Camille (aka. Scattered) by Pierre Lemaitre

Author:Pierre Lemaitre [Lemaitre, Pierre]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Fiction, Mystery & Detective, General
ISBN: 9781782066217
Google: E1JpBgAAQBAJ
Amazon: 0857052772
Publisher: Hachette UK
Published: 2015-03-04T11:00:00+00:00

Day 3

7.15 a.m.

Camille has barely slept in two days. Warming his hands on a mug of coffee, he stares out the window of the studio at the forest. It was here in Montfort that his mother painted for years, almost until her death. Afterwards the place lay abandoned, left to squatters and thieves. Camille hardly gave it a thought and yet, for some obscure reason, he never sold it.

Then, some time after Irène’s death, he decided not to keep anything of his mother’s, not a single canvas, a vestige of an old grudge between them: it is because of her smoking that he is only four foot eleven.

Some of the paintings now hang in foreign museums. Camille had promised himself he would donate all the proceeds of the sale but, of course, he did nothing with the money. Not until some years after Irène’s death, when he finally rejoined the world and decided to rebuild and refurbish the little studio on the edge of the forest of Clamart, which had once been the gatekeeper’s lodge to a country house that has long since vanished. Back then, the place was more isolated than it is now, when the nearest house is only three hundred metres away. The dirt road goes no further, it stops here.

Camille had the place renovated from top to bottom, replacing every wonky terracotta floor tile, installing a full bathroom and building a mezzanine which became his bedroom. The ground floor is now a huge sitting room with an open-plan kitchen, one entire wall is taken up by a picture window overlooking the edge of the forest.

The forest terrifies him still, just as it did when he spent long afternoons as a child watching his mother work here. These days it is an adult terror, a wistful feeling of mingled pleasure and pain. The one piece of nostalgia he has allowed himself is the gleaming cast-iron wood-burning stove in the centre of the room which replaced his mother’s that was stolen during the years the studio lay derelict.

Unless carefully regulated, all the heat from the stove rises so that the mezzanine is a sauna while downstairs his feet are freezing, but he likes this rustic method of heating because it has to be earned, because it requires as much attentiveness as experience. Camille knows how to stoke and regulate it such that it will run all night. In the depths of winter, there is a chill to the mornings, but he considers this initial hardship – refuelling and relighting the stove – as a little ritual.

He had much of the roof replaced with glass so that the sky is constantly visible and, the moment you look up, the clouds and the rain seem about to tumble on you. When it snows, it is unsettling. This opening onto the sky serves no real purpose. Though it lets in more light, the house had more than enough already. Le Guen, ever the pragmatist, enquired about the skylights on his first visit.

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