The Red Notebook Read Online Free PDF

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’sgenes. 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 anda 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,