Read Online Little Jewel by Patrick Modiano - Free Book Online

an old leather armchair. She sat me in the armchair and placed her hand on my forehead.
    â€˜You don’t have a fever…But your hands are like ice… What’s the matter?’
    For years I had never said a word to anyone. I had kept it all to myself.
    â€˜It would be too complicated to explain,’ I replied.
    â€˜Why? Nothing is that complicated.’
    I burst into tears, which I hadn’t done since the dog had died, at least twelve years or so earlier.
    â€˜Have you had a shock recently?’ she asked, lowering her voice.
    â€˜I’ve seen someone I thought was dead.’
    â€˜Someone very close to you?’
    â€˜It’s not at all important,’ I assured her, trying to smile. ‘I’m just tired.’
    She stood up. I could hear her, back in the shop, opening and shutting a drawer. I was still sitting in the armchair and didn’t feel any urge to move.
    She came back into the room. She had taken off her white coat to reveal a dark-grey skirt and jumper. She handed me a glass of water, at the bottom of which a red tablet wasdissolving in bubbles. She sat next to me, on the arm of the chair.
    â€˜Wait until it’s properly dissolved.’
    I couldn’t take my eyes off the fizzing red water. It was phosphorescent.
    â€˜What is it?’ I asked.
    â€˜Something good for you.’
    She’d taken my hand in hers again.
    â€˜Are your hands still as cold?’
    And the way she said ‘cold’, emphasising the word, suddenly reminded me of the title of a book that Frédérique used to read to me at night, in Frossombronne, when I was in my bed:
The Children of the Cold
.
    I downed the drink in one gulp. It tasted bitter. But in my childhood I’d had to swallow pills that were far more bitter.
    She went to get a stool from the shop and placed it in front of me so I could rest my legs.
    â€˜Try to relax. You don’t seem very good at taking it easy.’
    She helped me take off my raincoat. Then she unzipped my boots and gently removed them. She came and sat on the arm of the chair again and took my pulse. At the touch of her hand, clasped round my wrist, I immediately felt safe. Icould have dropped off to sleep, and that prospect filled me with the same sense of well-being that I experienced when the nuns gave me ether to inhale, and I fell asleep. That was just before I went to live with my mother in the big apartment near the Bois de Boulogne. I was a boarder in a school somewhere and I have no idea why I was waiting in the street that day. No one had come to collect me, so I decided to cross the street, and I was knocked down by a truck. I wasn’t badly hurt, only my ankle. They made me lie down in the truck, under the tarpaulin, and drove me to a nearby house. I ended up on a bed, nuns all around, one of them leaning over me. She was wearing a white veil and she gave me inhale ether.
    â€˜Do you live in the neighbourhood?’
    I told her I lived near Place de Clichy and that I was about to go home on the metro when I’d felt sick. I was on the point of telling her about my visit to the Death Cheater’s apartment block in Vincennes but, for her to understand properly, I would have had to go back a long way, perhaps to that afternoon when I was waiting outside the school gate—I’d love to remember exactly where that school was. It wasn’t long before everyone had gone home, the pavement was empty, the school gate shut. I was still waiting; no onehad come to collect me. Thanks to the ether, I couldn’t feel the pain in my ankle anymore, and I drifted off to sleep. A year or two later, in one of the bathrooms in the apartment near the Bois de Boulogne, I came across a bottle of ether. I was mesmerised by the midnight-blue colour of the bottle. Every time my mother had one of her episodes, when she didn’t want to see anyone and asked me to bring her meals to her room on a tray or to massage her ankles,