And when the car turned the corner, the distant, indefinable memory of a similar scene flashed through his mind, disappearing before he could catch hold of it.
“. . file a complaint,” the banker was saying, concluding a sentence that Richard Rivière hadn’t listened to. “Goodbye, Monsieur Rivière.”
Call me Richard, he wordlessly implored him, still pressing the phone to his ear after the other man had hung up.
He took the afternoon off to go to the police station, and when he walked into the apartment, hours later, so exhausted he thought he might faint in the hall, Trevor emerged from his room and announced that he had diabetes.
He’d just got the results of his blood tests via the Internet, and that’s what was wrong with him, he blurted out, seeming at once anxious and strangely excited: type 2 diabetes.
fuck you, you fucking fuck, Richard Rivière read blankly on Trevor’s green and black T-shirt.
Against a black background, the big green letters undulated like tall meadow grass on the boy’s shifting flesh.
“Type 2 diabetes,” Trevor repeated in a grave, pedantic voice.
fuck you, you fucking fuck.
Trevor bought these T-shirts with the money Clarisse earned.
Why did he seem so proud of himself for being ill? As if, forever failing tests, even the baccalauréat, twice, he could now tell himself he’d passed this one with flying colours?
Well aware of his cowardice, Richard Rivière realised this meant he could put off telling Trevor he’d lost the four-wheel drive money, thinking the lab results surely outweighed the swindle.
More than his own financial troubles, was it not the fear of letting Trevor down that had tied his stomach in knots as he waited in the police station?
Not to mention feeling like a pitiful failure, incapable of responding to Trevor’s progress with anything but false promises, undone by his own idiocy.
Because this was all his fault, he never should have trusted that jittery, pushy, overdressed buyer.
And, sitting on a hard metal chair, head in his hands, he could think only of how to help Trevor make a new start all the same, relegating the money problems hanging over him to a future too uncertain to worry about.
He couldn’t imagine how he might do it.
He owed the bank tens of thousands of euros as it was.
Well, he told himself, he’d just have to take out another loan.
So he’d be mired in debt — what did he care?
He laid an awkward hand on the boy’s shoulder.
“We’re going to get you the best possible care,” he said stupidly.
A hint of a derisive smile grazed Trevor’s lips, replaced at once by a thoughtful, diligent look.
“I’ve been reading up about it on the Internet. As a matter of fact I’ve got to get back to it now.” And he lumbered quick as he could towards his room.
It seemed to Richard Rivière, who had almost never seen Trevor in the company of another person, that nothing had ever interested the boy like this diabetes business.
Clarisse burst into tears when Trevor told her the news.
He came running as soon as he heard the key in the lock, and, at once frightened and pleased with himself, beaming like a child who knows he has something big to divulge, he threw that word diabetes in her face, then took a demure half-step back, hands behind him.
Richard Rivière found them this way, Clarisse wiping her damp cheeks with one hand, Trevor shifting his weight from one leg to the other, basking, and what struck and saddened him was not only the helpless solitude, the ordinary, trivial sorrow of these two people of no particular note, but also that they seemed to expect nothing more from him, that, though not yet aware of it, they realised he no longer lived there, with them, if he ever had. He wasn’t worried that he had not yet heard from Ladivine.
A presage would have been nice, of course, even a simple hint that something was coming, and all day long, and at night in his dreams, he stood ready to open the way to any visit his daughter might pay him.
When he thought of her, he no longer pictured the young woman’s face, now almost forgotten, but the guileless, quietly introspective face of the little girl. With numbing clarity, he remembered her hand in his as they went walking on the hill, even the feel of her skin, the mosquito bite on her thumb, his rough fingers absent-mindedly stroking it, which she liked.
Somewhere his beloved daughter, the child he once cherished, as he now remembered, was taking steps to flush out Clarisse Rivière
— how grateful he was, and how aware that he had to welcome any form her reappearance might take!
He confessed to himself that he would rather Ladivine come back after the trial, the following month. The mere thought of it filled him with dread.
He couldn’t help remembering that he had found a sort of escape from his grief, from the feeling of horror and then unreality that had filled him on learning of Clarisse Rivière’s murder, in the many interviews he gave at the time, bewildered, faintly desperate, little understanding why anyone should ask his opinion of the murderer’s personality, of that Freddy Moliger he knew nothing of, but offering it gladly, taking a strange pleasure in it, delighting in his role, his importance. He’d read some of those interviews, and they made him ashamed.
Who on earth was that Richard Rivière, he’d wondered, competent, informed, speaking unguardedly of the depth of his pain?
Now he got up every morning with the trial on his mind, and he was horrified to think of his daughter Ladivine being there in person, and so he silently begged her to stay away, wherever she was hearing him from.
He’d hired a lawyer to represent them both, a certain Noroit, from Bordeaux, someone he felt comfortable with, finding nothing to intimidate him in that middle-aged man’s dull, awkward appearance and plain polyester suits.
But if Ladivine were there with him, and if once again her presence gave him the painful impression that he could only have known her in his dreams, that her face meant nothing to him in real life, and that, no matter what he might think, he was therefore now dreaming, if that happened, as it always did, and he concluded that he would soon be waking up in his Annecy room, disoriented, desperately sad, how would he ever hold up till the end of the trial?
Wouldn’t it be hard enough just to see Moliger, with that loser look he remembered from the photos, imagining that to this man, perhaps, Clarisse Rivière had shown her real face?
Because otherwise, he wondered, why would Clarisse Rivière have taken up with that creep?
It couldn’t have been sex, he thought. He had the face of a drunkard, there was something repellent about him, something ignoble that he thought a sure cure for any sort of love.
She’d gone looking, he told himself, racked by a jealousy he’d never felt in his life, she’d gone looking for someone, anyone (preferably, perhaps, blind to what she was offering?) to reveal herself to.
Was that it? He wasn’t sure of anything any longer.
All he knew was that he didn’t want to see his daughter Ladivine in such circumstances.