Doing her best to seem carefree, she drifted from room to room on the ground floor, where the Cagnacs had a large office decorated with automotive posters, and everywhere she went she furtively looked around, trying to see Wellington.
Should she come face to face with the boy, she told herself, she’d have to beg his forgiveness, however real or serious or otherwise the thing she and Marko had done to him.
Yes, she told herself, humbling herself before Wellington was no sacrifice at all, and no apology on her part could erase all the terrible things Marko had thought about the boy, and the appalling happiness he found in his certainty that he’d destroyed him.
Wouldn’t she simply be trying to show him her joy that he was alive?
Not that she could seriously hope to find Marko relieved, for the moment, to see Wellington on his feet and evidently unhurt.
But when, with the children beside him, he entered the dining room where Ladivine and the Cagnacs were waiting, he had the face of a man condemned.
Wordlessly, with a wan smile, he pulled out his chair and slid into it.
And Ladivine didn’t need to study the Cagnacs to know that those two, that inflexible man and woman, had just dropped the blade onto Marko’s neck, moved more by disgust than by cruelty.
Gone was the Cagnac woman’s avid pleasure on discovering Marko’s beautiful, glorious face just that morning.
She impatiently tore at her bread, and her lean, flat, clenched person radiated such coldness, such hostility, that Ladivine thought she saw Marko shiver.
She’d never seen him so low, so wretched and uncertain.
Although angry with him for that, although mortally angry, she felt a violent, painful pity.
Yes, Wellington! she wanted to shout in Marko’s face. Be happy for him, and for us, instead of dragging the children into your defeat!
Because with one glance at Annika and Daniel she’d seen everything.
Their poor little bewildered faces, anguished and empty, no longer turned to their father but downcast over their wringing hands, bore witness to a disaster that was already total, and as if already past, beyond all repair.
Just that morning, Ladivine thought in dismay, the children were ready to go over to Marko’s radiant, cruel side, and now his fall had left them as devastated as if they’d learned he was dead.
How furious she was!
Could she not fill them with delight at Wellington’s return?
But what had they known of Wellington?
“Something wrong, kids?” asked Cagnac grumpily.
Annika and Daniel didn’t look up. Ladivine wasn’t sure they’d even heard.
“They must be tired,” Marko whispered.
The Cagnac woman let out a snide, almost contemptuous guffaw.
She shot Marko a look that would be the last she bestowed on him, thought Ladivine, a look heavy with disdain, disappointment, almost torment.
The Cagnac woman could not be wrong.
If Marko were simply tired or ill, she would never have treated him this way.
She could see he was no longer the man she’d met a few hours before, and if she didn’t yet know the reason for his fall (because how could she know about Wellington?), the mere fact that he could let himself slump into melancholy and terror showed quite clearly that he had, in a sense, fooled her — her, the incorruptible Cagnac woman. Wellington, Wellington, Ladivine repeated to herself, in a quiet, singing little voice.
The Cagnac woman called out:
“Wellington!”
She yawned wide, like a wild animal, showing her teeth, her bluish tongue.
Wellington hurried in with a salad bowl full of brawn in vinaigrette.
He set it on the table, stirred the chopped snout to coat it with the dressing, and his gestures were at once expert and slightly perfunctory, as if, however it may seem, he was only playing a role that he could abandon whenever he pleased.
Yes, Ladivine told herself, this was the Wellington they’d met at the National Museum, the young man with the long, slender limbs, the protruding hips, the resourceful, independent, clever, very faintly arrogant manner.
She found herself studying his walk as he circled the table to pour a taste of wine into Cagnac’s glass.
Was he limping?
Perhaps he was dragging one foot a little, or was he just sidestepping a chair leg?
She did not yet dare try to catch his eye to learn, from the way he looked back at her, whether she and Marko were guilty of something.
But what would the neutrality of that discreet, professional gaze ever say?
Sitting clenched in his chair, an anguished grimace on his lips, eyes half closed, Marko was beyond even pretending to be simply a tired guest, and in any case the Cagnacs had lost all interest in him.
And when Wellington approached to fill his glass, Marko pressed his fists to his closed eyes and began to moan quietly.
“I can’t take this anymore, I can’t take it,” he stammered.
Wellington broke into a suave, knowing smile.
He nimbly stepped away from Marko and walked out of the room, as if he’d got what he came for and now had only to disappear.
“I want to go home!” cried Daniel.
“Papa, papa!” howled Annika, eyes wide with terror.
“I can’t take it anymore, I can’t take it. .”
“This is intolerable!” cried the Cagnac woman.
She hammered at the table top with the handle of her knife. Annika stood up and awkwardly put her arms around Marko’s shoulders as he repeated, at once leaden and fervid, perhaps drunk on his own surrender:
“I can’t take it anymore, I can’t take it. .”
Later that evening, with Marko and the children up in their rooms and the Cagnacs closed away in their office on the pretext of urgent work to be done, Ladivine went out and walked towards the forest in the gathering darkness.
A deep calm slowed her thoughts, freed her footsteps of any imaginary burden.
Never hesitating, and although the forest’s edge was already dark, and remembering, too, that she was not a brave woman, she started down a narrow path.
Her first thought was that she was entering the domain of a silence so full and so thick that it hurt her ears like a deafening roar, and she almost gave up, almost turned back.
But then she made out the gentle, secret, insinuating appeal she’d heard from the newlyweds’ four-wheel drive, that dark sigh, like a heavy beast dying or in labour, calling Clarisse Rivière to her mind just as clearly as if her mother’s face had suddenly appeared on the half-moon above her.
That afternoon’s happy, sprightly little voices had gone silent.
There remained only that fearsome plaint, that breath exhaled by a breast at once anguished and resigned, but resolute, quietly unyielding in its determination to convince her.
Ladivine walked onward, with no fear in her gait.