The Foundling Boy (29 page)

‘Jean, your film’s at six. We’ve got time for a quick stroll before the boat leaves. This is not an adieu, it’s an au revoir. You’ve been the most delightful companion, and right from the off I liked you, I can’t think why. Possibly because I can be myself. Anyway, you’ve understood that caution demands one doesn’t do the same with everybody. One day I’ll tell you more, and we’ll go for another wonderful spin together. Now I need to be serious: I’ve almost reached the bottom of the barrel, and if I don’t want to end up in jail very soon I need to set up some pretty big ventures. Take note … Only small-timers end up in prison. Never those of us with stature and ambition. For your immediate future I don’t know what to suggest, except that it would be better for you not to hide yourself away at Grangeville. The countryside’s all very pretty, but it doesn’t lead anywhere.’

‘My parents—’

‘Yes, you’re a good son. Wait a while, and things will soon become clearer. Reflect, observe, learn to judge your fellow human beings and see through them.’

‘You were really cruel to my friend Joseph.’

‘Cruel? You must be mad. He was delighted with his lunch, and thinking that he was shining at my expense. He’s a charming boy, without a single original thought in his head: he borrows from everywhere and has no idea how to be selective. I have the impression that you know already how to be selective …’

They walked along the pebble beach whipped by the wind. Above them gulls hovered, motionless, then plummeted like stones into the trough of the swell.

‘I’d love to go to England again,’ Jean said, ‘come with you on the ferry, have a drink in the pub at Newhaven where Mrs Pickett gets drunk every night, then go to London and meet my friend Salah, see the prince and perhaps Mademoiselle Geneviève … At the same
time I’m happy to be back here in my shell, now that you’re going … There are reasons.’

‘Have you left your love affair behind?’

‘No, not really. But Grangeville’s the only place where I’ll get rid of it for good. You can’t imagine how disgusted with myself I feel when I think of Mireille.’

‘Then you’re getting better … Come on, come and see me off, and don’t forget my address. I have a feeling we’ll be seeing one another quite soon.’

From the dockside Jean made out Palfy’s outline as he handed his suitcase to a steward and stood at the rail until the packet cast off. They exchanged a discreet wave. As the boat moved into the Channel they lost sight of each other, and Jean felt at once a gap in his life from Palfy’s absence, though he had only known him for a few days. From now on things were going to feel very unexciting, and Joseph Outen would not be able to distract him from the bitter realities he found himself faced with.

Joseph was waiting outside the youth club, where he had hired a room at his own expense to show his repertoire of film classics. About a dozen young men were with him, members of the Rowing Club who had come purely to please him and were unimpressed by the supposed interest of old films that had gone out of fashion. Joseph hid his disappointment. Yet another. The bookshop was going downhill, and the film-club venture was going to eat up his last francs. The copy of
Hallelujah!
turned out to be as scratched and worn as it could possibly be, and the youth club’s loudspeakers were so defective that the film’s moving negro spirituals sounded more like a chorus of flayed cats. Joseph refused to admit the sad truth: with the resources he had available, he was simply vandalising the ‘classics’. When the lights went up and he suggested a discussion about King Vidor’s message, there was a shuffling of feet and every member of the audience had an urgent appointment. Jean stayed behind with his
friend, who took him to a bar-tabac at the port for a beer.

‘I’ll get there!’ Joseph declared. ‘I’ll shake them up, get them thinking. You’ll help me.’

‘How? I have to earn a living urgently. I haven’t even got enough to get the bus back to Grangeville.’

‘Good Lord, why didn’t you tell me?’

‘I’m telling you.’

‘Here’s ten francs. It’s all I’ve got on me. Let’s meet during the week. When are you going to start training?’

‘As soon as I can.’

‘You mustn’t give it up, you have a talent. How many press-ups are you on now?’

‘A hundred. Mireille wore me out in the last few days at Roquebrune.’

‘You didn’t pick it up again on the way back?’

‘I’d like to have seen Palfy’s expression, watching me do
press-ups
every morning.’

‘I didn’t like the man. I expect you noticed. His money doesn’t impress me. He’d do better to spend some time improving his mind. Oh well, you can’t always choose your travelling companions. Drop in at the bookshop during the week, I’ll think about your problem, but these days life is hard, the crisis is hitting everybody.’

That evening, at the rectory, Jean opened his notebook and wrote:

At six in the morning the abbé woke Jean.

‘I have no one to serve mass. Will you come, as you used to when you were a pious little boy?’

‘Yes, Monsieur l’abbé.’

In a church numb with cold, lit by two mean yellow bulbs and a few candles, a moving, simple mass took place that was attended by three old women and a young man on his knees at a prie-dieu, his face hidden in his hands. After the ‘Ite, missa est’ the three women
stayed behind, telling their rosary, and the young man crept towards the door as though he wanted to hide, but Jean was certain that the devout early-riser deep in prayer had been Michel du Courseau. Jean did not take communion, and when he was in the sacristy afterwards, helping the priest to take off his chasuble and alb, Monsieur Le Couec said to him sadly, ‘That mass was intended for you, my dear Jean. You must have had your reasons for not taking communion, which I respect and shall not enquire further about. Let’s go and have a bowl of coffee.’

The penury of the rectory was such that the abbé heated up his coffee over a spirit lamp, and for breakfast buttered two thick slices of a brown loaf he was given by one of the farmers every week.

‘And now what will you do, my boy? We hoped you would go on with your studies. It’s possible, there are scholarships—’

‘I want to earn a living straight away. But what can I do here?’

‘That is a very good question. Antoine du Courseau has gone, but we could speak to Madame du Courseau.’

‘She doesn’t like me.’

‘You’re wrong. Obviously there was that regrettable story—’

‘I didn’t do it.’

‘Time has passed. She’s a charitable woman.’

‘When she’s sure everyone around her will get to hear about it.’

The priest smiled and nodded his head.

‘At your age it’s a little sad to possess so few illusions. You’re undoubtedly right. So let us make her think that everyone in Grangeville who matters will hear about her tireless generosity towards her gardener’s son.’

They began to list a number of others who might be willing to help Jean.

‘The Malemorts?’ the abbé wondered. ‘Hmm … alas, I fear that
their own situation is not very splendid. The marquis has dismissed two farm workers, and I’m not sure I can see you working on a farm. There’s the Longuets …’

Jean snorted, and the abbé reddened. He still had a soft spot for Madame Longuet and felt sincerely sorry for her having a crook for a husband and a future thug for a son. He felt that she was a victim. She had, apparently, pleaded the Arnauds’ cause in vain to her intractable husband.

In the end it was Joseph Outen who found a job for Jean, at
La Vigie.
The newspaper also printed announcements, handbills, menus and cards. A dozen women made up the orders, and Jean stored them and delivered them in a van. It did not demand great genius, just physical strength and a character sufficiently cheerful to be able to withstand the crudity of the supervisor, a man named Grosjean who had fulfilled Jean’s own role for nearly twenty years and whose promotion at his career’s end, elevating him to the rank of supervisor, had dangerously intoxicated him. Jean left Grangeville on foot at six in the morning, started work at eight, and finished at six. In his lunch break he had a sandwich and went to Dieppe Rowing Club, where he rowed and trained with weights for an hour before going to see his mother in hospital.

Jeanne was not on the road to recovery. In truth she had quickly become used to the relative comfort of the ward on which she lived alongside several women older than she. Driven out of the place she had long considered her home, she found a ready-made community there, and unexpected company. Her neighbours’ chatter delighted her and she realised that until that point in her life she had only ever talked to her family circle. The women’s gossip, their fears and dreams, their nasty comments, opened up an unknown world to her. And for the first time in her life there were people serving
her and she enjoyed it. The sound of the trolley that brought her meals – the only interludes of those long days that began with the taking of her temperature and ended with her nightly infusion – filled her with pleasure. It made her quite forget the visitors sitting at her bedside, who suddenly discovered that their charitable gesture no longer interested the patient, who was overcome with joy instead at a very average hospital lunch. She rambled incoherently, especially with Jean and Albert, managed to mix up Madame du Courseau, Antoinette and the marquise de Malemort, and then the abbé Le Couec and Monsieur Cliquet, all of whom left each time with the impression that the doctors were keeping Jeanne captive, and that her stay in bed was making her weaker and weaker. Jean contemplated her with a sinking heart, remembering how often this half-disoriented woman, too unsteady on her feet to walk without help, had been good to him, how she had opened her heart to a baby abandoned in a Moses basket on her doorstep. He would have liked to question her – perhaps she knew the truth – but was afraid to upset her any more than she already seemed to be. Each time he saw her she asked him to tell her again the story of his papal blessing in Rome, and each time he patiently started again and watched her face take on a look of delight and serenity, her hands clasped together on the coarse brown bedspread.

Jean worked hard to erase his memories of recent weeks and was relieved to find that Mireille was easily forgotten, although her image nagged at him on certain nights so violently that it produced a real, physical pain. He did his utmost, walking, rowing and lifting weights, discovering that his youth required an almost demented expenditure of physical energy to resist the temptations of memory and imagination. He still had not seen Chantal de Malemort, and in a way he dreaded their eventual inevitable meeting, as if she would
instantly be able to see on his face that he was no longer the same, that some inner torment had devoured him and left him changed, even after it subsided. Antoinette on the other hand used every ruse she knew to meet him, and he could not avoid her. On the pretext of visiting the house her mother was building at Grangeville, she walked over from Malemort every afternoon and waited for Jean at the top of the hill. He would see her at the last bend and slow his pace. As night fell they walked on side by side, Antoinette talking volubly, Jean saying little, answering with a yes or no. He could not understand why she now came looking for him after having behaved so casually towards him before, but Antoinette, who was more perceptive, had guessed without him saying so that something had happened, something that had spoilt the memory of her joyous reward for his bac. Now she wished she could forget him, for the bitterness of other flings whose short-lived pleasure had never come near the state of sweet tenderness she had felt with him had torn away the veil: it was Jean and no one else that she loved, fled from, and tempted back, and the certainty of being able to lure him back every time had concealed the one fact that makes love insistent and nearly unbearable: its fragility. Jean’s absence, which was now no longer a physical absence but the absence of a response, profoundly distressed Antoinette without her being able to name the feeling that drove her to look for him every time she could slip away without attracting her mother’s attention.

One evening she succeeded in persuading him to come with her to visit the new house. It smelled of fresh plaster, varnish and paint. The electricity had not yet been connected, so she lit a candle which they took with them as they pushed open squeaking doors and wandered through deserted rooms. The new floor creaked sharply under their feet. Antoinette led Jean by the hand through the labyrinth
of bedrooms and bathrooms to a room that faced north for Michel to paint in and set up his printing press. Jean said nothing, and his silence put Antoinette into a state of panic. She could not understand, she did not understand anything any more, and looked desperately for the slightest sign that might bring back the closeness they had had before. Why didn’t he speak, why didn’t he hold her hand more tightly? In one of the rooms a bed had been set up for a cabinetmaker from Caen who had worked there for several days. Antoinette pulled Jean down onto the bare mattress. Despite the discomfort and the chill of the unheated house, she felt a pleasure so intense that afterwards she burst into tears. The candle’s harsh glow lit her wet face with grimacing shadows and Jean was touched to see her suddenly ugly, stripped of her attractiveness.