by Allan Massie
‘Oh, slander! The intention is clear. First, to disturb me, deprive me of such peace of mind as I enjoy. Second, to persuade me to rid myself of Miriam. I have five children, superintendent, legitimate children, by my previous wives, and they all dislike me and resent Miriam. They’ve resented her from the start. Resentment is a feeling which festers, as you know. The letters may be followed by something worse, I can’t tell. As for Maurice, I am almost fond of him, he’s quite an engaging youth. But, for the others, I am too close to the grave to indulge in false sentiment.’
‘I can examine the letters,’ Lannes said. ‘I can, with your permission, question your children, your wife and grandson, though they will be under no obligation to answer my questions. And in the end, when I have stirred the pot, it’s likely I will have discovered nothing. Moreover my interference may precipitate something, as you say, more unpleasant. Finally, unless you choose to lodge an official complaint, demanding a formal inquiry . . . ’
‘No. Talk to them, all of them, as you please, but informally. Now I’m tired. Marthe will see you out. My thanks, superintendent with a Marshal’s name. I shall tell Judge Rougerie – I knew his father, a tiresome fellow – how grateful I am to him for granting me some of your valuable time.’
The rain had stopped. Lannes limped back across the public garden where drops still fell heavily from the branches of the chestnut trees, turned down the Cours Clemenceau and into the Allées de Tourny. Stendhal had written somewhere that he didn’t know a more beautiful street anywhere in France, and Lannes, Bordelais by birth and long residence, was content to agree. But this morning he had a sour taste in his mouth: the conversation, not the Armagnac. The taste of corruption . . . he couldn’t get the phrase out of his mind; it was as insistent as church bells.
He would go home for lunch, to the refuge of the family, without which, he often thought, he couldn’t endure his life as a policeman, his exposure to cruelty, viciousness, resentment, fear, brutality. Why, he now wondered, wasn’t the count’s grandson this ‘quite engaging youth’, Maurice, at the Front, crouched like his own Dominique in or behind the defences of the Maginot Line? They were the same age. What strings had been pulled to keep this Maurice out of the army?
The younger children, the twins, Alain and Clothilde, were already at table when he arrived in the apartment in the rue des Cordeliers, five minutes only from the Lycée Michel Montaigne which Alain attended and little more than that from Clothilde’s convent school. He leaned over and kissed the top of his daughter’s head. The onion-spiced smell of the ‘taurin’ rose from her plate and he realized that he was hungry. He took his place, poured himself a glass of Medoc and dipped his spoon in the soup.
Alain, resuming an argument that in one form or another had been going on for weeks now, said, ‘But, no matter what you say, it was a mistake, wrong indeed, to ban it and absurd also because it was first shown two years ago. Wrong, because not only is it a masterpiece of French cinema, something we can all be proud of, but also because it speaks the truth: war solves nothing. It is what the title says: La Grande Illusion. I for one don’t have any desire to die for Danzig.’
‘Nobody’s asking you to. You’re only seventeen. And besides now it isn’t a question of anyone dying for Danzig since the Boches have already taken it, it’s a question of France now, not of Poland.’
‘Clothilde, child,’ her mother said.
‘It’s easy for you,’ Alain said. ‘You’re a girl. But ask Papa. Did your war solve anything, Papa? Did being gassed and wounded at Verdun make for a better world?’
‘That sort of question’s dishonest,’ Clothilde said.
‘No, it’s not. It’s the whole point.’
Marguerite collected the soup-plates and took them through to the kitchen.
‘That’s enough of this argument,’ Lannes said. ‘Talking like this certainly solves nothing, and, more importantly, it distresses your mother.’
Who now brought in the main dish – blanquette de veau with haricot beans – and said, ‘Eat up now, or you won’t have time for dessert. And it’s your favourite flan, Clothilde.’
‘I do wish they wouldn’t argue like that,’ she said, when they had collected their bags and departed, bickering again. ‘It amazes me to reflect that they spent nine months together in my womb. Perhaps they quarrelled even then. Certainly I was never comfortable in that pregnancy, not like Dominique’s.’
‘Cat and dog. Yet they’re close to each other,’ Lannes said, as so often before. In any case, he thought, on this matter they’re both right. War solves nothing, certainly mine didn’t, and yet there are times when it becomes unavoidable. All the same, if it wasn’t a question of dying for Danzig – certainly not now, as Clothilde had remarked – what precisely were the young men, Dominique foremost among them, being required to risk death for?
‘There was a letter from him this morning,’ Marguerite said, slipping her hand below the top of her dress and withdrawing a folded piece of thin paper.
‘Dear Papa, Darling Maman,
Really we’re doing nothing here. We huddle round the stove and are so numbed with apathy and till the last few days cold too that some of us don’t trouble to wash or shave or even undress before going to bed ( It’s all right, maman, I still do myself – and brush my teeth). Even our officers, who are mostly reservists and not regulars, think no differently from us. So we ask every day, “Why not send us home since we are doing nothing to the point here, certainly nothing that’s of any use?” Lots are hoping for an arrangement and some are quite sure there will be one. “Just you wait and see,” a corporal said to me yesterday, “It’ll all be arranged. The English will get tired of it and climb down, and then we can all stop leading this life which is fit only for an imbecile, and forget all about little Adolf.” I don’t exactly share this view, you’ll understand, but I confess I have never been so bored in my life. If I didn’t have a dozen Maigret novels to hand, I would cut my throat. (Don’t worry, that’s a joke, maman.) I think every day of you both and of Alain and Clothilde, and say prayers for you every night. And I wish – but what’s the use? We have got ourselves into this fool of a war, and so we have to see it through. Maybe some good German – there must be some – will assassinate Hitler. That would be the best solution. I’m giving this to a friend who is just off on leave to post. So it won’t have to pass the military censor. No word of leave for me yet, alas. I send you all my love, Dominique’.
‘He’s a good boy, a really good boy,’ Lannes said, and put his arm round Marguerite who was in tears, and hugged her and kissed her.
There was a pile of paperwork awaiting him in his office. He sighed and pushed it aside. Most was routine: a few notes, a tick here and there, a question-mark perhaps, and then his scrawled initials, would be enough to dispose of it. And yet he couldn’t bring himself to attend to the task. Not for the first time, he thought: bureaucracy will one day smother police work.
He pushed his chair back, got to his feet, looked out of the window, across the Place de la Republiqué which was now almost deserted. The rain had started again, more heavily now than in the morning. There were yellow puddles in the roadway, and each time a car passed, it threw up big splashes of dirty water. Lannes stood there, a Gauloise stuck in the corner of his mouth, his right eye half-closed against the spiralling smoke.
It struck him as odd that in all his years in the city he had never heard of the Comte de Grimaud, and now the old man was so clearly fixed in his mind’s eye, and he seemed to hear the chirping of the canaries in their cage behind his chair, though they had been silent throughout his visit and he had indeed been scarcely aware of them then. Yet it wasn’t in fact so odd or remarkable, even if it was evident that the count was, or had been, a figure of some reputation. Bordeaux was a city of innumerable self-contained compartments. No doubt Rougerie could tell him more, if he chose. But again he wondered if there was some other connection between the judge and the count of which he was ignorant. His th
oughts ran in circles.
He returned to his desk, lit another cigarette, and took out the letters. They were dated, which was unusual, till he realized it was the count who had added the date on which he had received them.
The earliest went back several months. All were typed. It would no doubt be possible to identify the machine, something which he guessed the writer probably didn’t know. The first ones were couched in general terms, mere unspecific abuse. The countess was accused of immorality, but no lovers were named: she was a Jewish whore. It was only later that she became a corrupter of youth, and it was only in the last letter that the boy Maurice was named. There was no threat of public disclosure, no hint of blackmail. Was the intention only to disgust the old man, or to prompt him to discard, then divorce, his wife? Only the last letter was truly disgusting: Miriam was a piece of Jewish filth, sucking, sucking, sucking – the word was repeated three times and underlined – the young Maurice into the Jewish cesspit and the stench of her ghetto-cunt.
Madness, Lannes thought. How could Grimaud bring himself to retain such filth, not consign it straightaway to the fire where it belonged? Had it excited the old man as much as it disgusted Lannes? Did he, deep down in the recesses of is being, indulge himself in picturing his wife enjoying congress with her lover, the boy of twenty who was his grandson and ‘quite an attractive youth’?
There was a knock at the door. Lannes thrust the letters into the drawer of his desk, as if to be discovered reading them would be shameful.
It was Joseph, the old office messenger, fellow-veteran of that other war, which had cost him his left arm. He handed Lannes a note from Judge Rougerie suggesting that, if convenient, he would be pleased to see Lannes at five o’clock
‘There’s a lady to see you, won’t give her name, but says it’s in connection with the visit you made this morning. She’s a bit of a Tartar if you ask me.’
‘Won’t do her any harm to wait then. Show her in, in ten minutes.’
When Lannes had followed the children out of the apartment, Marguerite cleared the table, did the washing-up, then settled herself to reply to Dominique’s letter.
‘It’s so sad, darling, that you have no word of leave. We all miss you so much, my lamb, but perhaps, as you say, things will be arranged and then you can come home and resume your studies. If only . . . I try not to worry about you, but don’t always succeed. These are bad times for everyone, though the way your brother and sister scrap in the same old style you might think that nothing had changed. They get on my nerves, I have to confess, and then I suddenly feel happy because they are going on as they have always done. You know what they’re like, it’s a joke we have always shared, isn’t it? And then I feel a hollow pit in my stomach because you aren’t here to give me that tender and understanding smile of yours. I worry about your father too. He has always been inclined to melancholia, as you know, but now it’s as if he is weighed down by responsibility and a sense of oppression. Sometimes he wishes he was not a policeman. ‘We pursue the wrong people much of the time,’ he said the other day. Of course, as you know, I never inquire about his cases because he has always been determined to keep his horrid work apart from family life, and I approve of that. But now he has this dreadful one that has been hanging over him unsolved for a couple of weeks, and what makes it worse is that he knew the victim – we both knew him actually – when he was young. And he thinks of that time as his golden days before he was sucked into the morass of his work. Then, like me, he worries terribly about you, my lamb, and what you are experiencing, having been through it himself in his war . . . ’
She stopped, laid her pen down and blotted the last line. It was impossible, a letter she couldn’t send.
Folding the paper she put it away in the top right-hand drawer of her desk, along with other letters to Dominique she hadn’t sent because they would make him unhappy, and wrote another, determinedly cheerful, full of little pieces of news, expressing nothing of what she felt, concealing her fears and longing for the boy.
The woman whom Joseph ushered in wore a black coat and a high broad-rimmed hat like an exaggerated version of a trilby. Her gloves were black too, and you only had to look at her pursed lips to judge that she lived in a chronic state of dissatisfaction.
‘I’ve been waiting forty-five minutes,’ she said.
‘Did you have an appointment?’
‘An appointment?’
It was as if she didn’t know the word, or as if appointments were not for her.
‘You are Superintendent Lannes? Very well, I must speak with you.’
‘You have the advantage of me.’
Since he was already on his feet, he busied himself raking out the stove to get a better glow. Then he lit a cigarette and settled himself again behind his desk.
‘Do you think it polite to smoke in the presence of a lady without so much as asking her permission?’
‘In her house, no. Here, in my office, well, that’s a different matter, especially since you have not troubled to make an appointment. In any case, you didn’t come here to tell me not to smoke. So what is the purpose of your visit.’
The strong cloying scent in which she had drenched herself didn’t altogether mask the sickly smell of unwashed flesh. He drew on his Gauloise.
‘I have never been in a police station before,’ she said. ‘I wouldn’t have thought I ever would be. It’s quite foreign to me.’
‘That’s the experience of a great many people who nevertheless find themselves here. Would you care to tell me your name, Madame?’
Again she hesitated, then, the words coming in a rush, said, ‘It’s these letters, these abominable letters. You must know, my father wrote them himself. It’s a game he’s playing, a nasty game, not the first such, I must tell you, calling you in to investigate.’
‘Your father is the Comte de Grimaud.’
‘Of course.’
As if his question had been impertinent!
‘And you are?’
‘Madame Thibualt de Polmont. I am his eldest daughter. But that is not to the point. You must have realized, unless you are stupid, that he is senile. He indulges in fantasies, sick, disgusting fantasies. I have come to tell you to pay no attention to them.’
‘Your father assured me that no one else knew of these letters – except of course their author – and that he had shown them to nobody.’
‘I tell you again, he is senile.’
‘In that case, a sad and painful business.’ Lannes said. ‘You have my sympathy, Madame. But tell me, you have actually read these letters?’
‘They’re disgusting. There was no need to read them. I know my father.’
‘I see. Do you live in his house, Madame?’
‘But certainly, since I was widowed. I thought it my duty to return. To care for him.’
‘Isn’t that normally a wife’s task?’
‘I see very well you don’t know my stepmother, though it’s too ridiculous to call her that, seeing she is twenty years my junior. But that is immaterial. It’s a large house as you will have seen for yourself, a family house. Where else, pray, should I have gone in my widowhood?’
Lannes shuffled the papers on his desk, then lit another cigarette. Really he didn’t want to keep her there any longer, and not only on account of that disagreeable smell. Was she, he wondered, conscious of it herself? Perhaps he should thank her for coming and say that in view of what she had told him, the matter might be regarded as closed. Yet he was curious – the old man hadn’t appeared senile. So, instead, ‘It’s helpful to have your opinion, Madame. Meanwhile however it would assist me to send in a report saying that in my view no further action or investigation is required, if you would be kind enough to answer a few questions. Would you say that your father’s marriage, which is, I understand, his fourth, is unsatisfactory, even unhappy?’
‘How could it be otherwise?’
‘On account of the disparity in age?’
‘On account of who she
is and what she is.’
‘And yet they are still together, they haven’t separated?’
‘She looks forward to being a widow, Madame la Comtesse. That’s all I have to say about her.’
‘And the allegations in the letters? Do they have any foundation? I value your opinion, Madame.’
‘My father must think so, since he wrote them, which he didn’t do only for his own amusement, you may be sure, but, if you mean, does she bring her lovers to the house, then certainly not. I would never permit it. Nor would my brother, the vicomte.’
‘I see. There are six of you, I believe. Brothers and sisters.’
‘Five, and one deceased. My youngest sister, Marie-France, was taken from us.’ She made the sign of the Cross. ‘It was the Lord’s will. And my younger half-brother, Edmond, is rarely in Bordeaux. He lives chiefly in Paris, where he is a man of some influence, the editor of a review which is well-spoken of, and engages in politics. So there is Jean-Christophe, the vicomte, who is my full brother, and our two half-sisters, Juliette and Thérèse. They have never married and it’s too late for them now.’
‘And you are quite certain your father wrote the letters which he assured me he had shown to nobody till he gave them to me? You don’t suspect your brother or your sisters of being the writer? I ask because, if you will forgive me for saying so, it has unfortunately been my experience that letters of this nature are very often written by spinster ladies. I don’t wish to offend you by making this suggestion.’
‘It’s easy to see you don’t know my half-sisters, superintendent. Juliette’ – she sniffed loudly – ‘aspires to be a saint and occupies herself with charitable works, while poor Thérèse lives in a world of her own, and has done for years, ever since. But that’s not to the point. Which is indeed that my father is not only senile, but also bored. He wrote these letters to make trouble. That’s his only amusement now. Which is also why he called you in. You may take my word for it. After all, I’ve known him all my life. I know what he’s capable of.’
