“We’ve come to ask you a few questions, if you don’t mind. Could you tell us what happened this morning?”
Adèle sits up and tells them simply and truthfully what she saw, what she remembers. One of the officers listens, with his hands behind his back, the other writes things down in a tiny notebook with a spiral binding, using a blue ballpoint pen. When she has finished she nods to them and turns away toward the window. She is waiting for them to ask for her real name, her address, her papers. She hears a movement in the room and the one who was listening with his hands behind his back goes out, the other one goes up to her. He has a lean face, without warmth but with no malice.
“You rescued a man and his son today.”
“The father was trapped. I couldn’t get him out.”
“You stayed with him till the firefighters got there, you held his hand and talked to him. He’s going to pull through.”
“I don’t remember.”
“That’s the shock. An accident always shakes you up.”
He concludes by staring out of the window like her. At the end of the corridor there is a metallic noise, as if someone were bumping into a cart piled high with medical equipment, and the other police officer returns. The man with the lean face turns around.
“This is all in order. Madame lost her bag in the accident. She will come to the station tomorrow so we can take down her statement.”
“Very good. Until tomorrow, madame, and congratulations on your bravery.”
“Goodbye.”
They leave unhurriedly, closing the door. The rays of the sun, broken up by the slats of the shutter, fall upon the ground, the bed, the bedside table, and Adèle’s bag, plainly visible.
Later Adèle calls Cecilia Lesparet. It is 2:00 and Madame Lesparet is at home.
“I waited for you, Adèle. I telephoned. I left at least five messages! The children didn’t want to go to school without you. I had to stay at home, I couldn’t find anyone to take your place. They’ve been impossible all morning. I don’t know what’s got into them. I haven’t had a minute to myself.”
Cecilia Lesparet is pacing up and down in the kitchen. The children are watching a film in the living room, their minds and bodies immobilized for a moment. She knows it will only take a trifle for them to come to life again like hyperactive jumping jacks. She can hear her own rather grating voice quickly becoming shrill (her own mother’s voice). She knows she must be understanding, it was an accident, there was an accident, Adèle was flung out of a bus, for heaven’s sake, she is in the hospital, but Cecilia cannot stop herself. She is still shaking from that cataclysmic morning when the clock had struck 8:00, and the children were so noisy, when the house was in chaos and she was waiting, motionless, dressed, with her makeup on, in the kitchen. She was fending off shouts from upstairs with an improvised mantra: “Adèle’s coming, Adèle’s just coming, Adèle’s going to be here any minute now, Adèle will take care of it.” But no. She didn’t come. She didn’t call. She had dared not to.
Cecilia dreaded finding herself alone with her children, dreaded things being like this every day, dreaded losing Adèle, this perfect nanny, who inspired the envy of all her friends. This was different from the constant and almost comforting fear of losing her children or her husband, it is more like the dread of being burgled while on vacation, or getting a scratch down the side of her new car, or of the new coffee machine not matching up to the price she paid for it.
When Cecilia had taken Adèle on seven years before (she had answered the advertisement in impeccable, if somewhat nineteenth-century, French), she had already tried out five nannies. She had only one child at the time. He was eighteen months old and not yet walking. They lived in an apartment in the city with a balcony that gave a partial view of the sea. Pascal had installed three small cameras in the apartment without telling the nannies, the way they do in the United States, he said, and at the end of each of their trial weeks the five nannies had been thanked. Nothing serious: the child in front of the TV already in the morning, closets opened in the bedrooms, perfumes sampled, the child left crying for a long time, the housework hardly done, an afternoon nap taken in the master bedroom.
Then came Adèle in her Corsican widow’s black dress, with her soft voice and her shaven head. Cecilia remembers the pictures from the cameras. She was certainly no Mary Poppins but, unlike the others, she took the child in her arms, she showed him things, and, above all, she played with him. Four days later the child had stood up on his two legs and toddled over to pick up a toy car.
They left the apartment, moved into the house, had two more children, changed jobs, went through a rocky patch in their marriage after the birth of the third, and made things up on a second honeymoon in the Maldives, but Adèle was always there somewhere, in the shadows on a photograph, in the corner of her eye, in the smell of the wax she polishes the furniture with on Fridays, in the perfect creases of the ironed sheets, in the way she manages the children’s hair after it has been washed, the parting on one side, unfamiliar eau de cologne behind the ears. The children love that. Obliging Adèle, kind Adèle, discreet Adèle, perfect Adèle.
Adèle has never been late, has never failed to turn up, and did not even object when she learned about the cameras, and Cecilia pays her in cash. Oh, the recriminations their friends who did not film their nannies used to get involved in, forever ranting and complaining about them. The Lesparets
