The thin black socks and beige tasselled loafers made his feet seem tiny beneath his gargantuan calves.
He looked like a mental case, Richard Rivière told himself, suddenly embarrassed by his own sympathy.
He couldn’t help feeling sorry for Clarisse, who had done nothing, he thought, to deserve a son who looked like a pathetic madman.
But why did he suddenly find it so urgent to acquit himself of all his responsibilities, and more, to Clarisse and Trevor?
Who and what would be awaiting him if he left Annecy?
His certainty that Ladivine had gone off to demand explanations and would not fail to tell him what she’d found had little by little convinced him that Clarisse Rivière herself would be coming back to him, with her sinuous body, her face unchanged but the veil lifted from her gaze, her voice lively and musical — how flat was her old voice, how cautious, how droning!
And why should that be?
Why believe such a thing?
Clarisse Rivière would rise and return — but from among what dead, from amid what miracles?
To his dismay, he realised he could now conceive of no other solution, that his own wish to go on living was at stake.
If nothing happened, if Ladivine came back empty-handed, her heart cold, then nothing would ever matter to him again.
The mountain could pounce on his back, Trevor could grab him and have his way with him, he would put up no defence, he would lie back, close his eyes.
Had he not been awaiting just that for nine years, since he left the house in Langon?
And would he not be waiting still, in his empty Annecy existence, had Clarisse Rivière not been killed?
Because what explanation could he hope for, what real Clarisse could he hope to meet, if she were still living, withdrawn, hermetic, obscure, with that human wreck Moliger?
Trevor climbed into Clarisse’s little car beside him, filling the closed, cramped space with his slightly musky odour, his loud breathing, his boredom.
And Richard Rivière realised he would feel guilty about Trevor if he went away, if he deserted Annecy without helping him somehow, unpleasant as Trevor was, and in spite of everything he’d put him through.
He remembered that Trevor had dropped the south-western accent after he brought up Moliger’s trial, three days before.
“I have an idea for you,” he said as he drove, staring straight ahead.
“Oh yeah?” Trevor said warily.
“After all, I did sell that four-wheel drive. I could help you get something going, a little software business. You could go back and study for a few months, get up to speed, and then the money from the car would be yours, to help you get started.”
“You talk to Mum about this?”
“Not yet. But she’ll be on board, and you know it.”
Trevor acknowledged this with a grunt.
Glancing towards him, Richard Rivière found the young man serious, almost sombre, which he took to mean that he’d struck a nerve.
“Why would you do that?” Trevor asked in a hurried, clipped, gruff voice, as if he disapproved of the question but felt he had to ask so that everything would be clear.
Because I’m going away, and I want to leave you with a good memory of me, because I’ve never done anything more than the minimum for you, knowing you didn’t like me, and so not much liking you either.
But he said no such thing.
Horrified to find himself blushing, he answered:
“After all this time, you’re sort of my son, aren’t you?”
Oh no, he wasn’t, and he never would be.
How was it that even now he could not forget Trevor’s many offences, or his own lack of love?
He felt only compassion and a need to do his duty, put his affairs in order and settle his debt, even if no-one but him thought he owed them anything, before he took off.
The vision of an abandoned Clarisse and Trevor tormented him.
He would simply say he was going back to Langon, back to the house, which was still up for sale.
Would Clarisse Rivière then come looking for him?
To take him where, into what frightful back ways?
In truth, he felt no fear, only burning desire and impatience.
Trevor grunted again, his forehead wrinkled, more sombre still. His left leg had started to twitch. During their lunch hour that Monday, while eating in the kitchen with Clarisse, he got a call from the bank.
His bank manager informed him that to his deep regret the cheque he had deposited five days before had been refused as a forgery, and the credit to his account cancelled.
“There must be some mistake,” said Richard Rivière. “I never deposited a cheque.”
He smiled reassuringly at Clarisse as her brow furrowed in concern, but that smile was more for himself than for her, a dazzling forced smile that left his lips aching.
“A cheque for forty-seven thousand euros, deposited on the fourteenth of this month,” the man replied, somewhat sharply. “It had your signature on the back, your account number.”
“I don’t understand.”
He broke off and took a deep breath, all trace of his smile gone.
Suddenly he found his own breath foul and repellent.
He turned his back to Clarisse and looked up at the mountain that had given up torturing him.
The midday sun was shining on the still-green slopes, suddenly reminding him of the landscape that came with an electric train he’d been given as a child, a little mountain covered in dark green felt overlooking a tiny chalet with doors and windows that opened.
How he had wished he could make himself small enough to get into that chalet and live there alone, undisturbed, far from his scolding parents, sheltered by that gentle springtime mountain!
“I sold a car privately, and the buyer paid by bank transfer, just as we’d arranged. I never deposited a cheque for that sale.”
“You’re absolutely certain it was a transfer?”
“I’m not, actually,” Richard Rivière mumbled, trapped, now so worried that he could feel his strength draining away. “I saw the credit to my account, and since we’d agreed he’d be paying by transfer, I thought, obviously. . And what about my signature, how could he have. .”
“I assume you signed a contract. He must have copied it, it’s not hard. I’ve heard of this happening before, you’re not the first and you won’t be the last,” said the banker, as if to console Richard Rivière.
“What do I do now?”
He fleetingly remembered the desperation in Berger’s last words on the telephone, his unspoken plea for Richard Rivière not to hang up just yet, hoping in vain for support or a few comforting words he could draw on when the phone call was over.
Now it was his turn to speak in that tone — oh God, oh God, he dully repeated to himself, and he saw the raspberry socks, the rippling overcoat, the lustrous, carefully styled brown hair.
The man had driven away in the four-wheel drive, gunning the engine, and Richard Rivière, standing on the pavement, had started to lift his hand in farewell, but his dishonoured, burning hand rose no higher than his shoulder.