He spoke quietly, because of all the open doors and all the ears listening behind the walls.
‘Excuse me … I’m looking for Mademoiselle Klamm.’
He had made up his mind that if the old man did not understand, he would not insist and would go away. But he insisted anyway:
‘Mademoiselle Elisabeth …’
The old man was thinking. He hadn’t understood. Ah, yes he had! A word had struck him, because he was knotting his brow, and finally pointed at the ceiling over their heads. He was even capable of speech. He said in a cracked voice:
‘I’ll show you.’
But seeing him so decrepit, leaning on his stick, the doctor was afraid, foreseeing some ridiculous scene in the corridor or on the stairs.
‘I’ll find it myself. Sorry to have troubled you.’
He climbed quickly to the second floor, and the old man remained standing in his doorway. If it was the room directly above …
He knocked at a closed door. A very young voice said:
‘Come in.’
He was red in the face. He had never felt so awkward in his whole life. He found himself in a large room, one which, later, was to grow larger and larger in his memory. In this huge space, her back to the window, a little girl was sitting at the table, turning the pages of a book.
He hadn’t recognized her at first and stammered:
‘Mademoiselle Klamm?’
‘Yes, that’s here.’
The little girl slipped off her chair, closing the book, which looked like a school prize, with its red cover and gilt-edged pages.
She was clean, well turned out, with a red and white gingham smock over her dress. She showed no fear of him. He wondered whether she recognized him. But that wasn’t possible.
‘You wanted to see Elisabeth perhaps?’
‘Your sister, yes.’
‘She’s just gone to deliver some work. If you want to wait.’
Like a well-brought-up little person, she offered him a chair, and not knowing what to do, he sat on it, his hat on his knees. In front of him he could see the closed shutters of the house opposite. Perhaps someone was spying on him through the cracks? People must have heard him coming up here. The whole house knew he was in this room, like an enormous ogre, with a little girl in a gingham smock.
She felt no need to make conversation. Standing two metres from him, she was looking at him with curiosity from head to toe, but still did not appear frightened.
‘Do you know if she will be back soon?’
‘I don’t know.’
A doorway led to another room, smaller probably, but it was not possible to see inside, as the door was only slightly ajar.
In the room he was in, there was a big table covered with an oilcloth and two beds, one of them a child’s cot, for the little girl presumably; Madeleine, her name was, the doctor remembered it now.
What struck him most was the counterpane on the larger of the two beds – Elisabeth’s of course – a white counterpane with a honeycomb weave, exactly like the one on his bed when he was twelve years old. He could see it now, in his bedroom in the country, lit by a slanting ray of sunshine. He could hear his mother’s voice saying, when he flung himself on top of the bed fully dressed:
‘Take the counterpane off, at least!’
Strangely, he had found the same kind of counterpane in Paris, in Madame Chaminade’s boarding house behind the Pantheon. And Madame Chaminade, who was protective of her belongings, and checked every week that no one had kicked the furniture, would repeat to her tenants:
‘Now please, if you go for a nap, take the counterpane off first.’
And here, on Elisabeth’s bed, he was finding the same counterpane a third time. He looked round. He knew that he would never forget the placing of the slightest object. There was a sewing machine by the window, a smaller table with some half-finished pieces of needlework, a gas ring and some sort of chest, evidently second-hand. Everything was clean and polished.
‘I think I’d better come back another time,’ he stammered.
He could stay there no longer, under the curious but friendly gaze of the child. What goes through the head of a little girl of ten? She was about the same age as his daughter. Jeanne did talk to him. He listened to her. He sometimes smiled at her remarks, but he had never wondered what she was thinking, and nor had she ever stood in front of him, scrutinizing him.
He explained:
‘I was just passing and I thought I might ask if your sister could do some sewing for my wife.’
The child replied, already very self-possessed:
‘I can’t say. I know she has a lot of work on her hands.’
‘I’ll come back some other time.’
She went to open the door for him and held out her hand.
It was over. He went away, delivered of a great weight. In a few moments he would be out in the street and would have nothing worse to face than the gaze of one or other of the three lounging women. He had only one fear: that he might meet Elisabeth on the stairs. If she didn’t recognize him – and she probably wouldn’t even look at him – he would go away with head bowed. If she did recognize him …
He reached the entrance hall, then the pavement, without meeting any obstacle and strode off towards the centre of town. He hadn’t seen her, but it came to the same thing, and was perhaps better anyway.
What would be really marvellous would be to bump into her at the corner of one of the little sloping streets of the old town, where all the houses were shops.
He had some time to wait. The bus did not leave until four o’clock. Here and there in the picturesque alleyways, despite the time of day, a little human activity could be glimpsed. Very simple, very poor, and yet somehow gentle and reassuring, this was not sordid poverty but a kind of poverty that was almost sumptuous. In the sunshine, the rendered walls of the houses glowed golden. They clustered together with unexpected curves and bulges. The shops were so low-built that you could touch their ceilings with your hand, and in some places, you could almost reach up to the windows on the first floor.
Outside a blood-red shop front, with a sawdust-covered floor behind it, sat a butcher. Arms folded and mouth wide open, he was fast asleep on his chair, a fly perching on his eyelid.
Nearby were piles of Italian cheeses, kegs of anchovies or cod, hams suspended from the ceiling, and all these smells mingled together, flies buzzed, while the water from a fountain ran down the edge of the pavement, gurgling like a running stream.
Yes, he should have dressed like Polyte, in canvas trousers, a cotton shirt and espadrilles, to be free to jump from one bus to another.
He didn’t meet her. He would surely not meet her in the old quarter, since if she was handling fine linen, she must work for the rich or the middle classes. It would be on the avenues lined with plane trees, with garden fences and sprinklers on the lawns, that she would be found.
He didn’t go there. He was afraid. Afraid above all of the first shock of her gaze. He thought of the counterpane, and saw it again, dazzling white, tidily covering the bed; he saw the little girl with her elbows on the table, turning the pages of her red book with gold edging.
He found himself not far from the bus stop, and went into a bar. Two or three men standing at the counter stopped talking as he approached, and looked at him with curiosity.
They were men like Polyte. They had the same supple bodies, relaxed attitude and the same look on their faces, where you always suspected some irony. The barman too, a thin man in shirtsleeves, was of the same type.
‘A pastis?’
One of the men was wearing grey trousers and crocodile-skin shoes, and had his jacket slung casually over his arm. From time to time, he looked outside.
‘It’s late.’
He was waiting for th
e bus to Nice. Sometimes cars went past, large ones mostly, with chauffeurs. You could hardly see them, but you heard a kind of breath of air and their wheels on the asphalt.
The road between Nice and Marseille was one long boulevard, in fact. In an hour these men would be in an identical bar at another point on the boulevard, in Saint-Raphael, Cannes or Antibes.
‘What did Pierre say?’
‘He’ll find him, all right. No need to worry, if Pierre’s there.’
‘Jules is the one who’ll be having kittens …’
And they went on staring at him, examining this fat man who was too hot and had landed in their bar like a bumblebee in a glass of beer.
Almost every day, just before the game of boules, while his wife was on Silver Beach with the children – she was a little happier now, since she had made the acquaintance of the wife of a factory-owner from Roubaix – almost every day, at about five o’clock, he would stroll, hands in pockets, over to Dr Lepage’s house.
He didn’t go in through the front entrance, but took the path round the back. Looking over the hedge, he could see that his colleague was there, slumped in his deckchair under the fig tree, doing nothing, eyes closed, or staring up at the blue sky.
‘Hope I’m not disturbing you,’ he called.
And immediately afterwards came the squeak of the gate.
‘Take a pew.’
‘It’s not worth it, the game will be starting soon.’
Because now, every evening, he played boules with the locals, including Gène, Polyte, the Cabrini brothers and the rest of them. They would wait for him, and come to look for him if he was late.
‘Hey doctor! Time to get on with it.’
And he would fetch his boules from his pigeonhole at Maurice’s bar. He played with care, tongue between his teeth, and watched the others take their turns, frowning as he tried to discover how they did it.
Dr Lepage’s garden was very small, but you could hardly tell, since it was a real jungle of plants of every kind. There were also flowers growing in glazed bowls, which tripped you over all the time. It contained a well where his maid came to draw water and its creaking was already a familiar sound to Dr Mahé.
‘Nice day …’
‘You’ve been to Hyères?’
‘Yes, I went for a walk in the old town, it’s extraordinary.’
They didn’t have anything to say to each other. Neither of them was fooled. Mahé knew that Lepage was cunning. Possibly even more cunning and determined than a horse dealer in Saint-Hilaire! He never mentioned his wish to leave the island these days, and if you asked after his health, he assumed an indifferent or even surprised expression.
‘I’m fine, just fine.’
So fine that he looked like a lamp about to go out. His skin had become colourless, like his faded blond hair. He coughed from time to time, then put his handkerchief in his pocket, muttering:
‘It’s nothing.’
He must have stuffed himself with creosote, since he gave off waves of it, and the whole house was full of the smell.
It was an old house, and inconvenient. From the garden, you went down two steps to the kitchen with its red floor tiles. The whitewashed walls had not been cleaned for years. The range wasn’t used, but there were two charcoal stoves and a gas ring attached to a butane bottle. The place was run-down. And dirty. But Dr Mahé always found some excuse to go inside, charmed as he was by the rosy reflections on the tiles and the constant buzzing of flies. Cool water was kept in a large earthenware jar and he would go and ask for a glass from the maid, who, for no particular reason, had taken a dislike to him.
He had seen some of the other rooms. But not the bedrooms, since his colleague had never invited him upstairs.
Whatever the hour of day, the house was always in semi-darkness, and when you came in from outside you had to feel your way until your eyes had time to grow accustomed to the dim light. He had never seen the shutters open.
In one corner was the narrow room which served as the pharmacy, with an old counter, painted black, a few chipped earthenware pots, some bottles on shelves, boxes of medicaments and, on the floor, some demijohns and trial samples of medicines still in their half-opened boxes.
Next door, the surgery was equally shabby, with its chipped enamel instruments, rubber tubing and consultation couch, covered with a worn oilcloth of indeterminate colour.
There was a sitting room too. The doctor had only been able to glimpse it. There was a bed in the room. Did Lepage sleep there?
Every evening, or near enough, he came sniffing around and sat for a moment or two in the garden. Every evening, he was on the point of saying:
‘So when will you pass this practice over to me?’
Elisabeth was in Hyères, but that didn’t alter his plans.
Hélène, unsuspecting, was still living on the island like an outsider, like the other boarders at Madame Harmoniaux’s guesthouse. She had got used to it in the end, in the sense that the island was now simply a background that she scarcely noticed any more.
She would get up every morning, dress the children and come down for breakfast in the bright, sunlit dining room. Her sewing bag was ready, along with the children’s toys, to go to the beach. She walked slowly, turning round and waiting for her new friend from Roubaix, who would soon join her.
She had never dreamed of putting on a bathing costume, still less of going for a swim.
Usually, because of the glare from the sea, which hurt her eyes, she would sit with her back to it. And in any case, she hardly ever looked up from her work.
She wrote to her sisters, to Madame Péchade, and to anyone else back home whose news she thought she should report to her husband.
‘Listen, François, little Madame Bailleux is expecting again. And yet her husband knows very well she has one miscarriage after another …’
He paid no attention. He watched the Cormoran arriving every morning, then he read the newspaper on the terrace outside Maurice’s bar, with a glass of white wine. He looked across at Lepage’s house, and the small building, like the narrow streets of old Hyères, grew bigger in his eyes.
He took a turn round the harbour, reddening with pleasure when people spoke familiarly to him:
‘Hey doctor, since you’re not busy, perhaps you can give me a hand folding this net?’
The odd thing was that he dared not address a word to Frans, although he often found himself very near him. Had the ex-legionnaire not noticed him?
He progressed through the days like one walking through warm sand, with the feeling he was sinking in, and at five o’clock, his head already heavy, he would go into his colleague’s garden, knowing that he hadn’t yet made up his mind to speak to him.
It was extraordinary how many scenarios he had constructed like this, under the hot sun, each more extravagant than the last. He had gone so far as to imagine an accident. For instance, he could break his leg. He wouldn’t be able to leave the island at the end of their holiday. Because of school, his wife and children would return to Saint-Hilaire. That way, he would have some time in front of him.
But what then?
Blushing to himself, he thought of another possibility, but even more ridiculous, and what was more, distasteful. Everyone, since his mother’s death, had agreed that he had been greatly affected, and the words ‘nervous trouble’ had been pronounced. Why not write to Péchade, and ask him for a favour. Péchade would come to see him, pretexting a few days break (he would, of course, reimburse him for the journey). It would not be hard to persuade Hélène that her husband should not go back to Saint-Hilaire yet, that his rest-cure needed much more time.
He felt cross with himself, and inwardly begged his mother’s pardon for making use of her in this underhand way, even in thought.
Then he shook h
imself angrily. What need did he have to explain himself anyway? Wasn’t he free to lead his life as he wished?
Yes, of course. In different circumstances, it would have been easy. For instance, if he had been ambitious, and if he had dreamed of setting up in practice in a town somewhere, or a city even.
Hélène would have had just as much trouble getting used to it, but he wouldn’t have felt in the least awkward saying:
‘I don’t want to stay in Saint-Hilaire all my life … I need a larger practice, and a better income.’
The trickiest thing would be to bring Hélène – or anyone else, for that matter – to stand outside Dr Lepage’s house and declare:
‘This is where I want to live from now on, and you’re going to live here with me.’
So much did he think about it that he ended up with a perpetual frown on his forehead and at moments, when he was ashamed of his thoughts, he couldn’t meet people’s gaze.
‘Hullo, doctor … Not busy today, then?’
‘Oh sorry,’ he would say to the indolent Lepage. ‘They’re waiting for me at the boules pitch.’
What a bastard! Yes, Lepage was a real bastard, who understood completely, but who wouldn’t lift a finger to help him. How shameful, at his age, to be so tortured by what was almost a childish desire and to feel constant shame without any relief.
He would cross the square to fetch his boules and would say to Jojo as she stood behind the counter:
‘A quick pastis, please.’
Before the game. The others only drank afterwards. They didn’t have the same reasons as he did to drink. They were waiting for him. They stood there, blue figures against the golden yellow of the square, their shirts white patches, and the little ochre-coloured church closing off the horizon.
‘You’re on my team, doctor. Go ahead, you throw the jack.’
Elisabeth had no doubt long since got back home. Her sister would have told her that a gentleman had called. What kind of gentleman? And the little one would describe him: a fat gentleman with a red face, he looked very hot and kept looking round.
The Mahé Circle Page 11