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in exchange for so many hours of painstaking hope. It was time for me to fire my last round: ‘Look,’ I said, bending over her nape, ‘there is even some marble, just there . . .’
    And then she smiled and let me love her.
    ‘And then with a smile she loved me’ would have been snappier, no? Would have been stronger, more romantic. But I didn’t dare . . . Because I’ve never known how, I guess . . . And when I look at her now, sitting on the other side of the table, light-hearted and affable, indulgent, so
magnanimous
with my family, and still just as attractive, just as . . . No, I’ve never known how . . . After the carpet at the Bristol and the false charms of alcohol, perhaps Mathilde was the third misunderstanding in our relationship . . .
    It’s something new, feeling dizzy like this. Being so introspective, asking these useless questions about our relationship, and it really isn’t like me. Been travelling too much, perhaps? Too much jet lag, too many hotel ceilings and restless nights? Or too many lies . . . Too many sighs . . . Too many mobile phones snapping shut whenever I show up in silence, too many forced poses and mood swings, or . . . Too much of nothing, if truth be told.
    This wasn’t the first time Laurence had cheated on me and up to now I’d usually got off fairly lightly. Not that I particularly liked it, but as I’ve already said, I’d thrown myself to the lions, trying to pat the kitty on my way into the coliseum. It hadn’t taken me long to figure out that I was out of my league. She’d always refused to marry me, didn’t want a child with me, didn’t . . . And then . . . I was working so hard, was away so often myself . . . So I just learned to bite the bullet and sweet-talk my pride to keep it docile.
    I managed pretty well, actually. I even think that her . . . slippages often acted as a fuel for our semblance of coupledom. Our pillows, in any case, were delighted.
    She’d seduce, embrace, get bored, and come back to me.
    Come back to me and talk to me in the dark. She pushed back the sheets and lifted herself up a bit, stroked my back, my shoulders, my face, a long time, slowly, tenderly . . . and always ended up murmuring something like ‘You’re the best, you know . . .’ or ‘There’s no one else like you . . .’ I kept my mouth shut, lay there motionless, never tried to resist her wandering hand.
    Because even if the skin was mine, it often felt as if those nights of strategic withdrawal were for her scars, not mine, and that she was somehow trying to contain something, appease something, by massaging those scars, very gently.
    But this time we haven’t got that far. Nowadays she’s trusting her insomnia to homeopathy and even in the dark she won’t let me see what it is that’s beating out of synch beneath her beautiful suit of armour . . .
    Who is to blame? Mathilde, for growing up too fast, like Alice in Wonderland when she bursts her way out of her tiny house, blasting it to smithereens? She hardly needs me any more to hold her stirrup for her, and soon she’ll be speaking English much better than I do . . .
    Or Mathilde’s father, for his carelessness that once upon a time seemed downright criminal but now seems almost funny? Irony has replaced bitterness and so much the better, but as a result I suffer by comparison. Even if I never mix up the dates of the school holidays, unlike some . . .
    Or maybe the passage of time, no longer doing such a great job? I was young when I met Laurence, younger than her, I was her ‘toy boy’. Now I’ve caught up. Maybe even overtaken her.
    There are days when I feel so old.
    So old . . .
    Or could it be my profession – the constant struggle, no sooner have you persuaded them than you have to start all over again. Nothing is ever sure, and here I am nearly fifty years old and I sometimes get the feeling I’m still this frantic student high on caffeine rattling on about how ‘I’ve got to rush, I’m running