Authors: Anna Gavalda
And, as a result, she was perfectly happy.
Charles, who – and this was unconscious on his part – could have, or should have been . . . how to put it . . . intimidated? hobbled? by those budding little wings beneath the strap of her bra, only loved her all the more for it.
But. He was careful not to show it. He had had his fair share of slaps in the face recently, and that bone, just there, which was supported by his spine in order to protect his heart, was in the process of healing, as it happens. This was not the time to be opening his arms any old which way.
No. She wasn’t a saint . . . She was a major idler who didn’t lift a finger, who could really knock it back with the best of them, was growing marijuana (oh, so that was her ‘comfort pharmacopoeia’ . . .), and she didn’t even hear the bell ring.
She had no sense of morality at all.
Phew.
This discovery was worth a bit of indifference.
Patience, little snail, patience.
What on earth was he doing that gave him the time to mull over all this besotted perpetual teenager nonsense?
He was sweeping up dead flies.
He wasn’t alone. He dragged along behind him both Yacine and Harriet who, obliged to relinquish their rooms to the star-spangled banner, decided to go into exile with him.
They drew straws for their rooms and spent two whole days swallowing cobwebs and wandering through the various barns as if they were in some dusty flea market of abandoned treasures. Commenting, patching, stripping and painting tables, chairs, mirrors and other relics nibbled by termites and capricorn beetles. (Yacine, somewhat annoyed by such inaccuracy in matters of worm holes, gave them a lecture: Holes, that’s capricorn beetles; and if it looks rotten and crumbly and brittle, that’s termites.)
They organized a little housewarming party and Kate, upon seeing his room – bare, stripped, whitened with pure bleach, austere, monastic, with all those files piled at the end of the bed, and his laptop and his books on the clever little desk he’d installed beneath an alcove – stood silent for a moment.
‘You came here to work?’
‘No. This is just to impress you.’
‘Oh?’
Everyone else was in Harriet’s room.
‘There’s something I would like to say,’ she added, leaning out of the window.
‘Yes?’
‘I . . . you . . . well . . . if I . . .’
Charles clung to the brass bedstead.
‘No. Nothing,’ she said, turning back, ‘you’ve made it very cosy here, haven’t you?’
In the three days that he’d been here, this was the first time he’d had her all to himself, so for two minutes he put aside his good cub scout badges: ‘Kate . . . talk to me . . .’
‘I . . . I’m like Yacine,’ she said abruptly.
Charles looked at her.
‘I don’t know how to tell you this, but I . . . never again will I take the slightest risk of suffering, ever.’
Charles didn’t know what to say.
‘Do you understand?’
He was silent.
‘It’s something Nathalie told me . . . A lot of foster children, when they sense there’s a change in the air, suddenly become unbearable and absolutely torment their host family. And do you know why they act like that? It’s a survival instinct. To prepare themselves mentally and physically for a new separation. They make
themselves
unbearable so that everyone will think their departure is a relief. To destroy the love . . . That . . . that hideous trap where they almost got caught, once again . . .’
Her finger traced the edge of the mirror.
‘And so I’m like them, you see. I don’t want to suffer any more.’
Charles was at a loss for words. One, two, three. More even, if he couldn’t make do with less, but words, for pity’s sake, some words . . .
‘You never say a thing,’ she sighed.
And, moving away towards the next room, ‘I don’t know a thing about you. I don’t even know who you are or why you came back, but there is one thing you have to know. I’ve had a lot of people to stay in this house and, it’s true, there is a Welcome sign on the doormat but . . .’
‘But?’
‘I will not give you the opportunity to abandon me.’
She peered back round the doorframe, made sure that the featherweight was well and truly knocked for six, and stopped counting: ‘To get back to more serious things, you know what’s missing here, darling?’
And as he was really almost out for the count, she added, ‘Une Mathilde.’
He spat out his gumshield and a few teeth along with it, and returned her smile before following her to the buffet.
And, while watching her laugh, raise her glass, and play darts with the others, he thought, well shit, she wasn’t going to rape him, so . . .
And then he remembered a joke Mathilde had told him: ‘D’you know why snails are so slow?’
‘Uh . . .’
‘Because drool is really sticky.’
So he stopped drooling.
11
WHAT FOLLOWS IS
what is known as happiness, and happiness is a very awkward thing.
It can’t be told.
So they say.
So it is said.
Happiness is flat, soppy, boring, and always hard going.
Happiness bores readers.
Kills love.
If the author had even the slightest good sense, that author would immediately resort to an ellipsis.
Thought about it. Had a look in the dictionary:
E
LLIPSIS
.
Suppression of words that would be necessary for the plenitude of the construction, where the words that are expressed convey the meaning clearly enough to avoid any obscurity or uncertainty
.
What on earth?
Why do without words that would be necessary for the plenitude of the construction of a story that has been missing so many words already?
Why deprive oneself of the pleasure?
On the pretext that one is writing, simply write out, ‘Those three weeks he spent at Les Vesperies were the happiest of his entire life,’ and send him back to Paris?
It’s true. Those six words: the, happiest, of, his, entire, life, would convey neither obscurity nor uncertainty.
‘And he lived happily ever after.’
But the author is feeling a certain reluctance.
There have been taxi drivers, family dinners, loaded letters, jet lag, insomnia, chaos, lost tenders, muddy building sites, an injection of Valium/potassium/morphine, cemeteries, morgues, ashes,
closed
cabarets, a ruined abbey, renunciation, repudiation, breakups, two overdoses, one abortion, bruises, too many lists, judicial decisions, and even hysterical Korean women.
Might have liked a bit of grass, too . . .
Sorry, a bit of greenery.
What is to be done?
Dig deeper into this lexicon of literary devices.
O
THER DEFINITIONS
:
An elliptical story strictly observes the unity of action, avoiding any pointless episodes and uniting everything essential in a few scenes
.
Thus, we are entitled to a few scenes . . .
Thank you.
Too kind of you, dictionary.
But which scenes?
Since
everything
is a story . . .
The author refuses to take responsibility. To determine what is ‘pointless’ and what is not.
And, rather than judge, shall entrust what follows to our sensitive hero.
He has proven his worth.
Let’s open his notebook.
In which an ellipsis could be a Roman amphitheatre, the colonnades on St Peter’s Square, or Paul Andreu’s Performing Arts Centre in Beijing – but under no circumstances an omission.
On the left-hand page, a sales receipt from the DIY where Ken, Samuel, and Charles had gone the previous day. You should always save sales receipts. Everyone knows that
.
It’s never the right thing. Never the right bolt, or the right length nail . . . You always forget something, and then they hadn’t bought enough sandpaper. The girls complained because of the splinters
.
Opposite, some sketches and some sums. Nothing insurmountable. Child’s play
.
A real game for children, as it happens. And for Kate
.
Kate, who never went bathing with them in the stream
. . .
‘There’s too much silt,’ she said, making a face
.
Charles was the head, Ken the right-hand man, and Tom in charge of the refreshment stand, cold beers at the ready at the end of a rope attached to the rowlock
.
The three of them had designed and manufactured a magnificent landing stage
.
And even a diving board on piles
.
They’d gone to collect huge oil drums at the nearby waste depot and placed pine planks over them
.
Charles had even thought of steps and a railing in the ‘Russian Dacha’ style, for drying towels and leaning against during the endless diving contests that would ensue
. . .
He’d even thought about it some more during the night, and the next morning he climbed up a tree with Sam and stretched a steel wire from one bank to the other
.
And here’s what you can see on the third page
.
A strange contraption made out of old bicycle handlebars: the children’s zipwire
.
He’d gone back to FixItFreddy for the third time and brought back two ladders that were sturdier. Then with the other ‘grown-ups’ they’d spent the rest of the day lolling about on their elegant wooden beach, encouraging any number of little scamps who would fly over their heads with a cry of Banzai! before dropping into the current
.
‘How many of them are there?’ he asked, dumbfounded
.
‘The entire village,’ smiled Kate
.
Even Lucas and his big sister
. . .
The ones who didn’t know how to swim were desperate
.
But not for long
.
Kate could not stand desperate children. So she went to get a rope
.
Thus, the ones who didn’t know how to swim were only half-drowned. They were pulled back to shore, and they had to recover from their excitement and all the mouthfuls of stream they’d swallowed before they were allowed to go back in
.
The dogs yapped, the llama chewed its cud and the water spiders moved elsewhere
.
The kids who didn’t have a swimming costume wore their knickers, and their wet knickers became transparent
.
The more modest among them would sit astride their bikes. Most of them came back with a swimming costume
and
a sleeping bag on the bike-rack
.
Debbie was in charge of tea and snacks. She loved the Aga’s pastry oven
.
The drawings on the following pages have only one subject: little Tarzan figures suspended between sky and water, hanging onto a pair of old handlebars. With both hands, with one hand, with two fingers, one finger, right side up, upside down, head first. All for one and one for all
.
But Tom is there, too, in his rowing boat, to pick up the dazed ones; there are a dozen pairs of sandals and trainers lined up along the bank, spots of sun sparkling on the water through the branches of a poplar tree, Marion sitting on the bottom step handing a piece of cake to her brother, and a big ninny standing behind her about to shove her into the water with a laugh
.
Her profile, for Anouk, and Kate’s, for himself
.
Quick sketch. He didn’t dare sit drawing her for too long
.
He was trying to forestall any social worker discussions
.
Alexis came to fetch his brood
.
‘Charles? What on earth are you doing here?’
‘Offshore engineering . . .’
‘But you . . . How long are you here for?’
‘Depends . . . If we find oil under the stream, for quite a while yet, I suppose . . .’
‘You’ll have to come over for dinner one evening!’
And Charles, our kind Charles, declined
.
Said that he didn’t feel like it
.
And Alexis went off, and took it out on his kids, What are all those marks on your thighs? And what is Mummy going to say? And how’d you get that hole in your swimming costume and where are your socks and niggle niggle nag and naggle naggle nig. Charles turned round and realized Kate had heard him
.
You still haven’t told me your story, said her gaze
.
‘I have a bottle of Port Ellen in my briefcase,’ he replied
.
‘Really?’
‘Yes.’
She put on her dark glasses and smiled
.
She hadn’t been in the water once, let alone put on her swimming costume
.
She’d tricked them good and proper
.
She wore long white shirts in cotton canvas, split high up, usually missing a few buttons . . . Charles didn’t draw her, but what was behind her, so that he could eye her calmly. A lot of the drawings in these pages are based on her skin. If you look at the foreground you can always see the top of a knee, a bit of shoulder, or her hand placed on the railing
. . .
And that handsome lad, there?
No, it’s not Ken. It’s her ancient Greek boyfriend, the one she wears on her finger
.
The next two pages have been torn out
.
The same landing stage, and the same zipwire, but neatly drawn, with all the dimensions conscientiously indicated
.
For Yacine. Who sent them to the editor of a junior science magazine, to the column entitled ‘Innovation Competition’
.
‘Look,’ he’d said one evening, climbing onto Charles’s lap
.
‘Oh, no,’ Samuel had moaned, ‘you’re not going to start with that, again . . . He’s been driving us nuts for over two years . . .’
And since Charles, as usual, didn’t know what was going on, Kate interrupted: ‘Every month he rushes to that page to see which little genius, never as brilliant as he is, has won the thousand euros . . .’
‘A thousand euros . . .’ came the languishing echo, ‘and their inventions are always useless . . . Look, Charles, what you have to send in –’ he said, grabbing the magazine from his hands, ‘– is the “prototype of an original, useful, clever and even entertaining invention. Send your application with diagrams and a precise description . . .” Isn’t that exactly what you’ve got? Right? Could you send it? Could you?’
So the two pages were sent, and from the very next day and every day thereafter, until the end of the holidays, Yacine and Hideous would rush out to meet the postman
.
The rest of the time was spent wondering what they would do with all that money
. . .
‘You can pay for your pooch to have a facelift!’ squawked the jealous bystanders
.