Underground Time (2 page)

They're interludes which she grants him – far from Paris and from everything else – less and less often.

You'd only have to look at them when she walks beside him, never brushing against him or touching him. You'd only have to see them in a restaurant or on any café terrace, and that distance which separates them. You'd only have to look down at them, by some swimming pool, their bodies side by side, the caresses she doesn't return and which he has given up on. It would be enough to see them anywhere, in Toulouse, Barcelona or Paris, in any city at all, him stumbling on the paving stones and tripping over the kerb, unbalanced, caught out.

At times like these she says: ‘God, you're clumsy!'

Then he'd like to say no. He'd like to say: ‘Before I met you I was an eagle, I was a bird of prey. Before I met you I flew above the streets and didn't bump into anything. Before I met you I was strong.'

 

It's four in the morning and he's acting like a complete idiot, shut in a hotel bathroom because he can't sleep. He can't sleep because he loves her and she doesn't give a damn.

Though she offers herself to him in darkened bedrooms.

Though he can take her, caress and lick her, he can penetrate her standing up, sitting down, on his knees. Though she gives him her mouth, her breasts, her buttocks, imposes no limit on him, though she gulps down his sperm.

But away from the bed, Lila escapes him. She slips away. Away from the bed, she doesn't kiss him, doesn't slip her hand round his back or stroke his cheek. She scarcely looks at him.

Away from the bed, he has no body, or else has a body whose substance she doesn't notice. She's unaware of his skin.

 

One by one he sniffs the bottles on the sink: moisturiser, shampoo, shower gel in their wicker basket. He splashes some water on his face, dries it with a towel folded on the radiator. He goes through the times he's spent with her since they met, remembering everything from the day that Lila took his hand as they left a café one winter evening when he couldn't face going home.

Even at the beginning he didn't try to resist, he allowed himself to slide. He remembers everything, and everything agrees; it all points in the same direction. If he thinks about it, Lila's behaviour shows her lack of enthusiasm better than all her words, her way of being there without being there, her walk-on part, except for once or twice perhaps when he thought for a night that something more than the obscure need she had for him was possible.

Wasn't that what she said to him, that night or some other? ‘I need you. Can you understand that, Thibault, without thinking it's about subservience or dependence?'

She had taken hold of his arm and repeated: ‘I need you.'

 

Now she thanks him for being there. While she waits for something better.

She's not afraid of losing him, of deceiving him, of displeasing him. She's not afraid of anything. She couldn't care less.

And there's nothing he can do about that.

He has to leave her. It has to stop.

He's old enough to know that what's done is done. Lila just isn't programmed to fall in love with him. These things are written inside people like data in a computer. Lila doesn't
recognise
him in the computing sense of the term, just as some computers can't read a document or open certain disks. It's not in her specifications, her set-up.

Whatever he does, whatever he says, whatever he tries to input.

He is too sensitive, too easily hurt, too involved, too emotional. Not distant enough, not chic enough, not mysterious enough.

He's not enough.

The die is cast. He's lived long enough to know that he has to move on, draw a line, get out.

 

He'll tell her in the morning, when the alarm call wakes them.

Monday the twentieth of May strikes him as a good date, it's got the right ring to it.

 

But tonight, like every night for more than a year, he tells himself that he won't be able to do it.

Mathilde has spent ages looking for where it all started – the beginning, the very beginning, the first clue, the first rift. She’d take things in reverse order, tracking backwards, trying to understand how it had happened, how it began. Each time she would come to the same point, the same date: that presentation one Monday morning at the end of September.

That meeting was where it all started, absurd though it may seem. Before that, there was nothing wrong. Before that everything was normal and went according to plan. Before that she had been deputy director of marketing in the main health and nutrition division of an international food company for more than eight years. She had lunch with her colleagues, went to the gym twice a week, didn’t take sleeping pills, didn’t cry in the metro or the supermarket and didn’t pause for three minutes before she answered her children’s questions. She went to work like everyone else and didn’t throw up half the time when she got off the train.

So was one meeting all it took for everything to collapse?

That day she and Jacques were getting feedback from a well-known institute. They’d come to present the results of a study commissioned two months previously into the use of and attitudes to diet products. The methodology had been the subject of much internal debate, especially the prospective plan, on which major investment decisions depended. In the end they opted for two complementary approaches – qualitative and quantitative – which they had entrusted to the same company. Instead of appointing someone from the in-house team to take charge of the brief, Mathilde had decided to keep an eye on it herself. It was the first time they had worked with this particular institution, whose research methods were comparatively new. She had attended group meetings and face-to-face interviews, she’d tested the follow-up to the online questionnaire herself and asked to do some cross-tabulation of the data before they collated the results. She was pleased with how things had gone. She’d kept Jacques up to speed as she always did when they were working with a new partner.

First one date for the presentation had been set, then another, but Jacques had twice postponed at the last minute, claiming he had too much on. He absolutely insisted on being there. The size of the budget alone warranted his presence.

The day of the presentation, Mathilde arrived early to set up the room, check that the projector was working and that the coffee trays had been prepared. The director of the institute himself was going to present the results. Mathilde had invited the whole in-house team, the four product heads, the two researchers and the statistician.

They were all sitting round the table. Mathilde had exchanged a few words with the director of the institute. Jacques was late. Jacques was always late. Eventually he came in without offering any excuse. His features were drawn and he was badly shaved. Mathilde was wearing a dark suit and the pale silk blouse that she was fond of. She could recall it with strange precision. She also remembered how the man was dressed, the colour of his shirt, the ring he wore on his little finger, the pen sticking out of his jacket pocket, as though the most insignificant details had been inscribed on her memory, unbeknown to her, before she was aware of the importance of this moment, that something was about to happen that would be impossible to repair. After the usual formalities, the director of the institute began his presentation. He had total command of his subject – he hadn’t just spent half an hour skimming through a document prepared by other people as often happened. He commented on the slides without notes, expressing himself with exceptional clarity. The man was both brilliant and charismatic. That was rare. He emanated a sort of conviction that commanded attention. That was immediately apparent from how attentive the team were to his every word and the absence of whispered remarks which normally plagued this sort of meeting.

Mathilde had noticed the man’s hands, she remembered the expansive gestures which accompanied his words. She wondered where his light, almost imperceptible, accent was from, a particular inflection she couldn’t identify. She very quickly sensed that the man was getting on Jacques’s nerves, probably because he was younger and taller than him and at least his equal as a speaker. She quickly sensed Jacques bristle.

In the middle of the presentation Jacques had begun to show signs of impatience – he sighed ostentatiously and said ‘yes, yes’ aloud, intended to draw attention to the fact that the director was going too slowly or stating the obvious. Then he began looking at his watch in such a way that no one was in any doubt about his impatience. The team displayed no reaction; they knew his moods. Later, when the director was presenting the results of the quantitative study, Jacques expressed astonishment that their statistical significance didn’t feature in the graphics on the screen. With somewhat exaggerated politeness, the director responded that only results whose statistical significance was above ninety-five per cent were shown. At the end of the presentation, Mathilde, who had commissioned the study, expressed her thanks for the work that had gone into it. It then fell to Jacques to say a few words. She turned to him, and as soon as she caught his eye she knew that Jacques would not be offering any thanks. In the past he’d impressed on her how important it was to establish relations of trust and mutual respect with outside contractors.

Mathilde asked the first questions about some points of detail before opening it up to the meeting.

Jacques was last to speak. With pinched lips and displaying the absolute self-confidence which she knew so well, he dismantled the study’s recommendations one by one. He didn’t question the reliability of the results, but the conclusions the institute had drawn from them. It was skilfully done. Jacques understood the market, brand identities and the history of his company inside out. But for all that, he was wrong.

Mathilde was used to agreeing with him. Firstly because they saw things in a similar way and secondly because it had struck her from the first months of working with him that agreeing with Jacques was a strategy that was both more comfortable and more effective. There was no point in confronting him. In fact, Mathilde always managed to express her reasons and her choices and sometimes got him to change his mind. But this time Jacques’s attitude struck her as so unjust that she couldn’t stop herself saying something. Presenting it as a suggestion so as not to contradict him directly, she explained how it seemed to her that the proposed direction with regard to the development of the market and the other studies carried out by the team were worth studying.

Jacques looked at her for a long time.

In his eyes, all she could read was surprise.

He didn’t say anything else.

She concluded that her argument had won him over. She accompanied the director of the institute to the lift.

Nothing had happened.

Nothing serious.

It had taken her several weeks to return to that scene, to remember it in its entirety, to realise the extent to which every detail had remained in her memory – the man’s hands, the lock of hair that fell across his forehead when he leaned forward, Jacques’s face, what had been said, what had gone unspoken, the final minutes of the meeting, the way the man had smiled at her, his look of gratitude, the unhurried way he gathered up his things. Jacques had left the room without saying goodbye to him.

Later Mathilde had asked Éric how he thought things had gone. Was what she said hurtful, discourteous? Had she overstepped the mark? In a low voice Éric answered that she’d done something that day which none of the rest of them would have dared do and that was good.

Mathilde had gone back over the scene because Jacques’s attitude towards her had changed, because nothing since had been as it was before, because it was then that the slow process of destruction that would take her months to recognise for what it was had begun.

But she always came back to this question: was that all it took for everything to collapse?

Was that all it took for her whole life to be subsumed in an absurd, invisible struggle which she could never win?

If it took her a long time to admit what was going on, the spiral they had embarked on, it was because up until then Jacques had always supported her. They had worked together from the start, defended their common positions, shared the same boldness, a certain taste for risk and the same refusal to take the easy option. She knew his tone better than anyone, the meaning of his gestures, his defensive laugh, his stance when he was in a strong position, his inability to give up, his upsets, his rages and his emotions. Jacques had the reputation of being a difficult character – he was known to be demanding, curt and unsubtle. People were scared of him and came to her more often than to him, but they recognised his competence. When Jacques recruited her she hadn’t worked for three years. He chose her from the group of candidates that the HR department had selected. She was a single mother of three, a situation which up till then had brought her only rejections. She owed him for that. She got involved in working on the marketing plan, in major decisions about the product mix of each brand and in monitoring the competition. Gradually she began to write his speeches and take control of the management of a team of seven.