She heaved a long sigh. She gripped the edge of the table to keep her hands still.
On the phone, she was remembering, Richard Rivière had spoken of a couple he knew who’d moved to this country long before, and she’d briefly mentioned them to Marko, half hoping Richard Rivière would forget to give her their phone number and address.
But he didn’t, and a few days later she got an e-mail with complete contact information for her father’s old friends.
However put off by the idea of meeting anyone from Richard Rivière’s new social circle, people Clarisse Rivière had not met, did not have the right to meet, people who, if they’d heard anything of her at all, must have pictured only the worn, humiliating image of a tiresome wife abandoned in middle age, however powerful her sense that she was betraying Clarisse Rivière, whose slender body, whose kindly face, whose whole fervent, timid, generous person Richard Rivière’s friends would never know, she nonetheless conscientiously copied down the address and put the slip of paper in her wallet, vaguely, superstitiously fearing that if she didn’t they would end up in desperate need of help from those very people, an expatriate French couple of whose history with Richard Rivière she knew nothing, and who she thought, without knowing just why, would have turned up their noses at Clarisse Rivière like the others, not being the type to like or understand her, and Ladivine pre-emptively held this against them, just as she felt a baseless but profound anger towards her father, who allowed himself to be friends with likely disparagers of Clarisse Rivière’s strange mind and boundless simplicity.
And so Marko’s suggestion found her unwilling, irascible, almost venomous.
“You really think it’s a good idea to look like we’re running away?” she hissed.
“I believe it would be prudent to leave as soon as we can,” said Marko, unruffled.
Not long after, taking the children to the pool, they saw two workers washing away the dark patch left by Wellington’s body.
Ladivine could not hold back an image of the boy’s stomach bursting open as he hit the ground, his healthy young entrails spilling onto the concrete, through Marko’s fault and her own, because, weak-willed, unable to bear the solitude of the foreigner, they’d let themselves be talked into accepting the boy’s company for a tour of the National Museum.
Would Wellington’s death be the subject of the museum’s next acquisition, Ladivine wondered, and would it show a sadistically grinning Marko ripping the intestines from Wellingon’s living flesh with his bare hands, would it show the woman in nightclothes, half hidden behind a pillar, feasting her eyes, would it go so far as to show the already dissolute children laughing in drooling delight?
Oh, the only thing to think was that Wellington had come back to harm them, maybe make off with Daniel and demand a ransom.
Only that intuition, only that certainty could have turned Marko violent, he who’d never raised a hand to a living soul, never screamed in anyone’s face.
The only thing to think was that Wellington had come back to harm them.
Evidently there were no witnesses to Clarisse Rivière’s murder in her Langon house, but, Ladivine now wondered as she sat at the pool’s edge with her calves in the warm water, if there had been, if some face peering in through the living room window had seen Freddy Moliger’s crime, had watched Clarisse Rivière’s blood pouring out onto the floor, soaking the sofa and the needlepoint cushions, would that face then have turned away, would that person have gone home to dinner and then to bed thinking that in any case there was nothing more to be done for Clarisse Rivière, that she was in all likelihood dead, as Ladivine had let Marko convince her that Wellington could not possibly still be alive on the terrace?
What would she feel, Clarisse Rivière’s only child, on learning such a thing, on learning that someone had witnessed her mother’s last moments and not tried to save her?
She would curse him, that’s what, she would want him to die in the same abject aloneness.
Annika and Daniel waded sullenly in the pool, looking bored.
A similarly opaque and unhappy expression marked the faces of the few old people who came to bathe there each morning, who never answered Ladivine’s timid greeting, pretending not to have noticed her.
Successive sunburns had left their fat shoulders stippled.
Fate seemed to have condemned them to spend an infernal eternity in the confines of the hotel and the pool, submerging their weary, pale, fragile flesh in the murky water, then laboriously pulling themselves out again, in an endless, absurd cycle, evidently thinking the hotel’s other guests and employees responsible for their torment, and thus never answering their hellos.
Ladivine was ashamed to be with them. She found them ugly in a way that worried her just a little.
When the heat grew too much to bear she called Daniel and Annika out of the water, and they gratefully hurried to obey, as if, for them too, swimming was now an element of some ritual torture.
Slightly dazed, painfully aware of her own haggard appearance, Ladivine caught sight of Marko coming towards her through the glimmering light, dressed in his pink tunic, whose radiant colour bathed him in a rosy glow.
She realised he’d gone off without her noticing, and now he was back, crossing the terrace, enveloped in the bleeding aura of his deed, giving himself away, thought Ladivine, drunk with anguish, as surely as if he’d cried out, “It was I who killed Wellington, that sweet boy, so full of life, who opened his door to us!” — now his athletic shoes were trampling the still-damp spot where Wellington had laid in repose, now he was coming to her with his head high and a bright, pleased look on his face, an impatient, excited little smile at the corners of his mouth, as if chafing to report wonderful news.
Annika saw him too, and she ran towards her father, forgetting that she usually thought such impetuous effusions unworthy of her age.
Did that vulnerable little girl believe she needed forgiveness for something? Ladivine wondered. Did she, in the tortuous ways of her childish logic, believe she was guilty of thinking, or perhaps vaguely seeing, that something terrible had happened with Wellington?
She pressed herself to Marko, her arms encircling his waist, in a demonstration of tenderness utterly unlike the reserved child she usually was.
As if it were she who’d done something wrong, thought Ladivine.
And she wanted to run to Marko, rip him from the child’s arms, horrified to think of Annika lingering one moment longer in that apotheosis of guilt, to think of that guilt impregnating and infecting her while perhaps Marko was delivered of it forever, not that he’d planned or wanted anything of the sort.
But she stayed where she was.
A misgiving raced through her mind: Maybe I’m the one who’s infecting her? Maybe she’s picking up that guilt and remorse from me?
She walked slowly and heavily towards Marko, holding Daniel’s hand, the boy scratching her palm with his nails, like a little trapped rodent.
“Let go, Mummy, let go!” he was whining.
Will we be ordered to give up Daniel as a replacement for Wellington, will we have to sacrifice Daniel to be washed clean of Wellington’s murder?