All Our Wordly Goods (11 page)

That summer was particularly hot. After lunch, Agnès took her two children, Guy, who was seven, and Colette, whom she was still breastfeeding, to the Coudre Woods. The baby was asleep in the pram, under a gauze cover to protect her from the flies. Guy was playing with the pine cones, wiping his dirty hands on his mother’s skirt.
Agnès was sewing. After an hour, Madame Hardelot appeared, with Madame Florent at her heels.

‘Agnès, this child doesn’t have a hat on,’ Marthe remarked.

‘It doesn’t matter, Mother, there’s no sun here.’

‘There may be no sun but there’s a storm brewing.’

‘Look at this little girl; she laughs whenever she sees me,’ said Madame Florent.

The two grandmothers looked at the baby who was waking up, waving her arms about and crying shrilly. Each of them wanted to pick her up and rock her. The same scene took place ten times a day. Agnès waved a branch to shoo away the flies and mosquitoes that were stinging her bare arms and neck. After the two grandmothers had sufficiently upset the baby, they handed her over to her mother.

‘Poor little thing, she wants her mother. Don’t you, my darling, my little sweetie? Calm your daughter down. You don’t know what you’re doing. What’s wrong with her?’

‘She was happily sleeping and you woke her up.’

‘Me? But I didn’t touch her. It’s always the same. I won’t go near these children any more,’ said Madame Florent.

The pine needles were slippery. There was a sweet smell of decay. It was stiflingly hot. Earlier, Agnès had found a little silver ring in the Coudre Woods.

‘What’s that, Mama?’ her son asked.

‘It’s mine, my darling,’ she replied. ‘I lost it here ten years ago. I was going for a walk with your papa …’

She fell silent. She smiled. It was the first time they’d met here. She was listening to him talk and was unconsciously playing with the ring; it was too big and she’d dropped it; it rolled under some leaves. They tried to find it, but couldn’t and she’d come back the next day to look some more. And here it was; it had surfaced, after all these years. She wiped it on her skirt.

‘It’s funny that the soldiers didn’t find it …’

‘What soldiers?’

‘You know, my darling, the soldiers, the ones who were here during the war, when your papa was wounded.’

‘Mama, what’s this insect called?’

‘It’s an ant.’

The little boy stretched out on the ground, his cheek against the earth, watching the insect. Agnès tried to put the ring on, but it didn’t fit any more; she’d gained weight since she’d been feeding her daughter. She put down her sewing. She leaned on one elbow. She closed her eyes. Her dishevelled hair was tickling her neck. She was too tired to push it back. Lazy, fleeting thoughts ran through her mind.

It’s hot … I wish we were at the seaside. How annoying that I’ve made my blouse too tight; I’ll have to add an extra panel. ‘Guy, you’re getting your clothes all green, dragging yourself along the ground like that.’ I wonder if Pierre will come and find us? Ah, finally, some air. She sighed, as a puff of wind, a light breeze swept through the pine trees. Maybe there’ll be a storm?
I want to eat an ice cream, stretched out in the sand, or floating in the sea. ‘Guy, don’t roll around like that,’ she said out loud. ‘You’ll make yourself even hotter.’

The afternoon passed slowly, with nothing happening. She fed the baby. Guy, who wanted to climb a tree, fell and cut his knee. At three o’clock Madame Florent left; she wanted to stop by the bakery to order some cakes for dinner the next day.

As soon as she had gone Madame Hardelot, now calm (no one could usurp her place in the good graces of little Guy), remembered that she hadn’t supervised the ironing of the delicate linen. She hauled herself up, put on her hat over her grey hair and sighed. ‘Well, I’m going back, my dear. Don’t you rush. It’s really hot along the road!’

‘We’ll be back by six,’ said Agnès, knowing that if she got home a few minutes late, she would find Madame Hardelot leaning out of the window, watching the road and exclaiming, ‘Finally! I thought you’d died.’

Once her mother-in-law had gone, Agnès tried to pick up her sewing again; it fell from her warm fingers. At four o’clock she took from her bag some jam sandwiches, fruit and biscuits, and poured some cool water into Guy’s silver cup. ‘Come and eat something, Guy.’

Guy ate his jam sandwich and she watched the wispy clouds around the sun as it began its descent.

‘It’s impossibly hot, there’s bound to be a storm. No doubt the weather will take a turn for the worse when we’re at the seaside, it always does. It’s funny having found that ring. It’s been ten years since I lost
it. Only ten years … It seems longer. So much has happened …’

Absent-mindedly she traced some patterns in the earth with her embroidery needle. ‘If, back then, the maid hadn’t gossiped … If the Hardelot-Arques ladies hadn’t seen anything … If Saint-Elme hadn’t found out that “the Hardelot boy and Mademoiselle Florent were meeting secretly in the Coudre Woods”, then I’d be married to someone else now. Happily? Perhaps. How little it takes to turn the course of your life in a different direction.’

She had a sudden thought: ‘What is it that binds Pierre and me together so strongly? Why is it that as soon as we got married, we stopped living, suffering, being happy, thinking as individuals? Why have we become so totally one entity? There are couples who never manage it. It’s a great mystery and a great blessing.’

‘Guy, come here, what are you doing?’ she called out. ‘Stop throwing those pine cones around; you’re going to hurt yourself or your little sister.’

‘Mama, can I have your ring?’

‘No. What do you want it for?’

‘I want to play with it.’

‘It’s not a toy.’

Once again her thoughts wandered, fleeting and lazy: ‘My little girl is growing nicely. She’s going to have dark hair. She’s going to look like my mother-in-law, unfortunately … I heard that Simone Burgères is expecting. She’s a guest at the château every Sunday.
People must think that idea is tearing me apart. If they only knew … But it upsets Pierre. Men are so strange. What time is it? When is Pierre going to get here?’

It was gone five o’clock when she saw him. Whenever she saw him, whether they were alone or in the midst of a crowd, her face, her entire body leaned towards him, as if she were being physically pulled in his direction. And she didn’t even realise it.

They didn’t kiss. They smiled at each other and he dropped down on to the ground beside her.

‘It’s so hot.’

‘There’ll be a storm.’

‘My only consolation is the thought of Wimereux. We’ll be so happy by the sea … And all alone. Think of it, Pierre, all alone with our children.’

He looked upset. ‘Oh, my poor girl, Wimereux …’

‘What is it?’ she asked, worried.

‘I don’t think we’ll be able to go this year.’

‘What? Again? This is really too much. Every summer it’s the Burgères who get all the holidays and nothing for us.’

‘Come on, my darling, you’re not being fair. Roland takes his beach walks alone. No chance that his wife will tear herself away from the factory. That woman … when I think that I nearly married that woman!’

He took her hand. It was so strange; everything brought them closer, even their anger, even the anger they felt towards each other.

Nevertheless, Agnès was furious and she began
crushing pine cones between her fingers. ‘Your grandfather is an old tyrant,’ she said over and over again, ‘an old tyrant.’

‘You’ve only just noticed?’ he said. ‘It’s funny. You women are so funny. You endure the worst humiliations with a smile, but when it comes to three miserable weeks …’

‘But those three miserable weeks, alone with you, are my whole life. It’s …’

‘Oh, no, please, no scenes, my sweet. It’s not like you; you’re supposed to be calm, like a cool spring …’

‘No. Don’t think you can soften me up with compliments, thank you very much. Do you know what I think? You’re a coward. You’re getting just like your father. You don’t dare open your mouth in front of your grandfather.’

‘Listen, Agnès, I knew what to expect when we came back to Saint-Elme. And so did you.’

She wiped away the little tears of rage from the corners of her eyes. ‘But why? Did he at least give you a reason?’

‘Grandfather never gives reasons, my angel. He just says, “Now … Pierre … you will stay in Saint-Elme until 1 October. After that, you can go away.” ’

‘But where the hell does he think we can go after the first of October? Where? The Riviera? With small children?’

‘I can just picture it,’ he said, laughing. ‘The Pierre Hardelot family leaving Saint-Elme at the beginning of winter. My mother would have a fit. You know very
well that in our family you can only go away between 10 August and 5 September, unless there’s a war or mass migration.’

‘Even then, it happened at the end of August.’

‘You see.’

‘No, you’re making light of it, but what I’m saying is …’

‘But what do you want me to do about it?’

They bickered for a few moments. Their little boy ran round them, pretending he was a horse on a merry-go-round and that they were the carousel. They didn’t understand his game, so when he tripped over their legs and fell, they shouted, ‘Stop that, Guy! You’re so annoying. Why are you running round in circles like that?’

‘I don’t understand,’ Agnès finally exclaimed, ‘I don’t understand how it doesn’t upset you. Just think about what our life is like here, between your mother and mine. Never alone, never a moment of freedom, or privacy. But at Wimereux … Pierre, we’re alone, we’re together. We go home. We close our door …’

‘We do that here too,’ he whispered. ‘At night, we close our door and we’re in our own home. So … what more could you ask, Agnès?’

They fell silent. A reddish dust, tinged with sap, was rising above the pine trees. The sun was setting.

‘Mama, I’m hungry,’ said Guy.

Pierre looked at his watch. ‘Goodness me! We’re late. Hurry up, Agnès. Guy, get your toys together.’

Agnès put the empty bags from their tea, the thermos and the toy horse into the pram. ‘It’s so annoying,’ she thought. ‘And it’s so hot.’

They left the Coudre Woods and walked along the flat road, burning hot from the sun. They couldn’t wait for the cool darkness to come. They brushed aside the day, relegating it to the past, to obscurity, without a single regret. It had been one of the sweetest and most peaceful days of their lives. But they had no way of knowing that.

It was Julien Hardelot’s birthday. He was eighty-five. His family was preparing to celebrate the event in a particularly spectacular way. During the past few months the elderly man had suddenly grown weaker, become hunched with age. Recently he had blacked out briefly, which made the doctor fear that he would soon suffer a stroke. The Hardelots sensed that he wouldn’t be with them for long; it was obvious in the way they began talking about him. ‘Poor Julien,’ they’d say, ‘poor Grandfather.’ He was already benefiting from the kind of sympathy usually reserved for the dead, since the living feel different emotions, more heated and less charitable, towards their peers. When Julien Hardelot got angry, he no longer instilled fear; people just shook their heads. ‘Of course, he’s not himself any more,’ they’d say. His outbursts no longer frightened anyone, but rather evoked a kind of sad pity. They looked at his
purplish hands that seemed swollen, stiff, dead. They noticed the hollow sound of his voice. It was difficult to know exactly what the Hardelots were feeling; mostly curiosity, no doubt, about his Will. They thought that Burgères and the young Hardelot would be made partners. They tried to work out what Pierre would get. But everyone agreed that almost the entire fortune of the old man had gradually been sunk into the factory. ‘He thought big.’ He had taken over rival paper factories; new machinery had been brought over from the United States, at great expense. Roland Burgères had reaped the benefits of that; he’d been able to go to America twice, far away from his wife, all expenses paid.

Finally, in December 1924, they heard that Julien Hardelot was turning his business into a public company. At the news, all of Saint-Elme said the same thing: ‘He definitely thinks he’s finished. He’s doing it to avoid inheritance tax …’ To the family, another bad sign was his indulgence towards Agnès when it came to his eighty-fifth birthday celebrations. He announced that she would be invited — tolerated — at the dinner that, until now, Pierre had attended alone every year. For all those years, in a desperate, pathetic attempt to save face, Marthe Hardelot had told everyone that Agnès couldn’t join the family because she had to stay at home to look after the children. But Guy was eleven now; he would come along with his mother, and Marthe herself would forgo the dinner and stay at home with Colette. No one was taken in. ‘He’s not the man he used to be,’ people
kept saying. ‘He’s gone gaga; now he’s making up with Madame Pierre.’ This truly seemed proof he was nearing the end. Had the old man softened with age? Was it nothing more than a whim brought on by senility? ‘Not at all,’ said the two younger Hardelot spinsters (the older two had died at the end of the war of Spanish flu, within a few days of each other), ‘not at all. He knows very well that after he dies that young woman will be mistress of his house.’

The women tried to express what, as Hardelots, they vaguely but strongly sensed: that it was far better, far less humiliating to concede a small piece of authority while alive than to see oneself scorned or ignored after death. By receiving Agnès, he seemed to be saying, ‘I refused to let you past my front door, but
I
was the one who decided when your punishment would end. So
I
remain in control. No one’s going to say that you challenged my authority after my death.’

‘And, of course,’ thought Agnès, ‘he sees the afterlife as a time when his spirit will hover over Saint-Elme and the factory for all eternity.’

She felt anxious about the idea of going to his house. She held Guy’s hand tightly in hers; he was wearing long trousers for the first time. He was a thin child, sprightly, with a turned-up nose; his light-blond hair was all tousled at the top of his head like feathers. Ten times a day Agnès smoothed down his wild hair, in vain; it was almost like the silvery down of a little chick. He didn’t look like either Agnès or Pierre; the Florent and
Hardelot families, despite their best efforts, could not recall a single relative, no matter how distant, who shared any of Guy’s features. Pierre and Agnès sometimes joked, ‘He must have been switched with another baby in 1914, when everyone was running away.’ This was his last year of freedom at home. In September he would be sent away to the boarding school that his father and grandfather had attended.