The Mahé Circle

by Georges Simenon; Translated by Siân Reynolds

  The moment he came in, they would make the children be quiet, lay the table immediately, clear away any objects around the room.

  ‘Quick, Jeanne. Your father’s home.’

  And Jeanne would close her school books.

  ‘Quick, Marie’ – the new maid – ‘I can hear Monsieur’s bike.’

  And Marie, flustered, would drop whatever she was holding.

  They made a great play of treating him as the head of the family. But he saw in this concerted attitude a way of enslaving him even more.

  In what way was he the head? What freedom, what kind of freedom, did he have?

  Who knows? He was beginning to wonder whether the same had been true for his father, the famous Mahé, for all that he was two metres tall and weighed a hundred and twenty kilos. Perhaps when, after a few drinks, he had taken on the other stock dealers, it was just a way – a poor effort – to convince himself that he was worth something.

  Sunday succeeded Sunday. The Péchades would come in turn to have lunch and tea at Saint-Hilaire. Everyone noticed that he was the first to go and fetch the cognac bottle from the cupboard and that he helped himself to several glasses.

  It was Madame Péchade who put her foot in it one Sunday. Not only by pronouncing the taboo word, but then, as soon as it escaped her lips, by blushing and looking round as if to apologize.

  She had simply said, in her pleasant and stupid way:

  ‘Will you be going to Porquerolles this year?’

  It was too late to take the words back. Hélène felt the immediate need to busy herself with the children. Péchade lit a cigarette. Everyone waited.

  ‘I’m not sure yet,’ he said.

  But he was sure. And this time it was far more serious than the other years. Not only would he go, but he knew what he was going to look for there.

  ‘Do you think the climate in the south is good for the children?’

  Poor Péchade!

  ‘No reason it shouldn’t be.’

  And perhaps to try to redeem herself a little, Madame Péchade hastened to say:

  ‘Hélène was telling me she was getting used to it.’

  ‘Of course. She’ll get used to it.’

  Without meaning to, he pronounced the last words like a verdict, with arrogant indifference. She’d get used to it, or not. Too bad for her.

  Had anyone ever asked him if he would get used to her? Had anyone worried so much about turning him into a country doctor, and then a married man and a father?

  That was life.

  If you admitted that, you would have to admit that there might be other lives; and he was thirty-five years old, and believed he now had the right to follow his own path, not that of other people any more.

  He didn’t feel resentment towards his mother. Or towards Hélène, when he thought about it calmly. He would have been inclined, if anything, to feel sorry for her. It wasn’t her fault either. He tried to ration his moments of ill humour, and certain gestures, words and expressions, which, he knew, did not pass unnoticed by his wife.

  She was not particularly intelligent, but a woman always notices those little things.

  ‘Will you go fishing there?’

  They had to talk about it, now that the subject had been raised.

  ‘Yes … I do sometimes go fishing.’

  ‘Do you go swimming?’

  ‘Yes, that too.’

  He would have found it hard to say exactly what he did there, what was attracting him. And anyway they wouldn’t have understood.

  He could have drawn a comparison. Here, every morning as he shaved, he could see from his window teams of huge oxen, bowing their heads under the yoke as they moved towards the fields, pacing so slowly that it seemed they were measuring eternity.

  There, leaning over the sea, he could watch strange combats, a perpetual life-and-death struggle: behind every rock or clump of seaweed, fish with aggressive shapes were lying in wait for others, and the very flowers that opened underwater were on the lookout for prey to imprison in their tentacles.

  Here, men drained the life out of day after day, with tasks that followed the inexorable rhythm of the ploughman’s almanac.

  There …

  But why talk about it? Why was this circle being formed round him, made up of anxious looks?

  As soon as his back was turned, they must be whispering:

  ‘His mother’s death gave him a terrible shock. He’s a changed man. Have you noticed he’s started to drink …?’

  Because he was trying to escape from the circle, quite simply. He was a Mahé. And because they were Mahés, and because these other Mahés whom he didn’t know were embedded throughout the region, they were all linking up to prevent him from escaping.

  So he pulled in his broad shoulders, glowered, and regarded the whole lot of them as enemies, including Péchade.

  That’s how it was. And it wasn’t his fault. And they needn’t think they’d win! They’d never be able to hold him back. On the contrary! Their resistance spurred him on, as did the puny little conspiracies they were plotting around him.

  He’d go to Porquerolles. And not only would he go, but he felt that it wouldn’t stop there. He was patient. Perhaps because, in spite of everything, he was a Mahé, a man from here.

  For four years now, it had been constantly on his mind, and he had not yet broken out, but had contented himself with ruminating a vague idea which was gradually turning into a plan.

  One fine day, he would wake up in the morning and find himself in possession of a worked out idea, a fully formed project, and woe betide anyone who tried to deter him from putting it into practice.

  The people in Porquerolles were beginning to get used to him. He had had occasion to treat them. He had made the acquaintance of his colleague on the island, Dr Lepage. A pale-faced little man, who had accepted the post because he had a weak chest.

  ‘You must understand,’ he had explained to Mahé, ‘to live here, you don’t want to be ambitious. In winter, there are only about four hundred residents, and few of them are ever ill. If the Cooperative didn’t pay me a stipend to make sure there’s a doctor on the island, I’d be unable to pay for my keep. There’s also the TB sanatorium, which brings in a small annual sum. But I’m not so sure the climate suits me. My sister, who lives in the mountains behind Nice, is always trying to get me to go and live with her.’

  He lived in a pink house at the corner of the square, near the church. He did a bit of dispensing on the side. One hardly ever saw him, since he spent most of his time dozing in his garden under a fig tree.

  Two weeks later, with summer already beginning, Hélène asked him:

  ‘Do you really mean for us to go to Porquerolles? It’s just that I need to know, because of getting the children’s clothes ready.’

  ‘Yes, we’re going.’

  ‘Should Marie come too?’

  He didn’t care. He wrote off to Paris to get a locum for the month of August. This turned out to be a timid young man who looked at the large grey house where he was going to live all alone with something like fear. They decided to leave Marie with him.

  There was still the car to be put right and a telegram to be sent to Madame Harmoniaux, who had reserved their room for them.

  The morning of their departure, when everyone was in the car, its roof covered with suitcases fixed on with ropes and straps, he turned back to look at the house. It was very hot that day. You could almost imagine slight steam rising from the grey stones.

  The doctor remembered another departure, that of his mother, who had turned around like him just as she was about to get into the ambulance. He had seen in her eyes a farewell, but a farewell full of sorrow.

  She knew she would never come back. She had taken all the necessary steps as a result. She had thought
of everything.

  And he was going off in a cheerful mood, without any sorrow or remorse, just a slight awkwardness, like a man who knows he is at fault.

  And yet he too had the feeling he would never come back. He hadn’t known anything of this the day before, or even when he was tying the luggage on to the roof of the car.

  It was a sudden sensation. He looked at the walls, the gate, the clipped box trees, and without any transition, it all slipped irrevocably away from him. There was nothing there but an ordinary kind of house, slightly forbidding, with an unknown young replacement doctor standing on the steps and waving goodbye and a fat servant girl at the kitchen window.

  It was over! Finished! Well, too bad. He didn’t know how things would turn out, but he trusted his presentiment.

  He slammed the driver’s door, put his foot down and changed gear. The houses on both sides of the road disappeared one after another, swallowed up by the past.

  ‘Aren’t we going to say goodbye to the Péchades?’

  He’d almost forgotten them. Poor old Péchade! He would have to remain in harness in spite of everything, going through the motions to the bitter end. But it didn’t alter the fact that Péchade too was already part of the past.

  His friend was wearing a grey suit. His skin looked greyish as well. He came out of his surgery, where he had been giving someone an injection, still holding the syringe in his hand.

  ‘Away for a month, then?’ he called.

  Madame Péchade was there too, pink-cheeked and rosy, with two of the boys.

  ‘Bon voyage! Do write!’

  ‘Of course.’

  Just at that moment, and only at that very moment, his hand on the steering wheel began to tremble. It was a kind of panic, almost animal, a feeling of loss, at the exact moment that something solid was falling away, something which after a few turns of the wheel no longer existed, but had melted behind them in the sun.

  And now the white and red milestones sped past, new names, different numbers. He was alone in the front, since his wife had preferred to sit with the children in the back. Alongside him on the seat was his hat, still bearing a black mourning band.

  ‘Where do you want to stop for lunch?’

  She thought he hadn’t heard, leaned forward to repeat the question, but he just made a vague gesture.

  ‘François, don’t drive so fast, you know it frightens me.’

  He could see her colourless face in the rear mirror and couldn’t stop himself from smiling, a smile that was almost evil.

  What would she have said, dear God, if she knew where he was taking her at top speed?

  7. The Visit to the Ramparts

  The building, on the left-hand side of a street running steeply uphill, looked like a barracks, or rather, with its pale green, unornamented façade, like a child’s drawing of a house. The resemblance was all the more striking since in the afternoon it was on the shady side of the street, and all its open windows were black holes, as if cut out of paper.

  The doctor had had some difficulty finding it. He had scarcely finished lunch at the Pension Saint-Charles than he was racing down to catch the Cormoran’s one-thirty sailing. At La Tour-Fondue, he had just time to note that the battery of his car was flat before jumping on the bus for Hyères, which was on the point of leaving.

  There were only five or six passengers in the vehicle, which bowled along belching oil in the blazing sun and heat. They were mainly island women, shopping for food. Polyte was on board too: canvas trousers, espadrilles, no jacket, and his naval cap on his head. They could hardly carry on a conversation, because of the racket from the engine. The doctor gathered, however, that Polyte was going to Toulon, and he saw him, when they reached a crossroads, leap from the bus to catch another one.

  Hyères, when they reached it, seemed dead, emptied of its inhabitants. The sun was striking down directly, and in the wide avenues of the lower town, around the casinos and cinemas, there were only ragged scraps of shade around the plane trees. The pavements were as deserted as at three in the morning. What gave the place a strange aspect was that all the front doors stood open, with bead or bamboo curtains hanging in front of them, or sometimes simply shabby strips of muslin, hardly moving in the still air.

  On one side of each street, the shutters were closed, but on the other, since the sun had left it, the windows were wide open.

  The people were all indoors, of course. They had to be somewhere. And although nothing separated the street from the interiors of the houses, there was not a soul to be seen: just the odd dog, lying on a doorstep, interrupting its dreams now and then to have a furious scratch.

  He had gathered where it was:

  ‘Up on the ramparts, two houses down from the whorehouse …’

  He had looked everywhere for some ramparts surrounding the town, but had been unable to locate any. Perhaps they had once existed, and the name had remained? Because of the brothel, he felt awkward about asking the way. And in any case, he had walked for hundreds of metres through the streets without meeting a living creature, accompanying his tiny shadow, which sometimes changed sides, and breathing in the strong smell of melting asphalt.

  It was by chance that he found himself in a square lined with artisans’ shops where, on a wall at the far end, he finally spotted the sign ‘rue des Remparts’.

  It was on the edge of town. The street was very steep. The first buildings were workshops or sheds, sometimes with a large double door, through which you could see a building site or waste ground.

  He started by walking past the house; then he saw, right on the pavement, three women lying on mats on the ground, three women in kimonos taking their siesta. The door and downstairs windows behind them gave a glimpse of café tables and a large pianola, decorated with a profusion of chrome and mother-of-pearl.

  One of the women raised herself on her elbow and looked at him. So, out of embarrassment, he continued to walk up the hill. But there were no more houses. It stopped being a street, and had turned into a simple country road with hedges on both sides, small allotments, and then fifty or a hundred metres further on, nothing but a sort of mound covered with weeds.

  He hadn’t got a plan. He had arrived at Hyères without anything firm in mind. He had been wrong not to dress like Polyte – instead having encased himself in a wing-collar, tie and formal jacket. It made him conspicuous. He was sweating.

  He went back down the hill, passing the three women again, and the one who had seen him before made a gesture of invitation which he pretended not to see.

  He hurried down the length of the street, but not without taking in the large green façade, and as he went past, he glimpsed a wide shady entrance hall and a broad staircase with iron bannisters.

  This was where Elisabeth lived. She had left Porquerolles with her brother and sister. He had gathered as much, as soon as he had seen her army hut from a distance, its door now open on to an empty room, empty of life and simply cluttered with old fishing tackle and random junk.

  He had already gathered as much before he even went up there, from Frans’s appearance: his shirt and trousers were in tatters.

  In the past, Frans had shaved fairly regularly. Almost always, his cheeks had been smooth. But now they were covered with half an inch of reddish stubble. The previous evening, a little way from the harbour and not far from the rubbish dump, the doctor had seen him crouching in front of a home-made fire, cooking fish in a pan.

  He had used naïve stratagems to raise with the boules players a subject which made him blush foolishly.

  ‘Elisabeth? Oh she’s away! That’s one little miss who knows what she wants. If you were to meet her in Hyères now, you wouldn’t recognize her.’

  The nuns had taught her to sew, and she had apparently become an excellent linen- and laundrywoman. Her brother was increasingly
in the good books of the musician who lived in a villa in Hyères and was taking charge of his education.

  One fine day, she had left, taking her little sister, who was about ten years old, with her.

  ‘She never comes back to Porquerolles. She has too much work over there. Frans agreed to it. He goes to see them now and then, about once a month. You can tell, because he starts by washing out his trousers and drying them on the harbour wall! He has a shave, he borrows some shoes from one of the fishermen. Seems that in Hyères, he always buys some sweets before he goes up to see them. But then afterwards, off he goes to Toulon, knocking it back like nobody’s business …’

  What reason could the doctor have for turning up on their doorstep? If only those women from the brothel weren’t lying on the pavement! He had never seen that anywhere before. No one here seemed offended by it. He went back up the street, and without warning, about twenty metres before reaching the women, he slipped quickly inside the entrance hall of the house. His heart was pounding. He only had a few seconds to invent some excuse.

  The floor was grey. All the doors stood open, most of them with bead or muslin curtains. He had the feeling that invisible eyes were spying on him from behind those curtains, and not knowing which door to try, he went awkwardly up the stairs.

  The building seemed to have several households living there. The first-floor landing was bigger than a room and cluttered with a pram, a washtub and a few toys. He approached an uncurtained door, coughed and knocked discreetly.

  Someone moved inside, a cane chair creaked, he could see a red geranium on a windowsill and a bird in a cage; finally a little old man appeared, walking with a stick, a railwayman’s cap on his head. The man stared at him without saying anything, as if he were a ghost, and his eyes, in the half-light, were so vacant that the doctor wondered whether he had chanced upon a madman.