The List of My Desires (11 page)

My schooldays, simple and sweet. Even Fabien Derôme’s non-kiss was a blessing, really. It taught me that ugly girls dream of handsome men, but all the pretty girls in the world stand between them and what they want, like so many peaks that can’t be scaled. So from then on I had tried to see beauty where it might be hidden: in kindness, honesty, delicacy, and that was Jo. Jo and his forceful tenderness; he won my heart, married my body and made me his wife. I was always faithful to Jo, even in days of torment, on tempestuous nights. I loved him in spite of himself, in spite of the malice that disfigured his face and made him say such terrible things when Nadège died on the point of being born; as if, putting her nose out, she had sniffed the air, tasted the world and decided that she didn’t like it.

My two live children and our little angel were my joy and my sorrow; I still tremble for Romain, but I know that on the day he is hurt and there’s no one else to tend his wounds, he’ll come back here. To my arms.

I loved my life. I loved the life that Jo and I had made. I loved the way that ordinary things became beautiful in our eyes. I loved our simple, comfortable, friendly house. I loved our garden, our modest little vegetable plot, the pathetic tomatoes on the vine it gave us. I loved hoeing the frozen ground with my husband. I loved our dreams of next spring. I was waiting with all the enthusiasm of a young mother to be a grandmother some day; I tried my hand at lavish cakes, gourmet pancakes, rich chocolate desserts. I wanted to have the scents of my own childhood in our house, with different photographs on the wall.

One day I was planning to convert a ground-floor room for Papa, I would have looked after him, and every six minutes I’d have invented a new life for him.

I loved my thousands of Isoldes who read
tengoldfingers
. I loved their kindness, calm and powerful like a river flowing along, a regenerating force like a mother’s love. I loved that community of women, our vulnerabilities, our strengths.

I loved my life deeply, but the moment that I won the lottery I knew that the money would wreck it all, and for what?

For a bigger vegetable plot? Larger, redder tomatoes? A new variety of tangerine? A larger, more luxurious house; a whirlpool bath? A Porsche Cayenne? A round-the-world cruise? A gold watch, diamonds? Enhanced breasts? A nose job? No, no and no again. I already had what money can’t buy but can only destroy.

Happiness.

My happiness, anyway. Mine. With all its flaws, its banalities, its petty drawbacks. But mine.

A huge, flaming, unique happiness.

So I had made my decision a few days after coming back from Paris with the cheque: I had decided to burn the money.

But the man that I loved stole it.

I
didn’t say anything to anyone.

When the twins asked me about Jo, I said that he had stayed on in Switzerland for a few more days, at Nestlé’s request.

Nadine was still sending me her news. She had a boyfriend, a tall redhead, a 3D film animator who was working on the next
Wallace and Gromit.
She was gently falling in love, my little girl; she didn’t want to hurry things, she wrote in her latest email, because if you love someone and then you lose him you have nothing left. At last she was finding words. Tears came to my eyes. I wrote back saying that everything here was fine, I was going to sell the haberdashery shop (true) and devote myself to the website (false). I didn’t say anything about her father. Or the harm he was doing us all. I promised to come and see her soon.

Romain, as usual, wasn’t sending any news. I knew that he had left the Uriage crêperie and the girlfriend, and was now working in a video club in Sassenage. Probably with another girl-friend. He’s a boy, said Mado. Boys are savages. And tears came to her own eyes, because she was reminded of her grown-up daughter who had died.

A week after the disappearance of Jo and my cheque for eighteen million euros, I gave a little party at the shop. There were so many people that they spilled out on to the pavement. I announced that I was leaving the haberdashery shop, and introduced the lady who was taking over from me: Thérèse Ducrocq, the mother of the journalist on
L’Observateur de l’Arrageois
. Thérèse was applauded when she explained that she wasn’t actually replacing me, just looking after the shop until I came back. Jo and I, I told my worried customers, had decided to take a year off. Our children were grown-up now. There were trips we’d promised ourselves ever since we first met, countries to be visited, cities to be explored, and we’d decided that now was the time. People came up to me, said they were sorry Jo wasn’t here. They asked which cities we were going to visit, what countries we planned to travel to, what the climate was like there, and went on to offer to make us a sweater, a pair of gloves, a poncho. You’ve spoilt us so much all this time, Jo, it’s our turn now.

Next day I shut up the house. Left the keys with Mado. And the twins drove me to Orly.

A
re you sure about what you’re doing, Jo?

Oh, yes. Yes a hundred times, a thousand times over. Yes, I’m sure I want to leave Arras, where Jo left me. Leave our house, our bed. I know I won’t be able to stand either his absence or the lingering odours of his presence. Of his shaving foam, his aftershave, the faint smell of his sweat in the clothes he’s put in the washing, and the stronger smell of it in the garage, where he liked making small pieces of furniture; his acrid smell in the sawdust, in the air.

The twins go with me as far as they’re allowed. Their eyes are flooded with tears. I try to smile.

It’s Françoise who guesses. Puts the unimaginable into words.

Jo’s left you, is that it? He’s gone off with a younger, prettier woman now that he’s going to be head of a unit and drive around in a Cayenne?

My own tears start flowing. I don’t know, Françoise. He’s gone. I have to lie about it. I avoid the trap, I resist temptation. The breach in the breakwater of my love. Maybe something’s happened to him? suggests Danièle in a soothing voice. Don’t people ever get kidnapped in Switzerland? I read somewhere that what with the private banking and laundered money, it’s a bit like Africa there these days. No, Danièle, he hasn’t been kidnapped, he’s kidnapped himself from me, he’s extracted, amputated, removed himself from me. And you didn’t see it coming, Jo? Not at all. Nothing whatsoever. Like in a bad film. Your man goes away for a week, you reread
Belle du Seigneur
while you wait for him to come back, give yourself a face-mask, a body scrub, you wax your legs, you massage yourself with essential oils so as you’ll be beautiful and soft when he comes back, and all of a sudden you know he won’t be back at all. But how do you know, Jo? Did he leave you a letter, or something? I have to go. No, that’s the worst of it, not even a letter, just nothing, a bleak void, like being in space.

Françoise takes me in her arms. I whisper in her ear for a moment, entrusting her with my final wishes. Call us when you arrive, she whispers back when I’ve finished. Have a good rest, adds Danièle. And if you need us to come, we’ll be there.

I go through security. I turn round.

They’re still there, their hands waving like birds.

And then I go.

I
haven’t gone very far.

It’s fine in Nice. It isn’t the holiday season yet, just the in-between season. A season for convalescence. I go down to the beach every day at the time when the sun will shine on my back.

I have the figure that was mine before Nadine, the figure I had before I put on all the flesh that stifled Nadège. I’m pretty, I look the way I did when I was twenty.

Every day, even when the sun isn’t strong, I put suncream on my back, and my arms are still too short; and every day, at that precise moment, my heart races and my senses sharpen. I’ve learnt to hold myself upright, to move with assurance. To get rid of that look of solitude. I gently massage my shoulders, my neck, my shoulder blades – my fingers move over my skin, there’s nothing tentative about them; I remember his voice. The words he said seven years ago, when I came here to escape the horrible things Jo had said.

Let me help you.

But the words behind my back today come from people chatting into their mobile phones, from kids who come here to smoke and laugh after school. The tired words of young mothers, already so lonely, their babies left in the shade in buggies, their husbands who have gone away, who don’t touch them any more; their words are salty, like tears.

So, in the afternoon, when I’ve counted forty planes taking off, I pick up my things and go back to the studio flat that I’ve rented for a few weeks, time enough for me to learn how to be an assassin, in the Rue Auguste-Renoir, behind the Musée des Beaux-Arts Jules Chéret.

It’s a nondescript flat in a 1950s apartment block, designed when the architects of the Côte d’Azur were dreaming of Miami, motels and buildings full of curves; the time when they dreamed of taking flight. It’s furnished. The furniture is tasteless but it’s solid, that’s all you can say for it. The bed creaks, but as I sleep alone the creaking doesn’t bother anyone but me. I can’t see the sea from the only window, where I dry my underwear. In the evening the place smells of the wind, of salt and diesel. In the evening I dine alone, I watch TV alone and I am alone with my insomnia.

I still cry in the evenings.

As soon as I get back from the beach I shower, as Papa did when he came home. But I do it not to get rid of any residue of glutaraldehyde, only to wash away my shame, my pain. My lost illusions.

I’m preparing myself.

During those first weeks after Jo made off, I went back to the Centre Sainte-Geneviève. The Dominican nuns had gone away too, but the nurses who had replaced them were just as considerate.

When he left me, Jo took away my laughter, my joy, my love of life.

He tore up the list of my needs, my desires, the list of my crazy ideas.

He’d deprived me of the little things that keep us going. The potato peeler you plan to buy at Lidl tomorrow. The Calor iron you’re going to buy at Auchan the week after that. A little rug for Nadine’s room in a month’s time, when the payslip comes in.

He’d taken away my desire to be beautiful, sexy, a good lover.

He had crossed out my memories of us, cancelled them. He’d done irreparable damage to the simple poetry of our life. A stroll, hand in hand, on the beach at Le Touquet. Our hysterical delight when Romain took his first steps. When Nadine first said
pipi
, wee-wee, when she meant Papa because she was pointing at him. A fit of laughter when we’d made love at the Sourire campsite. Our hearts racing at the same moment when Denny Duquette appears to Izzie Stevens again in season five of
Grey’s Anatomy.

When he left me because he’d robbed me, Jo wrecked everything he’d left behind him. Soiled it all. I had loved him, and now I had nothing left.

The nurses gently taught me to regain my taste for certain things. The way you teach famine-stricken children to eat again. The way you learn to live again at the age of seventeen when your dead mother wets herself on the pavement in full view of everyone. The way you learn to think yourself pretty again, to tell yourself lies and forgive yourself. They erased my black thoughts, brought light into my nightmares. They taught me to breathe from lower down in the body, from the stomach, well away from the heart. I wanted to die, I wanted to run away. I no longer wanted any of what my life had been. I had inspected the weapons available to me, and retained two of them.