The President's Hat. Antoine Laurain

out his hand before bending over a third, hatless egg. ‘This one’s for me.’ He smiled. Desmoine tapped the top with the handle of his teaspoon, making a small hole, then did the same at the other end, and threw his head back to swallow it down in one.

      ‘Every morning. A raw egg. My little treat,’ said Jean-Bernard Desmoine apologetically.

      Less than a month later, Daniel, Véronique and Jérôme were back on the platform at Gare Saint-Lazare, this time waiting for train 06781 bound for Le Havre, first stop Rouen. Their five suitcases bulged; the furniture had been despatched in a removal van. Daniel, his black hat firmly on his head, gazed down the track, looking out for the train that would take them to their new life in a new place. Véronique squeezed his arm, and Jérôme sulked because he wouldn’t be seeing his friends from school again.

      Throughout the journey, Daniel thought back over his Paris years on the third floor of the SOGETEC building. His colleagues had clubbed together to buy him a leaving gift: a year’s subscription to Canal +. For the past two years, the new pay TV channel had revolutionised office conversation. In the accounts department, Daniel couldn’t fail to notice the sudden irruption of ‘Canal’ into the collective consciousness. Canal was ‘un must’ as Florence, the communications manager, would say. Bernard Falgou and Michèle Carnavan swore by programmes that Daniel could only see as a hissing blur. The talk at the coffee machine was of feature films that had been in cinemas barely a year ago and were already on Canal. People who ‘had Canal’ could talk about them. The others could only listen in silence.

      ‘Didn’t you see it?’ the sect of set-top box subscribers would exclaim.

      ‘I haven’t got Canal +.’ The reply sounded like an admission of impotence, a fate to be endured.

      Now, Daniel would have Canal +. He had received the channel’s welcome letter to new subscribers, with its letterhead emblazoned with the slogan ‘Canal +, c’est plus.’ All he had to do was visit one of their official distributors in Rouen, show them the letter and his subscriber number, and he would be presented with the hallowed decoder. From now on, at the coffee machine, Daniel would be able to talk to his new colleagues about last night’s programmes, or the 8.30 film. He might even allow himself the wicked pleasure of asking some of them, ‘You haven’t got Canal? Oh, you really should …’

      From what he had been told, the new apartment had one room more than their old one in the fifteenth arrondissement, their home for the past twelve years. The landlord had protested at their sudden departure, as had Jérôme’s headmistress. Each time, Daniel had used the phrase: ‘I’m so sorry, but in life there are some circumstances …’ He took care to leave his words hanging, pregnant with meaning, a black hole absorbing any and all objections. What can you say to a man compelled by such mysterious, irresistible forces? Nothing, of course.

      *

      When they reached Rouen, the capital of Normandy, Daniel told the taxi driver their new address in the centre of town. After barely quarter of an hour in the car Véronique turned to him with that little frown that her husband was so fond of.

      ‘Where’s your hat?’ she asked.

      Time stood still for Daniel.

      A long, icy shiver ran down his spine, as if someone had just walked on his grave. With horrible clarity, he pictured the hat on the luggage rack on the train. Not the rack where they had put their suitcases, but the one opposite. The hat was on the rack. His hat. Mitterrand’s hat. In his haste to get off the train, Daniel, still unaccustomed to wearing a hat, had left it behind. He had just made the same mistake as the President of the Republic.

      ‘We’ll have to turn round,’ he said in shock. ‘Turn round immediately!’ he yelled, from the back seat of the taxi.

      The Peugeot 305 did an about-turn and accelerated back towards the station. Daniel leapt from the car and ran. But it was no good. The train had left. No one had taken the hat to the lost property office.

      Days, weeks, months went by. Daniel called the central SNCF lost property office. When he realised he knew the number by heart, he knew, too, that he would never see Mitterrand’s hat again.

      That very evening, Fanny Marquant boarded the train at Le Havre heading for Paris Saint-Lazare. She put her suitcase on the rack above seat 88.

      Directly opposite her in seat 86 was a young man with long hair, wearing mirrored sunglasses and a Walkman. The badges all over his leather jacket showed rockers with spiky bleached hair, also in black leather. Through his orange foam-covered headphones, Fanny could make out the ‘The Final Countdown’, Europe’s hit single. Fanny personally preferred listening to a new singer on the block, a redhead with anxious eyes by the name of Mylène Farmer whose kooky style and romantic lyrics appealed to her far more than the electric guitar solos of some bleach-blond rockers. You could tell Mylène Farmer was well read; she knew her Edgar Allan Poe and Baudelaire, which Fanny, herself a keen reader and writer, approved of.

      Fanny took out a pink Clairefontaine notebook where she had written the first three pages of a story called, simply, ‘Édouard’. The Prix Balbec short story competition was offering a prize of 3,000 francs and publication in the local supplement of Ouest-France. The prize was to be awarded in March at the Grand Hôtel de Cabourg. Fanny had been writing for as long as she could remember, first diaries in little locked notebooks, and later pieces of creative writing she kept to herself until she finally plucked up the courage to send one in to a competition. ‘The Bouquet’ was the winning entry; there was no prize money, but she had never before felt such a sense of recognition and pride. ‘Change of Address’ came third in another local contest and ‘An Afternoon at the Harbour’ was read out at Le Havre Theatre Festival.

      The theme of this year’s Prix Balbec was ‘A True Story’ and Fanny was attempting to record for posterity how Édouard had come into her life.

      Fanny, a secretary at the tax office in Le Havre, had been having an affair with Édouard Lanier for two years, five months and two weeks now. Édouard Lanier worked in Paris as an executive at Chambourcy, the famous yogurt brand splashed over billboards and TV screens everywhere. Édouard was also married with children.

      Early on in their relationship, he had been careless enough to tell Fanny: ‘I love you. I’m going to leave my wife …’ A moment of madness in the first flush of romance when he was still young enough to believe life would turn out just as he wanted. Realising the dizzying implications of his words, he had been saying ever since that he just needed time. It was his eternal refrain: ‘I need time … you need to give me time … all I need is time.’ He went through every possible variation. Over the last two years, Édouard had become more obsessed with time than the most meticulous Swiss watchmaker. He needed time to speak to his wife, time to make her understand and accept him starting over with someone else – and it was turning their sweet love affair sour.

      These days, in the hotel room in the Batignolles district of Paris where they met once, sometimes twice, a month, when the fun and games were over, Édouard would tie his tie in the light from the closed shutters, looking wary and waiting for Fanny to ask timidly: ‘Have you spoken to your wife yet?’ His face would fall and he would emit a barely audible sigh. ‘You know how it is, I just need time,’ he would mutter, shaking his head.

      And still Fanny went on loving Édouard. She had loved him from the moment he put down his briefcase in the compartment of the Le Havre–Paris train. Tall and slim with salt and pepper hair and a dimple on his chin, he ticked all Fanny’s boxes in the looks department. The wedding ring on his left hand had not escaped her attention, but she was even more struck when it was slipped off shortly afterwards. It left behind an imprint, a little circle running around his third finger which faded over the course of the journey from Normandy to the capital.

      All it had taken was a magazine falling to the floor, Édouard bending down to pick it up and handing it back to her with a smile, to seal the start of a passionate affair. If Fanny closed her eyes, she could go back to that one moment which had changed the course of her life. It was like an advert for cologne: man gets on train, pretty woman sits in carriage