Duvivier’s lips tightened as he found the lichen path round to the first graveyard where the family stones stood still pristine after twenty-seven years. The lettering clear despite the poor light.
HUBERT BÜBER DUVIVIER MADELEINE IRMA BÜBER
1er. août 1955 - 20 août 1967 6 février 1925 - 20 août 1970
UN FRÈRE BIEN AIMÉ. LA MAMAN DE MON COEUR.
Those were his words behind the mason’s hand, and his money for the best that money could buy. He wouldn’t have used those lilies anyhow – they were Pereire’s, already soiled. Maybe that driver was taking them home to his wife, but it didn’t matter.
Duvivier knelt on the weedy oblong set aside for his father that felt soft and alive under his robe. He cleared the grasses away from her slab and repositioned the knick-knacks and plastic roses that had blown askew from their holder. He could have had photographs like the others, whose old soft focus faces stared out enigmatically at the future, but that would have been too public. Too intrusive.
His fingers moved slowly as though this would somehow magnetise her back to life through the deep dry earth. He kissed the Jesus heart, repeating his confession to her through ever numbing lips. “...que j’ai grandement pêché en pensées, en paroles, et en actions par ma faute, ma faute, ma très grande faute. C’est pourquoi je prie...”
Close now, his crucifix trailing where her own heart might be, and in his ramblings, her first son imagined her ears reopening, her hair growing anew from the skull like a lion’s, to frame her beauty. He smelt once more her scent, the sweetness of her being, smothering the stench snaking upwards from two metres below.
“...toujours Vierge, saint Michel Archange, saint Jean-Baptiste, les Apôtres, saint Pierre et Saint Paul. Oh, maman, you should have loved me! You should have loved me, and given me your name, not his!”
At that moment, the force that had once expelled him from her body seemed now to pull him down for a final homecoming. He tore at the lungwort and Black Nightshade, splicing his fingers, staining his palms and as he finished the act of Contrition, tried to raise the tomb itself, oblivious to the mobile ringing again in his pocket.
***
The Javels spotted him as they came through the main gate, then quickened into the Church.
“He’s on the turn, as God’s my witness,” Hervé Javel wheezed.
“You’re right.” His daughter once inside the porch retied her hair and caught the stray pieces in two clips. “People are beginning to notice. Would you go to him for confession now?”
“Never.” He laid down the two boxes of candles. White for the chapels, red for the altar, then checked the weight of the collection boxes. “He won’t be getting the Bishop’s job, that’s for sure.”
“If there’s any justice.”
“We’re alright, then.” He grinned.
“By the way, papa, who do you think that smoothie with the weird nose was?” she asked.
“Looked a right bourgeois to me. I’m sure I remember him from somewhere. I’m trying to think. That’s the trouble with getting old. Did you see his shoes though?”
“Bloody cheek that’s all I can say, telling us to get a mower. I’m the domestic and you’re for things ecclesiastical, or whatever. He’d have had you grave digging if there’d been any more room in the ground.”
“Too right.” Her father returned to the main door and peered round. “Bet you five to one our mother’s boy’ll have dug her up by Christmas.”
“Oh, God.” Renate crossed herself. You and me, three wise monkeys, OK? See no evil, etcetera.”
“OK.” The seventy-five-year-old in dungarees and a lumberjack shirt rearranged the photocopied sheets of the church’s history then signalled to his daughter. “Time to exit.”
And, as the clouds deepened over La Croix Valmer, plunging Les Pradels into premature darkness, the two crept back to their Bedford van and made for Cavalaire. They left Duvivier prostrate on his mother’s black marble, his breathing rough and irregular until the cold crystalline limestone lowered his fever. After a few minutes he felt composed enough to stand and brush down his clothes. He then went to see if the Javels had returned.
The ancient cedar branches brushed his forehead and he leapt sideways half expecting his pale-faced persecutor to spring from the shadows.
“Damn you, Déchaux,” he muttered as a pair of ravens lifted towards the bell tower, croaking their contempt. “And damn you, Javel and your ugly, barren daughter. Where the Hell are you?”
He hung around light-headed, pacing between the Coronation of the Virgin and the main door before locking up. Ste Trinité felt awesomely empty without their footsteps, and during the past ten years he’d come to rely on them both for everything, including her lamb couscous every Wednesday night and the weekly washing of socks.
Duvivier looked back to where he’d embraced his mother and knew what he must do to prepare things for the rest of his next life. 7.13 p.m. exactly. Six kilometres to ‘Le Souterrain.’ He could smell the place already and the idiot dog, Arsène, would be halfway down the track waiting to take his leg off.
He shook the edge of his robe again and tucked his crucifix inside, then, having checked the hall light in the Presbytery, made his way on foot up the Route de Montjean towards his own unfinished business.
***
Away from the sea’s influence and into the dry rugged hills, Duvivier was sheltered from that same south-easterly that had buffeted him senseless on his journey back from Cavalaire.
His cape shielded him from the worst of the wind as headlights came and went, and all the while he counted the number of steps away from Madeleine Büber’s body, each one more difficult than the last, his lungs tight in the remembering.
A horsebox, a VW camper van, with a Dutch number plate, and youngsters crammed into old 306’s going down to the beach bars. Then the silence of Eternity before the hum of his father’s generator and the one light of ‘Le Souterrain.’
The priest fingered the bungalow’s post box at the end of the track – sometimes rewarding when Victor Duvivier forgot, but not tonight. No stars either, just a vague interlocking of clouds big with rain.
“Arsène!”
The white terrier was usually there, hurling himself skywards then worrying round his heels. Duvivier looked and listened with the practised ear of a night fisherman as he walked the last stretch down to the single storey dwelling whose walls sunk deep into the beginnings of the Col du Canadel.
Still no dog. “Arsène!” He clapped his hands and yodelled, a ploy that never failed, but only the crickets in the scrub replied.
Then something soft against his foot. White, in what little light there was, and lying across the path, lay the terrier, its ribs etched through the skin. Duvivier knelt down and stroked its head. Still warm, the eyes scrolled upwards to some Heaven, the paws draped in fresh blood from a wound to the heart.
He cradled the lifeless creature to the door, triggering the security light. He kicked against the new wood until his father stirred, grumbling from his armchair. His replica eyes passed from his son to the dog. A Pietà of sorts, white on black, except the wrong one was alive.
Victor Duvivier let out a cry like a foghorn through a winter mist then vanished into the back of the house. He returned holding out a hunting knife, straight and deadly as he sleep walked past his son who’d hidden behind a clump of bougainvillea.
With fingers sticking together, the priest laid the dog down, and followed his father at a safe distance.
Almost night. Nothing but the trickery of a moving sky and a plane from Hyères winking red, heading east.
“Probably old Barras going for rabbits. An accident,” he ventured.
“Barras, my backside. He won’t dare come round here after what I did last time. No, I know who did this.” He stopped. “And it’s all down to you, son.”
Francke Duvivier froze as the old man turned to face him, bigger in every respect, not shrunken as most do with age. The knif
e end toyed with his crucifix.
“I had a visitor.”
“A visitor? When?”
The fisherman checked his watch.
“Half an hour ago, if that. I’d just let the dog out.” For a moment his voice faltered but he kept the fine steel point firm on his son’s chest. “White face with a growth on his nose. Smart shoes, brown leather jacket. Parisian, definitely. Must have left his car up the end.”
Déchaux...
“What the Hell’s that to do with me?”
“Said I had certain duties as a father. Fucking cheek. As if I’ve ever been able to keep you in check.” Hatred beamed from his hiding eyes, anchovies sour on his breath.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Never you mind. Any more let-downs and he’d be back. That’s what he said.” Victor Duvivier tapped the Jesus with his knife. “So maybe you’d better be asking your friend for some helpful advice. God knows what you’re up to.”
“Did he give his name?”
“What do you think.” His father’s mouth trembled. “I loved that little dog, for goodness sake.”
“Whoever he was, he’s wrong. Got us mixed up with someone else. You know what goes on round here, trafficking, stolen goods. Last place God made and all that. I tell you, it’s nothing to do with me.”
But Déchaux’s inscrutable face and his shadow were stretching further over his life.
“Smells to me like the Croix de Feu’s still burning. You’re in it, aren’t you?”
“Don’t be ridiculous! I’ve far too much to do.”
“I remember you couldn’t wait to get your grubby little hands on my uniform, and my Knight’s Cross. You still got that, by the way?”
The French volunteer of the Third Reich found the button which secured his son’s cape and severed it with one neat twist. “Now Hubert always said you were mad. To your mother he was the calm after the storm.”
Francke Duvivier hit the knife from his father’s hand and seized his neck.
“Leave her out of this! She hated your stinking guts when you were in the Charlemagne Division. Strutting here and there, bringing all those creeps home...”
“And you, you could never keep your nose out. It was just a game, but that was too subtle for you.”
The priest suddenly laughed, but it came out wrong and his grim roar faded into the hills. “I went to bloody Villerscourt, remember?”
“You were the laughing stock. And the Javels, well they split their sides.”
Francke Duvivier stared at the man, who must have possessed his mother at least twice, and had blackmailed his surviving son for a final place by her side. And who’d sold his business to his brother-in-law and paid a top lawyer to alter his will so he wouldn’t inherit. And in that face which swelled from his strengthening grasp, he saw the past he had to lose. He’d never wanted the stinking boats, the breeze-block shed or the unworkable land.
“Can’t you see, I just want to lie next to Mother?”
“And our Hubert?” Victor Duvivier gurgled. “You’ve got the Devil’s nerve after what you did. That’s my plot and son or no son, Father André, you can rot somewhere else.”
His words strangled to a whisper. His fishing arms limp, no longer fighting, as the priest heaped him up on to his shoulder and carried him across No Man’s Land between the Duvivier hectares and the Pic de Redon.
“Je m’accuse de tous ces pêchés, de tous ceux que je dois oublier, de ceux de ma vie passée. J’en demande Pardon à Dieu et vous, mon père, la pénitence at l’absolution si vous...”
The end of his confession was taken up by the wind as stones became boulders on the rising ground and the rash of bedstraw clung to his hem, holding him to the place of sin.
XXXIV
At exactly 06.55 hours the TGV Atlantique slipped away from the Gare Montparnasse as dawn grew into a bright opacity that stifled Nelly Augot’s eyes and disguised the gulls looping westward towards the Seine.
She squinted out at the blur of office windows, saw white shirts busy behind each porthole, and felt more than a pang of jealousy for those with a salaried ordered life.
Over the Porte Briançon and out into suburbs, gathering speed through Massy and Palaiseau with three hours twenty minutes for her to go over and over the plan as though it was all she’d ever do with her life. This one mission of mercy.
The Gendarmerie had been useless, and after she’d finished her story about the nuns and poor desperate Chloë being dead, they’d quizzed her about her mama’s associates and after more questions on how long she’d been at the hostel, and what was she doing to survive, finally accused her of being on something.
“Fuck the lot of them.”
But the rest of Colette’s message was all she could think of now. Ask hostel about Bertrand Bataille again. My son... God bless... and again and again as the wheels beneath her added their own counterpoint.
With a seat to herself, she spread out her belongings. A rucksack specially cleaned for the occasion, a Galeries Lafayette carrier bag with map, torch, rope, all concealed in a pretty toiletries bag, while snug in the pocket reserved for soap lay her 9mm automatic.
“Just the job for a lady,” Max Bellino had laughed bad teeth after she’d begged him to borrow it for three days. Then he’d unzipped himself and made her gobble his dick and other things until she’d gagged. “One suck for every hour of the loan.” That was the deal. She squirmed at the memory, and licked round her mouth. Tried a fresh Hollywood gum but still couldn’t get rid of him and wondered, as houses outside became sparse and new, if her mama liked doing that to a man. Or what the Miller’s Wife would have made of it all.
Nelly extracted her battered Chaucer and pretended to read, to be once again the intense and interesting student, but suddenly she felt a current of danger, a warning almost, as two young women approached down the gangway looking for reserved seats.
Both tall, the older one although probably not more than thirty, wearing a black headscarf, crisp red suit and matching wild red mouth. Her companion in a silver tracksuit, her dark hair cropped close, bore no make-up. Nelly stared hard. There was something about the sporty one she particularly recognised as they finally sat down on the other side. Neither wore any kind of ring.
She set off for the WC keeping the plastic bag close to her legs as the train passed through Voves station and endless two-tone fields that stretched away to the sky. She was an appropriate couple of minutes, then the long walk back past businessmen and singles out job hunting, not visiting.
The red suit studied the window but her partner’s eyes were fixed ahead as Nelly reached her.
That’s it! The hostel’s cool receptionist bitch.
What was she doing on the train? And why so different, with her bobbed hair razored up her neck?
“Hi, I’m Nelly Augot, remember?” she said. “Room 35 at St, Anne’s hostel?”
But the tracksuit feigned a search for something in her overnight bag while the other woman still pretended to be hypnotised by the view.
“This is crazy! I’d know you anywhere. Claude Lefêbvre.”
“I’m afraid you’re mistaken. Now if you don’t mind...” The woman recrossed her legs and flicked through the latest copy of Paris Match as though the girl from St. Denis didn’t exist. But Nelly Augot, who’d had to fight to stay on at the Lycée to do her Bac, and funded herself through University, was not to be denied.
“You can tell me now, did a Bertrand Bataille ever stay at your place?” A quick glance between the two other travellers was enough to tell Nelly they knew something. “You have heard of him, haven’t you? So stop treating me like an idiot.”
“Leave us alone. We don’t know what you’re on about. Far as we’re concerned, you’re a complete stranger, and if you don’t lay off, I’ll call the guard.”
“Well, that’s charming.” Nelly noticed other heads turning their way. “Why are you lying? What have you got to hide?” she raised her voice. “Look her
e, someone very special to me is searching for him. Bertrand Bataille.”
“Piss off.”
“Piss off yourself. If it wasn’t for chômeurs like me you’d be out of a bloody job.”
“Say what you like.”
“Bloody snob. But I tell you something Mademoiselle Lefêbvre – I’m going to get to the bottom of this even if...”
“It kills you?” The unmade face turned, sneering, sending a shiver through Nelly’s body. She sat down again, trembling, and turned to the Pardoner’s Tale with no intention of reading it. Staple fodder of her second year, and no more relevant to her life than how to grow Bonsai. She kept a wary eye on Lefêbvre while the train sped through the Loir et Cher with the sun showing yellow in the clearing sky and furred ribbons of trees becoming just memory – until the occupants of seats 54 and 55 abruptly got up and left the compartment.
Nelly followed. They were at the bar ordering spritzers, their baggage alongside. A neat red case and the holdall.
Gripping the seats, she neared them but, in doing so, accidentally clipped an elderly man’s head, dislodging his hat.
“Allez.” His reaction was enough to attract unwanted attention. Nelly tried to hide, but too late. The two young women, wineglasses at their lips had seen her, and glared in unison. Then the red suit began to slide from her stool, her hand feeling in her pocket. Romy Kirchner, the fake Bostonian, who’d lent her the clothes. The one who knew everything.
Nelly didn’t wait for the rest. She sprinted back to the far end of the train, to the Fourgon à bagages and subsided next to the door under the curious gaze of a family playing a card game.
Dear Colette, I’m doing my best, God knows. Stay safe for me. I couldn’t bear it if anything happened to you...
Then she put her hands together and prayed.
As if to answer her, the train careered ever faster through the vineyards of the Dronne, and when at 10.15 it rested at Libourne she stepped on to the platform, her bare eyes heavy with sun, the two hunters were nowhere to be seen.
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