Fifteen
Raymond did not wake until early on Sunday afternoon. There was a sour taste in the back of his throat. His head hurt. He was still wearing his shoes and trousers, but he was naked from the waist up. The curtains were not closed and weak sun filtered through the window. The remains of a packet of cigarettes were strewn across the floor. He pulled the blanket over his head. He remembered nothing of the journey home from Johnny’s. Neither did he know if Thérèse had been up when he returned. His mother would certainly have been in bed. The best thing to do would be to get up and act as if nothing out of the ordinary had occurred.
Raymond threw off the blanket and lay on his back for a while staring blankly at the ceiling. The swaying motion of the train journey home returned to him. Had there been some incident with the conductor? He closed his eyes to stem the memory. In preparation for leaving the bed, he turned on his side. He must have tried to smoke a cigarette, because an end had burnt itself out on the carpet. Slowly he lowered his feet to the floor. When he leaned over to untie his shoelaces, he felt a convulsion and retched into his mouth. He straightened up and took a series of slow breaths. He prised off his shoes with the toes of the opposite foot. He walked bare-chested to the bathroom and drank two glasses of water. There were some painkillers among the bottles in the cabinet and he took three. He examined his face in the mirror. His skin was pasty, almost yellow, and his eyes bloodshot. He brushed his teeth thoroughly then removed his trousers. His underpants were crusted with semen. He got into the shower. The hot water was reviving. He turned his face towards the showerhead and pushed his hair back from his forehead, then soaped his armpits and private parts. An image of Delph flashed into his mind. A certain odour that he could not quite place. He exhaled slowly, allowing the memories to seep back into his mind.
When he had emerged from the WC at Johnny’s, Delph had indicated with a motion of her head that she should follow him. The room at the end of the passage was dark and smelled of drains. It was cold. Without ceremony, Delph pulled down her tights and underwear and perched on a pile of crates. It was too dark for Raymond to see between her legs. Once or twice, when his mother had got out of bed carelessly, he had glimpsed her sex, but other than that, and his inept fondling of Yvette, his knowledge of female anatomy was vague. Delph unbuttoned her shirt. She was not wearing a brassiere. Her chest was as bony as a pubescent boy’s. She suggested he take down his trousers, and he did so. She motioned him towards her. She took his penis in her hand and attempted to guide it into her sex, but he spent himself on the inside of her thigh as soon as she touched him. He attempted to disguise this by thrusting his hips between her legs in the way that he had seen actors do in certain films, but his erection quickly subsided. Delph made it clear that she found his efforts unsatisfactory. She pushed him away and slipped off the crates. Having first wiped the semen from her thigh, she pulled up her tights and fastened her shirt. Raymond zipped up his trousers. Delph’s hat had fallen off. He retrieved it from the floor and handed it to her, mumbling an apology.
‘Don’t worry about it,’ she had said. ‘Luc will sort me out later.’
She put her hat on, fixed it at a jaunty angle, and retraced her steps along the passage. A man waiting outside the WC had observed the whole episode. He was laughing. Raymond waited until he had gone into the toilet before making his exit.
In the shower, Raymond became aroused as he recalled the incident. He masturbated rapidly, one hand steadying himself against the tiled wall. As he caught his breath, he watched his emission form a tiny vortex before being sucked down the plughole. He resolved to push things forward with Yvette so that he might perform more satisfactorily next time. If there was to be a next time.
Raymond returned to his room and put on clean clothes. He was glad he had slept through lunch. He did not wish to face his mother. It was not that she would scold him. She would simply look forlorn, and Raymond could not bear to see her look forlorn. He put his baseball boots in his satchel and padded quietly down the stairs. Despite his efforts, his mother called out to him from the drawing room. She must have been listening out for him. Her tone was light, as if she wanted to make clear that he was not in trouble, but he continued to the front door and trotted down the drive, pausing only when he reached the pavement to put on his shoes.
Saint-Louis seemed even drabber than usual. The mid-afternoon light was flat and seemed to drain the colour from everything. The shops along Rue de Mulhouse had the air of being abandoned, rather than merely closed. Aside from the occasional passing car, the streets were deserted. Raymond felt queer. He could feel every contour of the pavement through the soles of his shoes. Buildings he had barely noticed before now seemed offensive in their ugliness. He was conscious of a moment of blackness every time he blinked and felt a momentary relief that the world was still there when he opened his eyes. He walked slowly past the gendarmerie. Perhaps the little cop was in there now, sitting in an office with a grey linoleum floor and a dying pot plant on the window sill. Raymond paused by the noticeboard at the foot of the steps up to the entrance. Behind the scratched perspex was an appeal for information about a missing person, Artur Kuper, with a photograph and a description of the clothes he had been wearing. He was an ordinary-looking man, with a scruffy moustache and a receding hairline. The poster was three years old. Next to the announcement was a faded advertisement for the Foreign Legion. It was illustrated by a picture of a handsome young man in a kepi gazing idealistically into the future, over the slogan Voir la vie autrement. Perhaps this was the sentiment that had inspired Artur Kuper to one day get on a train and disappear. Or perhaps he had simply fallen drunk into the canal and was decomposing in the sludge. Judging by his picture, the latter scenario seemed more likely.
A policeman emerged from the entrance to the station. Raymond instinctively turned his face away. The gendarme passed so close to him that he brushed his shoulder, but he did not so much as glance at him. Raymond walked off. His stomach was churning and he thought he might be about to vomit. He turned into the little park in front of the Protestant temple, where he had sat so often with Yvette. He took a seat on the bench nearest the church. The chestnut trees around the perimeter of the park had begun to shed their leaves. He placed his hand over his eyes and took a few slow breaths. His queasiness subsided a little. An old woman had sat down on the bench opposite and was watching him. Raymond returned her gaze. Her expression was one of mild curiosity, disapproval perhaps. She did not appear in the least afraid of him. There was no reason that she should be. She had no way of knowing that he had a knife in his satchel and could, if he chose, step across the gravel walkway and demand the purse she no doubt kept in the large leather handbag by her side.
Raymond creased his mouth into a smile and said: ‘Good afternoon, Madame.’
The woman’s expression did not change. Raymond wondered if she was deaf or gone in the head. He directed his gaze towards the trees behind her. After a few minutes, she gathered up her bag and slowly walked off in the direction of the gendarmerie. A cleric in black robes arrived and opened up the heavy wooden door of the church. He stood on the step for a few moments surveying his domain and then went inside. It had never occurred to Raymond that the temple might actually be in use; that it might function as a place of worship, rather than being merely a convenient landmark by which to orient oneself in the town. A few minutes later, the cleric reappeared and stood on the step, awaiting his congregation. He greeted Raymond with a cordial nod, perhaps thinking that he was waiting for the service to commence. He did not appear unduly concerned about the lack of worshippers. An old couple arrived and he greeted them with a handshake, before they went inside. The cleric glanced at his watch. It struck Raymond that were the clergyman stripped of his title and his outlandish attire, his actions would be recognised in all their absurdity. It was only on account of his position that people did not point him out in the street and laugh.
Raymond sat for a few more minutes before gett
ing up and continuing through the town. He felt the heft of his knife in his satchel. He could not imagine that he had once been without it. He had no intention of ever using it, but knowing it was there conferred a feeling of well-being.
Yvette and Stéphane were in the back booth of the Café des Vosges. They were deep in conversation, their heads almost touching across the table. The café had the atmosphere, as it always did on Sundays, of not really being open. There were two other customers, sitting by the window staring blankly out at the empty street, like extras in a film waiting for ‘Action’ to be called. The waitress with the harelip was cleaning the glass cabinet where the cakes and tarts were kept. When Raymond appeared at the table, Stéphane leaned back and stretched his arms along the back of the banquette. Yvette stared at the empty cup on the table in front of her.
‘Hello, old man,’ said Stéphane.
‘Monsieur, mademoiselle,’ said Raymond, nodding to each in turn. He slid onto the banquette next to Yvette. They exchanged a perfunctory kiss on the cheeks.
‘So, what’s happening?’ Stéphane asked. He seemed determined to generate a convivial atmosphere.
‘Nothing much,’ Raymond replied.
Stéphane had moved to Saint-Louis two years previously. When he had been introduced to the class, Raymond had immediately recognised a kindred spirit. He wore wire-framed oval spectacles and his hair was cut too neatly, as if his mother still took him to the barber’s. Nevertheless, he projected an air of indifference: if he was an outcast, it was because he chose to be. A few days later, Raymond spotted him in the canteen. He was hunched over a book. It was Yvette who had insisted that they join him. ‘He doesn’t know anyone,’ she had said.
‘Maybe he doesn’t want to know anyone,’ Raymond replied.
When they sat down, Stéphane closed his book as if he had been awaiting their arrival. He shook hands in an exaggeratedly formal way.
‘Stéphane Prudhomme,’ he said.
Yvette and Raymond introduced themselves.
‘I appreciate you joining me,’ Stéphane said. His father’s work—he did not specify what he did—obliged his family to re-locate frequently and as a consequence he was quite used to moving schools. ‘My policy is never to try to make friends. People are afraid of the unknown. They don’t want to get lumbered with someone they know nothing about. So I wait until someone approaches me. Sometimes people do this out of pity, but in other cases it’s because they have seen something in me that attracts them. I sense that in this instance the latter is true, and, if I may say so, the sentiment is reciprocated.’
Then he fixed Yvette with a broad smile. Raymond did not feel at all aggrieved that Stéphane’s eyes lingered on Yvette. On the contrary, he wanted him to admire her, as if Yvette’s fine features somehow reflected well on him. He tried to think of something clever to say in response to Stéphane’s little speech, but the moment passed.
A conversation ensued about the book Stéphane was reading, La Bête Humaine. Stéphane was dismissive: ‘It’s entertaining, but if Zola wanted to be a scientist,’ he declared, ‘he should have taken up a scalpel rather than a pen.’ Raymond, who at that time had never read a word of Zola, was captivated. Within weeks, the three of them had become inseparable. Yvette and Raymond seemed to take equal pleasure in their new friend’s company. Raymond did not mind that he could not always follow his companions’ conversation. The fact that Yvette now had someone with whom she could discuss things on an equal footing only filled a lack in their own relationship.
But now, as the threesome sat in awkward silence around the Formica table in the Café des Vosges, something had changed. Raymond looked at his two friends: Stéphane with his stupid fuzzy moustache, Yvette with the childish Alice band that held her hair behind her ears. They seemed no more than children. Only a week ago, it would never have occurred to Raymond not to share everything with them. Now such a thing seemed inconceivable.
The waitress approached the table. ‘A tea?’ she asked without preamble.
If Raymond ordered a beer, it was not because he wanted one—he did not—but rather to illustrate the fissure that had opened between them. The waitress nodded disinterestedly and shuffled back to the counter in the battered leather slippers she always wore.
It was, in a sense, Stéphane’s fault that they frequented the Café des Vosges. The first time they left school together, he had asked: ‘Is there anywhere to get a coffee round here?’ Until then, if Raymond and Yvette wished to postpone returning home, they would pause at one of the benches in the little park in front of the Protestant temple. Neither of them divulged this to Stéphane, however. Instead, it was Yvette who had said, for no reason other than that they happened to be passing: ‘We sometimes go in here.’
When they had settled themselves in the booth at the back of the café, Stéphane surveyed the place with interest. Raymond, embarrassed by the outmoded surroundings they found themselves in, felt obliged to remark that were was nowhere any better in the vicinity. ‘I think it’s splendid,’ Stéphane declared. Two old women who had not taken off their winter coats—Raymond remembered it clearly—fed lumps of cake to a poodle with rheumy eyes on the floor beneath their table. In time, he was to become familiar with their routine. The women came to the Café des Vosges once a week, on Tuesdays, shared a pot of tea and each had a cake. They varied their choice of cake and this formed the greater part of their conversation. At a certain point the poodle must have died, and from that time Raymond experienced the space on the floor between the women’s ankles as a kind of void.
When the waitress approached their table, Stéphane had ordered a café crème. Yvette followed suit. In order to assert his individuality, Raymond asked for a tea. They sat in silence until the drinks arrived. There were other, less dreary, cafés in Saint-Louis, but Raymond and Yvette had conspired in the pretence that the Café des Vosges was their regular haunt. It was not Stéphane’s place to suggest going elsewhere. In this way, they were condemned to frequent the Café des Vosges. Raymond often wondered if they would become like the old women in their winter coats, endlessly replaying the same conversation.
The waitress returned with Raymond’s beer. Neither Yvette nor Stéphane made any comment on this change in his drinking habits. Raymond took a sip of his beer then licked the foam off his upper lip. It tasted foul.
Stéphane said with affected casualness: ‘I called for you last night.’
Raymond could not prevent himself from glancing towards Yvette. She was looking at him questioningly with her chin cupped in the palm of her hand. They must have discussed this before he arrived.
‘Oh, yeah?’ Raymond said with a little shrug.
‘It’s just that your mother told me you had gone to Yvette’s.’
‘Yes,’ said Raymond, ‘I did tell her that.’
‘But I went to Yvette’s and you weren’t there.’ It wasn’t clear whether he had gone to Yvette’s because Raymond’s mother had told him he was there, or if he had been going there in any case.
‘Don’t tell me you’ve never lied to your mother,’ said Raymond.
‘You lied to me as well,’ said Yvette. ‘You told me that you had to spend the evening at home.’
Raymond looked from one to the other. Far from being ashamed of being caught out, he felt a sense of outrage towards them. Until this point, there had been a tacit agreement between the three of them that while Raymond might see Yvette or Stéphane separately, Stéphane and Yvette never saw each other in Raymond’s absence. He was the nucleus around which the threesome revolved. They had violated the norms of the group. Raymond felt that they had conspired against him.
He took a swallow of beer. ‘So now I have to account for my movements to you, do I?’ he said.
‘Of course not,’ said Yvette. ‘But I’m upset that you lied to me.’
‘And I’m upset that you two got together behind my back,’ said Raymond.
‘You can hardly say that, old man,’ said Stéphane. ‘I c
alled in for you.’
Raymond ignored him. ‘And did you open your legs for him as well?’ he said to Yvette.
Yvette had tears in her eyes. ‘Why are you being such a shit?’ she said.
Stéphane was staring at the table. Yvette shoved Raymond on the arm. He stood up to let her out of the booth. To his surprise, Stéphane also stood up to go. He shook his head at Raymond and the pair left together. Raymond resumed his seat in the booth. The waitress had been watching the little scene from behind the counter. Raymond felt bad. Yvette was right. He was a shit. He should go after her and apologise. She would understand. Yvette always understood. Then he remembered Delph unbuttoning her shirt on the crates in the backroom of Johnny’s and the moment passed.
The waitress was looking at him disapprovingly. In order to demonstrate that he was not embarrassed by what had taken place, he ordered a second beer. It was only when he came to pay that he remembered tossing the banknotes he had stolen onto the table at Johnny’s.
Sixteen
If there was one point on which Gorski was in agreement with his predecessor, it was on the usefulness of funerals. ‘Always go to the funeral,’ Ribéry liked to say. ‘Weddings are a waste of time. You learn more from five minutes at a funeral than in a whole day at a wedding.’ And so Gorski had found it. Perhaps it was the proximity of death, but it never took people long to loosen up at a funeral. There was always some wag who took it upon himself to be the first to lighten the atmosphere with a joke or a disparaging comment about the deceased. The guests would then breathe a collective sigh of relief and get properly stuck into the liquor. And no one ever looked askance at a cop at a funeral. At a wedding, the presence of a cop cast a pall over proceedings; at a funeral it seemed perfectly apt.
The Accident on the A35 Page 17
