Fortunately, his spells of unemployment never lasted too long. One of our neighbours got him a job with the telephone company where he worked. Dominique became a commercial technician. He started wearing a suit again. And he began getting home later than me again, dropping his briefcase in the hallway and coming to join me in the kitchen while I was preparing dinner.

  Outside the window, the laurel hedges and flower beds filled with geraniums were some of the most beautiful on our street, allée Auguste Renoir in Gournay-sur-Marne. I only needed to glance at them to feel a sense of safety. There were no dangers lurking on the quiet streets where our children grew up popping in and out of their friends’ houses. We called the neighbourhood Meeker Village, after the property developer who built it. Like so many others, Meeker had spotted the investment potential of a booming Parisian suburb, but for us it was as if a new frontier had been drawn, as if we had been gifted bedrooms with en-suite bathrooms, quiet, space and sunlight, a blank page on which to write our story. We associated the Meeker logo with our well-being, just as our Carrefour credit card provided for all our needs and desires. It allowed us to take out loans to go on holidays much further afield than our native Indre – to Spain or the Ermioni Aquarius Club in Greece – and it also came in handy when it was time to pay the monthly fees for the private school where we’d enrolled David after he’d fallen seriously behind, with the hope that he would pass the school certificate at the age of fifteen. Concerned by the poor reputation of the local state school, we ended up enrolling Caroline and Florian in the same private school when they were sixteen. It wasn’t a huge amount of money, and we wanted our children to go to university, as we had not. We wanted them to have the opposite of the environment we had grown up in, the opposite of the hardship we had known.

  We were heading straight for the day when all our things would be repossessed before Caroline’s terrified eyes, and that pitiful Christmas at the garden table. Added to this was a five-year period of deductions to my salary, because after my father died I had to pay inheritance tax on his estate for myself and for my brother who had died after him, and I didn’t have the money to pay it all at once. Meanwhile, a tax adviser suggested a sham divorce so that my salary, which was higher than my husband’s, and, unlike his, came in regularly, would not be siphoned off to pay all our debts. I thought the idea was totally mad, absolutely out of the question. I wanted nothing to do with it.

  Our marital crises were a thing of the past. As far as our sex life was concerned, nothing suggested twenty years of marriage and three children; we felt none of the boredom and friction that slowly wear couples down and make them turn their backs on each other when they go to bed at night. I might sometimes have been happy just to lay my head on Dominique’s chest and let my fatigue dissipate, but he was still very demanding sexually, so I allowed myself to be carried away. I sometimes even felt desire. I had set my boundaries and he always respected them, though he still teased me that I was a saint, which coming from him never sounded like a compliment. He repeated it often, yet I never suspected any dangerous impulse lurking under his skull, nor imagined the line between good and evil being crossed. I used to tease him back, quite calmly, the way old couples repeat themselves, that he should find a woman who was more his type, less shy, less reserved than me. We could speak to each other like that; our respective affairs had made such conversations possible. But he invariably replied, ‘No, it’s you I want.’

  I was taken aback the first time he called me ‘my bitch’ or ‘my little bitch’ when we were making love. I yelled at him, but it was a game of his; it turned him on, like an old cliché of erotic literature or pornography. In Gérard de Villiers’ spy novels, whose yellowing spines could be found on bookshelves all over France, almost all the women were bitches. I preferred it when he called me ‘my little painter’, because sometimes during the day, particularly when I was tidying the house, chasing away mess and dust, I’d whistle to myself, like an artist whistling while he worked, as though to convince myself that all was well, after all we’d been through. And yet I knew that clean, fragrant houses have a way of summoning bad news; the thought came back to me often, carried by the scents of Miror brass polish and beeswax, by the memory of a chicken being plucked for a good meal, by my cousin Micheline being burnt and my mother lying stretched out in the kitchen.

  Twice, during the 1990s, Dominique came home in tears. He told me he had lost his job. Both times I set his mind at rest. We’d get through. And eventually another job came along. He was building up a whole network of connections that allowed him to bounce back. The telecoms industry was rapidly expanding, and people were gradually getting used to having a mobile phone glued to the palm of their hand. Dominique specialised in strong currents and weak currents, as they’re known in electrical jargon – such telling words! Was this man with an erratic professional life strong or weak? Did he sense himself becoming like his father, going from one job to another, never satisfied and never satisfying anyone?

  At the time, I didn’t make the connection. Life was about making it through to the next day. It was about getting used to the idea that David didn’t like school. Helping him find his first job, which Dominique did by introducing him to the world of property. It was about getting used to the idea of upsetting Caroline, who’d always been a good student, but hadn’t worked hard enough in Year 10 to get into a mainstream lycée, and would have to go to a vocational school instead. I made her repeat the year so she could get the results required to get into the lycée, told her she had to go to university, get a good job of her choosing and become an independent woman. The words I said to her I had never heard said to me. Our life now was the complete opposite to how mine had been at her age. It was about going with my daughter to her first appointment with the gynaecologist. It was about a shared confidence one morning in the bathroom when she was a teenager. ‘I can understand why you had an affair,’ she said, ‘otherwise you’d only have had Papa in your life.’ But the tensions kept returning. I blamed them on adolescence; others said it was the inevitable turbulence between mothers and daughters. I didn’t know. No mother, no woman, had ever guided me. I had never opposed anyone. Caroline’s outbursts sometimes brought me to the edge of tears.

  Life was so busy we barely had time to think. Florian was growing up but he still kept dragging his mattress into our bedroom next to my side of the bed. And I finally realised that he had somehow contrived to repeat Year 5, because moving into Year 6 meant going on the school skiing trip and being apart from me. Did he sense, deep down, that it was possible to lose one’s mother at the age of nine? Were our past tragedies coming back to haunt our children?

  * * *

  • • •

  Those questions are only emerging now. Back then they were very remote. The whole point was that our family was supposed to be healing us. It was a rampart against the violence of our own childhoods, and against our children’s fears. We wanted to be with them, to stand by them, deluded enough to believe that anything and everything could somehow be sorted out. When Caroline told us a few years later that she wanted to earn a bit of money while she was studying, Dominique found her some part-time work cleaning the offices of an estate agent friend in Torcy. And then, when she was snowed under with work for her finals, it was her father and I who went every Sunday evening at seven o’clock to do the cleaning in her place. We would tear ourselves away from our Sunday rest to dust and vacuum the premises and take out the bins. But it was important: this way Caroline would keep getting a payslip. We were slaves not so much to our children as to our own painful memories. Perhaps it amounts to the same thing.

  For them as well as for us we continued to take out loans, to nudge up the credit limit of our Carrefour card and fulfil our longing for new things: nothing lavish, just little treats, new clothes we liked, that sort of thing. We never dreamed of being rich, just comfortable. But with an interest rate approaching twenty per cent, paying off our debts soon became impossible. So when in 1999 the idea of divorce came up again as a way of ring-fencing my salary, we decided to do it. We appeared before the judge, a woman, who seemed surprised that I wasn’t asking for more, for some kind of compensatory payment. She was clearly on my side and would have liked me to be more aggressive. I had taken on a lawyer who knew what we were doing. He advised me to pretend we were genuinely getting divorced. I told the judge I was happy with our amicable agreement, and I wanted things to move ahead quickly. When we finally left we were careful not to let it show we were both in on it. We were no longer officially husband and wife in the eyes of the law, but what did that matter, since we were still together?

  The armoured tanks in my nightmares withdrew, but another recurring dream took their place. Two men entered the house. I hid beneath my bed. I saw their feet pacing around the room as they searched for me. There was nothing to understand.

  Eleven

  Our lawyer warned me that journalists had been calling her as the media seized on the story. She explained that the identities of victims of sexual assault were protected and asked what name I would prefer to appear under – it was now just a question of when the first article would appear. Marie, I said. My middle name, and the name of my maternal grandmother, the strongest woman I have ever known, upright in her mourning dress. She always used to say that carnations bring bad luck. She was right. Dominique had worn one in his buttonhole the day of our wedding.

  The news broke on October 6th 2021. A friend called to warn me. The banner on the front cover of Le Nouveau Détective, a weekly true-crime magazine, read, ‘Revealed: The worst case ever. For ten years, he drugged his wife to offer her to other men. THE VAUCLUSE RAPIST NETWORK.’ A few lines dragging our life through the mud, just beneath the face of a notorious serial killer. The story was catnip for the lurid tabloid newspapers at the backs of news-stands and the posters in the windows of bar-tobacconists. They have no merit apart from reminding us that there is no hell except on earth. I went to buy a copy.

  Inside the magazine, Dominique’s blurred face took my breath away. I recognised the image straight away, without knowing how it had ended up there; I had taken that picture of him on the beach with our grandson while we were looking after him during the school holidays. That day, I had thought I was immortalising what I held most dear. I could just about make out the hair on the top of Maxime’s head beneath his grandfather’s chin in the crudely cropped picture. Everything else turned to dust: our bond, our love, our walks along the beach. Our memories had been put through a shredder that spat out nothing but a smiling criminal.

  They called him Dominique P., ‘a sixty-something retired tradesman, married to the victim for half a century’. I, therefore, was Marie P. ‘Dominique P. is outgoing, demonstrative even,’ according to the magazine. ‘Marie, a slight woman of sixty-five, is gentle, almost timid.’ Everything was in place for a drama of domination to unfold. Even our bulldog had a pseudonym, unless it was simply a mistake: they said he was called Abundance, perhaps thanks to some former neighbours in Mazan who, I found out later, were only too happy to open their doors to gossip-hungry reporters; they told them we had money, a swimming pool and a red convertible, and that I wore fancy clothes like a Parisienne.

  The article, filled with information that had clearly been leaked, included extracts from the statement taken at my first interview at Carpentras police station. Reading between the lines it became clear that several photographs of the rapes had also been leaked. Over the course of a few paragraphs I became nothing more than the ‘poor woman’ or ‘poor Marie’, the victim I had never wanted to be, which of course I am, legally speaking, but not in the way I live my life. No matter. I turned the pages in one direction then another, and noted that my lawyer had been willing to respond to questions and had declared that I was only coping thanks to the love of my children. I recognised the cul-de-sac bordered with cypress and olive trees where we used to live, the Carpentras supermarket where we did our grocery shopping and where it had all started. But more importantly, I caught a glimpse for the first time of five of my rapists. One was grilling sausages on a barbecue. His face was blurred out, like Dominique’s. They all were for me anyway: a crowd of faceless men whose names I could not yet recall.

  About forty men had already been arrested. My lawyer kept sending me the transcripts of their interrogations; they read like strange truths, scenes with me but without me. I found out that one of the men had HIV. He had come to our house several times and never used a condom. By some miracle he hadn’t infected me. I also realised that another man who had raped me used to greet me very politely at the boulangerie in Mazan; I recognised him because he once came to the house to buy some bicycle wheels. He’d come twice, in fact. I now know that the wheels were just an excuse, an idea of Dominique’s: the guy wanted to have a look at me, to inspect the merchandise – there is no other way of putting it – before raping me. The worst thing, though, was that most of the men denied the charge of rape, and several claimed that I had been moving, participating in their orgy. My lawyer warned me it wouldn’t be easy and that I would be under suspicion as well. I wasn’t expecting that.

  * * *

  • • •

  When the magazine came out, I took refuge in Caroline and Pierre’s holiday home on the Ile de Ré, in the little town of Loix on the north of the island. I settled in at the end of summer, in September. It had been almost a year since my whole life had blown apart. I didn’t want to be a burden to my children; each day I felt more urgently the need to be alone. So I suggested to Caroline and Pierre that I rent their little house, not knowing how long I would stay, and they agreed. For the first time in my life I found myself living alone. I wrote ‘Guillou’ on the letterbox. The summer season was over. The days were getting shorter. Calm was returning to this patch of land dotted with salt marshes like cloudy mirrors that turn pink every evening as the sun is setting. I was living on an island. I felt like a tiny island myself, or rather I wanted to be one, to be cut loose from the mainland, from other people, in other words from the rest of the world and all the human filth that had swamped us, my children and me.

  Over there Dominique was in prison; over there the list of men who had abused me, some of them younger than my children, grew longer every week; over there the media were greedy for more and more details. After Le Nouveau Détective, the Vaucluse section of La Provence and Le Dauphiné Libéré seized upon ‘the Mazan rapes’. Dominique was described as a retired electrician. He became ‘the monster’, ‘the wolf of Mazan’. Every word written about him took on a particular meaning for me, the person who had shared his life for so long. He hadn’t managed to escape any of it after all: the job as an electrician he had been so desperate to move on from, the father whose violence he now embodied and whose same terror he now inspired. Time was looping back on itself. Past and future met, engulfing everything we had strived for.

  I wasn’t sure this island could save me. It was contaminated. We had just found out that Dominique had once organised my rape in the very house where I was now seeking refuge. We had been looking after our grandson for the last week of the summer holidays before his parents came to pick him up for the beginning of the new school year. I remember the date because it was my name day, Sainte Gisèle, in 2018. Dominique and I stayed on for a few days after they left. A video shows a stranger raping me in my daughter and son-in-law’s bedroom. I am wearing garters, torn stockings and black lingerie. Dominique must have brought the paraphernalia with him; he had not been seized by a sudden impulse, he had known all along that the nice grand-père he was for the first week was going to turn into the monster in the second. And that the monster was going to open the front door stark naked. It is described in the court transcripts. He was no longer abiding by any rules of common decency; he reigned over the night like an animal. He must have already raped me before the stranger arrived. He imposed his ritual on the man: he had to undress as soon as he entered the house and make a neat pile of his clothes to be sure that he didn’t leave anything behind when he left. Afterwards the monster struggled to make way for the husband. Back home in Mazan, I couldn’t remember if I had emptied the bins before we left, so I sent a note to Caroline and Pierre to apologise in case I’d forgotten. In fact I had emptied them, but under the influence of the pills Dominique had ground into powder and mixed into my last meal just before we left. I only came round five hundred miles later, at home in Mazan. There is a video taken during our journey: my unconscious body lies on the reclined front seat of the car. He is raping me in a car park.

  I could not be an island.

  * * *

  • • •

  When the examining magistrate, Gwenola Journot, summoned me back to Avignon a month later, in November, she asked me how I was dealing with all the media coverage. I told her about the strange sense I had that they weren’t talking about me, but someone else entirely. It was not the same as the feeling of dissociation that my brain had granted me in Deputy Sergeant Perret’s office in Carpentras; what I felt now was rage. For as the story spread, I was appalled to see that more and more people were saying that I could not have been completely passive. I was starting to appreciate the ordeal that women go through when they report an abuser – confronting a police officer or even a family member or friend with only their honesty, their courage and their bruised body and memory. In my misery, I had no need to say or prove anything; the police had done this already, they had damning evidence, appalling images that I was incapable of looking at, which they had gone through one by one to the point of making the investigators want to vomit. Later I heard how gruelling it had been for them to spend entire days extracting the photographs, videos and messages from Dominique’s computer, phone, camera, memory cards and USB sticks, and then to look through it all, examine it second by second, month by month, year by year. They are trained to investigate crimes, not to witness them. And yet, despite everything, I would still have to convince people. The faint refrain of the accused kept rising, carried by their lawyers and – more wounding still – by what people so casually call ‘common sense’. Again and again those anonymous voices returned to me, whispering that I could not possibly have forgotten. Impossible, they insisted. For many, the idea of a macabre procession of men approaching the bed of a lifeless woman was unbearable, inconceivable. She could not, in their eyes, be entirely innocent.