Lullaby - Leila Slimani Page 0,52

go to the cinema. Hervé would rather have gone for a drink on the terrace of a café, but Louise insisted. And she likes the film so much that they go back to see it again the following week. Next to her in the darkness, Hervé dozes discreetly.

In the end she agrees to have a drink with him on a terrace, outside a bar on one of the Grands Boulevards. Hervé is a happy man, she thinks. He smiles as he talks about his plans. The holidays they could take together in the Vosges. They would go skinny-dipping in the lakes; they would sleep in a mountain chalet belonging to a man he knows. And they would listen to music all the time. He would play her his record collection and he is sure that, very soon, she wouldn’t be able to live without music. Hervé is ready to retire and he can’t imagine enjoying those years of rest and relaxation on his own. His marriage ended in divorce fifteen years ago. He has no children and solitude weighs heavily on him.

Hervé tried every ploy in the book before Louise finally agreed, one evening, to go home with him. He waits for her at the Paradis, the café opposite the Massés’ apartment building. They take the metro together and Hervé puts his red-skinned hand on Louise’s knee. As she listens to him, her eyes are fixed on that hand, that man’s hand which settles, starts to move, wants more. That discreet hand which tries to hide its intentions.

They make love clumsily, him on top of her, their chins sometimes banging together. Lying on her, he grunts, but she doesn’t know if it’s a grunt of pleasure or because his joints are hurting and she’s not helping him. Hervé is so short that she can feel his ankles against hers – his thick ankles, his hairy feet – and, to her, this contact seems more incongruous, more intrusive than the man’s sex organ inside her. Jacques was so tall and he made love like he was punishing her, angrily. After this embrace, Hervé emerges relieved, as if a heavy weight has been lifted from him, and he acts more familiarly towards her.

*

It was here, in Hervé’s bed, in his council house in the Porte de Saint-Ouen, with the man asleep beside her, that she thought about a baby. A tiny baby, just born, a baby completely enveloped in that warm smell of life just beginning. A baby abandoned to love, which she would dress in pastel-coloured romper suits and which would be passed from her arms to Myriam’s and then to Paul’s. A newborn that would bind them more closely to one another, bringing them together in the same surge of tenderness. That would erase all the misunderstandings, the dissensions, that would give meaning to their daily habits. She would rock this baby on her knees for hours in a little room, illuminated only by a nightlight that would project boats and islands on to the wall. She would caress its bald head and gently insert her little finger into its mouth. The child would stop crying then, sucking her varnished fingernail with its swollen gums.

*

The next day she makes Paul and Myriam’s bed more carefully than usual. She moves her hand over the sheets. She searches for a trace of their lovemaking, a trace of the child she is now sure is going to arrive. She asks Mila if she would like a little brother or a little sister. ‘A baby we could look after together – what do you think?’ Louise hopes that Mila will talk about this to her mother, that she will whisper this idea into her ear and from there it will enter her mind and grow stronger. And one day the little girl asks Myriam, under Louise’s delighted gaze, if she has a baby in her belly. ‘Oh, God, no, I’d rather die!’ Myriam laughs.

Louise thinks that is bad. She doesn’t understand Myriam’s laughter, the light-hearted way she answers this question. Myriam is saying that, she thinks, to ward off bad luck. She feigns indifference, but she thinks about it all the same. In September, Adam too will start school; the house will be empty, and Louise will have nothing to do. Another child has to arrive to fill the long winter days.

Louise listens to conversations. It’s a small apartment – she isn’t doing it deliberately – but she ends up knowing everything. Except that,