Shafts of sunlight shone through the branches of a linden tree and the small windowpanes, shedding flickering patches of light on to the objects in the room.
‘I never imagined that one day the famous Inspector Maigret would sit in that armchair.’
‘By the way, didn’t you say that you’d kept newspaper articles about me?’
‘That’s right. I often used to cut them out, the way I used to cut out the serial stories from my father’s newspaper.’
‘Do you have them here?’
‘I think I know where they are.’
He had sensed a hesitation in her voice. She went over with a forced naturalness to an antique writing desk and rummaged through the drawers in vain, then went to a carved chest.
‘I think I put them in my bedroom.’
She moved to go upstairs.
‘Don’t put yourself to any trouble.’
‘It’s no trouble! I insist on finding them. I can guess what you’re thinking. You imagine that I said that to you in Paris to flatter you and persuade you to come. It’s true that I lie sometimes, like all women, but I promise you I’m speaking the truth.’
He heard her pottering around upstairs and, when she came back down again, she put on a rather exaggerated show of disappointment.
‘Between you and me, Rose wasn’t very tidy; she was even what I call muddle-headed. Tomorrow I’ll go and search the attic. In any case, I’ll lay my hands on those articles before you leave Étretat. Now I expect you have lots of questions you want to ask me, so I’ll go and sit quietly in my granny chair. To your good health, Monsieur Maigret.’
‘To your good health, madame.’
‘You don’t think I’m too silly?’
He politely shook his head.
‘You’re not angry with me for having dragged you away from your Quai des Orfèvres? It’s funny that my stepson had the same idea as me, isn’t it? Being a politician, which he’s so proud of, he went about things differently and spoke directly to the minister. Tell me honestly, is it because of him or me that you’re here?’
‘Because of you, most definitely.’
‘Do you think I should be worried? It’s funny! I simply can’t take this threat seriously. People say that old women are fearful; I wonder why, when so many old women like me live alone in remote places. Rose slept here, but she was the one who was scared and came and woke me up at night when she thought she heard a noise. When there was a storm, she’d take refuge in my room and stay till morning sitting in my wing chair in her nightdress, mumbling prayers and quaking.
‘If I’ve never been afraid, it’s perhaps because I have no idea who could bear me a grudge. I’m not even wealthy any more. Everyone around here knows that I live on a modest annuity that survived the calamity. This house is also an annuity and no one will inherit it. I don’t think I’ve ever done anyone harm …’
‘All the same, Rose is dead.’
‘That’s true. This might make me sound stupid or selfish, but as time goes by, and now that she’s buried, I find it hard to believe. In a while, no doubt, you’ll go round the house. You see the dining room, next door. This other door opens into the guest room, where my daughter slept. Apart from the kitchen, the laundry and the tool shed, that’s all there is downstairs, and upstairs is even smaller because there’s nothing above the kitchen and the laundry.’
‘Does your daughter often come to visit you?’
She gave a resigned little pout.
‘Once a year, on my birthday. The rest of the time, I neither see her nor hear any news of her. She rarely writes either.’
‘She’s married to a dentist, I believe?’
‘I expect you’re going to need to know the entire family history, and that’s only natural. Do you like honesty, Monsieur Maigret, or would you rather I answered you like a well-brought-up lady?’
‘Do you need to ask?’
‘You haven’t met Arlette yet?’
‘Not yet.’
She went over to a drawer and took out some envelopes containing photographs, each envelope reserved for a specific category of portraits.
‘Look! This is her at eighteen. People say she resembles me and, as far as her features go, I have to acknowledge it’s true.’
The likeness was striking. As slim as her mother, the girl had the same delicate features and in particular the same big, pale blue eyes.
‘She looks as if butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth, doesn’t she? Poor Julien was taken in by her and married her despite my warnings. He’s a good boy, hardworking; he started out with nothing and struggled to finish his studies. He works ten hours a day and more in his cheap practice in Rue Saint-Antoine.’
‘Do you think they are unhappy?’
‘He may be happy after all. There are people who make their own happiness. Every Sunday he sets up his easel somewhere by the Seine and he paints. They have a canoe near Corbeil.’
‘Does your daughter love her husband?’
‘Look at the photos of her and answer the question yourself. Maybe she’s capable of loving someone, but I have certainly never noticed it. When I used to work at the Seuret sisters’ patisserie – you must have been told about that – she would sometimes say to me: “Do you think it’s nice for me to have a mother who sells cakes to my friends!”
‘She was seven when she said that. The two of us were living in a little room above a watchmaker’s shop that’s still there today.
‘When I remarried, her life changed.’
‘Would you mind telling me about your first husband?
‘I expect others will talk to me about him, and I’d rather hear it from you.’
She refilled his glass, not at all taken aback by the question.
‘I may as well begin with my parents, in that case. I was born Fouque, a name you’ll still find in these parts. My father was a fisherman, here in Étretat. My mother worked as a domestic help in houses like this one, only during the summer, because in those days no one stayed during the winter. I had three brothers and one sister, who all died. One of my brothers was killed during the First World War and another died from his injuries in a boating accident. My sister got married and died in childbirth. As for my third brother, Lucien, who worked in Paris as a hairdresser’s assistant, he went off the rails and was stabbed to death in a café near Bastille.
‘I’m not ashamed of it. I have never denied my roots. If I’d been ashamed, I wouldn’t have come to end my days here, where everyone knows my past.’
‘Did you work while your parents were alive?’
‘I was a nursery maid at fourteen, then a chambermaid at the Hôtel de la Plage. My mother died at that time, of breast cancer. My father lived to a fairly ripe old age, but he drank so much towards the end that it was as though he was no longer alive. I met a young man from Rouen who was a post-office clerk, Henri Poujolle, and I married him. He was kind, very gentle, well brought up, and I didn’t realize at the time what the bright pink spots on his cheeks meant. For four years I played the little lady in a two-bedroom apartment, then the mother. I went to meet him from work pushing Baby’s pram. On Sundays we bought a cake at the Seuret sisters’ shop.
‘Once a year we went to Rouen to visit my parents-in-law, who had a little grocery in the upper town.
‘Then Henri began coughing, and he died within a few months, leaving me alone with Arlette.
‘I moved home, making do with just one room. I went to see the Seuret sisters and they took me on as an assistant.
‘People say I was fresh and pretty, and that I brought in the customers.
‘One day, in the shop, I made the acquaintance of Ferdinand Besson.’
‘How old were you?’
‘When we were married, a few months later, I was thirty.’
‘What about him?’
‘Around fifty-five. He’d been a widower for several years, and had two boys of sixteen and eighteen, and that’s what was the strangest thing for me, because I always had t
he feeling that they were about to fall in love.’
‘And they didn’t?’
‘Théo, maybe, at first. Then he took a sudden dislike to me, but I never bore him a grudge. You know Besson’s story?’
‘I know he was the owner of Juva beauty products.’
‘So you probably think he was someone extraordinary? But the truth is very different. He was a small-time pharmacist in Le Havre, a very ordinary local pharmacist with a narrow, dingy shop that had a green jar and a yellow jar in the window. He himself, at forty, as you’ll see from his photo, looked more like a gas engineer, and his wife looked like a cleaning woman.
‘In those days there weren’t as many specialist products as there are today and he had to make up all sorts of preparations for his customers. That was how he came to mix a cream for a girl who had always had a spotty face. The cream worked wonders for her. The whole neighbourhood heard about it, and then the whole town.
‘One of Besson’s brothers-in-law advised him to market the product under a fancy name and between them they came up with “Juva”. It was the brother-in-law who provided the initial funding.
‘Almost overnight he made a fortune. He had to build laboratories, first of all in Le Havre, then in Pantin, outside Paris. The name “Juva” was in all the papers, then it appeared on the walls in giant letters.
‘You can’t imagine how much those products make, once they’re on the market.
‘Besson’s first wife barely benefited, because she died shortly afterwards.
‘He began to change his lifestyle. By the time I met him he was already a very wealthy man, but he wasn’t used to having money and he wasn’t sure what to do with it.
‘I think that’s why he married me.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘That he needed a pretty wife to dress and show off. Parisian women frightened him and he was intimidated by the bourgeois ladies of Le Havre. He felt more at ease with a girl he’d met serving in a patisserie. I don’t think he even minded my being a widow, or that I too had a child.
‘I don’t know if you understand what I’m saying?’
He did, but what surprised him was that she had grasped it so well and that she had accepted so amiably.
‘Immediately after our wedding he bought a town-house in Avenue d’Iéna and, a few years later, the Château d’Anzi, in Sologne. He showered me with jewellery, sent me to dressmakers, took me to the theatre and to the races. He even had a yacht built, which he never sailed because he suffered from seasickness.’
‘Do you think he was happy?’
‘I don’t know. In his office, Rue Tronchet, he probably was, because he was surrounded by subordinates. I think in fact that he always felt that people were laughing at him. And yet he was a good man, as clever as most big businessmen. Perhaps he had begun to have a lot of money too late.
‘He got it into his head to become a captain of industry and, alongside Juva cream, which was a goldmine, he decided to create other products: a toothpaste, a soap, I don’t know what else, and spent millions on advertising them. He built factories to make not only the products themselves but also the packaging. And Théo, who came into the business, was perhaps even more ambitious than he was.
‘It lasted twenty-five years, Monsieur Maigret. Now I can barely remember it, the time passed so quickly. We were always in a hurry. We went from our house in Paris to our chateau, and from there to Cannes or Nice, and then we hared back to Paris, with two motor cars, one for the luggage, the butler, the maids and the cook.
‘Then he decided to go travelling every year, and we went to London and Scotland, Turkey, Egypt, always in a rush because he needed to get back and attend to his business, always with trunks full of dresses and my jewellery, which we had to put in a bank safe deposit box in every city we visited.
‘Arlette got married. I’ve never known why. Or rather I’ve never known why she suddenly married that boy whom we hadn’t even met, when she could have taken her pick from among the rich young men who were frequent visitors to our house.’
‘Did your husband have a soft spot for your daughter?’
‘You’re wondering whether it wasn’t a bit more than a soft spot, aren’t you? I wondered about that too. It seems natural that a man of a certain age, living with a young girl who is not his daughter, should fall in love with her. I kept an eye on the pair of them. It’s true that he spoiled her with gifts and gave in to her every wish. I never came across anything else. No! And I have no idea why Arlette got married, at twenty, to the first comer. I understand many people, but I’ve never understood my own daughter.’
‘Do you get on well with your stepsons?’
‘Théo, the eldest, soon gave me the cold shoulder, but Charles always treated me as if I were his mother. Théo never married. In other words, for a number of years he enjoyed the life that his father wasn’t able to live, not having been to the manner born. Why are you looking at me like that?’
Because of the contrast again. She spoke lightly, with a faint smile, with the same candid expression in her light-coloured eyes, and he was amazed at the words that came out of her mouth.
‘I’ve had the time to think, you know, during the five years I’ve lived alone here! So Théo used to go to the races, was a regular at Maxim’s, Fouquet’s, all the fashionable places, and spent his summers in Deauville. In those days he kept an open table, always surrounded by young people who had famous names but no money. He still has the same lifestyle, or rather frequents the same places, but now he’s the one who’s broke and has to rely on others to pay for him. I don’t know how he manages it.’
‘You weren’t surprised to learn he was in Étretat?’
‘We hadn’t spoken to each other for years. I spotted him in town, two weeks ago, and I thought he was just passing through. Then, on Sunday, Charles brought him here and asked the two of us to make peace, and I held out my hand to him.’
‘He didn’t give you any reason for his presence here?’
‘He simply said that he needed a rest. But you interrupted me. I was telling you about the time when my husband was still alive, and his last ten years were no fun.’
‘When did he buy you this house?’
‘Before everything began to go downhill, when we already had the mansion in Paris, the chateau and the whole caboodle. It was me who asked him for a pied-à-terre here, where I feel more at home than anywhere else.’
Did a smile escape him? She hastily added:
‘I know what you’re thinking, and perhaps you are not entirely mistaken. At Anzi I played the lady, as Ferdinand asked me to do. I presided over all the good works, all the ceremonies, but no one knew who I was. It felt unfair that no one could see me in my new life in the town where I had been poor and humble. That might not be very nice, but I think it’s only human.
‘You may as well hear it from me, because everyone else is bound to tell you, that some people call me the Chatelaine – not without a hint of irony.
‘Behind my back they prefer to call me simply Valentine!
‘I never understood anything about business, but it’s clear that Ferdinand was over-ambitious and did not always make the right decisions, perhaps not so much to impress others as to prove to himself that he was a big-time financier.
‘First we sold the yacht, then the chateau. One night after the dance I gave him my pearls to put in the safe and he said with a bitter smile:
‘“It’s better, for the sake of appearances, but it wouldn’t be a tragedy if they were stolen because they’re only imitations.”
‘He became taciturn, withdrawn. Only Juva cream still thrived, while his new businesses went under one after the other.’
‘Did he love his sons?’
‘I don’t know. That might sound strange to you. People imagine that parents love their children. It seems natural. But I actually wonder whether the opposite isn’t true more often than we think.
‘He was certainly pleased to see Théo acc
epted in social circles where he couldn’t dream of being welcome himself. He must have realized, on the other hand, that Théo was worthless and that his grand ideas were largely to blame for the disaster.
‘As for Charles, he never forgave him for being spineless, because he had an absolute horror of spineless, weak people.’
‘Because deep down he was weak too, is that what you’re saying?’
‘Yes. The fact remains that his last years were sad, seeing everything he had built up fall apart, piece by piece. Perhaps he truly loved me? He wasn’t very communicative and I don’t recall ever hearing him call me “darling”. He was keen to ensure I wouldn’t want for anything financially: he took out a life annuity on this house and arranged a small allowance before he died. That is pretty much all he left. His children only received a few mementos of no value, as did my daughter. He treated her just like his sons.’
‘Did he die here?’
‘No. He died alone in a hotel room in Paris, where he had gone in the hope of negotiating a new business deal. He was seventy. So now you’re becoming acquainted with the family. I don’t know what Théo does exactly, but he always has a little motor car; he’s well dressed and lives in elegant places. As for Charles, who has four children and a wife who’s not particularly pleasant, he has tried several professions without success. His pet project was to found a newspaper, but this failed in both Rouen and Le Havre. Next he got involved in a business in Fécamp, making fertilizer from fish waste; then, since that was going reasonably well, he put himself forward on some list for the elections.
‘He was voted in by sheer luck, and lo and behold he’s been a politician for two years.
‘None of them is a saint, but they’re not bad people either.
Maigret and the Old Lady Page 3
