Consolation (29 page)

He ordered a beer, to celebrate.

‘There you go! I’ve given you a straw . . . What’s that? Hungry? Nicole! Bring a plate of mashed potatoes for the young man!’

Charles, with one buttock on the bar stool, gingerly sought sustenance while listening to Monsieur Nicole rattle off the list of all the injured, run over, crippled, lame, dead and other amputees that his excellent location (corner of a major crossroads, just what is required for a business) had allowed him to tally up over twenty-five years of keeping a look-out.

‘I think I’ve got a petition somewhere against their latest bloody idea of having the buses come down the wrong way; are you interested?’

‘No.’

He made painful progress, holding his box with one hand and his leg with the other. He was lost.

Not here in the Rue Monge, of course, but . . .

He dialled Laurence’s number as if he were removing five bullets from a barrel, pointed the thing at his temple, and waited.

Voicemail.

He headed back the other way and pushed open the door of a car rental service he’d walked by five minutes earlier while lost deep in thought.

He assured the salesman that it was nothing, a glass door. Ah . . . went the man, relieved, my colleague did exactly the same thing . . . Three stitches. Charles shrugged. What a wimp, his colleague.

At the last moment, his swollen knee conjured him to change his mind: ‘Hold it! Give me an automatic, instead . . .’

Holding back his little tears of pain, he wriggled himself in behind the wheel of a tiny category A city car, checked his diary, put it back on the right page, then as he adjusted his mirrors he suddenly realized that the Elephant Man was coming along for the ride.

He was grateful for his . . . unexpected company, turned left, and headed for the Porte d’Orléans.

The light had just turned green. He accelerated with a quick glance at the dashboard. With any luck, he’d be at Alexis’s place in time for dinner.

He wouldn’t allow himself to smile because it already hurt too much, but his heart was in it.

III

1

IN THE BEGINNING
it was easy: he’d made his decision.

He left the city behind and drove fast, and to hell with keeping a safe distance.

He had no idea what to expect but he wasn’t afraid. Nothing frightened him any more. Neither his reflection (or what took the place of his face); nor his fatigue; nor what he saw there before him: that conscientious woman, looking for the vein, sticking the long needle in, fixing it carefully, opening her fist for the last time, loosening the tourniquet and checking on the flow of her death before sitting back down in the only armchair in an empty flat . . . What . . . No. He was immune, now.

He managed to reach his assistant between two crash barriers.

‘Fine, I’ll cancel. Oh, and about Monday evening . . . Take-off is at 19.45. I think I’ve managed to get you an upgrade . . . I have the code for the ticket, do you have something to write with?’ asked his assistant.

Then he left a message for Laurence. ‘I got your message,’ she replied, eventually; ‘look, that’s fine because as you know I’m stuck with the Koreans this weekend . . . (No, he didn’t know.) And while I’ve got you on the line, don’t forget Mathilde, will you? You’d promised to go with her to the airport on Monday . . . I think it’s early afternoon, I’ll let you know . . . (The Air France lounge, his second home . . .) And what about her spending money? Do you have any pounds left?’

No. No. He hadn’t forgotten. Neither his kiddo, nor Howard.

Charles never forgot anything. That was actually his Achilles’ heel. What was it Anouk used to say? That he was intelligent? Not at all. He’d often had the opportunity of working with people who had extraordinary minds, so he did not nurture any illusions about his
own
. If he’d been able to put on a good show all these years, and fool them all, it was precisely because of his good memory . . . Whatever he read or saw or heard, he remembered.

And now he was a man with a burden – he was
loaded
, as the English would say, like dice. Yes, loaded dice. And those dreadful migraines – which, for the time being, seemed to be giving him some respite, buried beneath a screed of more . . . urgent suffering – well, there was nothing physiological about them. It was more in the nature of a computer glitch. The letter from Alexis and the tidal wave it brought with it, his childhood, his memories, Anouk, the little we know about her, and everything that he hasn’t told us, everything he prefers to keep to himself, to protect her for a while yet, and because he is so modest, the whole overload of unexpected emotions: all of this had, in a way, saturated his memory. Chemistry, molecules, perhaps a scan? Oh, feel free, go ahead, but it would have no effect. It was up to him to restore his files.

‘Where are you?’ asked Laurence.

‘Saint-Arnoult . . . Motorway . . .’

‘What’s that? A new site?’

‘Yes,’ he lied.

It was the truth.

But as the horizon gradually opened, the journey began to seem less certain. He’d dropped back from the fast lane and sat brooding in the shadow of an enormous lorry.

Instinctively, whenever he passed a sign indicating a new exit, his fingertips sought the indicator lever.

The fault of his memory, that he knew. Tut, tut. False modesty . . . a sun visor is damned useful when you’re headed south . . . Let’s talk about him for a while, and give this twice-shy man his due.

It was purely by chance that Charles became an architect, as a tribute, or out of a sense of allegiance, and because he was remarkably good at drawing. Of course he retained what he saw, and what he understood, but he also represented it. Easily. Naturally. On the drawing sheet, in space, and with any sort of clientele. Even the most discouraging critics eventually came round. But talent of that sort was not enough. What he was so good at sketching was his reasoning, his clear-sightedness.

He was calm and patient, and the mere act of thinking, in his presence, was a privilege. Better than that, even; it was a game.
For
lack of time he had always turned down the teaching positions he was offered, but at the agency he enjoyed being surrounded by young people. Marc and Pauline, this year, or before that the
brilliant
Giuseppe or even the son of his friend O’Brien. They had been welcomed with open arms in the spacious premises on the Rue La Fayette.

He was tough on them, gave them an enormous work load, but treated them as equals. You’re younger, therefore you’re quicker than I am, he would assert, so prove it to me. What would you do in this case?

He took the time to listen to them, and scuppered their more inept projects without ever humiliating them. He encouraged them to copy and draw as much as they could, however poorly; they should travel, read, listen to music, learn to read music again, visit museums, churches, gardens, and . . .

He was dismayed by their crass ignorance and eventually he would look at his watch, startled when he saw the time. But . . .? Aren’t you hungry? Well yes, they were hungry. So? Why are you letting me pontificate like an imbecile, then? Haven’t they told you that the days of the old waffling professors at the Art and Architecture Schools are over? Come on . . . To buy their forgiveness, he told them to head straight for the Brasserie Terminus Nord. Seafood platter, on him! But no sooner had they sat down, he couldn’t help himself: they put down their menus and he implored them to take a look all around them. School of Nancy, art deco, new simplifications, reaction against art nouveau, streamlining, sober geometric lines, Bakelite, chromed steel, rarefied essences, and . . . by then the waiter had returned.

Sighs of relief in the ranks.

In their small world, it was easy to belittle him. They reproached him for being . . . how to put it . . . a bit
classical
, no? As a young man, that had hurt. But he’d listened. It was why he had hitched his wagon to Philippe, the lad was more . . . subjective, and he had no fear, did Philippe, of having an emotional response to a given situation; Charles admired his intransigency, his talent, his creativity. Professionally, they worked well as a pair, but it was Charles whom the students sought out.

Even the most brilliant ones. The feverish visionaries, the ones who were ready to die of hunger at the foot of their own Sagrada Família.

Yes, it was Charles.

His common sense, his moderation . . . For a long time, this left him feeling confused. On a bad day he mused that he was the son of his father and that he had indeed not gone – nor would he go – very far. But there were other days, like that winter morning a few months earlier when, although he was already late and had climbed out of his taxi in the middle of a traffic jam, he’d suddenly found himself alone in the middle of the Cour Carrée at the Louvre, somewhere he had not been for absolutely ages: he decided to skip his appointment; he stopped running; he caught his breath.

The frost, the light, the absolutely perfect proportions, the sensation of something so powerful, yet utterly devoid of any overpowering intentions, a trace of the divine in human hands . . . He’d spun on his heel, calling out to the pigeons, ‘Hey! Fucking classical, no?’

But that absurd fountain . . . He set off at a run, again, and hoped that Lescot, Lemercier and all the others, from their perches up on high, were having a thoroughly good time spitting into it now and again.

To avoid any misunderstanding: the criticism – mainly of a very typically French kind – was restricted to, or focused upon, a moral attitude, a disposition, and under no circumstances the nature of his work. Given his background as an engineer (a weakness, a handicap, or so he came to believe, on the odd evening), his attention to detail, and his perfect knowledge of structures, materials, and other physical phenomena, Charles’s reputation remained, as it had done for a considerable length of time, completely above suspicion.

It was simply that he could see traces of himself in the theory put forward by inspired Irish engineer Peter Rice, and by Auden before him, according to which, in the course of a project, someone had to take on the dirty job of playing Iago and systematically impose reason upon other people’s disorderly flights of passion.

Classical? Huh. So be it. But conservative, no. No. And to prove it, he had to convince the industry, the promoters, the political circles and the public that his ideas were a hundred times, a thousand times superior to all those buildings that were ordinary but decked out in pretty post-modern or pseudo-historical flounces, and this had become the most trying aspect of his profession.

So he was given a rough time, and found himself – to get back to Othello – to be
Perplex’d in the extreme
. Fortunately, as it happened, fortunately. That role was somewhat shorter, but . . .

Hey? Where you off to, old man? He shook himself as he steered back into the middle lane, what are you waffling on about this time? Why are you talking about Rice and the Moor all of a sudden?

Sorry, sorry. It’s just this business of my memory not holding the road.

Well, what’s new.

Anouk was right . . .

Remember.

One last time.

When she got here earlier and she saw all that maths you were stuck with, just as she was hugging you she was feeling sorry for you at the same time. She thought to herself that for your age, you were spending far too much time trying to fold the world up into neat little squares. She knew, she knew! You were going to say that this was for your studies and all that, but
. . .

But?

What was there to say? He no longer tried to argue, he was tired. The next exit would be the right one.

No.

Please.

Come back.

We haven’t followed you this far just to turn round at Rambouillet.

Why do you always have to
think
about everything? Living as a project manager, drawing up plans, models, scaffolding, calculating, anticipating, foreseeing? Why so many constraints? You said just now that you weren’t afraid of anything, any more . . .

I was lying.

What are you afraid of?

I would like . . .

Yes?

Right. You want to play clever. Let’s look elsewhere. The shape of clouds, the first cows, the latest Audi, the rest area at La Briganderie, that buzzard taking flight, the price of unleaded, 17 kilometres further along, the –

When we were children, continued his inner voice in an undertone, and we used to pick on each other – and that happened a lot, because we both had a filthy temperament and I imagine we were fighting for the love and attention of one and the same woman – Nana, who’d used up all his patience and threats trying to reconcile us, always ended up going to fetch his little stuffed bird which was gathering dust on top of the refrigerator, and into its beak he’d cram whatever he happened to have on hand – most often a sprig of parsley – and then he’d come to wave it under our grumpy little noses.

‘Rruu, rruu . . . The dove of peace, my loves . . . Rrruuuu . . .’

And we’d burst out laughing. And bursting out laughing together, that meant we weren’t angry with one another, any more, and . . . And now he had that shoe box, there, in the passenger seat, and . . .

Who cares about unleaded petrol. Rental cars always run on diesel, no? What? Sorry? You were saying?

He sat up straight, tugged on his seatbelt, couldn’t . . . Couldn’t there have been just a little bit of hope, too, in that bloody IV? Maybe she was actually overestimating us, there,
testing
us yet again?

Would she never leave us in peace with her fucking overabundance of love that had already . . .

Ah-hah. One euro twenty-two, look at that . . . Hey, Balanda, you’re starting to try my patience with all your gobbledygook, you know that? You think you’re so bloody clever, with your quotations from Shakespeare et al. in the original, your rigour, your students dumb with admiration, your culture, your ingenuity and all that crap, you know we’d gladly swap all that gibberish for one single solid sentence that really went somewhere?