Underground Time Read Free

Jacques was always late. Eventually he came in without offering any excuse. His features were drawn and he was badly shaved. Mathilde was wearing a dark suit and the pale silk blouse that she was fond of. She could recall it with strange precision. She also remembered how the man was dressed, the colour of his shirt, the ring he wore on his little finger, the pen sticking out of his jacket pocket, as though the most insignificant details had been inscribed on her memory, unbeknown to her, before she was aware of the importance of this moment, that something was about to happen that would be impossible to repair. After the usual formalities, the director of the institute began his presentation. He had total command of his subject – he hadn’t just spent half an hour skimming through a document prepared by other people as often happened. He commented on the slides without notes, expressing himself with exceptional clarity. The man was both brilliant and charismatic. That was rare. He emanated a sort of conviction that commanded attention. That was immediately apparent from how attentive the team were to his every word and the absence of whispered remarks which normally plagued this sort of meeting.
    Mathilde had noticed the man’s hands, she remembered the expansive gestures which accompanied his words. She wondered where his light, almost imperceptible, accent was from, a particular inflection she couldn’t identify. She very quickly sensed that the man was getting on Jacques’s nerves, probably because he was younger and taller than him and at least his equal as a speaker. She quickly sensed Jacques bristle.
    In the middle of the presentation Jacques had begun to show signs of impatience – he sighed ostentatiously and said ‘yes, yes’ aloud, intended to draw attention to the fact that the director was going too slowly or stating the obvious. Then he began looking at his watch in such a way that no one was in any doubt about his impatience. The team displayed no reaction; they knew his moods. Later, when the director was presenting the results of the quantitative study, Jacques expressed astonishment that their statistical significance didn’t feature in the graphics on the screen. With somewhat exaggerated politeness, the director responded that only results whose statistical significance was above ninety-five per cent were shown. At the end of the presentation, Mathilde, who had commissioned the study, expressed her thanks for the work that had gone into it. It then fell to Jacques to say a few words. She turned to him, and as soon as she caught his eye she knew that Jacques would not be offering any thanks. In the past he’d impressed on her how important it was to establish relations of trust and mutual respect with outside contractors.
    Mathilde asked the first questions about some points of detail before opening it up to the meeting.
    Jacques was last to speak. With pinched lips and displaying the absolute self-confidence which she knew so well, he dismantled the study’s recommendations one by one. He didn’t question the reliability of the results, but the conclusions the institute had drawn from them. It was skilfully done. Jacques understood the market, brand identities and the history of his company inside out. But for all that, he was wrong.
    Mathilde was used to agreeing with him. Firstly because they saw things in a similar way and secondly because it had struck her from the first months of working with him that agreeing with Jacques was a strategy that was both more comfortable and more effective. There was no point in confronting him. In fact, Mathilde always managed to express her reasons and her choices and sometimes got him to change his mind. But this time Jacques’s attitude struck her as so unjust that she couldn’t stop herself saying something. Presenting it as a suggestion so as not to contradict him directly, she explained how it seemed to her that the proposed direction with regard to