Mathilde had noticed the man’s hands, she remembered the expansive gestures which accompanied his words. She wondered where his light, almost imperceptible, accent was from, a particular inflection she couldn’t identify. She very quickly sensed that the man was getting on Jacques’s nerves, probably because he was younger and taller than him and at least his equal as a speaker. She quickly sensed Jacques bristle.
In the middle of the presentation Jacques had begun to show signs of impatience – he sighed ostentatiously and said ‘yes, yes’ aloud, intended to draw attention to the fact that the director was going too slowly or stating the obvious. Then he began looking at his watch in such a way that no one was in any doubt about his impatience. The team displayed no reaction; they knew his moods. Later, when the director was presenting the results of the quantitative study, Jacques expressed astonishment that their statistical significance didn’t feature in the graphics on the screen. With somewhat exaggerated politeness, the director responded that only results whose statistical significance was above ninety-five per cent were shown. At the end of the presentation, Mathilde, who had commissioned the study, expressed her thanks for the work that had gone into it. It then fell to Jacques to say a few words. She turned to him, and as soon as she caught his eye she knew that Jacques would not be offering any thanks. In the past he’d impressed on her how important it was to establish relations of trust and mutual respect with outside contractors.
Mathilde asked the first questions about some points of detail before opening it up to the meeting.
Jacques was last to speak. With pinched lips and displaying the absolute self-confidence which she knew so well, he dismantled the study’s recommendations one by one. He didn’t question the reliability of the results, but the conclusions the institute had drawn from them. It was skilfully done. Jacques understood the market, brand identities and the history of his company inside out. But for all that, he was wrong.
Mathilde was used to agreeing with him. Firstly because they saw things in a similar way and secondly because it had struck her from the first months of working with him that agreeing with Jacques was a strategy that was both more comfortable and more effective. There was no point in confronting him. In fact, Mathilde always managed to express her reasons and her choices and sometimes got him to change his mind. But this time Jacques’s attitude struck her as so unjust that she couldn’t stop herself saying something. Presenting it as a suggestion so as not to contradict him directly, she explained how it seemed to her that the proposed direction with regard to the development of the market and the other studies carried out by the team were worth studying.
Jacques looked at her for a long time.
In his eyes, all she could read was surprise.
He didn’t say anything else.
She concluded that her argument had won him over. She accompanied the director of the institute to the lift.
Nothing had happened.
Nothing serious.
It had taken her several weeks to return to that scene, to remember it in its entirety, to realise the extent to which every detail had remained in her memory – the man’s hands, the lock of hair that fell across his forehead when he leaned forward, Jacques’s face, what had been said, what had gone unspoken, the final minutes of the meeting, the way the man had smiled at her, his look of gratitude, the unhurried way he gathered up his things. Jacques had left the room without saying goodbye to him.
Later Mathilde had asked Éric how he thought things had gone. Was what she said hurtful, discourteous? Had she overstepped the mark? In a low voice Éric answered that she’d done something that day which none of the rest of them would have dared do and that was good.
Mathilde had gone back over the scene because Jacques’s attitude towards her had changed, because nothing since had been as it was before, because it was then that the slow process of destruction that would take her months to recognise for what it was had begun.
But she always came back to this question: was that all it took for everything to collapse?
Was that all it took for her whole life to be subsumed in an absurd, invisible struggle which she could never win?
If it took her a long time to admit what was going on, the spiral they had embarked on, it was because up until then Jacques had always supported her. They had worked together from the start, defended their common positions, shared the same boldness, a certain taste for risk and the same refusal to take the easy option. She knew his tone better than anyone, the meaning of his gestures, his defensive laugh, his stance when he was in a strong position, his inability to give up, his upsets, his rages and his emotions. Jacques had the reputation of being a difficult character – he was known to be demanding, curt and unsubtle. People were scared of him and came to her more often than to him, but they recognised his competence. When Jacques recruited her she hadn’t worked for three years. He chose her from the group of candidates that the HR department had selected. She was a single mother of three, a situation which up till then had brought her only rejections. She owed him for that. She got involved in working on the marketing plan, in major decisions about the product mix of each brand and in monitoring the competition. Gradually she began to write his speeches and take control of the management of a team of seven.
That day at the end of September, in the space of ten minutes, something had come tumbling down. Something had interfered with the precise high-performance mechanism which governed their relations, something she had neither seen nor heard. It began the same evening, when Jacques expressed surprise in front of several people at seeing her leave at six thirty, having apparently forgotten the numerous evenings she’d sacrificed to the company in order to prepare group presentations and the hours she’d spent at home finishing off reports.
And so a different mechanism was set in motion, a silent and inflexible one which wasn’t going to stop until she cracked.
The first thing Jacques did was decide that the few minutes he spent with her each morning running through priorities and current projects was a waste of time. She’d just have to manage on her own and ask him if necessary. Likewise, he stopped coming to see her in her office at the end of the day, a ritual he had observed for years, a short break before going home. On more or less plausible pretexts, he avoided every opportunity to have lunch with her. He no longer consulted her on decisions and had stopped bothering about her opinion. He never again consulted her on anything at all.
Conversely, the following Monday he had turned up at the planning meeting she ran every week with the whole team, which he hadn’t attended in ages. He sat across the table from her, as an observer, without a word to explain his presence, arms folded, sitting back in his chair. And he looked at her. From that first time, Mathilde felt ill at ease, because his look wasn’t one of trust – it was a look that was judging her, seeking out a fault.
Then Jacques asked for copies of certain documents, took it into his head to have a look at the work of the researchers and product heads, to reread reports and to review resource allocation on various projects. Next, on several occasions he contradicted her in front of the team, looking as though he was suppressing some vague irritation or outright exasperation, and then in front of other people, during the regular exchanges they had with different department heads.
Then he had applied himself to systematically questioning her decisions, asking for details, demanding proof, justifications, figures to back up arguments. He began to express doubts and recriminations.
Then he started coming to her planning meeting every Monday.
Then he decided to chair it himself and as a result she could get on with something else.
She had thought that Jacques would come to his senses. That he would abandon his anger, let things get back to normal.
Things couldn’t get out of control, become deadlocked like that over nothing. It was crazy.
She had tried not to alter her own attitude. She tried to bring off the projects she had b
een given, to maintain good relations with the team in spite of the uneasy feeling that had developed and was growing all the time. She had reckoned that time was what was needed, time for Jacques to get over it.
She hadn’t reacted to any of his attacks – the ironic comments about her shoes or her new coat, the mean remarks about the dates of her Christmas holiday or the sudden illegibility of her handwriting; she had responded with patient, good-natured silence. She had responded with the faith she had in him.
Perhaps none of this had anything to do with her. Perhaps Jacques was going through a bad time and just needed to find his feet again, to get up to speed with projects he had long ago delegated. She had even imagined that he was ill, suffering from a secret disease that was silently eating away at him.
She refused to betray him and didn’t complain about it to anyone. She kept quiet.
But Jacques continued in the same way, every day a little more irritated, distant and harsh.
Over time Mathilde had had to admit that whether Jacques was present or not, other people in the department didn’t talk to her the way they used to, that they adopted an awkward, apologetic tone, since he wasn’t far away. All except Éric, whose attitude to her hadn’t changed.
In November Jacques forgot to invite her to an internal presentation of the ad campaign that the agency they used had produced for the launch of a new product. She found out about the meeting at the last minute from Jacques’s secretary and rushed to the communications director’s office. She knocked and found them both sitting on the leather sofa facing the flat-screen. Jacques didn’t look at her, and the other man gave her only a vague acknowledgement. Neither of them got up or made space for her. Mathilde remained standing there with her arms folded the whole time, while they watched the three films over and over, comparing the images, the voice-overs and the editing. Neither Jacques nor the director of communications asked her opinion. They both behaved as though she had simply burst in by mistake and had no reason to be there.
That was the day she realised that Jacques’s plan to destroy her was not confined to her own department, that he had begun discrediting her further afield and that it was completely within his power to do so.
For several weeks following that episode she asked for a meeting, through his secretary, and every time she passed him in the corridor or bumped into him at the coffee machine. Jacques always refused in an affable tone, putting it off or claiming he was too busy that week.
One day in November she burst into his office without knocking, closed the door behind her and demanded an explanation.
He had no idea what she was talking about. None whatsoever. Everything was absolutely normal. He was doing his job. End of story. She was well aware of the annual budget he was responsible for, the number of things he was involved in which depended on him. He didn’t have time for her mood swings. He had better things to do with his time. The onus was on him to check and verify and take good decisions. She was a complicated person and she made everything else complicated too. What was the matter with her? Had she done something wrong? She probably needed a holiday. It had been a tough year. It was only natural she’d run out of steam. She was looking tense. Tired. No one was indispensable, she knew that. She just needed to take a few days off and she would see things more clearly.
She remembers his voice. It was a voice she didn’t recognise. He could hardly suppress the hatred in it. It was a voice that left no possibility of going back to how things were before. It was a voice of condemnation.
From that day on, Jacques stopped talking to her.
Mathilde didn’t take any time off. She stayed later and later at the office and began to work weekends. She behaved exactly as though she were guilty, as though she had a serious mistake to make up for or a need to prove herself. She had begun to feel tired, exhausted even. She felt as though she was working more slowly than before and less effectively. Little by little she had lost her sense of ease, her confidence. Several times Jacques cancelled business trips with her. He went by himself or replaced her at the last moment with someone else. He stopped telling her about his discussions with top management. He had begun forgetting to send her documents, to invite her to meetings, to copy her in on important emails. When she was away from her desk he would pile it with files bearing illegible instructions scribbled on Post-its. Then he decided to communicate with her only via the company intranet.
To that had been added a heap of insignificant little things of no importance which she could barely describe, which she wouldn’t have been able to tell anyone about. The way he looked at her when they passed each other, the way he didn’t look at her in the presence of others, the way he went ahead of her, the way he sat opposite her to observe her, and the way he’d started locking the door of his office when he left before her.
A collection of insidious, ridiculous little things which made her more isolated every day, because she hadn’t been able to take stock of what was going on, because she hadn’t wanted to raise the alarm. A pile of little things which added together had destroyed her sleep.
In the space of a few weeks Jacques had become someone else, someone she didn’t know.
Because she has spent entire nights going over it hundreds of times, she is now able to put a name to what’s happening to her. She’s able to identify its different stages, where it began and where it’s heading.
But now it’s too late.
He wants her hide.
Light was coming in through the half-open curtains. Thibault was sitting on the edge of the bed, his body facing the room. For a few minutes he had been watching Lila sleep, her dishevelled hair, her open hands, her body rising and falling to the rhythm of her breathing. The alarm call still hadn’t rung. Lila hadn’t moved. Or else she had returned to that open, offered position in which he had observed her a few hours before.
He hadn’t slept a wink. He had spent the rest of the night tossing and turning, with a feeling deep in his stomach that something was missing. They were unequal, both in sleep and in love.
The long silver chain descended between her breasts and then, with the weight of the pendant, dropped to the left: its heavy teardrop-shape rested on the sheets. Lila had this necklace from a previous love affair, but only ever hinted at its importance to her. Thibault moved closer to her shoulder and then her neck and breathed in deeply. One last time. The smell of her skin, the lingering trace of her perfume. Lila’s face was smooth and peaceful. It was an expression he only saw when she was asleep. He brought his lips close to hers, as close as possible without brushing against them.
Then doubt crept in. What if he had been wrong right from the start? What if it was just a matter of finding the right rhythm, the right language? Perhaps she needed time. Perhaps she loved him silently, from a distance that only diminished by fits and starts. Perhaps that was her way of loving, the only way she was capable of. Perhaps there was no other proof but this: their bodies and their breathing, in harmony.
The alarm call had gone off. It was six o’clock. Lila opened her eyes and smiled. For a few seconds he held his breath.
Still lying on her back, she began to stroke the glans of his penis with the tips of her fingers, very gently, without taking her eyes off him. His penis became hard very quickly. He touched her cheek with his right hand, got up and went into the bathroom. When he came back into the bedroom, Lila was dressed and had tossed her things in her bag. She wanted to do her make-up before they left, so he went downstairs to settle the bill, then waited in the car with the windows down, repeating to himself that he could go through with it.
He remembered the November morning he had waited for her in vain at the taxi rank. The minutes before she contacted him, the twenty times he’d looked at his watch, her name eventually coming up on the screen of his mobile and the words she hadn’t even taken the trouble to say aloud. They were supposed to be going to Prague for the weekend. He’d booked everything.
He remembered another time, one of
those nights when he was aware how far away she was, sheltered in one of those private places he couldn’t reach, how if he hadn’t been there it wouldn’t have mattered to her on the other side of the bed. He got dressed in silence. As he was putting his shoes on, she opened her eyes. He explained that he couldn’t sleep, he was going home, it was nothing serious, and anyway nothing was serious in the end. She made a face. As he was leaving he took her face in his hands and looked at her. ‘I love you, Lila,’ he told her. ‘I’m in love with you.’
She gave a start, exactly as though she had been slapped, and exclaimed, ‘No, no.’
Underground Time Page 2
