by Michel Déon
Antoine roared with laughter.
‘Marie-Dévote hasn’t had a child. She’s only got a daughter.’
Toinette smiled. Perhaps she, too, felt, without bitterness, that boys were the only children. Théo protested.
‘If a girl isn’t a child, then the world really has gone mad. In any case Toinette, as you see, wears trousers. And I take my orders from her: Papa, go and deliver the fish; Papa, get some wood for the stove; Papa, wash the truck because it’s dirty …’
*
The weather held. Théo was delighted. In his mind it was always raining at Saint-Raphaël and always good weather at Saint-Tropez. Cyrille had stopped coughing and wandered on the beach like a little naked god, watched over by Marie-Dévote while Claude and Toinette bathed, joined before lunch by Jean, back from fishing with Antoine. The fish he caught were only good for the cat; Antoine mocked him. Fishing is a gift. In the afternoons Théo took Jean out in the truck, whose wood-gas generator struggled on every hill. Armed with his movement permit and well in with the gendarmes (to whom he distributed their share), Théo devoted himself to some discreet black-marketeering, delivering fish to Grimaud, Ramatuelle, Cogolin and Gonfaron, returning with vegetables and firewood for the kitchen stove. Under the firewood there was often a calf hidden, or a kid or a sheep, ready skinned. The risk was small, but Théo liked to put on secretive airs and take precautions, though the evening visits of Sergeant Thomasson made them pointless. The sergeant never left without a leg of lamb or some chops in his haversack.
After dinner they listened to the news, first from Vichy, which taught them nothing, then Radio-Paris which reported Germany’s dominance in the Mediterranean, the fall of Crete and the British Army’s rapid withdrawal to Sfakia. Théo curled his lip. The Mediterranean, German? He opened the window onto the empty sea, the placid shore and the sound of the waves whispering on the sand and lapping against the pilings of the jetty where Antoine tied up his rowing boat. Later on they picked up Radio-Londres, where there was small cause for comfort. The bulletins’ emphasis on secondary operations – raids on the Ruhr, the attack on Syria, the overthrow of Iraqi rulers sympathetic to the Axis – could not hide the way things were going. Their heart was not in it. Although he did not like the Germans Théo admired their ‘sense of organisation’, and though he did not like the English either he acknowledged their ‘bravery and coolness’. Antoine refrained from comment, unless he was genuinely indifferent, which was more likely. He listened with half an ear, busy with a pile of old cigar boxes, making model ships like the ones Jean had seen his uncle, Captain Duclou, making a hundred times on the long evenings of conversation in his parents’ kitchen at Grangeville. Marie-Dévote, Claude and Toinette knitted with rough wool Théo bought from a farm in the Maures where the old women had taken up spinning again. Cyrille would lay his head on the table and fall asleep and his mother would put him to bed. A little later Jean would join her, allowing everyone to think they were lovers, although their relations were still at the point Claude had sworn to herself never to go beyond, even if now she often walked around naked in their bedroom, a freedom Cyrille reproached her for one day.
‘Maman, you mustn’t show your tummy to Jean.’
‘It’s all right with him; he’s a very good friend.’
Cyrille no longer spoke about his father, who was already half forgotten, his face replaced by another that he saw every day. Claude never left his side. Perhaps she felt she would not have the force to resist Jean without her innocent guardian. Even when he was fast asleep in his cot, Cyrille was watching over her. But if her hand slipped outside the sheets, another hand, from the bed next to hers, would grasp it, squeeze her fingers and stroke her wrist, and she had no need for words to understand the meaning of the gesture.
One morning Jean said, ‘Cyrille’s right. Don’t walk around naked in front of me any more.’
She covered herself up, and immediately Jean begged her not to pay any attention to what he had said, to behave as if he didn’t exist. She was turning a warm amber in the summer heat, and her swimming costume left a line at the top of her thighs and above her breasts. She made Jean desperate. There were moments when she realised it and they fell into each other’s arms and wept in silence. Sometimes at night, obsessed and unable to sleep, he got up and slipped out of the window, crossed the garden overlooking the beach, ran to the sea and swam in its phosphorescent water. When he came back he found Claude sitting on her bed, waiting for him.
‘Where were you?’
‘I went for a swim.’
She would touch his damp shoulder and wet hair and kiss his salt-tasting lips.
One night as he left the bungalow, he bumped into Antoine walking across the garden.
‘I can see something’s not right,’ Antoine said, ‘and I don’t like not offering to help. But I’m a selfish man and it’s probably wise if I stay that way. If I don’t sleep, or not much – and badly at that – it’s because I’m getting old. But at your age you shouldn’t be having sleepless nights. Come into my shed – I’ve got a bottle of grappa. It’s not quite calvados, but you’ll get used to it.’
Antoine shut the door behind them and switched on a feeble light after drawing a curtain across the only window.
‘No lights at night on the coast. One evening I came in here and was looking forward to some odd jobs, and suddenly the gendarmes turned up. There’s a rumour that English submarines are landing spies. It could be true and it’s nothing to do with us.’
He took a bottle and two glasses from a cupboard.
‘This reminds me of our last night at La Sauveté. Do you remember?’
‘I haven’t forgotten.’
‘A house emptied by termites and removal men. It made me melancholy for a minute or two. Everyone has their weak points. You didn’t drink. In training, weren’t you?’
‘Yes.’
‘One day I saw you sculling at Dieppe Rowing Club. It gave me a lot of pleasure. Now?’
‘I drink a bit. To be honest, it doesn’t do anything for me.’
‘You mustn’t get too fond of it. It’s hard to stop if you do. I don’t know how our dear abbé Le Couec keeps going … I suppose there’s always another parishioner who needs his help … These stools are really dreadful … Let’s sit in the car.’
He pulled on the tarpaulin, uncovering the Bugatti, melancholy-looking in the light of the single bulb. Jean sat next to him as he placed his hands on the steering wheel and turned it right and left.
‘The steering’s a bit stiff. Bugatti always wanted cars that would turn on a sixpence. But first you had to learn to drive them. By the time the war’s over I won’t know any more.’
‘Do you think it’ll last long?’
‘I fear so.’
Antoine emptied his glass and refilled it from the bottle between his knees.
‘Well?’ he asked. ‘What’s wrong? You love each other, you’re together, and no one’s bothering you.’
‘We don’t make love,’ Jean said in a moment of recklessness.
‘Ouch! That’s serious. Is it you?’
‘Oh no! I’m fine on that front.’
He could have told him about Antoinette, Chantal, even Mireille Cece, whom they had shared without knowing it.
‘Then it must be her.’
‘I don’t know why. It’s a ridiculous situation. It makes me desperate and there are times when I just can’t go on, I feel like bursting.’
‘I can’t be any help to you. I’ve been lucky all my life. It’s true I had money. But when all the money was gone, Marie-Dévote stayed just the same. Of course now I don’t jump on her every five minutes, but I’m very happy, I’ve got lots of memories … Do you like the smell of leather? They won’t upholster cars with hides like this again. You’ll see a whole epoch vanish. If I hadn’t detached myself from everything, I’d find it a hell of a struggle … Tell me, did Claude still love her husband when you met her?’
‘I suspect not.’
‘Do you think she’s ever had a lover?’
‘She swears she hasn’t.’
‘One man in all her life! Good Lord, that’s not something you come across every day. Personally I’d look for the answer with her husband.’
They went on talking for a while longer before getting out of the car, which Antoine then covered up again with its tarpaulin.
Climbing through the window, Jean heard two bodies’ regular breathing. Claude and Cyrille were both asleep. He got into bed and lay there, gripped by the idea that Claude was obeying a pact agreed with her absent husband. What had it meant, then, when she disappeared for three days?
The noise of knocking at the door woke him. It was bright daylight. Théo had brought news that shattered the lethargy of the false peace.
‘It might interest you,’ he said, ‘to know that Monsieur Hitler has invaded Russia. Bang! Away we go. Some’ll be happy about it, others not at all. Uncle Joe isn’t going to be in a good mood this morning. Not like Antoine. He’s already out fishing. And Marie-Dévote says it’s no reason for us to go hungry. Brékefaste is served …’
In the days that followed, the radio broadcast place names no one had heard before. From the Barents Sea to the Black Sea the German offensive gathered pace. Thunder rumbled across Europe, and the beach in front of the hotel remained as calm and empty as before. Cyrille played in the sand, Antoine went fishing, Claude and Toinette swam out until their heads were small specks, and Marie-Dévote, beauty and forty-year-old matron, put a chaise longue out on the beach and knitted. Cyrille would have the best sweaters in all Paris that winter and Claude a wool overcoat. Jean drove away with Théo and they came back laden with olive oil, beef lard that they turned into lavender-scented soap, fresh fruit, goat’s cheese and big, round country loaves. At the wheel of his wood-gas truck Théo was in his element. Jean learnt from him that Antoine had spoken to Marie-Dévote. She, too, now knew that he was the grandson of the visitor from Normandy who had brought prosperity to their seaside café. He also learnt of the pictures Antoine had bought from painters who had passed through Saint-Tropez in the period between the wars. When the Italians attacked in June 1940 Marie-Dévote had prudently locked them away in one of the hotel’s cellars. They showed them to Jean, and he was astonished by Antoine’s taste. He, who had declared himself amazed to have a son who was a painter, had not bought a single bad painting.
‘With those in her trousseau,’ Théo said, ‘Toinette’s never going to be poor.’
‘But who knows you’ve got all these?’
‘Well … everyone who came here. People used to ask for the room with the Picasso or the Dunoyer.’
‘So you don’t know that the Germans are making off with every bit of French art they can find?’
‘The Germans? We’re still waiting for them. Right now, they’re going the wrong way. Saint-Tropez’s not on the road to Moscow …’
Watching Toinette as she hovered, fairy-like, discreet and silent in the background, it struck Jean that he might have found happiness there if … How many ‘ifs’ there were! He understood Antoine, his escape from Grangeville, his leaving everything behind. He had decided to grow old at Marie-Dévote’s side and, despite the situation’s ambiguity – Théo’s semi-acceptance, Toinette whom they shared without a mean thought – he had built himself, without really intending to, an ark of happiness that nothing could destroy. It had been his own wish no longer to have a penny to his name. Arriving at Saint-Tropez in the late summer of 1936 at the wheel of his 57S, with a cheque in his pocket representing all he possessed in the world, which he immediately handed to Marie-Dévote, he could – as one-time sugar daddy, the man who had paid for the hotel and much else besides – have been shown the door or offered a shack and ignored. Such a fate would have corresponded to the unflattering opinion he held of humanity and its gratitude, but Marie-Dévote had accepted the cheque and him, a man who asked for nothing apart from a new family, people who understood him and opened their hearts to him. Peace reigned at Chez Antoine, the renowned hotel, halted temporarily in its rise to fame. Marie-Dévote ruled the roost, in spite of Théo’s pretensions to the contrary. Her understanding of life, for all her mature warmth and sensual attractiveness, was born of a certain harshness. Her personality had developed to the point where two men had not been too many to unbalance her sense of equilibrium: for her dear Antoine she probably felt that vaguely Oedipal love that tugs at every woman’s heartstrings, and for Théo a kind of loving indulgence that fulfilled her maternal aspirations. Her ambitions satisfied, she had at last ventured to show her real generosity. That she might still be a desirable woman never crossed her mind, and she stretched out on her chaise longue in all innocence, hitching up her skirt to bare her long brown thighs which had first caught Antoine’s attention twenty years earlier, when she used to bring him his pan banias and cold carafe of Var rosé. She would have been astonished if you had told her that she could still tempt a man. Who? She never went out and had never been to a big city; twice she had refused to accompany Théo to the Paris boat show. Her curiosity had never even led her as far as Marseille, let alone Nice, which she considered a foreign country, where the English ruled on their promenade. What can you learn outside your four walls if your passion for your family is all you need: your love for your daughter, your husband, your old lover, and a hotel that was the fruit of so much hard work? Nothing.
She never invited anyone, not out of stinginess but out of politeness, feeling that people were always happier at home than with others and that invitations embarrassed their recipients, who did not know how to refuse them without giving offence. It was Théo’s job to maintain external relations. He brought back, on his own, all the excitement and noise she needed. She would say to him, ‘Théo, when the war’s over, let me know at once, so that I can get the rooms ready and do a bit of cleaning. I’ll ask the Swiss boy to come back and run the reception again. Poor boy, in his snowy mountains he must be very cold and lonely.’
Théo shook his head and feigned despair.
‘There’s millions of men dying, a worldwide cataclysm, towns burning; we could die of hunger—’
‘Don’t exaggerate!’
‘Well, maybe not, thanks to me, because I take care of things, but what about the others? The poor, the unemployed, the pensioners, the invalids? … You don’t know, do you? They can all cop it, and all you think of is reopening your hotel.’
‘When they’re dead, we’ll have to make peace.’
‘You’ve got no heart.’
‘Yes, I have. Just not for everybody.’
Marie-Dévote reduced the world, the war, the future, the peace to simple problems. She represented vitality and harmony and the selfishness without which, in the midst of tumult and strife, nothing would survive. Jean, being Antoine’s grandson, belonged to this selfish family circle. With Claude it was possible to see Marie-Dévote being more circumspect – ‘Who is this stranger who’s not from around here?’ – but she acknowledged her qualities as an attentive mother, a good cook, serious, and inspiring Toinette’s admiration. Cyrille’s presence incited no such reservations. Cured of his cough, he was turning brown under the Midi sun, and his gaiety and laughter enlivened an atmosphere that might otherwise have been too staid.
In mid-July Claude received a postcard from her mother, asking her to return. Was it a summons, or merely a request? It was hard to say, with the dryness of the printed card which left room for only single words in response to pre-prepared questions, expressing little. At the same time Jean had a telephone call from Saint-Raphaël.
‘Hello! It’s Marceline …’
For a moment the name meant nothing to him, nor the husky accent.
‘… I’d like to see you. I have a message from the baron for you.’
The baron? He remembered the title Palfy had adopted almost by accident and now used shamelessly. Madame Michette! He should have recognised her from her mysterious tone.
‘Can
you hear me?’ she asked anxiously.
‘Yes, yes, I can hear you.’
‘We need to meet.’
‘Well, come to Saint-Tropez.’
‘It’s not easy.’
He remembered that she had not been averse to travelling on top of a truckful of Jerusalem artichokes. Théo, who was going to Grasse that afternoon, could pick her up on the way back. They agreed a meeting place. She would be outside the station, carrying a copy of Paris-Soir, in a grey suit.
‘A suit? In this heat?’
‘I’ve come straight from Paris.’
At four o’clock that afternoon they saw her walking up and down, her eyes hidden behind dark glasses, brandishing her newspaper.
Théo had been briefed by Jean.
‘So, Madame Michette, you’re one of those who hug the walls and dress in grey …’
Put out by this newcomer broadcasting her secret, she stared quickly around her. No one was watching.
‘Don’t talk so loudly, please! Enemy eyes are listening.’
‘Ah well, that’s all right then. Jump in!’
She sat between Jean and Théo and they headed for Sainte-Maxime. She stared hungrily out of the window.
‘It’s pretty here!’
‘Haven’t you been before?’ Théo said.
‘I always spend holidays with my family. And my family’s from the Auvergne.’
The new life Palfy had conjured out of the air for Madame Michette had not changed her. Jean reflected that if she went back to her former profession, she would still lead her girls to the Bastille Day celebrations or to confession with the same authority. She accepted her humble clandestine missions from a sense of duty. ‘I’m doing my bit,’ she said. Her arrival was impatiently awaited at the hotel, as if everyone wanted to be part of Palfy’s huge practical joke. Marie-Dévote offered her ‘herbal tea’ which she tasted cautiously, her little finger crooked, after dissolving a saccharine tablet in her cup.
‘It’s better for your mood than sugar,’ she said. ‘Sugar gives you choler sterol.’