Were they afraid they might fall from Marko’s favour if they slept, and so find themselves back in Ladivine’s camp, where a tedious remorse about Wellington was accompanied by an utter inability to bring him back?
Wellington!
Why shouldn’t the children have concluded that their father could produce the boy whenever he pleased, and that if he didn’t want to he must have had very good reasons, whereas, manifestly, Ladivine could only cry Wellington’s name in subdued, pointless sorrow, unable even to speak of him, to summon up his image with amusing words and anecdotes?
Wellington!
Why, for that matter, shouldn’t the children rather be forbidden to speak that name than hear it heartlessly cried into their mystified ears by their frightened, opaque, uncommunicative mother?
The poor little things must have feared that Ladivine would take over their minds if they slept, then drag them away from Marko’s wondrous influence, spirit them away from that radiant force.
She turned around in her seat and caressed Daniel’s bare thigh, squeezed Annika’s calf, trying to smile reassuringly.
The children’s flesh felt hard, clenched. They refused to meet her gaze, and she realised she was being a nuisance, but what did she care, if she didn’t want to lose them?
Because, she thought, could she still see in them her beloved children if they turned into depraved little monsters?
Wellington!
She longed to tell them the boy was dead, and that she and Marko, for all their pretentions to excellent parenting, were, with this refusal to speak of what they’d done to Wellington, lying to them.
But it was too late, she couldn’t talk to her children now, and her children didn’t want to hear, she could tell by their averted eyes, the way their limbs tensed beneath her fingers.
Suddenly a broad clearing appeared down the road, opening up in the forest.
“We’re there,” said Marko.
Ladivine felt a shared astonishment briefly reuniting her with Marko, for what they now saw was nothing like even the vaguest image they’d conjured up of Richard Rivière’s friends, whom Ladivine, not quite knowing why, had pictured as a couple of grizzled drifters temporarily stranded by a lack of funds or a need for rest, but the dozens of clearly brand-new four-wheel drives, white, black, or grey, parked in the clearing beneath sheet-metal roofs, and the big pink house, which reminded Ladivine of certain villas in Langon, revealed the presence, deep in this forest, of prosperous car dealers, and why not, thought Ladivine with a stab of ill will, since that’s what Richard Rivière had become once he left Clarisse Rivière (as if Clarisse Rivière had somehow been keeping him down), having gone from assistant manager in Langon, at the Alfa Romeo dealership he’d been hired to just out of high school, to the head of a Jeep dealership in the Haute-Savoie, and Ladivine always wondered how he’d settled on that area, having, to the best of her knowledge (which is to say from what Clarisse Rivière told her), never spent any time there before going off to make it, perhaps forever, his home.
Oh yes, she’d thought on being told by her father that he now lived in Annecy, Richard Rivière had been quietly plotting his Haute-Savoie escape for some time — because how to believe that he’d rushed straight from Langon to Annecy with no plan in mind, no prospects, no idea even what the city was like?
A couple emerged from the house and stood looking in their direction, hands shading their eyes.
But why, the insidious little voice of common sense whispered in Ladivine’s ear, why should Richard Rivière have revealed to his daughter that he wanted to leave Clarisse Rivière and make a fresh start in Annecy?
So she would try to talk him out of it?
And on what grounds would she have sought to persuade him to go on wasting away with Clarisse Rivière?
He did the one thing he could do, not uncaringly, and no reasonable person could blame him for failing to foresee that his wife would end up drowning in her own blood because he wasn’t there beside her, because he wasn’t there to keep her from foolishness — to keep her from being herself, that is, to keep her from being the slightly dim Clarisse Rivière.
The sunlight that made the sheet-metal roofs sparkle poured down on the couple’s two identically unmoving heads, as if to designate them for veneration.
The woman’s wrists and throat glimmered, laden with gold.
She took a languid step forward, very consciously offering her adorned body to their gaze, and Ladivine felt a small shock on realising that this diminutive figure in spike heels, capris and a little sailor shirt was in fact an old woman, whose long hair, dyed deep black, seemed to wrap her gaunt, tanned, heavily made-up face like a scarf.
She was neither smiling nor looking at her expectantly, but only waiting, infinitely patient and docile in her certainty of being admired, and she raised her chin a little, boldly exposing her wrinkled face, slightly smoothed over by the make-up, to the stark sunlight.
“I’m Richard Rivière’s daughter,” said Ladivine, after nodding a hello.
She couldn’t help adding, so as to say something, for she was intimidated by the woman’s imperial aloofness:
“His only child, Ladivine.”
“Yes, I know, he said you’d be coming,” the woman answered, ever so slightly bored, as if she found the obligation to speak pointless when one had only to show oneself, exhibit oneself.
“Oh, he told you?”
“Yes, a few weeks ago, on the phone.”
She realised that Richard Rivière must have talked to his friends as soon as she’d hung up, and although she could have considered that diligence a sign of his eagerness to help out, it irritated her.
Because there was little chance that either she or Marko would ever have felt the urge to rent a car and drive out to these strangers’ property were it not for “the Wellington thing”, as she privately called what had happened, and did it not seem that, from his mysterious Haute-Savoie lair, Richard Rivière had foreseen the events that would bring them to this place, and so was it not in his power, a power he’d left unused, to say or do something to forestall those events?
Shouldn’t he have put her on guard, he who claimed to know this country?
And said to her: Beware of courtly teenagers who accost you at the front door of the National Museum? Beware of the violence nestled in your heart, waiting to be roused when you meet a young man with impenetrable schemes, beware of the sympathy you might begin to feel for your own extraordinary misdeeds, your new-found longing to let go and plunge endlessly into senselessness?
Marko and the children had now joined her before the woman with the cold, serene face, not so much covered with make-up as carved from it.
Marko held out his hand, and with a weary resignation she gave him her own.
Oh, how he’d changed, how he wanted it to be seen, thought Ladivine.
Because Marko had climbed out of the car and, smiling, his back ramrod straight, had materialised in front of that woman.