Ninety-One Days

At seven he went downstairs, made coffee, and did not drink it.

The kitchen was tidy. Everything in that house had been tidy since the twelfth of January: the cupboards, the papers, the clothes, the bathroom drawers. He had done it all in ten days, alone, methodically, refusing his sister-in-law's help, and his sister had said to somebody on the telephone, in the hall, a sentence he was not meant to hear: he's clearing the house as though he were moving a dead man he never knew.

He opened his notebook.

It was a spiral-bound A5 pad bought at the stationer's in the rue Gambetta on the fourteenth of January. Every evening he wrote down what he had done with his day. Not feelings: acts. Monday: lessons 8–12. Marking 2–4. Shopping. Walk 4.2 km. Called the notary.

He had started it for a reason he had never put into words, and which was very simple: to prove that he did something with his days.

He wrote, under the eleventh of April:

2.17 a.m. — call, number withheld, 58 s. É.'s voice.

He looked at the line. Then he added, underneath:

I did not dream it. I was standing at 2.20 and the lamp was on.

He closed the notebook.

Mathieu Kerbrat was forty-four, had taught mathematics at the Lycée Montesquieu in Le Mans for seventeen years, and had lost fourteen kilos since January. He knew that precisely because he weighed himself every Tuesday, which he had never done before.

He counted everything now. The steps in the school staircase: forty-two. The days: ninety-one this morning. The kilometres he walked in the evening to wear himself out before bed: between three and six.

When his sister-in-law had said, in February, “it's been three months”, he had answered: “Not three months. Ninety-one days.” She had looked at him, and he had seen in her look that he was becoming somebody people worry about.

He had put the house on the market on the nineteenth of January, ten days after the funeral.

His sister-in-law had said it was too soon. The notary had said there was no hurry. His sister had said you do not make that kind of decision in the first month, and she was right, and he had signed anyway, on a Monday morning at eight, before lessons, because he had spent Sunday night until four in the morning in a house of a hundred and ten square metres of which a hundred and six were now of no use to anybody.

On the ninth of January at twenty to six, on the D338 outside Yvré-l'Évêque, a grey Clio had left the road on a patch of black ice and hit a plane tree. There had been no other vehicle, no witness, no emergency call. She had been driving back from an appointment in Connerré.

The estate agent arrived at nine.

His name was Ludovic, he was thirty, and he wore shoes with very thin soles.

— We've got a viewing on Saturday at two. A couple in their forties, two children. They're looking for exactly this: three bedrooms, a garden, close to the school.

— Fine.

— I'll go round with you again, if you don't mind. There are two or three things.

They went round.

In the sitting room the agent suggested taking down the photographs. Mathieu said yes.

In the kitchen he suggested clearing the worktop. Mathieu said yes.

In the bedroom he stopped in the middle of the room and looked about him.

— Good room. What have you got, sixteen, seventeen metres?

— Sixteen point four.

— The headboard, is it fixed to the wall?

Mathieu looked at the wall.

It was a wooden headboard, upholstered, two metres wide, which Élise had had made in 2015 by an upholsterer in the rue Nationale and which had cost a sum they laughed about for six months.

— It's screwed on, he said.

— Are you leaving it or taking it?

— I don't know.

The agent noted something on his tablet.

— Is there a chimney breast behind it? I can see a step in the ceiling.

Mathieu looked up.

There was indeed a step in the ceiling, a band twenty centimetres wide running along the wall, which he had seen every day for twelve years without seeing it.

— There was one, he said. We closed it up in 2014, during the works.

— Shame. A fireplace sells.

— It didn't draw.

— Do you know what sells at the moment? said the agent, putting his tablet away. Empty houses. Not empty of furniture: empty of a life. People want to project their own.

— You mean I should take down the photographs.

— I am asking you to take down the photographs, yes. It isn't very tactful of me and I know it.

— It doesn't matter.

It did not matter. He had taken them all down on the twelfth of January, except one, in the upstairs corridor, which he had not been able to touch.

When the agent had gone, Mathieu stayed in the bedroom.

He sat on the edge of the bed, on the right-hand side, his side, and looked at the off-white wall.

He thought about what his sister-in-law would say if he told her about the call. He thought about what a doctor would say. He knew the words: grief, hypnagogic hallucination, dream of falling asleep. He had read about them in February, at three in the morning, on websites he would never have visited before.

He was forty-four, he taught proof to adolescents, and he knew the difference between a fact and a wish.

The fact was this: at seventeen minutes past two, a call lasting fifty-eight seconds.

He opened the log on his phone to check for the seventh time.

It was still there.