Winter was setting in. It would soon be too cold to get around on foot or by bicycle. I needed to start driving again, so I could go shopping, get to my therapist or the train station. I had hardly dared get behind the wheel after I’d lost control of my car between Carpentras and Mazan in the summer of 2018. Dominique had gone to buy groceries at that cursed Leclerc supermarket. He came home and told me he’d locked his keys in his car and someone had given him a lift back. I don’t know how much of that to believe now, but in any case we had to go back with the spare key. We took my car, but he drove. On the way home, we agreed I would follow him. As I pulled out of the car park I hit a low wall. After that everything went from bad to worse. I couldn’t steer straight, and he watched in his rear-view mirror as I drove dangerously close to the ditch, then veered into the opposite lane until I was hitting the plastic bollards that line the side of the road. Dominique switched on his hazard lights, got me to slow down, and we both stopped. I watched him run towards me with tears in his eyes. ‘You’re going to kill yourself!’ Yes, I could have died, and it would have been because of him, although I didn’t know it at the time, but it is clear now that I was under the influence of the drugs he was feeding me. Perhaps a rape had taken place the previous night, or there was one planned for that evening. It didn’t stop him genuinely weeping at the thought that I might have driven into the ditch. And now I will live out the rest of my days with that double face: the one that wept, and the one that was slowly killing me.

  I had no need to be afraid of driving now that my past blackouts had an explanation. And yet the sense of danger remained etched inside me. But I needed a car on the Ile de Ré, and ended up buying Caroline’s little runaround. I made my way carefully along the island roads, glad when I found myself behind a tractor slowing down the traffic, then with increasing confidence. I was no longer scared of having an accident.

  I decided to stay on the island for Christmas and New Year. I would greet 2022 facing the sea, the way one looks into the unknown. But Caroline wanted to use her house for a week during the holidays, and asked me to make myself scarce. I found myself with nowhere to go. I looked at hotels, mobile homes, campsites, but everything was either shut or already full. It was Angèle and Fred who offered me their house. They gave me the keys and their cat to look after while they were away.

  It was then that I began to feel the strength of these new bonds. I realised that it is possible to spend Christmas far from one’s family and still love them. That you can find comfort in sitting alone in the evening, nibbling on toast with cheese and a tomato, without having to look after anyone else. And most of all that I needed a place of my own.

  ‘Tell me about your childhood,’ my therapist said to me during our third session.

  And that was how she began to understand the life force within me.

  Twelve

  When the phone rang that October evening in 2022, I was curled up on the sofa with the flu. It had been a cold, damp autumn on the Ile de Ré. I didn’t recognise the number, and I hesitated before answering. Eventually I picked up. A man’s voice introduced himself as a police officer. It’s about your husband. Yes, I said. It’s always about my husband when the police call. No, this has nothing to do with the ongoing case, the policeman said. He told me he worked in Nanterre, in a unit investigating unsolved and serial crimes. Actually that was the first thing he said, so I should have known another storm was brewing; Nanterre was a long way from Avignon. I just hadn’t taken it in. I was too under the weather to pay proper attention. But every word he was about to utter was going to tear my life apart again. He brought up some cold cases from years ago, an attempted rape, a murder. He mentioned the 1990s. He gave me the name of one of the victims. I couldn’t grasp what he was saying, it had nothing to do with me. And then he said that Dominique was the principal suspect in both cases. It seemed utterly unreal, as if his words were being filtered through a feverish haze. I felt numb. I lay on the sofa, unable to move. At least I didn’t have to worry about collapsing when the policeman told me that a few weeks earlier Dominique had confessed to the attempted rape.

  I heard him say that he’d like me to come to Nanterre for questioning. I heard myself tell him that I lived a long way away and wasn’t well enough to travel. He didn’t insist. He said he would come to see me on the Ile de Ré. I hung up, my chest burning. When was this all going to stop? How many circles of hell were there in the pit I had fallen into two years ago?

  The next morning, when my lawyer called to discuss the new development, I gave her short shrift. I was exhausted and unwell, and the one thing I wanted to avoid was her commandeering the situation. I didn’t want to talk about it with her. I couldn’t bear to listen to her laying it on thick, the way she did every time she read me yet another confession from one of the men who had raped me. This was a different case, nothing to do with her, though it clearly had something to do with me. But I needed room to breathe.

  * * *

  • • •

  I had in fact been breathing more easily of late. I was no longer living in Caroline’s house. A couple of months earlier, I’d moved into a little three-room house just around the corner that adjoined a larger house built around a courtyard. Unlike most of the people I knew on the island, Patrice and Eric, the owners, knew what had happened, and when they heard that I was looking for somewhere they suggested I move into this little house. They even decided to build a wall in the courtyard to give me more privacy, with a door at one end so I could easily be in contact with them and the rest of the property whenever I needed. I loved the little sunny courtyard where I had my coffee in the morning if the weather was fine. This house became my bubble, a breath of fresh air that had nothing to do with my previous life and offered me hope for the future. For the first time since I had fled Mazan, I felt at home.

  In the meantime, my debt situation had improved slightly. I put together a management plan myself, as I couldn’t afford a lawyer. Françoise gave me a lot of help with gathering supporting documents and evidence of debt. In my defence, I furnished the tribunal with the newspaper articles about the Mazan rape investigation. I hated them, couldn’t bear what they brought to light, but I made use of them all the same. The tribunal hearing took place in March. There were so many other people there. So many debt-ridden people. I waited my turn, surrounded by those who had also come to plead their case: they couldn’t pay their rent on time; there’d been a divorce, they’d lost their job, been on long-term sick leave, had an addiction. All those slippery slopes seemed quite benign compared to my situation, just the banal twists and turns of ordinary life. I’d never asked anyone for anything. I envied all those people their problems. I had never believed in unadulterated happiness. Both love and adversity had been my inheritance. When it was my turn to be heard, I asked permission to move closer to the judges’ bench. I didn’t want to explain what had happened to me in front of everyone else in the room, that my husband was in prison because for ten years he had drugged me, raped me and invited other men to rape me. The shame I felt was still overwhelming. I was allowed to move closer and explain my story in a whisper. Clearly, the judges had not gone through every applicant’s file with a fine-toothed comb, and they hadn’t noticed the newspaper articles I had slipped into mine. I saw the expressions on their faces change. I was told that Dominique had paid the outstanding balance of his tax bill since being in prison, and it now fell to me to repay 350 euros a month over a period of four years.

  That was bearable, a much smaller sum than originally demanded. I’d been right to appeal. I was still hiding behind a pseudonym. At first I was the ‘victim’, or the ‘spouse’, then I became Marie P., chosen in haste six months earlier when the media first got hold of the story. Caroline took it up with me one day when I was visiting her in Paris. Marie was the name of her first cousin, Joël Pelicot’s daughter. She was furious and concerned about her reputation. I made the mistake of responding that it was my middle name, and there was no risk of her cousin being mistaken for me, since she was much younger and had never lived anywhere near Mazan. Caroline flew off the handle and threw me out of her house. When Pascale came to pick me up, she found herself an impotent witness to the wretchedly complicated relationship between me and my daughter, whom she had known since she was a little girl. Each of us locked inside our own grief, as if we were being borne off on two opposing currents, with very different survival strategies. ‘Pretend you’re suffering, it’ll do her good,’ our lawyer suggested to me one day. But I was suffering! Keeping going, hanging on, putting on a brave face was all I knew how to do, and it was what I wished for my daughter too.

  Eventually, after yet another argument, I stopped being Marie P. and decided to be known as Françoise P. It was my second middle name and that of the grandmother I had never known, my father’s mother, who died when he was seven. I was no longer concealing my identity behind the grandmother who had lit up my childhood, but behind a ghost.

  In any event, the media frenzy was at last beginning to abate. The spate of arrests had come to an end. Some fifty men were now behind bars; another thirty who can be seen in the videos proved impossible to identify. I couldn’t stop thinking about those filthy bastards walking free. What further crimes were they committing, who were they going to rape? They must have been fully aware of the case. To know they were at liberty out there in the world triggered waves of panic. What if they tried to find me? What if they wanted to hurt me? I knew I was being irrational; they would be much better off keeping their heads down given the terrible things they had done to me. Then I would return to my daily life, the small things. Mornings, afternoons and evenings. On sleepless nights, when it’s better to get up than to toss and turn, I would push open the courtyard door, go into Patrice and Eric’s laundry room, plug in the iron to flatten everything, smooth everything, and cry in secret while waiting for the first rays of the morning sun to appear. My only compass was the slow drip of time passing, and at moments it even seemed to offer me a few promises – if only because I was still alive.

  I still took long walks, alone or with my friend Françoise, Pascale’s sister, and my panting bulldog. A white patch had appeared on his muzzle since he had lost his master. How could I explain to a dog what had happened? I didn’t know, although I did sometimes find myself saying I’m dog-tired of the whole thing. I had no idea what Lancôme was feeling, but it seemed to me that the spreading white mark on his coat was an expression of his pain. I hoped that mine was less visible.

  * * *

  • • •

  Two weeks after the phone call I was summoned to the police station in Saint-Martin-de-Ré to be questioned by two officers from Nanterre. I could sense their discomfort. Their dread of layering the unspeakable on to the despicable, the fear that it would finish me off. And just as I had noticed in the expressions of so many other people, I could see their surprise that I was still standing. I had got over the flu. I was feeling much better. I was rebuilding my defences and my resilience. I listened more carefully this time: in December 1991, a twenty-three-year-old estate agent called Sophie Narme was drugged with ether, raped, strangled and stabbed to death while she was showing a client around an apartment in the 19th arrondissement in Paris. Almost eight years later, in May 1999, a young woman whose identity is now protected was similarly ensnared while showing a man around an apartment. She managed to fight him off and lock herself in a wardrobe. The man left. She had recognised Dominique from photographs published in the run-up to the trial. Initially he denied the attempted rape, but he was caught out by a DNA test and eventually confessed. He continued, however, to maintain that he had nothing to do with the murder of Sophie Narme, and the police didn’t have enough evidence to charge him. The DNA samples taken from the dead woman had been lost, but the police detectives were too struck by the similarities between the victims and the methods of the two attacks not to pursue their investigations.

  I confirmed that on the two dates in question Monsieur Pelicot and I were living together in a town just outside Paris, and that at the beginning of the decade Dominique was working as an estate agent, but by 1999 had stopped. They showed me a photograph of the Cartier watch worn by Sophie Narme. I had never seen it. They asked if Dominique was a tidy person, how he put away his clothes. The question surprised me. They explained that the second young woman he had attacked described how, after he had tied up her hands, the rapist had got undressed and neatly folded and stacked his clothes before he threw himself on her. I told the police officers about the valet stand in our bedroom where Dominique used to hang his suit. That was all. I didn’t know what I was doing there. I sat up very straight on my chair, but inside me everything was collapsing like one of those children’s games where you carefully build something and then knock the whole thing down with one wave of the hand.

  Françoise was being questioned in the room next door. She had only met Dominique a handful of times, and knew him far less well than her sister, Pascale, did; she really had nothing much to say, and she had even booked a hair appointment for straight afterwards, thinking she’d only be at the police station briefly. It never crossed her mind that the police would keep her for three hours, trying to pinpoint some detail that might emerge from a sentence and become a key piece in the puzzle. Françoise had nothing to tell them other than that she had met a nice guy who’d given her some helpful advice when she was looking to buy an apartment near Paris. As for me, I told them I’d never seen any sign of bruising or scratches on Dominique, or any rips or marks on his clothes. I was questioned for five hours. It was dark by the time I left. A friend from Loix came to pick me up so I didn’t have to go back to the house alone.

  After I got home I poured myself a glass of wine and called Françoise to ask how things had gone for her. Then I called Pascale. I needed to talk, to purge myself, to go back over everything in my own words. I wondered aloud why he had never said anything to me. I could only imagine that before he had acted on his impulses, he must have had urges he’d tried to restrain; I might have been able to help him myself, or at least encourage him to seek help elsewhere. ‘Stop trying to save the whole world,’ Pascale begged me. She tried to make me understand that this was no longer just about my husband, it was about a dangerous man. The crimes were no longer confined to our bedroom, our house. This was no longer the tragic love story of Gisèle and Dominique, though they certainly had once existed and I loved them still, with their youth, uncertainty and hope. I even protected them to the point of seeing in everything that had happened to me – in all the evil things he had done to me with other men – a form of ghastly possession, the decaying of our love. I was his drug, the only power he had over life. It sickened me, it could have killed me, but it was still fundamentally about him and me.

  The new inquiry told quite a different story. This was a sexual predator who preyed upon young women. I sensed in Pascale’s voice that she was doing everything she could to help me keep my head above water, even though she herself was at a loss for words. This was a leap into another dimension, where humanity no longer existed and language failed. I could barely breathe. My chest was so tight it hurt. I felt dismembered. Sometimes I was a headless body, chasing the idea that I might have saved him from his demons, at others I was a stupid woman who’d allowed herself to be manipulated, and was now eaten up with shame.

  I felt so alone that evening after I hung up the phone. There was no point trying to sleep. Even in those circumstances, there was no way I was ever going to take the sleeping pills that Dominique used to ply me with. Not that I had any in the house. I watched the hours tick by. What does an hour hold? Or a minute, or a lifetime for that matter? I didn’t know any more. I was losing my grip on reality. Everything was slipping away. It felt as if the sun would never rise again. My life was one long, endless night.

  * * *

  • • •

  I didn’t phone my children for a few days. I thought about them, about the devastating impact these revelations would have on them, how hard it was going to be. They would also be summoned for questioning. David, once so close to his father, was going to see Dominique’s face pinned up on the wall in the police station alongside photographs of other notorious serial killers and rapists. But I wouldn’t be able to console him any more than he could console me. Like Caroline and me, we now barely spoke. He had aligned himself with his sister and all her anger and suspicions that were gradually turning into certainties. But without evidence, without a confession, I could not bring myself to say that the irreparable had taken place. Yes, I so hoped that it hadn’t happened. For her sake, above all for her sake. Our infrequent telephone calls always ended badly.

  Tragedy had struck not only our current lives, but our memories too. David and Caroline were grappling with theirs, trying and failing to locate a red flag that might have alerted them, but finding only fragments of a happy childhood. I brandished the memories awkwardly in front of them, which made me feel better, but must have only made it all the more painful for them. They probably felt betrayed and at the same time guilty for all the laughter and fun they had shared with their father, and tainted by being the children of a man guilty of such crimes. They wanted to erase it all. And that erasure included me as well.

  The only one of my children I could talk to without either of us becoming upset was Florian. Sometimes when we spoke we didn’t even talk about the case. I could just ask what was going on with his children, how they were doing at school, their holiday plans, his creative projects. It was what I needed. To carry on living.

  That also meant living with the thought that one evening Dominique had come back to the house in Gournay-sur-Marne that we loved so much and sat down to dinner as if nothing had happened, hours after he had tried to rape a twenty-year-old woman. So young. Now she was in my head too. But always out of focus. The thing I could see in sharp detail was the man who had undressed her and tied her up, the man she had fought off, the man whose testicles she had grabbed so hard he let her go. The man with whom I had spent my life. That day, he had beaten her so he could rape her, and then he must have come back to our house. How had he not cracked? How had I not noticed anything? I didn’t forget the other young woman either. She was dead. But Dominique denied he had killed her, and the Nanterre police admitted they had no proof that he had, though they were still searching. Which left me with a faint shred of hope to cling to. Dominique was a rapist, but not necessarily a murderer. And once more I cut him in two, as if I were amputating a limb after gangrene had set in. Saving something of him was saving something of us, saving our skin and anything else that could be salvaged from the ruins of our life.