He tried to put on a good face with the children, but his sadness never left him, and Annika preferred him disconsolate to falsely light-hearted.
He was the nicest, most thoughtful father she knew, and the best-looking too, she thought, with his lush hair, tousled because he paid it no attention, and his tanned face and pale eyes and carelessness about his appearance, like some magnificent animal with no notion that anyone might think it beautiful, and no understanding of people’s admiring stares.
Often Annika was angry with Daniel, who, rather than shield their father as she did, continually nagged at him with his whining and whims, and tried to pull him away from the computer, to which Marko consented with an infallible patience and a gentleness so wistful and sad that Annika would later take Daniel aside to lecture and shame him — why try to take their father away from the one thing he thought brought him nearer their mother, that endless, painstaking search through the wilds of cyberspace?
He was in touch now with people all over the world, always asking this single question: Have you seen Ladivine?
And those strangers, he told them, put all their ingenuity and good will into the search for Ladivine Rivière, or, if they could do nothing else, into the attempt to console Marko Berger, which made Marko’s pain a little easier to bear, he added, wanting to be honest, but with a certain reluctance, Annika sensed, since his children could do nothing to unburden him of his grief, even a little.
How furious Annika was at their mother!
Every morning she stared at the dog with all the rage she could muster, then ignored it as it kept pace with them on the opposite pavement.
And in the afternoon, when their father escaped from Karstadt for thirty minutes to pick them up from school and hurry them back to the apartment, where they would stay on their own until his workday was done, the dog was still there, shivering, eternal, faithful to its charge and perfectly indifferent to Annika’s withering stare.
Young though she was, and aware of her youth, of her ignorance, she believed she understood that their mother had tired of them, the children, their energy and their needs, their inevitable, daily company, their moods and their chatter. She herself, Annika, often wearied of Daniel. She felt largely responsible for her brother, and she found the burden heavy and oppressive.
But she couldn’t forgive their mother for leaving Marko in such distress and despair.
Some freezing mornings, when they had to set off for school in the dark and the leaden sky foretold yet another grey day, Daniel would stamp his feet on the front step, find some pretext for refusing to go on. Bundled up stiff in his snowsuit, he would shriek:
“I want Mummy!”
Seeing Marko’s defeated face, and feeling herself at the end of her tether, she wanted to cry out:
“Let’s bring that dog with us, let’s take it home!”
But she held back, out of pity and love for her father.
:
the man was taking his time looking over the car, and Richard Rivière saw the elegant drape of his navy-blue overcoat, unbuttoned and gracefully rippling as he circled the vehicle, bent down to inspect the wheel rims, then lithely stood up again, his body visibly honed by regular exercise.
The coat must be cashmere, he thought, and the dark grey pinstripe suit a silk and wool blend. On his feet Richard Rivière had noted, with a fervid curiosity he knew well, and which always filled him with self-disgust, a pair of polished, point-toed ankle boots.
And when the man first squatted down Richard Rivière was astonished to see he was wearing raspberry-red socks.
Astonishment gave way to envious loathing, and that too was an emotion he knew well, always depressed and disappointed to be feeling it, him, Richard Rivière, who aspired to be a sensible and thoughtful man, noble in his sentiments.
Why, then, could he not help feeling jealous and frustrated when a well-dressed man had the breezy audacity to display some accessory — gaudy socks or a comical tie — that Richard Rivière would never dare buy, lest he give himself away as what he thought he was in others’ eyes, a parvenu with odd and dubious tastes?
He was not unaware that such encounters with tall, thin, chic men also inspired in him, along with envy, an immediate, baseless respect, slightly craven and limp.
How stupid, and how pitiful!
He put on an aloof and superior air, checked his watch. He glanced at the ground-floor windows of his apartment building and was relieved to see no sign of movement behind the sheer curtains. He would rather Trevor not see him trying to sell the four-wheel drive to a man of this sort, exactly the type Trevor made a great show of mocking, with their tailored suits and their gym-room physiques.
“OK, it’s a deal,” said the man, striding athletically towards him, his young, tanned face friendly and, Richard Rivière fleetingly thought, almost fawning.
“You’ll take it?” he asked, surprised.
Collecting himself, he added:
“You won’t be sorry.”
The man inside Richard Rivière who forever strove to decipher a customer’s uncertainties or unspoken misgivings thought he could make out an anxious little twinge behind the smile, a touch too unwavering, and the gaze, a touch too ostentatiously frank, in this man whose elegance was perhaps also, in the end, just a little too impeccable, he thought, every detail as if carefully weighed for its charismatic effect.
But why must those intuitions always be silenced by the Richard Rivière who was intimidated by wealth or its appearance, and anxious to sell what he had, to be rid of it, like some ill-gotten gain?
As the free, severe, impotent part of him whispered that question in his ear, he glanced again at the ground floor of his building and saw the kitchen window ajar.
That meant Trevor was up, eating his breakfast, perhaps observing his stepfather’s obsequious charade from his chair, with that awful little smirk he’d developed, full of smug, listless irony. Trevor’s implacable judgements meant nothing to Richard Rivière, but he did not like being spied on, did not like feeding the young man’s mindless censoriousness at his expense.
He turned his back to the window, irritated, and grimaced a smile at his customer, who was explaining that he was planning to give the car to his wife as a present. Yes, yes, let’s get this over with, he thought.
His eye lit on the man’s white cotton shirt, darkened by two little sweat stains on either side of the purple polka-dot tie. A few drops of sweat, too, he observed, between the upper lip and the nose, so short and straight that it must have been artificial, surgically reshaped.
Richard Rivière felt preoccupied, out of sorts, he didn’t know why.
He’d forgotten about Trevor. He’d almost forgotten that an overdressed stranger was on the verge of buying a Grand Cherokee for forty-seven thousand euros without haggling, nearly five thousand more than he’d paid for it at the Jeep dealership.
Come on, let’s get this over with, he was thinking, depressed, his mind elsewhere, but fixated in spite of himself on such trivialities as the beads of sweat glinting on the man’s suntanned skin or the way he stuck out his lower lip after every sentence to blow at the lock of hair draping his brow. The lock fluttered up, and Richard Rivière saw the pale skin, fragile and tender, at his hairline.