From time to time he would give an almost imperceptible signal to Jojo or Paul, which was enough for them to bring fresh champagne to the table. At other times, a different sign would bring Jojo, who would pour out a glass and take it over to someone in the room.
This might have had something haughty or condescending about it. The major did it so charmingly, so naively, that it gave no offense. He looked a little as if he were distributing good marks. When the glass had arrived at its destination, he raised his own and drank a silent toast from where he sat.
Everyone, or almost everyone, dropped in. Charlot, almost the whole evening, had been working the crane. He had started off by playing with the fruit machine and he could allow himself to spend as much as he liked since it was he who collected the kitty. The crane must have belonged to him as well. He fitted a coin into the slot, and with sustained concentration turned the knob, directing the small chromium pincers toward a cheap cigarette case, or a pipe, or a wallet from a bazaar.
Was Ginette not sleeping because she was worried? Had Maigret been too harsh with her? In the bedroom, yes, he had been hard. It was not out of spite, as might have been thought. Had she thought it was out of spite?
It is always ridiculous to play the Good Samaritan. He had picked her up in the Place des Ternes and had sent her off to the sanatorium. He had never told himself he was saving a soul, that he was “snatching a girl from the gutter.”
Someone else, “who was like him,” as she had told him, had looked after her in his turn: the doctor at the sanatorium. Had he been hoping for something?
She had become what she had become. That was her affair. He had no reason to take offense, to resent it with bitterness.
He had been hard because it had been a necessity, because that type of woman, even the least wicked of them, lie as they breathe, sometimes without any need, without any reason. And she hadn’t told him everything yet, he was sure. So much so that she couldn’t get to sleep. There was something on her mind.
Once, she got up. He heard her bare feet on the floor of the room. Was she going to come and find him? There was nothing impossible about that, and Maigret had prepared himself mentally to hurry into his trousers, which he had left lying on the floor.
She hadn’t come. There had been the clink of a glass. She was thirsty. Or else she had taken a sleeping pill.
He had only drunk one glass of champagne. The rest of the time he had drunk mostly wine, then, God knows why, anisette.
Who had ordered anisette? Oh yes, it was the dentist. A retired dentist, to be precise, whose name escaped him. Another phenomenon. There were nothing but phenomena on the island, at the Arche at any rate. Or perhaps was it they who were right and the people on the other side of the water, on the mainland, who were wrong to behave otherwise?
He must once have been very respectable, very well groomed, for he had a dentist’s surgery in one of the smartest districts of Bordeaux, and the people of Bordeaux are particular. He had come to Porquerolles by chance, on holiday, and since then he had only left for a week, the time it took to go and wind up his affairs.
He wore no collar. It was one of the Morins, a fisherman, who cut his hair once a month. That Morin was called Morin-Coiffeur. The ex-dentist’s beard was at least three days old and he neglected his hands, he neglected everything, didn’t do anything, except read, in a rocking chair, in the shade on his veranda.
He had married a girl on the island who had perhaps been pretty but who had very quickly become enormous, with the shadow of a mustache on her lip and a strident voice.
He was happy. Or so he claimed. He would say with a disconcerting assurance:
“You’ll see! If you stay long enough, you’ll be bitten, like the others. And then you won’t go away again.”
Maigret knew that, on certain of the Pacific islands, white people sometimes let themselves go like that, go native, as they say, but he didn’t know it was possible three miles from the French coast.
When someone was mentioned to the dentist, he only judged them in terms of the extent to which they had gone native. He called it something else. He said: Porquerollitis.
The doctor? For there was a doctor, too, whom Maigret had not yet met, but Lechat had mentioned him. Infected to the bone, according to the dentist.
“I presume you are friends?”
“We never see one another. We pass the time of day, at a distance.”
True, the doctor had arrived with his preoccupations. He was very ill and had only settled in the island to cure himself. He was a bachelor. He lived alone in a poky little house with a garden full of flowers and he did his own housework. Indoors, it was very dirty. On account of his health, he didn’t go out in the evenings, even in cases of emergency, and, in winter, if it happened to be really cold, which was rare, days and sometimes weeks would go by without his white nose being seen.
“You’ll see! You’ll see!” the dentist insisted with a sarcastic smile. “Besides, you’ve already got some idea of what it is by looking around you. Just think, it’s the same every evening.”
And it was indeed a curious spectacle. It wasn’t quite the atmosphere of a café, nor was it that of a drawing room. The disorder called to mind a soirée in an artist’s studio.
Everyone knew everyone else and people didn’t stand on ceremony for each other. The major, who came from a leading English school, was here on the same footing as a dockside loafer like Marcellin, or as a Charlot.
From time to time, someone would change places, or partners.
To start with, Monsieur Émile and Ginette had remained still and quiet at the same table, near the counter, like a long-married couple waiting for a train in a railway station. Monsieur Émile had ordered his usual tisane, Ginette a greenish liqueur in a minute glass.
Now and then they would exchange a word or two, in a low voice. Nothing could be heard. Only the movement of their lips could be seen. Then Ginette had risen with a sigh and gone off to fetch a game of checkers from a cabinet under the gramophone.
They played. One felt that it might have been like that every day, for years on end, that the people would grow old without changing their places, without attempting any actions other than the ones they were to be seen making now.
No doubt in five years Maigret would find the dentist in front of the same anisette, with an identical smile, at once savage and satisfied. Charlot was working the crane with the movements of an automaton, and there was no reason for that to stop at a given moment.
The engaged couple moved the men about on the checkerboard, which they contemplated with unreal gravity between each move, and the major emptied glass after glass of champagne, while he recounted stories to Mr. Pyke.
No one was in a hurry. No one seemed to think that tomorrow existed. When she hadn’t any customer to serve, Jojo went and leaned on the counter and, with her chin on her hand, gazed thoughtfully in front of her. Several times Maigret felt her eyes fixed on him, but the moment he turned his head she would look away.
Paul, the patron, still in his cook’s attire, went from table to table, and at each he offered a round of drinks. It must have cost him a lot, but it is to be presumed that he made it up in the long run.
As for his wife, a small person with faded blonde hair, hard-faced, who was scarcely noticed, she had settled down by herself at a table and was doing the day’s accounts.
“It’s like this every evening,” Lechat had told the chief inspector.
“And the islanders, the fishermen I mean?”
“They hardly ever come after dinner. They go out to sea before daybreak and retire early to bed. At any rate, in the evening, they wouldn’t come to the Arche. It’s a sort of tacit agreement. In the afternoon, the morning as well, everyone mixes. After dinner, the islanders, the real inhabitants, prefer to go to the other cafés.”
“What do they do?”
“Nothing. I’ve been to see them. Sometimes they listen to the wireless, but that’s fairly unusual. They
have a small drink in silence, staring in front of them.”
“Is it always as calm here?”
“It all depends. Listen. It can happen from one moment to another. It takes a mere nothing, a remark in the air, a round of drinks offered by one person or another, and everyone groups together, and starts talking at once.”
It hadn’t happened, perhaps because of the presence of Maigret.
It was hot, in spite of the open window. It had become an obsession to listen to the noises of the house. Ginette was still not asleep. There were occasional footsteps above his head. As for Mr. Pyke, he had to go a fourth time to the end of the passage and, each time, Maigret waited with a sort of anguish for the racket caused by the flush, before attempting to go back to sleep. For he must have been sleeping between the interruptions, a sleep not deep enough to efface his thoughts completely, but sufficient to distort them.
Mr. Pyke had played a dirty trick on him when he had spoken about the Dutchman at the end of the jetty. From now on the chief inspector could only see de Greef in the light of the peremptory phrases of his British colleague.
However, the portrait which Pyke had sketched of the young man did not satisfy him. He, too, was there, with Anna, who must have been sleepy and who, as time passed, allowed herself to lean more and more on her companion’s shoulder.
De Greef did not speak to her. He cannot have been in the habit of speaking to her often. He was the male, the leader, and she had only to follow, to await his pleasure.
He was watching. With his very thin face he called to mind a lean animal, a wild beast.
The others probably weren’t lambs, but indisputably de Greef was a wild beast. He sniffed like a wild beast. It was a mannerism. He would listen to what was being said and then he would sniff. That was his only perceptible reaction.
In the jungle the major would probably have been a pachyderm, an elephant, or better still a hippopotamus. And Monsieur Émile? Something furtive, with pointed teeth.
It was absurd. What would Mr. Pyke have thought if he had been able to read Maigret’s thoughts? True, the chief inspector had the excuse of having had too much to drink and being half-asleep. If he had foreseen his insomnia he would have accounted for a few more glasses, in order to plunge at once into a dreamless slumber.
All in all Lechat was a very good man. So good that Maigret would have liked to have had him in his service. Still a little young, a little excitable. He was easily agitated, like a gun dog which runs in all directions around its master.
He knew the Midi already, as he had been in the squad at Draguignan, but he had only had occasion to visit Porquerolles once or twice; he had only really got to know the island during the last two or three days.
“The people from the North Star don’t come every evening?”
“Almost every evening. They sometimes arrive late. Usually, when the sea is calm, they come by moonlight in a dinghy.”
“Are Mrs. Wilcox and the major friends?”
“They studiously avoid speaking to one another, and each looks at the other as though they didn’t exist.”
After all, it was understandable. They both had the same background. Both, for one reason or another, had come here to let their hair down.
The major must have been very embarrassed becoming drunk under the eye of Mrs. Wilcox, for in his country, gentlemen do that among themselves, behind closed doors.
As for her, in front of the retired Indian Army officer, she cannot have been very proud of her Moricourt.
They had arrived about eleven o’clock in the evening. As nearly always happens, she was nothing like the idea the chief inspector had formed of her in his mind.
He had imagined a lady, and she was a redhead—of an artificial red—rather a stout woman on the wane, whose broken voice recalled that of Major Bellam, only it was louder. She was wearing a linen dress, but she had round her neck three strings of pearls which were perhaps genuine, and a large diamond on her finger.
Straightaway she had singled out Maigret. Philippe must have told her about the chief inspector and from the moment she sat down she hadn’t ceased sizing him up and discussing him in a low voice with her companion.
What was she saying? Did she, on her side, find him heavy and vulgar? Had she pictured him as a film star? Perhaps she thought he didn’t look very intelligent?
The two of them were drinking whisky, with very little soda. Philippe waited on her hand and foot and the chief inspector’s attention irritated him; he evidently didn’t like being seen in the exercise of his functions. As for her, she was doing it on purpose. Instead of summoning Jojo or Paul, she would send her beau to change her glass, which she didn’t find clean enough, or made him get up again to go and fetch her some cigarettes from the counter. Another time, God knows why, she sent him outside.
She had to assert her power over the heir of the Moricourts, and perhaps, by the same token, to show that she was unashamed.
As they passed, the couple had greeted the young de Greef and his companion. Very vaguely. Rather in the way that masonic signs are exchanged.
The major, contrary to Maigret’s expectations, had been the first to leave, dignified but uncertain in his bearing, and Mr. Pyke had gone some of the way with him.
Then the dentist, in his turn, had left.
“You’ll see. You’ll see!” he had repeated to Maigret, as he predicted for him a speedy onset of Porquerollitis.
Charlot, who had had enough of the crane, had gone to sit jockey-style on a chair, next to the checkers game, and, silently, had pointed out one or two moves to Ginette. Once Monsieur Émile had left, he had gone up to bed. As for Ginette, she seemed to be waiting for Maigret’s permission. In the end she had come over to his table and murmured, with a little smile:
“Still cross with me?”
She was visibly tired, and he had advised her to go up to bed. He had gone up straightaway after her, because the idea had come to him that she might be going to join Charlot.
At one moment, when he was trying to go to sleep—but perhaps he was already asleep and it was only a dream?—he had had the impression that he had discovered a really important fact.
“I mustn’t forget it. It is essential that I should remember it tomorrow morning.”
He had all but got up and made a note of it on a piece of paper. It had come to him in a flash. It was very odd. He was pleased. He kept repeating to himself:
“Above all, I mustn’t forget it in the morning!”
And the flushing of the lavatory once more set the Arche resounding with its racket. Afterwards there were ten minutes of listening to the water slowly flowing back into the cistern. It was exasperating. The noise was becoming louder. There were explosions. Maigret sat up in bed, opened his eyes, and found the room bathed in sunlight, with, just in front of him, framed in the open window, the belfry of the little church.
The explosions were coming from the port. It was the engines of the boats being started up, and coughing. All the fishermen were leaving at the same time. One of the motors kept on stopping after several efforts, and a silence followed, then again the coughing sound, so that one wanted to go and help to get it going properly once and for all.
He felt like getting dressed and going out of doors, then looked at the time by his watch, which he had put on the bedside table, and found it was only half-past four in the morning. The smell was still more pronounced than on the day before, probably because of the damp of the dawn. There was no sound in the house, no sound in the square, where the foliage of the eucalyptus trees was motionless in the rising sun. Only the motors, in the harbor, an occasional voice, then even the thrumming of the motors died away in the distance, and, for a very long time, was no more than a vibration in the air.
When he opened his eyes once more, another smell reminded him of all the mornings since his early childhood, the smell of fresh coffee, and from most parts of the house came the buzz of activity, footsteps could be heard on the square, brooms
frisking against the stones in the roadway.
He was at once aware that there was something of vital importance that he had to remember, but could bring back to mind no distinct memory. His mouth was lined with fur, because of the anisette. He felt for a bell button in the hope of having some coffee sent up. There was none. Then he put on his trousers, his shirt, his slippers, ran a comb through his hair and opened his door. A strong smell of scent and soap was issuing from Ginette’s room, where she must have been busy at her toilet.
Wasn’t it about her that he had made, or thought he had made, a discovery? He went down and, in the main room, found the chairs in pyramids on the tables. The doors were open and the chairs on the terrace were similarly stacked up. There was nobody about.
He went into the kitchen, which seemed dark to him, had to accustom his eyes to the half-light.
“Good morning, chief inspector. Did you sleep well?”
It was Jojo, with her black dress, which was too short and literally clung to her body. She hadn’t yet washed either, and she seemed to be naked underneath.
“Will you have some coffee?”
For a second he thought of Madame Maigret who at that hour would be preparing the breakfast in their flat in Paris, with the windows open on to the Boulevard Richard-Lenoir. It struck him that it was raining in Paris. When he had left it was almost as cold as in winter. From here it seemed incredible.
“Shall I clear a table for you?”
What for? He was perfectly all right in the kitchen. She was cooking some vine stalks on the kitchen stove, and it smelled good. When she lifted her arms he could see the small brown hairs of her armpits.
He was still searching his mind for the discovery of the night before, uttering words without thinking, perhaps because he was embarrassed to be alone with Jojo.
“Isn’t Monsieur Paul up yet?”
“He’s already been at the harbor a good while. He goes every morning to buy his fish from the boats as they come back.”
She glanced at the clock.
“The Cormorant leaves in five minutes.”
My Friend Maigret Page 8
