The old Marko would have thought it enough simply to be there.
He glowed with pride and confidence in his pink tunic, the huge purple flowers ornamenting the front like the insignia of some ignoble order.
Ladivine was beginning to loathe that outfit.
She felt Marko’s hunger to present himself to this stranger in all his new magnificence, she sensed his pleasure that this woman had never seen him before, she saw his brazen manner, the full depth of his emancipation.
And was he not now even handsomer, far, than before?
He took the children by the shoulders to herd them before him, adorning himself with their presence, she thought.
The woman gave them a thoroughly indifferent glance, then looked again, interested, almost intrigued, and the curiosity that neither Marko’s nor Ladivine’s face had sparked in her jaded eye was now roused by Daniel and Annika’s two ardent little faces, a hint of a smile even taking shape on her crimson lips, and she looked again at Marko, now realising, now knowing what she would find on his face, thought Ladivine, and then back at the children, all the while smiling as if she’d seen something surprising and glorious, something important and wonderful, and finally she looked at Marko with her real eyes, now shining and quick, cynical, hungry, which said to him: I’ve seen your children’s lost, avid faces, and I know what manner of man you are, because we’re the same, you and I.
Marko let out a charmed little laugh. Annika feverishly echoed him.
The woman briefly caressed each child on the cheek and cried out:
“Your children are adorable.”
Which, though no surprise now for Ladivine, nonetheless displeased her, for to her mind Daniel and Annika looked anything but adorable at the moment.
She herself, had she just met them, would immediately have been wary of such children.
Would she not go so far as to think: These children are guilty? These children have done wrong, or believe they’ve done wrong, because some unnameable misdeed has been placed on their shoulders, and their sense of their own wickedness is ruining their faces and incomprehension is pinching their little noses, twisting their mouths into a detestable rictus?
“They’re very tired, they’re not quite themselves,” she said curtly.
“They look fine to me,” the woman decreed, not even bothering to glance Ladivine’s way.
“We’re not tired,” said Annika.
The children clung to Marko, rubbed their hair against his noisome tunic.
He tenderly pressed them to him.
There was something desperate, thought Ladivine, her heart bleeding, in the way they clutched at their father’s body, as if that contact alone could enlighten them on everything that was strange and different inside them, but that enlightenment never came.
Marko was embracing them with the same love and gentleness he’d always shown his children.
But perhaps they could sense that he himself no longer needed to feel and receive love, that he could now do without love, that he was strong enough for that, even as, kindness being a habit with him, he went on making the loving gestures they were used to.
Oh, come to me, she thought, my love for you is healthy and pure and I won’t force you to bear the burden of any crime.
But her thick legs, her legs like two very straight tree trunks, with no taper at the ankle, which she’d taught herself to display proudly as if fashions had changed and long, slender legs were now a curse, not a blessing, her massive legs wouldn’t let her move, wouldn’t let her run to her children, and her tongue, too, had turned sluggish and fat in her mouth, from which no sound emerged.
She could clearly see herself reaching out and pulling the children from Marko’s maleficent embrace, but her arms still hung limp at her sides, her fingers only feebly clenched against her linen skirt, sweat-stained and rumpled from the trip.
It was clear that Richard Rivière, Ladivine’s father, had, since leaving Langon years before, led a professional life as busy as it was prosperous, a life of which Ladivine had known little, and neither, surely, had Clarisse Rivière, notwithstanding the money she got from him every month, as Ladivine was aware, a sizeable sum that she never touched.
It was not long before her death that she’d told Ladivine of her refusal to make use of that money, with the stubborn, childish, patient air she sometimes had when she’d made a resolution she couldn’t or didn’t want to explain but would never go back on, though she was perfectly willing, as if to make up for her hard-headedness, to repeat tirelessly, always in the same affable voice, the simple words that expressed her decision.
She did just that when Ladivine finally voiced her surprise at everything Clarisse Rivière, her lonely, ageing mother, seemed to be giving Freddy Moliger, since Ladivine had to limit herself to the subject of gifts, oh even there blushing at her own indiscretion, and there was no question of broaching the principal subject of her fear and dismay, the sexual passion Clarisse Rivière seemed to feel for that vile man, Freddy Moliger, that loser no doubt picked up off the bar he collapsed onto each night in some Langon hostelry that stayed open past midnight.
Arming herself with a stubborn but amiable expression, Clarisse Rivière assured her that she liked making Freddy Moliger happy, just as she told her she never withdrew a euro from the money Richard Rivière wired to her account, and did not want to.
Ladivine realised that her mother didn’t dare ask Richard Rivière to stop sending that money, that she wouldn’t know how to go about it without seeming aggressive or sentimental or absurdly contrary, and Richard Rivière obviously would have said no, and she would have had to come up with reasons, and so it was easier to say nothing.
But Ladivine knew that, deep in her modest, thick-skinned, battered but unresentful heart, Clarisse Rivière thought it cruelly inconsiderate to be helped out by standing order.
She would have liked to get a letter each time, and the fact that a cheque was enclosed wouldn’t have bothered her in the least, on the contrary.
Richard Rivière thought he had only to direct his bank to wire a fixed amount on a fixed date, and then he could forget it, and that, Ladivine sensed, was what hurt Clarisse Rivière, his seeing to it that he would never have to think about her again, even just once a month.
That was why money was tight for Clarisse Rivière even before she met Freddy Moliger, she would gladly have taken Richard Rivière’s money but she couldn’t agree to receiving it in this way, or ask to be treated more thoughtfully, and this intransigence might have seemed an expression of wounded pride out of character for that unassuming woman, but it wasn’t that, Ladivine knew, because no-one was less proud than Clarisse Rivière, less aware of her dignity, it wasn’t that, it was rather the sign of a pain that still hurt, mute and incurable, the pain that had taken Clarisse Rivière by the throat when her husband walked out of the house and she realised that she too was now out of his life, Richard Rivière’s mysterious new life, as irreversibly as her reflection disappearing from the rear-view mirror when he turned the corner.
“Your father seems to be doing pretty well,” was all she had said to Ladivine of Richard Rivière’s business, and Ladivine didn’t ask for details, almost certain her mother knew nothing more and not wanting to make her confess that ignorance aloud, Clarisse Rivière who for twenty-five years of married life had listened each evening as Richard Rivière told of the cars he’d sold or not sold, the models he particularly loved or found sadly lacking in style or finish, or design, as he liked to say.