But that first night I didn’t try to piece together all the various events, it was too soon. Too painful. The children worked it out more quickly. They bought themselves train tickets to Avignon. ‘We’ll be there tomorrow,’ they announced in the middle of the night.

  * * *

  • • •

  The next morning, I left Sylvie’s and went back to the house, drawn by the urge to be in my own home and to salvage a few good memories and strength from it. The first thing I saw was that the police were back. ‘Where are the walking boots kept?’ one of the investigators asked. I showed him a shelf in the garage. He pulled a pair of socks folded into a ball from one of the boots and unrolled it. Out fell some blister packs of pills. Open. Sealed. Mostly lorazepam, an anxiety and insomnia medication. Dominique had clearly ended up talking.

  Suddenly my house was no longer my home. It was full of shadows, hiding places, nooks and crannies and poison. And where was all the sexy underwear the sleeping woman wore? Not in my chest of drawers, that was for sure. My pants and bras are white and maroon. Those are the colours I like. I always bought them myself. It’s true that sometimes Dominique would point things out in lingerie displays: ‘Look, they’re pretty,’ he’d say. I never paid any attention. That kind of thing wasn’t me at all.

  But there was that one time in Printemps, the department store on Place de la Nation in Paris. I was hesitating between two sets, we couldn’t afford both. While I was paying for the set I had chosen, Dominique slipped the other into his pocket, but he was stopped by security and made to pay for it before he could leave. ‘Madame, you mustn’t be cross with your husband,’ the sales assistant entreated. ‘It’s such a sweet thing to do.’ What to do with these memories?

  I drove back to the police station, where the children and I had arranged to meet. They were on their way in a taxi from Avignon station. The fleeting temptation to let go of the steering wheel and put an end to everything crossed my mind – no more than a few seconds, the time it took to dismiss it. I would never give death a helping hand.

  When David, Caroline and Florian arrived, I must have looked exhausted and vulnerable, completely lost in my big down coat. One after the other they took me in their arms. I clung to them as tightly as they clung to me. It was so good to feel their presence. I was completely rigid, desperate not to let myself go. I didn’t want to break down and cry. Alone, yes, but not in front of them. After we’d embraced, we all went inside. Deputy Sergeant Perret waved them into a small office on the ground floor while I waited alone at reception. I didn’t know what they were talking about – I just hoped they wouldn’t see the photographs. When they came out, Perret called me back in to see me again.

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me about your health concerns and your memory loss?’ he asked.

  It was Caroline who had brought this up. Perret had told them about the pills they had found at the house, and shown them prescriptions from our family doctor that had also been seized. The doctor had been prescribing lorazepam, Viagra and zolpidem to my husband, who must have been complaining about having trouble sleeping and getting an erection because of stress over our financial problems. I told Perret the truth: I hadn’t made the connection. Yes, I was concerned, yes, I had become a shadow of myself. I was forgetting so much. I had even booked an appointment for an MRI, because I wasn’t satisfied with the brain scan. Should I tell him that I was certain I was going to die of a brain tumour like my mother, that the black hole of my childhood sucked everything into it, extinguishing any question, suspicion or grievance? Should I admit that I was so sure of it that sometimes I said to myself, if this is what it is to die, it’s okay, it’s not so painful, and that this was how I reconciled myself to death, my mother’s and my own? What was the point? The thread of my thoughts led too far back in time, too far from his investigations. It led to a place where I had to go alone.

  * * *

  • • •

  The children and I went back to the house together. I remember thinking with relief that there was some leftover pumpkin soup in the fridge for dinner. All they were thinking about was going through drawers and cupboards. Searching. Discovering things they had never suspected. Florian began with his father’s desk. He found a speeding ticket given at two in the morning. What was he doing driving in the middle of the night? They all stared at me as if I had an answer. Their parents had turned into a pair of strangers. The phone rang. It was the police officer. He wanted to see the children again. Caroline and Florian went down to the station where Perret showed them two photographs of a young woman asleep, found on their father’s computer. ‘Is this you?’ he asked Caroline. It was.

  She was in a dreadful, almost crazed state when she got back. Had he done something to her too? This was the first I had heard of these photos, and I would only see them later when the case file was being compiled. Now the main thing was to assuage her fears, but what could we say to reassure her after such a horrifying discovery? Her suspicions were mounting, and her brothers’ too. It was all going too fast for me.

  Night fell. As I headed for my bedroom, Caroline suggested I come and sleep with her, away from that now cursed place where everything had happened. But I had a visceral need to be alone. It’s hard to deny your child that, but if I had joined her, if I had allowed my pain to swell with hers, I’d have collapsed and ended up an additional burden on my children. I was sure of it, it was my survival instinct that guided me. I needed time and silence to digest everything I had just found out. I needed to find my strength. She, on the other hand, did not want to be on her own. She asked her brother to come and sleep in her room. Florian moved his mattress next to her bed. And I lay down in my own bed. The scene of rape, but still my bed.

  Would it have made things easier if I had snuggled up to my daughter, if we had stayed up all night talking? I don’t know. The next morning I was up early. She came into the kitchen, restless and jittery. I felt incredibly sad. I was like a robot, clinging to the next task, the next hour. We started going over the events of the last couple of days. Though I understood her suspicions – from now on, nothing about this horror could be ruled out – I couldn’t let them become certainties. But to her my words sounded like denial. I tried to reassure her. I told her that we needed to give the judicial police time to establish the facts, time to search through her father’s computer files. But we were so different in our approaches to life and its tragedies. This was not the first tragedy I had experienced. I was familiar with the suit of armour I had to don to face the world. I was not going to let myself drown as my father and brother had, and I wanted to help Caroline stay afloat too.

  We got going on the huge task of sorting out the house. The children instructed me to gather up what I wanted to take with me, since we were leaving for Paris the next day. Suddenly Caroline yanked open the doors of the sideboard and began grabbing plates, sending them flying across the room one after another and yelling that I didn’t need them any more.

  ‘Caroline, don’t break everything, please, there are things I’d like to keep.’

  ‘What can you possibly want to keep from that life?’ she cried.

  Everything was splintering. Objects. Our history. Us. Me, a little more with each passing moment. Caroline ran into the corridor and tore down a picture her father had painted, a nude woman seen from behind. She had always said she wanted to inherit it after he died. Now she went out on to the terrace and started trying to rip it to pieces. As she attacked it the title appeared, written in pencil on the back of the canvas, utterly terrifying in light of what we had learned: Coercion. Eventually she managed to destroy it completely. Then she started on the framed photographs that hung throughout the house, and the photo albums stored in a trunk. All our holidays and Christmases, our youth, their childhood – she ripped up the lot. Page after page. Her brothers didn’t try to stop her. They carried on calmly combing through their father’s desk. But they undoubtedly shared their sister’s rage; all their memories had suddenly turned out to be unbearable lies. But mine hadn’t. I clung to my memories, I wanted to hold on to those pictures of a father, a husband, a family built by two messed-up kids from the Indre who got married in the shadow of a beautiful chateau. Of course our children could not tell themselves the same story, so I left them to it, a stranger in my own home. All I managed to do was keep our inquisitive neighbour at bay. She’d been alerted by all the screaming and crashing and I caught her poking her head over the fence into the courtyard. ‘You’re not at the circus, you know,’ I snapped.

  The house was wrecked by sorrow. David and Florian piled the debris into rubbish bags and loaded them into their father’s car. When it was full, they left for the dump; when they came back, they loaded up the car again. They made several trips and soon it was not just debris they were carting away, but the wicker garden chairs, and most of their father’s clothes and belongings too.

  Caroline was in a bad way the next day. She called a psychologist recommended to her by a friend. I watched through the window as she talked, pacing up and down the terrace where we ate in the summer. She told the psychologist what we had just found out, and described the two photographs of her asleep. I only caught snatches of the conversation. Eventually Caroline hung up and stormed back into the house like a fury.

  ‘He’s killed me! He’s killed me!’ she screamed.

  The psychologist, who had never met her and was speaking to her for the first time, had hinted that it was very likely she had been raped by her father. She fell to the floor. Florian moved her into the recovery position, while I ran to get her a glass of sugary water. We called the emergency services, who said we should take her straight to the hospital, but Florian and David didn’t want us to miss our train that afternoon, they couldn’t bear to spend another night in the house. They found a doctor in Mazan who prescribed Caroline a tranquilliser.

  It was time to leave. I didn’t want to. I wanted to spend the day at home and sleep at Sylvie’s. I wanted to keep walking around the house. But I didn’t protest. I didn’t have the strength to say no to them. They talked to me as if they were speaking to a child. I obeyed. They meant well. They thought it was their duty to look after me. I followed them.

  Sylvie dropped us at the station. All I had with me were two suitcases and Lancôme, our little bulldog, on his leash, still waiting for his master’s return. We sped away on the high-speed train. There were long silences between us, a mixture of exhaustion and shock. I was slowly beginning to put two and two together, but mostly I had the peculiar feeling of being inside an enormous shredder. My children had lives to go back to. I had nothing.

  Arriving at the Gare de Lyon in Paris was in a way the most painful moment of all. It still makes me cry to think about it. I had no idea what I was doing there. The crowd on the platform was like a swarm of flies bearing down on me. The void was sucking me in. It was the old fault line beneath my feet; it had been there all along and now it was opening up again, swallowing everything that I held dear.

  Four

  I was born in Villingen, a small town in West Germany, in 1952. It’s hard to summon up any memories of the place, I was so little when we left. It’s also hard to ignore the fact that I was born in a country in ruins, the very reason we were there. After the war, Germany had been stripped of its sovereignty and carved up by the Allies into four zones, one of which was occupied by the French. My father, Yves, had followed his regiment, and my mother, Jeanne, had followed her young husband.

  I have only one photograph of them from that time. They are standing in a meadow in the countryside, a lake just visible in the background, their arms around each other, very close, obviously in love. The catastrophe is behind them. They seem all alone in the world, happy to be living in this defeated Germany that had ravaged their youth. My father has the toned, muscular body of a soldier and my mother’s waist swells beneath a loose blouse. She must be expecting my brother, Michel.

  I was born the following December. My father insisted I be called Gisèle, the name his mother would have given a daughter if she’d had one. He held tight to the few precious memories he had of her. She died of tuberculosis when he was seven. Is that where the taint of misfortune began? Was my birth supposed to erase it?

  Another photograph. My father as a young man in uniform. He must be about seventeen. He looks like a kid. His hair is slicked back and he sports a little cap on the side of his head, like the American soldiers who peopled his teenage years. He has joined up. At some point later he jotted down on the back of the photo: ‘December 1945. My first leave. Papa.’ He must have gone home for a few days to see his family in Scaër, in Brittany. The town still bore the scars of the terrible battles of August 1944, when the Resistance rose up against the Nazi occupiers in the wake of the D-Day landings in Normandy. Our surname, Guillou, is carved on the war memorial, a lad named Corentin who was executed by the Nazis at the age of twenty-one. I don’t know whether he was a member of our extended family – we were never told anything about him if he was – but the blood that flowed at the Liberation certainly marked my father’s adolescence and forged his ambition to become a soldier. It was better than going off to work at the factory like his two brothers, and their father before them. His father had remarried, and then his second wife died in childbirth, leaving him with two motherless infants to care for. More misfortune. The infernal noise of the machines and huge rolls of paper from the Cascadec paper mill that you could hear from inside the house, all the way up the hill, was sucking my father in. It was his turn. But my father preferred looking out to sea, towards the open horizon and liberating winds. He wanted to join the navy, but he was turned down for being too short, so he joined the army instead. It was at a navy dance that he met my mother a few years later. That was how he always put it – ‘at a navy dance on the banks of the Seine’ – without ever explaining how they had both ended up on the dance floor in Paris that night. She had come to the city all the way from the Berry region in central France, he from the Brittany coast.

  Another photograph, taken in Paris, the two of them decked out in their Sunday best. It’s one of the ones my cousin gave me recently. I handle them with great care. They are the only traces of my parents together that I possess. Sometimes I think that without photographs, memories wouldn’t exist, at least not in enough detail to make recollections come alive. My father must have sent this one to his family in Brittany. He’s wearing civilian clothes, a belted trench coat with epaulettes. My mother is in a white fitted suit, with a rigid handbag hanging from her wrist. She looks happy and confident. And her smile – ah, that smile! My Aunt Andrée used to tell me she was always smiling. That smile is my inheritance. And, I think, my father’s shield. He is looking away from the camera, almost as if he were trying to evade it. And when I peer more closely at this photo taken on a Parisian street, I see that everyone – even the gawkers in the background – is looking at the person taking the picture, except my father. Was he on leave? Had he already been deployed to Indochina? People say that those who have been to war cannot bear the nonchalance of crowds when they come back. There’s no date on the photograph. Difficult to say. Perhaps my father’s elusive expression lasted no more than an instant. Or it was a veil of anxiety that never left him. A young couple about to get married, or just married, who were soon to move to Germany.

  * * *

  • • •

  I have three photographs of us in Germany. A modern interior, two young parents, each with a baby in their lap, Maman in a long negligée. These pictures conjure up my earliest sensations of the cold German winter, the cosy cable-knit sweaters my mother made for us, the delicious Bratwurst sausages we ate in the street and the beauty of the Christmas market. We lived in Reutlingen, a garrison town, whose long grey buildings housed the French artillery and cavalry. History’s open wounds and bitterness were all around us, visible still in the stationary tanks and training grounds where we risked falling into ditches as we leapt over them. But as far back as I can remember, the thing that most fascinated me was the serving hatch in the kitchen. You lifted the flap, slid the plate in and took it out in the dining room on the other side. It was like a little hiding place. I used to put my toys in there, anything that fell into my hands. I was tempted to make myself tiny and go through the wall. It was like a secret passage.

  The memory of what happened next cancels out everything. This I can recall in detail. I am four and a half, the pavement is icy, Maman slips and falls on the way to school. She manages to get up, slowly, but a friend insists on taking her to the doctor after she has dropped us off. Michel goes to his classroom, but I refuse. I won’t let go of her hand, I want to stay with her, I don’t know why but suddenly I am afraid for her. That’s how I find myself standing next to her under a doctor’s huge, blinding light, how I see the circle of red, burnt skin under her long hair, hidden at the back of her skull where her hair hasn’t grown back. The wound scares me, and even more so what it conceals, everything I am not being told.

  Maman was living on borrowed time.

  Two years earlier Papa had felt a lump as he ran his fingers through her hair. The tumour was treated with radiation that burnt her without offering much hope. The doctor could not promise she had more than six months to live. A battle began, a fight to the death. That explains why Papa was always leaving, why he went on more and more missions. He went away to earn more money so he could pay for the best doctors and the best treatment available. He was desperate to extend her reprieve, maybe some days he even believed he could save her. They would escape. He refused to let history repeat itself, to see the same tragedy play out, to lose his wife after he’d lost his mother, to see his children motherless as he had been. A year went by, then two. A victory: Maman was still alive. But Papa was never at home to enjoy being with her, and we could never enjoy being with the two of them, apart from during his brief periods of leave.