iii
Solange joined them on the train. Luc didn’t speak a word until they arrived at Limoges, where he gripped Arianne by the arm and pulled her roughly aside.
‘How could you!’ he exploded.
‘It wasn’t me!’
‘I trusted you!’
‘Romy . . .’
‘Do you know what his father is?’
‘I don’t know how he found out, Luc, I swear!’
‘They say he’s turned more people over to the Gestapo than anyone in the area.’
‘You’re hurting my arm,’ said Arianne.
‘Draft dodgers, black marketers – people like Thierry, like your own brother, for God’s sake. Imagine if Paul was older! Thierry’s only around because he bribes that scum. And you go blabbing to his son!’
‘I did not blab!’
‘You were gossiping about me!’
‘You’re just as bad as everybody else,’ she shouted as he walked off. ‘You think you’re better, but you’re not.’
‘What?’
‘You’re so afraid people will judge you because of your grandfather, but you’re very quick to tar Romy with the same brush as his dad.’
‘It’s not the same.’
‘Isn’t it?’
Luc looked furious. Arianne began to shake.
‘Come on, Ari.’ Solange had been waiting a small distance away and stepped forward now to take her cousin’s hand. ‘We’ll be late.’
Arianne burst into tears. Luc’s expression softened, then set again into a hard line beneath Solange’s reproachful gaze.
‘I don’t want to talk to you any more,’ he said.
‘That’s fine by me,’ sobbed Arianne. ‘I never want to see you again either.’
*
She guessed what had happened that afternoon, as soon as she discovered that the pagemark in her diary was missing.
‘You monster!’ she yelled. Paul was sitting on the floor of his bedroom, counting cigarettes. She waved the diary in his face. ‘You little toad!’
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’
‘I’m talking about the ribbon – mother’s ribbon – that I always keep in my diary. I’m talking about the sordid little deals you’ve been cutting behind my back.’
He managed to hold her gaze. ‘It’s called the free market.’
‘No it’s not! It’s called betraying and cheating and stabbing people in the back. It’s called having no honour or scruples or integrity!’
‘I don’t even know what any of those words mean!’ he said sulkily.
‘Exactly! You’re wild, and you’re becoming horrible. You would never dare behave like this if Papa was here!’
‘Well he’s not, is he!’ Paul shouted. For a moment, he looked like he was going to cry. ‘He’s not here, and neither is Mother!’
He threw his cigarettes to the floor and bolted from the room.
‘I haven’t finished with you yet!’ she roared.
She caught up with him at the back door and grabbed his arm.
‘Let me go!’ he yelled.
‘I’d like to whip you!’
‘Well, you can’t!’ He wrenched himself free and ran out into the garden. ‘I hate you! I hate all of you!’
*
Nobody ever went in to her father's study except for Elodie, and even then only to dust. Arianne entered it now as she would a shrine. Nothing had changed. There was still the same framed photograph of the four of them on the mantelpiece, her mother radiant and healthy, Paul no more than a toddler, she with braids hanging over her shoulders. The papers he had left on his desk lay under the stone paperweight she had once painted for him, the book he had been reading sat on the same table. Ready for me to pick up again when I come back, he had said. She threw herself into his favourite of the two armchairs before the fire. The leather smelt of his pipe.
She was still shaking from the argument with Paul.
‘You have to come home now, Papa,’ she sighed out loud. ‘I don’t think we can manage without you any more.’
She stayed until the light outside grew dim. She thought about lighting a fire and maybe sitting at the desk to write, but it would have meant disturbing the fragile balance of the room, and so she did nothing. In due course, she became aware of voices in the kitchen. Somebody was crying. She roused herself and tiptoed down the hall to listen.
Through the half-open door she saw Elodie, regal despite her bedroom slippers, hovering over a boiling kettle. Luc’s mother sat at the table.
‘I’m so sorry,’ said Teresa. Her voice quivered, and her face was puffy from crying. ‘I didn’t know where else to turn.’
The kettle whistled. Arianne strained to hear, but caught only isolated words. So ashamed . . . so angry . . . everybody knows . . . Was she talking about Luc or about herself?
Elodie turned, holding a pot full of limeflower tea, saw her great-niece and frowned. Arianne raised her hands and backed away. She didn’t go down to dinner that night but stayed in her room, pretending to be ill. Later, when the others had gone to bed, she stole back down to the study and took the family photograph. She put it on her bedside table and fell asleep still looking at it.
*
‘I don’t actually care,’ she told Solange over the days that followed, when Luc still wouldn’t talk to her.
‘Right,’ said Solange. ‘You don’t care.’
‘Just, we were friends. He was different.’
‘He’s different all right. Flying off the handle like that. I’ve gone right off him.’
‘He’s proud!’
‘Oh, proud,’ mocked Solange. ‘I don’t know why you even bother to defend him.’
‘You’re right,’ agreed Arianne. ‘He’s an idiot.’
‘I wish you would stop sighing,’ snapped Elodie when they sat together at the kitchen table. ‘Your aunt tells me you had an argument with the Belleville boy. You should either apologise or forget about it. It’s no good moping.’
Elodie was ruthless about the memorial service for Luc’s father.
‘I promised Teresa we would all go.’
‘But I don’t go to church!’
‘This is different.’
‘Father never goes.’
‘And look what happened to him!’
‘What, would God have saved him from the Nazis if he’d been a Christian?’
‘I promised.’
They arrived early for the service and sat a few rows back from the front. Arianne watched people stream into the church. There was no mistaking the current of excitement in the air. Something had brought them, though she wasn’t convinced it was the memory of Luc's father. The past winter had been cold and hungry. Perhaps this memorial service was their way of giving thanks that it was over and they were still here. Her mind wandered. Cattle were lowing in the lane outside. She knew without seeing them that the Legros’ farmhand was bringing them in for milking, could almost smell the farmyard on them, rising from their caramel hides. The evening sun caught the stained-glass windows of the nave, dotting the stone floor with pools of colour.
A murmur ran through the congregation. Teresa Belleville, very thin in a dark pre-war dress was walking down the aisle on the arm of her son, incongruous in a suit too tight across his shoulders. Father Julien walked behind them, his spectacles giving his round face the look of a surprised baby owl. Arianne stifled a giggle. Paul looked up hopefully. Elodie rapped each of them on the shoulder.
The service began.
‘Jacques Belleville,’ intoned Father Julien, ‘was not a churchgoing man. Yet all of us who knew his paintings could tell that God had touched him with His grace.’
God had touched him with His grace. She liked the phrase. Grace. It occurred to her that this moment was full of it and she felt suddenly overwhelmed with affection – for Father Julien, for this building, for the villagers in their Sunday best. For Luc too, though it wasn’t the same sort of affection. Her mind drifted to the world
outside and she thought with unusual fondness of quiet Samaroux, mellowed by the centuries into an extension of the countryside so that one could never imagine that once it had not existed. This too, surely, was a form of grace. Despite everything, it seemed to Arianne, in this laden moment, that the world was as it should be.
‘Is this what it means to believe in God?’ she wondered. It seemed unlikely that faith should be so easily stumbled upon.
The eulogy had ended and Father Julien had moved on to the mass. The invitation to communion was issued. Arianne shuffled down the aisle after Elodie.
Head bowed by the sacristy, she could not resist stealing a look at Luc. His eyes widened at the sight of her. I was wrong about that suit, she thought. It’s not too tight on him at all.
Father Julien was saying something.
‘I beg your pardon?’ she said.
‘I said, the Body of Christ.’ Father Julien gazed at her over the top of his spectacles with an expression of mild rebuke. Arianne flushed.
‘Amen?’
Father Julien sighed.
How was it possible to feel so much one minute and nothing the next? Arianne stood on the church steps after the service, watching Luc and his mother shake hands with their crowd of well-wishers. He had not spoken to her. Apart from that one quick glance in the church, he had not even looked at her.
‘Dear God,’ she prayed, ‘please make that good feeling come back. Please let me be nice. Please, also, tell me what I should do.’
‘You look troubled.’ She started. Father Julien had appeared by her side and was looking at her with a benevolent smile.
‘I was trying to pray.’
‘Do I take it you were not succeeding?’
‘I have no idea,’ she admitted. ‘I haven’t really had much practice.’
‘Do you feel, perhaps, that you would like guidance in this matter? Prayer, after all, is something of a speciality of mine.’
His blue eyes twinkled at her from behind his glasses.
‘I think that would be lovely.’ An idea struck her. ‘Could I come to confession?’
‘My child, what have you been up to?’
‘I mean now?’
‘Madame Belleville has invited me to her house to toast the memory of her husband.’ Father Julien leaned forward to whisper. ‘I understand she has unearthed champagne, and that Gaspard Félix has swapped a duck pâté for an old painting of her late husband’s.’
‘Gaspard Félix the butcher?’
‘Do you know any other?’
‘I didn’t know he liked art.’
‘People are forever surprising us. Now, about this confession.’
‘I'm sure it won’t take long.’
*
‘What do I do?’ she asked minutes later in the confessional box.
‘Tradition dictates that you ask me to forgive you and tell me when you last came to confession. Since that date is lost to the mists of time, I suggest you launch straight in and tell me what is troubling you.’
‘I’m not sure I believe in God,’ she warned him. ‘Earlier, during the service, I thought I was brimming with faith, but then I went outside and it just vanished.’
‘This can happen.’ Father Julien settled himself on his narrow seat and closed his eyes. ‘I’m listening.’
‘It’s not as if I’ve really done anything . . .’
‘You’d be surprised what brings people to confession,’ he said. ‘Some thoughts, perhaps. Sad, angry thoughts?’
‘I feel . . .’ Like crying, she wanted to say. Like believing, in God, in Luc, in something. ‘I want something to change.’
‘Something?’
‘Anything.’
‘It’s not so uncommon for the young to feel hemmed in. It is not a sin. It’s even necessary, otherwise how would you ever get on?’
‘But what can I do about it?’
‘The world is big, Arianne. One day you will learn that each of us holds its image in our hearts. We are all mirrors of God, beings of infinite possibilities, and it is not necessary to look so very far afield to make new discoveries about the world or to understand our place in it. Study, prayer, the pleasures of simple things . . . these too can broaden and open our minds. Personally I believe they are the only paths to true wisdom. But the young are not interested in wisdom.’
‘I’m not uninterested,’ said Arianne.
‘Then I recommend patience until you finish school, and after that . . . travel, more study! The Germans have not closed the universities. Go to Bordeaux, as your mother did. Or Paris, why not? You are quite capable of it.’
‘I would like to travel. Sometimes Samaroux feels so small . . .’
‘Was there anything else? Only this champagne . . .’
‘Why sometimes do people behave like you’re really important to them and then refuse to talk to you because of a stupid argument?’
‘Do I take it you are talking about young Luc?’
‘Did you know about his grandfather?’
‘What I know about my parishioners is really none of your concern.’
‘I think he must think I mind. But I don’t know if he minds thinking I think that. Which I don’t. Mind, I mean. How did you know?’
The grille between them threw latticed shadows over his face, but she saw that he looked pained. ‘Know what?’ he asked.
‘You know . . . Luc,’ she hissed. ‘Is it that obvious?’
‘Arianne, my dear, you hardly took your eyes off him throughout the service.’
‘That’s not true!’
‘I’ll be the judge of that.’
Arianne waited in silence for the heat in her cheeks to die down.
‘What should I do?’ she asked at last.
‘I am a priest, not a relationship counsellor. It does strike me that if you love this boy, perhaps the simplest thing to do would be to tell him so?’
‘I don’t love him! I just wish I knew where I stand. We were friends.’
‘Do you not see in his treatment of you a reflection of your treatment of God?’
‘God! What does God have to do with anything?’
‘Earlier I was brimming with faith, but as soon as I came out it just vanished. You loved God and then you did not love God. You do not trust your feelings for God. Some relationships are more difficult to apprehend than others. They are usually the more meaningful ones.’
‘You mean . . .’
‘Dear Arianne. Would it help if I said that you are not the first soul-searching teenager who has come to me looking for answers?’
‘Do you mean Luc? Has he been talking to you?’
Father Julien shifted behind his lattice screen. ‘Faith and love, child. There is nothing more important. Now, I think we have reached the end of this confession. We must not keep the widow Belleville waiting a moment longer.’
‘We?’
‘I am taking you with me,’ he announced, ‘as my guest.’
‘But . . .’
‘But what?’
‘Shouldn’t you absolve me first?’
‘I absolve you.’ The old priest made an approximate sign of the cross as he climbed out of the confessional box. ‘Come along.’
‘You’re not a normal priest.’
‘How would you know?’ He was already halfway down the aisle before she hurried after him.
iv
Solange collared Luc by the kitchen door when his mother sent him to fetch more wine.
‘I’m not going to pretend I don’t know what it’s all about,’ she said. ‘Because I do.’
‘I have no idea what you're talking about.’
‘Ari. I know why you quarrelled, and I’m sorry to bring it up at your father’s memorial and everything, but I think you’ve behaved like an absolute thug.’
Madame Jarvis, emerging from the kitchen, raised her eyebrows. Solange glared at her and she scurried away.
Luc’s eyes flashed as he glanced around the room. ‘It's none of your business.�
��
‘She’s my cousin.’
‘You have no idea what we’ve been through.’
‘What you’ve been through? Funny, when I heard about what happened, I didn’t think about you at all. I thought about the family who were arrested because of your grandfather, and I thought of my poor cousin sobbing away in bed at night because somebody is too bloody stubborn to realise she would never in a million years give away his secret.’
‘She told you.’
‘Only because I beat it out of her, because she was so upset. He’s a creep, I said, but she would defend you. For God’s sake, this is the girl who talked to nobody at all for almost a year when her father was taken prisoner.’
‘Except her brother.’
‘Ah,’ said Solange. ‘Her brother.’
‘There you are!’ Teresa Belleville descended on them a few minutes later. ‘Whatever are you whispering about? Luc, chéri, Father Julien has just arrived, so we can open the champagne. I’m going to fetch the pâté, so could you go and offer him a drink? There’s somebody with him – oh, Solange, it’s your cousin. I wonder why she didn’t come with your great-aunt.’
‘I really don’t know why she ever thought this party was a good idea,’ said Luc when she had gone. ‘She’s been having kittens all week.’
‘You heard what your mama said, chéri,’ said Solange. ‘Go and offer the man a drink.’
*
Arianne wouldn’t look at him as he approached, but Father Julien beamed.
‘Luc, my boy! Just the man we were looking for. With bubbles! Arianne here has just been to confession. I’m sure she’d love to tell you all about it.’
Arianne glowered. Father Julien’s beam grew wider.
‘Pour it out then, my boy!’
Luc poured. Father Julien stuck his nose into the glass, heaved a sigh of satisfaction and bustled off, taking the bottle with him.
‘There’s Sol,’ said Arianne. She waved, but Solange turned away.
A tendril of hair had fallen over her face. She raised a hand to push it back, and he was distracted by the way the gesture caused her breasts to rise in her dark slim-fitting dress.
‘It wasn’t a real confession,’ she said. ‘More like a chat.’
The Things We Did for Love Page 5