The President's Hat Read Online Free PDF Page B

is time.’ He went through every possible variation. Over the last twoyears, 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 reading magazine, train startsmoving, woman drops magazine, man bends down to pick it up, meaningful looks are exchanged, manly odours mingled with the scent of cologne waft towards her, woman swoons. Life had handed her one of those cheesy moments usually seen only on TV screens and girl- meets-boy American romantic comedies.
    Since then, Fanny had come to know the Le Havre–Paris route by heart, along with the occasional detour for a brief encounter in Rouen or Trouville. An average of forty-five trips a year, always paid for by Édouard and always taking place outside the Easter, summer and Christmas holidays which, it goes without saying, he spent far away from her, with his family. At the age of twenty-seven, Fanny had achieved the status of mistress. The question of whether she might one day be promoted to official wife was still up in the air, as was the possibility of promotion to executive secretary at the tax office. Her application for that position was ‘under careful consideration’. The recruitment process for her life role was at the same stage, ‘under careful consideration’ by Édouard, whose inertia was thus on a par with that of the civil service.

 
    â€˜You’re perfectly happy with the situation. You’ll never leave your wife, I know you won’t,’ she’d once said angrily.
    â€˜That’s not true,’ he had objected. ‘I love you and I’m not going to spend the rest of my life with my wife, I just can’t do it. We’ve stopped making love. There’s nothing between us any more.’
    â€˜Well, leave her then!’
    Ã‰douard had shaken his head, looking stricken, and uttered his favourite phrase: ‘You need to give me time.’
    Fanny had fallen back onto the pillows and stared up at the ceiling of the hotel room. This is going nowhere, it occurred to her, looking at him – and not for the first time. The history we share is a chance meeting on a train, our life together now is confined to a hotel room, and we have no future.
    Fanny was right. It was difficult to go anywhere but the bedroom with Édouard. There was no way they could walk down the street holding hands or go round the shopstogether. The one time they