Authors: Michel Déon
‘And who’ll do the dishes?’ she asked, in entirely token resistance.
‘Bugger the dishes.’
It is true that there are moments when the dishes are no longer of the slightest importance. Marie-Dévote did not need a great deal of persuading. And so they spent the afternoon together in bed, and I shall stop there, because this story already has many longueurs, and note merely that it was highly successful.
They slept for a time, and were woken by the sound of hooting as the bus returned from Saint-Raphaël. Marie-Dévote sprang out of bed and dressed in the twinkling of an eye to go and meet her Théo. Antoine’s mouth felt furry and his eyes swollen. He too got out of bed, walked down the beach, jumped into the sea, splashed around like a seal and came out breathless but rejuvenated. It had stopped raining, and one of the painters had set up his easel on the beach and was finishing a picture of Théo’s boat, beached on the sand. A soft orange-washed light spread from the horizon into a sky that was free of clouds. Antoine walked behind the painter and felt a shiver of delight. He knew nothing of modern art, but this painting, laden with primitive colours and an ample, sensuous reality conveyed in reds and blues, charmed him instantly.
‘Do you sell your work?’ he said awkwardly, not knowing how to go about such questions with an artist, without offending him.
‘From time to time,’ the painter said, cleaning a brush.
‘I mean: that picture.’
‘Who are you?’
‘Antoine du Courseau. But the picture will be for Marie-Dévote and Théo. They haven’t got anything for the walls of their dining room.’
‘Ah!’
The painter tidied his palette away and, folding up his easel, offered the canvas to Antoine.
‘Take it now. If you don’t I’ll change my mind. I’ll glaze it for you when it’s dry.’
‘But … I need to give you something for it.’
‘Of course … write to my dealer. I’ll give you his card. He’ll tell you how much. That’s his business.’
Antoine stayed standing alone on the beach, the canvas in his hand, like a stray object he had discovered on the sand. Dusk was falling. A cool onshore breeze began to blow and he shivered.
‘Saints! What’s up, Antoine? Are you dreaming?’ Théo shouted. ‘Come and have a pastis.’
He walked back to the terrace. The bottle was waiting next to the carafe of cold water. Théo poured pastis, then water. Antoine placed the painting on the table and drank standing up.
‘Do you like it?’
‘I suppose so. Hey … it really looks like it.’
‘To decorate your dining room.’
‘Nice. The boat looks as if it’s about ready to go.’
‘Are you fishing tonight?’
‘I’m thinking about it.’
It was part of the game. Antoine played with ill grace, and Théo brought it to an end by giving in, but only after enjoying Antoine’s discomfort. He left to go fishing with his lamp, and Antoine remained in the dining room with Marie-Dévote and the two painters, who acknowledged his shy nod with a smile. Marie-Dévote had rings around her eyes and the slightly too languorous and feline look of a woman who has spent the afternoon satisfying herself fully. Antoine still wanted her, but more calmly and deliberately this time, and as he sipped her
soupe au pistou,
served steaming in big blue china dishes, he felt to an extreme extent – to the point of oppression – the fear of loving and of experiencing an impossible passion for a woman who could never be his. It was a bewildering feeling, a feeling that, for all its desire, revealed the bitterness of a wasted life. He wished he had never met Marie-Dévote, and he cursed the appointment with fate that had driven him, on an August afternoon three years earlier, to this beach café where a young girl sat sunning her brown knees
on the terrace. At the same time he was forced to admit that, in the absence of Marie-Dévote, these last three years would have been pitiful, without any grace, joy or happiness. Without any happiness at all. He looked up.
‘What’s the matter?’ Marie-Dévote said. ‘Your eyes are watering.’
‘The soup’s hot. I burnt myself.’
‘Oh good. I’m glad it’s nothing worse!’
She left to help her mother with the dishes and he turned to the painters, who were also finishing dinner, and raised his glass.
‘Why don’t you join us?’ the one who had sold him the picture said.
‘I’d be delighted.’
They questioned him diplomatically, and he answered without bending the truth. One of the two men knew Grangeville.
‘I was up that way last year. I rented a little place near the cemetery. Very soft light. Grey gravestones, white cliffs, the sea. One of those places you wouldn’t mind dying in. I came back with a dozen seascapes, but that’s not what the dealers want. The only thing they can sell is the sun. Isn’t that true, André?’
‘Yes. And we’ll give them as much as they can handle, blue skies, blue seas, red sails, green boats. I know it like the back of my hand by now, I could go and paint it all in a cellar in Paris with a bare bulb over my head. This is the future, the Midi; people are going to make fortunes here …’
They discussed their respective dealers with a scorn and aggressiveness that startled Antoine. He had been expecting revelations about art, some explanation of heaven knows what, and all he got instead was talk about money, names, exhibition dates and moaning about critics who only cared about official art, that great producer of war memorials. Antoine had never questioned whether these memorials were beautiful or ugly. In the course of his excursions he had seen them going up in every village, allegories in exaggerated drapery shielding a wounded soldier with a tender hand, proud
bronze infantrymen watching over tearful women and children. They seemed unhealthy to him, full of dishonest symbolism, but the thought of judging their beauty or ugliness would never have occurred to him without the two artists’ sarcastic commentary. He felt ashamed of his ignorance, and left them to go to his room. Here, a little later, Marie-Dévote followed him.
‘Would you like it again?’
‘Of course, it’s all I’ve got. I don’t give a damn about all the rest.’
And it was true: about all the rest he didn’t give a damn, and there was no pain, no sorrow, but when he pressed Marie-Dévote against him or, daydreaming, stroked her pretty breasts and their brown tips, something else existed: his pleasure. He stayed at Saint-Tropez for three days, his limit, which he never exceeded, so that he could be sure of leaving with a trace of animal regret on his lips that provided him with the certainty that he existed. The route des Maures, then the high corniche road to Nice, took him down to Roquebrune, where he stopped. Léon Cece, recognising the note of the Bugatti’s engine, appeared at his door in linen trousers and torn white singlet. Far from fading, his facial scars had deepened, splitting the soft tissue of his cheek, twisting his mouth, and attacking one eye, its bloodshot white beginning to bulge out of its orbit. His restaurant was doing badly. In the egotism of peacetime, diners were not willing to put up with the sight of his smashed face, a reminder of a time everyone was doing their best to forget and an awful reproach to those who had got through it without too much hardship; a mute and unacceptable pang of conscience from which most fled like cowards.
‘All right, Antoine?’ Léon called. ‘It’s been an age since we saw you.’
‘Three months. I had an accident. My knee in plaster. This is my first long trip.’
‘Well, that’s good anyway. You’re not like the others.’
They dined together on the balcony, wreathed by clouds of moths that whirled around the hurricane lamp and singed their wings. Léon
was a man of truth. Unlike Charles Ventadour, the war he kept going back to was a squalid conflict, but it was his conflict, his alone, revolving around that attack when his head had been blown apart. He needed to talk about it, to go over it ceaselessly as though it were still possible, six years later, to take that one sideways step that would have saved him when the German 77 burst. And so great was his desire for that step that he seemed, at odd moments, almost able to erase the tragedy and recover his face as it had been, and his morale and cheerfulness, only to fall back again, harder than before, into the depths of a despair so bitter it had the taste of death about it. More than anything, he could not forgive the involuntary aversion of those who saw him for the first time. A curse had fallen upon him, and his uncomplicated and still sound spirit could not overcome the vast injustice that separated him from the rest of the living.
‘You don’t know what goes on,’ he said to Antoine. ‘My daughter and her mother do their best not to look at me. I don’t make love any more. It would be unsightly, and everything around me is so beautiful. Roquebrune is the prettiest place on Earth. The people who come to the Côte are happy, they’re beautiful, I turn away so that I don’t make them sad. Sometimes I say to myself: Léon, you’re not a man, you’re not a man any more, you’re like a dog, you’re a pest, you’ve got to hide away.’
‘You’re a very unhappy man,’ Antoine said.
‘Maybe that’s it. You’re the only friend I have. We talk to each other. We drink grappa and the hours go by. Then you leave, and I wait for months for you to come by again. It’s not your fault. I know you have a family and friends and, judging by your car, plenty of loose change. Maybe you’re unhappy too. But you get around. I’m stuck here. That’s my life. It’s all I’ve got.’
Antoine stayed the night. Léon put up a camp bed for him in a bare
room behind the kitchen. Mosquitoes descended on him and he stayed awake till first light, his head heavy with grappa fumes and his senses sharpened by the thought of Marie-Dévote lying in Théo’s arms.
Léon came in, bringing a cup of coffee.
‘It’ll wake you up for your visit to your daughter,’ he said.
‘Yes, it will.’
But Geneviève was no longer at the clinic and Antoine, a prisoner of his family’s habit of secrecy, did not dare admit it. Two years earlier, she had left Menton to spend the winter at Marrakesh. From there she had gone to Brazil, and recently they had received a postcard from her, sent from Japan. Who she was travelling with, who she was spending time with or, to be more accurate, was keeping her in such luxury – since she seemed to lead a sumptuous existence whatever latitude she found herself in – nobody knew. At La Sauveté nobody spoke of her. A fiction had taken root: Geneviève needed to get away from unhealthy climates. She would never return to Normandy. She needed air, sunshine, and the sea or snow-covered mountains outside her windows. Questioned, not without mischief, by her friends, Marie-Thérèse du Courseau invariably answered, ‘Our children are nothing like we were. Geneviève is in love with freedom. It’s the gift the war gave to her generation. I think we’re modern parents. In 1923 you don’t bring up children the way they were brought up fifty years ago.’
So Antoine pretended to spend a couple of hours at Menton, greeted Léon Cece with a blast on his horn on the way back, stopped to kiss Marie-Dévote, and slept at Aix after a second evening with Charles. On the road from Aix to La Sauveté he did his best to knock a few more minutes off his previous record. As he drove through the gates that evening in October 1923, he glimpsed Adèle Louverture, with Michel under her arm gesticulating and trying to kick her. He had just broken Jean’s tricycle by taking a hammer to it, and Antoinette was kissing Jean to try to make it better.
Jean was pretending to read. The lines were dancing in front of his eyes. If he rested his forehead on his hand, he could lower his eyelids, make the unreadable page disappear, and go back in the minutest detail to the circumstances in which he had seen and then very gently kissed Antoinette’s bottom. It had happened that afternoon at the foot of the cliff, behind a heap of fallen rocks. Of the scene, which had hardly lasted more than a minute, he retained an anxious feverishness, as though they both had deliberately committed a sin that defied the whole world. He felt proud of himself, and at the same time wondered to what extent his feverishness, which periodically felt just like dizziness, wasn’t the punishment he risked, the sign that would betray him to the abbé Le Couec, his father, his mother, and Monsieur and Madame du Courseau. But between four o’clock and six that evening most of them had had plenty of time to read his thoughts, to question him, to notice how he blushed when they talked to him, and now he felt that their blindness was a serious blow to an infallibility that they had, in their different ways, fashioned into a dogma. Hadn’t Antoinette said, ‘If you don’t tell, no one – do you understand? No one on Earth – will ever know.’
‘Well, my dear Jean, you’re not getting very far with your reading. Aren’t you interested?’
At the sound of the priest’s voice, Jean jumped as if he had been caught red-handed. The abbé was behind him, ensconced in the only armchair in the kitchen, his legs flung out straight and wide apart, stretching the coarse threadbare cotton of his cassock.
‘That boy’s ruining his eyes with reading. Always got his nose in a book,’ Jeanne said, quick to take her adopted son’s side.
‘I wasn’t blaming him!’ the abbé answered. ‘I’m just used to seeing him more engrossed in what he’s reading.’
Albert, who was playing
trictrac
with Monsieur Cliquet, raised his head and said with finality, ‘Anyway, there’s nothing to be learnt from books. Newspapers and life will show you everything you need. I’ve never read a book in my life, and I’m no idiot, am I?’
He had allowed Madame du Courseau to pay for Jean’s education with great reluctance. To his way of thinking, it would simply mean that the boy would later become a dropout instead of a good gardener who knew and loved his work, because if progress was one of Albert’s key words he also entertained, within that vast idea, an illusion that society, advancing with even step towards human well-being and the mastery of life, would do so with its beneficial inequalities and necessary hierarchies intact. By not continuing the tradition of gardeners in the family, Jean was sowing disorder. But he also conceded that a mystery hung over his birth, and that such a child could thus not be tied down to the Arnauds’ profession from father to son. He had to be given a chance to decide his own destiny, and his seriousness and application consoled Albert.
Captain Duclou, who, with his elbows on the waxed tablecloth, was completing the delicate manoeuvre of inserting a ship into the narrow neck of a bottle, whose three masts he would subsequently raise with a complicated arrangement of threads that he would tie off and snip with the help of long tongs, showed that for all his absorption he was not missing a word of the conversation.
‘At sea there’s no use for books. Everything you need for navigation, you learn from your elders and betters.’
‘Come along,’ the abbé said, ‘let’s not exaggerate. Moderation in everything. We don’t come to God on our own. We need the Gospels.’
‘Your turn, Albert!’ Monsieur Cliquet said, holding out the dice cup to his cousin to remind those present that he took no part in such conversations and considered them pointless.
Jean resumed his daydream where it had been interrupted, and
behind his lowered eyelids recreated his picture of Antoinette’s bottom, a white, soft, well-rounded bottom that went into dimples where it met her back. Antoinette’s face was not especially pretty – her nose was a little too long, her cheeks too plump, her small eyes, which sparkled with suppressed amusement, rather close together – but her body was firm, with well-shaped muscles beneath its roundness. She swam, cycled, rode and played tennis with unflagging vigour. She radiated an attractive vitality, and in her company you felt the same strong desire to exert yourself and to imitate and follow her. She had very recently started to develop into a young girl, and her bust joggled nicely when she ran across court playing tennis or stood on her pedals to climb hard up the road from Dieppe to Grangeville. Jean, under a spell of admiration, was almost always with her, breathless, furious, happy, enchanted by this creature four years older than he, who protected him from the endless stream of traps Michel laid for him.
She had asked him without warning, ‘Do you want to see my bottom?’
To be honest, her bottom did not interest him very much. He would have preferred her breasts, but they would be for later, another time, and anyway Antoinette only ever did the things she wanted to do. The two of them had found a place concealed by a rock, where it was hard for them to be seen even from the top of the cliff above them. Antoinette had lifted up her skirt and pushed down her white cotton knickers, uncovering two lovely, smooth fresh globes that exuded a sense that being naked like that filled them with joy, making them want to burst with health and pleasure. The cleft disappeared into a shadowy fold between her thighs. Beyond, other mysteries began that Jean would have liked to find out about and whose importance he sensed without knowing why.
‘So?’ she said.
‘It’s very pretty.’
‘You can kiss it!’
He had put his lips on the soft skin, so soft it had a sweet taste, and had managed to hold back from biting, a maddening impulse that suddenly started up like hunger somewhere between his teeth. He had not been upset when in an abrupt movement she covered up her two marvels, for their contemplation was making him dizzy. Mademoiselle du Courseau straightened her skirt, and they dashed back up the gully together, hand in hand, to fetch their bikes and pedal frantically all the way to La Sauveté …
‘Yes, Father,’ Jeanne said, ‘you’re right. In books we learn how we must behave in life. But there are also books that are dangerous for people’s good sense.’
‘What are you reading, Jean?’
‘Treasure Island, Father. It was a present from Uncle Fernand.’
‘Always stories about sailors!’
Fernand Duclou looked up. ‘Well then, father, perhaps you’ll tell us what you’ve got against the navy, you, a Breton?’
‘Nothing, my dear man. It’s perfectly true that stories about sailors are generally a good healthy read.’
‘Because there are no women on board sailing ships’ Monsieur Cliquet said mischievously, taking the dice cup from Albert. ‘Whereas,’ he added, ‘there are women on trains and even Madonnas in sleeping cars.’
He was referring to a novel that had sold a fabulous number of copies, whose title was known even to those who were illiterate. Jeanne coughed, covering her embarrassment, and pulled her chair closer to spread her knitting over the kitchen table, above which hung an electric bulb and its china shade. The light was yellow and it flickered, but it was a novelty they were becoming accustomed to, not without the anxiety that it would be more expensive than their oil lamps. Jeanne stretched out the sleeve of the jumper she was knitting
and compared it with the one she had just finished. Captain Duclou poured warm blue wax into the bottle, and the three-master bobbed on a sea stirred up by a swell.
Albert had won. He sat back and lit a pipe, reached for his newspaper and after reading a headline, said bitterly, ‘They’ll have his hide, and then we’ll have another war.’
‘The war is over, for all of us,’ the abbé said.
‘Oh, they’ll wait until Jean’s old enough to be called up.’
‘Well, that gives us a bit of time, and as for your Aristide, no one will miss him.’
‘Briand equals peace!’ Albert said forcefully.
‘Peace equals a good navy,’ the captain said. ‘We no longer have one.’
‘And a decent transport system,’ Monsieur Cliquet said firmly. ‘How can we mobilise today’s wonderful modern armies with a network as out of date as ours? If the government thought that there would be another war, it would take the railways in hand. It’s not doing that, and I therefore deduce that there is not going to be a war in the near future.’
‘Now, now!’ Jeanne said. ‘There’s no need to go having an argument when everyone agrees.’
The abbé protested. He did not agree, and he did not care for Briand, calling him an ‘orator’ and beginning to imitate rather grotesquely his famous ‘Pull back the machine guns, pull back the cannons’ speech. He then raised the embarrassing matter of his criminal record. In his eyes Briand embodied the worst aspects of the centralising republic that got itself mixed up in the affairs of the world willy-nilly, while denying its provinces their rightful cultural freedoms.
‘Just listen to the Chouan!’
2
said Monsieur Cliquet, who had voted radical socialist since his youth.
The priest roared with laughter and leant over to borrow Albert’s tobacco pouch to roll himself a cigarette between his fat peasant’s fingers.
Jean was no longer following their talk, his mind having gone back to the delicious picture of Antoinette’s bottom. He now badly wanted to see it again, and stroke its cool skin.
‘It’s time you went to bed,’ his mother said. ‘You have to be up at six tomorrow.’
Jean closed his book. In bed he would be alone in the dark, with no one to interrupt his reverie. He kissed everyone goodnight and went upstairs. Each year at Christmas Marie-Thérèse du Courseau gave him something for his bedroom, bookshelves, an armchair or some leather-bound books, and the simple room, whose only window looked out onto the park, was set apart by its taste from the rest of the house, where waxed tablecloths, the chimes of Big Ben and kitchen chairs reigned. Albert naturally disapproved of such luxury, which seemed to him devoid of sense.
‘One day that boy will be ashamed of us,’ he said.
Jeanne shrugged her shoulders. She did not believe it, and little by little had begun to indulge herself in dreams of a great future for the child who had fallen into her lap. Besides, how could she refuse? Despite being repeatedly rebuffed, Marie-Thérèse du Courseau interfered relentlessly in Jean’s upbringing. Hadn’t she recently been talking about him having tennis lessons, as Michel and Antoinette did, and wasn’t she always picking him up whenever a Norman accent crept into his speech? But for the moment Albert’s fears were unjustified: Jean admired him and adored Jeanne, and even if he showed enthusiastic gratitude to Madame du Courseau for her many kindnesses, he didn’t really understand her attitude and its apparently arbitrary mixture of reprimands and generosity. He remained scared of her and never entered La Sauveté without apprehension, equally on his guard against Michel, who continued to nurse a deep, though veiled, hostility towards him that was more dangerous than kitchen knives or rat poison.
*
A few days later the Briand cabinet fell. Its end affected Albert deeply. War was around the corner, now that the one man who could prevent it had been removed. His successor, André Tardieu, nicknamed ‘Fabulous’
3
in political circles for his cigarette-holder and personal elegance as much as his grand bourgeois manner, inspired confidence only among the bankers. They doubtless needed it, being in the middle of a recession, but the magic formulas that were apparently overflowing from Tardieu’s pockets were already too late. The country’s industrial base, including its armaments industry, was crumbling. Antoine du Courseau himself, having for a long time done no more than glance indifferently at his notary’s warnings, found himself having to contemplate the sale of half the La Sauveté estate. The ink was barely dry on the contract when he left for the Midi, as though unable to bear Albert’s reproach-laden look or his wife’s indulgent smiles, laden with commiseration. Marie-Thérèse was admirable in her stoical dignity. She might of course, without straining herself an inch, have used her own fortune to save the park, but such an idea never occurred to her, and, it has to be said, nor did it cross Antoine’s mind to ask her to do so. A wall went up, which Albert covered with ampelopsis. The view out to sea vanished and was forgotten, its only reminder the herring gulls that swooped over the beeches and continued to land on the lawn in front of the bluffs of rhododendrons. They alone betrayed the continued presence of the great disappeared space, the infinity of the sea that had been rendered so finite.
Jean was hardly aware of these changes. He quickly forgot the lost park. Antoinette filled his thoughts. Not all of them, to tell the truth, as though he had already guessed that a man lives better with two passions than one. Certainly Antoinette dominated, because she was there every day, but Chantal de Malemort reigned by virtue of an almost fairy-like absence and her pure, transparent graces. It was, therefore, the little girl he caught sight of once a month if he was lucky, in the course of a formal visit, who captured his heart’s
most passionate impulses. If she had decided to reveal to him the same secrets as Antoinette he would have detested her, just as he would have detested Antoinette if she had decided to stop exciting his imagination with her carefully arranged exposures. In fact he did end up detesting her several times when, as much out of caprice as to gauge the extent of her power over him, she refused to show him that part of her body that had so fascinated him one afternoon at the foot of the cliff. She was also prudent: without her foresight and coolness they would definitely have been caught. Jean went slightly mad. He demanded his due everywhere, in the garage, in the woodshed, even in Antoinette’s bedroom when he managed to slip in there. Their difficulties increased when Michel’s attention was aroused and he began to follow them, but Antoinette knew how to shake him off with a mischievousness worthy of her age, and Michel would get lost in the back ways to the sea while the two accomplices sprinted down the gully and hid themselves under the cliff. Jean’s pleasure was spiced with remorse: what would Monsieur du Courseau think if he found out? Their secret understanding, born six years earlier after the incident of the punctured hosepipe, had continued and strengthened, without any need for great declarations. A wink from time to time, a word here and there, had been enough to reassure Jean. Actions and opportunities would come later – but what a disaster it would be if, before that happened, a shadow were to fall between them! Jean did not even dare imagine it. On the other hand, at Christmas there would be a problem: to receive communion he would have to go to confession, and there was no question of confessing to any other priest than the abbé Le Couec. But how would he react to what Jean would have to tell him? By early December Jean was feeling increasingly anxious, and he decided to ask Antoinette about his problem. She burst out laughing.