The Foundling Boy (4 page)

It was not the dawn that woke him, but the sound of a pair of shutters opening on the balcony above his head. Geneviève appeared in a white nightdress with a ribbon in her hair. She seemed terribly thin to him, and pale, but more beautiful than before, a creature so fragile that the morning breeze or a shaft of sunlight might kill her.

‘It’s you, Papa!’ she said. ‘I thought it was. I was sure I heard the sound of a Bugatti last night. Is it the new one?’

‘Well, it’s the new one for now, the Type 22, four cylinders. Bugatti’s planning to replace it soon with the 28, which is apparently a marvel.’

‘I already like that one!’

Antoine puffed himself up. ‘Do you want to go for a spin?’

‘It’s difficult so early. The door’s still locked. A bit later, if you like.’

‘I’ll go and have a coffee. Look, I’ve brought you some nougat.’

He tossed two boxes up to the balcony, and Geneviève retrieved them.

‘Thank you! It’s so sweet of you to think of spoiling me. I adore nougat. When you come back, could you be really kind and bring me cigarettes and matches?’

‘You smoke? That’s not good.’

‘Nothing is good from where I’m standing.’

‘Really? I thought you felt better. You’re worrying me.’

From her pout he recognised his daughter from several years before, his little girl whom he had kissed on the doorstep of La Sauveté on the morning in August 1914 when he had left to join his unit. She had changed quite suddenly: now she was this frail young woman with an oval face and loose blond hair, who made him feel shy and intimidated.

‘Don’t worry,’ she said.

‘But you won’t get better!’

‘Do we get better?’

He realised that he wasn’t sure enough of the answer to be able to convince her. He could only think of distractions.

‘Do you need perfume?’

‘Well, if you can find something fairly modern …’

‘I’ll try.’

A figure in pyjamas appeared on the next balcony, a dishevelled man who began to gesticulate, showering them with insults.

‘What the hell is going on? Are you mad? There are people asleep here, sick people, and you don’t give a damn!’

‘Calm down, Piquemal,’ Geneviève said in a gentle voice. ‘It’s my father. We haven’t seen each other for five years. Anyway, he’s going. He’ll come back later.’

‘Your father, your father!’ Piquemal shouted, but said no more as he was choked by a fit of coughing.

‘You know you mustn’t get angry. It’s very bad for you.’

Piquemal, doubled up with coughing, retreated into his room.

Geneviève leant down to her father.

‘Don’t be offended. He’s half mad. In any case he hasn’t got much longer.’

‘I’ll be back soon,’ Antoine said.

‘See you very soon, Papa.’

The sloping drive allowed him to roll the Bugatti back to the gate, where he dropped the clutch and had the satisfaction of hearing the engine fire immediately. Menton was waking up in a golden dawn, an oblique light that slid across the oily sea and stroked the trees in the gardens. On the quay fishermen in straw hats were untangling their nets. He eventually found a barber, who shaved him and let him wash. He bought a new shirt and discarded the one he was wearing. Throughout his journey he had not burdened himself with anything: shirts, socks, undershorts, toothbrushes marked his route, tossed in
ditches or available rubbish bins. It was harder to find somewhere to buy perfume at this early hour, but he came across a shop that advertised ‘goods from Paris’. Lacking in expertise, he relied on the saleswoman’s advice, then looked for a florist’s and ordered an enormous bouquet of white roses. The thought of burdening his Bugatti with roses threw him for a moment.

‘Would you like me to have them delivered?’ asked the florist, a small brown-haired woman with a downy upper lip.

‘That’s not a bad idea. With this package, if you don’t mind. Be careful, it’s perfume.’

‘Do you have a card?’

He found one in his wallet and wrote carefully and legibly,

Feeling much calmer, he headed west once more and drove as far as the outskirts of Roquebrune, to the restaurant where he had stopped the previous evening. On a chair outside, still dressed in his grubby singlet, the patron was plucking a chicken.

‘Hello!’ Antoine said, without getting out of the car.

‘All right? So, your daughter is well?’

‘Much better, thanks.’

‘Are you eating with us?’

‘It’s a bit early and I’ve a long way to go. Another time. I’ll be back.’

‘Always in a hurry. Like a fart in a fan factory, you are.’

‘That’s life!’ said Antoine, who would never have thought he could slip so easily into this sort of badinage.

‘With a puss like mine, I don’t know that there’s any more life to
be had. But you’re right to make the most of it. On your way … see you again, and try not to have to scrape yourself off the road in that thing!’

‘Don’t worry, I’m a careful driver.’

He let in the clutch and the Bugatti leapt westwards down the coast, only stopping when it reached the outskirts of Saint-Tropez and the open-air café. Lounging in a wicker armchair, Marie-Dévote was reading a magazine with a cat on her lap. She turned her head and smiled.

‘Back already? Did you get bored?’

‘I’m hungry.’

‘It’s not really lunchtime yet. Will you be happy with a bowl of bouillabaisse?’

‘I’m sure I will.’

He sat down under the arbour, facing the beach, while she disappeared into the kitchen. A light breeze was blowing, raising ripples that expired on the white sand. He would happily have gone for a swim but the memory of his white, unappealing body disgusted him. Marie-Dévote put a steaming bowl and a carafe of Var wine in front of him.

‘It’s quiet here,’ he said.

‘On Sundays it gets busy.’

‘What day is it today?’

‘Friday. What are you doing that’s so interesting you can’t remember what day it is?’

‘Nothing,’ Antoine admitted.

‘Doesn’t your wife say anything?’

‘No.’

He wanted to ask her to sit on the corner of the table the way she had the day before, and swing her leg and show him her knee, but standing in front of him, hands on hips and feet apart, she seemed much stronger and more solid than he remembered her. Good health, sunshine, the men she had to serve and whose jokes she tolerated,
had made her grown-up at twenty. But it was more than that: she had ripened, she was ripe like a luscious Provençal fruit, with that directness of expression and rough candour that women from the Midi have. When she laughed she revealed strong teeth solidly planted in a hungry mouth. Marie-Dévote was as far away as it was possible to be from those girls of good Norman families to whom he had been introduced and from whom, out of boredom and lack of critical sense, he had chosen Marie-Thérèse Mangepain.

‘Are you always on your own here?’ he asked.

‘Cheeky! I can’t half see you coming! No, I’m not on my own. Maman’s here. She never leaves the kitchen.’

‘And your father?’

‘My father’s dead. In the war. Like everybody.’

‘Not me.’

‘I saw you on the beach yesterday. Your shoulder’s all kersnaffled.’

Antoine didn’t know the expression, but there was no need. Marie-Dévote’s speech communicated above all by its musicality, her sentences that began sharply and finished smoothly, with an internal sensuous and lush music that he could have listened to for hours without trying to untangle its sense. But her attention had shifted from Antoine. A fishing boat was being rowed onto the sand. A tall tanned boy leapt out of it, his trousers rolled up to his knees, a bucket in his hand.

‘It’s Théo!’ she said delightedly. ‘He’s bringing the fish.’

She ran towards him in her bare feet. Antoine was eaten up with jealousy, and as he became aware of it he felt glad to experience the feeling. Something was moving inside him. A barrier was crumbling. He belonged to the world of the living, the world of Théo arriving with a bucket of fish, of Marie-Dévote running towards the young man with ill-concealed pleasure. Théo handed her the bucket and walked off, and Marie-Dévote lost her sparkle for a moment, became suddenly dull and lifeless, but the decline was brief. Antoine finished his carafe of rosé and asked for another, merely for the pleasure of
seeing her get up, walk the length of the arbour and return with her light, swinging step, as if she were walking on the tips of her toes. Instinct demanded that he leave there and then, to nurse his appetite to return.

That evening he stopped again outside Charles’s garage at Aix. His work finished, Charles had his head under a tap of cold water.

‘All right, Captain? How’s the beast?’

‘Perfect, Charles. Are you free this evening?’

They had dinner together on a bistro terrace, talking naturally about the war they had shared together in the Balkans, a thankless and miserable episode but one that Charles, with a southerner’s talent for storytelling, had an ability to wrap in unexpected colours. Antoine, who remembered only mud, dysentery, thirst, hunger and wretchedness, listened with childlike attention as Charles crossed the Vardar on 22 September 1918, resupplied the Serbs at Gradsko two days later, raced in his truck to Prilep after the Bulgarians had set it on fire, and charged into Skopje alongside Colonel Gaspereau’s Chasseurs d’Afrique. Punctuated with a regular ‘crash, bang, wallop!’ that shook the table, his irresistible account attracted both waiters and patron to their table, making them briefly oblivious to the other diners. To Antoine Charles’s war was unrecognisable, as he juggled with entire divisions and possessed an incredible gift of ubiquity. But what did it matter? The former driver elevated the squalid, organised the disordered, gave reason to absurdity. When he at last sat down with the Bulgarian government to sign the armistice, the restaurant was in near rapture. The patron shook their hands, his eyes welling with tears.

‘You’re truly brave men,’ he said in a long sigh of garlic. ‘We owe you a great debt!’

A little unsteadily, drunk on stories and red wine, Antoine found a hotel room and slept a dreamless sleep.

Next morning Charles inspected the Bugatti, changed its tyres and
spark plugs, and retimed the ignition. When the engine fired up, his mechanic’s eyes shone with pleasure. Back at the wheel, Antoine had one desire: to get back to La Sauveté, which he did at the astounding average of seventy kilometres an hour, seeing nothing but the road ahead, the dust, the bends, the trees that whistled past his ears.

La Sauveté had survived his absence. Driving through the gates, he saw Albert limping in front of a wheelbarrow being pushed by one of the village boys. Victoire Sanpeur was strolling hand in hand with Michel and Antoinette through the rose walks. Antoinette ran to her father and climbed up to sit next to him. They did a lap of the park and pulled up at the steps of the house as Jeanne was coming out with Jean in her arms. Marie-Thérèse showed her surprise in an offended frostiness.

‘Where were you?’ she said.

‘I went to see Geneviève.’

‘I see.’

‘Do you object?’

‘Not at all. I assume you’re joking.’

Antoine bent over Jean, who stared at him with wide eyes, and gently squeezed his cheek. The baby smiled and held out his arms.

‘Extraordinary!’ Marie-Thérèse said. ‘Such a difficult child, and look at him smiling at you.’

‘He’s not difficult,’ Jeanne countered. ‘He just doesn’t like everybody.’

‘He’s not wrong!’ Antoine said.

Marie-Thérèse flinched, and said with feigned gentleness, ‘I thought that children could always sense whether you really love them or not.’

Antoinette drew herself up, her eyes thunderous.

‘But Papa does love children!’

Tears welled in her eyes.

‘Don’t you?’ she said.

‘Yes,’ Antoine answered, distracted by the appearance of Victoire dragging Michel behind her. He succeeded in wriggling out of her grip and ran to bury himself in his mother’s skirts.

‘Maman!’ he yelled, trembling with fright. ‘I don’t want
him
to take you away in his car.’

‘There’s no danger of that, my darling. No danger at all!’

‘What an idiot,’ Antoinette said.

Antoine caught the Martiniquan’s gaze. She lowered her eyelids, fringed with long, curly lashes. It was a yes, but he would have to wait until tomorrow morning, at five o’clock, after his bowl of coffee laced with calvados, on the hard day bed in the library. He sighed.

I mention 1920 only as a reminder. It no longer interests us. But let us touch briefly on the things that were bothering Albert at that time. Paul Deschanel, preferred to Clemenceau by both the Chamber of Deputies and the Senate as president of the victorious French Republic, was found wandering in his nightshirt at a level crossing after the official train had passed by. He was suspected of being a delusional lunatic and unfortunately the suspicions proved correct. Forced to resign, he was replaced by Alexandre Millerand. In the United States, matters were no better: the president had disappeared. Intoxicated by the ovations he had received and his own verbal incontinence, Woodrow Wilson shut himself in his room and refused to see even members of his administration. His wife served as intermediary, deciding world affairs between two rubbers of bridge. The League of Nations – upon which, despite the United States’ refusal to join, Albert had pinned his hopes – did not prevent the Soviets from invading Poland, the Greeks from attacking Turkey, or the French from ‘pacifying’ the Rif. Albert lived from one disappointment to the next. When he held young Jean in his arms he sang to him, as a lullaby,

Jean would never be a soldier. It was a promise, made on oath.

We jump forward then, to August 1923, three years later, to find ourselves again at La Sauveté, one fine afternoon when the sun sparkled on the sea that was visible from the first-floor windows. Monsieur du Courseau had lifted the edge of the lace curtain to admire his garden. Seated in a tub armchair, he kept his leg, encased in its plaster cast, up on a stool. A month earlier, as he had tried to avoid a cyclist without lights in the middle of the night on the waterlogged Tôtes road, he had slid off the carriageway and hit a fence that, fortunately, was made of wood. The car – the new Type 28 Bugatti, three litres, eight cylinders – had not been badly damaged (punctured radiator, bent front axle), but Antoine’s left knee, which was less sturdy, had shattered on contact with the dashboard. At the factory at Molsheim the car was being repaired, and would be delivered back to Antoine at the beginning of September. Even though there was no question of his driving anywhere in the near future, he was suffering from not having his baby in its garage, a loose box adapted for the purpose. He liked to know it was there, even when it was quiet, and he loved its sudden gleam whenever he pulled back the garage’s sliding door to let in the daylight. The bodywork shone a beautiful blue, the chrome flashed in the sunlight. Stuck in bed, then in an armchair, Antoine, deprived of his thoroughbred, felt his loneliness painfully acutely as he faced convalescent hours of desperate slowness. For at least another month there was no question of his being able to escape from his agonising melancholy and take to the road again.

The lifted lace curtain revealed a corner of the park where, at that moment, Albert was watering with an apron around his waist and a straw hat on his head. Sitting in a garden chair a few steps behind him, Adèle Louverture was dozing, her chin tipped forward. Behind her, Michel du Courseau (six years old) was carefully cutting with a pair of scissors the knot of the cotton scarf that held back the girl’s thick hair. When she woke up, her scarf would fall, and her hair would tumble free. From behind the du Courseau boy, Jean Arnaud
(four years old) watched him with his hands behind his back and his head on one side. After he had finished cutting the knot, Michel moved over to Albert’s hosepipe. Still armed with his scissors, he stabbed quickly, several times, into the rubber of the hose and ran off, handing the scissors to Jean as he did so. Albert’s flow of water dwindled to a trickle. Turning round, he saw jets of water spraying from the punctured hose and his son holding the scissors. Jean made no attempt even to draw back, taking the two slaps without complaint and running away to cry, pursued by Albert’s curses. Adèle, awakened, raised her head and her scarf fell off.

She saw at once that it had been cut with scissors.

Antoine rang a bell that had been placed there for the purpose. Marie-Thérèse came in. Ever since her husband’s accident, she had lived in a state of devotion and goodness. The tenderness with which she spoke to her friends about ‘poor Antoine’ had left many thinking that he was dying. The more anxious of them came to visit and were reassured: the dying man was doing well, in spite of his immobility. He kept a box of cigars and a bottle of calvados next to his armchair. He still looked fresh. After a period of eating very little, before the accident, he had regained his appetite, although it was an appetite that baffled the Normans who knew him: he ate bread rubbed with garlic, requested bouillabaisses, demanded aïoli with his cod, and chewed olives while drinking a yellow liquid which a few drops of water transformed into a whitish solution with a flavour of aniseed. In short, he was not in Normandy but elsewhere, living in an unknown world of lovers of spicy food. Marie-Thérèse understood perfectly well that he was being unfaithful to her. Her pride would have suffered if she had not been able to console herself that she was hardly the only victim of his infidelity: Joséphine Roudou, Victoire Sanpeur, and now Adèle Louverture had all found themselves in a similar position.

‘Are you feeling unwell?’ she asked, without much hope that he would say yes.

‘No, my dear. Unfortunately I’m not feeling unwell, but I should like to say something to my son.’

‘Michel?’

‘Do I have another?’

She acknowledged that, at La Sauveté at least, he could only mean Michel.

‘I’ll send him to you, but …’

‘But what?’

‘You’re always so hard on him.’

‘Have you ever seen me hit him?’

‘No. You’re worse. Either you don’t speak to him, or you look at him with astonishment, as if he were a stranger.’

‘He is a stranger. He’s the only person in the world who looks at me with terror in his eyes, and occasionally even something close to hate.’

‘He’s a wild boy. You need to make a bond with him.’

‘I’ll try.’

He turned his head impassively and lifted the curtain again. Albert was repairing his hosepipe with some rags and string. A few steps away, Jean was watching with his hand on his cheek. The slight movement of his shoulders gave away his stifled sobbing. Antoine’s silence conveyed to Marie-Thérèse that she should now do as he had asked.

He waited calmly, followed with an attentive ear the discussion between mother and son at the bottom of the stairs and their slow approach to the first floor, then listened, without attempting to work out their sense, to the excited whisperings on the other side of the door. Finally Marie-Thérèse must have managed to convince him, for Michel entered alone into the room with his father. He stood with his back against the closed door, his legs together, his head high. They exchanged a look and Antoine was glad to see that his son did not lower his eyes. They sized each other up for a moment in silence,
the father almost startled to find his son good-looking – this boy he knew so little of – the son surprised that his father did not vent his anger straight away.

‘You’re really quite a handsome little chap!’ Antoine said.

It was true. At six years old Michel, slim and with long,
well-muscled
legs, square shoulders, a long neck, a well-defined profile and pale blond hair, was a beautiful child. Antoine felt he was seeing him for the first time. What sort of incomprehension had kept them apart for so long? He mused on this for a moment, distracted at first, then suddenly conscious of what was happening on the other side of the door, of a mute and fearful presence. He waited; there was plenty of time. It was Marie-Thérèse who, unable to bear the silence any longer, knocked, tentatively opened the door and put her head around it. Antoine smiled.

‘Don’t worry. I haven’t eaten him.’

‘But you’re not talking.’

‘We are communicating to each other matters that cannot be spoken aloud.’

Barely reassured, Marie-Thérèse retreated. Antoine listened to the sound of her feet going away downstairs and, without allowing vexation or irritation into his voice, said, ‘Aren’t we, Michel?’

‘What?’

‘I think you know what I’d like to talk to you about.’

‘No.’

‘Something about a headscarf and a hosepipe punctured with scissors.’

Michel breathed deeply, like a diver about to disappear underwater.

‘Don’t punish Jean,’ he said. ‘He’s only four.’

‘Because he did it.’

‘Yes.’

‘He’s very precocious, isn’t he? But I appreciate you taking his side. You’re a good-hearted boy.’

‘He’s a servant’s son.’

‘Jeanne is not a servant. I don’t like to hear you say that word. Jeanne is our caretaker and her husband is my friend.’

‘How can he be your friend? He’s a gardener.’

‘I prefer a gardener to many of the people your mother makes me entertain in this house.’

‘Anyway, Jean doesn’t know what he’s doing.’

‘Are you sure he did it?’

‘Yes.’

Antoine remained silent. He was discovering who his son was, and the discovery interested him. In one sense he was proud that the boy was sticking to his lie, knowing that his father knew. He allowed that he had courage, and a deep scorn for the truth.

‘I want to be sure that Jean won’t be punished, so I would like Albert to come up and see me. Would you be very kind and tell him?’

Michel’s hand was already on the doorknob.

‘Wait. Don’t be in such a hurry. Give me a kiss.’

‘Why?’

‘Because it will give me pleasure.’

Michel let go of the knob, walked over to his father, and gave him a cold kiss on the cheek.

‘Thank you,’ Antoine said. ‘Now you can go.’

He watched Michel run out and go to the gardener. Albert put down the nozzle of his hose, dried his hands on his thick blue canvas apron and limped up the avenue, trousers flapping around his wooden leg. He kept his back straight, and no one watching him would have felt under any obligation to show him charity or pity. He was a deeply accepting man, who offered his suffering to the cause of peace about which he spoke so often, with the fervour of a visionary. Antoine was very fond of him and discreetly let him know that he was, as is proper between men.

‘I’m interrupting your work,’ he said when Albert entered.

‘I’d finished, Captain.’

‘Captain’ had replaced the ‘sir’ of before the war. They had met in uniform, on leave, and from that moment on, master-servant relations had become impossible. Better to substitute their military ranks, which at least reminded them in a soulless peacetime that men might come together in a brotherhood of respect, without servility.

‘Have a chair. A small glass of something?’

‘I wouldn’t say no.’

Albert filled his pipe and lit it. The pungent smell of caporal tobacco spread around the room. He took the offered glass, which was not small, and dipped his moustache in it.

‘The 1920,’ he said.

‘Mm. The last carafe.’

‘It’s good.’

Antoine swallowed a mouthful. ‘Yes. Good, but no more. It hasn’t learnt how to age.’

‘You don’t ask that from calvados.’

‘Yes, I know. Albert, I asked you to come up because you slapped Jean this afternoon.’

‘He deserved it. The hosepipe’s buggered. I’ll have to get a new one.’

‘No, don’t. I’ll have it replaced.’

‘I said I’ll do it!’ Albert said bad-temperedly.

‘From the window here I saw Michel cut Adèle’s scarf and then puncture your hosepipe. He gave the scissors to Jean to hold and ran away.’

‘Are you sure?’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘Then I’ve made a bad mistake.’

‘Did Jean protest?’

‘No, Captain. The little fool!’

Antoine saw Albert’s discomfiture, which was not due to his remorse at having smacked his child but to the idea that an
all-powerful
Justice had been offended against. He would have liked
to find a way to reassure his friend: all-powerful Justice was doing perfectly well (in men’s minds at any rate), despite the daily offences showered upon her. It was a pity that Albert didn’t possess a more relative sense of the great moral principles: he was storing up sad days for himself, disappointments and rages that would not be good for his health.

‘He didn’t say anything to me, he didn’t even try to defend himself!’

‘He’s still a very small boy. I’d like you to send him to me. I want to talk to him, but don’t tell him what it’s about. Let me deal with it.’

Albert downed his glass and left, looking thoughtful. A short time later Antoine heard a faint tapping at the door and called to Jean to come in. The boy entered, looking serious. His shorts were too long and covered his knees, and Jeanne, in her economical way, had studded his boots so that he slipped on the polished floorboards. He came to Antoine’s armchair and kissed him on the cheek.

‘Hello, Monsieur.’

‘I know who stabbed the hosepipe and cut Adèle’s scarf.’

‘Oh, you know!’ Jean repeated, smiling.

‘But I don’t understand why you didn’t say it was Michel who did it.’

‘If I had, he would have hit me, and anyway nobody would believe me. He’s your son.’

Antoine felt a gulf opening up in front of him. This small, sweet, discreet boy was showing him a world far more complicated than the one in which the du Courseaus lived so complacently. He grasped Jean’s hand and squeezed it in his own.

‘You see … I didn’t know any of that, and I’m very grateful to you for telling me. Do you like secrets?’

‘What’s a secret?’

‘Something you only share with one person.’

‘Yes.’

‘All right … you and I are going to have a secret. Michel won’t be
punished for his naughtiness, but you and I will be friends for ever. We’ll never argue. We’ll tell each other everything, and when one of us has a sadness he’ll tell the other one, who’ll cheer him up.’