Madeleine talked about René in such a vivid way that I half expected him to join us in the living room at any moment. To me, this was the most beautiful form of posterity: continuing to exist in someone else’s heart. I wondered how people coped with losing the love of their life. To spend forty or fifty years with someone, sometimes feeling as if they were your own reflection, and then one day the mirror is empty. You must reach out with your hand to touch the wind, feel strange movements in the bed, speak words that are transformed into a hollow conversation. You don’t live alone, but with an absence.

1. 2. This story reminds me of the film director Claude Lelouch, who has often recounted how his own mother would leave him for entire days in darkened cinemas during the Occupation, leading him towards his future vocation.

7

After a while Madeleine said: ‘Perhaps we could visit him at the cemetery?’ I politely dodged this, claiming that I didn’t feel I really belonged there. That was just an excuse. Above all, I didn’t want to end up writing a novel whose main purpose was to water flowers by a graveside. I preferred to stick with the living. So I brought up the subject of her daughters. The mere mention of Stéphanie’s name was enough to create a tension in the room. I couldn’t question Madeleine directly; I had to be patient, certain that I would eventually succeed in clearing up any grey areas.

Stéphanie had gone to live in Boston after meeting an American man. Listening to Madeleine, you might have thought that her daughter was simply determined to marry a foreigner, as if any man would do as long as he wasn’t French. Madeleine didn’t seem to know very much about her son-in-law. The few times she’d seen him, he’d always been incredibly smiley. But according to her, his smile was like a crack in a wall: it was all you could see, blotting out all awareness of the wall itself or the house around it. He worked in a bank, but Stéphanie never went into any detail about him. All her conversations with her mother took place on Skype, and Madeleine despaired that she could only communicate with her daughter and her two granddaughters via a computer screen, that she couldn’t hug or kiss them. And then there was the language problem: she couldn’t understand why Stéphanie didn’t speak French with her children. Madeleine would hear the little girls say ‘Hello Mamie’ or ‘Happy birthday, Mamie’ in English. It was like another barrier that her daughter had built to keep her out.

Thankfully, Valérie lived locally and came to see her almost every day. Madeleine started to smile: ‘There’s one of them I never see, and the other one I see a bit too often!’ Even if this wasn’t laugh-out-loud funny, I considered it a good sign that my heroine had a sense of humour. But I also thought it admirable that a woman my own age should go to visit her mother so often, always asking her if she needed anything. Valérie must be dependable, I thought, the kind of person who shoulders all the responsibility for family difficulties, who lives a life of permanent self-sacrifice. This was pure speculation, however, since Madeleine didn’t linger on the subject of her daughters. My overriding impression was of a distance between the two sisters. Later I would learn that they were no longer on speaking terms and discover the reasons for their conflict, which went back many years.