The President's Hat

by Antoine Laurain

  ‘Tuck in,’ said Desmoine, snatching the knitted hat off his egg. ‘I’m very particular about how my eggs are cooked,’ he added, smiling.

  So that was it, thought Daniel, remembering at the same time that the correct way to break the top of a soft-boiled egg was with the back of a spoon, not a knife, as he did at home. He lifted the hat from his egg and rapped the top of the shell.

  ‘Daniel, I won’t beat about the bush. I was very impressed by your analysis of the plans for the finance department.’

  Daniel embarked on a suitably humble reply, but was interrupted before he could finish.

  ‘No need to say anything,’ said Desmoine. ‘No false modesty, please. I’m not one for false compliments. Coffee?’

  The director poured him a cup. If someone had told Daniel, just a few days before, that Desmoine himself would be serving him coffee, he, Daniel, the man who stood in line at the seventh-floor coffee machine, waiting for his plastic cup to drop …

  Desmoine dipped the tip of a croissant in his coffee and chewed, at the same time proceeding to outline Daniel’s future with wondrous precision and clarity: ‘You see, I know a thing or two about people,’ he announced with the confidence of those who have their own offices on the upper floors of tall buildings. ‘People and business,’ he mused. ‘You don’t get many surprises in our line of work. People are judged on their first year in the post; after that, they either develop or they don’t. But no surprises. Do you get my drift?’

  Daniel nodded, his mouth full of croissant, indicating that he did indeed get Desmoine’s drift.

  Desmoine took it upon himself to pour Daniel another cup of coffee. ‘Important to drink coffee,’ he added. ‘Balzac drank litres of the stuff. You’ve read Balzac, of course.’

  ‘Of course,’ Daniel confirmed, never having read Balzac in his life.

  ‘You really are a resourceful fellow. Why hasn’t SOGETEC got you in a more important post? You should have a position better suited to a man of your quality.’

  ‘A position …’ muttered Daniel. ‘You mean …’

  ‘Maltard’s a complete arse,’ interrupted Desmoine. ‘Anyone can see that. But for reasons that are no concern of yours and which give me very little pleasure, I can assure you, I am obliged to keep him where he is. On the other hand, I want to promote you to director.’

  Daniel stared at him, his croissant suspended over his cup.

  ‘Daniel, I’m offering to make you director of one of SOGETEC’s regional finance departments. I know you’re based in Paris, but it’s all I can offer you. Pierre Marcoussi heads the Rouen department, but he’s leaving for health reasons. It’s not official for the moment. You’ll start in January.’

  The hat. It was the hat that was responsible for the events that had turned Daniel’s existence on its head in the last few days. He was convinced of that. Since he had taken to wearing it, the hat had conferred on him a kind of immunity to the torments of everyday life just by being there. Better still, it sharpened his mind and spurred him to take vitally important decisions. Without it, he would never have dared speak to Maltard as he had at the meeting. He would never have found himself on the eighteenth floor sharing a breakfast of soft-boiled eggs with Desmoine. In a strange way, he felt that something of the President was there in the hat. Something intangible. Some microscopic particle perhaps. But whatever it was, it had the power of destiny.

  ‘Thank you,’ Daniel muttered, addressing the hat as much as his superior.

  ‘So you accept?’ asked Desmoine, swallowing his last mouthful of croissant.

  ‘I accept,’ said Daniel, looking him straight in the eye.

  ‘We’ll be seeing each other again then,’ said Desmoine, holding out his hand before bending over a third, hatless egg. ‘This one’s for me.’ He smiled. Desmoine tapped the top with the handle of his teaspoon, making a small hole, then did the same at the other end, and threw his head back to swallow it down in one.

  ‘Every morning. A raw egg. My little treat,’ said Jean-Bernard Desmoine apologetically.

  Less than a month later, Daniel, Véronique and Jérôme were back on the platform at Gare Saint-Lazare, this time waiting for train 06781 bound for Le Havre, first stop Rouen. Their five suitcases bulged; the furniture had been despatched in a removal van. Daniel, his black hat firmly on his head, gazed down the track, looking out for the train that would take them to their new life in a new place. Véronique squeezed his arm, and Jérôme sulked because he wouldn’t be seeing his friends from school again.

  Throughout the journey, Daniel thought back over his Paris years on the third floor of the SOGETEC building. His colleagues had clubbed together to buy him a leaving gift: a year’s subscription to Canal +. For the past two years, the new pay TV channel had revolutionised office conversation. In the accounts department, Daniel couldn’t fail to notice the sudden irruption of ‘Canal’ into the collective consciousness. Canal was ‘un must’ as Florence, the communications manager, would say. Bernard Falgou and Michèle Carnavan swore by programmes that Daniel could only see as a hissing blur. The talk at the coffee machine was of feature films that had been in cinemas barely a year ago and were already on Canal. People who ‘had Canal’ could talk about them. The others could only listen in silence.

  ‘Didn’t you see it?’ the sect of set-top box subscribers would exclaim.

  ‘I haven’t got Canal +.’ The reply sounded like an admission of impotence, a fate to be endured.

  Now, Daniel would have Canal +. He had received the channel’s welcome letter to new subscribers, with its letterhead emblazoned with the slogan ‘Canal +, c’est plus.’ All he had to do was visit one of their official distributors in Rouen, show them the letter and his subscriber number, and he would be presented with the hallowed decoder. From now on, at the coffee machine, Daniel would be able to talk to his new colleagues about last night’s programmes, or the 8.30 film. He might even allow himself the wicked pleasure of asking some of them, ‘You haven’t got Canal? Oh, you really should …’

  From what he had been told, the new apartment had one room more than their old one in the fifteenth arrondissement, their home for the past twelve years. The landlord had protested at their sudden departure, as had Jérôme’s headmistress. Each time, Daniel had used the phrase: ‘I’m so sorry, but in life there are some circumstances …’ He took care to leave his words hanging, pregnant with meaning, a black hole absorbing any and all objections. What can you say to a man compelled by such mysterious, irresistible forces? Nothing, of course.

  *

  When they reached Rouen, the capital of Normandy, Daniel told the taxi driver their new address in the centre of town. After barely quarter of an hour in the car Véronique turned to him with that little frown that her husband was so fond of.

  ‘Where’s your hat?’ she asked.

  Time stood still for Daniel.

  A long, icy shiver ran down his spine, as if someone had just walked on his grave. With horrible clarity, he pictured the hat on the luggage rack on the train. Not the rack where they had put their suitcases, but the one opposite. The hat was on the rack. His hat. Mitterrand’s hat. In his haste to get off the train, Daniel, still unaccustomed to wearing a hat, had left it behind. He had just made the same mistake as the President of the Republic.

  ‘We’ll have to turn round,’ he said in shock. ‘Turn round immediately!’ he yelled, from the back seat of the taxi.

  The Peugeot 305 did an about-turn and accelerated back towards the station. Daniel leapt from the car and ran. But it was no good. The train had left. No one had taken the hat to the lost property office.

  Days, weeks, months went by. Daniel called the central SNCF lost property office. When he realised he knew the number by heart, he knew, too, that he would never see Mitterrand’s hat again.

  That very evening, Fanny Marquant boarded the train at Le Havre heading for Paris Saint-Lazare. She put her suitcase on the rack above seat 88.

  Directly opposite he
r in seat 86 was a young man with long hair, wearing mirrored sunglasses and a Walkman. The badges all over his leather jacket showed rockers with spiky bleached hair, also in black leather. Through his orange foam-covered headphones, Fanny could make out the ‘The Final Countdown’, Europe’s hit single. Fanny personally preferred listening to a new singer on the block, a redhead with anxious eyes by the name of Mylène Farmer whose kooky style and romantic lyrics appealed to her far more than the electric guitar solos of some bleach-blond rockers. You could tell Mylène Farmer was well read; she knew her Edgar Allan Poe and Baudelaire, which Fanny, herself a keen reader and writer, approved of.

  Fanny took out a pink Clairefontaine notebook where she had written the first three pages of a story called, simply, ‘Édouard’. The Prix Balbec short story competition was offering a prize of 3,000 francs and publication in the local supplement of Ouest-France. The prize was to be awarded in March at the Grand Hôtel de Cabourg. Fanny had been writing for as long as she could remember, first diaries in little locked notebooks, and later pieces of creative writing she kept to herself until she finally plucked up the courage to send one in to a competition. ‘The Bouquet’ was the winning entry; there was no prize money, but she had never before felt such a sense of recognition and pride. ‘Change of Address’ came third in another local contest and ‘An Afternoon at the Harbour’ was read out at Le Havre Theatre Festival.

  The theme of this year’s Prix Balbec was ‘A True Story’ and Fanny was attempting to record for posterity how Édouard had come into her life.

  Fanny, a secretary at the tax office in Le Havre, had been having an affair with Édouard Lanier for two years, five months and two weeks now. Édouard Lanier worked in Paris as an executive at Chambourcy, the famous yogurt brand splashed over billboards and TV screens everywhere. Édouard was also married with children.

  Early on in their relationship, he had been careless enough to tell Fanny: ‘I love you. I’m going to leave my wife …’ A moment of madness in the first flush of romance when he was still young enough to believe life would turn out just as he wanted. Realising the dizzying implications of his words, he had been saying ever since that he just needed time. It was his eternal refrain: ‘I need time … you need to give me time … all I need is time.’ He went through every possible variation. Over the last two years, Édouard had become more obsessed with time than the most meticulous Swiss watchmaker. He needed time to speak to his wife, time to make her understand and accept him starting over with someone else – and it was turning their sweet love affair sour.

  These days, in the hotel room in the Batignolles district of Paris where they met once, sometimes twice, a month, when the fun and games were over, Édouard would tie his tie in the light from the closed shutters, looking wary and waiting for Fanny to ask timidly: ‘Have you spoken to your wife yet?’ His face would fall and he would emit a barely audible sigh. ‘You know how it is, I just need time,’ he would mutter, shaking his head.

  And still Fanny went on loving Édouard. She had loved him from the moment he put down his briefcase in the compartment of the Le Havre–Paris train. Tall and slim with salt and pepper hair and a dimple on his chin, he ticked all Fanny’s boxes in the looks department. The wedding ring on his left hand had not escaped her attention, but she was even more struck when it was slipped off shortly afterwards. It left behind an imprint, a little circle running around his third finger which faded over the course of the journey from Normandy to the capital.

  All it had taken was a magazine falling to the floor, Édouard bending down to pick it up and handing it back to her with a smile, to seal the start of a passionate affair. If Fanny closed her eyes, she could go back to that one moment which had changed the course of her life. It was like an advert for cologne: man gets on train, pretty woman sits in carriage reading magazine, train starts moving, woman drops magazine, man bends down to pick it up, meaningful looks are exchanged, manly odours mingled with the scent of cologne waft towards her, woman swoons. Life had handed her one of those cheesy moments usually seen only on TV screens and girl-meets-boy American romantic comedies.

  Since then, Fanny had come to know the Le Havre–Paris route by heart, along with the occasional detour for a brief encounter in Rouen or Trouville. An average of forty-five trips a year, always paid for by Édouard and always taking place outside the Easter, summer and Christmas holidays which, it goes without saying, he spent far away from her, with his family. At the age of twenty-seven, Fanny had achieved the status of mistress. The question of whether she might one day be promoted to official wife was still up in the air, as was the possibility of promotion to executive secretary at the tax office. Her application for that position was ‘under careful consideration’. The recruitment process for her life role was at the same stage, ‘under careful consideration’ by Édouard, whose inertia was thus on a par with that of the civil service.

  ‘You’re perfectly happy with the situation. You’ll never leave your wife, I know you won’t,’ she’d once said angrily.

  ‘That’s not true,’ he had objected. ‘I love you and I’m not going to spend the rest of my life with my wife, I just can’t do it. We’ve stopped making love. There’s nothing between us any more.’

  ‘Well, leave her then!’

  Édouard had shaken his head, looking stricken, and uttered his favourite phrase: ‘You need to give me time.’

  Fanny had fallen back onto the pillows and stared up at the ceiling of the hotel room. This is going nowhere, it occurred to her, looking at him – and not for the first time. The history we share is a chance meeting on a train, our life together now is confined to a hotel room, and we have no future.

  Fanny was right. It was difficult to go anywhere but the bedroom with Édouard. There was no way they could walk down the street holding hands or go round the shops together. The one time they spent a whole weekend in Trouville, Édouard had convinced himself that everyone he knew was going to appear as if by chance at any moment. A work colleague, a friend of his, or worse, a friend of his wife’s might be having a day out in the Norman fishing village. What if someone saw them? It was the same with restaurants. They had never ventured beyond the confines of Batignolles, where Édouard knew no one. But even there, the idea that some acquaintance might decide to dine at the same place made him turn round every time the door opened.

  When they were together in Paris, Édouard would tell his wife he was on a business trip to another part of the country or abroad. This meant swotting up on train timetables, airport strikes and any local festivals he might be expected to know about, having supposedly been in town for them. Fanny understood that the pressure to stay on his toes was a burden on him; she, on the other hand, answered to no one. There was no one waiting up for her but her Minitel screen, on which she and Édouard planned dates and sometimes exchanged messages during the night. It was as if the machine had been invented with illicit lovers in mind.

  It was impossible to call Édouard at home and difficult to get hold of him at the office, so they met by dialling 3615 Aline. Their aliases popped up a few times a month among the names listed in flickering columns on the left of the Minitel’s black screen. Édouard was ‘Alpha75’ and Fanny ‘Sweetiepie’.

  Whenever Édouard found a gap in his diary, he would leave a message for Sweetiepie. Free 22nd–23rd, how about you? to which Sweetiepie would reply, I’ll be there, same time, same place. Less often, they would meet virtually during the night. Édouard would creep out of the marital bed (taking great care to avoid creaky floorboards), turn on the screen, wait for the dial-up tone and meet Sweetiepie at the agreed time. They would exchange sweet nothings and promises. ‘You have a message,’ it would flash at the top of the screen.

  Sometimes, Sweetiepie found her correspondent wasn’t Alpha75 after all but someone making obscene proposals she chose not to take up. As for Alpha75, he was occasionally contacted by men asking if he was free that night and up for real-life action or just a chat. Romance
found a way through the murky new world of electronic connections.

  Fanny had been sucked into a bittersweet ‘relationship’ which revolved around seeing her loved one for a quickie a few times a month. She wished she could find the courage to end it with Édouard the next time she saw him, but she knew she didn’t have it in her. This was not the first time she had felt so unsure, both of the situation and herself. If nothing changed between them, it could carry on like this for years.

  She could find nothing to write in her pink notebook, so Fanny put the lid back on her pen and dozed off. Two hours later, she opened her eyes. She would soon be in Paris and the rain was lashing against the window. She sighed, remembering she had not brought an umbrella, when her gaze fell on a black hat on the luggage rack. She looked around. There were only five passengers left on this late train, all of them sitting a good distance away from her. The felt hat could not belong to any of them. Fanny stood up as the train braked, took down the hat and put it on. She looked at her reflection in the darkened window. The hat suited her, and it would be just the thing to keep the rain off her hair.

  The black felt brim acted like a visor, compressing the space around her and marking out a distinct horizon. In Batignolles, a man did a double take as he passed her. What kind of image was she projecting, walking along in the moonlight in her denim mini-skirt, high heels, silver jacket and black hat? That of a hip eighties girl, young, free and sexy, perhaps a little bit forward … She stopped to look at herself in a mirror in the window of a boutique.

  The hat gave her jaw line a new air of distinction; she had put her hair up in a bun to help keep it in place. Perhaps she should always wear it up like this and put on a man’s black felt hat every time she went out. Donning the new accessory had made her feel somehow powerful; it had the same effect as the designer clothes she so rarely treated herself to. Take her Saint Laurent skirt and Rykiel heels, for example. All she had to do was put on the YSL skirt and she immediately felt more attractive. The same went for the shoes, which had cost her almost a quarter of a month’s salary: as soon as she slipped them on and did up the little straps, she felt taller, straighter and more significant. She walked completely differently, strutting along with confidence, and only she knew it was down to the hidden powers of the Rykiel shoes.