The following night, Gabriel had called out to someone in his sleep several times: Reine. The following morning, Karine had mentioned it to him. “Who is Reine?” Gabriel, his nose in his cup of coffee, had reddened.
“Reine?”
“You were saying that name all night.”
Gabriel had laughed with that laugh she loved so much, a booming laugh, and had replied: “That’s the wife of the accused. When she realized that her husband had been acquitted, she fainted.” Bad choice. Karine knew about the case of Cédric Piolet, whose wife was called Jeanne. But she hadn’t batted an eyelid—one can change one’s name, or have two names.
For several nights, Gabriel had continued to call out Reine in his sleep. Karine had put it down to work, pressure. Her husband took on too many cases.
When Karine had met Gabriel, he was a widower and separated from his last partner. When she had asked him if there was someone in his life, he had replied, “From time to time.”
As she held the two silk blouses that smelled of “L’Heure bleue,” she had remembered that. Karine had thrown the Guerlain-scented garments and scarf, along with the hairbrush, into the bin. These things didn’t belong to some transient tart, it was far more serious than that. In recent months, Gabriel had changed. When he came home, his mind seemed to be elsewhere. He was preoccupied with something, as though tormented. Karine had noticed that he drank more wine at the table. When she had pointed it out to him, Gabriel had quoted the screenwriter Michel Audiard, “If I were to miss anything, it wouldn’t be the wine, it would be the intoxication.” There was another woman in Gabriel’s lies.
It hadn’t been hard to find the number that appeared regularly on the last itemized phone bills. The same number cropping up during the weeks when Gabriel was around, either at his office or working from home. Always at about 9 A.M. Conversations that rarely exceeded two minutes. Enough to wish each other a lovely day and then hang up. Karine had called that number herself. A young girl had answered:
“The rose nursery, hello.”
Karine had hung up. She had called the following week, and fallen on the same person:
“The rose nursery, hello.”
“Yes, hello, my rosebushes are diseased, they have strange yellowish marks on the edge of their petals.”
“Which varieties?”
“I don’t know.”
“Could you come to the nursery with one or two cuttings?”
Karine had called a third time. Still the same voice:
“The rose nursery, hello.”
“Reine?”
“Hold on, please, I’ll pass her to you. Who’s speaking?”
“It’s personal.”
“Irène, you’re wanted on the phone!”
Karine had got it wrong: it wasn’t Reine that Gabriel was calling out in his sleep, but Irène. Someone had come to pick up the receiver, and this time, Karine had heard a feminine voice that was deeper, more sensual:
“Hello?”
“Irène?”
“Yes.”
Karine had hung up. That day she had cried a good deal. Gabriel’s “from time to time,” that was her.
Finally, she had called a fourth and last time.
“The rose nursery, hello.”
“Hello, could I have your address, please?”
“69 Chemin du Mauvais-Pas, in the Rose district, Marseilles 7.”
Karine ejected the video and put it back in its cover. Gabriel was still sitting on the sofa, ashamed of having cried. It was his turn to have that guilty look he spent his life defending.
As she put the film into her handbag, so as not to forget it on her way to work the following morning, she said to Gabriel:
“Four and a half years ago, when I was pregnant with Cloé, I saw Irène.”
Gabriel, although used to being confronted in court with the most complex and sordid cases, with every level of humanity, didn’t know what to say to his wife. He was flabbergasted.
“I went to Marseilles. I bought roses and white peonies from her. When paying, I introduced myself. Those flowers, I didn’t plant them in our garden, I threw them into the sea . . . Like when someone dies.”
That evening, they didn’t stop at the child’s bedroom before going to their own, and didn’t make love. In bed, they turned their backs on each other. She didn’t sleep at all. She imagined Gabriel, eyes wide open, not able to sleep, remembering scenes from the film he’d just seen, and those he had lived with Irène. They never broached the subject of Irène ever again. They separated a few months after that Sunday. Karine regretted for a long time having rented The Bridges of Madison County. And, unlike Gabriel, she never watched it again, despite its numerous showings on television.
* * *
IRÈNE FAYOLLE’S JOURNAL
April 20th, 1997
One year, now, that I haven’t touched this journal. But I can’t bring myself to part with it. I hide it at the bottom of a drawer, under my lingerie, like a young girl. Sometimes I open it and I’m off for a few hours. Basically, memories are summer holidays, private beaches. One doesn’t keep a journal when one has passed a certain age, and I’ve long passed it, my certain age. I suppose Gabriel will always take me back to being fifteen.
He has lost a lot of hair. He has filled out a little. His eyes are still just as serious, beautiful, dark, deep. His voice cavernous, unique. A symphony. My favorite one.
I met Gabriel
