“Probably shouldn’t have bought a place on the ground floor, then,” said Trevor with his eternal smirk, shifting his weight from one leg to the other as if making ready for a fistfight.
Richard Rivière sometimes told himself that with any other overweight, jobless, lonely young man, stuck living with his mother and stepfather as Trevor was, he would see this derision and childish defiance as nothing more than the sad effect of a difficult situation, and if they just tried to give him a hand, even love him a little, show some interest and faith in him, then he would drop that tiresome insolence, that whole mechanism of aggression and immediate, unctuous denial Trevor had put in place on his return.
Richard Rivière knew all that, he knew a case study of such a young man would have filled him with almost unlimited understanding and indulgence.
So why, he often asked himself, could he not give the real Trevor the gift of his sympathy and encouragement?
He chided himself for this when he was alone, vowing to change his attitude towards his stepson, even impatiently looking forward to seeing him again so he could put those good intentions into practice.
Then Trevor was there, ever the same, neither more nor less awful than he recalled, and a sort of cold stupor fell over Richard Rivière, a strange dismay at his inability to feel any emotion for the boy but squeamish pity before his misshapen young body.
The idea of devoting himself to Trevor’s rescue, and especially of affecting warm feelings for the boy, suddenly struck him as preposterous and indecent.
Because it was obvious that Trevor didn’t like him, and wanted no part of his support or solicitude, and even, for some mysterious reason, looked down on him.
That didn’t shock Richard Rivière, didn’t anger him, but it did make him wonder.
How could he have become the target of Trevor’s disdain when he’d always taken pains to bare nothing of his inner self to his wife’s difficult children? How could anyone despise him when they knew him as little as Trevor?
Deciding to act as though he were alone, he made himself an omelette without asking the young man if he wanted any. It pained him to feel rude, but Trevor always refused what he was offered.
Why was he standing there, watching him?
He sat down and began to eat, then glanced at the boy’s face, unable to help it. He knew Trevor found it hard to stand up for too long, and yet he’d not moved since he had come into the kitchen and leaned against the wall by the door.
He was surprised to find the young man looking faintly ill at ease.
Again and again he ran his hand through his ratty, strawberry blond hair, and his pale little eyes, as if pushed deep into his abundant flesh, darted this way and that, avoiding Richard Rivière’s. Below a pair of broad, bright-pink boxers that came down to midthigh, his legs were purplish and swollen.
“Well, sit down,” Richard Rivière snapped.
He pushed away his empty plate. He was so on edge that he’d scarcely even realised he was eating.
And now the omelette was eaten, shovelled in without awareness or pleasure, and it was almost one o’clock, and he had to be at work in forty-five minutes.
Still, he’d sold the car. Why couldn’t he be happy?
Trevor stood where he was, shrugged, and said, very hurriedly:
“So I saw on TV. . that trial, you know, that trial, it’s going to be starting soon. The lady who got killed. . that was your wife?”
“You know it was, don’t you?”
He was breathing quickly and heavily. Trevor’s face went blurry, as if he were seeing it without his glasses.
He mechanically raised one hand to his eyes, feeling the lenses, suddenly tortured by the little pads pressed to the sides of his nose. He tore off his glasses, rubbed his eyes.
He was breathing heavily — pathetically, he couldn’t help thinking. Was that why Trevor looked down on him? Because, at bottom, he was pathetic? But who was Trevor to judge, with his huge legs, his puffy little feet, his fat, spongy breasts?
“I think I do, yeah,” Trevor was saying. “I mean, you never said anything, but. . well, you know, I could guess.”
“So why are you asking?” He sighed.
“Um, just to be sure.”
For once, Richard Rivière couldn’t help noticing, Trevor had neglected to mask his unease behind a sarcastic, moronic or arrogant front. His face bore an almost childlike expression of respectful, intimidated interest.
Rather than feel moved or simply indifferent, Richard found a savage rage burning inside him, because it was Clarisse Rivière’s murder that had brought about this change in the boy. That’s the one thing that excites him, he thought, feeling his own furious, savage excitement, but also suspecting that Trevor was not so much excited as shaken, and, in his dull way, frightened.
He went on breathing in noisy little gasps, rubbing the inflamed wings of his nose with his thumb and index finger, making the pain even worse. But so terrible was the gnawing hurt in his heart that this other pain was almost a relief.
He wanted to snuff out the boy, see him disappear from the kitchen, where he’d just spoiled his lunch, from the apartment, bought with a loan in his own name and no-one else’s, and finally from his life, perpetually poisoned, he thought, by Trevor’s presence.
There was nothing he wanted less than to talk about Clarisse Rivière with Trevor. The mere thought of it sickened him.
When Clarisse Rivière was murdered, three years before, Trevor was still living in Switzerland, and neither Richard Rivière nor Clarisse, Trevor’s mother, ever told him what had happened, nor Clarisse’s other two children, twin brothers in their thirties who drifted from city to city in the south of France, so rarely heard from that Richard Rivière was always stunned to remember that they existed.
Those few years together, temporarily free of Clarisse’s three wearying children, were the one happy period of Richard Rivière’s life in Annecy, and now he missed it bitterly, as if he’d been perfectly happy in those days.
He had not, but he never expected to be, never even hoped to be, and so that sedate existence with an agreeably ordinary woman seemed the best he could wish for, and he enjoyed what he thought of as his good fortune, the bland, restful, soothing pleasure of a halfhearted attachment, of a daily routine without turmoil or upheaval.
Then Trevor came back from Switzerland, where he’d failed to start up a modest computer repair business with two friends. That project had struck Richard Rivière as nebulous in the extreme from the start, and because he had serious doubts about Trevor’s skills, given his uselessness when any little thing went awry with the family computer, he saw the young man’s shamefaced, bitter return as simply one more in a logical series of very predictable defeats.
And among his own string of defeats, thought Richard Rivière, was Trevor’s return.
He wasn’t particularly surprised that he had to endure this ordeal, oh no. He might well be forced to go on living with Trevor for years to come, maybe till he died.
Sometimes he rebelled at that prospect, as now, wishing he could expunge the young man from his life. And yet secretly he had accepted it, as fitting punishment for everything he’d failed to grasp in the past, when Clarisse Rivière was alive.