‘When did we have this flat tyre?’ Frédéric shouted.
‘After dinner – too late for the post office – so then we had to spend the night at an hotel. That’s all.’
‘Too late for a garage?’
‘Mais oui. Nous avions dîné un peu tard. How could we have imposed the dinner hour on Sandro’s friends? We’ll apologise of course. They’ll be furious, they like being furious, Papa too, and because they’ve been anxious. They may not be so very furious in front of Alessandro.’ (Mightn’t they? I thought.) ‘It’ll pass. What can they do to us? In eleven months I shall be twenty-one.’
‘We’re not talking about eleven months, ma fille, we’re talking about now,’ said her brother. Alessandro just groaned.
None of us mentioned the pitfalls in our tale. Each surmised; none asked questions. It was decided that the brother and sister accompanied by Alessandro – naturally, as the outing’s host – were to face the music. I was to be dropped off at Les Cyprès, the assumption being that the less there were to be cross-examined the safer. One less to blush.
As we were driving through Sanary, I saw Oriane Desmirail walking through the square. Instantly I asked Alessandro to stop, to let me out, I’d remembered something I had to get. Do stop. I said Bon courage to Alessandro as they drove on to whatever awaited them. I forgot to say goodbye to Frédéric. I was off like an arrow.
I caught up with Oriane on the port about to get into her car, the small Citroën. Oh, there you are, she said, Philippe and I have been looking for you.
‘We’ve been to Saint-Tropez.’
‘Ah. You’ve been making la bombe.’
‘We did rather.’
‘Deserting your friends. We wanted to help you clear up, and we wanted to ask you to dinner last night.’
‘Oh,’ I said, ‘if only I had known.’
She raised an eyebrow and took this up. ‘If only …?’
‘I would have gone to dinner with you.’
‘Quite right, instead of gadding about with those boring Panigons.’
‘How did you know?’ I said.
‘Somebody saw them in your car. Everyone knows everything in Sanary.’
Not everything, I thought.
‘Saint-Tropez is fun, or didn’t you have any? Why would you’ve rather had dinner with us?’
I knew the answer to that. With sudden clarity.
‘Diane,’ I said.
‘Diane who?’
‘Diane chasseresse, Diane the Goddess.’
The eyebrow again. ‘Yes …?’
‘You,’ I said.
‘Astride a 4-CV Citroën? Malheureuse, vous me rendez ridicule.’
‘Is that a quotation?’ I said.
‘It is.’
‘You could never be ridiculous,’ I said.
‘Whereas you might?’
‘I wouldn’t mind. I’m only a mortal. May I tell you something?’
‘Would it amuse me?’
‘It well might,’ I said with some grimness.
‘In that case, do tell me.’
I looked at her. Straight. With complete concentration. Then I uttered the three fatal words.
The three fatal words – they are three in French as well as in English though the pronoun is not in the same place – the words every human creature, one hopes – or despairs – uses once, more than once, too often, in his or her lifetime. Meaning them, thinking to mean them, not meaning them. I meant them. And when one does that, one is transfigured. Knowledge had descended on me in a span of seconds.
The pronoun I had used was vous, a shade less trite than the t’. How did Oriane take it? If it is the declarer’s great moment, it is not always the declaree’s. She, poor woman, treated me no better than I deserved, absurd rash young fool. Perhaps a little worse, being Oriane. But then I didn’t know what she was like (that was one of the things she pointed out to me). What I had known was that mockery was her strong suit.
‘You’ve chosen an odd time of day for making your dramatic announcement,’ she said, and bade me look about me – housewives who knew us were scurrying around with heaped market baskets looking for their cars. And it wasn’t only the wrong hour, hadn’t I made other mistakes?
‘Louis and I thought it was Philippe?’
‘Oh I do love Philippe,’ I said, ‘but with you … with you …’
‘With me?’
‘It’s not the same.’
‘Of course it’s not the same. What is it then?’
‘I cannot say it again.’
‘The dramatic announcement?’
‘It was true,’ I said.
‘Truth,’ she said, ‘is such a feeble excuse for so many things. What did you expect from me?’
I tried to think. ‘I don’t know. Nothing. I really don’t know.’
‘Oh dear. How inconclusive. Do try and make up your mind.’
And so it went on. She blew hot and she blew cold. Oriane was good at that too. I knew I was being teased. I knew I was making a fool of myself. It changed nothing. Finally she offered me a lift home. I turned the starting handle for her and meekly climbed into the car. At the gate of Les Cyprès, quoting the clinching line of Victor Hugo’s poem about the French captain discovering that the wounded soldier whom he is offering his water bottle to on the battlefield is a Prussian officer, ‘Allez, buvez quand même,’ she asked me to dinner that evening. ‘Bring your handsome stepfather,’ she said over her shoulder as she drove off.
I did not go into the house by the front door. I climbed into my room through the window, locked the door and pulled in the shutters. Le Rouge et le noir swam into my mind, the most heroically romantic novel I knew – my head, too, was full of French quotations – with Julien Sorel’s flash of revelation as he leaves Mathilde de la Môle at dawn: II était éperdument amoureux. Eperdument, I repeated to myself. Lost. Lost in love.
12
For some days, three of the four who had been to Saint-Tropez lived enclosed each in a private universe of troubles and emotions. Preoccupations and feelings ran parallel. The fourth, apart from relief which is soon forgotten, experienced merely bafflement. I, as one of the insulated three, only perceived or thought about this a little later. Soon enough. I was not able to stay behind a locked door for long.
The first thing that penetrated the armour of my own obsession was that the relationship with Alessandro had changed. Camaraderie had been replaced by complicity. Unavowed, and thus uncertain, complicity. There had been no word spoken. Then Cécile Panigon sought me out – she had to talk, she said – and made clear a situation I hoped did not exist.
Incidentally, all had gone miraculously well for her and her brother on their return to the parental roof. Madame Panigon’s mind, so readily suspecting adultery, incest, sodomy, rape and worse between any two people in her sight, did not proceed in this way at all when it came to her own offspring. That was the miracle. Fully aware of the season’s situation hôtelière, it did not occur to her for a second that the girls, Cécile and I, had not shared one of the rooms allotted, while les garçons occupied the other. The key figure, Cécile, had looked as if butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth, enabling Frédéric and Alessandro to control their nerves. So all went well. Of course they were given a terrific dressing down (I had a full account): they oughtn’t to have gone in the first place, they might all have been killed in that car … so inconsiderate, so selfish, so ungrateful … no one deserved such children … But it was all about bad manners and the dangers of the road.
Yes, but the perils, as I saw, as I was forced to see now, were not over. Cécile had been seeing Alessandro, alone, as often as they could. (As I might have noticed.)
She said, ‘I love Alessandro.’
She had no inhibitions about the three fatal words; she made them sound like an incontrovertible mathematical statement. I was silent.
‘You can understand me?’
That was a hard one. Perhaps one can only understand oneself. Imperfectly.
‘Cécile …’
‘He is so sensitive, he knows so much, he’s so interesting – he must have learnt so much from your dear mama, she’s given Sandró so much.’
I winced at more than this version of his name (she pronounced it à la française). ‘Cécile,’ I said, ‘what is to become of this?’
‘He doesn’t love me,’ she said. ‘I know he doesn’t.’ She said it with dignity and courage. ‘He is very nice to me … il est si gentil. But he only loves votre maman. I don’t mind what he feels as long as I can be with him.’
‘Cécile …’
‘I know that we haven’t much time. I call him mon papillon, my butterfly who will soon be gone.’ I groaned. She looked at me anxiously. She really had enormous eyes. ‘You don’t think we are doing wrong? Votre maman a l’esprit si large …’
My large-minded mother – on her own account she had been that. I dared not speculate further. ‘What about your father and mother?’ I said.
‘They can’t stop me seeing Sandró. They’d lock me up if they knew but I’d get out and run away.’ She got down to what she had come to talk to me about, she was asking me to help. ‘If you are afraid I’d tell anyone, you’re wrong,’ I said proudly and coldly. ‘This is not my business.’
It was not what she had meant, the help she needed was now. She had worked it all out. They would only have these few days, it wasn’t easy for Sandró and her to get off on their own – he wouldn’t like it if it came to a parent crisis – she had to invent opportunities and excuses, such as for instance spending an evening at the cinema in Toulon with me.
I laughed. ‘And go on my own and brief you on the film afterwards?’ Lying for them … Well, lying to the Panigons. Was it only to the Panigons? ‘Yes, I will,’ I said, feeling heavy at heart. Whatever I did or failed to do would be treacherous. If I refused at this point it could only cause more trouble, more unhappiness. I said again that I would do what I could. Yet I didn’t really want to know too much about the whole thing. I ought to have felt more sympathy for Cécile, for her being so much in love. I did not accept her as ma semblable, ma soeur. In fact, I could not bear the thought.
‘A pretty kettle of fish,’ I said.
‘Pardon?’
The same day Alessandro spoke to me. He looked careworn.
‘Cécile has been to see you? She told me she would.’ It was the first time her name had been mentioned between us.
‘Poor little thing,’ he said, ‘poor little thing.’
‘Alessandro,’ I said, ‘how was it possible then?’
‘Saint-Tropez. I’d had too much to drink.’
‘But … why now?’
‘You must have heard it from her – she’s taking it seriously. Terribly so. What can you do? What can a man do? Tell her I found a woman in my bed, I hardly knew who she was – that’s how it happened. Goodness knows I don’t want to hurt her, I can’t just push her off. You see, it doesn’t matter so much to a man, one way or the other … She’s really rather sweet in her way. I like her. And it will all come to a natural end very soon.’
‘She knows that.’
‘She’s a good, loyal girl.’
‘Loyal to you. She does admire you.’
‘God, yes.’
‘Isn’t it nice to be admired?’ I said. ‘I wish someone admired me.’
He laughed. ‘We don’t get much of that at home, do we?’
It was not what I had meant.
Alessandro turned gloomy again. ‘I don’t want to get involved with her blasted parents. You think Panigon’d fight a duel?’
‘Père or fils?’ I asked, daring to go fishing.
‘Oh père, of course,’ he said, ignoring the bait. ‘But I think not. He could make things unpleasant though. With good reason. Funny thing, Cécile is a good liar, you wouldn’t think she had it in her.’
‘L’amour,’ I said.
‘Oh please. I never dreamt this could happen – damn Saint-Tropez – I haven’t slept with a woman, or wanted to, since the night I met your mother.’
We said nothing for a moment.
‘How … how will she take it?’
‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘Perhaps I shouldn’t tell her.’
‘She must understand such things.’
‘You can’t be sure with women. They’re easily hurt.’
‘She’s different.’
‘She is different,’ said Alessandro fondly, ‘and not so different. I must not hurt her. I don’t want to hurt anyone.’
‘Dear Alessandro,’ I said, ‘poor dear Alessandro.’ Then I told him I was going to see the new film at Toulon this evening, on my own. He patted me on the shoulder, but he still looked careworn.
In the end I did not see the new film on my own. I went with the Desmirails. I mentioned it to them, they said good idea, we all went. Philippe, Oriane, Louis, I. I had been going about a good deal with them, mostly à quatre. The result of my disclosure on the port that morning, the only result one could say, was that Oriane now regarded me as a piece of her property. Not very valuable property. Well below Louis, I had been attached to her cortège. I, too, could now be seen in the back of cars or walking a step or two apart carrying coat or basket. In the mornings I would hang about the Place waiting for her to appear, rush to her car, open the door before it had stopped, kiss her hand – as Philippe and Louis did on greeting her – snatch at anything portable. Then I’d follow her to Chez Benech, the crémerie, the fruit stalls. When my presence bored her – often – she showed it, that was part of her on-and-off technique. When I did something clumsy, she was genuinely cross. One such occasion was when I took a fine ripe melon from her hands and put it on top of some small cream cheeses. In later years such incidents were transformed in anecdotage: the lovelorn page putting the melon on les fromages à la crème. At the time I was made to feel the fool I was.
She could also be charming to me, most so when Louis was about, hinting at shared private jokes, ruffling my hair, touching my hand. It did not take much to make Louis jealous, she always knew how to bring him to heel. There was none of that – no irritation, no flirting – when Philippe was present; I was treated (by both of them) with open affection as a well-liked, if somewhat absurd, young friend of the house. They liked to pretend that I was instructed beyond my years and nicknamed me Dix-sept ans: Je sais tout, the title of a popular review for the young. Sadly aware that far from knowing it all I was even no longer seventeen, I got Philippe to impart to me some of his manifold knowledge: he was both wonderfully instructed and instructive. I could make him tell about Paul Valéry and Valéry Larbaud and Marcel whom he’d been brought to see as a boy and if anything took against, to the disgust of Oriane who was Proustienne to her fingertips. He would feed my curiosity about book publishing, French political institutions, car engines, map-making and the drafting of timetables. The latter attracted me by the numerate ingenuity it required. Our calculations, if on a small scale, were no idle pursuit: the Desmirail bus line was to come into operation before long. There were to be seven buses to begin with linking Sanary to Toulon by two routes – one taking in Ollioules, the other La Seyne – at exact suitable times for getting people to work in the mornings, returning them at lunchtime and after entertainments past midnight. Working this out – computers had not been invented – was an intricate and enjoyable job with graphs spread all over the floor; Philippe said he was using the principle employed by the French National Railway network. It was important to get the service from La Seyne right as that rather deprived township, situated on the other side of the Bay of Toulon, was mainly inhabited by men who worked in the naval shipyards whose means of getting there were by steam ferry. Philippe hoped to provide alternative public transport by road. La Seyne had something over thirty thousand inhabitants. ‘You’ll be needing seventy buses soon, Philippe, not seven,’ Louis said. ‘You’ll be a millionaire.’
‘Not Philippe,’ said Oriane, with slightly less scorn than pride.
‘You’ll understand all right when you know him a bit better.’
‘Oriane,’ Philippe said firmly, ‘I refuse to believe that one cannot earn money unless one behaves like a crook.’
‘Depends what you call a crook. Everybody is entitled to look after their own interests.’
‘Anybody who commits or condones a dishonest act is a crook.’
‘You would call evading one’s taxes a dishonest act.’
‘It is,’ said Philippe.
I should not have liked to contradict that quiet tone.
‘You are the one and only Frenchman who thinks so,’ Oriane said.
‘Then I must be that Frenchman,’ said Philippe.
I resolved that, when the time came, I too would not evade my taxes. My immediate problem was, however, not to make sheep’s eyes at Oriane in Philippe’s presence.
Unrequited love. There is nothing new to be said about it. Whether it befalls one at eighteen, at thirty, at seventy, the pangs are much the same: the delirium, the hopes, the despair, the waiting. At eighteen one may believe oneself to be uniquely stricken, at thirty one may be able to say that no pain is irreversible, at seventy one knows that it is: irreversible.
Requited or not, some things can be said for it – the virtuous resolutions, the ecstasy of a presence, a rare soft look, the whole-heartedness, the being alive. My feelings were not deterred by the full awareness of my age, sex and station in life (none), but my comportment was. I valued Philippe’s good opinion; possibly more than Oriane’s. His example was teaching me tenue: grace – stoic or hypocritical – under pressure. I don’t know how far I succeeded. Whatever Philippe saw, guessed or knew about emotional human relations, he did not wish to know, nor appear to know.
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