We Only Saw Happiness

by Gregoire Delacourt, Anthea Bell

Genres: General Fiction; Family Life; Literary Fiction

Synopsis

'We looked like the perfect young family, something out of a magazine, in shades of marshmallow pink...'

A photograph. The father smiling beside his new car, the mother pregnant and radiant, the little girl placing cuddly toys in the cot for her new baby brother. All we see is the happiness.

'We don't see my mother. We don't see the lies.'

But behind every picture there is a story. And behind that story, there are others.

Every family has its secrets.

When Antoine was young, he believed in love at first sight. He finds the woman of his dreams, Nathalie, and has two children. But when Antoine's life implodes, he does something unspeakable.

Antoine's journey to come to terms with what he has done will take him across seas and continents, deep into his own heart and the hearts of others.

Because in order to find true happiness, you have to know where to look...

Read by Charles Armstrong and Victoria Fox

Release date: December 29, 2016

Publisher: Orion Publishing Group

Print pages: 320

Sample

 

Les Dossiers de l’écran, the weekly television programme, featured the Lindbergh case, so we’d been talking about it at school. I was nine years old. We’d been told all about the kidnapping of the twenty-month-old baby – curly-haired, chubby – and the ransom demand: fifty thousand dollars, a fortune in 1932. And then the terrible thing had happened. The money had been paid and the body of Charles Augustus Lindbergh was recovered, in an advanced state of decomposition, with a major fracture to the skull. The man responsible was caught and put to death in the electric chair. We felt scared leaving school that day. Many of us ran home; I walked quickly, looking over my shoulder, and arrived at my house pale, trembling and wet. My sisters made fun of me: he fell into the water, he fell into the water, what a stupid boy. They were barely five. My mother, guessing I was distraught, stubbed out her menthol cigarette – slowly, almost savouring the action. I threw myself into her arms, and she recoiled slightly, perhaps in surprise. We were not a family for affectionate words or hugs. We kept our emotions in place, under wraps. If someone kidnapped me, I asked my mother, shivering, would you and Papa give them your money? Would you save me? Her eyes, two incredulous marbles, lit up and widened, and then she smiled at me. Her smiles were infrequent, and all the more beautiful for that. She swept back a lock of my hair. My forehead was cold, my lips almost blue.

Of course, Antoine, she murmured. We’d give our lives for you. Our whole lives.

My heart stopped racing.

I never was kidnapped. So they never had to give their lives for me. But I was not saved.

 

I tell you, it was to die for. I found her on the internet. I was scared stiff at first, paranoid. Thinking someone might try to film me or blackmail me. Or I’d get my face smashed in, my money stolen or my watch, my teeth knocked out. Scared shitless. I’m nearly forty, like you, Antoine, and I can stand up for myself, know what I mean? But this was different. When I got there I was really bricking it. There was a keypad and a seedy little entrance hall. The smell of cooking, at eleven in the morning, a damp staircase, like you get in those cheesy movies. It was on the fourth floor. My heart was thumping. I felt my thirty-eight years catching up with me as I climbed the stairs. I need to get some exercise, I thought, at least ride a bike. I’ve heard that’s good for your plumbing. My heart felt like it was about to explode. Can you imagine the look on Fabienne’s face, if she was confronted by my corpse. What the hell was he doing there? What did my husband think he was doing at eleven in the morning, on the fourth floor of an apartment block, with a tart for heaven’s sake? I slowed down a bit. Stopped to catch my breath on the third-floor landing. Like an old mutt taking a rest between two throws of a tennis ball that has been chucked a long, long way, just to piss the dog off. I don’t like dogs. They smell bad when it rains. And then a dog gets old really quickly, it gets cancer or something and then you have to put it down. On the fourth floor I see four doors, I don’t know which one it is. But one of them is open, or rather, it’s opening. I move quietly, cautiously, still scared shitless. I might not even be able to get a hard-on, I think to myself. She’s on the other side of that door. Bloody hell, she’s small, she doesn’t look a thing like her photo. But she has a nice smile. It isn’t even a studio flat, just a room. It’s almost dark, and all I can make out is a bed, a computer, and a box of tissues. I give her the eighty euros, she counts them, and hey presto, they disappear. Then she comes over and opens my fly, getting straight to the point. I look around me. Nothing. No red camera light. Just a miserable, damp room. In fact, it’s lucky that Fabienne doesn’t like doing that sort of thing. (Silence.) Because I don’t much like asking her, it sounds really crude if you have to ask. Give me a blow job. That isn’t the language of love. Nor is fellatio. Even if you use something funny, like suck me off, it’s still not a very romantic thing to say. I love my wife, I don’t want to talk dirty to her. But that’s what the little tart is for, for all those words jammed inside me. To deal with my kind of cowardice. We men can’t win, you know. So I get sucked off for eighty euros, and I don’t upset Fabienne.

FFF swallowed the last of his beer, heaved a tiny sigh of pleasure, put his glass down delicately and then looked at me. He raised his eyebrows, smiled with his eyes and got to his feet.

No, that’s OK, it’s on me, I said when FFF put his hand in his pocket.

Thanks, Antoine. See you tomorrow.

And I was left alone.

I lit another cigarette and inhaled deeply. The smoke burned my mouth, my chest; I felt pleasantly dizzy. The waitress came over and cleared away our empty glasses. I ordered another beer. I didn’t want to go back to my empty life. She had a beautiful face, a beautiful mouth, a pretty body. Only half my age too. But I didn’t dare.

 

My parents had wanted a child in order to become a family quickly – that is, a couple who wouldn’t be asked questions. A child would put a certain distance between them and the rest of the world. Even back then.

When she arrived home from the maternity hospital, my mother went straight back to her room, where she would shut herself in to smoke menthols and read Françoise Sagan. She got her figure back quickly, like that of the writer; the grace of a twenty-year-old. And when she sometimes went out to buy vegetables, powdered milk or a packet of cigarettes and she was asked how the baby was doing, she’d reply: Oh, he’s fine, I think, he’s fine, and people were bowled over by her smile.

I made the trip home from hospital in their little 2CV. My father drove carefully, aware, I suppose, of the fragility of what he was transporting: more than three kilos of flesh and internal organs, seventy-five centilitres of blood and, most importantly, an open, pulsating fontanelle that one clumsy gesture could easily have destroyed. He dropped us off outside the building without getting out of the car. His arms did not shield me from any random violence that might have occurred between the car and the white cot in the bedroom. Instead, he left my mother to settle me in on her own, to marvel at the most beautiful baby in the world on her own, to try, on her own, to see in my nose the nose of one of my grandmothers, in my mouth the mouth of some other relative. He left us alone, he didn’t take his wife in his arms, he didn’t dance a jig. He simply went back to the pharmacy where he had been working for over a year, under the proprietor, a Monsieur Lapchin, a widower with no heirs who was very happy to have recruited my father. Apparently, my father could work miracles. He made up creams that worked on spotty adolescents, with a 4 per cent benzoyl peroxide base; he provided panic-stricken ladies with poison for rats, mice, spiders, cockroaches and sometimes a little something to cure the blues: three drops on your tongue before you go to bed and in the morning you’ll feel right as rain. That’ll be five francs, Madame Jeanmart. Oh, how convenient, I just happen to have a brand-new note, here you go. Five francs isn’t much to pay for a little happiness, thank you; no, thank you. My father had studied chemistry, he loved poetry, but his dreams of winning the Nobel Prize had vanished the day my mother crossed his path. She demagnetised me, he would later say, coldly, uttering the word as he might have said solubility. Or polymerization. She made him lose his bearings, his head, his trousers – which accounts for me – and a few hairs. They had met on 4 July at the Place Aristide-Briand in Cambrai. She was with her sisters. He was with his brothers. Their eyes met, then lingered. She was tall, slender, a Venetian blonde with dark eyes; he was tall, slender, with brown hair and eyes as green as water. They were spellbound, even if, back then, you behaved with decorum when under a spell: nothing more than a smile, a promise to meet again, a handshake. They did meet again, the very next day at the Montois bakery. My mother would later tell me that in daylight, without the fireworks, without a glass of champagne in her hand or the sweet sense of euphoria, she hadn’t found my father quite so spellbinding. But there it was, he had green eyes, and she had always dreamed of meeting a man with green eyes; even if no one ever dreamed of meeting a laboratory assistant. They had made promises to each other; they had introduced one another to their parents. The young man was studying chemistry. The young woman was not studying anything. He was twenty, she was seventeen. They got married six months later. On 14 January. The wedding photos, thank goodness, were in black and white. So you couldn’t see their blue lips, or my mother’s extreme pallor, her little Venetian blonde hairs standing up like prickles. It was cold. And already you could sense the chill that had numbed their love and darkened those green eyes.

For as long as I can remember; for as long as I have searched for answers, for as long as I have wept, it seems that my parents never did love each other.

 

I didn’t have time to finish my beer. My phone vibrated and a number came up; my father’s wife’s number.

I heard her voice, a voice that could soar, could sing Rachmaninov’s Vocalise, Schubert’s Ave Maria, with the church choir.

Her voice, suddenly; devastated.

We’ve just left the doctor’s it’s terrible just terrible I don’t know what to say what to tell you but it’s your father it’s about your father they don’t really know yet but it’s not good news there are things there are traces it’s his colon that’s where it started and I asked the doctor if they were certain it was that if it was the disease with the name you can’t say out loud and he looked at me he looked so sad he’s a good GP he knows your father well he’s been your father’s GP for ages and he was so sad that I realised I’m not an idiot you know I’m not your mama but I do love your papa I take great care of him I take care of what he eats he stopped smoking you know he stopped for me long ago because I couldn’t take it any more I was so worried but it isn’t his lungs it’s his colon that’s where it started the doctor said but it’s even worse think of that as if there could be anything worse than really bad it’s his liver it’s spread to his liver stage four he said in his sad way I don’t know what to do when it’s the liver it’s all over I know that everyone knows that and everyone knows it spreads too I wanted to cry and tear my hair out and stab myself I was just waiting to finally retire so I could enjoy being with him and now well now it’s over it’s as if life is all over and useless it’s not fair it’s horrible we were going to Le Touquet next month I’d rented a ground-floor apartment so it wouldn’t be too tiring for him call me back if you like if you can it’s horrible and at the end of all that he asked me for twenty-seven euros just think twenty-seven euros to be told the man I love is going to die.

Twenty-seven euros.

I paid for the beers. Looked around me. The terrace was full now; people were laughing, people were smoking, people were alive. Nothing threatened them. I rose with difficulty; suddenly I was carrying the weight of my father. I was carrying the weight of the silence between us; I was carrying our moments of cowardice, every last one; those tiny mistakes that, millimetre by millimetre, on the scale of a lifetime, had taken us down the wrong path. To a dead end. A purple wall. The waitress smiled at me, and I wanted to cry, to throw myself into her arms, into her pale tenderness, I wanted to dare say the words that plunge you into mourning and set you free, my father is dying and I’m going to be an orphan I’m frightened I don’t want to be alone I don’t want to fall, and I wanted to hear her say I’m here, Monsieur, I’m here, I’ll stay with you, don’t be frightened, don’t be frightened any more, there, lay your head there, against my breasts, don’t think about a single thing.

But I didn’t dare.

I never dared.

 

I don’t know if I loved my father.

I liked his hands, they never shook. I liked his recipe for lemonade made with bicarbonate of soda. I liked the smell of his experiments. The noises he’d make when they didn’t work. The noises he’d make when they did. I liked the way he unfolded his newspaper in the morning, in the blue kitchen of our big house. His eyes when he read the obituaries. His voice when he told my mother: this man was the same age as me, can you imagine? He was proud to still be alive. My mother would roll her eyes disdainfully; she was beautiful in her small, elegant contempt. I liked waiting for him in the evenings after school, outside the pharmacy. Through the window, I would watch him explaining things with extravagant gestures. I watched the ladies who were in love with him. The temptations. My father wasn’t handsome, but women liked him. His white coat made him look like a scientist. His youth beguiled them. And his green eyes. Ah, those green eyes. Behind the scenes, Monsieur Lapchin gloated. Business was booming. Customers came to the pharmacy for all sorts of things, for anything. For ethylene, ethanol, strong glue. They came a long way. From Raismes, from Jenlain, from Saint-Aubert. The ladies came to see my father, Monsieur André. They didn’t want to be served by anyone else, they arrived looking their best, they stood in line. They expected magic potions, beauty creams, slimming ointments. They liked to imagine his fingers on their skin, those hands that never shook and mixed marvellous concoctions. They all wanted him to choose them, but she was the one he chose: the woman with a wine stain on her silk blouse, a stain that looked like blood, like a broken heart. Come back tomorrow, Mademoiselle. And the next day there was a potion containing ammonia and her blouse was as good as new. She had two firm breasts under that blouse, a look, a smile. And my father asked her out to the Montois bakery. They’ve been together for nearly thirty years now.

Over the past thirty years he’s been known to smile. He never did when our family was still together.

I was about to turn six. My mother had just given birth to my two sisters, identical twins; they may as well have been Siamese twins. Anne and Anna. Anna was the younger, arriving seven minutes and eighteen seconds after her sister. A breech birth. An episi. . .