The Blue Room Read online

  ‘She sat down across from him, and I didn’t hear the rest of their conversation.’

  ‘Did they seem to be arguing?’

  ‘No. At one point, she opened her bag and calmly applied fresh powder and lipstick.’

  ‘How did he seem?’

  ‘With him, it’s hard to tell. You ever see him laugh, hmm? If you ask me, she got away with it, but if I were you … Is Gisèle here?’

  ‘On the terrace.’

  Vincent went to say hello to her. The air was mild, the sky clear. An express train went through the station without stopping or slowing down. In Rue Gambetta, Gisèle placed her hand on her husband’s arm, as she always did when out walking with him.

  ‘Is your brother pleased with how things are going?’

  ‘It’s been a good season so far. There are more and more tourists every year.’

  Vincent had not had to buy the building, but only the business, because the landlord, who had run the hotel before him and had retired to La Ciotat, did not want to sell.

  Starting with nothing, the two brothers had managed quite well for themselves and had already come a long way.

  ‘Did you see Lucia?’

  ‘No. She must have been in the kitchen. I didn’t have time to go and see her.’

  He felt vaguely uneasy, and not for the first time. Gisèle knew he had been in Triant that afternoon, yet had not asked him if he had seen his brother.

  At times he would have preferred that she ask him questions, painful though they might prove. Since she helped him with his bookkeeping at the end of every month, and thus knew all about his business, why wouldn’t she be interested in what he did when he was off at work?

  Did she have suspicions she preferred to keep to herself?

  They hurried back, for they could hear the bell inside the cinema signalling the end of the intermission, and others poured out of the little bar next door to join them.

  It was only on the way home, in the darkness of the car, as the headlamps flared across black-and-white landscapes like the ones in the film, that he suddenly announced, ‘Today is Thursday.’

  The word alone made him blush. Did it not evoke the blue room, Andrée’s voluptuous body, her spread thighs, her dark sex slowly oozing semen?

  ‘We could go on Saturday. I’ll phone Les Roches Noires tomorrow. If they have two rooms, or even one, and could supply a little bed for Marianne …’

  ‘Can you leave your work now?’

  ‘I could dash back here once or twice if necessary.’

  He felt saved, realizing only now the danger from which he had escaped.

  ‘We’ll stay there for two weeks, the three of us, lounging on the beach.’

  Filled with a sudden wave of tenderness for his daughter, he blamed himself for not having noticed her pallor. He had wronged his wife, too, but through sins of omission. For example, he would never have been able to stop the car by the side of the road, take Gisèle in his arms, press his face close to hers murmuring, ‘I love you, you know!’

  And yet, the thought had crossed his mind, he had often considered it. He had never done it. What was he ashamed of? Wouldn’t he have seemed like someone guilty and begging for forgiveness?

  He needed her. Marianne needed her mother, too. And he had betrayed them both when Andrée had asked him her questions. True, he had listened to them only distractedly, patting his lip with the damp towel. They were coming back to him now anyway, with cutting clarity, and he could even weigh the silence of her pauses.

  ‘You have a beautiful back.’

  It was ridiculous. Gisèle would never think of going into ecstasies over his back or his chest.

  ‘Do you love me, Tony?’

  In the overheated room smelling of sex, such a question was only natural, whereas now, in the quiet night, as the van hummed along, the words and intonations became unreal. He had thought himself clever to reply grudgingly, ‘I think so.’

  ‘You’re not sure?’

  Did he think he was playing a game? Didn’t he realize that for her, it was so much more than that?

  ‘Could you spend your whole life with me?’

  She had asked that question twice in the space of a few minutes. Hadn’t he already heard it during their previous encounters in the same room?

  ‘Sure!’ he had replied, flying high, light in body and spirit.

  She had sensed so strongly that he wasn’t speaking from his heart that she had come at him again.

  ‘Really sure? … Wouldn’t you be afraid?’

  What a fool he had been to say, with a clever glint in his eye: ‘Afraid of what?’

  The whole conversation was coming back to him, word for word.

  ‘Can you imagine what our days would be like?’

  She hadn’t said nights, but days, as if she meant for them to spend all their time in bed.

  ‘We’d get used to it in the end.’

  ‘Used to what?’

  ‘To us.’

  And it was Gisèle who sat next to him in the darkness, watching the same stretch of road, the same trees, the same telegraph poles surge out of the night only to hurtle into nothingness. He was tempted to take her hand and he didn’t dare.

  He would admit that one day to Dr Bigot, who preferred to visit him in his cell rather than the prison infirmary. Although the guard brought him a chair, he sat on the edge of the bed.

  ‘If I understand correctly, you loved your wife?’

  Tony spread his hands wide but simply said, ‘Yes.’

  ‘Only, you were unable to reach her …’

  He had never suspected that life could be so complicated. What did the psychiatrist mean, exactly, by ‘reach her’? They lived together like any married couple, didn’t they?

  ‘Why did you have no more children, after Marianne?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘You didn’t want any more?’

  On the contrary! He would have wanted six, a dozen, a houseful of children, as in Italy. As for Gisèle, she had talked about two or three boys and a girl, and they’d taken no precautions against a pregnancy.

  ‘Did you often have sex with your wife?’

  ‘Mainly at the beginning.’

  He spoke freely, without trying to hide anything. He had got caught up in this investigation and was as anxious as his interrogators to get to the bottom of it all.

  ‘There was a period while she was pregnant, of course, when …’

  ‘Was that when you began seeing other women?’

  ‘I would have done that anyway.’

  ‘Is it some need you have?’

  ‘I don’t know. All men are like that, aren’t they?’

  Professor Bigot was around fifty, with a grown son studying in Paris and a daughter recently married to a haematologist, for whom she worked as a lab assistant.

  The psychiatrist was untidy, wore loose-fitting, shabby clothes, on which a button often hung by a thread, and he was always blowing his nose as if suffering from a perpetual cold.

  How could he make this man understand that drive home in the night? Nothing special had happened. He and Gisèle hadn’t said much to each other. At that time he had been certain that she knew nothing – nothing about that afternoon’s events, at least, and probably nothing about his affair with Andrée, even if she had heard rumours about a few other escapades.

  Yet it was while driving those twelve kilometres that he had felt the closest he ever had to her, the most deeply bound to her. It was on the tip of his tongue: ‘I need you, Gisèle.’

  Needed her with him. Needed her to believe in him.

  ‘When I think of the years you cost me.’

  It was not his wife’s voice, but Andrée’s, a little hoarse, from deep in her heaving chest, reproaching him for leaving the village when he was sixteen to learn a profession elsewhere.

  He had gone to Paris and had worked in a garage until called up for military service. He had never paid any attention to Andrée: she was too tall, she
lived in the chateau, and her father was a local hero.

  A cold, stuck-up girl. A statue.

  ‘Why are you laughing?’

  For he was driving along laughing, and not very pleasantly.

  ‘I was remembering the film.’

  ‘Did you think it was good?’

  ‘As good as the rest of them.’

  A statue that came strangely to life and asked him, with a faraway look in its eye:

  ‘Tell me, Tony: if I became free?’

  Everyone knew that Nicolas was ill and would not make old bones, but that was no reason to talk about him as if he were as good as dead! He had pretended not to have heard her.

  ‘Would you free yourself too?’

  The train whistle had blown a furious blast.

  ‘What did you say?’

  ‘I’m asking if, in that case …’

  What would he have replied if he hadn’t recognized Nicolas in the crowd from the station, coming across the square?

  The lights were on downstairs in their house. Keeping track of the time, the Molard sisters must have put away their sewing and got ready to go home, for they were usually in bed by nine o’clock or even earlier.

  ‘I’ll put the van away.’

  She got out and walked around to the back of the house to go in the kitchen door, while he went to park the van next to the massive, bright red and yellow machines in the shed.

  As he came up to the house, the two sisters were leaving.

  ‘Goodnight, Tony.’

  ‘Goodnight.’

  Gisèle was taking a last look around to see that everything was in order.

  ‘Want something to drink? Are you hungry?’

  ‘No, thanks.’

  Later he would ask himself if at that moment she might have been waiting for some sign, some word from him. Was it possible that she had sensed a threat hanging over them?

  After they had been to the cinema, she usually went directly up to check on Marianne’s breathing.

  ‘I know it’s silly,’ she had admitted to him one evening. ‘I only do it after I’ve been away from the house. When I’m here, I feel I’m protecting her. That we’re protecting her,’ she added quickly. ‘When I’m not with her, she seems so helpless to me!’

  She would actually lean anxiously over her daughter until she could see her breathing evenly.

  He could think of nothing to say. They undressed facing one another, as they always did.

  Gisèle’s hips had broadened after childbearing, but she was still thin, otherwise, and her pale breasts sagged a little.

  How could he make others understand that he loved her, when that evening, longing to pour out his feelings to her, he hadn’t been able to make her understand that?

  ‘Goodnight, Tony.’

  ‘Goodnight, Gisèle.’

  She was the one who turned out the bedside lamp, on her side, because she was always the first one up, and in the winter it was still dark.

  Wasn’t she hesitating a moment, before turning it off? He held his breath.

  Click …

  3.

  He wasn’t the nervous type. They had put him through enough tests in Poitiers to find that out: first the prison doctor had examined him, then the psychiatrist, and that strange woman, a psychologist with eyes like a gypsy, who seemed comical at times but frightening at others.

  People tended instead to be amazed and even shocked at how calm he was, and someone in the courtroom – the assistant public prosecutor or the counsel for the plaintiff – would later describe his composure as cynical, even aggressive.

  It was true that he was usually in control of himself, more inclined to a wait-and-see attitude, preferring to remain on his guard instead of being more outgoing, more enterprising.

  Hadn’t it been a happy time, those two weeks at Les Sables-d’Olonne? Happy and a bit sad, with sudden rushes of anxiety he couldn’t always hide from his wife and daughter.

  They were living like most summer holiday-makers, having breakfast on the terrace, with Marianne already in her red bathing suit, and by nine all three of them were at the beach, where they had quickly claimed their own private spot.

  In two days they had established their habits and rituals, meeting their neighbours in the dining room of Les Roches Noires, smiling at the elderly couple at the table opposite theirs, who would wave affectionately at Marianne. As for Marianne, she was fascinated by the old gentleman’s beard.

  ‘If he leans any lower, his beard will land in his soup.’

  She spied on him every evening, waiting for the inevitable.

  Every morning and afternoon the same people would settle in under beach umbrellas all around them: the blonde lady who spent so much time putting on sun-tan oil before lying on her stomach, reading all day with her shoulder straps down, and the bad-mannered kids from Paris, who stuck their tongues out at Marianne and pushed her, out in the water …

  Gisèle, unused to being at leisure, was knitting a sky-blue pullover for their daughter to wear on her first day at school, her lips moving as she counted stitches.

  Was this holiday at the beach really turning out to be such a good idea? He played with Marianne, teaching her to swim, waist-deep in the water with his hand under her chin. He had tried to teach his wife, too, but as soon as she lost her footing she would panic, flailing around and clutching at him. Once a wave had suddenly knocked her over and she had shot him a look of – was it fear? Not fear of the sea. Fear of him.

  For hours, he stayed calm, relaxed, playing ball, walking with Marianne to the end of the pier. They would all stroll together along the narrow streets of the town, visiting the cathedral, taking photos of the fishing boats at the docks, the local fishwives at the market in their pleated skirts and varnished wooden shoes.

  There were perhaps ten thousand tourists all doing the same things, and whenever a storm broke, they would snatch up their belongings to rush off to the hotels and cafés.

  Why, at times, did he seem to absent himself? Was he regretting having left Saint-Justin, where Andrée might be trying in vain to signal him?

  ‘Now about this signal, Monsieur Falcone …’

  After a few weeks in Poitiers, he was losing track of which questions had been Diem’s and which the psychiatrist’s. Sometimes they asked the same thing, with different words, in a different context. Weren’t they getting together to compare statements between interrogations, hoping he would contradict himself in the end?

  ‘When did you and your mistress establish this signal?’

  ‘That first evening.’

  ‘You mean in September, by the side of the road?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Whose idea was it?’

  ‘Hers. I already told you. She wanted us to meet again somewhere else and thought right away of my brother’s hotel.’

  ‘And the towel?

  ‘Her first suggestion was to put a specific item in a corner of a shop window.’

  There were two front windows displaying a jumble of groceries, cotton cloths, aprons, rubber boots. The Despierre store was on the main street, a few steps from the church, and everyone going through town had to pass it.

  It was dark inside, with barrels and crates piled against the walls, both counters stacked high with merchandise, shelves brimming with bottles and cans, drill trousers, wicker baskets and hams hanging from the ceilings.

  The smell of this shop was the strongest, most evocative scent of his entire childhood, with that high note from the cans of kerosene, for the isolated farms and hamlets did not yet have electricity.

  ‘What item?’

  ‘She’d thought of a packet of starch. Then she was afraid that her husband might move it without her noticing while she was off in the kitchen.’

  How could they hope to learn in a few hours a day, over weeks or even months, everything they needed to know about a life so different from theirs? Not only his life, and Gisèle’s, but the lives of Andrée, Madame Despierre, Madame Formier,
the life of the village, the back-and-forth between Triant and Saint-Justin. Simply to understand the blue room, they would have had to …

  ‘In the end she decided that on the Thursdays when she could join me in the hotel she would set a towel out to dry on her window-sill.’

  Their bedroom window, hers and Nicolas’! For they did sleep in the same room. It was over the shop, one of the three narrow windows with safety bars, the one in which a lithograph in a black-and-gold frame could be glimpsed in the dim light, hanging on the muddy-brown wall.

  ‘So that every Thursday morning …’

  ‘I passed her house.’

  Who knows whether, while he was living in a bathing suit on the beach, perhaps Andrée was signalling him for help, and the towel was permanently draped on the safety bar … True, he had seen her and Nicolas driving home from Triant in the Citroën, but he knew nothing about their state of mind.

  ‘I wonder, Monsieur Falcone, whether, in suggesting that holiday to your wife …’

  ‘She had just mentioned Marianne’s poor colour.’

  ‘I’m aware of that. You did seize the opportunity: a chance, perhaps, to reassure her, to play the good husband, the loving father, to allay her suspicions. What do you think of that explanation?’

  ‘It isn’t true.’

  ‘You continue to claim that your intention was to get away from your mistress?’

  He hated that word, yet he had to put up with it.

  ‘That’s about it.’

  ‘You’d already decided not to see her again?’

  ‘I hadn’t any definite plan.’

  ‘Have you seen her again during the intervening months?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘She never signalled to you again?’

  ‘I have no idea, because from then on I avoided going by her house on Thursday mornings.’

  ‘And you did so simply because one afternoon you saw her husband walk from the station to the hotel terrace to sit there drinking lemonade? She is the only woman, by your own admission, with whom you have experienced the fulfilment of physical love. You described it, as I recall, as a revelation …’