by Michel D
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.
3
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 sai
d, ‘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 incid
ent 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.
‘You stupid boy! Why should you confess it? It’s not a sin. Don’t be such an idiot, or I shan’t show you anything any more.’
‘I’m sure it is a sin. It’s called lust.’
‘Oh my gosh, just listen to him! Who do you think you are? A man? For heaven’s sake, there are no children left.’
Impressed, Jean did not say any more, and on Christmas Eve went to confession with the village children. The abbé Le Couec officiated in his icy church, chilled by a west wind that whistled through the porch and made the altar-cloth ripple magically. The dancing candle flames twisted the shadows of the Sulpician statues of Saint Anthony, Saint Thérèse of Lisieux and Joan of Arc in their niches. Huddled in his rickety confessional, the abbé Le Couec listened to the piping litany of childish sins. When it was his turn Jean kneeled, trembling, and with his voice shaking with emotion recited an Our Father as if he were clinging to a lifebelt, then fell silent.
‘I’m listening, my child,’ said the priest, who had recognised his voice.
Jean confessed to some venial sins that he wasn’t even sure were sins. The abbé’s silence worried him. Was he there, listening behind his screen? What trap was waiting, right next to Jean, in the darkness of the confessional? What if there were no priest on the other side at all, but a huge ear sitting on the wooden bench, an ear of God with hearing so acute it could listen in to the most secret thoughts.