No, he couldn’t remember. What had he said?
‘Whether she had any lovers … Well, I don’t think so.’
‘You’re just saying that because of her big innocent blue eyes.’
‘No, no, uncle. I tell you, I’m pretty sure.’
What if he were to tell his wife or his sister-in-law, the boy’s mother, who had entrusted her son to them precisely because she was afraid of him meeting women! – or indeed tell any reasonable man, his friend Péchade, for instance?
Or his mother, who last year, when they had returned from holiday, had looked at him with an expression he well knew, one that had made him blush when he was a boy. It was as if she had guessed everything, when there was nothing to guess.
Because there really wasn’t anything! Nothing but some idle remarks one afternoon when it was too hot, when he was feeling irritated for no reason, addressed to his nephew, who was daubing away on paper with his brushes.
And now …
The rain was stopping already. Some young people had switched on a gramophone and were dancing in the tiny dining room of the Arche. You could hear the rhythm of their steps, and the dripping of water from the eucalyptus trees. They had lit the lamps too early. Now that the sky had cleared there was a misty twilight, full of strong fragrances.
Young fool, rushing to wash his hands! That alone would have been enough to reveal the truth to the doctor. Typical!
‘I was the first, you know!’
The doctor called back Jojo, who was passing, and ordered another brandy.
‘I don’t really know how it happened … She was on her own … I went in to ask for a glass of water. Yesterday I’d tried to kiss her. She almost let me, then she ran away. It’s very clean inside the house. A bit weird. It doesn’t look like any other place I’ve been into. Are you cross?’
‘Why on earth would I be cross?’
‘Don’t know … Just now, when I came back, you looked …’
‘Go on, silly.’
‘Well I kissed her again, and I held her so tightly she couldn’t get away. I could see she was looking over my shoulder at the door. She didn’t shut her eyes. She just stood still, looking blank. I got panicky.’
‘Yes.’
‘She started struggling to pull away from me, and she said:
‘“The doctor!”
‘Because you were outside, looking at my easel and the paint box. I thought you would guess. But she was trembling with fear. She seemed to think you would come in and be angry …
‘“Does he know you’re here?” she said.
‘I said no, and she said: “Go away.” And I thought I would go away, because she didn’t want to. Then I grabbed her again, she fell over, and that’s how …’
The doctor’s gaze had become as opaque as the sky.
‘And well, that was that,’ Alfred concluded.
Mahé made an effort to add in a casual voice:
‘Satisfactory?’
And the other, unconvinced:
‘Yes, uncle.’
‘You did take precautions, didn’t you?’
‘Oh, yes, uncle!’
‘Are you planning to go back tomorrow?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘What do you mean, you don’t know?’
‘I’m a bit scared to. On the way back, I met her father going up. If he’d been a few minutes earlier he’d have caught us.’
There was a silence. The eucalyptus leaves were still dripping, the ice was melting in his glass of brandy and water, couples were dancing, embracing each other tightly, as the cool evening air reached the terrace.
‘And another thing …’
‘Another thing?’
‘I wonder if she really liked it. Afterwards I got the feeling she hated me. She turned away when I tried to kiss her. “Go now, quickly” was all she said. Nothing else. I turned around on the way out, still hoping she’d make some little sign.’
‘Jojo!’
The teenager looked in astonishment at his uncle, who was ordering his third brandy.
‘I think I’m going to turn in now.’
‘Yes, off you go!’
‘Are you sure you’re not cross?’
‘Of course not, don’t be silly.’
‘Goodnight, uncle.’
And the gangling youth, right there on the terrace, offered his uncle his cheek to kiss, as he’d done as a child.
‘If Auntie asks me …’
‘Tell her I’ll be back before long.’
But he did not go back. The alcohol made him feel light-headed and his thoughts became thicker and more painful. From time to time, he would repeat in a low voice:
‘What a fool!’
He wanted another drink. He dared not order a fourth glass, so he got up heavily, paid, and made his way to a different bar on the square where he could satisfy his craving at the counter.
All the frogs in creation started making a din. He walked towards the harbour where boats and yachts were moving up and down with the swell, sometimes bumping gently against each other. Elisabeth had fallen. Alfred had said she’d fallen. To the floor. It had happened on the floor. She hadn’t kissed him. She hadn’t said goodbye to him.
He walked on through the sodden dust on the path. And now he was talking to himself, out loud, since he was alone in the night:
‘What a bastard!’
He meant himself. The army huts were two hundred metres ahead of him. They weren’t visible. There was just a darker patch of shadow, without any lights showing. Was she asleep?
Why, oh why had he … Oh, now that he had been drinking, he understood. It was complicated, but he understood. In the first place, he had perhaps been hoping she wouldn’t give in …
No! That wasn’t true. He had on the contrary supposed that … But anyway, if she hadn’t given in, what good would that have done him?
What he had hoped for, what he had wanted, was for her to be soiled, broken.
Then he would be rid of her once and for all, because it couldn’t go on like this.
He wasn’t even in love, it wasn’t that. If he had been in love, the problem would no doubt have been a great deal simpler.
No, it was an obsession, that was the word, a haunting obsession. And it had started that very first day, but faintly, insidiously, like those incurable illnesses that you only become aware of when it is too late for treatment.
It wasn’t about a woman, it wasn’t about the flesh. It was about two stick-like legs under a scrap of red fabric, a little figure curled up alongside a dead woman in a miserable hovel, two blue eyes, clear and dry; about a kind of doll, stiff-legged and indifferent, who led a small girl by the hand to the nuns, and who went fearlessly up to a man in the harbour to confiscate the money hidden in his pockets.
It was all that and much else, it was the disavowal of his own life, of everything his life had been, the foursquare grey stone house, as tidy as a child’s building set, with its box trees trimmed into topiary by his maniacal pre-decessor, the black metal gate, and himself, a fat man of thirty-five – for he was thirty-five now – playing at making his motorbike roar along the country lanes, playing at hunting partridge or rabbit, the disavowal of Saint-Hilaire and the two women sewing for him from morning to night, and telling him when to change his underwear.
It was … he needed another drink. He had drunk at once too much and too little. It was years since he had been drunk – the last time was during his student days and he had been terribly sick.
He went into a bar where there were no other customers, and the woman behind the counter looked at him with surprise.
‘What’ll you have, doctor?’
Too bad! Well, let her think what she liked.
‘A cognac with water.’
And Alfred was fast asleep! He had carefully washed his hands, and the rest. Tomorrow, the doctor was sure, he would avoid going up to the army huts. He was scared to.
‘Same again, Madame Cabrini.’
In the Arche, they were still dancing. Men about to do some night fishing went past with a huge acetylene lamp.
‘Night, doctor!’
And he replied almost gaily:
‘Goodnight!’
This was such madness. He had to fumble to find the front door knob and he made a noise going upstairs. People were asleep behind all those doors.
‘Is that you?’
He felt like answering: ‘No!’
The stage he’d reached now …
5. Péchade’s Letter
Bells. Masses of bells plunging into a sky like the sea, making trembling circles there. The circles widened, collided, merged with each other, and then the bells, with the elegance of dolphins, began to plunge again. He frowned and said:
‘There must be some ceremony going on …’
A funeral? A wedding? He couldn’t remember what it was. But he had to go to it. He was walking quickly. His mother was behind him, chivvying him.
‘Hurry up, François,’ she was saying, without seeming to notice that he was naked. And she added this curious sentence:
‘You’ll miss all the weddings.’
What weddings was she talking about? His own, or ones he had been invited to?
He was puzzled. His hand, feeling his chest, discovered that he really was naked. The sun was shining through his eyelids. He was lying down. He realized where he was: on the iron bed pulled up close to the window, so that the children’s beds could be nearer their mother’s. The window was open. Fresh air and sunlight were coming in through the slats of the shutters and streaming over him in his bed. He was also streaming with sweat.
He frowned, because he knew he had something unpleasant to deal with. The first thing he managed to place was the bells: nothing to worry about, it was just Sunday morning, that was all. He had forgotten it was Sunday.
But why were they whispering in the windowless bedroom where Mariette slept? He listened hard, without opening his eyes, and recognized Hélène’s voice.
‘Hurry up, Jeanne, you’ll make us late for Mass. Mariette, help her do up her shoelaces. She is just as slow every morning.’
All this in hushed, sanctimonious tones.
‘Michel, don’t make so much noise, you’ll wake your father.’
Ah, it was so as not to wake him that they had taken all their things into Mariette’s room, and were washing and dressing there. They would have to tiptoe through the main bedroom. It wasn’t worth opening his eyes, on the contrary.
He had never been in the habit of sleeping naked. He felt his body, smooth and plump under his hand, and was slightly shocked by it. It was not unpleasant, though. Coming back, he had managed to undress, but not to find his pyjamas, or perhaps he hadn’t been able to put them on. Had he switched on the light? He hoped not. He couldn’t remember. If only he could be sure he hadn’t walked about naked with the lights blazing, between these beds lined up like dominoes, where his daughter Jeanne, for example, might have woken up!
‘Jeanne! Prayer book, gloves!’
The door was opening, Hélène was pushing them in front of her. They had their new shoes on, he could hear the soles creaking, and they all smelled of lavender soap. Were they looking at him as they went past?
‘Come on.’
Mariette came behind the others. He recognized her smell. Because she had her own personal smell, very different from his wife’s.
What was it he had dreamed about weddings? It had just been for a few seconds and he couldn’t now remember. But on the other hand, a truth had struck him, as luminous as the window under which he was lying. A truth he had never enquired about or even glimpsed before. All in the time it had taken Hélène to cross the room on tiptoe.
It wasn’t for him that his mother had chosen her – he was thinking of Hélène, of course – it was for herself. He felt no anger about it. The door closed. On the stairs, they were already speaking a little more loudly. Then, when they reached the road, they were talking in normal voices. His wife was saying:
‘Hold Michel’s hand, Mariette. He’s deliberately dragging his feet to get dust on his shoes.’
Yes! His mother had chosen her for her own personal convenience, and when you thought about it in a detached way, you realized the difficulties she must have had to overcome. It was almost a miracle that she had found the right person.
Another woman would have taken up more space in the house, would have wanted to take charge of this and that. Another woman would in any case have kept her husband busy.
But not Hélène. She had come to the grey house with the black railing round it as if entering a convent. Exactly the same way. She’d obeyed all the rules, without ever trying to change a single one.
So that for his mother, life had gone on as usual, with the advantage that she need no longer feel afraid. Before Hélène, she had been worried that her son might do something stupid, catch a shameful disease, despite being a doctor, or worse, that he might father a child on some unsuitable girl, whom he would then have to marry, or whose parents would insist on asking for a lot of money.
Hélène helped his mother to look after him, not because she loved him, but because he was the master of the house, because that was the rule, you had to look after the master of the house, the breadwinner.
She was a mild woman. Oh, she didn’t have her equal for mildness. Just to see the way she had ushered the children through the room on the way to Mass …
And later on, she wouldn’t dare say a word to him. At most – he knew her: he had never known her so well as this morning – she would murmur with her timid little smile:
‘You haven’t got too much of a headache?’
Best not to move. If he kept still, he felt fine. He was sweating. He was beginning to sweat all the alcohol out of his body, drop by drop, and it was far from unpleasant, it was almost pleasurable. Nor was he upset to be thinking what he now thought, to be passing judgement on them all of a sudden, his mother and his wife, with calm lucidity.
They had imprisoned him, without appearing to, all the while seeming as if they were waiting on him hand and foot, and he, poor fool, had never noticed it.
That was why they hated Porquerolles. His mother would not for any price have left her house at Saint-Hilaire during the holidays. Not to mention that it was the season for stripping beans and bottling fruit. When they went to the Le Guens’ boarding house, she was happy. She had him on the end of a leading rein.
But here, she sensed that Hélène wasn’t capable of keeping a proper watch on him. She had tried various roundabout ways to stop them coming here for the third year. And if they had saddled him with Alfred, it was to keep him occupied, to supervise him indirectly.
He wasn’t yet thinking about whether he would continue to allow this to happen. It was already a giant step to have discovered what was going on, and to contemplate it calmly.
Ach! He had moved in bed and felt as if liquid were swilling from one side of his head to the other. He could hear people at breakfast downstairs. Old folk, mainly. The Pension Saint-Charles specialized in elderly couples and aged bachelors surviving on their own.
The postman. He heard his footsteps stopping at the front door and his voice calling:
‘Post!’
Eva replied from inside the house:
‘Coming!’
Would there be a letter for him? Perhaps. And perhaps Eva would bring it upstairs to him.
And at once lubricious thoughts flew into his head.
Not ordinary male desire. Dirtier thoughts, the kind he had had when he was at boarding school and couldn’t sleep. For instance, he tried to imagine Mémé stretched out on the sand, her flesh a violet colour, when the local men went with her for fifty francs.
He sniffed the odour of his own body. He was pleased to be naked under the sheets. He listened. Someone was coming upstairs. Eva. She knocked at the door of the next room.
‘A letter for you, Mademoiselle Dorchon.’
Now she was approaching his door. She knocked.
‘Come in.’
He opened his eyes at last in the sunlit bedroom, with the white of the unmade beds, the dazzling white of the walls and ceiling, the white shade on the lamp hanging from a wire. Eva too wore a white apron over her black dress. She seemed surprised to find him still in bed, and alone.
She wasn’t scared. She was only nineteen, but a man didn’t frighten her. In any case, she expected the occasional approach.
‘Let’s have it, my dear.’
She would have to move nearer the bed, and he had already prepared his strategy. He had deliberately let one arm trail on the floor. So that when she came close, he slid his hand up her bare leg and under her dress.
He felt no desire for Eva. She was a fat girl, with solid flesh, as muscular as a man. With his other hand, he had grabbed the maid’s hand, and slipped it, with some force, under the sheet.
All she could find to say was:
‘You’re not serious, sir!’
Their pose was ridiculous and uncomfortable for both of them. It meant nothing, could lead nowhere. He was disappointed. She objected:
‘Look, the door’s open, anyone could come past …’
‘Off you go.’
He waited for her to leave before sitting up in bed and retrieving the letter, which she had dropped on the floor. His head was aching again. Yet he was pleased – relieved, as it were – to have behaved as he had. It was a sort of revenge. Against whom? He didn’t know and didn’t try to explore that.
Oh! The letter was from his friend Péchade, who had been unable to find a locum to take his place, and consequently was unable to take a holiday. He had sent his wife and children to Les Sables d’Olonne, and went to join them on Sundays.
The Mahé Circle Page 7