‘What would you like to say to the men who question the claim that you were unaware of anything at all for the ten years during which the events took place?’ the magistrate asked me.

  ‘What do you want me to say to them? In the few photographs I’ve seen, I look dead, or as good as dead, at the very least in a coma.’

  Who could I speak to about my shame? Sometimes I’d wake up in the morning and my pyjamas were soaked. I couldn’t understand what was happening. It was as if I had wet myself in my sleep, as if I no longer controlled my ageing body. Not a single doctor had been able to allay my concerns.

  The magistrate persevered. She told me there was one defendant who had sworn to her that he had seen me make an inviting gesture; he was even prepared to discuss this with me in a face-to-face confrontation. I replied that this was pure intimidation and asked whether such a hand movement was visible in the videos I didn’t want to see. Obviously not.

  The idea of watching them myself, as she kept suggesting, was still more than I could stomach. The detailed interviews with the criminals, relayed to me one by one as each man was arrested, and these discussions with the magistrate, were more than enough. Quite sufficient to haunt me. Afterwards I could only recall fragments, I couldn’t take it all in, it was too crude, too violent, too many men, too many times. One part of me didn’t want to get swept away, another part was only just waking up. That was when I remembered that a crown on one of my teeth had come dangerously loose during the months of lockdown when it was so hard to get an appointment with a dentist. Dominique had wrapped his fingers in a piece of gauze and gently prised it off. To think that I believed he was being kind and helpful! In fact the crown had come loose under the violence of penises being repeatedly forced into my slack mouth. And I finally worked out why I kept waking up soaking wet. Once they had finished their filthy business, and the other pervert had left, Dominique would take the lingerie off me, give me a vaginal douche with an enema bulb and put my pyjamas back on. There was no reason for me to be ashamed. My body was telling me what was happening but I couldn’t understand its message. I didn’t need the videos on top of everything else I was imagining. I didn’t want to witness the evil things they had done to me.

  The magistrate went on to tell me about some new photographs of Caroline and my daughters-in-law, Aurore and Céline. She asked me if I wanted to see them. I said yes. With a tiny spy-camera pen placed in a toilet bag, he had taken pictures of them in the shower, both at our house and at theirs. With his mobile phone set up on the bedside table, he had filmed Caroline getting dressed in the guest bedroom in Mazan. He had gone further. He had photoshopped images of mother and daughter side by side, in lingerie, and posted the pictures on the internet. The magistrate read a message he had sent to one of his contacts: ‘You like comparisons, here you go. I made this one of my bitch and her daughter, she had no idea I took the picture.’ His daughter was just my daughter now, which was presumably what made it possible for him to serve her degrading, stolen image up to the sexual predators flocking to him on the dark web, and to claim to be a father the next morning. But I was still his bitch.

  ‘What do you have to say to this?’ the magistrate asked.

  ‘What do you want me to say? It’s so sordid, there isn’t anything to say.’

  * * *

  • • •

  There was nothing sacred left. He had sullied everything. All of us. Every room in the house. Our bedroom. The room his children slept in. The magistrate read me Dominique’s statement after she had showed him those images. He told her he had shared them on the internet a few times, ‘but not that many’. He acknowledged this was deviant behaviour. He insisted he had never drugged or touched his daughter.

  ‘What do you have to say to this?’ the magistrate repeated.

  ‘I don’t have an answer, about her, I don’t have an answer.’

  ‘Did you ever sense that your husband might be attracted to his daughter or daughters-in-law?’

  ‘Never.’

  I said he was a pathetic creep. The thought crossed my mind that he must have sat opposite her in the very room I was sitting in now. On this very chair, perhaps. Did he perch on the edge of the seat like you do when you’re ill at ease, or did he lean against the back rest? Was he handcuffed? The magistrate told me Dominique had brought up doubts about Florian’s paternity.

  I was horrified. ‘Next thing you know this will all be my fault! It’s absurd. Nothing makes sense any more.’

  ‘You pointed out that he didn’t even spare you on special dates – it happened on your saint’s day, Valentine’s Day, your birthday. What do you have to say about that?’

  ‘He had no boundaries any more. I don’t know how far he would have gone if he hadn’t been caught in the supermarket. I think I’d probably be dead by now.’

  * * *

  • • •

  In conversation with her, it was all about my torturer and the pack of bastards that he communicated with on the dark web. It was almost simpler that way. When I talked to her, everything was simple, I felt nothing but disgust. I was even able to face up to the thought that he might have killed me. But I knew full well that as soon as I was alone I would go back to thinking about the man with two faces, the rapist and the man I used to call Doumé. I knew that the beaches of the Ile de Ré would always remind me of our long walks, playing board games, our fits of the giggles, Maxime asking for yet another ride on the merry-go-round. And afterwards, as it got dark, I would begin to wonder what would have happened had I suddenly woken up to find a stranger in my bed – whether Dominique would have killed me. What was he thinking about as he watched me as I lay unconscious after his crimes had been committed? I can’t stop asking myself these questions, and more than anything, I can’t stop wondering what I could have done, or said, or even simply what I might have seen.

  There was the night when as we were having sex he whispered in my ear his fantasy of watching me being sodomised by a Black man. What if I had looked him in the eye then? I was shocked and hurt to know that while we were making love he was imagining me with someone else, imagining handing me over to another man who would do the thing I refused to have done to me. Our intimacy had no meaning any more. I didn’t move. What would I have seen on his face if I had removed his hands from my body, turned on the bedside lamp, spun around and said, ‘What on earth are you talking about?’ Would I have seen the grotesque smirk of the rapist come into focus? Would I have been able to make the mask slip? I will never know. I let it go that night. The next day I decided not to talk about it; I thought about bringing it up but I didn’t dare, I was still mortified. I was probably afraid of what it might reveal, or simply afraid of him. I let it go with a sense of bitterness against myself, and dumped it on to the garbage heap of male fantasy. Now I wonder if it hadn’t already happened. I think it must have done; in fact, I have seen it in the photographs, so surely it had already begun by then. He was letting me know in a half-whisper, but there was no way I could understand. It was inconceivable.

  ‘Did you ever notice a tendency on your husband’s part to lie?’ the magistrate asked.

  ‘No. Half-truths, yes, but outright lying, no.’

  Today, I don’t think I would be able to make the distinction between a lie and a half-truth. But when I said that, I was alluding to moments during the last few years when I would come upon him sitting alone, sombre, lost in thought. If I asked him what was wrong, he would be evasive, say everything was fine, and that was enough for me. I always put it down to our financial worries. What I didn’t tell the magistrate, though she must have suspected it, was that even since the revelation of all that had happened, I was still trying to detect doubt and regret in him; I wanted to believe that what I saw was him fighting his alter ego, swearing to himself that he would never hurt me again. Perhaps it was the opposite, a sign that the worst was yet to come, the prelude to the transformation, but I was desperate to believe the opposite. It was my way of shielding myself when I was alone.

  I clung to the memories of our shared laughter, of moments of intimacy. It was him, it was me. Obviously there could be no ulterior motive, not that time. In November 2017, we were going home from Caroline’s house on Ile de Ré, driving back to Mazan. It was All Saints’ Day and I wanted to clean and put flowers on my mother and brother’s grave, so we drove through the Indre and stopped at Azay-le-Ferron, where it had all begun. We felt like survivors, people from both here and there. Then we drove to Châtillon-sur-Indre to do the same thing for Dominique’s parents’ graves – really for his mother, in fact – but on the way, when we went to buy some chrysanthemums, our debit card was declined. We had reached our overdraft limit. So when we got to the cemetery, we borrowed the bouquet from the neighbouring tombstone, just for a moment, long enough to share some quiet thoughts, and to laugh. We laughed so much as we moved the flowers from one gravestone to the other, laughed as we thanked the gentleman next door, laughed at our bank for forbidding us this small gesture for his parents, laughed at them, and at ourselves as well, laughed nervously and painfully at the violence that haunted the past, and was buried at last. I thought we had learned how to live well, and evil was now rotting underground. And yet it was growing right there beside me. I now know that in 2017 the frequency of the rapes began to accelerate. By then Dominique had started to make contact with the worst kinds of men, feeding his most depraved fantasies, a far cry from the shy, gentle electrician I had met in the Indre.

  After our visits to the cemeteries, we went into town to the nursing home to see my Aunt Jeanne, with whom I had stayed after my mother died, before my father took us to live in Paris. She didn’t hear us come into her room. She was shrunken and emaciated, sitting with her back to us, looking out of the window. ‘Jeanne?’ I called out softly. ‘Gigi!’ she exclaimed as she turned around, and her voice held all the warmth and goodness that she had wrapped me in when I was nine. Then, looking up at Dominique, she asked, ‘Who’s that?’ She didn’t recognise him. At the time, I thought it was because his hair had gone white, or because she was so old. But now that I know what was going on in his head that year, how he had become my tormentor, I wonder whether my aunt, who had protected me during the worst time of my life, had had the clairvoyance of those who are about to leave this world. They see the true nature of things. If she hadn’t recognised the man I had married, perhaps it was because he was not the man standing at my side that afternoon.

  * * *

  • • •

  The interviews with the magistrate lasted three or four hours. We were beginning to get into the violence of the evidence. I would come out exhausted, usually around 6 p.m. Sometimes I stayed with my friends Brigitte and Guy near Avignon and only left the following day. Seeing friends made the ordeal easier to bear. One day, their son said to me, ‘I am ashamed of being a man.’ I told him he shouldn’t be. That day I took the high-speed train to Paris and spent the night at Pascale’s house. I left straight away the next morning. I had a meeting on the island with a therapist someone had recommended to me.

  Still shaken by my conversation with the magistrate, I told her the whole story. I was immediately struck by the impression that she didn’t believe me. She gave off a sense of authority, and I was convinced she thought I was a compulsive liar. ‘Google Mazan, you’ll see,’ I said. At last I’d found a use for the publicity that so horrified me. She did a quick search and saw the headlines. Now I was an enigma to her. To her as well, I should say. She couldn’t work out how I was still holding up, by what magic, or rather by what mechanism. I smiled as I explained that it was very difficult and painful, but everything would be all right in the end.

  I said pretty much the same thing to Françoise, Pascale’s sister, who lived year-round on the island and whom I saw frequently. To Geneviève too, Dominique’s half-sister. We had taken to speaking on the phone once a week. I always felt as if we were talking about the same man – she knew better than anyone where Dominique came from; this whole affair was reawakening within her the shadows of her youth, the danger of Denis Pelicot, everything she had fled. Like me, she felt she needed to speak to her brother, she had so many questions. She told me she’d like to visit him in prison, but she was in hospital – she was over eighty and had a weak heart – so instead of visiting she wrote to him. The magistrate read me a passage from one of Geneviève’s letters that she pulled out of a file – they had all been handed over to her, because correspondence sent to a prisoner is always opened before being delivered. This letter had been photocopied and added to the file. In September 2021 Geneviève wrote, ‘Gisèle’s doing well. You’re lucky, she only wants to hold on to the good memories of you.’ The magistrate was struck by this sentence and asked me to explain my sister-in-law’s assessment of me, which she shared and which, I sensed, disturbed her. I said I didn’t want to give the impression that I wasn’t okay. I told her I was talking through my pain with my therapist. But even she found it hard to understand me. I left it to them to figure out my pride, my reticence, my lines of flight.

  I walked. Even more than before. I love the island for its long beaches, its changing skies, and the certainty it gives you that the clouds will not hover above your head for ever, that the weather will turn and chase them away. I walked for hours through the forest and across the dunes, to the sound of the surf and the tides. It is only by moving, by scouring myself with the elements, that I am able to confront my grief. When I am indoors, or with another person, I keep it at bay. As if the trap will snap shut again, as if the game was up long ago, the day I learned of my mother’s death when I walked out of one room and into another. And that inconsolable little girl is still buried deep inside me, the child whom no one and nothing has been able to comfort ever since, not even love, not even friendship, not even motherhood.

  The little nine-year-old girl is still here, restless within me. She has peopled my nightmares with armoured tanks and men who are hunting me down. She has kept me from sleeping since Papa’s death. How hard I have tried to hush her voice and her pain. All my life I have warded off silence with music, fought insomnia with the hum of the radio, filled the empty spaces of daily life with cooking and tidying, chasing away dust, crumbs, mess, creases, weeds. I must seem obsessive, but keeping everything spick and span is vitally important to me. A single grain of sand could ruin everything and the little girl’s fears would catch up with me again.

  And now that everything has collapsed, that girl wants only to scream – or perhaps she wants to rejoice, since for ten years my sleep has been a kind of execution. There are only the two of us left. Only her and me.

  So I would go out, and with a slow but steady step, leaving no trace in the sand, I walked. I soothed her, rocked her, exhausted her, lulled her to sleep. I fought against her and for her. I asked compassion of no one. I kept going.

  * * *

  • • •

  There aren’t many people left on the island as the days begin to draw in. We see one another from a distance, find ourselves crossing paths at the same time every day by force of habit; our dogs sniff each other, we chat about them, their ages and breeds, then a little about ourselves. Eventually we exchange names, and wave in the direction of the house we live in. One day we go for coffee and begin to open up a little. ‘Were you married?’ ‘Did you own your own home?’ ‘Did you have to sell in order to buy here?’ Questions that reek of affluence, property deals, gilded retirement plans. But I had nothing now. I had never really owned anything anyway, and I was still dealing with my debt management plan, having lodged an appeal against the initial assessment of what I owed. So I remained evasive. I chattered away about other things. My story was making headlines, but it was simply impossible for me to talk about it.

  I made new friends nevertheless. I accepted the odd invitation. I discovered that a small door can open on to a large courtyard and a vast house as beautiful as in any magazine. It was a different world, yet it adopted me. I let it happen. It was as if I had two parallel lives. And I pushed back against any questions as best I could.

  With Angèle and Fred, who rented a little house up the road, I felt free to be a bit more open about myself, to display some vulnerability, I suppose because I knew something about theirs. They were the same age as my children but, with other lives and painful divorces behind them, like me they had come to the island to escape. They had slept in their car until they’d found a place they could afford. Angèle cleaned for a few families to make ends meet, and Fred harvested potatoes or worked in the vineyards depending on the season. One day I told them I’d been struck head-on by a high-speed train. It’s an image I like to use to describe what happened. It’s obvious that it means something serious, a real bloodbath, and there’s no need to say anything else. Angèle took it almost literally, she thought I had been in a terrible accident. She didn’t say anything but thought that the surgeon who had rebuilt my face had done an excellent job. And so my new friends came to understand that I would need a little time to explain my solitary presence on the island.