by Rose Tremain
Mallélou doesn’t ask his son why he stole. In the cities, you make out as best you can and you do your best not to get caught. He doesn’t blame his son for stealing. What he hates is that the woman, Mme. Motte, has now shaped Xavier’s future. Her cunning and the pathetic marking and counting of her goods has brought his son to this hell, this terrifying bloody prison. He could cry. His boy, trudging blank-faced round that exercise yard. His boy, carrying a slop bucket from his cell.
“Drink up, Xavier. You’re not drinking. Drink while you can.”
“What d’you mean?”
“You never know. With what this country calls Justice . . .”
“I’m not going back inside.”
“No, son.”
“I’ll kill her if they put me back,”
“Yes.”
“I’ll kill her.”
“Yes. Well, drink up, eh?”
Xavier doesn’t know the bar they’re in. He doesn’t want to take his father to any of his normal haunts. He feels childish, a failure. It enrages him that his father has to be involved at all. Stupid old man, never had any authority, any guts. Used to think he was a big shot because he worked the signals and screwed some leathery old German whore. Used to boast about this to his sons. Boast about that, when it was their mother who ran the family and kept it going. It was their mother, Gervaise, who had all the strength and passed it down to them.
“How’s Maman?”
“She’s fine. You want to switch to pastis?”
“No. Beer’s okay. Tell me about Maman. Is she mad at me?”
“I’m switching to pastis. Best to drink tonight.”
“Is she angry? What’s she said, Papa?”
“Nothing.”
“Go on. I know Maman. I know what she’d say.”
“Why d’you ask me, then? Hey, Xavier let’s do some proper bars later on, eh?”
“I don’t know. Maybe. I feel tired after those days there. You can’t sleep there. People cry in that prison, you know. They cry.”
In one corner of the bar, men still in their working bleus are playing cards. Pale youths hang round a pin-ball machine and a Babyfoot table. The thump-thump of the Babyfoot ball, the ping and grind of the pin-ball game, these noises are a reassuring day-to-day part of Xavier’s life. They reaffirm, in his exhausted skull, his right to a place here, in the heart of the city, a city you know and which knows you. In prison you know no one. The city turns its back. You wind up making pets out of mice or cockroaches, for the comfort of them. You might as well be in Alaska.
Mallélou orders two pastis. When they come, he sets one by Xavier’s beer glass.
“Drink it lad. You need it.”
“Okay. Tell me about Maman.”
Mallélou sighs. He wipes his mouth with stained fingers, tugs out a cigarette from crumpled packet and lights it. As he talks, the cigarette stays lodged between his lips, pressed wet and flat.
“She had her little cry. But then she’s spent her life blubbing for you boys. What’s one cry more? She blames me, of course. Blames the city. If she’d had her way, you and Philippe would have stayed in Pomerac, stayed staring at those cattle till you got simple-minded. That’s her idea of a life, that is, staring at cows’ arses.”
Mallélou pauses, waits for his son to laugh, but he doesn’t; he seems grave and sad. Mallélou coughs, swigs his drink, goes on: “Pomerac’s changing though, did I tell you? Those English people kissed goodbye to their Queen Elizabeth. They’re in next door, now. All year round. He looks a confused man. Her you don’t often see. I couldn’t do that – settle down in some strange bloody place. Perhaps they won’t last. I dunno. It’s odd them being there, though. You sense things changing.”
“How’s the Maréchal?”
“Oh, that one, he’ll be around for ever. Your Mother still scuttles round him. Come on, drink up, Xavier.”
“Did he lend us the bail money?”
“Why? D’you think I haven’t got it? D’you think I haven’t got eight thousand?”
“I don’t know . . .”
“I don’t borrow, Xavier. Never.”
“Maman does . . .”
“But not me. If my son’s in trouble, I bail him out. I find the money.”
“Where from?”
“Never you mind where from. I find it. Okay?”
“I’m frightened, Papa.”
“Yes. You look frightened. Frightened to bloody death. Where is it then, this woman’s restaurant?”
“Rue St. François. Near the station.”
“She’s the one who ought to be frightened.”
“Why?”
“Because I’m here, that’s why. And I defend my own.”
“What the hell d’you mean, Papa?”
“You think I’m not going to pay her a visit?”
“What?”
“You think I believe in State Justice?”
“Oh, come on . . .”
“State Justice my arse! If you’re rich you get justice. I believe in Rich Justice. But not the other kind. Not our kind. No. We just have to find ways of settling things ourselves.”
Xavier shakes his head in disbelief. Big talk. His father always loved this kind of big macho talk. But it remained talk. The nearest he got to “settling” anything for himself was to go and beat up that German, Marisa. But then, beginning to drink the pastis, his fear ebbing a little, Xavier starts to imagine Mme. Motte standing smug and safe by her chip-fryer, wiping her little greasy hands on her apron to take the mushy noodle soup to an early customer, smiling her tight smile, her stubby nose red from the kitchen steam. And this smugness, this safety, oppress him. Why should this ugly widow be so safe in her mucky little café, where the glasses aren’t even washed properly but only rinsed, where the ham she serves is slimy, where the oilcloth on the tables is yellow with fat fumes, where her one pathetic notion of decoration is sprigs of plastic oranges? And he, with his whole life in front of him, already on the outside, already destined for Alaska . . .
“She’s an old slag. She’d deserve anything she got.”
“So why are you afraid?”
“What?”
“Why are you afraid to take matters into your hands?”
“I’m not. But you could do more harm . . .”
“You said you’d kill her if they send you back.”
“Yeh.” Xavier feels choked, boiling hot. He considers now whether he shouldn’t go to some bar where his friends will be, just try to forget the whole business for the time being . . .
“So?”
His father’s an ugly man. Even as a child, Xavier Mallélou understood this. He used to search, in the mirror, for his father’s squashed features in his own face.
“So I could. I could kill her. But what then? That’s my life gone.”
One of the youths putting money into the pinball machine is whistling. This whistling aches in Xavier’s head. He wants to shout at the youth to belt up.
“Let’s move on, Papa. I know a nice bar.”
“Yes. All right. Get good and pissed, eh? Then we’ll think. What time does she finish up, your Mme. Motte?”
“Elevenish. I don’t know . . .”
“Don’t fret, Xavier. That’s the thing. Don’t fret.”
Mallélou pays for the drinks and he and Xavier walk out of the warm café into the street. A cold rain is falling.
Nadia is alone in her monogrammed sheets. She sleeps with the light on and dreams of Hervé and herself buying lime-coloured tickets for the space shuttle. The astronauts selling these tickets look on her and Hervé approvingly: the man is thin, the woman is small, they will fit in, they won’t weigh the shuttle down and stop it lifting off.
Larry is alone in the darkness without Miriam and wide awake. In the rain that drives onto his window is the memory of a night in September 1976 when, after the months of parched weather, with the concrete of his first pool laid that very afternoon and drying by teatime, a storm broke and the dust of summer
began to settle back into the clay. He’d woken Miriam and made her listen to the rain. She’d said, good, rain at last, now the willows may survive, and turned back to sleep. But Larry had got up and gone out into his front porch and stared hopelessly at the hurtling weather. In the hot, patient calm of July and August Aquazure had begun to grow an order book; now, in this return to dripping and damp and wind, England was pronouncing judgement on his fledgling enterprise: the swimming pool season is over. Around the corner is winter and frost; moss will bubble up in the splits and cracks of tiles; in this country a pool isn’t worth the money; this was a freak summer and the pools are simply its legacy. Already, before the first pool was built, Larry had seen the ruin. A swimming pool is only a pit, with plumbing. In time, nature reclaims it as a pond. Later, when Aquazure was failing, he’d have dreams of the things you find in swimming pools: dead belly-bloated hedge-hogs, blind drowned moles, frogs, newts, water beetles, smashed birds eggs, blanket-weed, algae, earth. But don’t tell the customers. Send in Bill the frogman, in his Aquazure blue wetsuit. Clean up. Check the pH. and the chlorine levels. Pour in the chemicals . . . He’s restless, remembering fears and portents that drove towards one ending. In his survival of that ending he feels cold. The white space in the bed that is Miriam’s absence is icy and grave. He wants to turn over into her warmth and feel her arms take him to her and give him hope. Since Aquazure he has been deficient in hope. His English doctor suggested a course of vitamin B6. Women are trying to ease pre-menstrual tension with these. He wonders if, month after month, women feel this same hope-deficiency. He wants to ask Miriam, but Miriam’s periods are erratic, ending. She mourns for this past pain and he’s not sure how best to comfort her. Now she’s not there to be comforted. Leni the newt, Leni the black beetle, Leni the earth mother, has reclaimed her. Leni’s arms blanket her and he’s left out in the cold.
He thinks of Hervé, tucked up in his ornate bed with a wire cradle shielding his broken legs from the weight of the blankets and wonders if he can learn to live like that – dry and alone. He thinks of Nadia’s hot little bathed body moist in its sudden yearnings for this clean leatherbound man, and wonders if, in the comedie humaine which is his life anyone will ever yearn for him again like this, with tears and fury. He thinks of Agnès. He imagines a nightie of crisp broderie anglaise with a tiny lattice of pink ribbon. In this, she sleeps straight and deep. Hervé’s breaths next door don’t disturb her. She dreams clean dreams of her fiancé, Luc. Her lips, opening and closing on the dream, are the pink lips of a child, of the daughter he never had. Thinking of this, he tries to forget Miriam and tries to sleep. Yet something in this sweet picture of Agnès disturbs him and keeps his mind beating as the rain beats on and in Nadia’s dream she and Hervé Prierè hurtle soundlessly in space, strapped to airline seats. Then out of the rainstorm, Larry picks another, frailer sound – the sound of Gervaise’s laughter.
Mallélou and Xavier have walked through the rain to one of Xavier’s favourite bars. You can eat at one end of it – good, expensive food, not the greasy filth ladled out by Mme. Motte – and a group of middle-aged men are ordering oysters.
Xavier has come here hoping to see friends. When any of his crowd are feeling rich, feeling optimistic, they come here. Sometimes they pig out on the seafood, get some good wine opened, and Xavier loves this, this feeling of how wealthy people eat. He decides, eating langoustines, he’ll work his arse off to be rich one day.
Mallélou senses the altered clientele in this bar and regrets moving on from the first place, where he felt comfortable. Here he feels shabby. He notices the dirt under his nails, dreads the city people’s disdain: he’s off the land, he’s a shit shoveller. He wants to tell them: I may have married a peasant, but I used to fuck your whores, I used to stub out my fags in a woman’s cunt.
“This your kind of place?” he asks Xavier.
Xavier nods, staring at the door. He needs his mates now, not his stupid father. But no one shows. Where are they? Have they forgotten him? Is someone giving a party somewhere?
“You get ripped off in bars like this,” says Mallélou. He’s still slurping pastis, but without relish now. Xavier stares at him, hating him. It amazes him that he’s this man’s son. When he was little, he used to invent alternative fathers for himself. One of these was the Maréchal. Occasionally, he still does this: he imagines the day when his mother tells him, you’re not Mallélou’s son. But it was after the boys left Gervaise that Klaus came. Neither of her sons know that Klaus is always there now, summer and winter.
Xavier drains his glass, feels the burning aniseed fire his stomach. He swallows, then turns to Mallélou.
“If you want to do something about la Motte, it’s better you go on your own, you know.”
“Uhn?”
“It’s better you go. I’m in enough trouble.”
Mallélou stares at his son. Why in heaven’s name did he shed the SNCF uniform for some lousy restaurant job? How could this have been allowed to happen?
“So you want to give me your responsibilities?”
“No. But I don’t want to see her again. Her face makes me puke.”
“So why did you ever go and work there?”
“It’s all there was.”
“You had a good job, Xavier . . .”
“Good job? You think that’s a good job, knocking bits of wood into the ground?”
“You would have got on. If you’d stuck at it.”
“You didn’t stick at it.”
“I worked my way up.”
“There’s no such thing these days.”
“Of course there is.”
“Signalmen. You know what signalmen are now? They’re computer operators.”
“You could have trained . . .”
“I didn’t have the fucking education!”
“No. But that’s not my fault. Don’t look at me. If we’d stayed on in the city, you and Philippe could have done okay. They don’t give children the right start in the country schools. They don’t teach them the right things.”
The door of the bar opens. Three young men, collars turned up against the rain, come in. Xavier’s heart lifts. Some of his friends at last. But they’re not his friends. They’re strangers. They walk past his table to the far end where the oysters are served.
Mallélou is beginning to be drunk. He feels that sliding of his blood which is both exciting and futile. His mind imagines for his body feats it will never manage. He gazes at Xavier. When the drink begins to get to him, other people’s faces seem to move and stretch. He feels he could take them apart, like unstitching rags.
“There’s a limit to what one man can do.”
He hears himself say this. What he meant was, two men are better than one when it comes to teaching a woman a lesson. But the words echo, as if shouted in a tunnel: there’s a limit, limit to what one man can do . . . Dark echoey excuse trapped in a tunnel. The excuse for all the things he will never be, all the women he will never have. He sees Xavier shrug.
“Suit yourself. I don’t want to go near her.”
“You fuck her, did you?”
“What?”
“You screw her? I told you not to.”
Xavier makes a disgusted face. “I’m not so desperate. There’re women in this town, you know.”
“I know, son. No one knows better than me.”
“And not just German tarts, either.”
Mallélou looks at his son with the scared eye of a ratty dog. Handsome though Xavier’s face always was, he could unstitch it.
“You know nothing about the Germans. You didn’t live the war as I did.”
“Thank God.”
“What you hear in France is mostly lies.”
“What lies?”
“About what they did.”
“What the Germans did? Well documented lies, then.”
“They would have run this country well.”
“Oh shut up, Papa.”
“No one likes to admit
it, that’s all.”
“I’m not interested in your perverted crap. Just because you banged that stinky old woman . . .”
“Beautiful you mean.”
“What?”
“She was beautiful. Marisa. She was beautiful.”
“Go on.”
“I used to bugger her. Come in her arse. That’s what she liked.”
“So?”
“So it was beautiful.”
“Yeh?”
“Yes. Better than anything you’ve ever done.”
“You’re pathetic.”
Xavier gets up, goes to the bar and asks for change for the telephone. Tired though he feels, he’s half decided to ring his friend, Pozzo, and get him to join them. Mallélou suffocates him. His filthy hands. His turgid sex talk. Earlier, he’d resigned himself to giving the old man his bed for the night and sleeping on the floor with a blanket. Now he decides he’ll put Mallélou on the floor. After six nights in a cell, he can at least sleep in his own bed. Unless he gets rid of him and he and Pozzo go and look up some girls. One thing feels good anyway: his fear is going. He snatches up the change from the bar counter and orders more pastis. Perhaps, if he keeps the drinks coming, he can send his father to “tidy up” Motte, give her a scare, just enough so that she agrees to drop the case, to tell the police she made a mistake. “I defend my own,” the old idiot bragged. So let him show that he can. Xavier glances behind him at Mallélou. His father is looking people over with sad, glassy eyes.
Now, into Gervaise’s mouth, where her songs fly out in the cold of morning, Klaus pours his red tongue like an eel. Her own tongue first makes way for it, then curls under it, pushing against its beautiful weight.
For all his strength, he holds her lightly, carries her aloft on him to her bed, where they subside onto the featherbed coverlet she once filled with the down of her own barnyard birds. It amuses and delights Klaus to make love to Gervaise riding on the bleached feathers of squabbling geese and ducks that have, in time past, fed her and kept her alive. The coverlet is noisy with these goose-ghosts, these duckling-ghosts, and Klaus sets them all squawking, quacking and gobbling with his rollicking love.