The Stone Boy (4 page)

A hundred meters to go. The road was restricted by a line of parked cars as it led toward the station.

“Take the next left and stop at the house with the green gates.”

Martin had taken the train with his mother early that morning. Madame Préau had nothing more for baggage than a handbag and an old carpet bag. Most of her things had been moved the week before by a hauler from Hyères les Palmiers. A slightly sharp stop sent the bouquet of flowers sliding off the old woman’s knees. Martin caught it before it could brush against her shoes. Nevertheless, neither Madame Préau nor her son passed comment on the man’s driving. They were eager to get out of the overheated vehicle and to reach the end of their journey.

When she spotted the low wall that ran around the property, Madame Préau felt her heart rate surge. Over time, the stones had blackened, eaten away by pollution. The pillars marking out the property line were missing in a few pieces, giving their surfaces a grainy finish. Madame Préau looked up to the chestnut tree, majestic behind the iron railings atop the wall. Out of the tortured frame of its trunk shot branches trimmed with buds. One sigh followed the next. With her helmet of gray hair in a bob, and her fine, pinched lips, Madame Préau looked tiny beneath the umbrella her son held to protect her from the elements.

“You didn’t get it cut down. Thank God for that.”

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.

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.

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 good 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.

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.