She has everything; doting parents, a loving husband and family; all the comforts that the middle-classes have grown accustomed to. But she's bored. She takes up all sorts of hobbies to try to make something happen in her life, but no matter what she does, nothing truly satisfies her, because deep down, she feels flat. Empty. Until she meets Philippe . . . In Madame Bovary of the Suburbs, Sophie Divry dramatises the philosophical conflict between freedom and comfort that marks women's lives in a materialistic world.
Release date:
July 27, 2017
Publisher:
Quercus Publishing
Print pages:
272
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It is a story that began before our time, that will continue for as long as we keep records, hold conversations, erect walls, dig with bulldozers, grow vegetable gardens, raise children, afford surveyors and engineers and workmen; for as long as it remains possible to meet in an air-conditioned room at the solicitor’s to print out a deed of sale in four copies. It’s a story that will carry on after we are gone, as long as there are couples to live there, to love and clean and do the place up and have people over – to live, in other words; for as long as they are fertile enough to reproduce, to give birth to a family with several members, and in this family there is you, the woman, M.A.
You are sitting at the kitchen table. Your gaze is absently deciphering the label on a jar of stewed apples that is standing on the plastic tablecloth. And in the early afternoon silence, the refrigerator compressor starts up.
It’s a built-in model, one metre thirty high by forty-five centimetres wide, consisting of a white door with a little plaque on it which says BREUND CONFORT; a green light is shining; to the left of the diode a knob in the shape of a stylised snowflake reads SUPER COOL. If you press it, you will hear a little rumbling noise to indicate the passage to a lower temperature. The door is covered with postcards and a dozen or so magnets; some are the size of a drawing pin – white, gold, silver, or black; there are larger ones: a square magnet with the drawing of a cat that says GATTO DI ROMA, and which must be a souvenir from Italy; a little wooden heart decorated with a flower and some sprigs of raffia; another magnet the shape of a camel; one an ostrich, and the last one, which must be from an African country, depicts a woman pounding grain. Several postcards are held in place by these magnets. On the uppermost one there is a sunset, with the inscription
EL PORT DE LA SELVA, COSTA BRAVA; beneath it there is one featuring a landscape that says LES CLOCHES DES PYRÉNÉES, another one with the Moroccan desert, one from Greece, one from Petra in Jordan. There is a postcard with a dolphin peering out of a translucent sea, and the creature looks as if it’s laughing; a second photograph is set into this first one, showing a beach full of bathers, and above the dolphin is written BONJOUR, and beneath it, DE CARNAC. On the fridge door there is also a photograph of three children and on it is written, “Happy Birthday, Mamie”. Further down there is an older, yellowed photograph of a child squatting in a paddling pool; the boy must be four years old or so, he’s having his bath, and he’s smiling, squinting in the bright light; to the right of the basin a toy has been abandoned in the grass; to the left of the photograph is the aluminium handle which opens the fridge.
We now know that these magnets were presents from family members; we know that these postcards have been here for months, even years; we know that they will be moved as soon as new postcards arrive in your letterbox; we know that the children on the photographs have grown up, become mothers, fathers, and homeowners, they are travellers long returned to tell of their holidays, in another kitchen.
Whereas you, in moments like this, you are on your own, and you remember.
When you were little you often got bored.
*
You had to walk for ten minutes to get home from school. Your parents lived in a house in a neighbourhood that people in the village of Terneyre referred to as “the housing estate”. The closest town was called Valvoisin, and the town council later renamed it Valvoisin-sur-Isère, but you didn’t go there often.
*
Occasionally on a Sunday your mother would put some lamb’s brains in a glass to soak; you were disgusted; you would turn your head to one side as you made your way through the kitchen.
“Oh, my . . . Such a sensitive child!”
*
On your papa’s lap: “A farmer went trotting upon his grey mare, bumpity-bumpity-bump . . .”
*
You remember the motor oil in your father’s garage. Six days a week he would hammer away on the cars, and you were proud as could be, because the family name was there on the sign.
When you stopped in to see him after school, you could smell that acrid mixture of oil, chains and tyres, and nothing seemed more beautiful to you than your papa in his overalls all smudged with black. He would take you in his arms and lift you up in the sky.
“Well, then, my little queen?”
“Come and give us a little kiss.”
“Go on, one more spoon and then we can have dessert.”
*
You were sitting on the schoolbench, rocking with laughter.
*
The taste of pencil lead between your lips. Your mother: “Stop chewing that, it’s poison!” That word, poison, how it just made you want to suck on the pencil even more.
*
Things your schoolmates said:
“Open your mouth and close your eyes.”
“I’m going to tell you something, but it’s a secret.”
“Liar, liar! She’s in love!”
*
The metallic toothpaste tube that your mother was carefully rolling against the edge of the sink:
“Mustn’t waste.”
“Mind you keep clean!”
“Be careful!”
*
Suddenly a spark flew out of the fire and burned you. Your father quickly cut open a potato and placed it against your skin; the accident allowed for a different order of things, usually all you heard was “Don’t play with your food.”
*
You counted the days until your birthday. The big candle for when you turned ten.
*
You got a fever. An adult’s hand on your brow.
*
On the kitchen table in Terneyre, vegetables brought home in the net of the string bag.
You remember the red-and-green-checked apron your mother used to wear over her skirt while she was cooking.
Her woollen dressing gown, how you liked to snuggle up against it.
*
Your pride when you overheard the adults talking about you. When they said, for example, “She’s working hard at school”, or “What a temper she’s got!”
*
How excited you were, those first evenings your parents left you at home alone. You went and searched their room, you put on one of your mother’s skirts, tried her lipstick. You pranced around in front of the mirror dressed like that, and lifted your hair up on your head. Suddenly the front door opened; quick, you hurried to take everything off. But even your fear was a pleasure.
*
Things your grandparents would say:
“He’s been poaching, one day he’ll get into serious trouble!”
“If we all keep to ourselves everything will be fine.”
“Poor woman, her husband drinks.”
*
Your bedroom window overlooked a very narrow, very green garden.
The vegetables down at the end, a swing that no-one used anymore, a few hens that had disappeared by the time you reached your teens.
“They’re too much work.”
“And besides, they’re filthy creatures.”
*
Drawing flowers on blank pages, always the same drawing.
“She’s a regular little woman.”
“You’ll end up making her depressed.”
*
“Sometimes she answers back,” said the French teacher to your mother, and they told you you were insolent. You asked what you were supposed to do after someone asked you a question, was it so bad to answer?
“Do you think we’re stupid?”
“Go to your room.”
“Don’t you speak to me like that.”
*
The magazines you bought in secret with your pocket money.
*
You listened to the radio in your room, your heart pounded as you watched the films on television.
*
You collected pictures of horses.
*
You were bored.
*
Then you left for the city to study. You ate sandwiches that cost ten francs, you got to know the names of the classrooms and lecture theatres, you smoked cigarettes, you could not sleep the night before an exam, you waited for buses and metros, you learned to order a pint and to join in the conversation when you were sitting around a table with a dozen friends or more, you read books in tiny print, you drew charts, you came to realise how expensive life was, for the first time you fell ill and your mother was not there by your side, on Friday evenings you’d go home with your load of washing, your parents seemed to be moving more slowly, their faces had aged, you couldn’t wait to leave again, you took part in a general meeting calling for a strike, you went to a strange party, you gave sanitary towels to your girlfriends, you thought you were poor, since no-one was watching you ate your noodles straight from the pan, and then one day you got your degree.
*
But – before that, you had to settle on your future.
Your teenage self had neither the soul of an artist nor the vocation to help others, according to the careers adviser at the lycée in Valvoisin-sur-Isère. She suggested you study economics at a faculty in Lyon: as a rule, thought the civil servant, this went down rather well in your sort of family. “I think I’ve settled on a profession,” you said, very excited when you went back to Terneyre that evening, and no-one found any reason to protest. A new world was opening up to you, a world where you would no longer have to listen to your father slurping his soup.
You would never go on what are called business trips, but your degree in economics meant you would be hired by the Bédani Company in 1978, then by Coead in 1995. Thanks to this degree – quite sought-after back then – you would find your place in a market economy, and in those days, that meant a job that was done thoroughly and meant to last. So your life as a student was only a stage; difficult mornings after “the wild party last night”; shopping at the Prisunic; your first joint; losing your virginity; arguments with the neighbours, everything you would go through; just a necessary stage before you were hired to work in furniture manufacturing at Bédani, and later you were hired to monitor I.T. suppliers.
(We might note here that with that sort of university background you could easily have found yourself working in:
Because she was good at her studies, that little girl who only yesterday found all those forms her parents were filling out so mysterious; forms for their retirement plan, for the Sécurité Sociale, for credit; the little girl who had asked one day whether there was “a school for becoming an adult” would in the space of only a few years become a tenant, a student, an intern, an employee. You would move into a two-room flat and do what you had to do to have running water and a hook-up to the city gas line, since all it took was a few trips to the counter to obtain access to all the mod cons, you would make the most of them; without ever pausing to wonder how the pipes that warmed you in your flat had actually made their way from the lower echelons of some societal public works.
But for the time being: you were still an adolescent in your room with yellow walls in Terneyre. Everything around you seemed mediocre – your father’s pleasantries with the neighbour, his arm across the hedge as he handed over half a kilo of green beans.
“We had a bumper crop this year. I’ve never seen the likes in ten years or more.”
“Well, when you think of all the rain we’ve had!”
Getting the baccalaureate was what it would take to get away from there. You studied every night. But you were already having trouble concentrating; you stretched out on the bed. You were seventeen and melancholy and you stared at the ceiling. Outside the window, a car drove by. You took out some purple paper and began a letter to Catherine, a girl you had met in the first year of lycée who became your friend, until her father was transferred to Paris. Writing to each other had added another dimension to your friendship, something which elevated you above the common herd. You were not the only girl in the neighbourhood who found relief from boredom through this type of correspondence, but your letters were particularly touching. The lycée, the composition you had to hand in on Monday, and the latest argument with your mother featured large, but a few paragraphs further down you would go into the description of your ideal life: you would live at night and sleep during the day, you would go around the world and marry a dark handsome man you would travel a long way to be with; then; with a little ginger dog yapping by your side, you would run naked along the beach, rolling in the sand, returning at twilight to an immense house overlooking the ocean, and you “would be happy, infinitely happy” – you ended your letter with a joking aside to say that you were no fool.
Catherine’s letters were laden with the particular mystery of her home in Paris. You watched and waited for the postman. Just the sight of the postmark paris-massy allowed you to envisage the Métro, the crowds, Brigitte Bardot . . . With the envelope in your hand you would rush upstairs, lock your door and, lying on your stomach on the bed, you would greedily decipher her handwriting. Catherine thanked you for your letter, she told you about her move to the capital, her new lycée, she told you she’d been to see the Eiffel Tower, the Trocadéro, Notre-Dame, the place de la Concorde, that she’d wandered around the Latin Quarter; you could hear all sorts of different languages spoken; this amazing city never slept. She swore to you that despite the distance you would be friends for life, “sisters of the heart”. Your mutual pledges gushed forth in a burst of sincerity which you took for emotional depth, for love; because during adolescence one believes it’s enough to cloak friendship with grandiloquent promises for it to exist in that form, and to endure in that form, and never become misshapen, consumed or eventually broken by life. You entrusted Catherine with your desire to escape your bloody bedroom, she scoffed at her old parents, told you that she wanted to run away “for real” . . . and your letters filled your hearts with dreams of freedom that echoed identically from Paris to Terneyre: after the baccalaureate, life will be ours!
The country was booming, it was a time for pleasure, and there was work to be had for anyone prepared to do their bit, as your young physics teacher enthusiastically informed you; but, above all, Lyon was only seventy kilometres from Valvoisin. What a joy it would be to get to know this great industrious city, to wander alone through the streets, to go to the cinema and then have a yoghurt for dinner if that was what you felt like. Ah, you wrote on the purple paper, you couldn’t wait for the day when you could finally leave this rotten hole where the neighbours were always asking you about your latest marks at school. Worst of all were the ones who would call out to you as you walked home from school:
“Tell your papa that I’ll come for the motor on Tuesday. Hey, you won’t forget to pass it on?”
In the kitchen, more and more often, dinner ended in an argument.
“You’re never happy!”
“Nothing is good enough for you!”
The door slammed, and there you were in tears, in your room. Major strikes all over France; in moments like that, your isolation seemed all the crueller, you would have liked to be with them – not the workers with their glum expressions, but the gang of long-haired Parisians, the very ones your father insulted in front of the telly; you went on sobbing with rage in your room, and now you pictured yourself as some poète maudit heading off down a dusty road with your pack on your back . . . Anything rather than stay here, engulfed by conversations about engines to repair and other things such as:
“Could you tell Renée to come and fetch her soup tureen.”
“Hand me those socks so that I can darn them.”
Sometimes it was so suffocating that you were haunted by the thought of suicide. You hurled yourself from the balcony and then came the terrible moment when your body was found, your parents’ sorrow and remorse, the funeral and everything that people would say about you, how your destiny had been exceptional, misunderstood . . . These imaginings absorbed you, and you forgot about the pain that had caused them and which overwhelmed you again the moment you came to the end of your funeral. You curled up in a ball on your bed. If only you’d had brothers and sisters! Together you could have dressed your dolls, and played cowboys and Indians, and climbed trees, and at bedtime you would have read them fairy tales . . . Oh, it must be wonderful to be pregnant, you wrote to Catherine, it must be so sweet to touch your belly and feel a little thing moving. You would have several children, four at least, you would hold them tight so they would never be cold, you would all go for a walk in the wind, then have a delicious meal in the white house with their papa, the same one by the vast ocean, with the little ginger dog.
Otherwise, there was always reading: it alleviated the boredom. A schoolfriend had given you L’Astragale, you pictured yourself as a delinquent, chasing anything in trousers, but after an hour you’d grown bored and you went back down to the living room. You watched soaps on telly in which rich Americans made babies with women who had long cascades of blonde hair, then they married them in a convertible. In the kitchen your mother was mending a pair of overalls. She shouted at you, said you’d do better to do your homework than watch that rubbish. You replied, surly as could be, that you’d already done your homework, and anyway, what did they know.
The next day you got up at seven. Your father had already left for the garage. Your mother couldn’t help it:
“Sure you’ve got everything? Have you put it all in your schoolbag?”
“Maman, I’m not eight years old.”
“I can never say anything to you!”
“Have to go, the bus is coming . . .”
*
Your first romance, at the sports complex in Valvoisin. Your mother had signed you up for gym class, because she was of the opinion that physical exercise was part and parcel of a decent upbringing (and because it was cheaper than her other idea, piano lessons), and your class was under the influence of girls who had lost their virginity quite early on, and who tried to outdo one another with snide remarks that were terrifyingly precise. You remember the oldest one, a regional balance beam champion whose breasts bobbed abundantly during the exercises; in the evening her boyfriend used to wait for her on his scooter outside the stadium; he had long hair and wore a leather jacket and the girl would swing one long leg over the seat to straddle it before clinging to his back. The other schoolgirls like yourself watched them ride off, and quivered.
You started watching what you ate. You hid a lacy bra in a drawer, you shaved your legs over the bidet; you would have your first kiss with a boy called Antoine, a member of the regional athletics team. You liked his smile, the way he walked, the way he carried his backpack. He stood there with you at the stop for the number 6 bus, a little stretch of pavement that became as romantic to your fifteen-year-old self as any Shakespearean balcony. You stayed there and let the buses go by as you embraced, and held hands, sharing the silly secrets of people of your age; and it was there that for the first time you would know the sensation of a tongue that wasn’t your own inside your mouth, and that, for the first time, you felt a warm tide spread beneath your skin, delicious, paralysing.
Back in your room, you wrote page after page to Catherine; how eager you were to see Antoine again the following Wednesday, what he had said to you last Wednesday and, above all: was he in love with you? From the ground floor, your mother shouting:
“Dinner!”
That first love: scenes in your memory.
The day Antoine asked you whether he could be “more than a friend to you”.
The day you went together in secret to the cinema.
The day he invited you to his house to “show you something, you won’t regret it”. He took you up to his brother’s bedroom. You followed, a little afraid to be alone in a strange house, and then you saw a basket with a cat and her four kittens.
“Oh, they’re so sweet!”
“They were born ten days ago.”
The cat purred among her litter. You held your hand out to her.
“Can you pick one of them up for me?”
The boy crouched down and handed you one of the kittens. The warm, delightful feel of it on your skin. You caressed its little head, its tiny ears, and with a stiff . . .
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