certainly wasn’t the first time that I’d been witness to one of her affairs. And far from languishing, our sisterly bond had always formed my only real family, a family my son had joined, unlike my husband and the lovers Marie and I had had, who’d never really belonged. I had to admit that until then, men could count themselves lucky if they landed a small speaking role instead of simply a walk-on part. Béno, however, had grabbed himself a starring role from the first moment, throwing me off balance. Was this a sign that Marie and I had outgrown the age when we could settle for the family founded by our parents?
Yet the idea of loosening my bond with Marie made me feel ill. What if this affair were to last? I tried to peer into the uncertain future that seemed to lie ahead. What would the house be like under their care? Béno was a successful and ambitious man; he would doubtless modernize the place and give it a tastefully fashionable veneer. I had the feeling the beach, like an open-air nightclub, would acquire sleek furniture, canopied beds, and fresh style remixes of old standards selected by a sound designer for a lounge ambience. How awful! I thought, solely for the pleasure of falling back on a snobbism as comforting as a lighthouse in the fog. Crisscrossed by golf carts, as in the TV series The Prisoner, the property would also have its heliport, its home movie theater, and a workout center with a treadmill, a Power Plate, gleaming dumbbells, and mirrors everywhere. Oof, we’d be a long way from my grandparents’ gymnastics room with its abandoned trapeze, rings, vaulting horse, and grand piano.
This detour through our childhood brought me back to Marie. I imagined her, with Béno, as the proprietors of L’Agapanthe, where they would receive their friends, a crowd of handsome, rich, and famous stuffed shirts, whereas I would be only … their guest. An idea that would have made me shudder—if I hadn’t pulled myself up short. Really, I just didn’t know what I wanted! Béno was an ideal suitor, if we meant to keep the house. Thanks to him, L’Agapanthe would retain all its luster. In which case, he might well transform it into a show-business showcase, if he felt like it. Especially since, if I’d read him correctly, he would make it over into a highlight of the Cannes Film Festival, a venue touted on the Promenade de la Croisette like a password among the happy few invited to parties worthy of Fitzgerald’s Gatsby. What more could I ask?
The shortcut
August 3, 1990
I’m thirteen. Instead of the grown-ups’ usual route to the beach, I prefer the one that leads me from the heart of the house to the path running past the lawn down to the sea. I am as proud of this shortcut as if it were my own creation. It begins, like the universe of a fairy tale, in a ground-floor junk room next to the guest powder room, where the elevator, behind a forgotten folding screen, gives off a strange and delightful scent of forest undergrowth. The basement, I’ve been told, was laid out by some Russians before the Great War and was meant to house a casino. A wide corridor leads down with a series of landings to the foundations of the house, giving onto areas planned as game rooms along the way. Papered with bamboo matting and feebly lit by jaunty little sconces, the corridor aspires to the rakish atmosphere of a nightclub from the Roaring Twenties, but the game rooms, frozen in midcompletion by the Russian Revolution and the First World War, now seem like dungeons with their rough stone walls, gravel floors, and those iron doors with their little barred windows.
Is it the cool air of the corridor, the semi-obscurity, the insouciant casino atmosphere of going on a spree? I breathe deeply, inhaling the ambience of adult pleasures, dreaming of leaving boredom behind. But the shadows of the cells now storing a jumble of lawn mowers and old armchairs soon encroach on the subdued light in the corridor. Suddenly, I think I hear rats. I freak out … so I avoid looking too closely around me as I move through this underground passage that both scares and excites me. And I settle for regretting the peace I might enjoy if only I had the courage to stay there, because this basement would make an ideal hiding place.