The President's Hat Read Online Free PDF Page A

sharpened his mind and spurred him to take vitally important decisions. Without it, he would never have dared speak to Maltard as he had at the meeting. He would never have found himself on the eighteenth floor sharing a breakfast of soft-boiled eggs with Desmoine. In a strange way, he felt that something of the President was there in the hat. Something intangible. Some microscopic particle perhaps. But whatever it was, it had the power of destiny.
    â€˜Thank you,’ Daniel muttered, addressing the hat as much as his superior.
    â€˜So you accept?’ asked Desmoine, swallowing his last mouthful of croissant.
    â€˜I accept,’ said Daniel, looking him straight in the eye.
    â€˜We’ll be seeing each other again then,’ said Desmoine, holding 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.
    â€˜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 Danielcould 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.
    â€˜Didn’t you see it?’ the sect of set-top box subscribers would exclaim.
    â€˜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,