The Catastrophist: A Novel Read Online Free

notorious liberals. It makes me very unpopular with Madeleine. Isn’t that so, my dear?”
    “You should be locked up,” Madeleine replies, meaning it and not.
    Her eyebrows are carefully plucked, giving her face, with its high cheekbones and strong jaw, a lapidary look. The top buttons of her blouse are undone.
    De Scheut recommends the chicken cooked in butter or the tilapia or the fondue. There’s plenty to choose from. “The mussels are good too,” he says.
    I go for the fish.
    “Zoubir tells me you are a writer,” de Scheut says. “What do you write?”
    “Novels,” I say.
    “Are you going to write a novel about Africa?”
    “I’m one of those writers who likes to stay with what he knows.”
    “Which is what?”
    “London, I suppose.”
    “You are Irish, though, aren’t you?”
    This always bores me. Irish, English, what’s the difference, what does it matter? I have lived in London a long time is all I say.
    “Are you a journalist as well, like Inès?”
    “I sometimes write for magazines and Sunday newspapers to make ends meet.”
    “Novels don’t pay?”
    “Not mine.”
    “Is that why you’ve come to the Congo—to write for the newspapers?”
    “No, I’m here really”—I hesitate to say this in front of a stranger, but there is something about de Scheut I have already taken to—“because Inès is here.”
    “You have made the right decision,” he says, and he pats my forearm. “She’s a very particular young woman, and she’s very popular here.”
    “She likes to be liked,” I say.
    “As we all do.”
    He looks at me with sympathy, as though he knows what’s going on in my head, the fears I have, the doubts. I have always had a weakness for father figures.
    The food arrives, course after course, and so does the drink. When the dinner plates are removed the waiters set before us a selection of cheeses—Camembert, Brie and—a concession to Flemish tastes—Hervese. They bring us liqueurs and spirits; then a bottle of champagne, another, another.
    My eyes keep being drawn back to Inès and her lighthearted group. I might have begun to resent my exclusion from the ribbons of her laughter had I not enjoyed seeing again her social display—the flash of the eyes, the gestures, the pantomimic swiftness of the change in tone and look: someone says something and her disagreement is transparent and unmitigated; seconds later she is in full and extravagant accord with the same person. She happens to glance in my direction and gives me a bold wink, then turns back to her friends. She always has friends, she is always with others. In the two years we have been lovers I do not recall ever having seen her alone. I exaggerate. Moments, yes, the small, inevitable domestic moments: when I would return to the flat to find her preparing food or performing some other chore. Images jump into my mind. Of her lying on her stomach on the bed, a pillow under her shoulders and a book propped open before her, wearing only a vest. Or that awful afternoon when unexpectedly I glimpsed her from the upper deck of a bus as she returned from the doctor’s appointment. How frail she seemed as she trudged along Kentish Town Road in the miserable January slush. I almost didn’t recognize the small, slow figure. But that was not Inès—vital, subversive, impatient, and always part of others’ lives.
    “You look older than Inès.”
    It is Madeleine.
    “I am.”
    “By how much?”
    I do not want to appear defensive, but I am unused to direct personal questions of any kind.
    “By thirteen years,” I say as evenly as I can.
    She studies me closely before taking a cigarette from its packet.
    “Hardly anything,” she says. “My husband is twenty-seven years older than me. He’s a farmer.”
    I light her cigarette. She holds up a champagne bottle, a mimed query to me. I nod and she pours.
    “Are you here like Inès to write about the great Patrice Lumumba?”
    She crosses her legs and leans towards me a