites was brutally called to a halt; the windows of Madame Préau’s house weren’t vibrating each time they passed; the street was deserted, the neighborhood had been siphoned of all its commotion; not even a one-eyed tomcat snuck across the dew-covered garden.
So Madame Préau would watch the neighbors.
12
High-pitched screams and the squeak of a swing forced Madame Préau out of her Sunday nap at about three o’clock. She got up, opened the double curtains, and discovered the children playing in the garden. A little girl and two boys. The smaller of t
he two boys was barely more than three and was sniveling a lot, the victim of his sister’s taunts. Aged five or six perhaps, she was deliberately making him fall out of the swing, grabbing the ball from his hands, or pushing him off a little truck so that she could take his place. She was using her physical superiority with some skill, taking advantage of the lack of supervision by either her mother or her father. For their part, they were happy enough to glance over at their children when they got too rowdy. Occasionally, the father came out to smoke a cigarette and drink a coffee or a beer. He would sit on a plastic garden chair and would pay the most attention to his mobile phone. The mother rarely appeared outside the house; she would charge across the garden, but only to take down the laundry that was hanging in front of the wall of the garage. Both were blond of a rather Nordic sort, like the little boy and his sister.
The other boy, the bigger one, had dark, chestnut-brown hair. He must have been Bastien’s age, seven or perhaps eight years old. He stood apart from the other two. He stayed in his corner beneath the weeping birch, calmly collecting stones and pieces of twigs so that he could arrange them on the paving stones in the garden. Invisible from the street, hidden by the cypress trees and the concrete wall, he no doubt thought that he was protected. Other than Madame Préau’s tall fieldstone house, none of the nearby houses were high enough to overlook that part of the garden. Sitting at the little inlaid table that she had placed in a corner of the room, near the window, the old woman would witness the children’s games, nostalgic for the games that she used to oversee at break time when she was still teaching at the Blaise Pascal School. Soothed by the familiar hubbub that reigned in her neighbors’ garden, she would occupy her hands by mending or sorting everything she could in the house: buttons, ribbons, nuts and bolts, pencils, bills, family photographs, letters, postcards, or drawings by former students. Sometimes, when the girl went too far, torturing her little brother for the fun of it, Madame Préau would lean against the lace half curtain. She adjusted her glasses and bit her lip. Certainly it would have been nice to play the role of the schoolmistress again, to open the window and give the little girl a stern warning. Best to not get involved. Madame Préau allowed herself the right to go to speak to the parents only if the little girl crossed a line. As for the child underneath the tree, he was of such exemplary intelligence that he would get curious. One Sunday after the next, he would go through the same motions, constructing totems with bundled twigs and flat stones. He was still, whether crouched or standing, gazing out into the curtain of cedars. No doubt he was looking at insects. And then, sometimes, he would look up suddenly in the direction of Madame Préau’s house. She would pull back, and drop her box of buttons or the pile of photos propped on the writing drawer. With her fringe mussed, she’d pick up the things she had dropped, blushing. Wasn’t it a sin to covet the fruits of your neighbor’s garden?
The Stone Boy Page 3