Читать книгу The Foundling Boy - Michel Deon - Страница 6

I mention 1920 only as a reminder. It no longer interests us. But let us touch briefly on the things that were bothering Albert at that time. Paul Deschanel, preferred to Clemenceau by both the Chamber of Deputies and the Senate as president of the victorious French Republic, was found wandering in his nightshirt at a level crossing after the official train had passed by. He was suspected of being a delusional lunatic and unfortunately the suspicions proved correct. Forced to resign, he was replaced by Alexandre Millerand. In the United States, matters were no better: the president had disappeared. Intoxicated by the ovations he had received and his own verbal incontinence, Woodrow Wilson shut himself in his room and refused to see even members of his administration. His wife served as intermediary, deciding world affairs between two rubbers of bridge. The League of Nations – upon which, despite the United States’ refusal to join, Albert had pinned his hopes – did not prevent the Soviets from invading Poland, the Greeks from attacking Turkey, or the French from ‘pacifying’ the Rif. Albert lived from one disappointment to the next. When he held young Jean in his arms he sang to him, as a lullaby,

And all you poor girls

who love your young men

if they reward you with children

break their arms, break their legs

so they can never be infantrymen

so they can never be infantrymen.

Jean would never be a soldier. It was a promise, made on oath.

We jump forward then, to August 1923, three years later, to find ourselves again at La Sauveté, one fine afternoon when the sun sparkled on the sea that was visible from the first-floor windows. Monsieur du Courseau had lifted the edge of the lace curtain to admire his garden. Seated in a tub armchair, he kept his leg, encased in its plaster cast, up on a stool. A month earlier, as he had tried to avoid a cyclist without lights in the middle of the night on the waterlogged Tôtes road, he had slid off the carriageway and hit a fence that, fortunately, was made of wood. The car – the new Type 28 Bugatti, three litres, eight cylinders – had not been badly damaged (punctured radiator, bent front axle), but Antoine’s left knee, which was less sturdy, had shattered on contact with the dashboard. At the factory at Molsheim the car was being repaired, and would be delivered back to Antoine at the beginning of September. Even though there was no question of his driving anywhere in the near future, he was suffering from not having his baby in its garage, a loose box adapted for the purpose. He liked to know it was there, even when it was quiet, and he loved its sudden gleam whenever he pulled back the garage’s sliding door to let in the daylight. The bodywork shone a beautiful blue, the chrome flashed in the sunlight. Stuck in bed, then in an armchair, Antoine, deprived of his thoroughbred, felt his loneliness painfully acutely as he faced convalescent hours of desperate slowness. For at least another month there was no question of his being able to escape from his agonising melancholy and take to the road again.

The lifted lace curtain revealed a corner of the park where, at that moment, Albert was watering with an apron around his waist and a straw hat on his head. Sitting in a garden chair a few steps behind him, Adèle Louverture was dozing, her chin tipped forward. Behind her, Michel du Courseau (six years old) was carefully cutting with a pair of scissors the knot of the cotton scarf that held back the girl’s thick hair. When she woke up, her scarf would fall, and her hair would tumble free. From behind the du Courseau boy, Jean Arnaud (four years old) watched him with his hands behind his back and his head on one side. After he had finished cutting the knot, Michel moved over to Albert’s hosepipe. Still armed with his scissors, he stabbed quickly, several times, into the rubber of the hose and ran off, handing the scissors to Jean as he did so. Albert’s flow of water dwindled to a trickle. Turning round, he saw jets of water spraying from the punctured hose and his son holding the scissors. Jean made no attempt even to draw back, taking the two slaps without complaint and running away to cry, pursued by Albert’s curses. Adèle, awakened, raised her head and her scarf fell off.

She saw at once that it had been cut with scissors.

Antoine rang a bell that had been placed there for the purpose. Marie-Thérèse came in. Ever since her husband’s accident, she had lived in a state of devotion and goodness. The tenderness with which she spoke to her friends about ‘poor Antoine’ had left many thinking that he was dying. The more anxious of them came to visit and were reassured: the dying man was doing well, in spite of his immobility. He kept a box of cigars and a bottle of calvados next to his armchair. He still looked fresh. After a period of eating very little, before the accident, he had regained his appetite, although it was an appetite that baffled the Normans who knew him: he ate bread rubbed with garlic, requested bouillabaisses, demanded aïoli with his cod, and chewed olives while drinking a yellow liquid which a few drops of water transformed into a whitish solution with a flavour of aniseed. In short, he was not in Normandy but elsewhere, living in an unknown world of lovers of spicy food. Marie-Thérèse understood perfectly well that he was being unfaithful to her. Her pride would have suffered if she had not been able to console herself that she was hardly the only victim of his infidelity: Joséphine Roudou, Victoire Sanpeur, and now Adèle Louverture had all found themselves in a similar position.

‘Are you feeling unwell?’ she asked, without much hope that he would say yes.

‘No, my dear. Unfortunately I’m not feeling unwell, but I should like to say something to my son.’

‘Michel?’

‘Do I have another?’

She acknowledged that, at La Sauveté at least, he could only mean Michel.

‘I’ll send him to you, but …’

‘But what?’

‘You’re always so hard on him.’

‘Have you ever seen me hit him?’

‘No. You’re worse. Either you don’t speak to him, or you look at him with astonishment, as if he were a stranger.’

‘He is a stranger. He’s the only person in the world who looks at me with terror in his eyes, and occasionally even something close to hate.’

‘He’s a wild boy. You need to make a bond with him.’

‘I’ll try.’

He turned his head impassively and lifted the curtain again. Albert was repairing his hosepipe with some rags and string. A few steps away, Jean was watching with his hand on his cheek. The slight movement of his shoulders gave away his stifled sobbing. Antoine’s silence conveyed to Marie-Thérèse that she should now do as he had asked.

He waited calmly, followed with an attentive ear the discussion between mother and son at the bottom of the stairs and their slow approach to the first floor, then listened, without attempting to work out their sense, to the excited whisperings on the other side of the door. Finally Marie-Thérèse must have managed to convince him, for Michel entered alone into the room with his father. He stood with his back against the closed door, his legs together, his head high. They exchanged a look and Antoine was glad to see that his son did not lower his eyes. They sized each other up for a moment in silence, the father almost startled to find his son good-looking – this boy he knew so little of – the son surprised that his father did not vent his anger straight away.

‘You’re really quite a handsome little chap!’ Antoine said.

It was true. At six years old Michel, slim and with long, well-muscled legs, square shoulders, a long neck, a well-defined profile and pale blond hair, was a beautiful child. Antoine felt he was seeing him for the first time. What sort of incomprehension had kept them apart for so long? He mused on this for a moment, distracted at first, then suddenly conscious of what was happening on the other side of the door, of a mute and fearful presence. He waited; there was plenty of time. It was Marie-Thérèse who, unable to bear the silence any longer, knocked, tentatively opened the door and put her head around it. Antoine smiled.

‘Don’t worry. I haven’t eaten him.’

‘But you’re not talking.’

‘We are communicating to each other matters that cannot be spoken aloud.’

Barely reassured, Marie-Thérèse retreated. Antoine listened to the sound of her feet going away downstairs and, without allowing vexation or irritation into his voice, said, ‘Aren’t we, Michel?’

‘What?’

‘I think you know what I’d like to talk to you about.’

‘No.’

‘Something about a headscarf and a hosepipe punctured with scissors.’

Michel breathed deeply, like a diver about to disappear underwater.

‘Don’t punish Jean,’ he said. ‘He’s only four.’

‘Because he did it.’

‘Yes.’

‘He’s very precocious, isn’t he? But I appreciate you taking his side. You’re a good-hearted boy.’

‘He’s a servant’s son.’

‘Jeanne is not a servant. I don’t like to hear you say that word. Jeanne is our caretaker and her husband is my friend.’

‘How can he be your friend? He’s a gardener.’

‘I prefer a gardener to many of the people your mother makes me entertain in this house.’

‘Anyway, Jean doesn’t know what he’s doing.’

‘Are you sure he did it?’

‘Yes.’

Antoine remained silent. He was discovering who his son was, and the discovery interested him. In one sense he was proud that the boy was sticking to his lie, knowing that his father knew. He allowed that he had courage, and a deep scorn for the truth.

‘I want to be sure that Jean won’t be punished, so I would like Albert to come up and see me. Would you be very kind and tell him?’

Michel’s hand was already on the doorknob.

‘Wait. Don’t be in such a hurry. Give me a kiss.’

‘Why?’

‘Because it will give me pleasure.’

Michel let go of the knob, walked over to his father, and gave him a cold kiss on the cheek.

‘Thank you,’ Antoine said. ‘Now you can go.’

He watched Michel run out and go to the gardener. Albert put down the nozzle of his hose, dried his hands on his thick blue canvas apron and limped up the avenue, trousers flapping around his wooden leg. He kept his back straight, and no one watching him would have felt under any obligation to show him charity or pity. He was a deeply accepting man, who offered his suffering to the cause of peace about which he spoke so often, with the fervour of a visionary. Antoine was very fond of him and discreetly let him know that he was, as is proper between men.

‘I’m interrupting your work,’ he said when Albert entered.

‘I’d finished, Captain.’

‘Captain’ had replaced the ‘sir’ of before the war. They had met in uniform, on leave, and from that moment on, master-servant relations had become impossible. Better to substitute their military ranks, which at least reminded them in a soulless peacetime that men might come together in a brotherhood of respect, without servility.

‘Have a chair. A small glass of something?’

‘I wouldn’t say no.’

Albert filled his pipe and lit it. The pungent smell of caporal tobacco spread around the room. He took the offered glass, which was not small, and dipped his moustache in it.

‘The 1920,’ he said.

‘Mm. The last carafe.’

‘It’s good.’

Antoine swallowed a mouthful. ‘Yes. Good, but no more. It hasn’t learnt how to age.’

‘You don’t ask that from calvados.’

‘Yes, I know. Albert, I asked you to come up because you slapped Jean this afternoon.’

‘He deserved it. The hosepipe’s buggered. I’ll have to get a new one.’

‘No, don’t. I’ll have it replaced.’

‘I said I’ll do it!’ Albert said bad-temperedly.

‘From the window here I saw Michel cut Adèle’s scarf and then puncture your hosepipe. He gave the scissors to Jean to hold and ran away.’

‘Are you sure?’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘Then I’ve made a bad mistake.’

‘Did Jean protest?’

‘No, Captain. The little fool!’

Antoine saw Albert’s discomfiture, which was not due to his remorse at having smacked his child but to the idea that an all-powerful Justice had been offended against. He would have liked to find a way to reassure his friend: all-powerful Justice was doing perfectly well (in men’s minds at any rate), despite the daily offences showered upon her. It was a pity that Albert didn’t possess a more relative sense of the great moral principles: he was storing up sad days for himself, disappointments and rages that would not be good for his health.

‘He didn’t say anything to me, he didn’t even try to defend himself!’

‘He’s still a very small boy. I’d like you to send him to me. I want to talk to him, but don’t tell him what it’s about. Let me deal with it.’

Albert downed his glass and left, looking thoughtful. A short time later Antoine heard a faint tapping at the door and called to Jean to come in. The boy entered, looking serious. His shorts were too long and covered his knees, and Jeanne, in her economical way, had studded his boots so that he slipped on the polished floorboards. He came to Antoine’s armchair and kissed him on the cheek.

‘Hello, Monsieur.’

‘I know who stabbed the hosepipe and cut Adèle’s scarf.’

‘Oh, you know!’ Jean repeated, smiling.

‘But I don’t understand why you didn’t say it was Michel who did it.’

‘If I had, he would have hit me, and anyway nobody would believe me. He’s your son.’

Antoine felt a gulf opening up in front of him. This small, sweet, discreet boy was showing him a world far more complicated than the one in which the du Courseaus lived so complacently. He grasped Jean’s hand and squeezed it in his own.

‘You see … I didn’t know any of that, and I’m very grateful to you for telling me. Do you like secrets?’

‘What’s a secret?’

‘Something you only share with one person.’

‘Yes.’

‘All right … you and I are going to have a secret. Michel won’t be punished for his naughtiness, but you and I will be friends for ever. We’ll never argue. We’ll tell each other everything, and when one of us has a sadness he’ll tell the other one, who’ll cheer him up.’

Jean watched Antoine, concentrating carefully. He did not understand everything he was saying, but the friendly sound of his voice made enough of an impression on him that afterwards this scene never left his memory, and nor did Antoine’s affectionate hug that accompanied it and smelt of cigars, calvados and embrocation. As Jean was leaving, Antoine called him back.

‘Let me look at you again. You remind me of someone, but I don’t know who.’

‘Someone?’

‘Yes, we’ll try and find out who. Goodbye, Jean. Come up and see me when you get bored. We’ll talk.’

In September, from his bedroom, Antoine followed the days’ rhythm. The rose bushes faded to make way for autumn flowers. One morning, the last horse they kept in the stables, which took Marie-Thérèse in her tilbury to church at Grangeville on Sundays, was led away on a long rein behind a knacker’s cart. A few minutes later, Madame du Courseau appeared at the gates at the wheel of a Model T Ford, in which she turned two circles in the drive before parking in the loose box belonging to the Bugatti. Antoine rang his bell. Marie-Thérèse appeared, her cheeks pink, a little out of breath.

‘Did you see?’ she said.

‘I saw, and you have three minutes to take your heap of junk out of my Bugatti’s garage and put it somewhere else.’

‘But the Bugatti’s not there!’

‘All the more reason. Would I put another woman in your bed when you’re not there?’

‘I must say I think you’re being extremely fussy to include a car in your respect for the conventions.’

‘Then you respect them too!’

‘I knew you were attached to your car … but to such an extent … more than to your wife, more than to your children …’

‘Have I ever specified the degrees of my passion? No. So stop making things up and go and get the woodshed behind the outhouse cleared out. You can park your dinosaur there.’

Marie-Thérèse did as she was told, and the Model T Ford did not cohabit with the Bugatti, which returned from Molsheim one afternoon with a mechanic in white overalls at the wheel. Antoine, who had been brought down to the ground floor on a chair, studied his car, its engine still ticking from the road and its bodywork spattered with squashed mosquitoes. He had it washed as he sat there, with a sponge, warm water and hose. The blue paintwork and spoked wheels gleamed in the warm afternoon light. Everyone came to watch: Adèle, Jeanne, Marie-Thérèse, Albert, Jean, Michel, Antoinette and two other servants, whose names I shan’t bother with because they were only casual staff. Hands caressed the bodywork, the chrome and the oak steering wheel, felt the still-warm bonnet secured with a leather strap, the gear lever and oil pump lever. Antoine managed to squeeze himself into the passenger seat, and the mechanic took the wheel again. They did a lap of the park to the sound of eight cylinders firing like organ pipes, raising a delicate cloud of white dust behind them. When they arrived back at the front steps, the abbé Le Couec was waiting, a handkerchief in the neck of his cassock.

‘The golden calf!’ he said in his rich, gravelly voice. ‘How we love the golden calf! And the sinners they do increase … Pity the heavens as they empty!’

He nevertheless helped Antoine to extricate himself from the cockpit and get back upstairs to his room, where they remained alone with the carafe of calvados and the box of cigars. A strong smell rose from the abbé, who did not always take great care of his cassock. Domestic matters did not preoccupy him. He lived in one room of the rectory, which functioned simultaneously as bedroom, library and kitchen and which, very occasionally, he allowed a female parishioner to sweep and dust. But as a former infantryman, trained by the Manuel d’infanterie, he paid very particular attention to the health of his feet. The faithful souls who visited him often found him sitting in a chair and reading his breviary with his cassock hitched up to his knees, revealing his sturdy legs and hiker’s calves and his feet soaking in a bowl full of water, in which he had dissolved coarse salt collected from the hollows of the rocks. Grangeville’s parish priest needed this treatment: he walked a great deal. To walk to Dieppe and back did not trouble him in the slightest. He had walked to Rouen in twelve hours once, to answer a summons from his bishop, and returned the following day at the same pace, relieved of a number of bitter feelings after a stormy audience.

Antoine, whose nose was sensitive, offered the abbé a cigar, which the priest lit after clearing his throat.

‘Not bad! So how goes it? I’m not talking about your knee, naturally.’

‘Another fortnight and I’ll be as nimble as a deer,’ Antoine responded, pretending not to understand.

‘It’s been two months, hasn’t it?’

‘Yes, two months.’

‘Two months without sin! Some people up there will be very interested in your soul.’

‘How very kind of them.’

Antoine recounted the story of Jean and Michel, of the punctured hosepipe and the cut-up headscarf. The abbé listened less than attentively. The first glass of calvados, drunk a little too quickly because he had been thirsty, distracted his attention. He would have liked to know its vintage, but when Antoine began to think aloud he was not to be interrupted.

‘I’m very drawn to Jean. If you could see how serious he is, how closely he looks at you, if you could read his thoughts as they pass across his face, you’d be asking yourself the same question as I do: where does he come from? And it is doubly frustrating that when I look at him, I say to myself every time: I know that face, I’ve seen it somewhere before. In a dream? In the real world? Impossible to tell. Will we ever know?’

The abbé maintained a prudent silence. He knew, but no one would make him betray a confidence. Or possibly later, if circumstances demanded it. He poured himself another glass of calvados and sipped.

‘One thing at a time. Don’t get too interested in Jean Arnaud. Your son has priority, and he needs it. Jean, on the other hand, has all sorts of advantages: a mother of admirable virtue, a father who is both a hero and an idealist …’

‘You’re suggesting that Michel doesn’t have those advantages?’

‘I’m not suggesting anything. By the way, how are matters at Saint-Tropez?’

‘Excellent,’ Antoine replied, put out and instantly withdrawing into himself in the wake of his rebuff. Quite understandably, he did not hold with a priest reminding him, in conversation, of things said in the confessional. But the abbé Le Couec, a man of excessive integrity, could not forget words murmured in an unguarded moment. Antoine’s life, both internal and external, belonged to him, and he intended to maintain his right to oversee it outside the church as well as inside.

‘You’re fortunate,’ the abbé said. ‘You might have been a lot less lucky.’

‘I’m obliged to you!’ Antoine said drily.

‘As a matter of fact, I have never understood what drove you away from Madame du Courseau.’

‘If only I knew myself!’

‘She has great qualities.’

‘I shan’t contradict you on that point.’

‘She’s an excellent mother.’

‘Without a doubt.’

‘She is beyond reproach.’

‘Who would dare say anything to the contrary?’

‘So?’

‘She bores me,’ Antoine said wearily.

The abbé did not know what boredom was, and supposed it to be some sort of illness that a healthy man would fight with prayers, calvados and long, strenuous walks. Perhaps Antoine’s illness was the result of him never going out without his Bugatti.

‘When your leg’s out of plaster, we’ll take some exercise together.’

‘I had a sufficient dose of that to last me a lifetime between ’14 and ’18.’

‘The doctor will most certainly prescribe another one.’

‘The park will be quite enough for me.’

Shouts and laughter came from outside. Antoine lifted the curtain. Antoinette was chasing Jean, who was running away from her with all the speed his legs could muster, round and round some armchairs and a bench. Finally she cornered him and threw her arms around him to kiss him. He wriggled out of her grasp and kept running, looking behind him and paying no attention to Michel who, as he ran past, stuck out his foot. Jean went sprawling, but made no sound, and got up again with knees, hands and chin covered in blood. Grabbing a stick, he launched himself at Michel, but Adèle, who had come running, took the stick from him and let Michel run away. Antoine heard snatches of his daughter vehemently arguing, accusing Michel. Madame du Courseau and Adèle took Jean inside to clean him up and paint him with iodine.

‘Did you see that?’

‘Yes. Strange. Very strange. I’m surprised at Michel. At Sunday school he’s a very attentive and devout little boy. A good Christian in the making. He’s very talented, you know. On Sunday he sang a solo in church, in a marvellous soprano. I would have given him absolution without confessing him. If you give him modelling clay, he’ll sculpt you miniature saints that are little masterpieces. I intend to ask him to make the Nativity models for me at Christmas.’

‘An artist in the family? That’s all we need. Where does he get it from? I have nothing to hide. Not a creative bone in my body. Generations of unambiguous Normans going back as far as you like. I’m the first of my line who’s even dreamt in his sleep. Nothing on the Mangepain side either. Not a glimmer of sensitivity anywhere.’

‘Let’s not make too much of Pasteurian inevitability. It’s a perfect case of spontaneous generation. We should wait … all children are gifted. It’s afterwards that it goes wrong.’

They carried on talking as the dusk fell, one of those long conversations containing many overtones, peppered with Antoine’s occasional acid and cynical remarks and the abbé’s stolid common sense. When the latter stood up to go, the house swayed a little around him. The room stank of cold cigar smoke. The carafe was empty. On the stairs the abbé missed his footing and travelled the rest of the way on his bottom, laughing like a lunatic. Marie-Thérèse offered to drive him back to the rectory.

‘No, thank you, my dear. I’ve filled my tank and I need to burn it off.’

‘You talk like my husband, Father. Like a mechanic.’

‘They don’t yet have their saint, but they will. They deserve him. If need be, I shall go to Rome personally to petition His Holiness Pius XI. Actually, you’ve hit on something, I shall go and make my request this instant.’

He caught his foot on the doormat inside the front door and nearly fell over again.

‘Father!’ Marie-Thérèse said in a voice full of reproach.

‘My dear penitent, one does not dictate his conduct to a priest such as myself. I have certainly overdone the calvados in your husband’s company, but it is when the spirit elevates itself and is released from material contingencies that ideas come in their multitudes. On which note, the Lord bless you and keep you.’

Taking down his wide-brimmed hat from the coat hook, he placed it on his head with an energetic gesture and strode out into the darkening night. She watched him until he was past the gates and was surprised to hear him, just as he presumably thought himself out of earshot, let go two crisp and substantial farts that rippled through the evening air. But with what circumlocutions could she report that to his superiors, especially when the abbé couldn’t care less? He had two more calls to make, before returning to the rectory and a dinner of cold potatoes and a bowl of curd cheese.

The purchase of her Model T Ford changed Marie-Thérèse’s life profoundly, and even her appearance. She abandoned her Lanvin for a more sporty look, exchanged high heels for flats, bobbed her hair and started smoking two packs of caporal cigarettes a day. Her stubbed-out butts filled the ashtrays at La Sauveté, and when she spoke her breath, laden with cold, sour smoke, hit you in the face. She drove prudently and without haste along the region’s narrow roads, venturing twenty-five or thirty kilometres from Grangeville but never overstepping the confines of her self-imposed kingdom. She often took the children with her, including Jean, to show them churches and ruined abbeys and the châteaux of friends, where they were invited in to nibble snacks in large, gloomy rooms that smelt of furniture polish and old ladies. The château that fascinated Jean Arnaud the most was the Malemorts’: an elegant residence in red brick, flanked by two turrets and a pretty dovecote. The Marquis de Malemort, who had recently turned thirty, was struggling valiantly against the hard times. He had razed three-quarters of his parkland to turn it into fields and taken back his two tenanted farms to run them himself. Each year this solid Norman with his highly coloured complexion lost a little more of his aristocratic manner and looked a little more like a peasant, but on Sundays, dressed in grey and wearing white gloves with a carnation in his buttonhole, at the reins of his trap, in which sat the marquise and their daughter, Chantal, he still possessed a definite style. People bowed low to him not from servility, but as befitted a proud picture of the past in an era without pity.

You will be saying: what is all that doing in here? Why don’t you tell us about Antoine’s road trips instead, about Marie-Dévote and Théo, about Charles Ventadour, about the man with the mangled face at Roquebrune, about Geneviève? My answer is to beg you, please, to allow me a little time. This is a long story and the Malemorts have their place in it, especially Chantal, who is exactly Jean’s age and a ravishing child, with black hair and eyes of forget-me-not blue. At four years old Jean would willingly stand in front of her and just adore her, or if he could would stroke her porcelain cheeks and her long and graceful neck; but the Malemorts were intimidatingly grand, and Chantal was a shy child who spoke in a quiet though not affected voice. Marie-Thérèse, of course, occasionally daydreamed of marrying into the family, and with her tendency to long-range calculation had already mentioned it to Michel.

‘What a gorgeous girl she’ll be! And how well you’ll get on together! Next time you ought to bring her one of your little sculptures. They have a piano. I’ll accompany you and you can sing “Auprès de ma blonde” …’

‘But her hair’s black!’

Madame du Courseau was not so easily discouraged.

Albert hated ‘lending’ Jean and consented reluctantly, under pressure from Jeanne who said, over and over, ‘Our little boy needs to see the world.’

The ‘little boy’ had already decided to see it. The closed universe behind La Sauveté’s high walls made him feel uncomfortable. At every step he encountered either the traps Michel set or Madame du Courseau’s smothering affection, and if it was neither of those it was the haughty disdain of the governess who, like clockwork, a fortnight after taking up her post, turned into the biggest snob in the house. At least when they were in the car Michel felt car-sick as soon as they started moving and spent the best part of the journey throwing up out of the window, and the black woman was never invited. And sometimes out on the road they would see the blue Bugatti overtake them or pass them going the other way, and for a split second they would make out Monsieur du Courseau at the steering wheel, his cap back to front and his big mica goggles shielding his eyes from the wind and dust. As soon as his plaster cast came off he had started training again, criss crossing the country to get back into condition. One day, on a bend he was deliberately taking as tightly as he could, he nearly collided with the Ford. Wrenching the wheel over to avoid him, Marie-Thérèse put her nearside wheels into the ditch. Antoine reversed back to her.

‘Nothing broken?’ he asked, not getting out of the car.

Antoinette was crying with laughter, Michel was moaning. Madame du Courseau, pale and furious, snapped, ‘No!’

‘I’ll ask them to send the oxen then.’

An hour later a farm worker hauled the Ford out of the ditch, but that evening Antoine was not to be found at La Sauveté. He had left for the Midi.

For three years his route had not changed by a kilometre. The only difference was that he now followed it less madly, no longer sleeping in ploughed fields, stopping instead to rest at Montargis before pushing on to Lyon where, at the same bistro each time, a sausage and a jug of Beaujolais were waiting for him. At Montélimar he stocked up on nougat, and at Aix he stopped to have dinner with Charles and listen to his stories of an imaginary war so much more glorious and heroic than the one they had lived through that it was almost a pleasure to recollect it. Charles’s skill lay in never merely going off into fables of his own heroism, but instead weaving Antoine into them with such conviction that Antoine let himself be carried away, involuntarily holding himself straighter, looking for the stripes on his sleeve, covering his ears when the crash-bang-wallops of his former driver rang out, marvelling at his own cheek towards his colonel, and at the offhand way he treated the liaison officers dispatched by headquarters. He protested mildly at Charles’s story of how he had picked him up at the roadside, wounded in the buttock by a Bulgarian cavalryman’s lance, but Charles – who, like every good storyteller, brooked no interruptions – stuck to his version and refused to back down, even when Antoine, by now rather tipsy, jumped up and began to drop his trousers to prove that his buttocks bore no trace of the alleged shameful gash. The restaurant owner halted this affront to public decency just in time, and Antoine resigned himself to accepting that the shrapnel wound in his right shoulder had metamorphosed into a less dignified laceration as the result of a heroic confrontation with a moustachioed horseman who had the yellow-tinged face of a Tatar and had been terrorising and violating the gentle Serbian peasant women in the countryside all around. In fact, Charles’s conviction was so strong that Antoine surprised himself on his return to his hotel by contorting himself in front of his wardrobe mirror to try to verify the mechanic’s words. All he could see was his slightly fat, fairly white and very ordinary bottom, and he went to bed nursing a pang of regret that he had not really had a truly heroic Balkan war.

Antoine’s appreciation of Charles Ventadour had grown at each meeting since their first in 1920. He was particularly grateful for Charles’s substitution of his own appalling and pitiful memories by an epic of men’s valour, an adventure in which Justice advanced in triumph at the head of armies marching to drive out the oppressors and restore the happiness of the oppressed. Alas, there remained the memory of Les Éparges, from which a man could not free himself so easily, and often at night Antoine woke up covered in an icy sweat, the taste of earth in his mouth, his temples thumping as if a mortar had just exploded, face to face with that colossus with the black, mud-covered head who had erupted in front of him in the small hours one morning leading a shrieking horde behind him, and whom he had had the good luck to kill with a single pistol shot to the heart. Who could transform the memory of such panic-stricken terror and cowardly slaughter into a knights’ joust, in which French elegance would crush Teutonic brutality? No one, sadly, and Antoine, sedated every three or four months by Charles on his way through Aix, found himself exposed afresh to the obsessive images of his nightmare as soon as he returned to La Sauveté. But Provence offered remission, and it would have been excessively ungrateful of him to complain. A new life began there, and whenever the Bugatti, singing down the route des Maures, rolled into Grimaud to the buzz of cicadas, the resin smell of pines, and the perfume of thyme and lavender, whenever a first bend suddenly disclosed the glittering Mediterranean, the roofs of Cogolin and Ramatuelle, and the small port of Saint-Tropez cluttered with tartanes and smaller boats, Antoine’s heart swelled with an inexpressible happiness. Often he would pull up to gaze at the view and delay the pleasure to come, to relish for a moment longer that wonderful ‘before’, so full of the promises of Marie-Dévote, of grilled fish on an open fire, of olives kept for him in oil and vinegar, of dried figs in winter or melting in the mouth in September, of Var rosé and glasses of pastis distilled secretly by Théo, drunk in the evening in the open air, bare feet on the table, chewing langoustines. Those people knew how to live.

It was lunchtime when he parked in front of the hotel, whose handsome sign could be seen from a long way off: Chez Antoine. To the beach café of 1920 had been added a pretty building finished in ochre plaster, whose bedrooms overlooked the beach. Marie-Dévote and Théo lived on the ground floor and rented the first, to painters mostly. Maman still ran the kitchen, invisibly but noisily, fanning the flames with her curses. Antoine had not seen her more than four or five times in three years, one such occasion being the marriage of Marie-Dévote, at which she had appeared swathed in black and wearing a wide-brimmed hat from which floated a veil held in place by a pair of jade pins. Of the face he caught a glimpse of that day, he could only remember a red nose and striking black eyes like Marie-Dévote’s.

Yes, Marie-Dévote was married. I have not had time to say so until now, or perhaps it was so obvious I did not take the trouble to make it clear. In any case, no marriage was more natural than hers, for she had been sleeping with Théo since she was fifteen and he was handsome and lazy, which makes it much easier to keep a man at home, have him all to yourself, not share him with his work, and keep him fresh for bed at night. There is an interesting philosophy at work here, which I have no leisure to develop because time presses, but which deserves some reflection by the reader. It will have its defenders and its critics. Some will judge it impracticable, others will point out that it can only thrive in sunny places, where a man can live on very little: an olive, a chunk of bread, figs off the tree, and bunches of grapes hanging from the arbour. The admirable thing is that this philosophy was an instinctive reflex for the happy young couple, who did not go round in circles analysing the situation. They simply lived the way their feelings took them, and, young but already wise, congratulated themselves on such a perfect success.

Théo helped by possessing great understanding. He had no better friend than Antoine, and on the days Antoine was there he went fishing at dawn and returned, noisily, in the small hours. The little hotel adjoining the beach café, and a fine new boat that was soon to be equipped with an outboard motor, justified this sacrifice. And when their benefactor had gone Marie-Dévote came back to him more tender than ever, and as though her appetite had merely been whetted.

*

Théo appeared first at the sound of the Bugatti’s engine revving for the last time before Antoine switched off. Antoine pulled off his helmet and goggles. The sight of his face reddened by the air, with a white line across his forehead and pale circles around his eyes, made Théo buckle with laughter.

‘Saints! You should see your face, old friend. You look like a watermelon. Come on, get out if you can. If not I’ll fetch the corkscrew.’

Antoine, ordinarily rather thin-skinned, put up with Théo’s jokes. He felt he owed it to the man whose wife he was sleeping with so openly. At least that was how he saw it, although from his point of view Théo was convinced that it was he, the husband, who was cuckolding the lover. As a result they were both full of sympathy for one another, and incapable of hurting each other.

Marie-Dévote was on the beach, at the water’s edge, her skirt hitched up to her thighs, showing off her beautiful long brown legs as she washed the catch she had just gutted.

‘Really, Antoine, it looks like you smelt there was going to be bouillabaisse today.’

‘My sense of smell is acute.’

He kissed her on both cheeks. She smelt of fish, and as he closed his eyes for an instant she changed in his imagination into a sea creature, a siren come to warm herself in the sun. He would happily have laid her down on the beach and wriggled beneath her skirt there and then, but Théo was standing a few steps away, his hands on his hips and his brown face lit by a wide smile.

‘I’m hungry!’ Antoine said to conceal his agitation.

And he was hungry for Marie-Dévote. She was one of those women that one wants to bite and eat, whose skin tastes of herbs and conjures up the pleasures of food as much as those between the sheets. He kissed her again on the neck and she squealed, ‘Hey! I’m not a radish, just because I’ve got a sprinkling of salt on me. Leave a bit of me for Théo. He needs feeding too.’

*

Unluckily, the sea’s blue suddenly darkened, violent gusts whipped across its surface, and a warm drizzle stained the sand. Eating under the arbour was out of the question. Marie-Dévote laid the tables in the dining room, one for Antoine, Théo and herself, another for the two painters living on the first floor, who came down soon afterwards.

Antoine regarded them with suspicion. He distrusted artists, though he had never seen any at close quarters and all his knowledge of them was from books. These two looked reasonable, however. Properly dressed in corduroy and suntanned, they conversed normally without raising their voices, ate with knives and forks, and drank in moderation. One was well-built and had a thick neck, the other was slim and distinguished-looking. Marie-Dévote served them but so gracefully, unobtrusively and rapidly that she never seemed to leave her place at the table between her two men, both in a cheerful mood after drinking several glasses of pastis. Antoine watched her from the corner of his eye as she crossed the room, flitting from one table to the other. Then he saw one of the painters studying her, and his heart sank.

‘Come on, Papa, don’t be jealous!’ Théo, leaning over, muttered to him. ‘They’re not going to steal her from under your nose.’

Of all Théo’s jokes ‘Papa’ was the only one that irritated Antoine, especially in front of Marie-Dévote.

‘If you call me “Papa” again, I’ll break a bottle over your head.’

‘Keep calm, Antoine, I didn’t mean to upset you. You’re “Papa” because I think of you as part of the family.’

Turning to the two painters, who had stopped talking at the commotion, he added, ‘Antoine is a friend. Our great, great friend. He’s not from round here. He comes from the north where it’s cold and it rains a lot.’

‘I should like to point out,’ Antoine said, ‘that it is likewise raining here.’

The deluge was streaming noisily down the windows and obscuring the view of the beach. The sea was only thirty metres away, but it was impossible even to make it out.

‘We need the weather,’ Théo said. ‘Without it the plants, they all die, and it’s a desert. Even the cold. It kills the germs, otherwise you walk round knee-deep in them and pretty soon you die.’

His self-assurance had grown since his marriage, and Antoine suspected that he might even be reading the odd newspaper and picking up some basic facts there that he then passed off as his own knowledge. But Antoine’s problem was rather more pressing than the irritation he felt towards Théo. Inactive since his accident on the Tôtes road, reduced to the furtive kindnesses requested and received from Adèle Louverture in his room, where there was always the danger of being disturbed, and with his blood now warmed by pastis, rosé wine and Bénédictine, Antoine battled against the arousing effect of Marie-Dévote’s skipping around the room. From the corner of his eye he followed her bottom and legs as she moved rapidly between the kitchen and tables; he miserably failed to resist the temptation offered by the neckline of her blouse, and would have given anything to be the little gold crucifix that swung between her breasts on a black velvet ribbon and caressed each of them with every movement. Théo was not so accommodating as all that, and would certainly not have given up his siesta with his wife without a number of expansionary projects that had been evolving over recent months, all of them requiring Antoine’s patronage. Having left his friend in lengthy nail-biting anticipation, Théo suddenly announced that he was summoned to Saint-Raphaël and stepped outside to catch the bus that stopped in front of the hotel. The two painters, giving up hope of a break in the clouds, started a game of jacquet, and Antoine, successfully trapping Marie-Dévote in the hallway behind the door, at last placed her hand where she could measure the length of his admiration.

‘And who’ll do the dishes?’ she asked, in entirely token resistance.

‘Bugger the dishes.’

It is true that there are moments when the dishes are no longer of the slightest importance. Marie-Dévote did not need a great deal of persuading. And so they spent the afternoon together in bed, and I shall stop there, because this story already has many longueurs, and note merely that it was highly successful.

They slept for a time, and were woken by the sound of hooting as the bus returned from Saint-Raphaël. Marie-Dévote sprang out of bed and dressed in the twinkling of an eye to go and meet her Théo. Antoine’s mouth felt furry and his eyes swollen. He too got out of bed, walked down the beach, jumped into the sea, splashed around like a seal and came out breathless but rejuvenated. It had stopped raining, and one of the painters had set up his easel on the beach and was finishing a picture of Théo’s boat, beached on the sand. A soft orange-washed light spread from the horizon into a sky that was free of clouds. Antoine walked behind the painter and felt a shiver of delight. He knew nothing of modern art, but this painting, laden with primitive colours and an ample, sensuous reality conveyed in reds and blues, charmed him instantly.

‘Do you sell your work?’ he said awkwardly, not knowing how to go about such questions with an artist, without offending him.

‘From time to time,’ the painter said, cleaning a brush.

‘I mean: that picture.’

‘Who are you?’

‘Antoine du Courseau. But the picture will be for Marie-Dévote and Théo. They haven’t got anything for the walls of their dining room.’

‘Ah!’

The painter tidied his palette away and, folding up his easel, offered the canvas to Antoine.

‘Take it now. If you don’t I’ll change my mind. I’ll glaze it for you when it’s dry.’

‘But … I need to give you something for it.’

‘Of course … write to my dealer. I’ll give you his card. He’ll tell you how much. That’s his business.’

Antoine stayed standing alone on the beach, the canvas in his hand, like a stray object he had discovered on the sand. Dusk was falling. A cool onshore breeze began to blow and he shivered.

‘Saints! What’s up, Antoine? Are you dreaming?’ Théo shouted. ‘Come and have a pastis.’

He walked back to the terrace. The bottle was waiting next to the carafe of cold water. Théo poured pastis, then water. Antoine placed the painting on the table and drank standing up.

‘Do you like it?’

‘I suppose so. Hey … it really looks like it.’

‘To decorate your dining room.’

‘Nice. The boat looks as if it’s about ready to go.’

‘Are you fishing tonight?’

‘I’m thinking about it.’

It was part of the game. Antoine played with ill grace, and Théo brought it to an end by giving in, but only after enjoying Antoine’s discomfort. He left to go fishing with his lamp, and Antoine remained in the dining room with Marie-Dévote and the two painters, who acknowledged his shy nod with a smile. Marie-Dévote had rings around her eyes and the slightly too languorous and feline look of a woman who has spent the afternoon satisfying herself fully. Antoine still wanted her, but more calmly and deliberately this time, and as he sipped her soupe au pistou, served steaming in big blue china dishes, he felt to an extreme extent – to the point of oppression – the fear of loving and of experiencing an impossible passion for a woman who could never be his. It was a bewildering feeling, a feeling that, for all its desire, revealed the bitterness of a wasted life. He wished he had never met Marie-Dévote, and he cursed the appointment with fate that had driven him, on an August afternoon three years earlier, to this beach café where a young girl sat sunning her brown knees on the terrace. At the same time he was forced to admit that, in the absence of Marie-Dévote, these last three years would have been pitiful, without any grace, joy or happiness. Without any happiness at all. He looked up.

‘What’s the matter?’ Marie-Dévote said. ‘Your eyes are watering.’

‘The soup’s hot. I burnt myself.’

‘Oh good. I’m glad it’s nothing worse!’

She left to help her mother with the dishes and he turned to the painters, who were also finishing dinner, and raised his glass.

‘Why don’t you join us?’ the one who had sold him the picture said.

‘I’d be delighted.’

They questioned him diplomatically, and he answered without bending the truth. One of the two men knew Grangeville.

‘I was up that way last year. I rented a little place near the cemetery. Very soft light. Grey gravestones, white cliffs, the sea. One of those places you wouldn’t mind dying in. I came back with a dozen seascapes, but that’s not what the dealers want. The only thing they can sell is the sun. Isn’t that true, André?’

‘Yes. And we’ll give them as much as they can handle, blue skies, blue seas, red sails, green boats. I know it like the back of my hand by now, I could go and paint it all in a cellar in Paris with a bare bulb over my head. This is the future, the Midi; people are going to make fortunes here …’

They discussed their respective dealers with a scorn and aggressiveness that startled Antoine. He had been expecting revelations about art, some explanation of heaven knows what, and all he got instead was talk about money, names, exhibition dates and moaning about critics who only cared about official art, that great producer of war memorials. Antoine had never questioned whether these memorials were beautiful or ugly. In the course of his excursions he had seen them going up in every village, allegories in exaggerated drapery shielding a wounded soldier with a tender hand, proud bronze infantrymen watching over tearful women and children. They seemed unhealthy to him, full of dishonest symbolism, but the thought of judging their beauty or ugliness would never have occurred to him without the two artists’ sarcastic commentary. He felt ashamed of his ignorance, and left them to go to his room. Here, a little later, Marie-Dévote followed him.

‘Would you like it again?’

‘Of course, it’s all I’ve got. I don’t give a damn about all the rest.’

And it was true: about all the rest he didn’t give a damn, and there was no pain, no sorrow, but when he pressed Marie-Dévote against him or, daydreaming, stroked her pretty breasts and their brown tips, something else existed: his pleasure. He stayed at Saint-Tropez for three days, his limit, which he never exceeded, so that he could be sure of leaving with a trace of animal regret on his lips that provided him with the certainty that he existed. The route des Maures, then the high corniche road to Nice, took him down to Roquebrune, where he stopped. Léon Cece, recognising the note of the Bugatti’s engine, appeared at his door in linen trousers and torn white singlet. Far from fading, his facial scars had deepened, splitting the soft tissue of his cheek, twisting his mouth, and attacking one eye, its bloodshot white beginning to bulge out of its orbit. His restaurant was doing badly. In the egotism of peacetime, diners were not willing to put up with the sight of his smashed face, a reminder of a time everyone was doing their best to forget and an awful reproach to those who had got through it without too much hardship; a mute and unacceptable pang of conscience from which most fled like cowards.

‘All right, Antoine?’ Léon called. ‘It’s been an age since we saw you.’

‘Three months. I had an accident. My knee in plaster. This is my first long trip.’

‘Well, that’s good anyway. You’re not like the others.’

They dined together on the balcony, wreathed by clouds of moths that whirled around the hurricane lamp and singed their wings. Léon was a man of truth. Unlike Charles Ventadour, the war he kept going back to was a squalid conflict, but it was his conflict, his alone, revolving around that attack when his head had been blown apart. He needed to talk about it, to go over it ceaselessly as though it were still possible, six years later, to take that one sideways step that would have saved him when the German 77 burst. And so great was his desire for that step that he seemed, at odd moments, almost able to erase the tragedy and recover his face as it had been, and his morale and cheerfulness, only to fall back again, harder than before, into the depths of a despair so bitter it had the taste of death about it. More than anything, he could not forgive the involuntary aversion of those who saw him for the first time. A curse had fallen upon him, and his uncomplicated and still sound spirit could not overcome the vast injustice that separated him from the rest of the living.

‘You don’t know what goes on,’ he said to Antoine. ‘My daughter and her mother do their best not to look at me. I don’t make love any more. It would be unsightly, and everything around me is so beautiful. Roquebrune is the prettiest place on Earth. The people who come to the Côte are happy, they’re beautiful, I turn away so that I don’t make them sad. Sometimes I say to myself: Léon, you’re not a man, you’re not a man any more, you’re like a dog, you’re a pest, you’ve got to hide away.’

‘You’re a very unhappy man,’ Antoine said.

‘Maybe that’s it. You’re the only friend I have. We talk to each other. We drink grappa and the hours go by. Then you leave, and I wait for months for you to come by again. It’s not your fault. I know you have a family and friends and, judging by your car, plenty of loose change. Maybe you’re unhappy too. But you get around. I’m stuck here. That’s my life. It’s all I’ve got.’

Antoine stayed the night. Léon put up a camp bed for him in a bare room behind the kitchen. Mosquitoes descended on him and he stayed awake till first light, his head heavy with grappa fumes and his senses sharpened by the thought of Marie-Dévote lying in Théo’s arms.

Léon came in, bringing a cup of coffee.

‘It’ll wake you up for your visit to your daughter,’ he said.

‘Yes, it will.’

But Geneviève was no longer at the clinic and Antoine, a prisoner of his family’s habit of secrecy, did not dare admit it. Two years earlier, she had left Menton to spend the winter at Marrakesh. From there she had gone to Brazil, and recently they had received a postcard from her, sent from Japan. Who she was travelling with, who she was spending time with or, to be more accurate, was keeping her in such luxury – since she seemed to lead a sumptuous existence whatever latitude she found herself in – nobody knew. At La Sauveté nobody spoke of her. A fiction had taken root: Geneviève needed to get away from unhealthy climates. She would never return to Normandy. She needed air, sunshine, and the sea or snow-covered mountains outside her windows. Questioned, not without mischief, by her friends, Marie-Thérèse du Courseau invariably answered, ‘Our children are nothing like we were. Geneviève is in love with freedom. It’s the gift the war gave to her generation. I think we’re modern parents. In 1923 you don’t bring up children the way they were brought up fifty years ago.’

So Antoine pretended to spend a couple of hours at Menton, greeted Léon Cece with a blast on his horn on the way back, stopped to kiss Marie-Dévote, and slept at Aix after a second evening with Charles. On the road from Aix to La Sauveté he did his best to knock a few more minutes off his previous record. As he drove through the gates that evening in October 1923, he glimpsed Adèle Louverture, with Michel under her arm gesticulating and trying to kick her. He had just broken Jean’s tricycle by taking a hammer to it, and Antoinette was kissing Jean to try to make it better.