Chicken Skin – Chapter VIII

Christine passed the step of the front door. Antoine’s secretary, who as always remained at her post, was sitting at her desk.

Christine greeted her. With regard to her, she was feeling a slight hostility breaking inside herself, and she couldn’t refrain or silence it. Her always slightly ironic smile when she talked to the young woman and each time they met, had finally achieved to exasperate her.

After the usual courtesies, Christine got to her study.

On a pile of folders that occupied one of the corners of her desk, she discovered a note from Antoine who was inviting her for lunch.

It seemed that Antoine had really resolved to seal a relationship that, at the beginning, had the appearances of an affair with no future, uncertain and fleeting , just as so many of them build between men and women of all time.

Christine daydreamed for a short while before she opened up the folder that contained an ongoing file, and dived in the reading of a complicated document.

When Antoine finally walked into Christine’s study, by 11 a.m. he was ending up a lively conversation with his secretary. Before he even entered the room, Christine had understood he was in a bad mood. She had heard spitters, exceeded remarks. Some irritation was torturing him, some unpleasant unforeseen event had surely occurred.

Antoine closed the door behind himself after he had finished what he was telling to his secretary and he had entered the room.

He took Christine to task, explaining that one of his suppliers had one more time postponed his delivery time because the production that he was supposed to handle was keeping behind. It wasn’t the first setback of the type he had had with him. Antoine was thinking about purely and simply put an end to a collaboration that had been lasting on the same note for two or three years, and that was ending up giving him cold sweats.

Christine tried to pacify Antoine whose anger was obviously not faked. As she knew the supplier’s products well, she also knew that they were high-quality ones. She had had to do with him directly some times. It seemed to her that  the interest of the firm wasn’t to break off connections that would finally end up being fruitful in the near future. At least, that was the feeling she had about this specific supplier.

At last, Antoine had cooled down. After having spent some more minutes fulminating  against the indelicacy of a partner who was so rarely on time, obviously unaware of the commitments Antoine had with his own clients who suffered the repercussions of those delays and reproached him for them, he sat down on Christine’s desk corner and radically changed the subject.

One of the defining features of Antoine’s personality was his aptitude to go from a mood to another, just as to change the subject, in a very short period of time.

When you didn’t know him, it was somehow disconcerting. But, eventually, you would get used to it. That was the way it had taken for Christine.

At first, she found it hard to get used to this other way of behaving: she liked to treat the whole matter before taking in charge another one, just as to deal with an issue till she reached a satisfactory solution before she would released her concentration and her energy. Finally, she just simply admitted that one could be different from her.

Of course, this distinctive characteristic of Antoine had incontestable repercussions on his firm life.

Antoine was difficult to follow to people who worked with him, and, above all, for those who had to implement his instructions. He could change his mind on what he wanted to do in ten minutes time. He could ask his secretary to mail such type of letter to such person then, point blank, even though everything was ready, the contents of the letter had to be totally modified, or it wasn’t anymore question of a letter, but a phone call was to be given in its place.

If his secretary, fortunately endowed with a patience of steel, hadn’t succeeded to get used to his behavior, she would have probably quickly come to tear her hair out: she worked in an unbroken fickleness.

Neither was Antoine sparing Christine: she also had to cope with his sudden changes and unexpected turnarounds. Because she was clever, Christine invented a work method to help her get by the circumstances. First of all, she waited that Antoine be decided for good on what he wanted to do, or else, she would go until suggesting him such or such idea that seemed to her suitable to solve the current problem or to fulfill the step in question. Antoine often listened to her, although he wouldn’t have borne that someone else that himself take on the paternity of an idea that had to do with the management of his firm.

Therefore, Christine remained very modest. She regarded the influence she had upon Antoine, that by the by was real, in a very distant way, as a perfectly insignificant amount. She simply gave her ideas that she wouldn’t have claimed anymore to be hers, even deep inside herself, as soon as Antoine had appropriated them. She was sparing his amour propre that she had come to know, and that was, she had to admit it in spite of the feelings she had for Antoine, quite immoderate.