The President's Hat Read Online Free PDF

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.
    â€˜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.
    â€˜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 wasoffering 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