by Michel D
Oh, I didn’t do anything, apart from show her the album Michel gave me.’
He had, without being aware of it, touched a sensitive nerve. In return for his supposed admiration for Michel, Marie-Thérèse forgave Jean everything.
‘It’s a pity,’ he said, ‘that he’s more interested in singing than engraving.’
‘He’s so good at both, he’ll do both. Do you want to see his studio? Antoinette, will you take him? I must leave you, I have to go into Dieppe. You’ll stay for lunch, won’t you?’
‘No, I’ll have lunch with my father. But thank you.’
He was well aware that his father had lunch in Marie-Thérèse’s kitchen, and in the evening made do with what Uncle Cliquet cooked up on his cheap portable gas stove while he leafed through that year’s railways almanac.
They found Michel in his studio, with its glass walls that faced the soft north light. An unfinished canvas stood on the easel. Michel smiled in embarrassment.
‘You’ve discovered a secret of mine. I’ve started doing oils. Nobody has seen it yet. It’s The Pilgrims at Emmaus. What do you think of my head of Christ?’
‘Very accomplished.’
The face was fine, that of a young man whose deep, calm blue eyes gazed out at them.
‘It’s the butcher’s son from Grangeville,’ Antoinette said.
‘You can’t imagine how serene he is. He can keep still without moving for hours on end in the studio. When I tell him he can stop, he stays here and asks me questions: his mind is still a tabula rasa, a fantastic uncultivated territory. He asks me how destiny chose him to be the very image of Christ. I say the same thing to him every time: it was an intuition, a voice that told me to stop one day as I saw him leaving the boys’ lycée in Dieppe. It could only be him.’
Outside in the corridor Antoinette winked at Jean.
‘Do you know what’s going on?’
‘I think so.’
‘So does Maman. A big shock to begin with. Then she accepted it, and now she prays for him, repeating that the ways of the Lord are not for us to know. You see … religion everywhere.’
‘What about the abbé Le Couec?’
‘He sees absolutely zero. Michel takes communion two or three times a week. Even more elevated souls – and they do exist, forgive me, dear old Father,’ she said, comically pressing her hands together, ‘even more elevated souls would be taken in. Do you remember this bedroom?’
She opened the door into a small room that looked out over the garden.
‘I only came here once.’
‘We made love on the bare mattress.’
‘Yes we did.’
She took him into the sitting room, patted the place beside her on the sofa, and took his hand.
‘Is it really true that you haven’t slept with Chantal?’
‘Why are you asking me again? Chantal isn’t the sort of girl you go to bed with just like that.’
‘The way you can with me, for example.’
‘I never said that.’
He did not recognise her completely any more. She had used make-up to give herself back some of the bloom she had lost so quickly. She was no longer the delicious ripe fruit from years gone by, the Antoinette of the barn, the Antoinette of the night he had passed his baccalauréat. Then he remembered another night, the night of his departure, at Dieppe, and her feverish and weary face touched him again.
‘What have you come back for?’
‘An idea that will seem stupid and and pointless to you. I’d like to know whose son I am.’
She looked down.
‘I can’t help you. I’ve never found out. The abbé would tell you if it weren’t for the seal of the confessional. And it’s likely that Maman knows too.’
‘What about your father?’
Antoinette shrugged her shoulders.
‘He never asked himself the question. You know him well enough. Why are you asking all of a sudden?’
‘Someone said …’
He stopped; the words did not come easily. Would he ever be able to say it?
‘What? Tell me.’
‘It wasn’t by accident that unknown hands placed me at the gates of La Sauveté nineteen years ago.’
Antoinette squeezed his hand.
‘I’ve thought that too, but why?’
‘Because I may be the son of your father or your mother?’
‘Maman an adulteress? Be quiet, don’t make me laugh. You’ve never looked at her properly. Papa? It’s strange, I don’t think so.’
‘Nor me.’
‘But you’d be my half-brother! In that case we’ve been gaily committing incest, just like they do in all the farms around here, with brothers and sisters sleeping in the same bed.’
‘It wouldn’t bother me very much, either,’ he said.
Through the window he caught sight of Albert limping across the garden, a full flowerpot in each hand. Father and son still loved each other deeply, but their separation was almost complete. They could no longer play the same game they had played for so long. It would have been absurd. Albert never lied, never dissembled about anything. Jean felt an urge to be with him, to leave this pretend La Sauveté that possessed none of the charm of the old one.
‘Who’s living at La Sauveté now?’
‘The delightful Longuets.’
‘What about Gontran?’
‘He’s bought himself a Delahaye. Makes him irresistible. Apparently he wants to be a racing driver. All the girls are falling over themselves.’
‘And you?’
‘No, I’m finished with him since you know what. You know I can never have children?’
‘Does it make you sad?’
‘Yes.’
‘What a bastard.’
Jean felt that Antoinette was about to say something, but she was silent and stood up.
‘What are you going to do?’ she asked.
‘Wait for the abbé. He’s my only hope.’
‘And then?’
‘I haven’t any money. Find a job.’
‘Why don’t you go to Paris?’
‘I don’t have a sou.’
‘I can lend you some. Papa sends me the occasional cheque behind Maman’s back. I don’t spend anything. What for? I’m dead and buried here already.’
He kissed her.
‘It’s not because I’ve just discovered you’re a good person. I’ve always known it. But I need to take care of myself.’
‘Will you tell me what you were doing in London?’
‘Nothing exciting.’
She pouted.
‘Were you being kept by a rich woman?’
He laughed.
‘No. It’s more complicated and simpler than that.’
At the door she kissed him back.
‘Don’t forget my offer of help.’
‘You’re really generous.’
‘And stupid,’ she laughed, with tears in her eyes.
Crouching at the edge of the pond, Michel was again stretching out his hand full of birdseed. Pigeons swirled around him. One pecked a seed from his open palm and another followed suit. He smiled with contentment.
‘Did you see that?’ he said to Antoinette. ‘I’m going to Dieppe this afternoon to buy another pair.’
Jean walked towards his father.
‘Papa, I’d like us to have lunch together. Do you want to go to Chez Émile? But I haven’t got a sou. It’ll be on you.’
‘If you like, my boy, if you like.’
They said nothing to each other about peace. Albert no longer believed in it. He had carried his pacifism like a cross since the socialist Left had moved to warmongering and the Right to attempting to restrain its adventurism. Jean worried him too, reawakening his old anxiety that a man did not leave his class without shedding a few drops of blood along the way. He looked at him with a gruff tenderness that would not be fooled but was disarmed none the less by Jean’s evasive answers to his questions. When the boy announced that he
might go to Paris to look for work, Albert raised thick unruly eyebrows. Paris? Why Paris? There was no life better than country life, especially when it was next to the sea. There was nowhere and nothing more healthy. Jean made no attempt to reason with him, for fear of deepening their estrangement. Nor did he dare raise the question of his birth again, and by the time he returned to Malemort that afternoon he knew the answer would not be revealed so quickly. The abbé remained his only hope.
Chantal was at Dieppe with her father. The marquise offered him tea. He declined, saying he had letters to write that claimed his urgent attention. His notebook acquired a new page of reflections.
j) If I don’t find out whose son I am one day, I’ll end up spending my life as an invalid. Or rather – and only to my own eyes – a sort of monster of nature, a twentieth century offspring of the Virgin and the Holy Spirit. Albert is marvellous as Joseph, but who wants Joseph for a father?
k) What happened last night with Chantal is the first poisoned chalice of my life. I loved her face, loved to look at her. Now that image has been torn up and replaced by a body that is a complete lie. I need all my strength to struggle against the obsession that gnaws at me: who came to her before I did? I’ll be the last to know, inevitably. Antoinette knows. She’s dying to tell me, but she’s scared of my reaction. There’s only one way out: to leave. Two possibilities: London or Paris. In London I’ll manage somehow. In Paris it will be harder. That means I’ll be obliged to borrow the money that Antoinette offered me.
He closed the notebook and slipped it into his suitcase. Someone was knocking at the door. Chantal came in dressed in a soft wool skirt and polo-neck sweater. Leaning against the door panel, she refused to come any further.
‘You’ve just hidden something,’ she said.
‘Yes. A notebook where I write down some very personal thoughts.’
‘Do you write about me in it?’
‘Yes. You see how I answer your questions very openly. Answer mine—’
She put out her arm, her hand up.
‘No, don’t ask it. What are we going to do?’
‘Nothing. I intend to go either to Paris or to London.’
‘Take me with you.’
‘You’re mad!’
‘Perhaps.’
She slammed the door as she left. A tractor rumbled beneath the window. Jean saw the marquis at the wheel, wearing a cap and corduroy trousers, his shirt open on his athletic torso. Madame de Malemort was making her way to the kennel. It was time for her to exercise the Brittany spaniel and Braque d’Auvergne that her husband hunted with. Jean took out his notebook again.
l) The question in the last paragraph was badly put: I stand to suffer a lot less if the person who came to Chantal before me is someone I don’t know. If, on the other hand, it’s someone from Grangeville, I won’t be able to bear it. It would send me mad. The wisest thing would be never to ask Chantal directly, but, strange as it may seem after my behaviour of recent months, I love her and only her, and last night has got me even more involved. I can’t see any way out except knowing.
Chantal again spent part of the night with him. They scarcely spoke to each other. At breakfast the marquis suggested to Jean that he might like to accompany him to the market at Dieppe. Chantal stayed behind to help her mother. The two men left in the 301, hauling a small trailer into which the marquis had loaded a couple of calves. While the marquis was in conversation with a livestock dealer, Jean took the opportunity to slip away to the last address he had for Joseph Outen. He found him in his attic, where two fanlights provided all the room’s illumination. Joseph greeted him joyfully.
‘You’re not much of a pen pal, are you? Nor me, I must admit, though I have an excuse: I’m working like a slave …’
‘When’s your exhibition?’
‘My exhibition?’
‘Of drawings.’
Joseph roared with laughter: he had given up all that nonsense months ago. He had encountered an impregnable wall of rejection. Every gallery, without exception. Jean had no idea how resistant dealers were towards new ideas, and artists themselves guarded the territory like wolves. You had to be utterly naïve to expect to make a breakthrough in times like these. Conditions were turning out to be the worst they had ever been: the big money was investing in Impressionists, the safe money in tinned food, for when war broke out. Joseph had destroyed his whole winter’s work with a light heart.
‘So what are you doing?’
‘My dear chap, you know the words of Monsieur Homais: “One must move with the times.” The idiocy of Flaubert’s character is summed up in those words. We shouldn’t be trailing behind the times or moving with them. We need to anticipate them. For what lies ahead of us? Nothing could be clearer. Hitler will soon annex the Sudetenland. France and Great Britain will declare war on him. Germany, whose military strength is nothing but a bluff, will be overrun by us within three weeks. Nothing very extraordinary there, except that we shall find ourselves face to face with the Soviet Union in a Europe dominated by Paris and London. Stalin will attack us. There will be a short and nasty war, and three months later Tartars and Kalmucks will be parading through Paris. That is the moment Chiang Kai-shek will choose to attack Siberia for supplying the Communist rebels. Eight hundred million Chinese will rush at the Soviet paradise. Why should they stop politely at the West’s borders? They’ll keep going until they reach Paris, Madrid, Lisbon and Rome. The future is Chinese, because the USA won’t intervene. The two Americas will shut themselves up inside their Monroe doctrine. Can you imagine what our life will be like at that moment? Two hundred and fifty million Europeans wrestling with a Chinese army of occupation? Who will translate when General Chi Ho-li wants to order his café au lait each morning? There aren’t twenty Frenchmen who speak and write Chinese. I intend to be the twentieth. For two months I have been learning Chinese.’
‘In Dieppe?’
‘Yes. Obviously I should be in Paris at the School of Oriental Languages, but our education system is completely fossilised. I’d be taught literary Chinese. Can you see me, armed with my literary Chinese, translating a peace treaty for Chiang Kai-shek or discussing his generals’ requisition requirements line by line? They’d laugh in my face. But I’ve found an extraordinary chap here, Li Pou, who used to be a cook on a cargo ship, well read, a veteran of the civil war. He has taken me in hand. I work with him for two hours every day. Progress is slow for brains like ours, which have been trained by logic and generalisations. But I give you less than a year, no more than two, before you come and say to me, “Joseph, you were right.” So why don’t you make a start too? Just a second …’
He drew back from Jean, startling him.
‘What’s the matter?’
‘You’re looking very swish. Have you made your fortune?’
‘I only own what I’m wearing.’
‘Good. You had me worried for a moment. Think hard about what I said, and come and see me this week. I’ll introduce you to Li Pou. You’re made to get on with one another.’
Jean thanked him. He would think about it. In the meantime he needed to find Monsieur de Malemort, who, having sold his two calves, had probably gone to ground in one of the cafés around the market and been doing himself no good. That was the gist of the mission with which the marquise had discreetly entrusted him that morning. Joseph smiled condescendingly: the aristos were jumping the gun a little. They would be better off drowning their sorrows when the Chinese came. He personally was very happy: he knew he was backing the right horse.
Jean left him sadly. He no longer saw Joseph the way he once had, as a big older brother whose life was a lesson in energy and adventure, but increasingly as a loser who laid every failure at the door of a general hostility to his talents. Jean felt that the world he had once lived in had not matured in the way he had. What had happened to turn the marquis into little more than a narrow-minded farmer, Chantal perhaps into a tart, to make Antoinette a has-been, Michel an ambiguous figure, and Alb
ert – so decent and honest – an old quibbler? What had changed: them, or his own outlook on life? How he would love to have been left with his illusions intact. It was impossibly sad. He found Monsieur de Malemort at a café and managed to get him home, not without difficulty. Having put on an old pair of trousers and a wool shirt, he was about to go out into the fields with him on his tractor when the rain started, drowning the château and and its farm. Jean recognised the smell of Normandy: green and melancholy. The marquis pulled off his boots with an effort, changed into a sports jacket and grey trousers, and fell asleep in an armchair reading a farming paper. Chantal sat in silence next to her mother, who was knitting. From time to time Madame de Malemort glanced at the streaming window. Night was falling, buffeted by gusts of wind.
When Chantal came to Jean’s bedroom after dinner, she was no longer the same defeated young woman.
‘Do you understand now?’ she said aggressively.
‘Yes, I think I do.’
They appreciated each other better after this exchange, and their enjoyment was great. Too great for Jean to leave her behind.
‘Living here is like dying,’ she said. ‘I don’t want to die. When are we going to run away?’
‘As soon as I’ve seen the abbé.’
‘The abbé won’t tell you anything.’
‘I’m afraid you’re right, but he’s my last chance.’
Chantal’s expression hardened.
‘I won’t wait another day.’
‘Who will you go with if I don’t take you tomorrow?’
‘What’ll it matter to you?’
‘It will be unbearable.’
She threw herself into his arms. He undressed her slowly and let her misery overflow as he held her until dawn. The longest night of his life was ending in a defeat that he needed to turn into a victory, as Julien Sorel had done.
Chantal woke up. ‘So?’
‘We’re catching the train to Paris this afternoon.’
Antoinette lent him the money, knowing what he intended it for. Timidly Albert reminded his son that war was looming and that no boy of twenty, sound in heart and mind, should take part in the madness to come.
