by Michel Déon
‘Why are you spying on me?’ she asked.
‘Why shouldn’t I spy on you?’
Wrapped in a towel, she pushed the screen aside and sat on the edge of his bed. Cyrille was still sleeping, and they had to talk in low voices.
‘What if he wasn’t here?’ Jean said, pointing to Cyrille.
She thought about his question with the seriousness and concentration she showed every time they discussed their unusual relations.
‘I wouldn’t be so strong.’
‘He wasn’t there to protect you when you went away for three days.’
‘Do you still think about that?’
‘Now and then.’
Stretching out his arm, he held her ankle, squeezed it hard, ran his hand up her shin to the knee he loved so much and stroked her thigh, exposed by the towel.
‘No!’ she said.
‘When?’
Her eyes glistened with tears.
‘I want it as much as you do,’ she whispered. ‘But not here. Not here. Not now.’
‘You’re right, it’s horrible here. And we came to find the sun. I hate this place, I hate the wardrobe, the colour of the curtains, the violet carpet, that embroidered armchair. Let’s not stay. I’ll telephone Antoine.’
‘Who’s Antoine?’
‘My grandfather, but he doesn’t know it and I’m not going to be the one to tell him. He lives at Saint-Tropez.’
It was not Antoine who answered, because he was out fishing in his rowing boat as he did every morning, but Toinette, whose cool voice and singsong accent brought back the last delicious summer before the war, the cruises on Théo’s ‘yacht’ and a way of living in the moment that now seemed lost for ever. The hotel was shut, she said, and her mother and father were in the ‘village’, but her mother would phone back before lunch.
It was Théo who telephoned at lunchtime.
‘What’s all this, Jean, your rain from Paris you’re bringing us? We’re going to send you and your miserable storms straight back, you know. And what the hell are you doing at Saint-Raphaël? It’s the middle of nowhere. Antoine and me’ve decided you’re coming here. I’ll pick you up in the truck at three, if I can get the gas generator going.’
‘I’m not on my own, I’ve got a friend with me, a girlfriend.’
‘Saints … Toinette didn’t say nothing about that. I hope she’s good-looking, at least.’
‘I think so.’
‘That’s all right then. We got to take life as it comes … we’ve been making do ever since we ran out of petrol … What was the war like? We got plenty of time, save it for later … I’ll pick you up at three.’
The rain stopped just before Théo arrived, and a radiant sun daubed the houses in fresh colours and lightened the ochre mass of the Maures, sending up a bluish mist in the new sunshine. Théo assured them that wherever he went, the sun followed him. His truck smelt of fish.
‘I never make a trip for nothing. I’ve brought them two hundred kilos. They don’t know how to fish at Saint-Raphaël. I’m taking chickpeas and rice back. That’s all they have here. Put your bags on top.’
He showed no surprise at seeing Cyrille. He stroked his cheek and peeled him an orange.
‘Nice boy. A bit pasty. We’ll fix that.’
Théo had not changed. The odd grey hair at his temples, but his face had stayed young, enlivened constantly by the winks, pouts and comical expressions that punctuated his indefatigable chatter. He had sold his ‘yacht’, which had sailed away, laden with English passengers, just after the armistice. His truck now satisfied his hunger for mechanical toys. The gas generator was not perfect, but by fiddling and coaxing, the truck could be made to start. Antoine had looked very happy at the thought of his friend Jean coming, having not seen him for so long. Of course … very happy was putting it too strongly. Being a Norman, a man of the north, he didn’t show his feelings much, and spoke less and less. Fishing was the only thing that interested him. He was getting very good at it. He kept the house well supplied. Toinette was seventeen now. A real angel. She helped her mother. Oh, yes, Marie-Dévote was well too. He’d find her a bit thinner than before … yes, true, Jean hadn’t met her … Well, some said she was better-looking like that. He, Théo, he’d liked her skinny, and with a bit of flesh on her, and even good and round, and he loved her the way she was now because there was no other woman on earth like her.
The road followed the curve of the gulf. After three days’ torrential rain the rivers were pouring the red earth of the Maures into the sea, staining the waves. Cyrille sounded the horn as they went round the bends.
‘I tell you, Jean, this little chap’s going to send both of them dotty, Marie-Dévote and Toinette. You don’t see blond kids around here much. They’ll be crazy about him! Cyrille, you say that’s your name?’
‘Yes, Monsieur.’
‘And polite too! Dotty! Dotty’s what they’ll be, I tell you. They won’t want to give him back! My word on it.’
They were arriving at Saint-Tropez, outside the shuttered hotel. Théo hooted furiously and Toinette appeared at the door in trousers and a sweater, her long chestnut hair falling over her shoulders, instantly reminding Jean of the delightful, unspoken complicity between them during the short summer of 1939 and the deliciously sweet letter he had received at the camp at Yssingeaux where he and Palfy had done their basic training. He could have recited by heart the few lines she had written, to which he had never replied.
Dear godson, I send you my best warm wishes and a muffler. I hope it isn’t dangerous there, where you are. Don’t catch cold. Uncle Antoine sends you a thousand affectionate thoughts. He says you are his only friend. He kisses you, and I shake your hand. Toinette
Marie-Dévote appeared next, as they were unloading their cases. Jean had not seen her before and he was struck by the richness and maturity of her beauty. She had kept her soft skin and her fleshy mouth, like a Provençal nectarine. Rationing had made her lose the ten kilos excess that had weighed down her hips and bust. She was no longer the scornful girl, the wild fruit who twenty years earlier had beguiled Antoine, but almost another creature, fully in control of her body and its gestures.
‘Antoine’s waiting for you inside,’ she said. ‘He’s quite choked up at the thought of seeing you again. He hasn’t talked much about you, but we always knew you were his friend from way back.’
Turning to Claude, she said, ‘I’m Marie-Dévote, and this is my daughter Toinette. What’s your little boy’s name?’
‘Cyrille. And I’m Claude.’
‘Cyrille’s my pal,’ Théo said. ‘I’m kidnapping him. We’re going to check over the boat. Like boats, Cyrille?’
‘Oh yes.’
He took Théo’s hand and followed him.
‘The hotel’s shut,’ Marie-Dévote said, ‘but we have friends come down now and again and we give them the bungalow over there. There’s one big bedroom. Toinette will bring over a cot for the little one. Come on, Monsieur Jean, Antoine’s waiting. I’ll sort everything else out with Madame Claude. It’s women’s work.’
‘Where’s Antoine?’
‘In his little place over on the beach side. It’s his retreat. Nobody but him’s allowed there. You might find he’s changed from when you saw him last. To me – to us,’ she corrected herself, ‘he’s still the same.’
Antoine could not have failed to hear the truck hooting as it arrived. Seated on a stool, he was checking the weights on a line he was coiling into a wicker basket. He looked up as if someone he saw every day had come to disturb him, put down the line, and got to his feet. He too had lost several kilos as a result of rationing, and his faded red cotton trousers and rollneck sweater flapped around him, but at sixty-seven, his face scarcely wrinkled, he remained the same solid Antoine, with the same deliberate step.
‘I’m so pleased to see you again, Jean! A few days ago I was telling myself I’d probably never see anyone from Grangeville again. Deep down I was convinced I’d left it all beh
ind, but this morning when Toinette came to tell me you’d telephoned I suddenly couldn’t wait; I wanted you to be there at once. Come and kiss me. We’re old friends – and I’ve always considered you as my son. Like a second son, one who might have loved me a little … because … the first … Oh, let’s not talk about it. It’s of no interest … See, I’ve become quite chatty, haven’t I? Spending four or five hours every morning in my little boat, all alone, I tell myself stories and when I set foot on dry land it all spills out. Then I shut up again. What are you looking at? Yes, it’s my garage, my workshop, my shed. I’ve got my nets, my lines, my tools … and there’s my last love – you’ll remember her …’
At the back of the garage a waxed tarpaulin covered the shape of a car. Antoine pulled on a rope that ran through a block and the tarpaulin rose, revealing the 3.3-litre Bugatti 57S in which he had driven away from La Sauveté.
‘Obviously she’s not really presentable, except to those in the know. I greased the chromework and the chassis’s up on blocks, so the wheels hardly touch the floor. I know it spoils her lines, but the tyres won’t rot so quickly. I’ve covered the inner tubes with talc. Twice a week I start her up … Wait …’
He sat behind the wheel and tugged the ignition switch. The engine started instantly, perfectly on song.
‘There,’ Antoine said, ‘a little treat for her. She’ll have started three times this week. Can’t afford to spoil her like that too often. I’ve only got two hundred litres of petrol in cans to last till the end of the war. You know that with the 57S you can do the same trick they do with a Rolls-Royce …’
He took a bronze two-sous piece out of his pocket, opened the bonnet, and balanced it on its edge on the cylinder head. The coin stayed upright for several seconds before a stronger vibration of the engine made it fall over.
‘Obviously,’ Antoine said, ‘that wouldn’t happen if it wasn’t on blocks.’
The tarpaulin descended, covering the Bugatti again.
‘They tell me you’re not on your own?’
‘No,’ Jean said. ‘Actually I left Paris to come here with a friend whose little boy badly needs some sun.’
‘Is she divorced?’
‘Not yet. Her husband’s in London.’
‘I look forward to seeing her.’
He said it with the indifference of a man happy with the few friends he had.
‘I haven’t got a lot of news to tell you,’ Jean said. ‘Antoinette’s written. Michel is in Paris. Last month a gallery on the Left Bank had an exhibition of his pictures.’
‘So he really wants to be an artist? It’s a case of spontaneous generation in our family.’
Antoine sat down on his stool to carry on winding his line. The lead weights lay on top of each other, and in the middle of the basket the line coiled up like a lasso.
‘I’m not bored,’ he told Jean. ‘I like this kind of work. You need two or three hours to get a line straight again, and then a few seconds for it all to uncoil into the sea. Time was, I had about thirty trawlers all working for me and never felt the slightest urge to go on board any of them. Now I fish on my own, grandpa out in his boat, and it gives me more pleasure than you can possibly imagine. I didn’t know it, but this was the life I always wanted. I don’t need anything, which is perfect because I don’t own anything, except for my lovely Bugatti that may never go again. There’s a risk that this war will last as long as the first one. It’s not my business … or hardly … Were you old enough to be called up?’
‘Yes, I enlisted in September 1939.’
‘I don’t suppose your father thought much of that. How is he?’
‘Fairly well, I think … I haven’t seen him since then. He works for Madame du Courseau. Antoinette sends me news.’
‘I say your father … it’s a manner of speaking, obviously, as we’re never going to know whose child you really are.’
‘I’ve found out.’
‘Ah!’
Antoine stood up and reached for a meerschaum pipe, carved in the shape of a Moor’s head with a silver lid, from a rack above a tobacco jar. He filled it with tobacco.
‘I’d be wiser not to smoke,’ he said. ‘Tobacco’s getting scarce and Théo, who keeps me supplied, must be paying a small fortune for it. You don’t smoke?’
‘Not very often.’
‘That’s good.’
Jean hesitated. Was he going to tell him? Here in this shed, with its door open onto a wide beach of sand soaked by the last few days’ rain? The sea was quieter now, and empty. Order reigned inside the shed: nets meticulously tidied, oars leaning against the wall, every tool hanging in its place. A three-horsepower diesel motor, well greased, was hooked onto a trestle. Antoine followed Jean’s gaze.
‘A good little motor. I made do with it very nicely before the war. Now there’s no more fuel. I stripped it down to wait for happier days. It doesn’t have reverse, so the trick is to cut the throttle at the right moment. You can brake with the oars too, of course. Now I row with all my might and have a lateen sail. I never go far, but I usually come back with about ten kilos of fish. We keep what we need and Théo exchanges the rest for olive oil and sugar. We have everything we need …’
‘Aren’t you curious to know whose son I am?’
Antoine relit his pipe.
‘The annoying thing about the tobacco you get on the black market is that the smugglers sell it by weight. So they soak it. The first thing you have to do is dry it. You’re left with about half what you paid for … You want to know if I’m curious to hear whose son you are? Perhaps. Is it someone I know?’
‘Yes.’
‘Ah! Come with me. Let’s walk along the beach a bit. I like to stretch my legs. I’m almost always sitting down, in my boat or in my shed.’
They heard Marie-Dévote calling from the terrace of the hotel.
‘Antoine!’
He cupped his hands to his mouth.
‘We’re going for a stroll, we’ll be back.’
She gave a gentle wave and watched them go.
‘She’s a woman of complete, perfect goodness,’ he said. ‘A man as clumsy and demanding as me could have spoilt her, ruined her. She’s stayed the way she was when I met her. Better still, she’s improved. She had a good head on her shoulders and I didn’t even notice it. I only saw her body, only heard her lovely singsong accent.’
Jean was surprised to hear emotion in the voice of this man who had so rarely shown any. It was love: Antoine had stumbled on love, and love had not let him down. They took their shoes off and walked across the cool sand. The tramontana was shooing the last clouds towards the reddening horizon.
‘You know, it’s such a joy to walk barefoot, Jean. I learnt that here …’
He fell silent until they were at the far end of the beach, near a large grey rock.
‘Let’s go back now,’ he said. ‘So whose son are you?’
‘Geneviève’s.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘As sure as I can be.’
‘To tell you the truth, I had my suspicions, but I found it hard to believe that Marie-Thérèse would hide it from me. Idiotic woman! She kept us apart. In the name of what, I’d like to know! Propriety? Morality? Because of what people would say? It’s a disgrace, you know; I loved Geneviève. She led her life the way she wanted to, and so she should. Does she know you’re her son?’
‘She might have her suspicions too. I’m not sure. I have a feeling she might have decided, once and for all, that she never had a child.’
‘And where is she?’
‘In Lebanon.’
Antoine laughed and hung on to Jean’s arm. They were approaching the shuttered hotel.
‘So, in a nutshell, you’re my grandson. Do you know, I’m almost disappointed. I thought I’d found a stranger to love, someone I’d chosen consciously, a long way from all those family ties – I mean the compulsory sort of love people cultivate within the family circle – and now I discover we have the same blood
in our veins. In 1939, back when you met Théo and Toinette, I made up a story for my own amusement: Jean, that nice, straight, honest boy, would be the ideal match for my Toinette … She used to blush when she talked about you. At least we’ve avoided a catastrophe …’
‘Toinette’s your daughter.’
‘Is it very obvious?’
‘Yes.’
Antoine sighed.
‘I’m proud of her. I adore her. We all adore her.’
‘What about Théo?’
‘He can’t have children. You have to take him as he comes: talkative, sly, always with an eye to the main chance, but with a heart of gold. He likes mechanical things. At least we have something to talk about when we’re not talking about Toinette.’
Marie-Dévote had made tea in the kitchen. A cup of hot chocolate for Cyrille, a herbal tea for everyone else.
‘We don’t have any proper tea left,’ she said. ‘We make an infusion with the herbs from the mountain. It’s good for you …’
Jean, watching, compared Claude and Marie-Dévote, the young woman and the older, one reserved and fragile, the other outgoing and in the full bloom of her fairly commonplace beauty; yet a link had instantly united them: the blond child sitting in a high chair (Toinette’s when she had been small) with a napkin around his neck, drinking mouthfuls of hot chocolate and observing, without speaking, these strangers bending over him one after another with an anxious tenderness, because he had coughed twice as he walked into the kitchen. Jean liked the fact that Claude was not an over-anxious mother, with a suffocating tenderness towards her son. Whatever she did for him she did rapidly, skilfully, without words, and if he were honest, it might have made him jealous because she already loved Cyrille like a man, intelligently, not wanting to crush him. The only difference he noticed in Marie-Dévote’s kitchen was that, for once – and perhaps so as not to disappoint Marie-Dévote – she fussed a little more over her son, wiping the corners of his mouth and his hands covered in chocolate.
‘So lucky, you are,’ Marie-Dévote said. ‘Me too, I’d’ve liked to have a child.’
