The Sunday Before

On Sunday mornings Raphaël made the eggs and Mathilde made the coffee, and neither of them could have said how long it had been that way.

She had come down in a T-shirt, the one he had brought back from a trade fair in Frankfurt, advertising a food-flavourings company nobody had ever heard of. He was already at the stove, barefoot, his hair going in every direction.

— Did you put the butter in before or after?

— You ask me that every Sunday.

— And every Sunday you lie.

He turned his head and showed her the pan, the butter foaming.

— Before. Like your grandmother.

— My grandmother uses olive oil and it's hopeless.

— Like somebody else, then.

She went round behind him to reach the cups and laid her cheek for a moment between his shoulder blades. He smelled of sleep and of what was left of yesterday's scent. She stayed there longer than she needed to and he didn't move, spatula in the air, as though moving would make her leave.

— The coffee, he said after a while.

— I know.

She still didn't move.

---

Their flat looked onto a courtyard in the seventh arrondissement: two plane trees and the bike store. In twelve years they had considered moving four times and had never once viewed a flat. Mathilde said it was laziness. Raphaël said it was because they were happy where they were, which came to roughly the same thing but sounded better in company.

They ate the eggs standing up, because it was eleven o'clock and sitting down would have turned it into a meal.

— I saw Pauline yesterday, Mathilde said. She's selling her share.

— Of the practice?

— She's moving to Chambéry. Her husband's been transferred.

— And you're buying her out?

She shrugged, her mouth full.

— I'd need ten minutes to think about it and I don't have ten minutes.

— You've got ten minutes right now.

— Right now I've got eggs.

He laughed. It was a short laugh, two notes, that she knew by heart and had first heard in the hallway of a block of flats twelve years earlier, while she was looking for the bell of a flat where she knew nobody.

They washed up together, him washing, her drying, because their dishwasher had died in February and they hadn't replaced it, probably for the same reason that kept them in that flat.

— Your mother rang yesterday, said Raphaël.

— She rang you?

— She rang the landline. She asked if you were all right and hung up before I could answer.

— That's her all over.

Mathilde picked up a plate, turned it over, put it down again.

— When I was little we went down to Les Aubes every summer. Three weeks in July. My uncle Francis did the cutting, my grandmother did the distilling, and my mother stayed in the kitchen doing the beans and making sure nobody made a fuss.

— Making sure nobody made a fuss?

— That was her line. It's still her line.

She held out her hand for the tea towel, changed her mind, kept it.

— There was the big house at the top, my grandmother's. And a hundred metres below, the lower house, where Solange lived.

— Who's Solange?

— My grandmother's friend.

She had answered without thinking, in exactly the tone you use to give someone the time.

— She was a schoolteacher in Nyons. She made us pancakes that were far too thin and she swore like a trooper. She's eighty-six, she's in a home now. My grandmother goes every day.

— Every day?

— Every day.

Raphaël let the sink drain. The water made that sucking noise that made Mathilde laugh when she was tired, and she laughed.

---

In the afternoon there was that thing that happened to them less and less often and that they never talked about: they went back up to bed at three in the afternoon, for no reason, with nothing to announce it. The window was open; somebody outside was parking a car with far too many manoeuvres.

Afterwards she lay on her stomach, the sheet across the small of her back, and watched him watching the ceiling.

— What are you thinking about?

— Nothing.

— I can see you're thinking.

— I'm thinking we should buy out Pauline's share.

— There, she said. That's why I married you. So you'd do my thinking for me on Sundays.

He turned his head towards her.

— You married me because I make the eggs.

— That too.

She closed her eyes. There was a long, easy silence, one of those silences that ask for nothing.

Then he said:

— Tuesday, what time is it again?

And the silence changed.

---

Tuesday was eight forty-five, at the hospital, on the third floor, in the unit where they had learned to tell the nurses apart by the way they said hello. It was the third transfer. The first had been in September, the second in January.

Mathilde didn't answer straight away. She knew he knew the time. She also knew he was asking for another reason, one he probably couldn't have named himself, and one she didn't want to go looking for now.

— Eight forty-five, she said. Same as the other times.

— All right.

— Can you come?

— Of course I can come.

He had said it very fast. She opened her eyes and looked at him, and he was smiling, and his smile was perfectly normal.

— Good, she said.

She got up, looked for her T-shirt on the floor, couldn't find it, took a shirt of his.

— I'm going to call my grandmother.

— Now?

— She's left me three messages. Three. She never leaves messages, she thinks it's money thrown out of the window.

— Messages haven't cost anything for twenty years.

— You go and explain that to her.

She went out onto the balcony with the phone. He heard her say hello Mamie, then nothing for a while, then yes, then yes again, then all right, we'll come.

When she came back in, she had the face of someone who has just been given a piece of information and doesn't yet know what to do with it.

— She wants us to come down next Sunday. Everyone. My parents, Francis, Corentin.

— A birthday?

— Her birthday's in August.

— What, then?

— She didn't say.

She started looking for her T-shirt in earnest, lifted the sheet, looked under the bed.

— She said: come, and don't come on your own.