Underground Time Read Online Free PDF Page A

they’re telling her. Sometimes she starts crying for no reason, when she’s alone in the kitchen, when she watches them sleeping, when she stretches out in the silence. Now she feels sick to the heart when she gets out of bed; she scribbles what she’s got to do on a notepad, sticks useful instructions, dates and appointments to mirrors. So that she doesn’t forget.
    Now it’s her sons who are protecting her, and she knows that’s not good. Théo and Maxime tidy their room without being asked. They set the table, have their shower and put their pyjamas on. They’ve done their homework by the time she gets home and their bags are ready for the next day. When Simon goes out with his friends on a Saturday afternoon, he calls her to tell her where he is, wants to know she’s OK with it and doesn’t need him to get back sooner to look after the twins. Maybe she’d like to go out for a bit, to see friends or go to the cinema, he’ll suggest. All three of them watch her all the time, attentive to her tone of voice, her moods, the hesitation in her movements. She can tell they’re worried about her. They ask her several times a day how she is. She talked to them about it. At the beginning. She told them that she had some problems at work, but they’d pass. Later she tried to describe them, to explain the situation, the way she had gradually fallen into a trap and how hard it was to get herself out of it. With all the confidence of a fourteen-year-old, Simon wanted to go and punch Jacques right away, to slash the tyres of his car. He demanded revenge. That had made her smile back then, this adolescent revolt against the injustice done to his mother. But can they really understand? They don’t know what business is, its constraints and mean tricks, the hushed conversations. They’ve never heard the noise the drinks dispenser makes, or the lift, or seen the grey carpet. They don’t know about the superficial courtesy and the hidden resentments, the border skirmishes and the territorial battles, the secrets and the memos. Even for Simon, work is something abstract. And when she tries to translate things into a language they can understand – my boss, the woman who runs personnel, the man who looks after advertising, the big, big boss – it feels to her as though she might as well be telling them a story about barbarous Smurfs killing each other silently in a village cut off from the rest of the world.
     
    She doesn’t even talk about it to her friends.
    In the beginning she tried to describe the glances, the delays, the excuses. She tried to describe the things that went unspoken, the suspicions, the insinuations. The avoidance strategies. The accumulation of petty irritations, covert humiliations, tiny things. She tried to describe how it all fitted together, how it came about. And every time the story seemed ridiculous, risible. And every time she would break off.
    She’d end up dismissing it with a vague wave of her hand, as though all this didn’t haunt her nights, didn’t eat away at her little by little, as if none of it ultimately mattered.
     
    She should have told someone.
    At the start. Way back then.
    When Jacques started saying to her in the morning in that tone of concern that he was so good at faking, ‘You look dreadful.’ Once, then twice, a few days apart. The third time he had used the word ‘crap’. ‘You look like crap.’ But sounding vaguely worried.
    What hate was contained in that word, hate she didn’t want to hear.
    She should have told someone about the time he had kept her waiting for forty-five minutes on some godforsaken industrial estate, ostensibly while he went to get the car, when the car park was only a couple of hundred yards away.
    She should have told someone about the meetings cancelled at the last minute or relocated without telling her, the sighs, the sharp remarks under the guise of humour, and her calls which he no longer took, even when he was in his