Marie NDiaye - Ladivine

She lowered the window and shouted to Ladivine to climb in beside her.

In the back seat, her husband and Cagnac were talking like a couple of new friends, animated and effusive.

Ladivine hoisted herself onto the seat of buttery, enveloping leather.

“What do you think, lady? I’m leaning towards this one, myself,” said the young woman with a wink.

“But it’s the most expensive one,” said the husband, feigning torment.

Cagnac chortled, merry and obsequious.

“Isn’t it comfortable!” murmured Ladivine, reclining her seat.

The young woman turned towards the forest.

But, rather than follow one of the many lanes vanishing into the massive trees, she gently veered away and began skirting the forest’s edge, as Ladivine had seen her do before.

Then a strange, aching regret wrung her heart.

To erase it, she turned halfway around and asked Cagnac:

“That boy who works for you, Wellington. . Has he been here long?”

“Wellington, Wellington,” said Cagnac, searching his memory. “Oh, yes, that young one. We have him out now and then, when we need him, two or three weeks at a time, and then he goes back. Fine boy,” he added, dreamily.

“And when did he come this time?”

“Oh, I’m not sure. . Maybe last night.”

Cagnac sat up straighter and, avoiding Ladivine’s eye, adopted the impatient, somewhat pinched air of one who finds this subject unsuitable in the fragile, momentous midst of a test drive, of a deal in the making.

He turned to the husband and threw out a few flattering words on the young woman’s skill at avoiding the branches that sometimes blocked their way, fallen from the trees of the forest.

The husband smiled contentedly.

“So,” the young woman asked Ladivine, “what do you think?”

“Of the car? Very nice, very comfortable,” said Ladivine eagerly, guessing that her new friend, or her old friend, perhaps her lifelong friend, had her heart set on it.

She didn’t say that the bright, beckoning voices of the forest were calling her, and that beneath them she also heard a throaty, muted summons that scorned those happy little cries, a summons Ladivine would not escape.

You can listen to that happiness, the summoner said, if it helps you, but you won’t get away.

What was Clarisse Rivière doing in the forest?

Clarisse Rivière had never commanded anyone to do anything

— or had she?

After her last visit, when Clarisse Rivière introduced Freddy Moliger to her daughter, who immediately conceived the most unpleasant impression of that man, she could nonetheless only concede that Moliger seemed to hold no power over Clarisse Rivière, whereas Ladivine had thought it likely or even certain that he had her mother firmly under his thumb, unable to imagine any cause but coercion and contamination for the shocking new life Clarisse Rivière had chosen.

She had in fact almost exploded at her father on the phone, having called him two or three times solely to tell him what Clarisse Rivière was doing with her life, and express her concern, and hear, she hoped, Richard Rivière’s concern echoing back.

But instead, almost silent, uncomfortable, as if he thought it was no longer his place to know of such things, he simply said in a hesitant voice that Clarisse Rivière might finally have learned how to be happy, and those trite words threw Ladivine into the icy waters of barely repressed rage, which came back to her a few months later when he called to tell her of Clarisse Rivière’s death.

“You see, you see!” she cried. “If only you’d shown a little concern too!”

“But, my little girl, what would that have changed?” he’d answered, very quietly, distraught, tears in his voice.

Ladivine thought he was trying to dodge his responsibility, that this was hardly the real question.

No-one, she thought, could in good faith deny that shared, unhidden concern might have a protective force, and that Clarisse Rivière might have lived her new, strange, thorny life more carefully had she felt the shared concern of a daughter who loved her and an ex-husband who didn’t hate her and was worried about her.

Or would she have behaved more foolishly still?

Or would she have decided that at her age she had no reason to think her freedom in any way limited or complicated by the groundless anxieties of two people she loved who had, each in their own way, turned away from her?

In any case, when Ladivine met her mother’s lover, her mother twice asked a favour of Moliger, and to Ladivine’s almost outraged surprise he obeyed her at once.

“Go and get us some beers, would you?” Clarisse Rivière asked in a firm, confident voice as she dropped onto the blue couch, not yet soaked with her gushing blood. And then, a few minutes later:

“Maybe a little something to nibble on with these beers?”

And Moliger hurried off for a bag of crisps from the kitchen, docile, solicitous, but always with something both derisive and furious about him, as if he had to make up for his evident pleasure in obeying with a look that expressed just the opposite, concealing that pleasure from anyone who might find it laughable.

What was Clarisse Rivière doing deep in this foreign forest?

And why did it seem, oh yes why, wondered Ladivine, that Clarisse Rivière was calling to her in her true voice, her dark, solemn, trusting voice, that the naive, sunny songs also winging their way from deep inside the forest were meant only to attract her to what would otherwise fill her with terror?

But nothing that involved Clarisse Rivière could ever frighten her, far from it.

She had not heard her mother’s whimpers or screams as her blood drained away, as she weakened with each passing second, and any unspoken appeals Clarisse Rivière might have made after Ladivine’s father left she’d refused to hear, in self-defence and embarrassment.

And so, if Clarisse Rivière was now calling her in her true voice, her dark, solemn, trusting voice, she would come running with all the fervour of her uneasy conscience, her remorse-choked affection. When Marko came down to dinner that evening, Ladivine’s first thought was that her husband had been handed a death sentence.

Neither Marko nor the children had left their rooms all afternoon, and Ladivine, feeling uncomfortable for the Cagnacs, had tried to keep their hosts company, though she saw she was disturbing them as they dealt with the four-wheel drive’s sale to the young couple, typing up papers, a purchase contract, flattering and fussing over them to make sure, Ladivine realised, that they didn’t get any ideas about backing out.

Doing her best to seem carefree, she drifted from room to room on the ground floor, where the Cagnacs had a large office decorated with automotive posters, and everywhere she went she furtively looked around, trying to see Wellington.

Should she come face to face with the boy, she told herself, she’d have to beg his forgiveness, however real or serious or otherwise the thing she and Marko had done to him.

Yes, she told herself, humbling herself before Wellington was no sacrifice at all, and no apology on her part could erase all the terrible things Marko had thought about the boy, and the appalling happiness he found in his certainty that he’d destroyed him.

Wouldn’t she simply be trying to show him her joy that he was alive?

Not that she could seriously hope to find Marko relieved, for the moment, to see Wellington on his feet and evidently unhurt.

But when, with the children beside him, he entered the dining room where Ladivine and the Cagnacs were waiting, he had the face of a man condemned.

Wordlessly, with a wan smile, he pulled out his chair and slid into it.

And Ladivine didn’t need to study the Cagnacs to know that those two, that inflexible man and woman, had just dropped the blade onto Marko’s neck, moved more by disgust than by cruelty.