The Mahé Circle

by Georges Simenon; Translated by Siân Reynolds

  The men stood around outside the little white-painted town hall, into which Frans and the mayor had gone. The doctor had to move away, since he could see along the tamarisk walk his wife, Mariette and the children coming to meet him. It was time for Silver Beach.

  He saw no more of Frans that day. Nor did he hear any news of him, since the people at the Pension Saint-Charles knew nothing about the affair.

  Next day, as usual, he went out early, in order to leave the bedroom free for his wife and children to get up and wash. He heard the bells ringing. The church door stood open.

  As he stood in the middle of the square, he saw two old men coming out of the church, carrying what looked like a coffin. Behind, in the shadows, he glimpsed a flash of red, and close by a white shirt-front, against a black suit.

  He recognized at the foot of the church steps the grocer-mayor’s handcart, shafts in the air. Frans himself had to steady the cart as they loaded the coffin on to it.

  Then a choirboy ran down the steps, carrying the cross on its long black haft. Finally came the priest, muttering prayers.

  The two men pushed the cart, one holding the shafts, the other from the side, for all the world like stonemasons on the way to a building site.

  Frans was in black, a suit which seemed rather too big for him, but looked almost new. He was wearing a starched collar and a black ribbon for a tie. He had proper shoes on his feet, and they seemed to be uncomfortable to walk in.

  Elisabeth must have owned no other dress than the red cotton one, as she was still wearing it. Someone had given her some black stockings, her mother’s perhaps, which were corkscrewing on her thin legs. Her younger brother, aged about eleven, was wearing a first communion suit. The youngest child wore a blue dress, to which the doctor paid little attention.

  The choirboy was walking quickly, flapping his surplice, underneath which one could see his heavy hobnailed boots. They all passed behind the houses round the square, and into an avenue of olive trees the doctor had not yet discovered.

  He had followed from a distance, almost in spite of himself. The sloping path was lined with olive trees rustling with intense life. He could scarcely hear himself think for the sounds of birds and cicadas, and walking along, his steps occasionally disturbed a lizard or grass snake, which left a mark in the dust before vanishing into the dry grass.

  The doctor dared go no further. He stood, watching the strange little procession as it wound its way in and out of sight between the zigzags in the path, finally disappearing behind a wall round a garden with leafy trees, which must have been the cemetery.

  That afternoon, on his way back from the beach where he had lain in the shade of the umbrella pines, between the two women sewing and the children playing in the sand, he took his constitutional down to the harbour.

  A man with no shoes on was using a scraper to clean the grey-green paintwork on the underside of a boat pulled up on land.

  Bareheaded, he was wearing canvas trousers and, on his lean torso, a white vest, much worn under the arms.

  It was Frans, the ex-legionnaire.

  At the end of the jetty, the old man, whom the locals called the Admiral because he had once been topman on a five-master for the Bordes Line, was explaining with gestures to a group of visitors how he had caught an enormous conger eel from the hole, and that he would perhaps now catch another.

  In the cabin of a moored yacht, a gramophone was playing Hawaiian music, and some village boys, in thin underpants instead of swimming costumes, were swimming among the boats.

  The man was scraping the paint without looking round, his movements steady, unhurried and regular. No one was taking any notice of him. Further along, a few fishermen, seated on the ground, were mending nets, using their big toe to stretch them out.

  The doctor wandered about like a stray child. He would have liked to approach Frans and talk to him, but he had no idea what to say. It was absurd. He walked in circles, pretending to be interested in the various activities in the harbour, then, feeling thwarted, he made a sudden about-turn, deciding to rejoin his wife and children, who were sitting on a bench in the square.

  But he did not go there straight away. First he walked up the steep path on the left, to the waste ground with its thorny plants.

  The army huts glowed red in the setting sun, a warm, deep red, standing out against the dark green of the pines. But there was another red patch, of a quite different tone.

  Outside, in front of the dark doorway, Elisabeth was leaning over a tub, washing clothes. There was no sign of the eleven-year-old boy. Perhaps he was swimming with the others in the harbour water with its streaks of oil.

  The youngest child was sitting on the ground, playing with a grubby bundle of rags as a substitute doll.

  The silence was total in this part of the village. There was no sound of cicadas. In the distance, only faintly audible, came the Hawaiian music from the yacht, a tinny and derisory tinkling.

  A warship was once more slipping noiselessly between the island and the coast, on its way to Toulon.

  Elisabeth stood up, pushing back her sun-bleached hair from her face. In that movement, she turned towards the doctor, standing there without moving: he must have seemed enormous, and perhaps even threatening in his stupid stillness.

  He thought he saw her frown, then she glanced at her little sister, as if to protect her.

  ‘François, where’ve you been? We went looking for you in the harbour …’

  ‘I was just taking a walk. Is it supper time already?’

  ‘Mariette thinks she heard the bell. You know Madame Harmoniaux doesn’t like to be kept waiting.’

  They crossed the square. People were already dining on the terrace of the Arche de Noé. Their boarding house looked tiny, its whiteness even more dazzling against the royal blue shutters. It was so small that he felt he had to bend down and shrink himself as he went into the corridor and then the dining room, laid with white tablecloths, where middle-aged guests were chewing in silence.

  ‘Fish again,’ sighed his wife, who only liked fresh-water fish. ‘Do you think Jeanne ought to eat it?’

  He must have said yes, absent-mindedly. He wasn’t aware of it.

  ‘But yesterday, you said …’

  ‘Oh, yes. Well, she’d better not, then.’

  ‘But I can’t keep asking for rice every mealtime. Perhaps if I had them cook her an egg?’

  In front of him, the wine bottle labelled with their name was half-full, standing alongside a bottle of mineral water and their napkins in numbered rings.

  3. The Garden Gate

  What on earth was the explanation? A few moments earlier, just a few seconds, even fractions of seconds before perhaps – it was hard to say – he had been sitting in the garden, his belly in front of him, because they had lunched well, and he was puffing at his pipe while chatting to Péchade, his good friend Armand Péchade, with whom he had been at medical school, and who was now in practice at Bressuire, a mere fifteen kilometres from Saint-Hilaire. In other words, he knew him well, indeed almost better than his own wife.

  And then, suddenly, for no reason, what had been a feeling of well-being was turning into a malaise. Unlike the eyes of a sleeper, which dilate on waking, the doctor’s pupils seemed to be contracting. He could see at first only a tiny section of space, Dr Péchade’s mouth and a corner of his cheek. Péchade was saying something. It was extraordinary, almost repulsive, to see the rolls of fat with pink inside, parting, closing, stretching, uncovering the little yellowish bones, irregularly positioned, that were his teeth. It reminded the doctor of something, he couldn’t remember what, and it was only much later, when he had pronounced his famous sentence, that light dawned. What it reminded him of – but he didn’t know that yet – was the conger eel that the Admiral had tempted out of its hole under the jetty, alm
ost a year ago now, that fat sausage of thick, compact flesh, that skin stretched tight over a life that couldn’t quite be crushed out.

  He had never before noticed that Péchade had one cheek fatter than the other, nor that his stubble showed through, and in fact he must always have five-o’clock shadow, because even on a Sunday his skin was bluish-grey.

  He could hear the words. His friend was talking about typhoid fever. But the syllables were meaningless. The phenomenon was getting worse. It wasn’t only the mouth and cheek that he was contemplating, as if they formed a separate piece of the universe, it was the house, the garden where they were sitting, the women close together on one side, the black iron gate with the road beyond it, and down below, against the sky, the slate-roofed belfry of the church.

  Like Péchade’s cheek, it had all suddenly stopped living its usual life. And the most alarming thing of all was that the doctor could see himself, sitting on the bench, leaning slightly to one side, his arm along the back, his legs crossed, in his khaki breeches and his lace-up boots. He could see himself, feel himself encrusted into the scene, and the scene itself looked like a picture postcard. He could have stood up and gone into his surgery, where, in a drawer stuffed with odds and ends, advertisements, used syringes and medical samples, there were still at least a hundred old postcards, all depicting the same scene. You could see some of them, yellowish and fading, in the window of Mademoiselle Julie’s, the haberdasher’s near the station, which also sold toys and seeds for the garden.

  They showed a photograph of the house, the very house in front of which he now sat. His predecessor had ordered the photograph from a perambulating salesman who was in the region taking pictures of churches, old mills or hotels for visitors.

  The former doctor, whose name was Riou, had had a shock of fine white hair. He it was who had trimmed the box trees in the garden into the strange shapes they still had. On the greyish postcard, the old man was shown sitting casually on the same bench, in the same pose as his successor, while his daughter, Mademoiselle Fernande, who was now almost sixty, but had been hardly more than a girl at the time, pretended to be cutting flowers from the standard roses.

  The house was grey, with a dark slate roof, and there were black iron railings round the garden; the white-painted shutters at the windows, a slightly grubby white, made everything else appear all the greyer.

  Today was a sunny day, late in June. The air was still and warm. There was no one in sight on the road, apart from two cyclists who had stopped for a chat at the crossroads. What was strange, worrying, even disturbing, was the immutability of the scene. The sight, for example, over a shop front with closed shutters, of two words written in large black letters: ‘AGAT, ironmonger’.

  The women were knitting. It was as if they had been knitting for ever, as if the woollen garments, and the hands mechanically handling the needles, were eternally locked into this fragment of the world.

  Perhaps the doctor had over-eaten, and it was making him drowsy? And yet he was quite clear-headed. He’d had a good day. Early that morning, he had left the house on his heavy motorbike to go catching crayfish. He’d taken Agat on the pillion, the same Agat as on the sign, the ironmonger, because he didn’t like doing anything on his own. They had put down their special nets. By ten a.m. they were already back home. He had gone into the barber’s for a shave; on Sunday mornings he liked not having to shave himself. Then he had gone to high mass with his elder child, the daughter. Afterwards, Péchade, his wife and their three sons had come to lunch.

  Perfectly normal. A typical Sunday for the season. Winter was the time for hunting: partridge and hare at first, then rabbits. Once the hunting season closed, there was always fishing in the Sèvre and, as just now, catching crayfish. It had been a better year than usual too, since he had allowed himself two new toys: a rod for fly-fishing, with a marvellous reel, that had cost a lot of money, and his powerful and noisy motorcycle, on which he liked to do his rounds in the countryside.

  Porquerolles had never been mentioned, not by him at any rate. He’d gone back to wearing his thick corduroy breeches, his laced boots and his heavy jerseys. He had gone back to finding his surname – ‘Mahé’ – on fifteen or twenty businesses in the neighbourhood, because the region was full of Mahés, not all related to him, or if so, only very distantly. Mahés and Lansquets. His mother was a Lansquet.

  Twenty or fifty times, he had gone past the house where he had been born and raised, another corner house on a crossroads, in a neighbouring village: nowadays it was a café.

  So he was solidly rooted. He avoided remembering the Porquerolles holiday, and didn’t even want to think about it. Hélène, his wife, sometimes mentioned it, to Madame Péchade, for instance, but always to complain about the steak fried in oil, the fish soup, the mosquitoes and the scorpions. Because one morning, when turning the children’s mattresses, as she did every day, she had indeed found in Michel’s bed a big black scorpion, its tail raised threateningly.

  They were so far from thinking of Porquerolles that, just last week, he had written to Monsieur and Madame Le Guen, who kept the family boarding house on the Sèvre where the Mahés usually spent their holidays. They had booked rooms for the first week in July.

  And even a moment before, the doctor had not been thinking about Porquerolles at all. He was sure he hadn’t been thinking about it. He had been looking at his friend Armand’s mouth, listening, without hearing them, to the syllables in the air, as his gaze rested on the garden, the clipped box hedges, the women in their white blouses – except for his mother, always in black or grey, who was just now mending a pair of the little boy’s trousers.

  Michel had been ill. Twice. The first time, almost as soon as they were back home, he had had measles. Then in the spring, at the same time as his sister and the doctor, a throat infection had kept them all in bed, so that Péchade, this same friend who was here today, had had to look after his patients for a fortnight.

  Péchade was ill too. He was always ailing, and his complexion was unhealthy. His wife was the only person in their house in good health, since the three boys had no sooner recovered from one illness than they caught another.

  There were no clouds in the sky, and yet it was a dark blue, verging on violet, and the air seemed to stand still: all the houses round about were grey, plastered in the local roughcast with a few pink bricks round the windows, and the slates on the black roofs were clearly outlined as if with Indian ink.

  ‘I think …’

  He had been going to say something. Péchade stopped talking and listened. But the doctor fell silent, and motioned to his friend to carry on.

  He had blushed, as if caught out in something. And yet he knew, now, that he was going to say it. He was waiting for a favourable moment, forcing himself to listen to his colleague’s words, while failing to concentrate on them.

  ‘Brédecart claims …’

  Brédecart had been one of their professors at medical school.

  ‘… that it’s Parisians who come on holiday who start these epidemics. They’re not …’

  ‘I think …’ began Dr Mahé again.

  He could see himself, hear himself, still encrusted in this world of frightening immutability, and he had to make an effort to escape that depressing sensation.

  ‘I think we’ll go to Porquerolles instead …’

  His mother was the first to look up, since despite her age she was more alert than Hélène. She was also the only woman he was afraid of. He had always lived with her. When he had married, he had not had like other men, who leave home, a feeling of freedom.

  Life had continued, just as when he was a child going to school. It was still his mother, even today, who woke him in the morning, and told him when to change his underclothes.

  She had a very gentle air about her. Her voice was soft. She looked after e
veryone, watched over everything, sat up at night with the children when they were ill.

  All the same, he was afraid of her.

  ‘What on earth do you mean?’ she said, in the same voice she would have used in the past to pick him up on some mischief.

  ‘I said … I’m not sure yet … I wanted to have a word about it with Péchade, that’s just it.’

  His friend had already understood that they were on delicate ground. As for Hélène, she looked in turn at her husband and her mother-in-law, hoping that someone would put an end to this bad joke.

  ‘There have been cases of typhoid all along the Sèvre, and especially over by Saint-Laurent and Mortagne … The children have never been exposed to it.’

  ‘There have been a few cases here too.’

  ‘Only three, not the same at all.’

  Although he could see that Péchade was embarrassed, he called on him to back him up.

  ‘The children, especially Michel, have had a bad year. Michel hasn’t put on any weight for six months. I’m sure that a change of climate …’

  His wife risked a word:

  ‘Last year, in Porquerolles, he was no better, and he had a lot of tummy trouble as well.’

  ‘When we got back, he picked up again. That’s what counts. Don’t you think so, Péchade?’

  He preferred not to look at them, and not to look at himself.

  He had just made a shattering discovery. That he had spoken about this wish to go to Porquerolles as if it were a shameful desire.

  That was why, for a year, he had not wanted to think about it. In fact he had never consciously thought about it. True, Porquerolles had never vanished from his memory. On the contrary. But it had shown itself in a different form, like a photographic negative.