Free Consolation by Anna Gavalda Page A

ready to fly to Greece. It was the last evening, they were celebrating his departure. She had stopped by, on the off chance.
    It’s lucky you stopped by, he said, pleased, come over here, let me introduce you, and when he turned round to take her by the shoulders, he understood that she . . .
    Yes. He remembers. And because he remembers, he is devastated. That
unbearable
message was the poacher’s snare, sprung from a poorly wound ball of wire and, by opening his hand and letting out nine months – twenty years, in other words – in the dark, he had got caught in the trap.
    Never mind. Too bad for him. He won’t fall asleep. The story is never-ending. And at least he is still honest enough to admit that those three months were nothing more than a pretext. If she hadn’t said that, he would have found something else. The story is never-ending. The bell has just rung and he has to get back to his feet.
    Go back into the ring, get pounded some more.
    Anouk was dead, and Claire, that night, had not stopped by on the off chance.

6
    HE HAD FOLLOWED her down the street. It was a beautiful evening, soft, warm, elastic. The asphalt gave off a good Paris smell and the outdoor cafés were packed. Several times he asked her if she wasn’t hungry, but she kept walking ahead of him, the distance between them ever greater.
    ‘Right,’ he said, getting cross, ‘
I’m
hungry and I’m fed up. I’m stopping here.’
    She turned around, took a paper out of her bag and placed it on top of his menu.
    ‘Tomorrow. Five o’clock.’
    An address in the
banlieue
. An utterly improbable place.
    ‘At five o’clock I’ll be on the plane,’ he said with a smile.
    But not for long.
    How could you smile at such a face?
    *
    Later, she had come into that café bent double. As if she were trying to hold back what she had just lost. He had got up, put his hand on the back of her neck, and let her cry her fill. Behind her, the café owner was sending him anxious looks which Charles waved away with his other hand as best he could, flattening the air around them with his palm. Afterwards he had left a big tip, to make up for the embarrassment, and had taken her to see the sea.
    It was a crazy idea but what else could he have done?
    He closed the door to the toilet and put on a jumper before going back to collapse on the sofa.
    What else could he have done?
    They had gone on long walks, drunk a great deal, smoked all sorts of amusing grasses and even danced, on occasion. But most of the time they did nothing.
    Sat there and observed the light. Charles drew, dreamt, haggled down in the port, and made their meals, while his sister read the first page of her book again and again before closing her eyes.
    And yet she never slept. If he had asked her a question, she would have heard and would have responded.
    But he didn’t ask.
    They had been brought up together, had shared the same tiny flat for almost three years and had both known Alexis for ever. Nothing could resist them.
    And there was not a shadow on this steep terrace.
    Not a single one.
    On the last evening, they had gone to the restaurant and, as they started on the second bottle of retsina, he tested the atmosphere:
    ‘Will you be okay?’
    ‘Yes.’
    ‘Sure?’
    She nodded vigorously.
    ‘Do you want to come back home to live?’
    She shook her head vigorously.
    ‘Where will you go?’
    ‘To stay with a friend . . . a girl from college . . .’
    ‘Okay.’
    He had just shifted his chair so he could share the street scenes with her.
    ‘You still have keys, anyway.’
    ‘And you?’
    ‘What about me?’
    ‘You never talk to me about your love life.’ She made a face.
    ‘Um love, well, your life, what’s going on . . .’
    ‘Nothing terribly exciting, I should think.’
    ‘What about the surveyor you were seeing?’
    ‘She went off to take some other measurements . . .’
    She smiled.
    Although he was tanned, his face seemed extremely brittle. He filled their glasses again