‘Leave him,’ Dominique told his mother.

  The first time he said it he was fourteen and had just started his first job. After that he told her to leave his father many times, but she never did. She probably never even considered it. She was ten years older than her husband, and he was starting to make her pay for it. Juliette was mired in unhappiness.

  ‘She loved him, she was really in love with Denis, she’d have accepted anything,’ Dominique’s half-sister, Geneviève, told me recently over the phone. What options did she have? Geneviève knows what it was like to grow up in Denis Pelicot’s terrifying house. She never went into detail about what went on there, but she said at the trial something she had often said to me in the past, ‘He’d have liked to have the daughter.’ She was talking about herself. She had fled, got married very young just to escape his grasp. How could any of us help wondering if things might have turned out differently had Juliette left Denis, had she managed to pick herself up and escape too?

  Denis Pelicot made yet another fresh start. He was hired as a repair man by Debiard, a household appliances firm. The family moved to 90, route de Tours, an apartment in a three-storey council-owned building in Châtillon-sur-Indre. To make ends meet, they took in Nicole, a little girl with learning disabilities who was a ward of the state. She was five. She probably didn’t expect much from her new foster family, given that she had been beaten in her previous foster homes. She clung to a doll that she would not let go of for anything in the world, an imaginary friend who was supposed to protect her.

  These were the people I was to get to know several years later. A month after we first met at my aunt’s house in July 1971, I joined Dominique on a camping trip to the Ile d’Oléron with his parents, his half-brother and wife, and Nicole, still clutching her doll. We were nineteen, thus still legally underage. We were not allowed to sleep in the same tent, but every evening we liked to spread out a blanket on the sand and watch the lights on the coast. I joined them again the following summer. I even brought along my brother, Michel. Denis was incensed when I laid my mattress next to Dominique’s in the tent. ‘They’re sleeping together!’ he bellowed. He tried to stop us. We didn’t give in. But it was Juliette who paid the price. He refused to address a single word to her, except to issue demands.

  It was during another such camping holiday one summer several years earlier that a younger Dominique had apparently surprised his parents in their tent: his mother on her knees, hands tied behind her back, being forced to fellate her husband. He never told me about it. I only found out during the trial.

  Whenever I spent time with the Pelicots, I understood a little more about where the man I loved came from, what he was fleeing, why he always used to stay so late at Aunt Andrée’s house.

  * * *

  • • •

  When Dominique decided to join me in Paris, he communicated his decision to his father on a slip of paper that he placed inside his shaving kit. He didn’t dare tell him in person. Leaving, for him, was synonymous with escape. It also meant less income for his family, because he had been paying his salary in full over to his parents. He did have his own bank account with Crédit Agricole, into which I had been putting a little aside every month for our future together. But because he was only nineteen, his father still controlled his account, and when he got wind of our plans he emptied it. He bought a small farm called La Thibaudière and insisted Dominique do the renovations. I still have this image in my mind of Dominique right at the bottom of the well, as though he would never be able to climb out again and was going to let himself be buried alive by his father, who was still trying to control our future. He stole from us, and we said nothing. Just as I said nothing when Papa came to meet him, and Denis Pelicot announced that he and his wife could not afford a sit-down lunch for our wedding. Papa tried to insist, he wanted a fitting celebration for his daughter, nothing fancy, just my uncles, my aunts, his family and Maman’s family sitting together at long tables draped with white tablecloths. Dominique’s mother said she would roast some chickens and that was it. She did what she was told. I did too. I said it didn’t matter, it would be fine like that. It wasn’t true. We had a dreary picnic lunch, but I couldn’t face yet another fight, I just wanted to get married so we could live together. Escape at last. I let Denis Pelicot trample on my father’s only request. He frightened me too.

  I have never forgotten the way he looked at me when we came to visit the following year. I was in my bathing costume outside in the yard of the new farm, pregnant with David, combing my hair, which at the time went down past my waist. As I turned I saw him through the window sitting on his bed, watching me. Something in his expression made me feel deeply ill at ease. I mentioned it later to Dominique. He wasn’t surprised, he was the ogre’s son, after all. The following summer, his brother groped my backside. The older boy was just like his father, but Dominique was different. He was nothing like either of them. He was close to his mother in her silent suffering. A loving young father who got up in the night to give his son a bottle. And we were happy. We took David everywhere with us, even out to friends’ houses in the evening. He was such an easy child. I remember how, aged three, he used to fall asleep, curled up on the floor underneath the table where we were playing board games. We had left, moved far away from the Indre and his family’s brutality. We had joined the ranks of the growing middle classes in the suburbs of Paris. And for years, every Sunday morning, Dominique would take the children out to the forest in Sénart and play endless games of football with them, as if, at last, he’d found the playmates he’d never had when he lived at Oublaise.

  As time passed, I stopped believing we mirrored each other. I was protecting him. I knew that where he came from, nobody offered comfort to anyone else. Only tyranny held his family together. I began to understand how different we were. In his case, there was a constant threat of violence and, significantly, it came from within the family. For me, the tragedy belonged to the past; it left us inconsolable, but full of lost love.

  My brother had grown into a taciturn, resigned young man. He worked as a plumber on construction sites and let slip no other details about his life. My father, under pressure from my stepmother, had moved to Brittany, where he was born. I was sad that he would no longer live nearby, now that David had just been born. I wanted him to be close to me and my children. ‘Papa, you’re leaving?’ His resigned expression was his only answer. His wife called him Younic – Yves in Breton – or simply Youn. Like many other former soldiers, he worked recruiting labourers for the construction industry. One day his secretary found him collapsed on the floor of his office in Quimper. An aneurism that might burst at any moment had triggered an epileptic fit. He had emergency surgery but when he awoke from the operation he was paralysed on his left side. He was forty-seven. He learned to walk again, but his left arm remained lifeless. He would pick it up with his good hand and place it on his leg when he was sitting down, or slip it into his pocket. Half of him was no longer there, perhaps even more. But he was still elegant; he wore his suits well and never forgot cufflinks. And of course he still talked to me about my mother when we were alone. He would reminisce about her gentleness and her joie de vivre. She was his greatest loss, and my guiding light. By moving away, my father added to the absences in my life; he seemed to say that he didn’t have much to offer any more, and that a new arrival offered no consolation for loss.

  Caroline was born in January 1979. A baby girl. I don’t know why but I was surprised. A few people wanted me to call her Jeanne, after my mother, but it was out of the question for me to bequeath her the legacy of a life so cruelly cut short. I came up with the name Caroline because of Princess Caroline of Monaco, I thought it sounded nice with Pelicot. We were ennobling the family name, writing a whole new history. And I can still see Caroline, looking adorable with her princess tiara in her hair, twirling her dress at the school fete. That day her grandmother Juliette was with us; she adored her granddaughter. And David had formed a close bond with his grandfather, who introduced him to his beloved westerns.

  Despite our difficult memories, Dominique’s parents occasionally came and stayed with us for a few days, and the children would sometimes go to them during the school holidays. They would meet up with their cousins and explore the landscapes that Michel and I had explored at the same age. We had left, but hadn’t really managed to get away. We were born after the war, and throughout our childhood we had always sensed its shadow over the adults around us. Something made them tighten their jaws and quickly lose patience. They never talked about it, and we in turn never talked about how it affected us. They instilled in us a kind of fatalism. The most important thing for us was to live differently to our parents. We probably thought we could fix everything with our happiness and our wonderful children. Then one day, when David was eight, he told me that his grandfather had shut Caroline up in the dark with the goats because she wouldn’t eat her dinner. My blood ran cold. I rang and told them they would never see their grandchildren again. We stopped going to La Thibaudière. But Juliette missed them terribly. She was sad, and of course Dominique was sensitive to that. So eventually we returned.

  Nicole was now an adult. I said to my father-in-law I was surprised that she never went out or saw more people. I had gained a little confidence over the years. ‘It’s none of your business. Don’t you go putting ideas in her head,’ he snarled. We began to wonder. Was he abusing her? What better victim than a mentally disabled young woman without any family? Was he abusing her in front of his wife? Dominique tried to talk about it to his brother, Joël, who apparently brushed it aside and told him that incest happens in all families, rich and poor. He would know, of course, being a doctor. It seemed that for him incest was unremarkable, but for me it was the first time I had even heard the word. Joël was embarking on a political career with the local branch of the right-wing party Rally for the Republic; it was out of the question to risk a scandal in the family that might taint his pedigree. We said and did nothing, like everyone else who lived under Denis Pelicot’s roof. We heard Juliette weeping. She asked us to lend her a bit of money. Dominique slipped her a few banknotes and I paid their electricity bill. It was almost as if our happiness, in order to exist, had to pay a tithe to misfortune.

  When she was diagnosed with breast cancer, Juliette Pelicot realised that this would be her escape at last. In early 1986 I called to tell her I was pregnant again.

  ‘I’m due in October, Juliette. Hang in there.’

  ‘I won’t be around by then,’ she said. She died in the hospital, alone, with no one at her bedside, a few days before her sixty-fifth birthday. As was the custom back then, her body was brought back to the house for the wake. In the coffin, wearing a cancer wig, she finally looked at peace.

  As soon as she was buried Denis Pelicot made his relationship with Nicole official. Nicole was twenty-five, he was fifty-eight. ‘It does you no end of good to have a young thing in your bed,’ he said.

  Florian was born that October.

  Something about Dominique was changing. It was as if up until then he had dissolved his pain into his mother’s. Now she was gone, something burst. Memories began flooding back. He told me about a long-ago quarrel back in Oublaise with Joël, who had thrown a rock at him and hit him on the head. Dominique was eight. He was taken to the hospital in Châteauroux and kept overnight for observation. In the middle of the night he woke up, unable to breathe. When he opened his eyes, he thought he saw a moustache – that was how he said it, like a child. The penis of a male nurse was in his mouth. We had been married almost fifteen years and he had never told me this before. We began paying visits to La Thibaudière less and less often.

  Denis Pelicot died of a heart attack in February 2004. Nicole found him on the kitchen floor. Dominique went to view the body, but did not attend the funeral. We had a trip planned to the Antilles. The children went. They knew, deep down, this man’s significance for his son, the shadow he cast on him, and on them.

  Several years later, Caroline asked her father to write about his childhood. She sensed that there were knots to be untangled, which writing might help him process. Dominique followed her advice. He gave me what he had written to read, and he also gave a copy to David, Caroline and Florian, and Geneviève. I don’t have our copy any more. It was destroyed by the children that night in Mazan. Caroline’s was deposited in the police case file. The text is suffused with his mother’s suffering and his father’s violence. He writes about the Château d’Oublaise, a rock thrown at his head, Nicole, and many other things. It ends with our first encounter. For him, he writes, meeting me signalled the end of the nightmare.

  Eight

  In the beginning we had love, freedom and the song by Michel Fugain that we sang at the tops of our voices as if it had been written especially for us: ‘Une belle histoire’. Yes, ours had been a beautiful story and it haunted me now. It was both painful and vital. I needed what had been. I needed people who could listen, who believed it, who might even share it with me. My children couldn’t. They had dumped the past at a recycling centre where everything is separated into glass, paper and plastic, but they were unable to distinguish their father from the poisoner and the rapist.

  ‘You’ve had such a shitty life,’ Caroline said.

  No, that wasn’t true.

  Her intuition was good though. It was she who told Deputy Sergeant Perret about Pascale, when he was trying to find witnesses to my relationship with Dominique. Caroline remembered this friend of her parents who had mysteriously vanished from their lives. She even recalled how strange and abrupt it had been. Perret asked me to try and find Pascale. What a good idea. All of a sudden it felt terribly urgent to speak to her. We’d met in 1982 when we were both working for EDF. It had almost been like falling in love – one of those friendships that came out of nowhere and within a matter of days I couldn’t imagine not having her in my life.

  She was twenty and I was thirty, married with two children. She nicknamed me Pelic. Usually it’s the men who call each other by their surnames. The way she did it, the way she amputated the last syllable, gave it a different consonance, lighter somehow. We began going out in the evenings. I’d leave Dominique at home with the children. She loved being invited over too. It was like having a younger sister. She was friends with my husband and the children were always excited when she came over to our house. She went on holiday with us.

  And then, around the turn of the new millennium, I ended the friendship. She walked into my office one day when I had just got off the phone with Dominique. I must have said something nice about him, because she cut me short. ‘Ah, your Doumé, you put him on a pedestal, but you have no idea what kind of a person you’re living with.’

  I was livid. I didn’t even try to figure out what she meant. ‘Get out of my office. I never want to see you again,’ I hissed. I preferred to lose a dear friend than to understand. For the next eleven years, Pascale and I would pass each other in the corridor without even saying hello. I spoke to her briefly after I heard about the death of her mother, of whom I had been very fond. She sent me a card when I retired. Neither of us responded to the other one. And our paths never crossed again. It had been twenty years since we’d last spoken.

  I contacted some former colleagues to see if anyone could put us in touch. I was doing it more for myself than for the police. With Pascale, I could go back in time. She wouldn’t trample on my old memories. I wanted to hear what she had to say. I wanted her to explain what she had meant that day in my office, for the most painful aspect of what I was going through now was that I had not noticed anything back then. Every so often I found myself fantasising that I might have prevented it all, I might have saved us.

  Eventually I got hold of her number. One morning at Florian’s, after breakfast, I called her.

  ‘Pascale, do you remember me? It’s Gisèle Pelicot.’

  ‘Pelic! How could I forget you?’

  She sounded so happy to hear from me. Afterwards she told me that when she first heard my voice she thought Dominique must have died. She was convinced I would never have called her while he was still alive. In a way she was right. The man she had known, the man I had loved, no longer existed.

  I said I needed to know what had happened. She told me he was always hitting on her. He sent her flowers after he’d done some work on her kitchen. One time when we were all on holiday together in Spain, he had held her in his arms after she had fainted and then told her he hoped to do it again. That was what she had been trying to tell me. Nothing that foretold the rapist of Mazan, just the pathetic, banal tale of a cheating husband playing footsie with his wife’s younger friend.

  I told her what was going on. She listened to me in absolute stupefaction, without painting me as submissive or a slave. She knew my life and our relationship. She remembered being all of twenty years old, telling me she hoped to meet a wonderful man too, to find her own Dominique. She was able to understand where I was – the icy, suffocating fog I was moving through. We talked for a long time. She told me how her life had turned out, about the various jobs and boyfriends she’d had. She said she had never been in a relationship as strong as mine and Dominique’s. It was as if, despite the horrors I had just found out, the impressions and words from an earlier time could not be erased, were being expressed one last time. I could breathe again. I no longer felt so alone.