Lullaby - Leila Slimani Page 0,33

refilled them. They argued and Myriam worried about her daughter being woken. She could have screamed from tiredness.

After Adam’s birth it was even worse. The night they came home from the maternity ward, Myriam fell asleep in the bedroom, the transparent cradle next to her. Paul couldn’t sleep. It seemed to him that there was a strange smell in the apartment. The same smell as in pet stores, on the docks, where he sometimes took Mila on weekends. A smell of secretion and confinement, of dried piss in a litter tray. That smell sickened him. He got up and took the bins outside. He opened the window. And then he realised that it was Mila who had thrown everything she could find in the toilets, which were now overflowing, spreading that foul wind throughout the apartment.

*

During that period Paul felt trapped, overwhelmed by obligations. He became a pale shadow of his usual easy-going, optimistic self, the tall blonde man with the booming laugh who made girls turn to watch him as he passed without him even noticing. He stopped having mad ideas, suggesting weekends in the mountains and trips in the car to eat oysters on the beach. He tempered his enthusiasms. In the months that followed Adam’s birth he started avoiding the apartment. He invented meetings and drank beer, alone, in hiding, in a quarter far from home. His friends had become parents too, and most of them had left Paris for the suburbs, the provinces or warmer lands in the south of Europe. For a few months Paul became childish, irresponsible, ridiculous. He kept secrets and harboured desires of escape. And yet he made no allowances for himself. He knew just how banal his attitude was. All he wanted was not to go home, to be free, to live again. He realised now – too late – that he hadn’t lived very much before this. The clothes of a father seemed at once too big for him and too sad.

But it was done now, and he couldn’t say that he didn’t want it any more. The children were there – loved, adored, unconditionally – but doubt was insinuating itself everywhere. The children, their smell, their gestures, their desire for him: all of this touched him to a degree that he would never be able to describe. Sometimes he wanted to be a kid too, to put himself in their shoes, to dissolve into childhood. Something was dead and it wasn’t only youth or the feeling of being carefree. He wasn’t useless any more. They needed him and he was going to have to deal with that. By becoming a father, he had acquired principles and certainties, things he had sworn never to have. His generosity had become relative. His passions had grown tepid. His world had shrunk.

*

Louise is there now and Paul has started arranging dates with his wife again. One afternoon he sent her a message. ‘Place des Petits-Pères.’ She didn’t reply and he found her silence wonderful. Like a form of politeness; a lover’s silence. His heart was racing when he arrived in the square, slightly early, slightly worried. ‘She’ll come. Of course she’ll come.’ She came and they walked on the docks, like they used to do, before.

He knows how much they need Louise, but he can’t stand her any more. With her doll’s body, her irritating habits, she really gets on his nerves. ‘She’s so perfect, so delicate, that sometimes it sickens me,’ he admitted to Myriam one day. He is horrified by her little-girl figure, that way she has of dissecting every little thing the children do or say. He despises her dubious theories on education and her grandmotherly methods. He ridicules the photographs she has started sending them from her mobile phone, ten times a day, showing the children smiling as they lift up their empty plates, with the caption: ‘I ate it all.’

Since the incident with the make-up, he talks to her as little as possible. That evening he even thought about firing her. He called Myriam to discuss the idea with her. She was in the office, and she didn’t have time. So he waited until she got home and when his wife came through the door, about 11 p.m., he told her what had happened, the way Louise had looked at him, her icy silence, her arrogance.

Myriam reasoned with him. She played down the episode. She blamed him for having been too hard on the nanny, for having hurt