* * *

  • • •

  In fact, my health concerns had started around the time we moved to Mazan. Namely, after I stopped working and we began spending most of our time together. But how could I have suspected anything? When we first started contemplating retirement, we drew a circle on the map of France between Valence and Marseille. We decided that was where we wanted to go, to the sunshine in the South. We had both begun working so young that now we had years of leisure time to look forward to. He first suggested the Ariège department, but I said no, it was too far from everything. I wanted to be close to a city and to the high-speed train that would take me to Paris to see the children, and I wanted a swimming pool so they would come and stay in the holidays. I wanted to remain connected to them. Was he already plotting to isolate me? The splendour of the Vaucluse landscapes at the foot of Mont Ventoux settled the matter for us. We moved on March 1st 2013. We were both sixty. Had he already planned it all out?

  Yes, he had, as I later learned from the investigation. But that night in Caroline’s apartment, and the ones that followed, I couldn’t unravel it all. My mind was in disarray, filled with a cacophony that strangely took me back to our first years together. All those memories relentlessly flooding back, that feeling of being slammed on to the sand by the waves. I somehow had to protect those early days, to isolate the past from the present, to preserve that first spark, come what may. I couldn’t have been so wrong about this man who was going to love me. I had believed it so strongly that I had heard it as a promise. I can still feel that sensation that swelled inside me the day I met him, it burns in me to this day, it hurts, but no one can take it away from me. He offered me the affection and confidence I lacked. He looked at me in a way that no one ever had, his eyes intense and his cheeks blushing. I was no longer the fat, ugly girl my stepmother endlessly denigrated. I was not going to drown in my father’s grief-stricken eyes. All of a sudden I wasn’t afraid of how other people saw me. Happiness had found me at last. Had found us.

  Immediately after the wedding, Dominique and I moved in together near Paris. My father had found him a job as an electrician. I had found us a place to rent in Brunoy, in the Essonne. It was a one-bedroom apartment on the ground floor of a newly built three-storey building surrounded by gardens. I wanted to live somewhere rural for Dominique’s sake; he had grown up among fields and trees. To begin with, we had nothing, just a mattress on the floor, with flattened cardboard boxes beneath it to insulate it from draughts coming through the floorboards. A camping stove to heat up our food. Dominique knocked together a wardrobe. Our impoverishment was the sign of our freedom. The price of our escape. We were always laughing. I wore the thigh-high white boots and miniskirts that were all the rage. I listened to the talk of the times, the fight for birth control, for legal abortion; I understood, but these were not my battles. My victory was building the kind of family life I had never had – that none of the people I loved had ever had.

  A year later David was born. It was my suggestion to name him after the artist who had given the emperor’s mother back to him. I stopped working. I didn’t want anyone else to look after my son. Dominique was promoted to foreman with the industrial electrical company Trindel, and we received a government housing subsidy that helped us make it through to payday. We were happy. We had made it.

  And yet. Whenever Dominique was called out for an emergency repair in the middle of the night, I always left the light on in our bedroom and switched on the radio to listen to a phone-in show on Europe 1 that came on at midnight called Ligne Ouverte, with Gonzague Saint Bris. I loved the opening music, Erik Satie’s Gnossienne No. 1. Strangers called in to share their woes. I could have shared mine. I lay awake, waiting for Dominique to come home. I was afraid to fall asleep on my own.

  That night at Caroline’s it all came back to me. I can’t remember in what order, I suppose the memories were flooding in all at once. Distant ones. Recent ones. How could he have ruined everything, thrown me to the wolves, sacrificed me? How could he have turned me into that inert, almost dead woman? I talked to him and to the children in turn, lying there alone in the dark. The children who used to say to us, ‘Your childhood is straight out of a Zola novel!’ They couldn’t understand what had brought us together, how we had struggled, what we had achieved, what sinister undertow might have carried us off.

  A battle was unleashed in my head. Between shadow and light. From the spark of our first meeting, I had ignited a flame. Must I blow it out now, once and for all, as David and Caroline seemed to be asking me to do? That would mean opening my eyes, finding myself desperately alone in the dark of the night, in a bedroom that was not my own, with nothing but my bulldog’s ragged breathing for company. I couldn’t face that. You don’t get a second chance at life. If I erased everything, it would mean I was dead. And had been for years.

  Six

  The next morning, there were so many things to do. First a blood test, to check for HIV, syphilis and herpes. All the nasties left by strangers’ penises. I did it calmly, without panicking. My body did not remember anything; it was my body, but it was also not quite mine, the way you have no memory of the scalpel cutting into flesh when you come out of the operating theatre. I made an appointment with a psychologist in Versailles whose contact details my son-in-law Pierre had found. She understood the urgency. The appointment was scheduled for the following day.

  In the meantime, Caroline called Florian to come and pick up the dog. He told her that if he was going to take Lancôme to his house he would take me too, because we couldn’t be separated. Caroline was determined to take charge. She began going through the documents that we had hastily gathered together before leaving Mazan. The thick file containing the details of our debts shocked her. She turned the pages uneasily, looking through the loans, the eye-watering interest rates, the penalties. I tried to make light of it all. We had always had financial issues, it was just part of our life. She knew about them because her father sometimes called her to borrow small sums of money to avoid going over his overdraft limit, which he paid back later. But the harsh light of day changed everything, exposing our life ticking like a time bomb, and no doubt also bringing back painful memories, the buried fears that children repress in order not to add to their parents’ woes. Caroline must have been eleven or twelve when she saw bailiffs and a removal truck turn up at our house and take everything away except the children’s beds, their father powerless to stop them. He was unemployed at the time. I was at work. I remember my daughter’s terrified expression when I came home. I tried to console her. ‘It doesn’t matter,’ I said, ‘it’s only furniture, we can buy new things.’ But she was deeply disturbed by the episode. I did what I always did, what people try to do when they have lost everything, stay strong, not fall apart, while she felt the ground swaying beneath her feet. No doubt this left her too vulnerable, caught between her father’s powerlessness and her mother’s apparent lack of concern.

  It had all been waiting to resurface. We were replaying exactly the same scene, a few decades later, both of us adults now: she was panicking, and I was trying to keep things on an even keel. Dominique and I had always juggled with our finances. In 1999 we had even got divorced without actually separating, in order to avoid my salary being seized to cover Dominique’s debts. We remarried in 2007. Maybe David, Caroline and Florian had assumed that everything had been cleared up, and their parents were a rare example of miraculous, inseparable coupledom.

  The house in Mazan must have ended up convincing them. It was the perfect place for them and their children to spend their holidays. Opening up the French doors in the living room, watching the little ones run out into the garden to the swings or the hammocks rocking in the breeze, jump into the pool that we left uncovered all summer long, seeing them grow, learn to swim, gain confidence, and then, when night fell, tidying up all the delightful havoc they had wreaked – wet towels, pool noodles, inflatable slide, tangled garden hose – always gave me a wonderful feeling of serenity and accomplishment. Of course, it was all beyond our means, far too idyllic for our modest origins and Dominique’s chaotic career. Obviously we didn’t own the house. But nothing worried me as long as I could keep up with the 1,200-euro monthly rent. We lived on my pension while Dominique was paying back his debts. ‘It seems like you’re tightening your belts, you don’t go anywhere any more,’ David once said with concern. We replied that the splendours of Provence were enough for us.

  * * *

  • • •

  Caroline was enraged. She kept screaming that her house and everything she owned were going to be seized because her father was insolvent and in prison. I tried to reason with her, she mustn’t worry, no one was coming after her. I would set up a debt management plan in my own name. But my words only made things worse. Either I was irresponsible and blind, or I was guilty. Perhaps I was guilty – of promising them too much, a lovely life, the kind of security we’d never had. It was all a lie, as it turned out.

  In the evening everything changed dramatically. Caroline discovered that someone had leaked some grim details about our story, although it was just a few vague lines in a local newspaper published in the South of France. She broke down. I had no words, I was completely exhausted, I no longer knew who I was, all I wanted to do was shut myself away with Maxime. Caroline rang Florian, who tried, in vain, to calm her. Pierre, her husband, was also unable to. I was so worried that I begged him to call an ambulance so she could be sedated. This time everyone thought it best to take her to hospital.

  Caroline spent the night in the psychiatric unit. I slept at her apartment, in the guest room at the end of the corridor. She was terrified. I was too. Did she let out the screams that I held in, allowing herself to collapse as I did not?

  I could have asked these questions, without hope of finding any answers. But that night, like the previous nights, I was simply hanging on, vainly seeking sleep. I refused to take a sleeping pill. Never again. All night long I delved back into my memories, talking to everyone in words I would be unable to articulate in the morning. Alone in my bed, I was outraged, I defended myself. I couldn’t let my daughter claim we had behaved irresponsibly. I had always been so frugal. The white tennis shoes I kept until the soles wore through. The way I was so careful never to spend more than we could afford at the supermarket each week, even if it meant putting items back on the shelves. The way we never filled the car up with petrol, putting in just enough to get us through a few days at a time. We only filled the tank when the children came down to stay. We would go to the petrol station the day before they arrived and ask the pump attendant not to cash the cheque until the following month. We never wanted the children to feel limited or deprived of anything when they were with us. That was how we had always been, juggling overdrafts and loans to help pay for their studies, their weddings, their travels.

  * * *

  • • •

  I lay awake, clinging to memories of gestures and objects, all the little things that fulfil us, or give us the illusion they do. It was so hard to see the whole picture now. I pleaded. And then, all at once, I was furious with myself. I was so angry that I hadn’t noticed anything. One time in Mazan I had come close to the truth. On a pair of trousers I had just bought on sale, I noticed some odd, discoloured blotches like splashes of bleach, indelible, inexplicable. I tried to figure out what could have happened, to go over what I might have done or handled the day before. Nothing came to me. An immense fog shrouded the entire day. I couldn’t remember a single thing. What time I got up, what I wore, what I ate, whether or not I left the house, absolutely nothing. I joked to Dominique, who was busy fixing something, ‘Doumé, you haven’t been drugging me, have you?’

  He burst into tears. ‘How could you possibly say such a thing?’ I was instantly overcome with guilt. He was hurt. I immediately apologised. It was September 2013. This was not the first time I experienced a strange memory lapse, but it was the first time I really took note of it. I wonder now if perhaps, deep down, in some inaccessible part of me, I didn’t entirely trust him, since I had accused him, albeit in the tone of a bad joke. So why did he begin to cry? To remind me of the pact against sorrow that had long ago sealed our commitment to each other? He was putting me off the scent. His tears should have alerted me. Now, unable to sleep, I began reviewing my life on an endless loop. It became a spiral, a tornado destroying everything in its path. But I clung to what I had loved. I would not succumb.

  ‘You can’t stay with your daughter,’ said the psychologist the next day when I told her about Caroline’s condition and her accusations. ‘Do you have anywhere else you can go?’

  ‘I could stay with my son.’

  Florian came to fetch me. I took my two suitcases and my dog and moved in with him. I was exhausted. I was no longer in control of anything. I let things happen. The legal machine had been set in motion and was making decisions for me.

  I now had a lawyer whom Caroline’s husband, Pierre, had found a couple of days after the initial revelations. We spoke one evening on the telephone when I was still in Mazan, and met for the first time on my birthday, December 7th. I’m sure I wasn’t what she was expecting. She had imagined either a woman in pieces, or a warrior. I was neither. I was a little disconcerted by her as well. She was blonde and wore an Hermès scarf around her neck like a good bourgeois Parisienne, but without the polish that usually goes with it. From the outset, she established a kind of camaraderie between us. For me, entering a world so unlike my own, this was both reassuring and disorienting. She called Caroline and me her ‘petites chéries’, her little darlings. She talked about initiating divorce proceedings. I said yes, but just as when the police had asked me if I would be pressing charges, it hadn’t actually occurred to me.

  * * *

  • • •

  On December 14th, she and I met with the juge d’instruction, the examining magistrate, at the court in Avignon. We were early, so we went into a small side office to prepare for the meeting. Our lawyer pulled up some photographs from the case file. She wanted me to look at them, because the magistrate would undoubtedly confront me with them. Up until then I had only seen the three they had shown me at the police station. She scrolled through several more. Always the bedroom. Always me, lifeless, a man raping me. Only the dates and the names of the criminals changed. I stopped her. I didn’t want to see any more. She took out the two photographs of Caroline. I had not seen them before. They’d been taken in the dark. My heart clenched. I didn’t recognise her straight away. She is lying on her side, her face in shadow. In one picture she wears a sweatshirt, in the other a tank top and a pair of beige underpants. Her body does not look completely limp; her arms are drawn together as if she’s asleep in the foetal position, whereas in the photographs of me, mine flop open like a broken marionette. The photographs are abject, showing her father’s unbearable incestuous gaze on his daughter while she slept. I peered more closely, trying to recognise the room where they had been taken and to work out what year it could have been. No matter how hard I tried, I could not think of a time they had ever been alone under the same roof. Where were we? Where was I? The darkness of the images made it impossible to answer immediately. Basically, we were both looking at them from the perspective of who we were: I was warding off the worst-case scenario, while my daughter was heading straight for it. ‘Mes petites chéries,’ she called us. Her little darlings.

  Eventually we were summoned to the office of the examining magistrate, Gwenola Journot. She was so young that at first I thought she was the court clerk. But then the clerk came in and she was even younger. I was old enough to be their mother. Imagining them looking at the photos and videos that I refused to see made me feel ashamed, and now in their presence I felt the modesty of an older woman. I had never been afraid of growing old, but here I was, trapped in the image others had of me. I wanted the two young women not to see the pictures; I wanted to protect them from these horrors, as I was protecting myself.

  The magistrate asked if I had anything to add to what I had already told the police. I told her about the jigsaw puzzle in my head that I was relentlessly trying to piece together and then take apart, day and night, the thousands of elements I was trying to make sense of, in vain. Of course, I didn’t tell her about the good memories, which she had no interest in and which even my children didn’t want to hear about. I kept these to myself, to wrap myself in like a blanket to ward off the cold. I told her about all the incidents that I now realised were signals I had missed. My odd little joke when I discovered bleach stains on my yellow trousers. The cocktail he handed me that he hurriedly emptied into the sink when I said it tasted peculiar. The glass of beer that had turned green. I had to pinpoint each event to be able to date it and work out when it had all started. The incident with the cocktail was when we were living in Villiers-sur-Marne. Which meant that the poisoning had begun at least as long ago as 2011.