Gallic Noir. Pascal Garnier

him of the robe.

      ‘You’ve a good type of hair, thick but slightly dry. I’ve a very effective lotion, if you’d like.’

      ‘Um, OK. Why not?’

      Every time he got out of the hands of a hairdresser he was in such a vulnerable state that he could be sold anything at all, at no matter what price – something those seasoned professionals were not slow to sniff out and exploit.

      While Brice was waiting for his change, a curious apparition made the little bell on the door ring.

      ‘Hello, Blanche. I’ll be right with you.’

      Blanche lived up to her name, being dressed in white from the toes of her shoes right up to her strange crocheted lace cap which reminded him of a tea cosy. All in white, but an off-white bordering on old ivory. She was like a bride who had been in the shop window for too long. It was difficult to put an exact age on her; she could have been anywhere between sixteen and sixty, depending on whether you looked at her eyes, which were like those of a timid child, or her hands, gloved in skin like puckered silk.

      Instead of making a beeline for the dog-eared magazines littering the coffee table, as any other female client would, she stayed standing, twisting a little purse embroidered with pearl beads in her impossibly delicate fingers. Her eyes were fixed on Brice. It made him vaguely uneasy.

      ‘So, Monsieur. Welcome to Saint-Joseph!’

      Outside, the north wind grabbed the back of his neck with its icy fingers. Through the curtain veiling the window, he saw Martine take Blanche by the arm and lead her gently to the washbasin, where she sat down, leaning back so abruptly that it looked as if an invisible hand had just snapped her in two. On his way from the hair salon to the post office he could not rid himself of that immaculate vision imprinted like a negative on his retina.

      In the post office, three elderly ladies were waiting at the counter – one big, one middle-sized and one small, all so alike it was tempting to think of slipping them one inside the other like Russian dolls. The saving in space would have been advantageous as the place was minuscule. Four customers was definitely one too many. Brice squeezed himself up against the wall as best he could, between a missing persons notice depicting a curly-headed cherub and an advertisement for a loan with unbeatable rates. One after the other, each babushka exchanged with the postmistress news of their respective states of health. The talk was of hernia bandages, support stockings, varicose veins, rheumatism, prolapses, and other of life’s small mishaps, punctuated by the sound of documents being stamped, and this for a good half-hour. At last it was his turn. Not yet on sufficiently intimate terms with the postmistress to mention the ravages wrought by time on his own body, he confined himself to asking for a packet of cards, intended to inform people of his change of address. Éliette (that was the postmistress’s sweet name) had the ashen complexion of a consumptive heroine. No doubt her screen was not up to the job of protecting her from her customers’ germ-ridden breath. She broke into a wan smile as she handed him a bundle of cards and, raising an eyelid like a withered iris petal, turned a watery gaze towards him.

      ‘Are you the gentleman who’s taken over the Loriol house?’

      ‘Yes, that’s me.’

      ‘Do you have relatives here?’

      ‘But … No … Why?’

      ‘You look like a gentleman who used to live here. The family goes back generations. Welcome to Saint-Joseph, then.’

      He thought he detected a touch of irony in the little phrase which she breathed out like a last sigh.

      The days went by, or was it perhaps the same one again and again? Other than a minimum of maintenance – eating, drinking, sleeping – which necessitated brief commando raids on the supermarket, Brice did nothing. Not once had he gone up to the studio, nor into the other rooms, for that matter. He had adopted the stance of the monitor lizard: total immobility, eyelids half closed, prepared to wait for centuries for its prey – that is, a sign from Emma – to come along. He was becoming inured to boredom as others are to opium. Elbows on the table littered with dirty plates and cutlery, the remains of charcuterie in greasy paper, and wine glasses with a coating of red, he would leaf through his address book, yawning. Except for a few professional connections useful to his survival, he saw no one he should inform of his new contact details. Acquaintances, he had those, of course, but friends? They all seemed to belong to a bygone world, for which he no longer felt the slightest nostalgia. Under each of the names he scored through in red, a face would dissolve, its blurred outlines overflowing the page and calling to mind only faint, drowned continents. He experienced neither remorse nor regret. They had had their time. He had new friends now, called Martine, Blanche, Éliette, Babushka. Only women. Obviously, since in the daytime the village was transformed into a no man’s land. From dawn to dusk the able-bodied men were engaged in obscure and mysterious occupations. Occasionally you might come across an old man on a rickety bicycle in a back street, carrying a crate of cabbages or leeks. Otherwise it was women, nothing but women. Practical, solid women, women you could rely on, with short hair and loose-fitting clothes. In the mornings they would walk the children to school, picking up bread and the newspaper, exchanging two or three pieces of gossip before hurrying off to their respective homes to get on with the countless chores in house or garden which would keep them busy until evening. What might the inner lives of these housewives be like? By what dreams were they haunted? What secrets were they hiding?

      Brice was at that point in his reflections when a loose slip of paper drifted out of his address book. He recognised Emma’s rounded handwriting. She had made a note of the various places she wanted to put up shelves. It was ridiculous how fond women were of shelves. All those he had known had made him put them up when they moved in. It had to be some sort of initiation rite. To be honest, he had never really been excited by that sort of activity, but anything to drag himself out of the dull apathy into which his lunch of tripe à la Provençale had plunged him. It was time to take some measurements, he told himself, braving the garage in search of a tape measure.

      Currently the garage looked like nothing on earth. It was as if some sort of typhoon had laid waste the pyramids of boxes built with such care by the removal men. Odd items of clothing flopped like stranded seaweed over piles of crockery, books fanning open, and scattered CDs, which he had to pick his way over like a heron. The wreck resulted from the simple fact that, in order to lay your hands on some vital object (which very often was still not found), it was necessary to fight your way through a mountain of this, that and the other with an energy born of desperation. If the first few boxes had been meticulously packed and labelled, most of the others, marked ‘Misc.’, simply contained a jumble of things he had no idea even existed. And the more of them he uncovered, the more the confusion grew, until it was no longer possible to tell one thing from another. Only chance could be of any help. And it was thanks to chance that he came upon his DIY kit, after he had toppled a shoebox which hit the floor, pouring out a stream of seashells. He crushed some in regaining his balance, and set about making an inventory of his tools: one hammer minus its shaft, one twisted screwdriver, two baby-food jars (spinach and ham, apple and pear) half full of nails, screws, drawing pins, rubber bands and wall plugs, a Stanley knife without a blade, a gummed-up paint brush, rusty pincers, a ball of string, a roll of sticky tape, two jam-jar lids and, yes, a flexible steel rule, one of those that joiners carry proudly in the special little pocket on the right leg of their overalls. In view of the overwhelming task Emma had entrusted to him, these materials were clearly insufficient. For an hour he sat in the dark, bursting countless blisters of bubble wrap, unable to convince himself of the necessity of a sortie to the nearest Bricorama. DIY superstores were beyond the pale to him, as much a no-go area as a locker room. In any case, if he did have to steel himself to it, it was too late for today. That kind of expedition was undertaken in the early morning, like hunting or fishing. Anyway, he didn’t feel prepared – he had to make a list, take measurements. That was it, first the measurements!

      Armed with the steel rule, he began measuring anything and everything, the width of doors, the length of handles, his left forearm, the wingspan of a beetle squashed at the bottom of the sink that morning, the height of the sink, the depth of a box of camembert, and its diameter. And so on until