When he reached the house, everything was as he had left it. All the doors, shutters and windows were still open, and the curtains upstairs were still closed. The building was like a ghost ship with all its sails lowered, travelling alone through the ocean without a soul on board. Franck got out of the car with the pride of someone who has journeyed the entire land for provisions, full of the hunter’s sense of satisfaction at returning with a haversack full of game. He called Lise twice. She didn’t reply. He opened the boot and the bags were warm; he had to get them all out quickly. He called her again.

‘Lise, come and look at what I’ve got!’

Lise still didn’t answer. She couldn’t still be asleep; it was gone midday. Franck left the bags there and went back into the house. He couldn’t see her, so he went upstairs. She was no longer in bed. The sheet was where it had been that morning with the bedspread discarded on the floor, but she wasn’t in the bed. He was afraid of shouting from the window, of making her name ring out through these hills. He was afraid that by calling out ‘Lise’, he would awaken whatever enemy might be lurking in the hills and trees, watching them. Lise’s phone was still on the bedside table. Switched off. He didn’t like seeing phones turned off; it seemed like death to him. His imagination ran riot before he could do anything about it. This time it wasn’t because of the wild animals he didn’t want to believe in but had heard loud and clear last night; this time he was wondering whether Lise had simply left, terrified at waking up alone in the big open house. Maybe when she saw the car wasn’t there she had panicked and fled, either distressed or disappointed, or pursued by that dog … He was again overcome with crippling anxiety at the thought that if he lost his wife one day, or if she lost him, there would be nothing to show for their life together: no descendants, nothing apart from absence, a silence just like the one all around him. Children help to fill the silence, the emptiness. Humans don’t have children to populate the world but to prove they exist. If he lost Lise, he would lose everything, and now he couldn’t find her.

October 1914

October 1914