Yes, I enjoy it and yes, I’m proud of it. No, it hasn’t gone to my head, and no again, you can’t really call it a success. Yes, success is dangerous when you stop doubting yourself. Oh yes, I doubt myself every day. No, my husband doesn’t help with the blog. He does help me think about what we stock for the site, yes, because sales are going well; we even sent a cross-stitch kit to Moscou yesterday. What, Moscow in Russia? I laugh. No, the Moscou that’s a district in Toulouse near the Canal du Midi. Oh, that one. No, there’s no message in what I’m doing. Only pleasure, and patience. Yes, I do think that not everything from the past is outmoded. Giving yourself a chance to possess something very good, taking your time, that’s important. Yes, I think everything does go too fast these days. We talk too fast. We think too fast – if we think at all, that is! We send emails and texts without reading them through, we lose the elegance of proper spelling, politeness, the sense of things. I’ve seen children publish pictures of themselves vomiting on Facebook. No, no, I’m not against progress; I’m just afraid it will isolate people even more. Last month there was a news item about a young girl who wanted to die, she told her 237 Facebook friends in advance and no one reacted. What did you say? Yes, she’s dead. She hanged herself. No one told her that it would mean twenty minutes of atrocious pain. That suicides always want to be saved, but only silence answers their suffocated pleas. Well, since you want a formula so badly I’ll say that tengoldfingers is like the fingers of a hand. Women are the fingers and the hand is their passion. Can she quote me on that? No, no, it sounds ridiculous. On the contrary, she thinks it’s touching. A pretty comparison.
Then she turns off her tape recorder.
I think I’ve got lots of wonderful stuff for my article, thank you, Jo. Oh, one last question. You must have heard about the woman from Arras who won eighteen million in the lottery? Suddenly I am wary. Yes. If it was you, Jo, what would you do with it? I don’t know what to say. Would you expand tengoldfingers? she goes on. Help women living alone? Set up a foundation?
I start stammering. I . . . I don’t know. Anyway . . . anyway, that’s purely theoretical. And I’m not a saint, you know. I live a simple life, and I like it that way.
Thank you very much, Jo.
‘Papa, I’ve won eighteen million euros.’
Papa looks at me. He can’t believe his ears. His mouth opens in a smile, which turns to laughter. Nervous laughter at first, turning to joy. He wipes away the little tears that spring to his eyes. That’s wonderful, my little girl, you must be pleased. Have you told Maman? Yes, I’ve told her. And what are you going to do with all that money, Jocelyne, do you have any idea? That’s just it, Papa, I don’t know. What do you mean, you don’t know? Anyone would know what to do with a sum like that. You could have a new life. But I like my life as it is, Papa. Do you think Jo would still love me as I am if he knew? Are you married? he asks. I lower my eyes. I don’t want him to see my sadness. Do you have children, darling? Because if you do, spoil them; we never spoil our children enough. Do I spoil you, Jo?
Yes, Papa, every day. Oh, that’s good. You make Maman and me laugh; even when you cheat at Monopoly and swear it isn’t you cheating, that 500 note was there all the time among your pile of fives.
Maman is happy with you. Every evening when you come home, as soon as she hears your key in the lock, she has a charming way of tucking a stray lock of hair behind her ear and looking at herself furtively in the mirror. She wants to be pretty for you. She wants to be your present, your Belle du Seigneur. Do you think your mother will be here soon? Because she was going to bring me my newspaper and some shaving foam. I’ve run out. She’ll be here soon, Papa. Good, good. What did you say your name was?
Six bloody minutes. They don’t last long.
At the weekend, Jo takes me to Le Touquet.
I’ve lost more weight; he’s worried. You’re working too hard, he says. The shop, the blog, giving Mado moral support. You ought to rest.
He’s booked a room in the medium-priced Hôtel de la Forêt. We arrive at about four o’clock.
On the motorway, seven Porsche Cayennes passed us, and I noticed the way he looked at them every time. His sparkling little dreams. They shine more brightly than usual.
We refresh ourselves in the bathroom and then go down the Rue Saint-Jean to the beach. He buys me some chocolates at the Chat Bleu. You’re crazy, I whisper in his ear. You need to build your strength up, he says, smiling. There’s magnesium in chocolate – it’s good for stress. What surprising things you know, Jo.
Outside again, he takes my hand. You’re a wonderful husband, Jo, I think; a big brother, a father, you’re all the men a woman could need.
And maybe even an enemy, too. That’s what I’m afraid of.
We walk on the beach for a long time.
Sand yachts speed past close to us, their sails snapping in the wind, making me jump every time, like the clusters of swallows flying low over Grandmother’s house during my childhood summers. Out of season, Le Touquet looks like a picture postcard. Retired people, Labradors, people riding horses, and sometimes a few young women walking on the promenade with baby buggies. Out of season, Le Touquet is a place outside time. The wind whips at our faces, the salty air dries our skin; we shiver, we are at peace.
If he knew, just think of the fuss, it would be war. If he knew, wouldn’t he want islands in the sun, tangy cocktails, burning sand? A huge bedroom, fresh sheets, glasses of champagne?
We walk for another hour and then go back to our hotel. Jo stops at the little bar and orders a non-alcoholic beer. I go upstairs to have a bath.
I look at my naked body in the bathroom mirror. My spare tyre has deflated, my thighs look slimmer. I have a body in transit between two weights. A soft, blurred body. But all the same, I like the look of it. It’s touching. It suggests a blossoming to come. A new fragility.
I tell myself that if I were very rich, I’d think it ugly. I’d want a complete makeover. Breast implants. Liposuction. A tummy tuck. Cosmetic surgery, including an arm lift. And perhaps a little work on my eyelids.
Being rich means seeing all that’s ugly and having the arrogance to think you can change things. All you have to do is pay for it.
But I’m not as rich as all that. I just happen to have a cheque for eighteen million five hundred and forty-seven thousand, three hundred and one euros and twenty-eight centimes, folded eight times and hidden inside a shoe. All I have is the temptation. A possible new life. A new house. A new TV set. Lots of new things.
But nothing really different.
Later, I rejoin my husband in the hotel restaurant. He has ordered a bottle of wine. We drink to each other. Let’s hope nothing changes and we go on as we are, he says. Nothing really different.
Thank you, whoever’s up there, for keeping me from cashing that cheque yet.
My wish list.
A holiday alone with Jo (and not at the Sourire campsite. Tuscany?).
Insist on a different room for Papa.
Take Romain and Nadine to see Maman’s grave. (Talk to them about her. And her currant loaf, yum yum.)
Get my hair cut.
Sexy red lingerie. (It will drive you mad, Jo!)
That coat at Caroll’s before someone else snaps it up. QUICK!!
Have the sitting room redecorated. (Flat-screen TV???)
Change the garage door for an automatic one.
Have lunch at Taillevent in Paris some day. (Read a mouth-watering article in Elle à Table.)
Foie gras on gingerbread with the twins and fine wine, while we talk about men all through the night.
Ask Jo to make a shelter for the bins in the yard. (I hate recycling!!!)
Go back to Étretat.
Spend a week in London with Nadine. (Share her life. Love and cuddles. Read her The Little Prince. My God, I must be crazy!)
Pluck up the courage to tell Romain that I thought the girlfriend he brought home at Christmas was nasty, vulgar and, well, super-nasty. (Send him some m
oney.)
Spend time at a spa. (Massage. Esthederm skin-care products? Simone Mahler?) Take care of myself. Oh, go away, there’s nobody at home!
Eat better.
Go on a diet. (Both of the above.)
Dance with Jo to ‘Indian Summer’ on the next fourteenth of July.
Buy all the James Bond films on DVD. (???)
Ask the journalist to lunch. (Give her mother a present.)
A Chanel bag.
Louboutins.
Hermès. (Get them to unfold lots of scarves and then say, hm, I’ll think it over.)
Buy a Seiko watch.
Tell everyone I was the winner of the eighteen million jackpot. (Eighteen million five hundred and forty-seven thousand, three hundred and one euros and twenty-eight centimes, to be precise.)
Be envied. At last!
Go to the Porsche showroom (in Lille? Amiens?). Ask for brochures about the Cayenne.
Go to a Johnny Hallyday concert at least once. Before he dies.
A Peugeot 308 with a satnav. (???)
To be told I’m beautiful.
I almost had a lover once.
It was not long after the birth of Nadège’s dead body. When Jo was breaking things around the house and had stopped drinking eight or nine beers in the evening, slumped in front of the Radiola.
That was when he turned nasty.
Drunk, he just thought he was a big vegetable. A wimp; everything a woman hates in a man: vulgarity, egotism, thoughtlessness. But he stayed calm. A wimp, set in his ways, in fact congealed in them.
No, it was sobriety that turned Jo cruel. At first I put it down to coming off the booze. He’d replaced up to a dozen full-strength beers an evening by twice the number of low-alcohol Tourtels. You might have thought he wanted to drink them all to get at the 1% of alcohol each is supposed to contain, according to the tiny wording on the label, and be back in his inebriated comfort zone. But there was nothing at the bottom of those bottles, or himself, except sheer nastiness. The hateful things he said: it was your big body that suffocated Nadège. Every time you sat down you were strangling her. My baby’s dead because you didn’t take care of yourself. Poor Jo, your body is a dustbin, a great fat disgusting dustbin. You’re a sow. A slag and a sow.
I took it all.
I didn’t reply. I told myself that he must be suffering horribly. That the death of our little girl was sending him mad, and he was turning that madness on me. It was a black year, everything about it was dark. I used to get up in the night to go and cry in Nadine’s room as she slept with her fists closed. I didn’t want him to hear me and see how much he was hurting me. I didn’t want the shame of that. I thought again and again of running away with the children, and then I told myself all this would pass. His grief would lift in the end, would simply leave us and go away. Some kinds of misery weigh so heavily that you have to let them go. You can’t keep everything inside you. I stretched out my arms in the dark; I opened them hoping that Maman would walk into them. I prayed to feel her warmth around me; I didn’t want the darkness to carry me away. But women are always alone in the face of men’s ill-will.
If I didn’t die then, it was first because of an ordinary little remark. Then because of the voice that spoke it. And then because of the mouth that voice came out of, and then the attractive face in which that mouth was smiling.
Let me help you.
Nice, 1994.
Eight months after we had buried Nadège. A horrible glossy white coffin. Two granite doves taking flight on her tombstone. I vomited; I couldn’t bear it. Dr Caron, our present doctor’s father, prescribed something for me. And then rest, and then good fresh air.
It was June. Jo and the children stayed in Arras. The factory, the end of the school year; their evenings without me; warming up meals in the microwave, watching videos, the moronic films you can indulge in when Maman is away; evenings telling yourselves she’ll soon be back, things will get better. A little period of mourning.
I told the older Dr Caron that I couldn’t cope with Jo’s cruelty. I said things I never ought to have said. About my weaknesses, my feminine fears. I told him about my terror. I was ashamed, frozen, petrified. I wept, slobbered, held in his bony old arms, his pincers.
I wept over my husband’s disgust. I had punished my murderous body; the point of the carving knife had drawn screams on my forearms; I had smeared my face with my guilty blood. I had gone mad. Jo’s savagery had eaten me up, destroyed my strength. I could have cut out my tongue to silence him; I could have burst my eardrums so that I wouldn’t hear him any more.
So when the older Dr Caron said, in a cloud of bad breath, ‘I’m sending you away for a cure all by yourself for three weeks. I’m going to save you, Jocelyne,’ his bad breath brought a ray of light.
And I went.
Nice, the Centre Sainte-Geneviève. The Dominican nuns were lovely. To see their smiles, you’d have thought there was no human atrocity that they couldn’t imagine and yet still forgive. Their faces were luminous, like the faces of the saints on the little bookmarks in our childhood missals.
I shared a room with a woman the same age as Maman would have been now. As patients, she and I were both what the sisters called mild cases. We needed rest. We needed to find our way back to ourselves. Rediscover ourselves. Be reconciled to ourselves, in fact. Our status as mild cases meant we were allowed out.
Every afternoon, after the siesta, I walked down to the beach.
An uncomfortable beach, covered with pebbles. But for the sea, you’d have thought it a small stretch of wasteland. At the time of day when I go down there the sun is on your back as you look at the water. I’m putting on suncream. My arms are too short.
Let me help you.
My heart leaps. I turn round.
He’s sitting two metres away from me, wearing a white shirt and beige trousers. His feet are bare. I can’t see his eyes because of his dark glasses. I see his mouth. His lips – the lips coloured like a fruit that have just uttered those four audacious words. They are smiling. Then the atavistic prudence of all my female forebears resurfaces.
No, that wouldn’t do.
Why wouldn’t it do? Would it be wrong of me to want to help you, or for you to agree?
My God, I’m blushing. I snatch up my blouse to cover my shoulders.
I’m just leaving, anyway. So am I, he says.
We don’t move. My heart is racing. He’s handsome, and I’m not pretty. He’s a predator. A Lothario. A bad character, I’m sure of it. People don’t speak to you like that in Arras. No man ventures to talk to you without first asking whether you’re married. Or in a relationship with someone. Not this man. He comes in without knocking. Just shoulders his way in. A foot in the door. And I like it. I get to my feet. He’s already standing up. He offers me his arm. I take it. My fingers feel the warmth of his tanned skin. Salt has left white marks on it. We leave the beach. We walk along the Promenade des Anglais with barely a metre between us. Further on, when we are opposite the Hôtel Negresco, his hand takes my elbow; he helps me across the road as if I were blind. I like the sense of vertigo. I close my eyes for a little while; I do as he wants. We go into the hotel. My heart is racing. I’m losing my mind. What has come over me? Am I going to go to bed with a stranger? I’m crazy.
But his smile reassures me. And then his voice.
Come on, I’ll get you a cup of tea.
He orders two orange pekoes.
It’s a light-bodied Ceylon tea, a pleasant afternoon drink. Have you ever been to Ceylon . . . Sri Lanka?
I laugh. I lower my eyes. I’m fifteen years old, a romantic schoolgirl.
It’s an island in the Indian Ocean less than fifty kilometres from India. It became Sri Lanka in 1972, when—
I interrupt him. Why are you doing this?
He delicately puts his cup of orange pekoe down, and then takes my face in his hands.
I saw you on the beach from behind just now, and I was overwhelmed by the loneliness of your
whole body.
He’s good-looking. Like Vittorio Gassman in Scent of a Woman.
I raise my face to his, my lips seek his, find them. It’s a strange, unexpected kiss; a kiss warm with the flavour of the Indian Ocean. It’s a kiss that goes on a long time, a kiss that says everything about what I lack, what he wants, my sufferings, his impatience.
Our kiss is my rapture; my vengeance; all the kisses I never had, from Fabien Derôme in my class in middle school, from my timid ‘Indian Summer’ dance partner, from Philippe de Gouverne whom I never dared approach, from Solal, Prince Charming, Johnny Depp, Kevin Costner before the implants, all the kisses that girls dream of; the kisses before Jocelyn Guerbette’s.
I gently push my stranger away.
I murmur: No.
He doesn’t insist.
If he can read my mind just by looking at my back, now he can see in my eyes how afraid of myself I am.
I’m a faithful wife. Jo’s cruelty isn’t a good enough reason. My loneliness isn’t a good enough reason.
I went home to Arras the next day. Jo’s anger had died down. The children had made toasted ham and cheese sandwiches, and were praising the merits of The Sound of Music.
But nothing’s ever as simple as that.
Since that article was published in L’Observateur de l’Arrageois, the world’s gone mad.
The shop is never empty. The tengoldfingers blog gets eleven thousand hits a day. Our mini-merchandising site receives over forty orders daily. I’m sent thirty CVs a week. The telephone never stops ringing. People ask me to hold sewing workshops in schools. Embroidery workshops in hospitals. A hospice asks me to give knitting lessons, simple things like scarves and socks. The children’s oncology department of the local hospital wants caps in cheerful colours. And sometimes gloves with two or three fingers. Mado is run off her feet, she’s taking Prosoft, and when I worry she replies, with a nervous laugh twisting her mouth: If I stop, Jo, I shall fall down, and if I fall down I’ll bring the whole place down with me, so don’t stop me, keep pushing me, Jo, please keep pushing me. She’s promised to go and see Dr Caron, to eat more salmon, to hang on. In the evening Jo gets me to recite the rules of nutritional safety and the principle of the cold chain, which he has to know for his exam to be a foreman. ‘Deep-frozen foods’ have undergone the process known as ‘deep-freezing’ in which the maximum crystallisation zone is passed as quickly as necessary, the effect being that the temperature of the produce is maintained (after thermal stabilisation) uninterruptedly at values below or equal to -18ºC. Deep-freezing must be carried out without delay on produce of healthy and marketable quality using appropriate technical equipment. Only air, nitrogen and carbonic anhydride respecting the specific criteria of purity are authorised as refrigerant fluids.
The List of My Desires Page 5
