by Michel D
‘Hello. Are you still cross with me?’
He said ‘yes’ at the exact moment when he realised that he no longer was, that Antoinette, there in front of him, in all the freshness of her seventeen years, a little plump but so sleek too, and as fragrant as a young peach, still had an inexpressible power that he was far too inexperienced to detach himself from in a single encounter. It was to her that he owed the discovery of wonderful sensations. But how could she give them to someone else, to others? Tears filled Jean’s eyes, and he clenched his fists to keep his emotions in check. Seeing him, Antoinette guessed the reason for his furious silence and tried hard not to show her delight too quickly.
‘Will you come for a walk with me?’ she said.
‘We’re not allowed to see each other.’
‘I know a barn—’
‘Who else have you been there with?’
‘Nobody.’
‘Liar!’
Antoinette’s face hardened, and Jean was overcome by panic. What if he lost her? He wouldn’t be able to bear it, any more than he could bear being with her and her huge dishonesty.
‘I didn’t lie to you,’ she said. ‘I don’t lie to you.’
‘But you said it was me that you did your horrible things with at the bottom of the cliff.’
‘I didn’t say that.’
‘Who said it then?’
‘Do you really want to know?’
‘Yes.’
‘You won’t try to get your own back?’
‘Tell me … you can say anything you like, can’t you?’
‘Michel.’
‘Oh the … I hate him! One day I’ll kill him.’
Antoinette smiled. Jean’s noble vow enchanted her.
‘Just this once, you would be wrong. He really thought it was you. Ever since he started trying to catch us out. He confused you with Gontran.’
‘Have you been doing it with him for a long time?’
‘It was the first time.’
He did not believe her but felt too upset to be angry and make her realise how shameless she was. Besides, he could no longer think about anything except slipping his hand inside Antoinette’s sweater, stroking her sweet girlish breasts, feeling their points stiffen under his hand. A mist passed across his vision, and he bowed his head.
‘Come quick,’ she said. ‘I promised to be home by six.’
Jean cut across the fields while she cycled on. They met up again on a path next to a hedge that ran around an abandoned house. The barn was invisible from outside the hedge. Antoinette hid her bicycle and they climbed over the wooden barrier. Inside they caressed each other in the straw, but Jean sensed that he could not go as far as Gontran. He cursed his inexperience. Antoinette promised that it would be for another time.
‘You’re only thirteen!’ she said. ‘It could be bad for you, and you could make me have a baby.’
Defeated, he accepted his pleasure from Antoinette’s hand as his reward, and afterwards they spent a good fifteen minutes laughing as they pulled off all the stalks of straw that had stuck to their hair and sweaters. Antoinette cycled cheerfully home, reassured and joyful. Jean dashed to the grocer’s and bought the butter.
‘You’ve been away a long time, my boy!’ Jeanne said, busy ironing in the kitchen.
‘I met Antoinette!’ he said impulsively.
‘Oh!’
Jeanne held the iron close to her cheek and put it back on the range.
‘It would be better for everybody if you kept your meetings to yourself.’
‘You know, Maman … it wasn’t me with her, down at the cliffs.’
‘I believe you … but why didn’t you stand up for yourself?’
‘Because of her!’
Jean’s heart was beating madly. The warmth in his mother’s face filled him with remorse. He knew that he was just playing with words, and that what he had been doing an hour ago was the same, apart from one detail, as what Gontran had done with Antoinette. At least I’m not the idiot who gets caught in the act, he thought.
‘Your father’s been very upset. He says he no longer dares to look Monsieur Antoine’s family in the face. We thought about giving up our place here, but then we’d be penniless: when you’re fifty-five and you’ve got one leg less than everyone else, there’s no work to be had.’
Jean was appalled that he had not, for a single moment, considered the extent of what had happened.
‘I’ll talk to him,’ he said.
‘Try, my child … but there’s none so deaf as those who don’t want to hear.’
‘And I’ll talk to Monsieur du Courseau.’
‘Madame would be better.’
‘No, not her.’
Jeanne smiled indulgently.
‘You owe her a lot.’
‘To you, to Papa, I owe a lot. Not to her.’
‘One day you’ll understand.’
Jeanne kept so much goodness hidden inside her that it was enough to tell her there was no such thing as evil for her to believe it and for her pious, honest soul to rejoice that she lived in an unblemished world. Albert might have been the same, if the horrors of war and the sacrifice of his leg had not produced an authoritarian outlook that mistook itself for intelligence. He had ideas: firm, clear-cut, and to a certain extent immovable. Jean had little hope of convincing him by a confrontation. On the other hand, something told him that Antoine du Courseau might show himself to be understanding. He had to be brave enough to talk to him, but Antoine was a man who discouraged conversations that he had not initiated. At the first sign of difficulty he climbed into his Bugatti and vanished for several days, returning when those who had stayed behind had dealt with the problem for him. Jean would have continued to hesitate if he had not been so angry about being deprived of his bike for the rest of the summer. Not daring to go to the house, he resorted to a letter, which he rewrote ten times over before he was sure that it was short enough for Antoine to deign to read it and not throw it straight into the wastepaper basket.
Monsieur,
May I permit myself, in the name of our very old pact, agreed when I was a small boy, to ask you for an interview. I will explain to you that I am not guilty and why I have allowed people to think that I am. I will say it to you because you are the only person whose opinion matters to me. Your
Jean Arnaud
He posted the letter at Grangeville, and the next morning the Bugatti, nosing out of the park, took the drive that led past the lodge. Jean had been looking out for it, and ran down and jumped in beside the driver. Antoine put his foot down, and they sped to the Dieppe road; reaching the docks, they halted at a café where hot shrimps, washed down with an honest sparkling cider, were served around the clock.
‘Thank you, Monsieur!’ said Jean, after Antoine urged him to start.
‘I suspected you weren’t guilty. But to tell you the truth, and I’ll say it only to you, I wouldn’t care if you were. Antoinette is seventeen … Some girls are like that. She has my temperament …’
Jean did not know exactly what he meant by temperament, but guessed it had something to do with a predisposition to forbidden pleasures, and he smiled so understandingly that Antoine smiled back, then said, ‘What do you want to do when you grow up?’
‘Uncle Duclou wants me to take the merchant navy examinations, but I’m not very good at maths … and Uncle Cliquet is pushing me to work on the railways—’
‘And you think it’s boring!’
‘Really boring.’
‘And you don’t have any idea of your own?’
‘No. All I know is that I’m not going to be a gardener, and I am going to travel.’
‘Ah!’ Antoine said casually, buttering a slice of brown bread.
Jean, on the brink of other confidences, stopped short at Antoine’s rapid loss of interest.
‘I suppose,’ Monsieur du Courseau went on, ‘that you took the blame to spare my daughter from getting into more trouble.’
‘I like her a
lot. Sometimes I even think she’s my sister.’
‘What about Michel?’
Jean looked down and did not dare to answer.
‘I see,’ Antoine said. ‘You know, I feel exactly the same about him. What a strange idea to have gone and told everyone what he saw. He turned the house upside down. You and I are obliged to hide to talk to each other, and my wife is not about to forgive you in a hurry.’
‘I’m even more cross that my father won’t forgive me. He’s so upright and so good. I feel ashamed.’
‘I’ll do my best to fix that. Man to man, you can say what you want.’
‘You won’t punish Antoinette?’
‘Punish Antoinette? I’ve never done such a thing. And in any case, my little Jean, I’m not blameless myself. I have another life … Far away …’
He broke off to watch an English couple who had walked into the café, a tall, slim blonde woman and a man in a tweed jacket and grey trousers. All his attention was taken up by the young woman. She sat down and attempted to decipher the menu that she had been given by a good-humoured waiter. Her husband took the menu from her and ordered mussels and white wine without consulting her.
‘They’re aliens!’ Antoine said.
‘Yes, they’re English.’
‘No, no, I mean they weren’t born on the same planet as us. Like the Chinese, the American Indians, the Arabs or the Africans. Our planet is here, Normandy. They’ll leave it behind on the midday packet, and tonight at six o’clock they’ll be at Newhaven, where they’ll drink tea and eat ham squashed between two pieces of rubbery bread with the crusts cut off.’
‘I’d still really like to go to England.’
‘There’s an idea! Would you like to go and explore? Geneviève is living in London at the moment. I can write and tell her you’re coming.’
‘Papa will never let me go!’
‘Leave that to me.’
Antoine drank the last of his glass of cider and called the waiter to ask for the bill. When he had paid, he walked out, climbed into the car and drove away, forgetting Jean, who had gone back to fetch his cap, which he had left hanging on a peg inside. Without a centime to his name, he could not even catch a bus, and so he walked back to Grangeville that warm August day, seething every time a cyclist passed him. He was arriving at La Sauveté when he met the abbé Le Couec, huge and red-faced, striding along.
‘Jean! Heaven has sent you to me!’
‘Father, you were looking for me?’
‘Yes, I need you.’
The priest’s iron hand clamped the boy’s biceps, and for a second he thought he had been taken prisoner.
‘My parents will be thinking that I’ve run away …’
‘That is indeed what’s happening! Let us go to the rectory. I need to talk to you and to introduce you to a hero.’
‘They’ll punish me.’
‘I’ll square that, don’t worry.’
‘I’ve already lost my bike for the whole summer.’
‘You’ll get your bicycle back. Come along … time presses.’
We shall call the man hidden at the rectory Yann, for the sake of convenience. Jean saw a tall Celt, with yellow, wavy hair, eyes of a clear blue and hollow cheeks, who shook his hand and immediately addressed him as a man.
‘Jean Arnaud, the abbé has told me about you. Just by looking at you, I know that I can count on your discretion and your loyalty.’
‘Yes, Monsieur.’
‘The police are looking for me. Don’t ask me why, but a false move, a word in the wrong place, will put me in prison for many years. We have to be certain of your discretion and your complicity.’
‘Yes, Monsieur.’
The abbé took out of his cupboard a bottle with the sort of label children use on their school exercise books: ‘Monsieur Le Couec’s calvados’. He filled two glasses, and was about to fill a third when Jean stopped him.
‘Father, I mustn’t … being fit … you know … I’m trying to stay fit even though I don’t have my bike.’
‘You’ll have your bicycle back tonight, a priest’s word on it.’
‘Papa won’t give in that easily.’
‘I know how to persuade him. But before dinner you need to go to Tôtes and meet someone at a café.’
‘In that case, it’s Maman who won’t let me go so easily. She doesn’t like me going out on my bike at night.’
‘I’ll take care of it.’
‘The man you’ll meet at the café – it’s Les Amis de Tôtes,’ Yann said, ‘will be wearing a white carnation. He’ll be drinking cider, and you’ll go up to him to shake hands and say, “Good evening, Monsieur Carnac,” and he’ll reply – pay attention, it’s important – “All right, son?” After you’ve exchanged a few words, you’re to leave together and bring him here. He will have a car, a motorbike or a bicycle. He’s short, clean shaven, and his hair’s going grey. You won’t know his real name, any more than you know mine.’
The abbé emptied his glass of calvados. Red blotches appeared at his neck and throat.
‘Now I’m going to see your father,’ he said.
Albert, who had just had to deal with a lecture from Antoine du Courseau about the absolute necessity of returning Jean’s bicycle to him, felt like the victim of a plot when the priest then came to him demanding the same thing. It irritated him to be, as he saw it, pushed around, and Jean was briefly in real danger of having his bicycle confiscated until he was twenty-one. Monsieur Le Couec guessed what had happened, and quickly changed his insistent tone to one of gentle flattery, with the result that Jean found himself reunited with his cherished bicycle. He immediately set about oiling its chain and hubs and pumping up its tyres.
‘I’ll take him with me,’ the priest said. ‘We have things to talk about. He can sleep at the rectory tonight. I’ll send him back to you for his breakfast, because I have nothing to give him.’
‘Behave yourself!’ Jeanne implored, no longer knowing whether her child was a monster or a man already worthy of a priest’s company.
On the road to the rectory, the priest offered Jean a monologue all to himself.
‘God is all goodness. He will forgive me, after my penitence, for having lied to your parents. Lives are at stake. One day all of this will be much clearer to you than it is today. This evening I only ask you to trust me, as your spiritual guide and your friend … In fact, as I am your confessor, how is it possible that I don’t know why you have been so severely punished by your father?’
Jean began to think his legs would fail him. The confessional lent itself to the lie of omission, but here on the road, face to face with the priest, who had stopped and was staring at him in his rough and tender way, it was infinitely harder to wriggle out of the truth. He made a vague gesture to signify everything and nothing, intending to play down the matter.
‘Oh, it was nothing, just some stories about girls!’
‘Is that all it was?’ the abbé said. ‘Hardly enough to hang a Catholic, I’d have said. If you knew what I heard at confession. But you’re a bit on the young side, all the same … It’s true that you look a good deal older that thirteen … Girls could easily think you were older. Anyway, you’re not having your head turned, are you?’
‘No, Father.’
‘That’s the essential thing. We’ll talk about it again. At this moment, what needs our attention is Monsieur Carnac. I knew him at the seminary, but he gave up … didn’t have the vocation … Some are like that … I’m not talking about myself. When I look at my life, I don’t think I could have been anything but a priest. Well, I am a priest and there’s never been a day when I haven’t been happy to be one, when I haven’t thanked God for having taken me into his service, for having given me the health that my ministry demands, and the strength – or innocence if you prefer – not to have been undermined by any doubt.’
They arrived outside the rectory. Monsieur Le Couec took a large key from his pocket and opened the glazed door. Yann was sittin
g next to the stove, positioned so that he could not be seen from either the window or the door. He put down a book and Jean read its title: it was an anthology of poets. How could a man who was being hunted by all the police in France be interested in poetry? Yann intercepted his look.
‘Do you sometimes read poems when you’re alone?’
‘No, Monsieur. Only in class, when the teacher recites them to us.’
