Tatiana de Rosnay: A Secret Kept

I stop. That is the end of the story.

Angèle gently turns me around so I can see her face. She puts both hands on my cheeks and looks at me for a long time.

“Is that how it happened, Antoine?” she says very softly.

“I will never know the truth. That is the closest I can get to it.”

She goes to the fireplace, leaning her forehead against the smooth wood of it, then glances back at me.

“Did you ever manage to talk to your father about this?”

My father. How can I begin to tell her? How can I describe our last talk, a few days ago? I felt compelled that evening, as I left the office, to confront him. No matter what Mélanie said. No matter how hard she had tried putting me off for reasons of her own. I needed to talk to him then. There would be no more waiting. No more guesswork. What exactly did he know about Clarisse’s death? What had he been told? Did he know about June Ashby?

When I turned up, my father and Régine were having dinner in front of the television. They were watching the news. The upcoming American presidential elections. The tall, thin man, barely older than I am, the one people were calling “the black Kennedy.” My father was silent, tired. Little appetite. Loads of pills to swallow. Régine whispered that next week he was scheduled to stay at the hospital for a while. A bad patch was coming up. She shook her head despondently. When the meal was over and Régine was on the phone with a friend in another room, I said to my father, hoping he’d tear his eyes away from the television, that I would like to talk to him if he didn’t mind. He nodded and gave a sort of grunt, which I assumed was a positive response. But when he finally turned his eyes to me, they were so full of weariness that I was instantly silenced. The eyes of someone who knew he was dying, who could not bear being on the face of this earth any longer. There was sheer misery in those eyes, as well as a quiet submission that stirred me. Gone was the maverick lawyer. Gone was the dictatorial father. Gone was the arrogant censor. I was looking at an old, sick, foul-breathed man who was ready to die, and who didn’t want to listen to me, or to anyone else, anymore.

It was too late. Too late for me to reach out and tell him I cared, too late for me to tell him that I knew he had cancer, that I knew he was dying, too late to ask him about Clarisse and June, too late to risk myself in that territory with him. He blinked slowly, not even puzzled. He waited for me to speak, and when I finally did not, he shrugged weakly and looked back at the television. He did not even ask me what I wanted. I felt as if he had dropped a curtain onto a stage. The show was over. Come on, Antoine, this is your father. Reach out, take his hand, make sure he knows you’re there, even if you can’t bring yourself to do it, make an effort, tell him you do care, tell him before it is too late. Look at him, he is dying, there is not much time. There is no time.

I remembered when he was young, his smile shining out like a beacon in his otherwise severe face, when his hair was dark and thick, not the meager, scanty roots of today. I remembered when he would take us into his arms and kiss us lovingly, when Mélanie used to ride on his shoulders at the Bois de Boulogne, when his protective hand at the small of my back, propelling me ahead, made me feel I was the most powerful boy in the world. I remembered, after my mother’s death, how he clammed up, how the tender kisses stopped, how he became demanding, inflexible, how he criticized, how he judged, how he made me feel wretched. I wanted to ask him why life had made him so acrimonious, so hostile. Was it losing Clarisse? Losing the only person who ever made him happy? Was it finding out she had been unfaithful? That she loved someone else? That she loved a woman? Was it that, that final humiliation, that had broken my father’s heart, broken his soul?

But I asked him nothing. Nothing at all. I got up. He did not move. The television blared on. So did Régine’s voice next door.

“Goodbye, Father.”

He grunted again, not even looking at me. I left, closing the door behind me. On the stairs, I could no longer contain the bitter tears of remorse and pain that seemed to sear into my flesh.

“No, I could not talk to my father. I couldn’t do it.”

“Don’t blame yourself, Antoine. Don’t make it even harder on yourself.”

The urge to sleep takes over like a heavy blanket thrown over my head. Angèle leads me to bed, and I marvel at the gentleness of her hands, those respectful, caring hands that deal with death every day. I drop into an uneasy sleep, like sinking into a bottomless, murky sea. Such strange dreams come to me, my mother kneeling in her red coat facing the train, my father with his happy smile of long ago, climbing a treacherously steep, snowy peak, his face burned by the sun, Mélanie, wearing a long black dress, floating on the surface of a black swimming pool, arms outstretched, sunglasses perched on her nose, and me striding through a thick, overgrown forest, bare feet on muddy, insect-ridden soil.

When I wake up, morning has broken, and for a panic-stricken second I don’t know where I am. Then I remember. Angèle’s place. In her remarkably renovated nineteenth-century house that used to be a small primary school. Situated by a river in the heart of Clisson, that quaint historical town near Nantes I had never heard of before I met her. Ivy creeping up granite walls, two broad chimneys overlooking the tiled roof, and an enchanting walled garden, the pupils’ old playground. I am in Angèle’s comfortable bed. But she is not lying next to me. The space next to me is cold. I get up, patter downstairs. The appetizing aroma of coffee and toast greets me. A pale, lemony sunshine pours through the windowpanes. Outside, the garden is covered with a delicate sprinkling of frost, like icing on a cake. From where I stand, I can just glimpse the top of the ruins of Clisson’s medieval castle.

Angèle is sitting at the table, hugging one knee, deeply immersed in a document. Her open laptop is nearby. As I come closer, I see that she is studying my mother’s medical file. She glances up, and by the circles under her eyes, I can tell she hasn’t slept much.

“What are you doing?” I ask.

“I was waiting for you. I didn’t want to wake you.”

She rises, pours me a cup of coffee, hands it to me. I see that she is dressed for the day, wearing her customary black jeans, boots, and black turtleneck.

“You look like you haven’t had much sleep.”

“I read your mother’s medical file.”

Something about the way she says it makes me look at her more closely.

“Did you notice anything?”

“Yes,” she says. “I did. Sit down, Antoine.”

I sit next to her. It is warm and sunny in the kitchen, and after that troubled sleep, those disturbing, vivid dreams, I don’t think I can face anything distressing. I brace myself.

“What did you notice?”

“I’m not a doctor, you know that. But I work in a hospital and I see death every day. I read medical files too, I talk to doctors. I examined your mother’s file while you were asleep. I took notes. And I did some research on the Internet, as well as sending a couple of e-mails to friends of mine who are doctors.”

“And?” I ask, suddenly unable to drink my coffee.

“Your mother had been having migraines two years before she died. Not very often, but strong ones. Do you remember them?”

“One or two. She had to lie down in the dark, and Dr. Dardel would come to see her.”

“A few days before she died, she had a migraine, and she saw her doctor. Look, you can read it here.”

She hands me the photocopied note. Dr. Dardel’s crooked handwriting. I had seen this before. It was the last entry in his notes before Clarisse died. “February 7, 1974. Migraine, nausea, vomiting, eye pain. Double vision.”