Suite Francaise (33 page)

From her seat, Lucile could see their German officer at the window; for a few days now he’d had the regiment’s Alsatian with him. He was in Gaston Angellier’s room, sitting at the Louis XIV desk; he emptied the ashes from his pipe into the blue cup that the elder Madame Angellier used for her son’s herbal tea; he tapped his heel absent-mindedly against the gilt bronze mounts that supported the table. The dog had put his snout on the German’s leg; he barked and pulled on his chain.

“No, Bubi,” the officer told him, in French, and loud enough for Lucile to hear (in this quiet garden, all sound hung in the air for a long time, as if carried by the gentle breeze), “you can’t go running about. You will eat all these ladies’ lettuces and they will not be happy with you; they will think we are all bad-mannered, crude soldiers. You must stay where you are, Bubi, and look at the beautiful garden.”

“What a child!” Lucile thought. But she couldn’t help smiling.

The officer continued, “It’s a shame, isn’t it, Bubi? You would love to make holes in the garden with your nose, I’m sure. If there were a small child in the house it would be different . . . He’d call us over. We’ve always got along well with small children . . . But here there are only two very serious ladies, very silent and . . . we’re better off staying where we are, Bubi!”

He waited another moment and when Lucile said nothing, he seemed disappointed. He leaned further out of the window, saluted her and asked with excessive politeness, “Would it inconvenience you in any way, Madame, if I were to ask your permission to pick the strawberries in your flower beds?”

“Make yourself at home,” said Lucile with bitter irony.

The officer saluted again. “I wouldn’t take the liberty of asking you for myself, I assure you, but this dog loves strawberries. I would point out, as well, that it is a French dog. He was found in an abandoned village in Normandy, during a battle, and taken in by my comrades. You wouldn’t refuse to give your strawberries to a fellow Frenchman.”

“We must be idiots,” thought Lucile. But all she said was, “Come, both of you, and pick whatever you like.”

“Thank you, Madame,” the officer exclaimed happily and immediately jumped out of the window, the dog following behind.

The two of them came up to Lucile; the German smiled. “I hope you don’t mind me asking, Madame. Please do not think me rude. It’s just that this garden, these cherry trees, it all seems like a little corner of paradise to a simple soldier.”

“Did you spend the winter in France?” Lucile asked.

“Yes. In the north, confined to the barracks and the café by the bad weather. I was billeted with a poor young woman whose husband had been taken prisoner two weeks after they got married. Whenever she saw me in the hallway she started to cry. As for me, well, it made me feel like a criminal. Though it wasn’t my fault . . . and I could have told her I was married too, and separated from my wife by the war.”

“You’re married?”

“Yes. Does that surprise you? Married four years. A soldier four years.”

“But you’re so young!”

“I’m twenty-four, Madame.”

They fell silent. Lucile took up her embroidery. The officer knelt on the ground and began picking strawberries; he held them in the palm of his hand and let Bubi come and find them with his wet black nose.

“Do you live here alone with your mother?”

“She’s my husband’s mother; he’s a prisoner of war. You can ask the cook for a plate for your strawberries.”

“Oh, all right . . . Thank you, Madame.”

After a moment he came back with a big blue plate and continued picking strawberries. He offered some to Lucile who took a few and then told him to have the others. He was standing in front of her, leaning against a cherry tree.

“Your house is beautiful, Madame.”

The sky had become hazy, cloaked in a light mist, and in this softer light the house took on a pinkish ochre colour, like certain eggshells; as a child, Lucile had called them “brown eggs” and thought they tasted more delicious than the snow-white ones most of the hens laid. This memory made her smile. She looked at the house, its bluish slate roof, its sixteen windows with their shutters (carefully left only slightly ajar so the spring sunshine couldn’t fade the tapestries), the great rusty clock over the entrance that no longer sounded the hour and whose glass cover mirrored the sky.

“You think it’s beautiful?” she asked.

“One of Balzac’s characters might live here. It must have been built by a wealthy provincial notary who retired to the countryside. I imagine him, at night, in my room, counting out his gold coins. He was a freethinker, but his wife went to first Mass every morning, the one whose bells I hear ringing on my way back from night manoeuvres. His wife would have been blonde, with a rosy complexion and a large cashmere shawl.”

“I’ll ask my mother-in-law who built this house,” said Lucile. “My husband’s parents were landowners, but in the nineteenth century there must have been notaries, lawyers and doctors, and before that farmers. I know there was a farm here a hundred and fifty years ago.”

“You’ll ask? You don’t know? Doesn’t it interest you, Madame?”

“I don’t know,” said Lucile, “but I can tell you about the house where I was born; I can tell you when it was built and by whom. I wasn’t born here. I just live here.”

“Where were you born?”

“Not far from here, but in another province. In a house in the woods . . . where the trees grow so close to the sitting room that in summer their shadows bathe everything in a green light, just like an aquarium.”

“There are forests where I live,” said the officer. “Very big forests. People hunt all day long.” After thinking for a moment he added, “An aquarium, yes, you’re right. The sitting-room windows are dark green and cloudy, like water. There are also lakes where we hunt wild duck.”

“Will you be getting leave soon so you can go home?” asked Lucile.

Joy flashed across the officer’s face. “I’m leaving in ten days, Madame, a week from Monday. Since the beginning of the war I’ve only had one short leave at Christmas, less than a week. Oh, Madame, we look forward to our leave so much! We count the days. We hope. And then we get there and we realise we don’t speak the same language any more.”

“Sometimes,” murmured Lucile.

“Always.”

“Are your parents still alive?”

“Yes. My mother will probably be sitting in the garden right now, like you, with a book and some embroidery.”

“And your wife?”

“My wife,” he said, “is waiting for me, or rather, she’s waiting for someone who went away four years ago and who will never return . . . Absence is a very strange thing!”

“Yes,” sighed Lucile.

And she thought of Gaston Angellier. There are some women who expect to welcome back the same man, and some who expect a different man from before, she said to herself. Both are disappointed. She forced herself to picture the husband she hadn’t seen for a year, and what he must be like now, suffering, consumed with longing (but for his wife or his hatmaker in Dijon?). She wasn’t being fair; he must be devastated by the humiliation of the defeat, the loss of so much wealth . . . Suddenly, the sight of the German was painful to her (no, not the German himself, but his uniform, that peculiar almond-green colour verging on grey, his jacket, his shiny bright boots). She pretended she had some work to do in the house and went inside. From her room she could see him walking up and down the narrow path between the large pear trees, their arms stretched out, heavy with blossom. What a beautiful day . . . Gradually the light began to fade, making the branches of the cherry trees look bluish and airy, like powder puffs. The dog walked quietly beside the officer, now and again rubbing his nose into the young man’s hand. The officer stroked him gently each time. He wasn’t wearing a hat: his silvery blond hair shone in the sunlight. Lucile saw him looking at the house.

“He’s intelligent and well-mannered. But I’m glad he’ll be leaving soon. It pains my poor mother-in-law to see him living in her son’s room. Passionate souls are so simple,” she thought. “She hates him and that’s all there is to it. People who can love and hate openly, consistently, unreservedly, are so lucky. Meanwhile, here I am, on this beautiful day, confined to my bedroom because that gentleman wants to take a little walk. It’s too ridiculous.”

She closed the window, threw herself down on the bed and continued reading. She persevered until dinner time, but she was half asleep over her book, tired from the heat and bright light. When she entered the dining room her mother-in-law was already at her usual place opposite the empty chair where Gaston always sat. She was so pale and rigid, her eyes so raw from crying, that Lucile was frightened.

“What’s happened?” she asked.

“I wonder . . .” replied Madame Angellier, clasping her hands together so tightly that Lucile could see her nails turning white, “I wonder why you ever married Gaston?”

There is nothing more consistent in people than their way of expressing anger. Madame Angellier’s way was normally as devious and subtle as the hissing of a serpent; Lucile had never endured such an abrupt, harsh attack. She was less indignant than upset; suddenly she realised how much her mother-in-law must be suffering. She remembered their melancholy, affectionate and deceitful black cat who would purr, then slyly lash out with her claws. Once she even went for the cook’s eyes, nearly blinding her. That was the day her litter of kittens had been drowned. After that she’d disappeared.

“What have I done?” Lucile asked quietly.

“How could you, here, in his house, outside his windows, with him gone, a prisoner, ill perhaps, abused by these brutes, how could you smile at a German, speak with such familiarity to a German? It’s inconceivable!”

“He asked my permission to go into the garden to pick some strawberries. I couldn’t exactly refuse. You’re forgetting he’s in charge here now, unfortunately . . . He’s being polite, but he could take whatever he wants, go wherever he pleases and even throw us out into the street. He wears kid gloves to claim his rights as a conqueror. I can’t hold that against him. I think he’s right. We’re not on a battlefield. We can keep all our feelings deep inside. Superficially at least, why not be polite and considerate? There’s something inhuman about our situation. Why make it worse? It isn’t . . . it isn’t reasonable, Mother.” Lucile spoke so passionately that she surprised even herself.

“Reasonable!” exclaimed Madame Angellier. “But my poor girl, that word alone proves you don’t love your husband, that you’ve never loved him and you don’t even miss him. Do you think that
I
try to be reasonable? I can’t bear the sight of that officer. I want to rip his eyes out. I want to see him dead. It may not be fair, or humane, or Christian, but I am a mother. Being without my son is torture. I hate the people who have taken him away from me, and if you were a real wife, you wouldn’t have been able to bear that German being near you. You wouldn’t have been afraid of appearing uncouth, rude, or ridiculous. You would have simply got up and, with or without an excuse, walked away. My God! That uniform, those boots, that blond hair, that voice, and that look of good health and contentment, while my poor son . . .”

She stopped and began to cry.

“Come on now, Mother . . .”

But Madame Angellier became even more enraged. “I wonder why you ever married him!” she exclaimed again. “For his money, for his land no doubt, honestly . . .”

“That’s not true. You know very well it’s not true. I got married because I was a little goose, because Papa said, ‘He’s a good man. He’ll make you happy.’ I never imagined he’d start being unfaithful to me with a hatmaker from Dijon as soon as we got married!”

“What? . . . What on earth are you talking about?”

“I’m talking about my marriage,” Lucile said bitterly. “At this very moment a woman in Dijon is knitting Gaston a sweater, making him sweetmeats, sending him packages and probably writing ‘My poor sweetheart, I’m so lonely without you tonight, in our great big bed.’ ”

“A woman who loves him,” muttered Madame Angellier, her lips becoming as thin and sharp as a razor, and turning the colour of faded hydrangea.

“At this very moment,” Lucile thought to herself, “she would cheerfully kick me out and have the hatmaker here instead,” and with the treachery present in even the best of women, she insinuated, “It’s true he loves her . . . a lot . . . You should see his chequebook. I found it in his desk when he left.”

“He’s spending money on her?” cried Madame Angellier, horrified.

“Yes; and I couldn’t care less.”

There was a long silence. They could hear the familiar sounds of evening: the neighbour’s radio sending out a series of piercing, plaintive, droning notes, like Arab music or the screeching of crickets (it was the BBC of London distorted by interference), the mysterious murmuring of some stream hidden in the countryside, the insistent croak of a thirsty frog praying for rain. In the room, the copper lamp that hung from the ceiling—rubbed and polished by so many generations that it had lost its pink glow and was now the pale, yellow colour of a crescent moon—shone down on the two women sitting at the table. Lucile felt sad and remorseful.

“What’s wrong with me?” she thought. “I should have just let her criticise me and said nothing. Now she’ll get even more upset. She’ll want to make excuses for her son, patch things up between us. God, how tedious!”

Madame Angellier didn’t say a word for the rest of the meal. After dinner they went into the sitting room, where the cook announced the Viscountess de Montmort. This lady, naturally, did not associate with the middle-class people of the village; she wouldn’t invite them into her home any more than she would her farmworkers. When she needed a favour, however, she would come to their homes to make the request with the simplicity, ingenuousness and innocent superiority of the “well-bred.” The villagers didn’t realise that when she dropped by, dressed like a chambermaid, wearing a little red felt hat with a pheasant feather that had seen better days, she was demonstrating the profound scorn she felt towards them even more clearly than if she had stood on ceremony: after all, they didn’t get dressed up to go to a neighbouring farm to ask for a glass of milk. Her deception worked. “She’s not stuck-up,” they all thought when they met her. Nevertheless, they treated her with extraordinary condescension—and they were just as unaware of it as the Viscountess was of her feigned humility.