Chapter 4
She Never Wanted to Marry Me
You’re picking up where you left off.
He caught up with me at the bottom of the steps, at 11.58, just as I was opening my umbrella.
“Madam.”
I turned round. Close up, he was even taller, and more broken. Three days' stubble, red, dry eyes, a black tie badly knotted. He had the pen from the register in his hand; he had torn it off its string without noticing.
“Who are you?”
There was no anger in his voice. Only exhaustion, and a kind of fear.
I said nothing. I opened my purse, took out my identity card and held it out to him. It was simpler than talking, and it was accurate.
He took it. He read the name. He read the date. He read the place of birth. I saw his lips shape the word “Verviers” without saying it. He looked at the photo, looked at me, looked at the photo again, and did what someone does when they are looking for a face and can't find it: he closed his eyes for a second.
“Come with me,” he said. “Not here. There are too many people.”
The tea room was two hundred metres away. He lifted the half-lowered shutter, turned the key, and the copper bell rang above our heads, two clear, absurd notes, as if for a customer.
Inside, the chairs were upturned on the tables, legs in the air. On the oak counter, an old-fashioned till, an empty bowl, a folded tea towel. The window with the jam jars looked out on the grey street. It smelled of cold butter, sugar and stale air. A china clock above the kitchen door had stopped at 4.10.
The girl had followed us. I hadn't heard her come in. She had taken off her black coat; underneath she wore a grey sweatshirt too big for her, the sleeves rolled up twice. She went behind the counter without a word and sat on a stool in the corner, her knees against the cupboard.
“My daughter,” Vincent said. “Emma. My mother's gone home with a cousin.”
He took two chairs down from a table, then a third, which he left empty. He sat down. So did I. He laid my card on the table between us, like an exhibit.
“Vincent Lambotte,” he said. “I'm… I was… We'd been together for eighteen years.”
He searched the inside pocket of his jacket. He took out a red leather wallet, worn at the corners.
“It was in the Panda. The police gave it back to me on Tuesday. I keep it on me. I don't know why.”
He opened the wallet, drew out an identity card and placed it next to mine.
Two cards. The same surname: Mathy. The same first name: Claire. The same date: 14 March 1982. The same place: Verviers. Hers had been issued in Spa in 2017 and was valid until 2027. In the photo, the woman who laughed in the missing-person appeal wasn't laughing; nobody laughs on an identity card. A round face, light eyes, the streak barely visible, pulled back. A different face from mine. The same name underneath.
I turned her card over. I didn't think about it: I always turn documents over, I always read the back. The back is where you find what people didn't think to hide.
The National Register number was printed there, in small type. 82.03.14-238.
Mine I have known by heart for twenty years. It's on every payslip, every tax return, every form from the health insurance fund. 82.03.14-164.
Right.
The same date of birth. The same first six digits. Then two sets of three digits that had nothing to do with each other. Two different people, as far as the state's computer was concerned.
I took out the black notebook and wrote it down: 238. Me: 164. Vincent watched me write without understanding.
“Are you police?”
“I'm an accountant.”
He gave a brief, joyless laugh.
“She wrote everything down too. The oven temperatures, the invoices, the date on every jar. Are you family? She said she didn't have any left.”
“I don't know,” I said. “That's what I came to find out.”
I told him about the death notice. The envelope, the handwritten address, the illegible postmark. He shook his head at every sentence.
“It wasn't me. I only sent the ones on the list. My mother's family, the customers, my colleagues at the practice. My mother sent about twenty. I didn't know you. I didn't even know you existed.”
“And the notice itself? The wording?”
“The funeral director suggested 'has left us'. I said 'died accidentally'. We had to write something. They've stopped looking, madam. It has to have a name.”
“And 'partner'?”
He looked up.
“That's what I was. Eighteen years. We weren't even legal cohabitants. I asked her to marry me every Christmas from 2009 on. The first time, she was pregnant with Emma. The last time…”
He stopped. He looked at his hands.
“She never wanted to marry me. She said she didn't believe in marriage.”
Behind the counter, Emma hadn't moved. I thought she wasn't listening. She spoke without raising her head, in a low, clear voice, to nobody in particular, or perhaps to me.
“Mum never ran without her watch. The watch is on the draining board.”
Vincent closed his eyes.
“Emma. Not now.”
She said nothing more. She picked up a tea towel, unfolded it, folded it again. On the counter beside her lay a sheet torn from a pad, with a shopping list: unsalted butter 2 kg, flour, unwaxed oranges, baking powder, bin bags 30 L. It was written in purple ink.
“She does the shopping now,” Vincent said quietly. “She wants us to reopen. She says her mother wouldn't have wanted us to throw the butter away.”
I looked at the list and thought it was the list of a child who wanted life to go on.
Someone tapped on the window.
Three light taps, with the fingertips. A man stood under the awning, a tweed cap on his head, a grey beard cut short. He was holding two cups of coffee, one in each hand. I recognised him: the man by the pillar, under the porch.
Vincent got up to open the door. The bell rang.
“Marc,” Vincent said. “Come in.”
He turned to me.
“He did the search with us. On the Monday, all day.”
The man put the cups down on the table and took off his cap.
“Marc Lenoir,” he said. “I'm sorry to disturb you. I saw you go in, and I thought nobody had had anything to drink since this morning.”
He had a soft, steady voice that didn't take up room. Past fifty, perhaps a little more. Attentive eyes. He pushed one cup towards Vincent, the other towards me.
“I saw you in the church, madam.”
“Mathy,” I said. “Claire Mathy. It's a long story.”
He didn't look surprised. He nodded slowly, as if he were filing the information in its proper place.
“Mrs Mathy. I used to work in the emergency services. When I heard they were looking for someone on the fagne, I signed up with the volunteers. You do what you know how to do.”
He looked at Vincent, then at me.
“I didn't want to bring it up today. But there's something that doesn't add up, and I can't let it go. The phone. It rained all night, Sunday into Monday. Proper rain, not drizzle. The rescuer who picked it up, on the Monday at 9.10, told me himself: the phone was dry.”
Vincent passed a hand over his face.
“The police know.”
“The police have made a note of it,” Marc said gently. “That's not the same thing.”
He wrote his number on a paper napkin, slid it next to my cup and put his cap back on.
“If you want to talk about it, some day. I'm in the area for a while.”
The bell rang behind him.
Vincent stood for a moment with his back against the door, looking out at the street. Then he went behind the counter. He opened the till drawer, lifted the coin tray and took out a brown envelope, folded in two.
“She didn't have a single photo from before,” he said. “Not one. No parents, no school, no holidays. She said it had all burned. Except this one. She didn't keep it at home. She kept it here.”
He laid a photo on the table, between our two identity cards.
A paper print, the colours faded, the corners dog-eared. A cobbled street covered in confetti, a painted cardboard float behind, masks, children. In the foreground, a girl of twenty was laughing, cheeks flushed, a paper streamer in her hair. It was her: the same laugh, the same way of turning her head. She was holding the arm of a man of about fifty in a beige raincoat, who wasn't laughing but was watching her laugh.
On the back, in biro: Verviers, carnival, March 2004.
“Do you know this man?” Vincent asked.
I knew the raincoat. My mother bought it in the sales, in Liège, and he wore it for twelve years. I knew the way he tilted his head to listen. I knew the white streak at the left temple, in hair that was still brown.
It was my father.