just couldn't. She would suddenly be cocooned again in the past, the ghosts and memories ripping her apart — and she would feel that she had nothing to give to the present, to him and Clarisse.
Dominic was always understanding when those times came, would phone her the next day to see if she was better. Her grey moods usually didn't last long, a few days at most.
As the summer arrived, they took to eating outside at night on the back patio. Monique had also found a babysitter nearby and they started to go out more. He took her to see Lawrence of Arabia and they held hands and kissed in the back row like two teenagers. On her birthday, he took her to a new restaurant in Cannes he'd discovered: Pierre T'etre. It was on a narrow lane full of restaurants that meandered gently down to Cannes harbour with small candle-lit tables on each staged terrace. Monique found the atmosphere magical.
It was late summer when he finally proposed. She looked concerned. She reminded him not only that she had a daughter but the scars the past had left on her. Part of her heart might always be dragged back there. Could he live with that?
He said that he could, but deep down he was thinking that she would gradually improve — he had seen marked improvement already in the past months — until finally the ghosts and the pain of her memories faded to insignificance or went completely. And he felt very close to Clarisse; with gifts every few visits and occasional hugs, if he was still some way from becoming a surrogate father, he was at least a favourite uncle.
Monique made him wait two months before she answered; to be sure that any impulsiveness on his part had mellowed. They were married the next February, 1967. Louis was best man and looked comical in a dress suit. The small reception was also held at Louis’, and he had trouble totally escaping from his proprietary role, occasionally barking orders at the waiters. Harrault and Levacher were the only ones present from the gendarmerie.
And Dominic was right, the ghosts from the past did subside — until their first born. A son. Apart from it being an horrific breach birth which could have cost Monique's and the baby's life, Dominic should have read the warnings when she first mentioned during pregnancy that she hoped for a boy.
The second sign that she might see it somehow as a replacement for Christian was when she asked, if it was a boy, if they could call him Yves — Christian's middle name. He began to wish that it was a girl purely to avoid any possible complications. A gain to replace a past loss: a macabre tangle of emotions that could only lead to problems.
But in the end he resigned himself to fate, consoled himself that if it was a boy and somehow managed to bury Monique's reliance on the past — that in an obscure way it might be a godsend.
He didn't know how wrong he would be.
Monique didn't tell him about the dream until two months after the birth. That moments after urging the nurses that she'd like her husband by her side, when she was fully under the anaesthetic and the doctors were fighting to save her life, she'd seen Christian.
In the dream, they were dining at Pierre T'etre. Dominic had taken her there the night she'd announced she was pregnant; perhaps that was what had made the connection, he thought. She saw Christian in the distance as she looked up the street. As she left the table and walked towards Christian, the other people and the tables in the street seemed to fade into the background — only the steps and the candlelight from the tables remained prominent. Guide lights marking the path to the solitary figure of Christian ahead, the harbour a misty silhouette far behind her. She'd seen his face clearly, seen the gentle tears in his clear green eyes. As she came closer, she thought she heard him say, 'It's all right… it's all right' — but it was barely a whisper. And in that moment she had reached out to touch him — though their hands never quite connected. She'd awoken then. A nurse was leaning over and telling her that everything was all right. 'You have a little boy.'
She hadn't mentioned the dream earlier, she explained, because at the time the joy of having Yves had consumed all else.
For the first few years, her absorption with Yves seemed natural: the love and affection of a doting mother to her new-born child. But as the years progressed, he began to notice how fearful and protective she was. It became an obsession: never letting Yves out of her sight, ensuring that there was never an unguarded moment in his life. Dominic railed against it. It wasn't a natural childhood, he argued: Yves was unable to have any freedom, could not play with his friends out of sight of her for any length of time.
Monique promised repeatedly that she would change, but any easing in her protectiveness was minimal. The only thing to help was the birth of Gerome a few years later — though mainly when Gerome was old enough to play with Yves, keep him company. They could partly watch and protect each other.
Her intense protectiveness became a recurring argument through their years together. She was well aware that it was a fault: 'But I could never again go through the trauma of losing a child.' She and Jean-Luc partly blamed themselves for Christian's death. Felt they'd allowed him too much freedom, he'd been let loose to play in the fields or with friends most days. Only natural, Dominic supported; he himself had enjoyed such a childhood in Louviers. She had stifled Yves terribly and now Gerome too was heavily under her protective wing.
In turn, Monique's advice with his career was equally as incisive. Drawing it out of him that he'd only stayed in Bauriac because of his ailing mother, she pushed him to take a transfer a year after they were married. Career-wise, he was stagnating in Bauriac. At heart, part of him had recognized that fact, but he'd become numbed into acceptance by routine. It had taken Monique to bring it to the surface.
It was also Monique's encouragement that led him to take his Inspectorate exams not long after, and she had advised on many of his career moves since. Her style was gentle, no more than a series of questions, so that in the end he felt he had all but arrived at the decision himself.
It was ironic, Dominic thought. She had such intuitive views about his career in the same way that he could see the errors she was making as a mother. A clear picture only gained by being detached from the problem, taking an overview. But in the case of Yves, he wished he'd been wrong.
In his teens came the backlash effect of Monique's protectiveness. At fifteen he left home and got in with the wrong crowd. He started off with sporadic promotional work for a chain of clubs and discotheques, handing out cards on street corners. He would turn up at the clubs late evening and started drinking heavily, peppered later with some drugs — marijuana at first, then cocaine. He started free-basing and took extra work as a drugs packet 'runner' to some of the clubs to pay for his habit. Often he was paid half in cash, half in cocaine. Dominic picked him up one night after one of the clubs had been raided.
Yves had been lost to them for almost two years. Throughout, Monique had been inconsolable. Where had she gone wrong? She'd done everything to shield him, to guide him on the right path, but still he'd drifted away. Not once did Dominic say, 'I told you so,' suggest that her obsessive protectiveness might have caused the problem, made Yves crave freedom and rebel.
Dominic kept Yves' name clear of any charge sheets, but added a condition: that he remain with them at least six months and attempt to dry out before deciding what he wanted to do with his life. In the end he stayed ten months — a painful period of adjustment and regular visits to a drugs counsellor — before embarking on his national service. He joined the French navy.
The two years of discipline combined with the frisson of travel broadened Yves outlook. He came back a changed person and enrolled for another year, taking a special course in maritime communications. When he returned, he joined the national police in Marseille as a sergeant. History was repeating itself.
Within two years, he was covering the Vieux Port area attached to narcotics. His maritime communications background and his knowledge of the drugs trade was invaluable in an area where most shipments came in by sea. Gerome was at Nice University, studying pure maths with a second in IT software architecture, hoping later for a career in computer programming. He had never been a problem.
Monique had long ago ceased to view either of them as any form of replacement for Christian, but she still worried about Yves, especially with his current work. That one day he might swing open the wrong warehouse door to face a
Throughout the years of arguing against her unreasonable protectiveness, a recurring fear for Dominic had been that one day he might be wrong. That having urged her to loosen the reigns, told her not to worry, nothing would happen — against all odds it might. He'd often contemplated how he'd face her given such a circumstance. For it to happen twice and him feel that he was partly to blame: it was unthinkable.
When Marinella Calvan's call caught up with Dominic in Lyon, Yves was a DI still stationed in Marseille and
