The Woman Who Didn't Grow Old

by Gregoire Delacourt, Vinet Lal

Genres: Women's Fiction; Thrillers; Psychological Thrillers

Synopsis

A charming and thought-provoking novel about a woman who wouldn't age.

The new book by internationally bestselling author Gregoire Delacourt.

What happened to Betty is every woman's dream.
Isn't it?

There are those who never grow old because they are taken too soon.
There are those who grow old without worries, enjoying everything life has to offer.
There are those who desperately try to slow down the ticking clock.

And then there's Betty. Betty, who mysteriously stops growing old on her thirtieth birthday - the same age as her mother when she died.

The years leave no trace on Betty's face, but as everyone around her is transformed by the relentless march of time, her once golden life begins to come apart.
Because an ageless face is a face without history, without passions, without memories.
A blank canvas others will slowly, inexorably forget...

Release date: February 20, 2020

Publisher: Orion Publishing Group

Print pages: 240

Sample

1

When I was a year old, I was a perfect match for my age.

A charming little twig, seventy-four centimetres tall, blessed with an ideal weight of 9.3 kilos, a head circumference of forty-six centimetres, sprouting a mop of blonde curls and a woolly hat on days when it was windy.

After being breastfed, I had turned to drinking more than half a litre of milk a day, and I was given a few vegetables, carbohydrates and proteins to enrich my diet. At teatime I’d have home-made compote and, every so often, a few morsels of food that melted under my palate, like sorbet.

At the age of one, I also took my first steps – there’s a photo to prove it. While I was skipping around like an awkward little deer, occasionally tripping over a rug or a coffee table, Colette and Matisse took their final bow, Simone de Beauvoir won the Goncourt prize and Jane Campion came into the world little knowing that, thirty-nine years later, she would move me to tears by placing a grand piano on a New Zealand beach.

At two, my growth curve filled my parents and paediatrician with pride.

When I was three, four second molars were added to the collection of teeth in my mouth, which already included eight incisors, four first molars and four canines. But Maman still preferred to grind the walnuts and almonds I insisted on having, for fear that I might choke.

I was almost a metre in height, ninety-six centimetres to be precise, and my weight was statistically noteworthy: fourteen kilos, perfect for my age, distributed with a great deal of finesse. The circumference of my head came to fifty-two centimetres, going by my health record book, and Papa’s time in Algeria was extended. He would send us letters filled with sadness, photos of himself surrounded by his friends – they’d be smoking, sometimes laughing, sometimes they seemed depressed. They were maybe twenty-two, twenty-five, twenty-six; they looked like children dressed as grown-ups.

You had the feeling they wouldn’t grow any older.

At five, I was just like any girl of five ought to be. I ran, I jumped, I pedalled, I climbed, I danced. I was good with my hands, I could draw well, I would argue, I was curious about everything, I refused to say rude words. I would dress up as a seven-year-old and feel rather proud of myself; then there was an uprising in Algiers and Papa came home.

He had a leg missing and I didn’t recognise him.

At six and a half, I began losing my incisors and my expression would see-saw between a grimace and an idiotic grin. I managed to skip the metallic taste in my mouth, the tooth fairy and the one-franc coins under my pillow.

At eight, records show that I was 124 centimetres tall and weighed twenty kilos. I wore cotton jersey shirts, gingham skirts, a little bib-fronted dress and, for my Sunday best, a silk taffeta frock. Ribbons fluttered in my hair, like butterflies. Maman loved taking pictures of me. She used to say that beauty doesn’t last – it always flies away, like a bird from a cage. It’s important to fix it in our memory; important to thank it for having chosen us.

Maman was my princess.

At eight, I was aware of my sexuality.

I knew the difference between sadness and disappointment, pride and joy, anger and jealousy. I knew I was upset because Papa still wasn’t brave enough to let me sit on his knees, despite his new prosthetic leg. I knew about joy, when he was in good spirits; then we would play together, he would pretend to be Long John Silver, thrilling me with tales of wonder, of buried treasure and the high seas. I knew disappointment, when he was in pain, when he’d be in a foul mood and turn into a different Long John Silver, a bad-tempered and menacing one.

At nine, I learnt at school how people managed to move around, and lit their streets and homes, on the eve of the French Revolution. We were told about Gambetta’s escape in a hot-air balloon, while above our heads a Russian had been orbiting in space – he would later give his name to a crater that measured 265 kilometres in diameter.

At ten, I bore a shocking resemblance to a little girl of ten. I dreamt of having a fringe on my forehead like Jane Banks in Mary Poppins, which we’d gone to see as a family at the cinema, Le Royal. I dreamt of having a brother or sister too, but Papa didn’t want any more children in a world that saw fit to kill them.

He never talked to us about Algeria.

He had found work as a glazier – a balancing act on a stepladder, he would chuckle, and a one-legged guy won’t be running the show! He often fell, or cursed his absent leg, and each new step he climbed was a victory: I’m doing this for your mother, so she can see I’m no cripple. He liked to look around people’s homes. To study others closely. He was reassured to see that suffering was everywhere. That young men of his age had returned from Algeria with wounds that would never heal, their hearts ripped out, lips sewn together to avoid the unspeakable, eyelids glued shut to avoid reliving the horrors.

He glazed over the silence as if closing up a scar.

Maman was beautiful.

Sometimes she came home with flushed cheeks. Then Long John Silver would smash a plate or a glass before tearfully apologising for being so clumsy and picking up the shattered fragments of his sorrow.

At ten, I was 138.3 centimetres tall, I weighed 32.5 kilos and my body surface area was close to one square metre – a micron, in terms of the universe. I was graceful, I would sing ‘Da Doo Ron Ron’ and ‘Be-Bop-A-Lula’ in our yellow kitchen to make everyone laugh, and one evening Papa made me sit on his sole remaining leg.

At twelve, I noticed my areolae getting larger and darker; I could feel two buds starting to open under my chest.

Maman had taken to wearing skirts that left her knees bare, thanks to a certain Mary Quant, in England; it wasn’t long before they revealed almost all of her thighs. She had long, pale legs and I prayed that one day I’d have the same.

On some evenings she never came home at all, but Papa didn’t break any more plates or glasses.

His work was going well. He no longer only repaired frames or replaced panes damaged by storms or vandalism, but also installed windows in the modern houses that were shooting up everywhere around the town, attracting new families, cars and roundabouts – and a few unsavoury types as well.

He was keen that we leave our apartment so that we, too, could move into one of the pristine new homes. They’ve got gardens and huge bathrooms, he would say, and fully-fitted kitchens. Your mother would be happy. That was all he really hoped for. In the meantime, he had bought a television set, a Grandin Caprice, and we would sit there in fascination, watching Playing with Words and Starring Your Favourite Songs, without talking about her, without expecting her back, without joy.

Then I turned thirteen.

At the beginning of the summer, Maman went to Le Royal with a friend to see a film by a young director who was only twenty-eight: A Man and a Woman. When she came out of the cinema she was laughing and singing, and as she danced on the road an ochre Ford Taunus took her from us.

She had just turned thirty-five.

I’d always thought she was immortal.

At thirteen, I suddenly grew old.

2

I felt a shiver of cold.

The room was poorly lit and Maman was lying on a bed that looked hard; her long legs and body were draped in a white sheet. Her beautiful features were still intact and yet her beauty had already flown away. I later found out how the undertakers managed to preserve the image of serenity and the illusion of life: injections with a hypodermic needle, to restore the face’s natural appearance, filling up the sagging flesh around the earlobes, cheeks and chin. This process also allowed them to reinstate the plumpness of the deceased, in cases where they might have lost a lot of weight during the time preceding their death.

Which wasn’t the case with Maman. She had simply been torn away. Torn apart.

Papa was crying; I wrapped my arms around his big, lopsided pirate body. We comforted each other in the silence.

I didn’t cry because Maman used to say that tears would spoil your face.

Later, he took off his coat and used it to cover Maman’s body; she’ll catch cold here, he said, but he was the one who caught a cold that day.

His heart turned to stone.

I didn’t dare talk to Maman aloud, not in that ghastly room – a bouquet of plastic flowers in a dark corner, without fragrance or dew, a book for noting the cries of anguish she would never read, the juddering rattle of the air conditioning.

I let the words clatter around my chest, choke in my throat and escape between my lips in a muffled haze. Then I took my leave, as if bidding farewell before going back to war, and returned to the street, to the blare of murderous cars, the mildness of spring, the faint scent of summer that already hung in the air; and suddenly Papa was beside me, towering, an oak tree.

At the local café, he asked for an extra-large glass of beer that he downed in one and I had a mint cordial. Then he ordered a kir that he left on the table – she used to love kir – and, as the mixture of alcohol and grief began to take hold, he broke down: it’s not because she’s no longer here that she’s no longer here.

At thirteen, I understood what it means to be alone.

Later, the family arrived. Maman’s brother, who lived in Talloires and prepped rally cars. He was accompanied by someone who wasn’t his wife; she looked like Françoise Hardy, the woman who sang ‘The House Where I Grew Up’ – the latest hit that Maman and I would belt out, screaming hysterically, into wooden. . .