The Mahé Circle

by Georges Simenon; Translated by Siân Reynolds

  My dear François …

  Péchade’s handwriting was not the usual doctor’s scrawl, he had a round, regular hand, like a quartermaster or a postal clerk. A good fellow. Always off sick though, if it wasn’t his kidneys it was his liver or some other organ. And there was forever someone ill in that house. He had become so used to it that he didn’t complain, even found it normal. Recently, an X-ray had revealed a shadow at the top of his oldest boy’s lung. He had taken him to Nantes for a pneumothorax operation, and intended to send him to a sanatorium in the mountains for the winter.

  The Cormoran was pulling into port with its Sunday load, a crowd packed together so tightly that you feared a whole row of people would fall into the water whenever the boat tilted slightly. Silver Beach would be heaving. It would be impossible to find their usual place. On such days, Hélène twitched her head about like a worried bird or a mother hen, because of the couples coming over from Toulon, who were not circumspect enough in their behaviour in front of the children.

  My dear François,

  I hesitated greatly to bother you on holiday, but in the end I think it is my duty to warn you …

  That was Péchade all over. Honest and conscientious. But what was the matter this time?

  The other day when I went over to your place to pick up the eel-nets you said I could borrow, your mother asked me to stay for a moment, and I could see straight away that she was worried.

  Above all, she said to me, don’t tell my son, he’ll only get ideas.

  And she admitted that for a long time now she’d had a pain in her side.

  How long? I asked her.

  Oh, for years, maybe five years, I’ve had this little thing on my chest. I would have asked François about it. But you know how he is, he’d panic.

  What an idea! He, who was serenity incarnate!

  Finally, after a lot of beating about the bush, she admitted she had a small lump on her right breast. At first she’d thought it was a mosquito bite that she must have scratched in her sleep so that it had become infected. Then as it got bigger instead of going away, she thought it was eczema.

  ‘That’s why I stopped eating fish,’ she told me. It took some time before I could get her to show me her breast. You know her better than me. She told me she could never have undressed in front of you.

  And that’s how it is, my dear François, I’m getting to the most delicate part. I don’t want to take responsibility for a definite diagnosis. You may guess what I immediately thought. In my view, she should be taken as soon as possible to our old teacher, Charbonneau.

  I’m sure she is in more pain than she will admit to. The way she spoke, I would imagine that she too has thought in terms of cancer. She’s distressed. She wants to have it treated, but without putting anyone out.

  It’s up to you to decide what you should do. I hope you will forgive me for writing to you so frankly. I’d noticed for a while that your mother was losing weight, but I just put it down to her age. And the kind of clothes she wears makes it hard to judge anyway. I was horrified to find that her chest was so thin and that she had an ulcer as big as a five-franc coin.

  A large tear fell on the letter and smudged the ink. It wasn’t sweat. The doctor could no longer read the lines which danced in front of his eyes in the sun.

  Coming out of Mass, his wife gave a start when she found him standing in the square. It was all the more unexpected as he was wearing a city suit with collar and tie and his dark felt hat.

  He hardly noticed a red dress and a flash of blonde hair in the sunshine: Elisabeth, who was also coming out of Mass with the other Children of Mary, holding her little sister’s hand.

  ‘What is it, François?’

  ‘Bad news about my mother. A letter from Péchade. She consulted him and he is afraid it’s serious. I’m going home at once.’

  ‘You’re going back to Saint-Hilaire?’

  ‘I’m taking the Cormoran in half an hour. I’ve already telephoned ahead to La Tour-Fondue for them to have my car ready. I’ll come back to fetch you and the children, or you can come back by train at the end of the holidays.’

  ‘We’re coming with you.’

  He had foreseen it. This was bound to happen. The idea of packing them all up, taking the whole family back in the car, exhausted him in advance.

  ‘No, you won’t have time to get everything ready. And the children need …’

  ‘No, no, you know perfectly well they prefer it at home. Hurry up, Mariette! Give the children something to eat. We’re leaving!’

  ‘Today?’

  ‘At once. You pay the bill, François, I’ll go upstairs.’

  ‘You haven’t had any breakfast …’

  ‘Never mind. It won’t hurt this once.’

  ‘What about Alfred?’

  ‘We can take him with us. If we all squeeze up.’

  ‘No.’

  Then he had a thought. He said:

  ‘Oh well, if you insist …’

  ‘Unless he prefers to stay …’

  ‘No, he can come with us.’

  He didn’t want to leave his nephew alone on the island. The young man was still asleep when Mahé pushed open his bedroom door. He usually went to the later Mass. Seeing him lying there, his hair ruffled, his mouth open, the doctor detested him.

  ‘Get up! We’re leaving. My mother is ill.’

  ‘What’s wrong with her?’

  ‘I don’t know. We’re leaving in half an hour.’

  He felt delivered of a great weight. The idea that his mother was probably suffering from cancer distressed him, but Péchade’s letter nevertheless had something miraculous about it.

  He bustled about, paid Madame Harmoniaux, who felt obliged to commiserate and tell him stories about people with cancer, and gave a tip to Eva, who disgusted him. From time to time, as he spoke to someone, a glistening teardrop escaped from his eyelashes.

  What struck him hardest, what filled him with an emotion he had not felt since childhood, was the word ‘breast’.

  Because with that, his mother became a woman again. And that breast, now undermined by ruin, had no doubt been bruised by him when he was a baby. How many times had he heard his aunts say, when they were discussing infants:

  ‘Not like François – he was still taking the breast at two years old!’

  He was the guilty one, and his mother was no longer a rather dried-up old lady in grey or black, a person who trotted round the house or sat sewing in the window, but a woman with fragile internal organs.

  The island was as hot as a furnace that morning. Under his heavy suit, his shirt clung to his skin. He had found a handcart – the same cart belonging to the grocer-mayor – to carry their luggage. The Cormoran had started its engines. They were waiting for the children, who were always slow, with Mariette chivvying them.

  ‘Do you think it is so very serious?’ Hélène asked, seeking to reassure him.

  What was the point of answering? His mother had breast cancer. For years she had said nothing. Nobody had suspected that under her severe blouses, under the cameo brooch which she wore only on Sundays, the cruel thing was developing, gnawing at her flesh.

  He could see again with hallucinating clarity a page from one of his student textbooks, Ambroise Paré’s interpretation of cancer: a kind of crab with hairy pincers.

  The clear water flowed past the white hull of the ferry. The seaweed at the bottom of the sea seemed to sway under the boat’s passage. They were almost alone making the return trip. As they neared La Tour-Fondue, they could see a dense crowd waiting their turn to go over to the island.

  Then he made a vow, moving his lips, looking out to sea so that no one could notice him talki
ng to himself:

  ‘Dear God, if my mother gets better I swear I’ll never, ever, come back to Porquerolles, I swear …’

  There were no words to express what he was thinking. It was vague. A whole procession of ideas, feelings, sentiments.

  ‘Please, God, you know what I mean.’

  And he was relieved. He had to see to filling up the car with petrol, checking the oil, loading the luggage. The vehicle was full to bursting and the heat unbearable. Because of the children, they couldn’t drive all night, so they slept overnight in Toulouse. They stopped for a barely edible meal somewhere, on a terrace under a red and yellow awning. The doctor felt as though his head was being squeezed inside a helmet.

  They were given a room with a double bed, so he was alongside his wife again.

  ‘Please God, I promise …’

  ‘Are you crying, François?’

  ‘No.’

  He was sniffing, it was true, but he was not weeping. At six in the morning, he was up, the car was out of the garage, and he was pacing about in the empty streets watching the trams going past.

  ‘What are you going to say to her?’

  ‘I don’t know. It doesn’t matter.’

  He avoided speaking to Alfred, or if he did say anything, it was to snap at him.

  ‘Do watch what you say, François. He’s wondering what you’ve got against him. I can see he’s upset …’

  And what about him?

  The landscape was becoming more familiar. Then they recognized villages, houses, they started to see the names of Mahé and Lansquet and other local families on notices.

  ‘You don’t want to stop off at the Péchades’?’

  They did stop, but there was no one home but the maid, Péchade was on his rounds.

  ‘Tell him we’re back, and I’ll phone him presently.’

  The houses were grey, the roofs of black slate, it was impossible to imagine that in another place there were houses painted in pastel shades, pink or light blue, or pale green, like women’s dresses. Here in Saint-Hilaire, people would find shocking the idea that men might walk about barefoot in espadrilles, their shirts open-necked to show their sunburnt chests, while the women, mothers even, paraded in shorts, with their children, heading for Silver Beach where they would spend their day stretched out on the sand. You often saw women lying on their fronts, pulling their bathing costumes down so far that the soft white shape of their breasts was visible.

  His mother’s breast …

  His heart beat faster as the house came into view, he looked up at all the windows, which were open, but it was in the garden that he caught sight of the familiar silhouette, under a large black straw hat. His mother was stripping beans. It had rained, because the earth looked dark and the sun was a washed-out yellow after the rain. She was looking in astonishment at the car, which she did not at first recognize, then she saw him, jumping out, pushing past the gate and running clumsily towards her.

  ‘François!’ she said, in the tone of voice she used when she had something to reproach him with.

  ‘Mother!’

  He had sworn not to cry, to stay calm, to make light of things, but he lost control, his heart was bursting, he didn’t wait to lead his mother inside the house, but embraced her awkwardly, repeating:

  ‘Mother!’

  He swallowed his saliva.

  ‘What is it? What’s happened?’

  How could he explain it to her? It went well beyond the cancer. Just yesterday, yes, yesterday morning, he had been lying in bed, naked, sweating, full of lustful thoughts behind the baking-hot shutters.

  Well! That was all over now. Here he was, back home. He was amazed, in this little garden, to find he had become taller, stronger, more solid. He would soon put on his breeches and his boots. His nostrils could already detect the slightly old-fashioned smell of the house.

  ‘I know, Péchade wrote to you. When I expressly forbade him to. All this fuss about nothing. And the children! You’ve brought the children back! And poor Alfred, who was so glad to be spending a month in Porquerolles!’

  The others had spilled out of the car. The children kissed their grandmother. Mariette was already unloading the lighter pieces of luggage and opening the door of the kitchen, where the gas was lit and the kettle singing.

  ‘Yes, I’m sure it’s nothing, mother, but the best thing is to go and see Charbonneau. And then we’ll all feel better.’

  ‘If I’d known …’

  He went upstairs to change his clothes and stood still a moment staring at his socks, from which a trail of fine sand fell. He could hear doors being opened and windows closed. He went into his surgery and asked for Charbonneau’s number.

  ‘Yes, professor … Tomorrow morning? Yes … Many thanks. So we’ll set off this evening, I expect, and spend the night in Poitiers.’

  Charbonneau was due to go on holiday himself the next morning at nine o’clock. Because Mahé had been a pupil of his, he agreed to see him before leaving.

  His mother had not been away from the house in years. They heard her coming and going for hours, terrified of the trip, and giving fussy instructions to Mariette, to her daughter-in-law and to old Guérin, who looked after the garden.

  ‘If only I’d known,’ she kept on saying. ‘Turning everything upside down like this, it’s as bad as moving house!’

  Finally, at five o’clock, she was seated in the car, alongside her son.

  ‘Why didn’t you ever tell me you were in pain?’

  ‘Because we women are used to it. Don’t drive so fast … You know I’m scared of having an accident.’

  They took two rooms at the hotel. She refused absolutely to eat in the restaurant, because she had brought her own provisions.

  ‘Go and have dinner, go on. Don’t worry about me.’

  He could hardly recognize her in the ordinary hotel room, where she looked around at the dust in despair. She seemed smaller, older, more fragile. He was seeing her at last as other people might see her, not as one sees one’s own mother.

  ‘I’ll go and get something to eat, and I’ll be right back,’ he said, feeling ashamed.

  He really needed to get outside, to see people coming and going. Fatigue and emotions had set his nerves on edge. He drank some wine, half a bottle perhaps, and felt it going to his head.

  When he went to bid her goodnight, he found she had brought a set of sheets both for herself and for him, since she didn’t trust the doubtful linen of a hotel bedroom. She had also brought her kitchen alarm clock, whose ticking he recognized.

  ‘Don’t go getting up too early. Charbonneau is only expecting us at eight.’

  She had brought with her her best underwear, which she hadn’t worn for the best part of twenty years.

  ‘Don’t worry about me, go to sleep.’

  She woke him in the morning, bringing him his coffee. She was up and ready. She was wearing the black dress she had had made some years earlier for a wedding, and he noticed that she was wearing her jewellery. He was so touched by this that he cut himself shaving and it took a long time to stop the bleeding.

  ‘Right, let’s go.’

  ‘You will let me see him on my own, won’t you? Promise! Otherwise, I won’t go …’

  ‘Of course, mother.’

  They were ushered into a sitting room, where the furniture had been covered in dustsheets. In the hall, luggage was piled up, including golf clubs, and people could be heard moving about noisily upstairs.

  They sat silently, facing each other, perhaps equally impressed. Charbonneau came in. He was a very large man, with thinning hair and a grey goatee. His whole demeanour conveyed reassuring calm.

  ‘Forgive me for asking you to come so early, but we’re catching a train to the Pyrenees, where we go every year …’

  He
pushed open the padded door to his consulting room.

  ‘If you would be so good as to come in here.’

  He was expecting his colleague to come in as well, but Mahé remained standing awkwardly in the middle of the room. The professor understood, and closed the door, and after that Mahé only heard distant whispers, the kind you hear coming from a confessional. A few footsteps from time to time. Then the metallic sound of medical instruments being handled.

  A boy of about fifteen rushed into the room, stopped short and went out again stammering apologies when he saw someone there. A car drew up at the front door and people started loading luggage.

  Mahé was damp with sweat, and yet he didn’t feel warm. His palms were moist. He concentrated on the bronze bust of Charbonneau on the mantelpiece, and on a large oil painting of a young woman in evening dress on the opposite wall.

  And still the voices from the next room. Sometimes long silences. Finally, the padded door opened. His mother’s face gave nothing away. But her cheeks were a little pinker than usual – embarrassment, no doubt, at having had to undress.

  Mahé’s eyes searched for Charbonneau’s. There was no need for words to be exchanged. In any case, he already knew. The miracle hadn’t happened. A simple movement of the other man’s eyelids, a blink which signified:

  ‘Yes, of course, that’s what it is.’

  But the professor said out loud:

  ‘As I’ve just told your mother, I’ll need to see her again to make a categorical diagnosis. I’ll be back in three weeks. I’ll write and give you an appointment. And meantime, she shouldn’t worry, and she should tell herself that even if this is a cancer, which is not at all certain, these days we have very effective ways of fighting it …’

  She smiled, the most pathetic smile he had seen in his life, and fearing he was about to burst into tears himself, he turned to the window.

  ‘We’re holding you up, professor.’

  She trotted along the street beside him. He repeated to her Charbonneau’s sentence, the famous sentence which the patient was often to hear from her family.