The Foundling Boy (32 page)

‘And I suggest you don’t start that again,’ he said, retrieving his cap from the dirt.

Jean got off with a bruised lower stomach for the next fortnight. It might have been worse. But Gontran, with a split cheek and black eye, was the laughing stock of Grangeville. He no longer hung around Mademoiselle de Malemort. Joseph Outen, hearing what had happened, drew a moral from it.

‘The truth is, you don’t know how to fight. It’s a gap in your education. I know a Japanese man here who gives judo lessons. Go and enrol—’

‘No money.’

‘He’s a saint. He teaches for the greater love of Buddha.’

Jean attended the classes a dozen times and gave up. It was asking too much of his strength, when training was intensifying at Dieppe Rowing Club. In June he competed with Joseph in a coxed pair for the club heats and won. Two weeks later they faced the Rouen club. Fifty metres before the finish, they were leading and on the point of winning when Joseph drove his blade in too deeply. The scull nearly capsized and they came third. Joseph refused to accept the defeat and, blaming the equipment, gave up rowing. He was in any case at a period of great decisions in his life, and at the same time quit his job as sports editor at
La Vigie
, wound up the film club, sold his books and furniture, keeping only his Littré,
14
a bed, and a table and chair that he set up in a servant’s room in an attic overlooking the port. He had wasted too much time. He was going to write a book, something completely new, in which he would make clear, by means of fiction, that humanity lives in a prison so long it refuses to divest itself of its need for love and money. He intended to finish by September, just in time for the NRF
15
to publish it before the prize season. A representative of that house had confirmed to him that they were urgently looking for new manuscripts. If the NRF could not promise him their full support for the Goncourt,
16
he would give his novel to Grasset.

‘I’m taking holy orders,’ he said to Jean. ‘You understand what that means: blinkers on. Don’t disturb me for anything. Find yourself another crew member at the Club. It wasn’t the equipment that let me down at Rouen, it was me who let the equipment down. I wasn’t where I should have been. I was already in my book …’

A few days later, when he visited the hospital to see his mother, Jean was surprised to see a screen around her bed. She had died half an hour earlier. Marie-Thérèse du Courseau arrived from Grangeville with Albert who, numb and with trembling lips, repeated several
times in a hoarse voice, ‘It’s happened to others besides me … it’s happened to others besides me …’

The abbé Le Couec delivered a funeral oration so affecting and so simple that Albert suddenly understood the extent of his misfortune and the solitude to which he had been condemned. Jean had made confession the night before and this time took communion, kneeling at the altar next to Michel du Courseau, who stealthily squeezed his hand and murmured, ‘I am your brother.’

At the cemetery, through tears that he kept in check with the greatest difficulty, Jean saw the Malemorts and their daughter crossing themselves as the coffin was lowered into the small vault. The marquis and marquise shook his hand, Chantal kissed him on both cheeks, and the intense happiness of her kissing him lightened the sad day. The next day he resumed work at
La Vigie,
where Grosjean behaved less odiously than usual. Pedalling back to the rectory that evening, he found Antoinette waiting at the top of the hill.

‘I couldn’t speak to you yesterday,’ she said. ‘There were too many people. You must be very sad.’

‘Yes.’

‘Are you going to go away?’

‘How do you know?’

‘Chantal told us. She knows more of your secrets than I do. What are you hoping for?’

‘Nothing.’

‘Don’t leave me without saying goodbye.’

They walked together down a path that cut across the fields, where they kissed for a long time. Antoinette had lost weight after her terrible experience. She was no longer the deliciously ripe fragrant fruit he had stroked in the hay, but a nervous and desperate woman, who reminded him more of Mireille than anyone else.

‘Before you leave,’ Antoinette said, ‘we’ll go and spend the night in a hotel in Dieppe. I want to sleep in your arms and wake up next to you.’

How lonely she must be! Marie-Thérèse du Courseau’s excessive love for her son had taken an aggressive form towards everything that upset him, even if it was no more than another presence. And how could she hope to marry Antoinette off after what had happened? Everyone knew. The only way out would have been to set her free, send her to Paris, but the idea of setting foot outside Normandy never occurred to Madame du Courseau. One married among one’s own, in one’s own milieu, never outside.

Jean promised. Weeks passed. He wrote to Palfy and by return received a long telegram.

Jean had his eighteenth birthday, and the only thoughtful present he received was an album bound in black leather of twenty drawings by Michel. They were all of him. He felt a sense of embarrassment and thanked Michel flatly, in a quiet moment, Michel having explained that his mother was to know nothing. Why such a mystery?

Albert took Jean’s departure philosophically.

‘I can’t tell you to stay, though I can see nothing good in your journey. But I have no right to keep you in France. Everything here is rotten. Perhaps it’s the same with the English, in which case you’ll come back and be happy to see us again. If war breaks out between France and Germany, don’t listen to the warmongers. Stay put, where it’s safe …’

The abbé Le Couec added, ‘I knew the demon of travel would not let you go. Be careful of life’s many traps. Will you find work? The English are not pushovers. Anyway, you’re a free man.’

And so everyone, apart from him, had known for a long time that
he was leaving. Instead of the wealth of vague and innocent advice he received, he would have preferred a bit of money. His savings amounted to 2000 francs, enough to live on for a month once he had bought himself a suit. He left
La Vigie
on 31 July without bothering to tell his employers, resisting the violent impulse to punch Grosjean’s face and shout at the women whose job it was to fold the print work that all in all they were the biggest bunch of idiots he had ever come across. He plucked up courage to telephone Chantal and invite her to a last meeting. She arrived on a bicycle. Her horse was lame. They left their bicycles behind a bush and walked in the lovely forest.

‘I wanted to say goodbye to you. Can I still write to you?’

‘Of course. What could be more natural?’

What else was there to to be said? One might have been tempted to add: alas! The two had known each other since they were children, and no shadow had ever fallen between them.

‘I talked to my father about you. He thinks you’re right. At your age it’s suffocating here. You’ll come back a man. You will come back, won’t you?’

‘Yes. I’ll come back.’

The truth was that up to this point he had never thought about coming back, or leaving, for good. The commitment that she was asking of him was an important one whose significance seemed not even to occur to her.

‘My father approves of you,’ she said. ‘He praises your spirit of adventure. He regrets …’

She stopped, embarrassed. Jean came to her aid.

‘That I’m the son of a gardener?’

‘Oh no. It’s not that. We’re only farmers ourselves now—’

‘Living in a handsome château.’

‘They’re just appearances.’

‘I can reassure you on one matter: I’m not a gardener’s son, even if I wouldn’t blush to be one.’

‘I know.’

‘You too!’

He could not understand how his origins had become an open secret.

‘And do people know who my parents are?’

‘No.’

For a moment his hopes had been raised. Was Chantal concealing something that he would perhaps find out one day, after everyone else? Seeing him looking so sad, she put up her hand and stroked his forehead, as if to chase away the clouds there. Jean grasped her hand and kissed it.

‘I’m glad we’re such good friends.’ Chantal said, stepping away.

There would be nothing else between them, except for that ghostly gesture and its fleeting aftermath. Things needed to be that way in order to last. They carried on walking through the forest for a long time, both with heavy hearts, neither of them knowing whether the other suffered as they did. When they came back to their bicycles they kissed each other politely on the cheeks.

‘Come back soon!’ Chantal whispered.

He watched her pedal away down the path, her skirt revealing her pretty, pale legs, and only moved when she had disappeared around the corner of the gamekeeper’s lodge, where the dogs barked as she passed.

The same evening, after his goodbyes to Monsieur Cliquet, Captain Duclou, his father and the abbé, he walked down to Dieppe with his single small case, asked for a room at the Hôtel de l’Océan and waited for Antoinette, who arrived just after he had finished dinner. They spent the night together. Their lovemaking was not the same any more. She wept, and he hugged her tightly until dawn began to lighten the sky and the gulls announced the coming day with their plaintive cries. Antoinette was still sleeping when he left, case in hand, and went down to the port to have a coffee by the landing-stage. Joseph joined him in espadrilles, cotton trousers and a turtleneck
sweater. Two months of confinement had changed him almost beyond recognition. Eating and drinking only bread and butter and coffee, leaving his room only when he had to, he seemed unsteady on his long legs, and in his gaunt pale face, framed by a black beard, his eyes shone, feverish. Did he realise he looked like Dostoyevsky, like
The House of the Dead
revisited? Without the Russian’s talent, alas, although the famous novel had made considerable progress, driven on by its author’s whip.

‘You’re leaving, then,’ he said. ‘You’ve decided to run for it.’

‘To run to the future.’

‘When you come back, I’ll either have won the Goncourt or I’ll be the last of the losers. Don’t write to me. I shan’t have time to write back.’

The packet left at nine o’clock. Jean was abandoning his country to a new prime minister, Camille Chautemps, whose name the right-wing press invariably wrote by preceding it with a ∴

‘Have a look round it,’ Palfy said. ‘It’s a monument. No two are the same. It was ordered specially in 1930 by Lord Albigate to drive around his estate in Suffolk, a distance of eighteen miles. A short expedition that he undertook once a year. Add it up: that makes 126 miles in seven years, not much more than 200 kilometres. It’s new, in other words. Obviously its body doesn’t have the same lines as a modern car. High wings, and the same radiator grille they’ve had since 1912, but that’s the beauty of a Rolls-Royce. They’ve never thought of themselves as peanut sellers. A loyal clientele. Try to buy one if your name’s Levy. They’ll look at their order book and tell you there is nothing available until 1947. Albigate asked to see my certificate of baptism before he’d let me have it, forgetting for a second that he married a Rosenstein. But honour was satisfied.’

Jean walked around the silver Rolls parked at the bottom of the gangplank, gleaming in the afternoon sun as if it had just left the factory. The green hide cushions, the walnut burl dashboard, the internal intercom, everything was of a fully achieved and lordly distinction. It really was an extremely incongruous sight among the dusty production-line cars that were coming off the ferry and lining up to present themselves for customs inspection. Palfy had made himself worthy of driving it, in his golfing plus fours and his calves sheathed in green tasselled hose. He had not changed, though his face looked more yellow than before.

‘I’m not sure,’ he said, ‘that you’ll ever see a more beautiful example. To tell you the truth, I’m thinking very seriously, the day I no longer have the use of it, of burning it rather than see it fall into unworthy hands. Put your case on the back seat and let’s go.’

After a rather rough crossing Jean could have done with a sandwich to settle his stomach, but it was quite clear that one did not eat sandwiches in a Rolls-Royce. One only drank, thanks to a silver drinks cabinet prettily built in to the rear compartment. At Palfy’s suggestion Jean poured them each a neat whisky as they drove out of Newhaven.

‘My outfit isn’t nearly elegant enough for your car,’ Jean said. ‘I should stay outside, on the running board.’

‘Outfit! Oh, the clumsiness! Certain people will judge you by your use of such words. We say suit. And yes, you’re right, your suit reeks of off-the-pegness. We’ll deal with all that. First I shall drive you to my tailor …’

‘I have enough to live on for a month if I’m not extravagant.’

‘You fool, who said anything about paying the tailor? Only the nouveaux riches have such egregious taste, and you’ll see how fast it loses them respect in Savile Row. Trust me.’

‘I haven’t noticed you bringing much good fortune to those who trust you.’

‘Are you becoming sarcastic in your old age? Be quiet, you’re still a child.’

‘All right. I’ll be quiet.’

The Rolls-Royce sped noiselessly along a country road that Jean had travelled five years earlier, first on his bicycle and then in the prince’s Hispano-Suiza, with Salah driving him. He saw it as a definite sign of his advancement, since one could hardly imagine anything more superior than a Rolls, unless it was the monarch’s state coach. Had Palfy stolen this car, as it was his habit? It would all end badly one day, but the anxiety that Jean felt at sharing his friend’s adventures again was also tinged with pleasure. It banished the last crushing year of mediocrity that he had spent in France, waiting for something, anything new to happen. It was a year that had passed desperately slowly, and now here he was, rolling at sixty miles an hour along a lovely road through little red-brick towns with bright
red and apple-green shopfronts. It was impossible for this not to be the dawning of a new era, the beginning of a man’s life of multiple twists and turns. Palfy had not changed. Precise, relaxed, he drove with a light hand, displaying an almost exaggerated courtesy towards cars he overtook or to which he gave way. It occurred to Jean that he did not even know which country his friend was from.

‘That’s rather complicated,’ Palfy said. ‘My mother was English, my father Serbian, and I was born in France, at Nice. So I’m French by accident, merely because my father was there trying out an infallible system at the Casino on the Jetée-Promenade. That said – since you’re interested – I’ll make a confession. I’m not just French by civil status, as they say, but in my heart too. It’s true. It’s my ridiculous side.’

‘Why ridiculous?’

‘Who still believes in the French? But who does things better than they do? Talking of which, I hope you haven’t forgotten the Camembert and baguette.’

‘No. They’re there in my case.’

‘We’ll have them tonight. I have a couple of friends for dinner. The Ascots. Charming, both of them.’

‘I don’t speak English.’

‘We’re going to sort that out too. A good teacher—’

‘Not too strict.’

Palfy roared with laughter.

‘You really astonish me! How is it that you already know about such a typically English vice?’

‘What vice?’

‘The one with whips, chains, spanking.’

‘I don’t know anything about it, except that a few years ago I met a French lady in Soho who gave lessons and claimed to be very strict.’

‘Goodness me!’ Palfy said with a smile.

‘A friend told me later she’d been murdered. She was called Madame Germaine.’

‘I remember reading something about that. She was one of those many French prostitutes who offer their London clients the latest refinements on Masoch’s pleasures. There are about a hundred of them in Soho, generally well thought of, so they quickly become rich. After working here for three or four years they go back to France with a nice lump sum, settle somewhere provincial, open a haberdasher’s or a shop selling religious pictures and marry into the petty bourgeoisie. I know a couple like that: one in Vannes, the other at Colmar. Excellent mothers …’

Jean felt Palfy was making fun of him.

‘If you like, I’ll introduce you to one,’ Palfy said.

‘When?’

‘Not tonight, we have a dinner. But tomorrow if you like.’

Jean was ill at ease. He thought about Salah, whom he had not yet mentioned to Palfy. What pleasures had the prince’s chauffeur been seeking in these unsavoury districts? Palfy’s disclosures showed Salah in a disturbing light. A hundred questions occurred to Jean, to which it was getting interesting to find answers. Who were all those international Maries who had played the housemaid at Mademoiselle Geneviève’s? Who was the blonde mulatto Marie whom he had met at Hampton Court, glimpsed later in the hall of the Chelsea house, then seen again in the brasserie in Via del Babuino? These were mysteries that needed solving. The Rolls was coming into the London suburbs. People here hardly gave the car a second glance, despite the fact that in all the crushing repetitive ugliness that surrounded it, it looked like a meteorite, an incomprehensible thing of grandiose beauty from another planet, which deigned to reflect in its silver bonnet and chrome radiator the fleeting, deformed images of a world of troglodytes.

Palfy drove his friend straight to Savile Row, where a tailor and his staff busied themselves about them. Palfy chose cloth for five suits and a dinner jacket for Jean, then led him to a shirtmaker and bootmaker.

‘I don’t want anyone to notice you,’ he said. ‘This evening I’ll lend you a dinner jacket of my father’s. He was about your height. Fortunately for you, it’s old and very shabby and nearly antique, and therefore madly chic. It doesn’t fit me, I regret to say. My father was tall and broad-shouldered.’

Palfy was living in Eaton Square, in a four-roomed flat that possessed a butler who wore a black suit and tie and white gloves.

‘This is Price,’ Palfy said. ‘You’ll notice that he’s about my size. He’s very good for breaking in my new shoes. Essential man, in every way. Of course he doesn’t know French, but if you can say “yes” and “no”, you’ll got on very well with him.’

‘Then – you’ve become rich?’ Jean asked, dismayed, unable to believe that one could surround oneself with such comfort and pay for it all with bad cheques.

‘Well, it’s true that you haven’t known me in my comfortable phase. But the wheel turns. Have a bath and get yourself ready. Dinner is at seven thirty. Price will bring you a tie and socks. Relax.’

History was repeating itself. This second arrival in London resembled, in its surprises, the first one five years earlier. Jean gave up trying to think and even drifted off to sleep for a few moments in his bath, exhausted by the night spent with Antoinette and the bad crossing. A discreet knock at the bathroom door woke him. Price’s muffled voice was calling, ‘Mr Arnaud, please.’

He dressed in a hurry. The dinner jacket fitted him well, despite being a little short in the sleeves. He had some difficulty buttoning the stiff collar and realised he had entirely forgotten how to tie a bow-tie. Price knocked at the door a second time. Jean opened it and, pointing at his neck, indicated his predicament. The butler understood immediately, pulled off his gloves, and tied the black tie. It was perfect.

But why go to such trouble? The Ascots were a couple of indeterminate age, rather hatchet-faced, who spoke absolutely incomprehensible English. Jane – despite her sharp features her face
was pretty, her skin fresh – wore a lamé dress will all the grace of a coal sack. Her neckline gaped when she leant forward, revealing two fairly unappetising poached eggs. Both Ascots were very affable to Jean at the outset, and then, rapidly realising that he was not from their world, ignored him for the rest of the evening, talking only to Palfy, who gave up translating when he gauged Jean’s total lack of interest in their extended personal conversation about a society in which he knew no one. To tell the truth, the dry Martini before dinner, the sherry with the turtle consommé, the claret with the roast, the Graves with the apple tart, the port with the Camembert (over which they went into raptures, gaining Jean a brief flicker of renewed interest) and the brandy with the coffee had all been too much for him to take. He was dropping from fatigue; his eyelids were drooping, his tongue was like cardboard, his mind wandering, mostly back to Antoinette, whom he would have liked to be caressing again tonight, after unbuttoning the stiff collar that had been digging into his neck without mercy. At ten thirty the Ascots stood up and left. Palfy saw them to their car. He returned to find Jean collapsed on the sofa.

‘Not quite up to the mark yet, I see,’ he said. ‘My friends thought you were charming.’

‘Charming? Me?’

‘Utterly. They’ve invited you to the country next weekend.’

‘You must be mistaken.’

‘Well, obviously they’re not particularly entertaining hosts, but it will amuse you to experience English country life for yourself.’

‘Constantin, I didn’t come here for that. I’m looking for work. Any work. You have to help me find something, not too mindless if at all possible. I dragged parcels around for nearly a year. I couldn’t go on.’

‘Work? Listen, my fine fellow. I’ve worked very little in my life and have no connections whatever among those who do. It’s no good your relying on me to help you there.’

‘But I can’t just sponge off you, can I?’

‘Why not? I live very well from sponging off other people. Let’s make the most of it. Later on, you’ll do your bit to help me if you get the chance.’

Dog-tired, Jean gave up arguing and went to bed to sleep and dream of Chantal de Malemort who, regarding him sadly, informed him that she knew about his affair with Antoinette and was giving him up.

‘As a good Christian,’ she said, ‘I must sacrifice myself for that sinner’s salvation. She loves you. Do not let her down. She is waiting for you in the barn with the abbé Le Couec, who will bless you.’

‘What about you?’

‘I am going to marry Michel. For his salvation.’

The revelation was so unpleasant that he awoke in the grip of nausea, and only just made it to the bathroom in time.

‘You look positively green!’ Palfy said to him at breakfast.

‘I’m never going to touch another drop of alcohol.’

‘You’re absurd! You just need to get used to it, show your liver what’s what. It’s impossible to exist in society without drinking. Look at my complexion. I’m turning into a lemon, but I drink and I never suffer for it. It’s a question of will.’

Price came in, wheeling a trolley. The poached eggs and bacon were still cooking beneath a silver dome. Jean ate while he listened to Palfy.

‘You interest me, and you have every right to wonder why. First of all I assure you I have not the slightest interest in pinching your bottom. Do not for a moment imagine that I am a poof, even if I’m not all that wild about women. I know they find you attractive, and in time they’ll find you more and more attractive. I noticed it only last night with Jane Ascot. On the way out she asked how she might meet you again.’

Jean looked at the poached eggs on his plate and remembered Mrs Ascot’s gaping neckline.

‘I know, I know,’ Palfy went on, ‘there’s not much meat on her and she’s not a wonderful example, but it’s a sign: you’re
good-looking
and, as they said in the eighteenth century, you have honesty written all over your face. What an advantage you have over me! Obviously you’re raw material, shapeless, have not the slightest idea of how to keep a boring conversation going and possess none of the tools one needs to navigate one’s way through a world of pretence. In short, it all remains to be done with you – apart from teaching you table manners. There someone has shown you what to do, and I’ve never seen you strike a false or vulgar note at dinner. One day we shall also get to the bottom of the mystery of your birth, though I personally don’t set much store by genetics. You’re the son of the people who brought you up.’

Jean, who had been considering wiping the yolk off his plate with a slice of bread, thought better of it. Price was standing behind him. He already felt badly enough about having let the servant see his striped cotton pyjamas, threadbare shirts and woolly slippers. Price had rummaged vainly in his case for a dressing gown.

‘I am not motivated by fine feelings,’ Palfy continued, ‘if it helps you put away your scruples. My offer of an accelerated education is purely so that we can collaborate. I have big plans.’