But we were able to distinguish between the 2CVs and 4CVs that belonged to the locals, and the Citroën DSs that belonged to the rich people who parked in front of the patisserie in Azay-le-Ferron, famous for its millefeuille and a cake shaped like a melon (from which it got its name, ‘melon with almonds’) that was served with crème anglaise. And we knew why our grandmother always wore mourning dress even though our grandfather was still alive. I was with her and Maman the day one of my uncles came to tell us that Micheline had died. His eyes were red, and his two little boys stood next to him clutching their pillows. Their sister had got burnt when their mother was heating up the alcohol she used to pluck chickens; the liquid had spilled on her and she didn’t survive the journey to the hospital. My cousin Micheline was dead. She was one of us, a little girl with cropped brown hair. Not the cousin I played with the most – she was older, twelve – but she was family. The next day, my grandmother put on the black dress that she would wear for the rest of her life. And all around us, the trees, fields and chateaux would bear witness to how we knew to hold our tears in.

  Most of all, we knew that Maman was very ill. Sometimes she went to hospital and was brought back, pale and thin, on a trolley pushed by the ambulance drivers. I was always afraid that she would fall off, that she would roll on to the ground and never make it back inside the house. One day, as we were walking to school, one of my cousins let slip the word ‘cancer’; she was talking about someone else, but the word stuck, it sounded like a possible explanation, and also like a death sentence. Soon after, Grand-mère began cycling over to our house to take care of everything, to look after us all, especially Maman. I watched her arrive in her black dress every morning, and leave every evening. Maman never cried, or at least never in front of us. So I never did either. I once heard her scream. The slightest pressure caused her pain. The cancer had reached her bones. No one could touch her any more. I watched my grandmother unroll long bands of white cotton that she padded behind Maman’s shoulders. Her pelvis was in a plaster cast. Her bed had been moved into the kitchen near the window so that she was never alone. There was the red Formica table next to it with the Telefunken radio sitting on top, and the smell of polish with which Hélène, the cleaner, gave a high shine to the copper pieces Papa brought back from Algeria, where he had been deployed.

  These memories were still vivid when I returned to my aunt’s house in the summer of 1971. Everything in me was trembling. I was unsteady on my feet. The past was pulling me in, with all its happiness and tragedy, as if my life had already been mapped out. And then Dominique walked into the kitchen. I’d been stung between the eyes by a wasp that day, the venom was circulating, my eyelids were so swollen I could barely see. I must have looked unrecognisable. He reminded me of the pop star Julien Clerc, with his shoulder-length curls and his striped sweater.

  He stayed late at my aunt’s house that evening, obviously putting off the moment he would have to go home to his parents in Châtillon-sur-Indre. He appeared very fond of my family, who offered him a warmth he seemed never to have encountered before. As if he were seeking some kind of reparation or affection. I was too.

  I was nineteen that summer, and living in Paris with my father, brother and stepmother, working as a secretary at a printing press that produced bank cheques. To Dominique, I was a Parisienne, with everything that the countryside can project on to that word. In fact, we were just two kids who had been pushed into working at a very young age. And we had both spent our childhood scraping our knees in this corner of the Indre. His shyness reassured me. He blushed a lot. He was not one of those self-assured young men. I knew nothing of love, I had never even had a flirtation, but I just knew that he was going to love me. The fact that I met him at Andrée’s house was a sign, a sign from Maman that she was watching over me. This man was going to fall in love with me. And my life, which had lost its meaning, was about to take on a new purpose.

  As soon as I got back to Paris, I told my father about him. He poured cold water on my enthusiasm. He said that I was too young, that we had no life experience. As a career soldier, he disapproved of the fact that Dominique had avoided military service. I think he didn’t want to let me go. I was not yet legally an adult, but I was earning my living, and every weekend I would take the train to the Indre to be with Dominique, bringing him gifts of sweaters and cologne I had bought in Paris. I was drawing him towards me, towards the city and away from his family, whom I was only beginning to get to know. His mother, Juliette, said that he would be unhappy in Paris. She was fifty, and already looked worn out by life. His father, Denis Pelicot, seemed to be constantly shouting. They often spoke admiringly of his brother, Joël, who was studying medicine in Tours, whereas Dominique had left school early and still handed over his electrician’s salary to his parents each month. He shared a bedroom with Nicole, a little girl with a learning disability who was a ward of the state being fostered by the family. The other bedroom was where his paternal grandfather slept. For many years he had been a porter at a grand hotel in Trouville, and from the way they said it, it was as if he had returned from a distant continent. He suffered from Parkinson’s now. Dominique’s parents slept in the living room. I sensed how bleak their world was, their sad lives behind all those closed doors.

  And yet it was under that very roof that we made love for the first time. I kept putting the moment off, I wanted to be sure, I needed to know he was the One. He was in more of a hurry, but was prepared to wait until I was ready. It happened one night in May 1972. I was visiting for the weekend, staying at his parents’ house, and since we weren’t married, I had been given his grandfather’s room. In the middle of the night Dominique sneaked in. It was my first time, and his too. I remember the softness of skin on skin, how shy we were, and obviously a little awkward. Afterwards he slipped back to his own room, leaving me with the impression that we had made a pact. We were lovers and we were twins. We would always be together; our suffering behind us, we would escape from our damaged families. I would be his cure and he would be mine. A few months later he came up to Paris to ask my father for my hand in marriage. My father didn’t dare say no.

  ‘For better or for worse,’ declared the man who married us on April 14th 1973. I became Gisèle Pelicot. The celebration was a simple one. We had no money. Dominique wore a carnation in his buttonhole. There is a beautiful wedding photograph of the two of us, taken in the castle grounds, in the shadow of the Château d’Azay-le-Ferron.

  I was starting a new life. I was in love.

  Three

  I wanted to go home.

  ‘Will you be pressing charges?’ Deputy Sergeant Perret asked.

  ‘Yes.’ The word came out of my mouth sounding so meek. If he hadn’t asked the question, it never would have occurred to me. I just wanted this to stop. To go home. To get back to my normal life. I signed the crime report form he held out to me, as if signing a disclaimer. Then my statement. I scribbled PCT, the abbreviation of Pelicot, at the bottom of each page, without reading any of it, without seeing that I had also said yes: ‘Yes, that is me, that’s my room.’ Those are the words that are written on the document; those are the words the police heard me say. It’s all so different from what I remember. My head was screaming no – no, it’s not me, it’s not him. ‘I don’t know where I am any more.’ Those words are written too. That’s what I said.

  Laurent Perret suggested a colleague take me home. ‘You should call someone, you mustn’t be alone,’ he said. When I finally left the police station, Dominique must have still been there. A police officer drove my car and parked in the gravel driveway in front of the garage. He did not come inside. He left immediately in the police vehicle that had followed us to the house. I opened the front door with relief, as if coming home might erase the hours that had just passed – as if I could forget them, as I had forgotten so many things over the last few years. I’d forgotten what we’d done for my birthday only a day before. I’d forgotten saying goodbye to the children when they left. I’d forgotten I’d been to the hairdresser, even though I could see in the mirror that my hair had just been cut and coloured. I had been having more and more of these memory lapses. I dreaded them. I was afraid to drive, I was afraid to take the train, I was afraid I’d miss my station. I was afraid I was dying. But that day, I deliberately wanted to summon that emptiness into my head. I wanted to forget that I had just come home from the police station, alone.

  Impossible. While we were at the station, investigators had been to the house to carry out a search. They’d turned the whole place upside down. I started tidying up. Everything had to be back in its place. I put a load of laundry in the washing machine. Then I rang Pierre, my son-in-law, and left a message: ‘Pierre, can you call me back? It’s about Dominique.’ That was it. No details. Telling and not telling. I had no idea what I was going to say to the children. I vacuumed the living room. I called my friend Sylvie: ‘Can you come over? I have to talk to you.’ No explanation, like my message to Pierre. She said she would come right away. I was still reeling. I hung Dominique’s boxer shorts, pyjamas and trousers on the washing line in the garden. It was a sunny day, the clothes would dry in no time. Everything was nice and clean. I was like a dog waiting by the garden gate for its master. He’d be back soon. His car was in the garage. I vacuumed the bedrooms and started on the pile of ironing.

  Sylvie arrived. ‘Are you ill?’ She was afraid I had Covid. We sat down.

  ‘Dominique’s been arrested. He raped me. He brought people to the house to rape me, for years.’

  I managed to find a way to say the thing that my whole being refused to hear, the thing that all the obsessive cleaning and tidying I had been doing for the last two hours had been an attempt to block out, as I begged the washing machine, the vacuum cleaner, the iron to give me back my life. A wave of shame swelled up inside me as I read the incredulity on Sylvie’s face. She knew Dominique well, she’d known him for years. We had met at work originally; she was a reserved young woman in the resource management department at EDF, the French national electricity supplier. We’d struck up a friendship and began socialising as couples outside the office. She and her husband used to so enjoy staying with us during the summer that they decided to retire to Mazan too. She didn’t understand. Her state of shock confirmed mine: it wasn’t possible. But when the police officer called to check that someone was with me, that I wasn’t alone, there was so much concern for me in his voice that it made me realise the weight and significance of the case file he was putting together.

  ‘Can you look to see if you can find any medication in the house? We couldn’t find any,’ he said.

  So that was what they had been looking for while we were at the police station. What it takes to change a woman into a dead weight, her features melted on to the pillow so that she doesn’t even have a face any more.

  Pierre finally called early in the afternoon. He was also worried I might have Covid. That morning he had left a cheerful message for his father-in-law: the itinerary of the Tour de France had just been announced, and the ascent of Mont Ventoux would take place when they were staying with us in Mazan, what good news! And here I was, once again forced to say what I didn’t want to hear.

  ‘Your father-in-law’s been arrested. He raped me and he had me raped by others.’

  Pierre didn’t say anything. I went on. I needed his help. I didn’t know how to tell Caroline about what was happening. Of all my children, my daughter is the least predictable. She’s one of those highly strung people who love and lose their temper in the same breath. She seems to have been filled since childhood with a feeling of insecurity that I have never really understood or been able to soothe. She was forty-one. I was afraid of telling her, afraid of how she would react. She was about to go through hell and back, that much I knew. I was worried about her. Pierre, who lived with her, understood. He said he’d let me know the minute she got home.

  Deputy Sergeant Perret came to the house. He was relieved to see Sylvie. He wanted another strand of my hair – the sample taken that morning was insufficient. I let him take some of the fine hairs from the back of my neck. Later I learned they are traps for chemical substances and can reveal poisoning. The laundry hanging in the garden was already dry. Dominique’s boxer shorts and trousers dangling over a void. How I loved our garden and the single-storey house we had chosen for our old age. I pictured him a few weeks earlier, sitting on our leather sofa and weeping, saying he couldn’t bear to lose me. Suddenly I realised he must have already known what was awaiting him; he knew what he was dragging us into, because his computer and his phone had already been seized by the police. And there I was imagining I was seeing the mirror image of my father’s grief.

  It gets dark early in November. I locked up and then drove behind Sylvie to her house. Her husband, Michel, had got out a bottle of champagne. Sylvie must have warned him before our arrival, and I imagined him trying to figure out what he could do or say, then putting the champagne in the fridge to blur the line between good times and bad. I drained my glass, grateful for the small gesture of positivity. Caroline called around seven o’clock. I didn’t answer. I didn’t want her to be alone when I told her. I sent another message to Pierre. He texted back that he would let me know as soon as she got home. ‘You have to stay right by her side,’ I insisted.

  A short while later he messaged to say that she was outside parking the car. I waited five minutes before I called. ‘Is Pierre with you? I think you should sit down.’ I told her that her father was in custody. That he had drugged me and raped me. Brought other men to the house to rape me. She began to scream. A shriek of anguish. The howl of a wounded animal. My daughter was breaking down. The words I was saying to try and calm her were not getting through. Pierre took the phone from her, said a couple of words to me, and hung up.

  Then I called David, my elder son. ‘Sit down. I have bad news,’ I said softly. I could hear my voice. I was talking like a robot. He listened without reacting. Everyone knows there will be difficult things we have to tell our children, but not this, nothing like this, this is beyond the boundaries of what can be imagined. Sure, things can fall apart, but not like this.

  David didn’t respond. Eventually he said, ‘I have to go, Maman.’ Later I found out he had run to the toilet to vomit.

  Florian, our youngest, was calm and composed when we spoke. He asked how I was and where I was. I told him I was spending the night at Sylvie’s, I wasn’t alone, I was going to sleep in the guest room upstairs.

  I didn’t sleep a wink that night. Almost every fifteen minutes one or other of the children rang, terrified I was falling apart, just as their own childhoods were collapsing. They kept calling me, and then each other, to discuss and pick apart the last few years. It was Caroline who said, in the middle of the night, ‘But Maman, all those memory lapses, it has to be that!’

  I hadn’t made the connection, despite what the police officer had told me, the house search and the two samples of hair. Dominique had always been there to witness my memory losses. He was the one who reassured me and took me to the doctor; he was the one to whom my hairdresser had confided her concerns that time I’d completely forgotten I’d been in for an appointment. I went back the next day to try to piece together what had happened. She told me how relieved she was when I walked in again, and described my blank expression in the mirror the day before, my mechanical responses to her questions, how she had been afraid I might be having a stroke, how she’d suggested to Dominique I get some tests done as a matter of urgency. He was my ally.

  I had become convinced I was going to die like my mother. It was my destiny; I had a brain tumour. A brain scan in 2017 proved me wrong, but that wasn’t enough to banish the idea from my head. The doctors assured me it was just anxiety, but that didn’t make sense to me: one morning, like Maman, I was not going to wake up. My whole existence revolved around this tragedy. I had wanted my life to be a redemption, but it turned out it was simply a continuation. It was genetic. I felt it. I let myself be taken in by this scenario as the memory lapses became more and more frequent. Even my children had witnessed them. There was one occasion they told me about later, when I was on the phone to my grandson Maxime, Caroline and Pierre’s son, and I kept repeating the same thing over and over like a broken record. The little boy was so embarrassed that his parents motioned to him to hang up. A neurologist friend of Pierre’s said she thought it might be Alzheimer’s. David’s wife, Céline, murmured that they ought to think about putting me in a home. The signs were alarming. When the children called it was not unusual for their father to tell them I was too tired to speak. Whenever they came to visit, though, I was fine, there was never anything wrong, except for one time when everyone was leaving to go back to Paris. I had spent lunch slumped in my chair, my arm falling continually as if I couldn’t control it. Florian was clearly upset, he didn’t want to leave, but his father frogmarched him to the car and said, ‘Don’t worry, she’s just tired, I’m going to put her to bed.’

  He was going to put me to bed, yes. To rape me and invite other men to rape me a few hours after my son had left. He knew that the poison in my wine glass or on my plate was taking effect.