The Red Notebook. Antoine Laurain

heard the door slam. He was left standing stock still in the middle of the sitting room, the black bottle of Habanita in his hand.

      He hastily pulled on his clothes so that he could run after her, but Dominique had already found a taxi, which was disappearing round a corner of the square. Her phone went straight to voicemail. Laurent didn’t bother to leave a message. Instead he sank down onto a stool at the counter of the Jean-Bart, where Jean Martel had just returned from some early morning antique hunting. The antique dealer had laid out several snuff boxes and was examining them with a pocket magnifying glass.

      ‘It’s like an investigation,’ said the old trader; ‘you have to choose a clue and see where it leads.’

      ‘And what is the clue?’ Laurent asked him wearily.

      ‘There’s a partially erased coat of arms on this one – I think it’s a count’s. If I can identify him, perhaps I can find out where it came from.’

      Laurent nodded, paid for his coffee then went back up to his flat. The bag was on the table beside the note. Perhaps we can discuss it one day. Or perhaps not. That’s up to you. He would call her later in the day. It was very unfair – it certainly looked as if he had done something wrong, but he had the right to defend himself, to explain properly. Although that was what he had done and Dominique hadn’t believed him.

      After another cup of coffee, he looked at his emails. More spam including the dog umbrellas – they were certainly persistent.

      From: [email protected]

      To: [email protected]

      Subject: Meeting with ME!

      Hey Brainy Bookwhizz

      Are we still on for Monday evening? Meet me at Chez François at exactly six o’clock. It’s that café with the tables outside near the lycée, up on the left in front of the big tree and the statue, the one we had lunch at last month. Get a table facing the street. Right at the front. Wear your black jacket and white shirt with those blue 501s we bought together last Saturday. Then we can have dinner. What are you going to cook? I’d like one of your pot-au-feus.

      C. xxx

      Laurent smiled. The message sounded like an imperious summons from his mistress. But it was nothing of the sort – just a message from his fifteen-year-old daughter. Feisty, very pretty and, according to her mother, ‘appallingly manipulative’, Chloé had taken her parents’ separation in her stride. ‘I think it’s perfectly reasonable,’ she had told her father from the great height of her twelve years, ‘but I don’t want to lose out.’

      ‘I’m sorry? I’m not sure I understand.’

      ‘I want double pocket money.’

      ‘I’m sorry?’ said Laurent again.

      ‘As I’m going to live with Maman, I’d like a cat.’

      That time Laurent had not said ‘I’m sorry’ again. Instead he had sat down on the velour sofa and taken a long look at this scrap of womanhood, a blend apparently of his and Claire’s genes. There must have been some kind of mutation. As a child he would never have had that much nerve, and neither would Claire.

      ‘There’s a white female kitten for sale in the next-door apartment block,’ Claire had told her a few weeks later.

      ‘I don’t want a white female kitten, I want a male. A big one. A Maine Coon.’

      Claire had told Laurent about this demand, referring frequently to ‘your daughter’.

      Now Chloé lived with her mother and an enormous Maine Coon.

      ‘What are you going to call it, darling?’ Claire and Laurent had asked her.

      ‘Putin,’ Chloé had replied slowly, smiling for added effect.

      ‘No!’ cried Claire. ‘You can’t call your cat Putin.’ But her words made no difference.

      Putin never left Chloé’s room except to go to his food bowl or litter tray. He refused to let anyone other than Chloé stroke him, and would stride disdainfully across the living room to sharpen his claws on the sofa under the horrified eye of Claire, before going back to his room to await the return of his mistress.

      Laurent typed back:

       All right, my love. I’ll be there. And I’ll make pot-au-feu. But less of the ‘brainy bookwhizz’.

       Lots of love

      The moment he’d sent it, he reflected that he had probably never actually said ‘no’ to her. He took out his folding card table from behind the bookcase and resumed the task he had abandoned the night before. He put the bag on the green baize and took all the items out, laying them down at random. There was a tiny pocket in the lining where he found two unused Métro tickets and a dry-cleaning chit. Thursday’s date was ticked, and the word ‘dress’ encircled. He checked the diary. It was obviously the ticket for the strappy dress, but it was just a generic ticket with no logo or address.

      What was she like, this Laure who enjoyed having lunch in the garden, was frightened of red ants, dreamt she was making love to her pet which had been transformed into a man, and had a signed Patrick Modiano?

      She was an enigma. It was like looking at someone through a fogged-up window. Her face was like one encountered in a dream, whose features dissolve as soon as you try to recall them.

      ‘She’s probably some old slag.’

      The sentence had dropped like a fly into a bowl of milk, and Laurent rolled his eyes. He was lunching at the Jean-Bart with his friend Pascal Masselou, considered his ‘best friend’ since adolescence. The years had rolled by. Did Pascal still merit the appellation? He certainly didn’t have any competition for the title. But in fact the two men had little in common now. Their family situation was the same though; they were both divorced. But apart from that, everything that had bound them together had been left behind in the past. Messing about together in class, fantasising about supposedly inaccessible girls, giggling and shared secrets, beers in the bar, then university degrees all seemed light years away from the adults they had become. They had kept their relationship going like two poker players who continue late into the night, shuffling their cards and emptying their glasses long after the others have left the table and gone to bed. Laurent had told him about the bag, wanting to believe for a moment that Pascal would share his fascination.

      ‘Why do you say that?’

      ‘Because you don’t know who she is and you never will,’ replied Pascal, chewing his entrecôte. ‘All you have is the bag and her first name, no address and, most importantly, no photos. When I go after a woman, I know who she is, everything about her: what she looks like, how old she is, what we have in common, what she does, the colour of her eyes and hair, height, weight …’

      Since his divorce Pascal had discovered dating sites on the web. Usually he signed up to them under various pseudonyms. He was spreading himself about in the cyber jungle of the lonely hearts ads and had several times tried to convince Laurent to join him. He used ‘SeniorExec’ on Meetic and Attractive World – and the more evocative, not to say grotesque, ‘Shivers’, ‘Jimmy’, ‘Magnum’ and ‘TheBest’ on respectively: Adultery.com, Infidelity.fr, AshleyMadison.com, Adopt-a-bloke.com. Available for no-strings intimacy evenings and weekends, he was also in the market for ‘serious’ relationships, thereby easing his conscience.

      ‘I’m making the most of it,’ he liked to say, with a satisfied smile.

      It seemed to Laurent that Pascal had been seduced by the very worst that the Western world offered, managing his love life, or, not to put too fine a point on it, his sex life, like the product manager of a small business. At a previous lunch, he had shown Laurent the relevant files on his laptop. In one click, Pascal had made three folders appear, filled with photos of women. ‘Stock’ for the women he had already slept with, ‘In progress’ for those he’d had a date with, ‘Prospective’