Chapter 3
One Hundred and Thirty-Four
You’re picking up where you left off.
The savings-account statement runs to eleven pages.
Judith printed them, because she cannot work on a screen where figures are concerned. She got the printer out of the cupboard, hunted for a cartridge, printed the eleven pages single-sided, and spread the lot over the dining-room table.
Then she took a ruler and a pen, and started ticking.
It took her an hour and forty minutes.
This is what she found.
The first payment dates from the fourth of October 2013. The last payment of four hundred euros dates from the fourth of November 2024.
Between the two there are one hundred and thirty-four payments. Not a hundred and thirty-three, not a hundred and thirty-five: a hundred and thirty-four, she ticked them one by one in red and counted them twice, and both times she arrived at the same number.
A hundred and thirty-four months is eleven years and two months.
A hundred and thirty-four times four hundred is fifty-three thousand six hundred.
She wrote the sum out in words in the margin, which is a hospital habit — you write doses in words so as not to misplace a zero.
fifty-three thousand six hundred
Then she added the line from the third of December, two hundred and seventeen euros and forty-three centimes, and did the addition by hand, in a column, as at school.
53,817.43
She looked at that number for a long time.
There is one thing she noticed on the fourth page and did nothing about.
The interest.
A savings account earns. Not much, but it earns, and in eleven years it had earned something like four thousand two hundred euros, paid in each thirty-first of December on a line called interest capitalised.
Which means there are not fifty-three thousand eight hundred euros in that account. There are a little under fifty-eight thousand.
Judith stared at that total for a moment and felt something unpleasant that took her a while to name: this money had been working. For eleven years, without her lifting a finger, somebody else's money had earned her four thousand two hundred euros.
She ringed the line in pen and went to make tea.
She came back with the tea and started the eleven pages again from the beginning, but differently.
This time she was not looking for what came in. She was looking for what went out.
An untouched savings account has no withdrawals. Hers had one.
14 March 2019 — WITHDRAWAL — €1,200.00
She remembered before she had even finished reading the line. Milan's brace. The quote was two thousand four hundred, the health insurance covered half, her ex-husband was supposed to pay a quarter and only paid it in June.
She had taken twelve hundred euros out of the account on a Thursday in March, and put them back on the second of July, all at once, as soon as she could.
Three months and nineteen days.
She looked at the withdrawal line, then at the repayment, and thought, very distinctly:
That doesn't count, I put them back.
And immediately behind it, in the next second, a second sentence arrived uninvited:
Then why did I just say that to myself?
That evening she made a list of what she had been telling herself for eleven years.
She wrote it on the back of page 7, because there was room.
2013-2015: it's a mistake, it will sort itself out.
Two years. She had sincerely believed that for two years, which is a long time for a woman who counts infusion rates to the tenth.
2015-2018: it's somebody from the unit, a family.
She had liked that hypothesis very much. She had even built a whole story around it: a father who had come into money, a child saved in 2012, a discreet gratitude. She had never checked it. She could not check it — and that is precisely why she had kept it so long.
2018-2022: it's a family matter and I don't want to know.
There she put the pen down.
Because she had written that sentence without thinking, in one stroke, and on rereading it she saw that it was the only one of the three that contained a decision.
2022-2024: nothing. No hypothesis at all.
After a while you stop wondering. Four hundred euros on the third of the month becomes a fact of life, like the tax deadline or the noise from the flat upstairs. She would have been incapable of saying when she had stopped thinking about it.
The third of January fell on a Friday.
Judith was working. She looked at her phone in the changing room at ten to seven, as always, and there was nothing.
She looked again at midday. Then at three. Then at seven when she left.
Transfers arrive between ten past six and a quarter past seven. She has known that for eleven years. By midday there was no reason left to look, and she looked anyway, seven times that day.
On the fourth, nothing. On the fifth, nothing.
On the sixth of January she called her bank to ask whether a transfer could be delayed by a technical problem. The adviser told her no, not by six days, and wanted to know whether it was a salary.
— No, said Judith.
— A pension?
— No.
There was a small polite silence at the other end, the silence of a man who is waiting to have it explained and who has been trained not to press.
— Can I make you an appointment with your adviser, Madame Ancelin?
Judith looked at her kitchen window, the yard, the wall opposite.
— Yes, she said. As soon as possible.