He had come close to giving all that up, and he trembled in retrospective terror all the way home.
Because the Clarisse Rivière he’d found waiting was in every way the one he’d realised he could not go on living with.
In her liquid gaze he saw only her usual abstraction, slightly heartless despite its show of deep kindliness, the same strange, ghostly presence that had troubled him more with each passing year.
She seemed to be there, with her delicate, sinuous body, her beautiful face, unlined, as if polished, satin-smooth, but her being was somewhere else, bound to something he couldn’t understand, beyond his reach.
Clarisse Rivière was often awkward, shy beyond reason, unsure of herself — but that very diffidence had no depth to it.
Richard Rivière sometimes thought her a mere illusion of a human being, not wanting to be, perhaps not knowing she was — that he couldn’t say.
But her actions that day were those of a love without rancour, entire and intact.
She threw herself into his arms, pressed against him with all her might.
He recognised the feel of the firm, serpentine body he once so loved.
And as he also recognised, unnerved, almost frightened, the emptiness in her vague and impersonal gaze, and something he could only call coldness, which made him stiffen in incomprehension and discomfort, he felt for the first time an overpowering desire to see the real Clarisse Rivière.
Because, he understood only now, this wasn’t her.
He’d never seen or tried to see the real Clarisse Rivière, never realised or wanted to realise that he lived with her semblance alone.
And now it hit him, now he was ready to come back and live in Langon.
Might he also have heard, his ear now more acute, a muted appeal, a desperate plea from the very thing he didn’t know?
But then they went to his mother’s little flat in Toulouse, and that hateful old woman told them the repugnant story of the dog that supposedly devoured the elder Rivière, insinuating that it was all Richard’s fault, like everything else that had gone wrong in the world since his birth.
It was always Richard’s fault.
He felt wearied, sour, impatient, emotions he’d forgotten in Annecy.
Then, vaguely but with an aversion clear enough to keep him from going back to Clarisse Rivière, he remembered another dog, long, long before, when Ladivine was just a baby, he recalled Clarisse Rivière and his father very oddly coming together, against him in a way, he who at that moment lacked something, he didn’t know what, that his father seemed to possess,
Twenty-four hours after he’d shown the Cherokee to the man with the raspberry socks, Richard Rivière found the agreed-upon sum credited to his account.
He immediately called the buyer, invited him to come by that evening and pick up the car.
He paced lazily back and forth on the pavement as he waited, carefully studying his surroundings.
He felt watchful but calm, ready for anything.
No matter how Ladivine chose to reveal herself, he’d be prepared to accept her, and there was, he thought, nothing he could not now understand and say yes to.
The mountain was finally leaving him in peace.
He did not tell himself that he had beaten it, only that it had decided not to bother with him any longer, for there was a mightier force reigning over him now.
He was watching for his daughter’s return, wherever she might be coming from.
In one way or another, she would be bringing Clarisse Rivière back to him.
He was surprised to feel so serene, so sure things would go his way.
He laughed to himself, thinking that should Ladivine send him some sign from the mountain, if it was there that she wanted to announce her presence, then he would go, he would climb, he would embrace those hated slopes. He would do even that.
A taxi stopped, and the man got out.
He was even more resplendent than two days before, though Richard Rivière noted something furtive in his gaze, then thought no more of it.
He did on the other hand look long and hard at the dark grey wool suit with pink pinstripes, the very pale pink shirt, the light grey tie and long, belted black coat, unbuttoned, hanging loose.
He gave Richard Rivière a brief, slightly clammy handshake, then quickly circled the car. Suddenly he stopped in the street, groaning in dismay.
“What’s this? It’s scratched!”
“Scratched?”
Richard Rivière came running to his side. The man pointed to a long scrape on the rear door.
“That wasn’t there this morning,” Richard stammered, reflexively looking around for someone who might be able to explain.
To his deep surprise, he felt tears welling up. He took off his glasses, looked around again, quickly wiped his eyes on his sleeve.
“Listen,” he began, staring at an invisible point far beyond the man’s face, and speaking in a professional tone that rang false to his own ears, “I can take it right now to the dealership where I work. It should be fixed by tomorrow.”
“I can’t stay in Annecy till tomorrow, there’s no way! What have you got on you right now?”
“On me?”
“Give me whatever you can, I’ll get it fixed myself.”
Richard Rivière hurried, almost ran, back to his apartment and frantically rummaged under the bedroom closet’s false bottom, where he kept a store of ready cash. He grabbed the bills, counted them quickly, clipped them together, and rushed out to the street.
“Will this do?. . I have eight hundred and fifty euros.”
The man gave him a taut, indignant smile.
Richard Rivière felt dishonoured, he didn’t know what to do with the slightly trembling hand holding out the bills.
Finally the other man snatched them away and stuffed them into his overcoat pocket, grumbling.
He was as surprised as Clarisse to see Trevor so readily agree to be taken to the doctor, not that the boy had not met the proposal with his usual contempt, but Richard Rivière sensed that he no longer quite believed in the pertinence and the usefulness of his sarcasm, and fell back on it now only out of habit.
He shrugged, let out a resigned “Why not?”
And although, refusing to make any further concessions, he had dressed in the least flattering clothes his wardrobe had to offer, thereby expressing his disdain for the opinion of a doctor he’d never asked to see, Richard Rivière couldn’t help feeling that Trevor had let down his guard, that he had in a sense tired of himself.
And so, taking note of that modest change, he refrained from commenting on the young man’s grotesque get-up.
But it pained his heart.
He looked away when Trevor emerged from his room in a T-shirt that bulged over his belly and breasts, ornamented in large silvery letters with the English words i need a girl — call 0678986, and Hawaiian swimming trunks, and a sleeveless jeans jacket with a dirty fleece collar.