Underground Time Read Free Page B

lunch with her. He no longer consulted her on decisions and had stopped bothering about her opinion. He never again consulted her on anything at all.
    Conversely, the following Monday he had turned up at the planning meeting she ran every week with the whole team, which he hadn’t attended in ages. He sat across the table from her, as an observer, without a word to explain his presence, arms folded, sitting back in his chair. And he looked at her. From that first time, Mathilde felt ill at ease, because his look wasn’t one of trust – it was a look that was judging her, seeking out a fault.
    Then Jacques asked for copies of certain documents, took it into his head to have a look at the work of the researchers and product heads, to reread reports and to review resource allocation on various projects. Next, on several occasions he contradicted her in front of the team, looking as though he was suppressing some vague irritation or outright exasperation, and then in front of other people, during the regular exchanges they had with different department heads.
    Then he had applied himself to systematically questioning her decisions, asking for details, demanding proof, justifications, figures to back up arguments. He began to express doubts and recriminations.
    Then he started coming to her planning meeting every Monday.
    Then he decided to chair it himself and as a result she could get on with something else.
    She had thought that Jacques would come to his senses. That he would abandon his anger, let things get back to normal.
    Things couldn’t get out of control, become deadlocked like that over nothing. It was crazy.
    She had tried not to alter her own attitude. She tried to bring off the projects she had been given, to maintain good relations with the team in spite of the uneasy feeling that had developed and was growing all the time. She had reckoned that time was what was needed, time for Jacques to get over it.
    She hadn’t reacted to any of his attacks – the ironic comments about her shoes or her new coat, the mean remarks about the dates of her Christmas holiday or the sudden illegibility of her handwriting; she had responded with patient, good-natured silence. She had responded with the faith she had in him.
    Perhaps none of this had anything to do with her. Perhaps Jacques was going through a bad time and just needed to find his feet again, to get up to speed with projects he had long ago delegated. She had even imagined that he was ill, suffering from a secret disease that was silently eating away at him.
    She refused to betray him and didn’t complain about it to anyone. She kept quiet.
     
    But Jacques continued in the same way, every day a little more irritated, distant and harsh.
    Over time Mathilde had had to admit that whether Jacques was present or not, other people in the department didn’t talk to her the way they used to, that they adopted an awkward, apologetic tone, since he wasn’t far away. All except Éric, whose attitude to her hadn’t changed.
    In November Jacques forgot to invite her to an internal presentation of the ad campaign that the agency they used had produced for the launch of a new product. She found out about the meeting at the last minute from Jacques’s secretary and rushed to the communications director’s office. She knocked and found them both sitting on the leather sofa facing the flat-screen. Jacques didn’t look at her, and the other man gave her only a vague acknowledgement. Neither of them got up or made space for her. Mathilde remained standing there with her arms folded the whole time, while they watched the three films over and over, comparing the images, the voice-overs and the editing. Neither Jacques nor the director of communications asked her opinion. They both behaved as though she had simply burst in by mistake and had no reason to be there.
     
    That was the day she realised that Jacques’s plan to destroy her was not confined to her own department, that