Lullaby - Leila Slimani Page 0,55

any of his tenants. Nobody is careful enough: there is always something to be found, a defect to be highlighted, a stain somewhere, a scratch.

Alizard has a head for business. For thirty years he drove a lorry between France and Poland. He slept in his cab, barely ate, lied about his rest time, resisted every temptation. He consoled himself for all of this by calculating the money he’d saved. He felt pleased with himself, proud of his ability to make such sacrifices in preparation for his future fortune.

Year after year he bought studio flats in the Paris suburbs and renovated them. He rents them out, at an exorbitant price, to people who have no alternative. At the end of each month he goes round to all of his properties to pick up his rent. He pokes his head through doorways; sometimes he goes inside, to ‘have a look round’, to ‘make sure everything’s in order’. He asks indiscreet questions, to which the tenants reply grudgingly, desperate for him to leave, to get out of their kitchen, to take his nose out of their cupboard. But he stays there and in the end they offer him something to drink, which he accepts and slowly sips. He tells them about his backache (‘Thirty years driving a lorry, it messes you up’). He makes conversation.

He likes to rent to women, because they’re more conscientious and less likely to cause trouble. He particularly favours students, single mothers, divorcees – but not old women, who can move in and stop paying and still have the law on their side. And then Louise arrived, with her sad smile, her blonde hair, her lost-waif expression. She was recommended by one of Alizard’s former tenants, a nurse at the Henri-Mondor hospital who had always paid her rent on time.

Bloody sentimentality. This Louise had nobody. No children and a dead husband. She stood there in front of him, a wad of euros in her hand, and he thought she was pretty, elegant in her blouse with its Peter Pan collar. She looked at him, docile and grateful. She whispered: ‘I was very ill’, and in that moment he was eager to ask her questions, to ask her what she’d done after her husband’s death, where she had come from and what pain she had suffered. But she didn’t give him time. She said: ‘I’ve just found a job, in Paris, with a very good family.’ And the conversation ended there.

*

Now Bertrand Alizard wants to get rid of this mute, negligent tenant. He’s no longer fooled. He won’t put up with any more of her excuses, her shifty behaviour, her late payments. He doesn’t know why, but the sight of Louise makes him shiver. Something in her disgusts him: that enigmatic smile, that excessive make-up; that way she has of looking down on him, her mouth tight-lipped. Not once has she ever responded to one of his smiles. Not once has she made the effort to notice that he’s wearing a new jacket and that he’s brushed his sad few strands of red hair to the side.

Alizard heads over to the sink. He washes his hands and says: ‘I’ll come back in a week with the parts and a plumber to do the work. You should finish packing.’

Louise takes the children for walks. They spend long afternoons in the park, where the trees have been pruned, where the lawn – green once again – attracts the local students. Around the swings, the children are happy to see one another again, even if they don’t know anyone’s names. For them, nothing else matters but this latest fancy-dress costume, this new toy, this miniature pram in which a little girl has nestled her baby.

Louise has only one friend in the neighbourhood. Apart from Wafa, she speaks with nobody. She offers nothing more than polite smiles, discreet waves. When she first arrived, the other nannies in the park kept their distance. Louise was like a chaperone, a quartermaster, an English governess. The others disliked her haughty airs, her ludicrous grande dame pose. There was something sanctimonious about the way she didn’t have the decency to look away when another nanny, phone glued to her ear, forgot to hold a child’s hand as they crossed the road. Sometimes she would even make a point of telling off unsupervised children who stole toys from others or fell off a guardrail.

As the months passed, the nannies – sitting on those benches for hours on end –