There was a time when she loved that torment of Marko’s, that excessive conscientiousness.
Lately she often thought it misplaced, faintly ridiculous.
How she missed the innocence of Clarisse Rivière! *
Wellington knocked three times on the very low door of a cinderblock house with a red sheet-metal roof.
Suddenly it was dark. One blink and it’s night-time, thought Ladivine, and just a few seconds ago the sun was so blinding.
Equally strange, to her mind, was the fact that they’d become Wellington’s guests, even if at the time it had seemed perfectly natural to be following him out to this distant neighbourhood.
Ladivine had simply assumed that Wellington had nowhere special to go, and was thus sticking with them, falling in with their vague plan to watch the sun set over the sea (how silly, she would later tell herself, amused, since the sun didn’t set here, but literally vanished), but now here they were standing before Wellington’s house, as he told them, at precisely the early-evening hour assigned to dinner in this rigid country.
Winding, narrow, the dirt street ran through an unbroken succession of shabby little bare-cement huts, old bicycles chained up at the front with gigantic locks.
The prospect of an evening at Wellington’s filled Daniel and Annika with delight.
And indulging one’s children’s delights, reflected Ladivine, often led to imprudence. For were it just she and Marko, she told herself, she would never have accepted this invitation to a stranger’s house in a remote district of a city she didn’t know.
Were it only the two of them, she would have run the risk of offending Wellington, and they would have gone back to the hotel without for one moment worrying about maintaining and even cultivating an unwholesome friendship with that teenaged boy.
As they stood waiting to be let in, a feeling of being watched from behind forced Ladivine to turn around.
She made out a pair of dark eyes glinting in the night, a few metres further on, down a little hill from the street.
The dog had found her.
Sitting very straight, ears pricked up, watchful but calm, it stared at her with its neutral gaze, perhaps waiting, she then thought, perhaps waiting for some sign from her, no, not even that, a breath, a thought, and with that it would come to take her away to some mysterious place with no name.
She shivered and quickly turned around again.
Before the closed door, Wellington was losing patience.
He began to pound on it with his fists, bellowing, and when it finally opened, he bitterly upbraided the girl at the door in a language that Ladivine thought something like English stripped of all gentleness, only the harshest sounds left.
He introduced the girl as his sister, then thoroughly and categorically denounced her, as if to excuse the long delay, along with the girl herself, since, plagued as she was by so many deficiencies, she could certainly be slow to react as well.
The girl let him talk, limply scratching her arm.
She smiled into space, neither friendly nor hostile, simply detached, absent.
To her we don’t even exist, thought Ladivine, she wouldn’t care if we died right here on the spot, or ran away, or collapsed in the street.
This disturbed and upset her.
Because she herself cared deeply about that girl’s existence the moment she saw her face, her existence and almost her happiness, for which, had it been possible, she would gladly have given some small part of herself: time, a little money, thought, or emotion.
Wellington ushered them down a passage dimly lit by a single naked bulb, then across a pitch-black courtyard and into a vast room where a small crowd had just sat down to dinner.
Apart from a long table of dark green plastic and matching chairs, the room was bare.
Every plate was laden with chunks of sweet potato and lamb in sauce, lit by a fly-specked fluorescent tube unevenly diffusing a flickering, greenish light.
Intimidated, Annika and Daniel retreated to the darkest corner of the room. But Wellington went and gently led them back, talking to them in a soothing voice, as though to a couple of skittish kittens.
Marko circled the table, shaking everyone’s hand, slim and charming in his pink suit, his face sallow in the fluorescent light, and Ladivine admired his confidence, his casual, easy manner.
Nonetheless, she chose not to imitate him, thinking there was no need to go to such lengths. She simply glanced around the table and threw out a collective hello.
Wellington disappeared, then immediately returned with more chairs, and everyone slid aside to make room, silent but with a good will Ladivine found reassuring.
She’d blamed her discomfort and guardedness on her reluctance to intrude, but from the intensity of her relief she realised she’d been fearing a trap, and her tablemates’ mute civility allowed her to put that suspicion aside.
But she was unhappy with Marko for never even considering the possibility that Wellington was luring them into an ambush, for so readily trusting in a friendliness that back in Europe would have put a sceptical, embarrassed smile on his face.
Why, here, could he be so easily convinced that a young stranger had taken a sincere liking to them?
It was immature and unworthy of him, Ladivine told herself crossly.
But she had to concede that their hosts seemed determined to prove Marko right, and to persuade her that he was guilty of neither credulity nor blindness, that he had shown only the soundest of judgement.
Some ten adults of various ages were sitting around the table. Ladivine saw them all quietly trying to put the new guests at ease, even Wellington’s sister, whom Ladivine first found so coldly dismissive and who was now keeping a discreet eye on the platefuls of tasty lamb stew she’d efficiently served, ready, Ladivine guessed, to leap up as soon as they were empty and bring out a second helping.
Sitting across from Ladivine, an old woman nodded and smiled each time their eyes met.
A man who might have been Wellington’s father cut the lamb shanks into little pieces on Daniel’s plate, having seen the boy’s difficulties with his dull knife.
That handsome, thin-faced man was dressed in a light green short-sleeved shirt. Ladivine couldn’t take her eyes off it, her head swimming slightly.
Hadn’t Marko packed that shirt for this trip, with the tone-ontone crest on the breast pocket?
She hoped neither Marko nor Annika would notice, as if, once again, her own responsibility was caught up in something repugnant, something deeply ignoble.
To avoid drawing their attention to that shirt, she resolutely looked away from the man, whose chest, more filled out than Marko’s, strained the buttons every time he inhaled.
Now she was feeling more at ease.
Her dining companions didn’t talk much, but those who did now and then break the silence did so in careful English, articulating carefully, looking now at Marko, now at Ladivine, making themselves easily understood.