Blood Wedding
Authors: Pierre Lemaitre
Blood Wedding
Translated from the French by
Frank Wynne
Also by Pierre Lemaitre in English translation
First
published in the French language as
Robe de marié
by
Editions Calmann-Lévy in 2009
First published in Great Britain in 2016 by
MacLehose Press
An imprint of Quercus Editions Limited
Carmelite House
50 Victoria Embankment
London EC4Y 0DZ
Copyright © Calmann-Lévy, 2009
English translation copyright © 2016 by Frank Wynne
The moral right of Pierre Lemaitre to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.
Frank Wynne asserts his moral right to be identi8 ed as the translator of the work.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Ebook ISBN 978 1 84866 599 6
Print ISBN 978 0 85705 331 2
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places and events are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
THE BRIGADE CRIMINELLE TRILOGY
Irène
Alex
Camille
The Great Swindle
For
Pascaline, obviously,
without whom, none of this would be . . .
Sitting
on the ground, back against the wall, legs extended, struggling for breath.
Léo is lying across her, utterly still, his head resting in her lap. With one hand she strokes his hair, with the other she tries but cannot quite manage to wipe away tears. She is crying. The sobs rise to become a wail, she lets out a howl that comes from deep within her belly. Her head sways gently from side to side. At times her misery is so intense she pounds her head against the wall. Pain offers a temporary respite, but all too soon she breaks down again. Léo is perfectly behaved, he does not stir. She bows her head, looks at him, hugs him to her belly and weeps. No-one could imagine the depths of her misery.
This
morning, like so many others, she woke with tears streaking her face and a hard lump in her throat though she had no particular reason to be upset. Tears are an everyday occurrence in her life: she has wept every night since she went mad. Were it not for the fact that her cheeks are damp every morning, she might think that her nights were spent in deep and peaceful sleep. But waking to find her face bathed in tears and a tightness in her throat is a simple fact of life. Since when? Since Vincent’s accident? Since his death? Since the first death, so long ago?
She props herself on one elbow, wipes her eyes with a corner of the sheet, fumbles for her cigarettes but cannot find them, then suddenly she realises where she is. Everything comes flooding back, everything that happened yesterday afternoon, last night . . . Immediately she understands that she must go, she must leave this house. Get up and get out, but still she lies there, rooted to the bed, incapable of the slightest movement. Drained.
*
When
at last she manages to drag herself from the bed and stumble to the living room, Mme Gervais is sitting on the sofa, calmly bent over her laptop.
“All good? Sleep well?”
“All good. Yes, thank you.”
“You look a little peaky.”
“I’m always like this in the morning.”
Mme Gervais saves her file and closes the computer.
“Léo is still asleep,” she says, walking over to the coat stand. “I didn’t dare look in, I was afraid I might wake him. Since there’s no school today, I though it best to let him sleep, give you a bit of peace . . .”
No school today. Sophie vaguely remembers something about an INSET day. Mme Gervais is standing by the door, she has already slipped on her coat.
“I’ll leave you to it. . .”
She knows she does not have the courage to announce her decision. In fact, even if she had the courage, she would not have the time. Mme Gervais has already closed the door behind her.
Tonight . . .
Sophie hears footsteps on the stairs. Christine Gervais never takes the lift.
*
There is silence. For the first time since she has worked here, she lights a cigarette in the living room. She paces up and down. She feels like the survivor of a terrible disaster, everything seems futile. She has to leave. She feels less panicked now that she is alone, now that she is up, now that she has a cigarette. But she knows that, for Léo’s sake, she has to get ready to leave. To give herself time to collect her thoughts, she wanders into the kitchen and switches on the kettle.
Léo.
Six years old.
As soon as she saw him that first time, she thought he was beautiful. It was four months earlier, in this same living room on rue Molière. He raced into the room, stopped dead in front of her and stared up, his head tilted slightly. In him a sign of intense concentration. His mother simply said:
“Leó, this is Sophie – remember I told you about her.’
He studied her for a long moment. Then he said “O.K.”, stepped forward, and hugged her.
Léo is a gentle child, a little awkward at times but intelligent and full of life. Sophie’s job entails taking him to school in the morning, collecting him at lunchtime and again in the evening, and looking after him until whichever random hour Mme Gervais or her husband finally return home. She can clock off work anytime between 5.00 p.m. and 2.00 in the morning. Her availability was a decisive factor in securing this job: she has no personal life, that much was obvious from the first interview. Mme Gervais did her best not to take advantage of Sophie’s constant availability, but the day-to-day routine trumps all ethical principles and, in less than two months, Sophie has become an indispensible part of family life. Because she is always there, always willing.
Léo’s father, a tall, lean, brusque man in his forties, is departmental head at the Ministère des Affaires Étrangères. As for Mme Gervais, an elegant, willowy woman with a captivating smile, she tries to balance her onerous responsibilities as statistician to a firm of auditors with those of mother to Léo and wife to a future secretary of state. Each of them earns a very comfortable living. Sophie was wise enough not to exploit this evident fact when it came to negotiating her salary. In fact it did not occur to her, since what she was offered was sufficient for
her needs. Mme Gervais increased her salary at the end of the second month.
As for Léo, he is devoted to her. Only she can effortlessly get him to do something that would require hours of coaxing from his mother. He is not, as she feared, a spoiled child prone to tantrums, but a quiet little boy who listens. He has his moods, obviously, but Sophie ranks high in his hierarchy. At the very top, in fact.
Every evening at about 6.00 p.m., Mme Gervais telephones to get the day’s news and in an embarrassed tone lets Sophie know what time she will be home. She always talks to her son for a few minutes before speaking to Sophie, with whom she does her best to be friendly. These attempts have met with scant success: Sophie confines her conversation to small talk and a resumé of what has happened during the day.
Léo is put to bed every night at 8.00 p.m. precisely. This is important. Sophie has no children of her own, but she has standards. After reading him a bedtime story, she spends the rest of the evening sitting in front of an enormous flat-screen television capable of receiving every available cable channel, a self-serving gift in the second month of her time there when, no matter what time she came home, Mme Gervais noticed that Sophie would be sitting in front of the television. More than once Mme Gervais has wondered how a woman in her thirties, who is clearly cultured, can be content in such a lowly job and spend her evenings staring at a small screen. During the first interview, Sophie explained that she studied communication. When Mme Gervais pressed her further, she said that she had completed a two-year technology diploma, that she had worked for a British-owned company – though she did not say what her role was – and that she had previously been
married. Mme Gervais had been satisfied with this information. Sophie had come recommended by a childhood friend, now the director of a recruitment consultancy, who for some mysterious reason had been much taken by Sophie at her only interview. Besides, she needed someone immediately: Léo’s nanny had left without warning, having given no notice. Sophie’s calm, serious expression inspired confidence.
During the first weeks, Mme Gervais had probed her a little more about her life, but delicately gave up, sensing from Sophie’s answers that some “terrible secret tragedy” had blighted her life, a vestige of the romanticism common to many people, even among the upper classes.
*
As often happens, by the time the kettle begins to boil, Sophie is lost in thought. With her, it is a state that can last for some time. It is as though she is absent. Her mind becomes fixated on a single idea, a single image, her thoughts slowly coil around it like an insect, she loses all sense of time. Then, by some force of gravity, she comes back to earth and to the present moment, and she picks up her life where she left off. This is how it is.
This time, curiously, it is the image of Doctor Brevet that comes into her mind. She has not thought about him in a long time. He was not at all as she had imagined him. On the telephone she had pictured a tall, overbearing figure, but in fact he is a short little man; he looks like a legal assistant overawed at being allowed to deal with less important clients. On one side of the consulting room is a bookshelf filled with knick-knacks. The moment she stepped into the psychologist’s office, she told him she did not want to lie on a couch, preferring to sit instead. Doctor Brevet made a gesture to indicate that this presented no problem. “I don’t have a couch here,”
he said. Sophie explained herself as best she could. “A notepad,” the doctor finally declared. Sophie was to record everything she did. Perhaps she was making “a storm in a teacup” of these memory lapses of hers. One needed to try to see things objectively, said Doctor Brevet. That way, “You will be able to measure the extent of what you have forgotten, what you have missed.” And so Sophie began to note down everything. She had done so for about three weeks . . . Until their next session. And during that time she had forgotten many things. She had missed several meetings and, two hours before her visit with Doctor Brevet, she realised she had mislaid the notebook. She could not find it. Would this be the day she stumbled finally on Vincent’s birthday present? The one she had been unable to find when she had wanted to surprise him.