Chapter 2

Eight Forty-Five

In the waiting room there was a fish tank with no fish in it.

Mathilde had noticed it in September, pointed it out to Raphaël in January, and by May she no longer saw it. You get used to anything, including an empty tank in an assisted reproduction unit, including the blue carpet, including the machine that gives you your change only half the time.

Raphaël had come. He had moved a meeting to nine o'clock; he had said so twice in the car, as if she needed to know the price.

— Do you want a coffee?

— It's disgusting.

— I know. Do you want one?

— Yes.

He went to get two coffees. She watched his back at the machine, hitting the flap with the flat of his hand. He was wearing the blue shirt. He always wore the blue shirt on hospital days, and she didn't know whether he was aware of it.

Next to them another couple was waiting too. The woman had an exercise book on her knees, an actual school exercise book, and was writing something in pencil. The man was looking at his phone and holding his wife's handbag on his lap with the seriousness of someone who has been entrusted with something important.

Mathilde looked at them too long. The woman glanced up, met her eye, and gave her a small sign — not a smile, something smaller and more accurate, two people recognising each other without wanting to speak.

— Madame Delfau?

Mathilde stood up. Raphaël stood up too, then sat down again, because it wasn't him they were calling.

The transfer took eleven minutes. Mathilde counted, now. She had counted all three times.

The embryologist was the one from January, a woman of about fifty who spoke softly and said we instead of you, which the first few times had struck Mathilde as extraordinarily tactful and which today irritated her.

— We lie still for ten minutes, and then we go home and we live normally.

— Normally, Mathilde repeated.

— Normally. Are you working?

— This afternoon.

— Then work this afternoon.

In the corridor Raphaël took her hand. His fingers were cold. She wanted to ask him what he was thinking and didn't, and realised, walking towards the lift, that it was the second time in three days.

In the afternoon she worked.

Her practice took up two rooms on the ground floor of a building in the rue Chevreul, with a brass plate that Pauline polished and that she herself no longer saw. She had six patients. The fourth was Monsieur Sanchez, seventy-eight, hip replacement in February, who always arrived a quarter of an hour early and apologised for being early.

— Have you been doing your exercises?

— I've done half of them.

— Which half?

— The easy half.

She took his leg, bent it gently, felt under her fingers exactly where it caught. It was the thing she loved most about her job and had never managed to explain to anyone: her hands knew before she did.

— Push against me. Not hard. There.

Monsieur Sanchez pushed, winced, and apologised for wincing.

She thought, showing him out, that she had spent the morning lying on a table doing absolutely nothing and the afternoon on her feet looking after other people's bodies, and that the second half of the day was worth a great deal more than the first.

The answer came ten days later, on a Friday, at twenty past five, in a call she took in the bike store because she was coming home from work and the phone had rung at exactly that moment.

She said thank you, she said yes, I understand, she said goodbye Madame. Then she stayed there among the bicycles with her bag on her shoulder.

When she went up, Raphaël was already home. He saw her face and didn't need to ask.

He held her. She didn't cry straight away. She cried after a minute, all at once, against his jacket, and he said nothing at all, which was exactly the right thing to do, and he knew it.

They ordered pizza because cooking was beyond them. They ate on the sofa with the box between them and the television on, showing a programme neither of them was watching.

— Three, said Mathilde.

— I know.

— She said: statistically, it's often the third.

— She said sometimes.

— She said often.

He didn't argue. He picked up a slice, put it down again, didn't eat it.

— We'll stop for three months, said Mathilde.

She heard herself say it and surprised herself. It hadn't been decided. It came out like that, with the tiredness, with the cold cheese, with the fourteen months of prescriptions in the hall drawer.

— Three months, she said again. We breathe. We do something else. We go away somewhere, I don't know.

— Yes, said Raphaël.

He had said it straight away.

He had said it with his body too: the shoulders coming down, the hand going back to the slice of pizza. One second, no more. One second of relief he hadn't been able to hold in and would have been hard pressed to explain if she had seen it.

She didn't see it. She was watching the television, where two people were discussing cooking with a great deal of enthusiasm.

— Three months, she said again.

— Three months.

He took her foot, the way he did, and pressed his thumb into the arch, and she closed her eyes.

— And we go down to your grandmother's on Sunday, he said.

— And we go down to my grandmother's on Sunday.