Tatiana de Rosnay - A Secret Kept

The summers with Bibi and Jean-Luc had begun to take their toll. Despite the grandiose beauty of Black Périgord, cohabiting with my in-laws grew tough. There was something fastidious about Jean-Luc’s obsession with bowel movements, consistency of stools, frugal menus, calorie counting, and perpetual exercise. Bibi put up with all this, as busy as a bee in the kitchen, her moonlike pink face dimpling, her snow-white hair tied back in a bun, indulging in happy humming and plenty of good-natured shrugs. Every morning as I drank my black, sugared coffee-“So bad for you!” barked Jean-Luc, “you’ll be dead by the time you’re fifty!”-and hid behind a hydrangea bush to hurriedly smoke a cigarette-“A cigarette will reduce your lifetime by five minutes, did you know that?”-Bibi would walk briskly around the garden entirely swathed in plastic in order to perspire as much as possible, brandishing two ski poles. This was called the Nordic walk, and as she was Swedish, I supposed it suited her, although she did look ridiculous.

My in-laws’ throwback to 1960s nudity around the swimming pool and in the house had also begun to tire me. They pranced about like aging fauns, impervious to the fact that their sagging behinds inspired nothing but pity. But I had not dared bring this up with Astrid, who was also into summer nudism on a more moderate scale. The alarm went off when Arno, just twelve, mumbled something at dinner about being embarrassed having friends over to the pool because of his grandparents’ flaunting their genitals. By then we had decided to spend our summers elsewhere, although we did come back to visit.

So we swapped oak-dotted, forested Dordogne, bichermuesli, and nudist in-laws for the teeming-hot, overly cheerful, and calorific Club Med. I had not noticed Serge at first. I didn’t pick up any sign of danger whatsoever. Astrid went off to her aqua gym classes and tennis lessons, the kids went to the Mini Club, and I spent hours on the beach or in the sea, snoozing, swimming, tanning, or reading. I read a lot that summer, I remember, novels that Mélanie passed on from her publishing house, talented new authors, confirmed authors, foreign authors. I read them breezily, easily, not completely concentrating. Everything I did that summer, I did lazily. I should have kept my guard up. Instead, I lolled in the sun, convinced that all was right in my small world.

I think she met him on the tennis courts. They had the same teacher, a smarmy Italian who wore tight white shorts and strutted his stuff like Travolta on the dance floor. I didn’t sense anything was odd till later, during a trip to Istanbul. Serge was part of our group, fifteen of us from the Club Med, with a guide, an odd Turk who was educated in Europe and spoke with a surprising Belgian accent. Dazed with heat and exhaustion, we traipsed through Topkapi, the Blue Mosque, Saint Sophia, the ancient cisterns with the strange upside-down Medusa heads, the bazaar. Lucas was only seven and did a lot of complaining. He was the smallest child there.

What I noticed first was Astrid laughing. We were on a boat cruising up the Bosphorus, the guide pointing out the sights on the Asian bank, when I heard her laugh again and again. Serge was standing with his back to me, he had his arm around a girl, and they were all laughing together. The girl was young, fresh-faced, her hair tied back in a ponytail. “Hey, Tonio, come and meet Serge and Nadia.” So I ambled over and shook hands, screwing my eyes up against the sun to be able to see his face. Nothing special about him. Smaller than I am, beefy. Unremarkable features. Except I noticed that Astrid kept looking at him. And he at her. He was there with his girlfriend, and he couldn’t take his eyes off my wife. I felt like shoving him overboard.

What I also noticed, with rising anguish, was that when we got back to Palmiye, we kept bumping into him at every corner. Lo and behold, there was Serge in the hammam, there was Serge doing the customary Club Med Crazy Signs, dancing with the kids by the pool, there was Serge at the dinner table next to ours. Sometimes Nadia was there, sometimes she wasn’t. “They’re a modern couple,” Astrid had explained. I had no idea what that meant, but I didn’t like it one bit.

During the aqua gym classes, he was inevitably there, treading water next to my wife, kneading the back of her neck and shoulders during the mutual massage relaxing session at the end. There was nothing I could do to get rid of him. I began to understand with a dull hopelessness that I would have to wait till the end of our stay to see the last of him. I had no idea that their affair began just after we all returned to France. For me, Serge was an unpleasant part of our otherwise successful vacation. How blind I had been.

It was then that Astrid began to show signs of strain. She was often tired, short-tempered. We never seemed to make love anymore. She fell asleep early, cuddled up on her side of the bed, her back to me. Once or twice at night, after the kids had gone to bed, I caught her crying alone in the kitchen. She always managed to convince me that it was just sheer exhaustion or a problem at the office, nothing serious. And I believed her.

It was so easy, believing her. Not asking her any questions. Not asking myself any questions.

She was crying because she loved him and she didn’t know how to tell me.

The next day, Mélanie’s closest friend, Valérie, turns up with her four-year-old daughter, Léa (Mélanie’s goddaughter), her husband, Marc, and their Jack Russell terrier, Rose. I had to wait outside with the child and the dog while they went in to spend some time with Mélanie. The dog is the snappy kind that cannot keep still, seems to be built on springs, and barks persistently. The little girl is just as bad, despite her angelic looks. In order to try to pacify them both, I walk them round and round the hospital, holding one on the lead and the other by the hand, much to Angèle Rouvatier’s amusement as she watches me from a first-floor window. I feel a slow heat irradiate my pelvis as her eyes flicker over me. But it’s hard to look sexy with a howling child and a yelping dog in tow. Rose inelegantly straddles and pees on anything she can, including the front wheel of Angèle’s Harley, and Léa wants her maman and can’t think why she has to be lumped with me in the heat of an August afternoon in some worthless place where there isn’t even anywhere decent to play or any ice cream to be bought. I realize how lost I am, confronted with a child of that age. I have forgotten how tyrannical they can be, how obtuse, how noisy. I find myself longing for the nebulous silences of adolescence I have become accustomed to, which I think I know how to deal with. Why in God’s name do people have children? I muse, as the combination of Léa’s wails and Rose’s growls is now causing nurses to open windows and glance at me with despair or disdain.

Valérie finally emerges from the building and takes over the screaming pair, much to my relief. I wait till Marc comes out and whisks Rose and Léa off for a walk, and I sit down with Valérie under the shade of a chestnut tree. The heat is worse today, the white-hot, drying-out kind that makes you long for icy, bottomless fjords. Valérie is majestic and tanned, just back from a vacation in Spain. She and Mélanie have been friends for years, through the Sainte-Marie de l’Assomption school they both went to on the rue de Lubeck. I suddenly wonder if Valérie remembers my mother. I want to ask her but don’t. Valérie is a sculptor, quite well known. I find her work good, although overtly sexual and far too explicit to have hanging about a house full of kids, but I guess that’s because I’m a “bourgeois, uptight boy from the sixteenth arrondissement.” I can almost hear Mel’s voice poking fun at me.