Platform (28 page)

We made love a little later, in the late afternoon, again that evening and once more the following morning. Such frenzy was a little unusual; we were both conscious of the fact that we were about to enter a difficult time, when Valerie would once more be stupefied with work, problems and calculations. The sky was an immaculate blue, the weather almost warm; it was probably one of the last fine weekends before the autumn. After making love on Sunday morning, we took a long stroll on the beach. I looked in surprise at the neoclassical, slightly kitsch hotel buildings. When we arrived at the far end of the beach, we sat down on the rocks.

'I suppose it was important, that meeting with the German,' I said; 'I suppose it's the beginning of a new challenge.'

'This will be the last time, Michel. If this is a success, we'll be set up for a long time.'

I shot her a doubtful and slightly sad look. I didn't believe in that line of reasoning: it reminded me of history books in which politicians declared that this would be the war to end all wars, the sort that was supposed to lead to a permanent peace.

'It was you who told me,' I said gently, 'that capitalism, by its very nature, is a permanent state of war, a constant struggle which can never end.'

'That's true,' she agreed without hesitation, 'But it's not always the same people doing the fighting.'

A gull took off, gained altitude and headed out to the ocean. We were almost alone at this end of the beach. Dinard was clearly a very quiet resort, at least at this time of year. A Labrador came up and sniffed us, then turned tail; I couldn't see its owners .

'I promise you,' she insisted, 'if this works as well as we hope, we can roll out the concept in lots of countries. In Latin America alone there's Brazil, Venezuela, Costa Rica. Apart from that we can open clubs in Cameroon, Mozambique, Madagascar, the Seychelles. In Asia too there are obvious possibilities: China, Vietnam, Cambodia. In two or three years, we can become an uncontested market leader; and no one will dare invest in the same market: this time we'll get it, our competitive advantage.'

I didn't reply, I couldn't think of anything to say; after all, it had originally been my idea. The tide was coming in; waves crashed on to the beach and died at our feet.

'On top of that,' she went on, 'this time we're going to insist on a decent share package. If it's a success, they can't possibly refuse. And when you're a shareholder, you don't have to fight any more: other people do the fighting for you.'

She stopped, looked at me, hesitant. It made sense, what she was saying, it had a certain logic. The wind was getting up a bit; I was starting to feel hungry. The restaurant at the hotel was excellent: they had impeccably fresh shellfish, and delicious, delicate fish dishes. We headed back, walking across the wet sand.

'I've got money . . .' I said suddenly. 'Don't forget that

I've got money.' She stopped and looked at me in surprise; I hadn't expected to say these words.

'I know it's not the done thing to be a kept woman,' I went on, a little embarrassed, 'but there's nothing forcing us to do things the way everybody else does.'

She stared calmly into my eyes. 'When you've got the money from the house, at best it'll come out to three million francs, maximum . . .' she said.

'Yes. That's right, something like that.'

'It's not enough, at least not quite. We need just a little more.' She began walking again and said nothing for a long moment. 'Trust me . . .' she said, as we stepped under the glass roof of the restaurant.

After the meal, just before heading to the station, we paid a visit to Valerie's parents. She was about to be submerged with work again, she explained; she probably wouldn't be able to visit again before Christmas. Her father looked at her with a resigned smile. She was a good daughter, I thought, an attentive and caring daughter; she was also a sensual lover, affectionate and audacious; and, if need be, she would no doubt be a wise and loving mother. 'Her feet are of fine gold, her legs like the columns of the temple of Jerusalem.' I continued to wonder what exactly I had done to deserve a woman like Valerie. Nothing, probably. I observe the world as it unfurls, I thought; proceeding empirically, in good faith, I observe it; I can do no more than observe.

Chapter 12

At the end of October, Jean-Yves's father died. Audrey refused to accompany him to the funeral; actually, he had been expecting as much, he had asked her only for the sake of propriety. It would be a modest funeral: he was an only child, there would be some family, very few friends. His father would have a brief obituary in the ESAT alumni newsletter and that would be it, the end of the line. He had hardly seen anyone recently. Jean-Yves had never really understood what had moved him to retire to this undistinguished area, rural in the most depressing sense of the word and to which, moreover, he had no ties. Probably a last vestige of the masochism which had dogged him more or less his whole life. Having been a rather brilliant student, he had become bogged down in a lacklustre career as a manufacturing engineer. Though he had always dreamed of having a daughter, he had consciously limited himself to only one child - in order, he maintained, to give the boy a better education; the argument didn't stand up, he earned a very good salary. He gave the impression of being accustomed to his wife rather than truly loving her; perhaps he was proud of his son's professional successes - but, truth be told, the fact was he never spoke of them. He had no hobby, no leisure activity to speak of, apart from breeding rabbits and doing the crossword in La Republique du Centre-Ouest. We are probably wrong to suspect that each individual has some secret passion, some mystery, some weakness; if Jean-Yves's father had had to express his innermost convictions, the profound meaning he ascribed to life, he could probably have cited nothing more than a slight disappointment. Indeed, his favourite expression, what Jean-Yves remembered him saying most often, what best encapsulated his experience of the human condition, was limited to the words 'You get old'.

Jean-Yves's mother seemed reasonably affected by her bereavement — he had, after all, been her lifelong companion - without really seeming to be shattered for all that. 'He'd gone downhill a lot . . .' she remarked. The cause of death was so vague that one might well have been talking about a general fatigue, or even despondency. 'He had no interest in anything anymore . . .' his mother said again. That, more or less, was her funerary oration.

Audrey's absence was, of course, noticed, but during the ceremony his mother refrained from mentioning it. The evening meal was a frugal affair — in any case, she had never been a good cook. He knew she would broach the subject at some point. Bearing in mind the circumstances, it was quite difficult to avoid the issue as he usually did, by turning on the television, for example. His mother finished putting away the dishes, then sat opposite him, her elbows on the table.

'How are things, with your wife?'

'Not great. . .' He expanded on this for a few minutes, getting ever more bogged down in his own boredom; in conclusion, he indicated that he was thinking of divorce. His mother, he knew, hated Audrey, whom she accused of keeping her from her grandchildren; actually, it was quite true, but her grandchildren weren't too keen to see her either. If things had been different, it's true, they could have become used to it; Angelique at least, in her case it wasn't too late. But it would have meant different circumstances, a different life, all things that were difficult to imagine. Jean-Yves looked up at his mother's face, her greying chignon, her harsh features: it was difficult to feel a rush of tenderness, of affection for this woman; as far back as he could remember, she had never really been one for hugs; it was equally difficult to imagine her in the role of a sensual lover, a slut. He suddenly realised that his father must have been bored shitless his whole life. He felt terribly shocked by this, his hands tensed on the edge of the table: this time it was irreparable, it was definitive. In despair, he tried to recall a moment when he had seen his father beaming, happy, genuinely glad to be alive. There was one time, possibly, when he had been five and his father had been trying to show him how Meccano worked. Yes, his father had loved engineering, truly loved it, he remembered his father's disappointment the day he had announced he was going to study marketing; perhaps it was enough, after all, to fill a life.

The next day, he made a quick tour of the garden, which, to tell the truth, seemed quite anonymous to him; it evoked no memories of his childhood. The rabbits shifted nervously in their hutches, they hadn't been fed yet: his mother was going to sell them immediately, she didn't like looking after them. In reality, they were the real losers in this whole business, the only real victims of this death. Jean-Yves took a sack of feed granules, poured a couple of handfuls into the hutches; this gesture, at least, he could make in memory of his father.

He left early, just before the Michel Drucker programme, but that did not stop him getting caught up, just before Fontainebleau, in endless traffic jams. He tried a number of different stations, and ended up turning off the radio. From time to time the queue moved forward a few metres; he could hear nothing but the purring of engines, the splat of solitary raindrops against the windscreen. His mood was attuned to this melancholy emptiness. The only positive element of the weekend, he thought, was that he would never have to see Johanna the babysitter again. The new one, Eucharistie, had been recommended by a neighbour; she was a girl from Dahomey, serious, worked hard at school. At fifteen she was already in two years from graduation. Later, she hoped to be a doctor, possibly a paediatrician; in any case she was very good with the children. She had succeeded in tearing Nicolas away from his video games and getting him to bed before ten o'clock - something that they had never been able to do. She was wonderful with Angelique, fed her, bathed her, played with her; the little girl obviously adored her.

He arrived at half-past ten, exhausted from the journey; Audrey was, as far as he could remember, in Milan for the weekend; she would fly back the following morning and go straight to work. Divorce was seriously going to cramp her lifestyle, he thought with malicious satisfaction; it was easy to understand why she should want to put off broaching the subject. On the other hand, she did not go so far as to feign any affection, any rush of tenderness; that was something that could be counted in her favour.

Eucharistie was sitting on the sofa, she was reading a paperback of Life: A User's Manual, by Georges Perec; everything had gone okay. She accepted a glass of orange juice; he poured himself a cognac. Usually, when he came home, she would tell him about the day, what she and the children had done together; this would last for a few minutes before she went. This time, too, she did so, as he poured himself a second cognac; he realised he hadn't been listening to a word. 'My father died . . .'he said, realising the fact again as he said the words. Eucharistie stopped abruptly and looked at him hesitantly; she did not know how to react, but he had clearly succeeded in capturing her attention. 'My parents were never happy together . . .' he continued, and this second observation was even worse: it seemed to deny his existence, to deprive him of a certain right to life. He was the fruit of an unhappy, mismatched union, something which would have been better if it had never been. He looked around him anxiously: in a few months at most he would leave this apartment, he would never again see these curtains, this furniture; everything already seemed to be fading, losing its solidity. He could just as easily be in the showroom of a department store after it closed; or in a photo from a catalogue, in something, at any rate, which had no real existence. He stood up unsteadily, walked over to Eucharistie and hugged the young girl's body violently in his arms. He slipped a hand under her pullover: her flesh was living, real. All of a sudden he came to himself and stopped, ashamed. She too had stopped struggling. He looked straight into her eyes, then kissed her on the mouth. She responded to his kiss, pushed her tongue against his. He slipped his hand higher under her pullover to her breasts.

They made love in the bedroom without a word; she had undressed quickly and then crouched on the bed, so he could take her. Even after they had come, they remained silent for some minutes and avoided mentioning the subject afterwards. She told him about her day again, what she and the children had been up to; then she told him that she could not stay the night.

In the weeks that followed, they did it again many times, every time she came over, in fact. He had more or less been waiting for her to broach the subject of the legality of their relations: after all, she was only fifteen, he was thirty-five; he could, at a pinch, have been her father. But she did not seem in the least inclined to see things in ; that light: in what light, then? In the end he realised, in a rush of emotion and of gratitude: in the simple light of pleasure. His marriage manifestly cut him off, he was out of touch; he had quite simply forgotten that certain women, in certain circumstances, make love for pleasure. He was not Eucharistie's first: she had already been with a boy the year before, a guy in his final year with whom she'd lost touch afterwards; but there were things she was unaware of, fellatio for example. The first time, he held back, was hesitant about coming in her mouth; but he quickly realised that she enjoyed it, or rather that it amused her to feel his semen spurt out. Usually, he had no trouble bringing her to orgasm; for his part it was immensely pleasurable feeling her firm, supple body in his arms. She was intelligent, curious; she was interested in his work and asked him lots of questions: she was almost everything Audrey was not. The universe of business was, to her, a curious, exotic world whose customs she wanted to learn; she would not have asked all these questions of her father, who, in any case, would have been unable to answer - he worked in a public hospital. In short, he thought, with a strange feeling of relativism, theirs was a relationship of equals. Even so, he was lucky that his first child had not been a daughter; in certain circumstances he found it difficult to imagine how - and more especially why - incest might be avoided.