“Why should we be apart? I really love you, baby, cross my heart . . . ”
He stuffs the envelope into my apron pocket and then leaves. I fall to my knees. I hear him starting up his motorbike. He’s gone. He won’t come back again. Now, I’m sure of it, he won’t come back. He’s just said goodbye to me. It’s finished, over.
I look at the letter he’s crumpled up. The solicitor instructed by Mr. Rouault is called Gilles Legardinier, like the author. The letter informs Philippe Toussaint that a request for divorce by mutual consent has been submitted on behalf of Violette Trenet, married name Toussaint, to the registrar at the court of Mâcon.
I go upstairs to have a shower. I scrub away the soil from under my nails. He’s passed his hatred on to me. Transmitted it to me like a virus, an inflammation. I pick up my dolls, and put my bedcover into a plastic bag to take it to the dry cleaners. As if a crime had taken place in my house and I wanted to erase the evidence.
The crime is him. His footsteps in mine. His presence in my rooms. The air he inhaled and exhaled between my walls. I air everything. I spray a scent of assorted roses.
In the bathroom mirror, I’m scarily pale, almost translucent. It’s as if my blood has stopped circulating. That it’s all gone to my arm, which is blue. He has left imprints of his fingers on my skin. That’s all I’ll have left of him: bruises. I’ll cover it up very quickly with a new skin. As I have always done.
I ask Elvis to stand in for me for an hour. He looks at me as if he can’t hear me.
“Do you hear me, Elvis?”
“You’re white, Violette. Very white.”
I think of those youngsters I terrified a few years ago. Today, I wouldn’t need any disguise to make them bolt.
38.
The memory of the happy days soothes the pain.
And so, we returned home to get the garlands ready for the Christmas tree, cutting up bits of paper in the middle of August. We turned our backs on the sea, we did the same journey in reverse.
In the trains that brought us back to our barrier at Malgrange-sur-Nancy, Léo and I drew boats on the sea with turquoise felt-tip pens bought at the station, and suns, and fish and cicadas, while Philippe Toussaint tried out his tan on the girls he came across, on platforms we stopped at, in the train’s bar, from one compartment to the next. He seemed delighted by all the looks he was getting.
When we arrived, our replacements were waiting for us on the doorstep. They barely greeted us. They didn’t allow us time to open our suitcases. They told us that everything had gone smoothly, that there was nothing to report, and then left us just like that, leaving an unbelievable mess behind them, too.
Fortunately, they hadn’t set foot in Léo’s bedroom. She sat on her little bed and wrote two lists: one for her birthday and another for Father Christmas.
I started putting things away while Philippe Toussaint went off on a ride. He had to make up for lost time. The time he’d wasted with me in the bed at the chalet.
By the following day, I had cleaned everything and life returned to normal. I raised and lowered the barrier to the trains’ rhythm, Philippe Toussaint continued to go off on rides, and I to do the shopping.
Léo and I went back to sharing bubble baths, and we looked at our holiday photos a hundred times. We pinned them up all over the house. So as not to forget, so as to be back there now and then, just for a glance.
In September, between two trains, I repainted her walls pink. She helped me, she wanted to do the skirting boards. I had to go over them after her, without her noticing.
Léo started primary school, and very soon we were back in our woolly cardigans.
We made our paper garlands and bought a synthetic Christmas tree, so it would do all our Christmases to come and avoid a real one being killed every year.
I thought to myself that it was the last year she would believe in Father Christmas, the following year it would be over. Some older kid would tell her that he didn’t exist. All through life, we encounter older kids who inform us that Father Christmas doesn’t exist, we stumble from one disappointment to the next.
I could have found it intolerable, Philippe Toussaint chasing anything in a skirt, but it suited me. I no longer wanted him to touch me. I needed sleep. I slept little between the last train at night and the first in the morning. I needed peace and quiet. And his body on mine was a disturbance that I had once liked, but no longer liked at all.
Sometimes I dreamt of a prince when I listened to songs on the radio. Male and female voices coming out with sweet, crazy, coarse words. Voices full of promise. Or when I told stories to Léonine in the evening. Her bedroom was my refuge, an earthly paradise in which dolls, bears, dresses, necklaces of glassy beads, felt-tip pens, and books slept, all mixed together, jumbled up, in a magical mess.
I could have found it intolerable, not speaking to anyone apart from my daughter and Stéphanie, the checkout girl at the Casino. Stéphanie who commented on my purchases, which were always the same. Recommended a new dish soap to me, or said to me, “Did you see the ad on TV? You spray the product on the bath, you wait a good five minutes, and all the grime washes away. Well, it works, you should try it.”
We had absolutely nothing to
