‘I want to play with it.’
‘It’s not a toy.’
Once again her thoughts wandered, fleeting and lazy: ‘My little girl is growing nicely. She’s going to have dark hair. She’s going to look like my mother-in-law, unfortunately … I heard that Simone Burgères is expecting. She’s a guest at the château every Sunday. People must think that idea is tearing me apart. If they only knew … But it upsets Pierre. Men are so strange. What time is it? When is Pierre going to get here?’
It was gone five o’clock when she saw him. Whenever she saw him, whether they were alone or in the midst of a crowd, her face, her entire body leaned towards him, as if she were being physically pulled in his direction. And she didn’t even realise it.
They didn’t kiss. They smiled at each other and he dropped down on to the ground beside her.
‘It’s so hot.’
‘There’ll be a storm.’
‘My only consolation is the thought of Wimereux. We’ll be so happy by the sea … And all alone. Think of it, Pierre, all alone with our children.’
He looked upset. ‘Oh, my poor girl, Wimereux …’
‘What is it?’ she asked, worried.
‘I don’t think we’ll be able to go this year.’
‘What? Again? This is really too much. Every summer it’s the Burgères who get all the holidays and nothing for us.’
‘Come on, my darling, you’re not being fair. Roland takes his beach walks alone. No chance that his wife will tear herself away from the factory. That woman … when I think that I nearly married that woman!’
He took her hand. It was so strange; everything brought them closer, even their anger, even the anger they felt towards each other.
Nevertheless, Agnès was furious and she began crushing pine cones between her fingers. ‘Your grandfather is an old tyrant,’ she said over and over again, ‘an old tyrant.’
‘You’ve only just noticed?’ he said. ‘It’s funny. You women are so funny. You endure the worst humiliations with a smile, but when it comes to three miserable weeks …’
‘But those three miserable weeks, alone with you, are my whole life. It’s …’
‘Oh, no, please, no scenes, my sweet. It’s not like you; you’re supposed to be calm, like a cool spring …’
‘No. Don’t think you can soften me up with compliments, thank you very much. Do you know what I think? You’re a coward. You’re getting just like your father. You don’t dare open your mouth in front of your grandfather.’
‘Listen, Agnès, I knew what to expect when we came back to Saint-Elme. And so did you.’
She wiped away the little tears of rage from the corners of her eyes. ‘But why? Did he at least give you a reason?’
‘Grandfather never gives reasons, my angel. He just says, “Now … Pierre … you will stay in Saint-Elme until 1 October. After that, you can go away.” ’
‘But where the hell does he think we can go after the first of October? Where? The Riviera? With small children?’
‘I can just picture it,’ he said, laughing. ‘The Pierre Hardelot family leaving Saint-Elme at the beginning of winter. My mother would have a fit. You know very well that in our family you can only go away between 10 August and 5 September, unless there’s a war or mass migration.’
‘Even then, it happened at the end of August.’
‘You see.’
‘No, you’re making light of it, but what I’m saying is …’
‘But what do you want me to do about it?’
They bickered for a few moments. Their little boy ran round them, pretending he was a horse on a merry-go-round and that they were the carousel. They didn’t understand his game, so when he tripped over their legs and fell, they shouted, ‘Stop that, Guy! You’re so annoying. Why are you running round in circles like that?’
‘I don’t understand,’ Agnès finally exclaimed, ‘I don’t understand how it doesn’t upset you. Just think about what our life is like here, between your mother and mine. Never alone, never a moment of freedom, or privacy. But at Wimereux … Pierre, we’re alone, we’re together. We go home. We close our door …’
‘We do that here too,’ he whispered. ‘At night, we close our door and we’re in our own home. So … what more could you ask, Agnès?’
They fell silent. A reddish dust, tinged with sap, was rising above the pine trees. The sun was setting.
‘Mama, I’m hungry,’ said Guy.
Pierre looked at his watch. ‘Goodness me! We’re late. Hurry up, Agnès. Guy, get your toys together.’
Agnès put the empty bags from their tea, the thermos and the toy horse into the pram. ‘It’s so annoying,’ she thought. ‘And it’s so hot.’
They left the Coudre Woods and walked along the flat road, burning hot from the sun. They couldn’t wait for the cool darkness to come. They brushed aside the day, relegating it to the past, to obscurity, without a single regret. It had been one of the sweetest and most peaceful days of their lives. But they had no way of knowing that.
16
It was Julien Hardelot’s birthday. He was eighty-five. His family was preparing to celebrate the event in a particularly spectacular way. During the past few months the elderly man had suddenly grown weaker, become hunched with age. Recently he had blacked out briefly, which made the doctor fear that he would soon suffer a stroke. The Hardelots sensed that he wouldn’t be with them for long; it was obvious in the way they began talking about him. ‘Poor Julien,’ they’d say, ‘poor Grandfather.’ He was already benefiting from the kind of sympathy usually reserved for the dead, since the living feel different emotions, more heated and less charitable, towards their peers. When Julien Hardelot got angry, he no longer instilled fear; people just shook their heads. ‘Of course, he’s not himself any more,’ they’d say. His outbursts no longer frightened anyone, but rather evoked a kind of sad pity. They looked at his purplish hands that seemed swollen, stiff, dead. They noticed the hollow sound of his voice. It was difficult to know exactly what the Hardelots were feeling; mostly curiosity, no doubt, about his Will. They thought that Burgères and the young Hardelot would be made partners. They tried to work out what Pierre would get. But everyone agreed that almost the entire fortune of the old man had gradually been sunk into the factory. ‘He thought big.’ He had taken over rival paper factories; new machinery had been brought over from the United States, at great expense. Roland Burgères had reaped the benefits of that; he’d been able to go to America twice, far away from his wife, all expenses paid.
Finally, in December 1924, they heard that Julien Hardelot was turning his business into a public company. At the news, all of Saint-Elme said the same thing: ‘He definitely thinks he’s finished. He’s doing it to avoid inheritance tax …’ To the family, another bad sign was his indulgence towards Agnès when it came to his eighty-fifth birthday celebrations. He announced that she would be invited — tolerated — at the dinner that, until now, Pierre had attended alone every year. For all those years, in a desperate, pathetic attempt to save face, Marthe Hardelot had told everyone that Agnès couldn’t join the family because she had to stay at home to look after the children. But Guy was eleven now; he would come along with his mother, and Marthe herself would forgo the dinner and stay at home with Colette. No one was taken in. ‘He’s not the man he used to be,’ people kept saying. ‘He’s gone gaga; now he’s making up with Madame Pierre.’ This truly seemed proof he was nearing the end. Had the old man softened with age? Was it nothing more than a whim brought on by senility? ‘Not at all,’ said the two younger Hardelot spinsters (the older two had died at the end of the war of Spanish flu, within a few days of each other), ‘not at all. He knows very well that after he dies that young woman will be mistress of his house.’
The women tried to express what, as Hardelots, they vaguely but strongly sensed: that it was far better, far less humiliating to concede a small piece of authority while alive than to see oneself scorned or ignored after death. By receiving Agnès, he seeme
d to be saying, ‘I refused to let you past my front door, but I was the one who decided when your punishment would end. So I remain in control. No one’s going to say that you challenged my authority after my death.’
‘And, of course,’ thought Agnès, ‘he sees the afterlife as a time when his spirit will hover over Saint-Elme and the factory for all eternity.’
She felt anxious about the idea of going to his house. She held Guy’s hand tightly in hers; he was wearing long trousers for the first time. He was a thin child, sprightly, with a turned-up nose; his light-blond hair was all tousled at the top of his head like feathers. Ten times a day Agnès smoothed down his wild hair, in vain; it was almost like the silvery down of a little chick. He didn’t look like either Agnès or Pierre; the Florent and Hardelot families, despite their best efforts, could not recall a single relative, no matter how distant, who shared any of Guy’s features. Pierre and Agnès sometimes joked, ‘He must have been switched with another baby in 1914, when everyone was running away.’ This was his last year of freedom at home. In September he would be sent away to the boarding school that his father and grandfather had attended.
The young Hardelots waited for the car beneath the glass awning. They only had to go up the road to the château, but Saint-Elme, like all provincial towns, had its own tacit code of behaviour, customs that had to be rigorously followed. No one walked anywhere after dark. And besides, Agnès’s satin shoes might have got dirty along the road. It was a winter evening, damp with no wind. The smell of sea fog was in the air, wafting inland from the Channel across the flat countryside. Agnès was wearing a dress of black tulle with the long transparent sleeves in fashion that season.
Even though he wouldn’t let it show, Guy was very excited by this invitation. He could sense something strange in the relationship between his mother and his grandfather, but this didn’t really surprise him. Vague rivalries divided all of Saint-Elme. Court cases, inheritance issues, old quarrels, political disagreements. These things were taken for granted from childhood, as if they were a necessary counterbalance to the much vaunted familial spirit. As soon as a child was old enough to speak, its ears were filled with whispered warnings during the New Year’s Day visits: ‘Now, when we’re at Aunt Adèle’s house, don’t mention the electric train that Cousin Jules gave you.’ — ‘Why not?’ — ‘Because.’ Other things were said in front of the children: ‘Why just picture it! I was with Georges when Marie happened to pass by.’ — ‘What did you do?’ — ‘Oh, it was embarrassing; they haven’t spoken to each other since 1911.’
The war, and especially the years immediately after the war, had made all this bitterness even worse.
The car pulled up. Pierre was driving. None of the families in Saint-Elme had a chauffeur: a car was necessary; a driver was a luxury. The art of living and saving money was summed up in such subtle distinctions.
‘This is just like the night when I went to the château in 1914,’ Agnès whispered in Pierre’s ear.
‘They’ve rebuilt the house exactly like the old one. You’ll see. All in all, nothing much has really changed.’
They passed Jault’s Inn, the police station and the town hall, whose new stonework shone brightly in the car’s headlights. Nothing much had really changed, Pierre thought peacefully. He forgot about the terrible injury to his hip that had nearly crippled him for ever, that still caused him so much pain. He forgot that in each of these houses one, two, three men, sometimes more, had not returned.
The car stopped. Agnès got out.
‘Be brave,’ her husband said, teasing her. He always teased her, she thought tenderly. He went to park the car so she had to go inside alone; Guy had run on ahead with his little cousins.
The elderly man looked shrivelled, shrunken; his cheeks were a deep reddish colour, almost black in places, the colour of dried blood. He held out two fingers to Agnès, without saying a word, and almost immediately turned towards Simone. Every Sunday, at Mass, Simone and Agnès saw each other, said hello and asked after each other’s children. But now, beneath the bright lights and without their hats on, they could get a better look at one another. Each woman, a murderous expression in her eyes, noted the defects of her rival in great detail, instinctively homing in on the very feature that time had spared least. For Agnès, it was the fine wrinkles on her forehead and a few grey hairs; for Simone, it was the broken veins on her cheeks and nose, and especially her stoutness that made her look older.
‘What a frump,’ Agnès thought, but she would have liked to be more beautiful, more elegant herself. ‘People age so quickly in the provinces.’
The two women shook hands.
‘Isn’t Monsieur Burgères here?’
‘No. He’s gone to Paris for two days. He has to see a client, for your grandfather,’ said Simone, knowing full well that Roland had gone to be with his mistress in Paris.
‘Oh, really?’ said Agnès, who also knew the truth.
The guests were standing around the fireplace, admiring the gift that the factory’s workers had given Julien Hardelot that morning. It was a clock of grey marble depicting a stark-naked warrior wearing a Roman helmet, and a scantily clad damsel, her hair crowned with a Phrygian bonnet. These two figures were cast in bronze and their crossed spears rested on the enamel face of the clock whose numbers and hands were gold. The guests looked at the marble and metalwork, trying to assess its value, then respectfully declared, ‘It’s beautiful. It’s heavy.’
Through the darkness you could make out the workers’ houses that had sprung up at the foot of the factory and now surrounded the Hardelots’ street in every direction. Little lights shone in the windows. They lived right next to each other, but they didn’t know each other and didn’t like each other. When Agnès had first arrived in Saint-Elme she had wanted to set up a health centre and a day nursery near the factory, but her father-in-law had told her that ‘it was pointless’, that Julien Hardelot looked after the welfare of his workers himself. Hardelot looked upon everyone born in this place as family. He made sure that the intelligent children were educated and, when they had finished their studies, he gave them jobs. But woe betide anyone who wanted to leave Hardelot’s factory! A tacit agreement between the industrialists of the region meant that all doors would be closed to him. Even Hardelot’s rivals respected this decree. Hardelot had built inexpensive housing and a school when the workers had asked for them, but refused their request for a swimming pool and a sports stadium. ‘The factory is the only place where you need to tire yourselves out,’ he’d told them when they’d asked about the stadium; as for the swimming pool, to him it was a pointless luxury. The salaries were low at his factory, but the members of the family (Pierre and the young cousins who also worked for him) were not better treated than anyone else.
‘My grandfather’s very clever,’ Pierre always said. ‘He’s in charge. He knows that to the ordinary people the misery of everyone is preferable to the happiness of a few. After he has told me off in front of the workers (and Lord knows he can go on!), everything he says to them seems sweetness and light.’
Pierre had just come into the room. He kissed his grandfather and congratulated him; then he went and joined the men standing in front of the fireplace. The ladies were sitting on the settee and the large expanse of the reception room separated the two sexes. The men talked about their cars; it was a topic of conversation they never tired of. They described them lovingly. They passionately compared them to other people’s cars. They told gleeful tales of the accidents that had befallen them.
‘That hill, you know the one, when you’re leaving the village …’
‘Oh, I know it all right; it’s dangerous.’
‘It was in 1921 … no, January 1922. A truck was parking. There was clearly a red light, but …’
The ladies, meanwhile, talked about giving birth. Like soldiers remembering the wounds they suffered at the front, they recalled the event with pride and a shudder. ‘With Jean, you know, they had to use forcep
s …’ ‘Well, when Suzanne was born, I …’ The older ones recounted their stories with a touch of nostalgia. They were like war veterans who say with a sigh, ‘When they cut off my leg on the battlefield …’, implying: ‘Those were the days.’
They went in to dinner. All these respectable people leaned over their soup: the men with their heavy, ruddy-cheeked faces, the women, mostly sweet-looking and ageing. The meal was copious and excellent. Old Hardelot looked from left to right along the two rows of guests. He had tucked the corner of his napkin between his chin and his detachable collar. For some time, now, his eyes had been clouded over with a kind of film, like you find in very old dogs. Pierre wondered if his grandfather weren’t going blind. But the old man fiercely hid this failing. He wanted to pick up his wine glass; he felt around the tablecloth but couldn’t find it.
Pierre pushed the glass towards him. ‘Would you like your wine, Grandfather?’
He shot Pierre a vicious look. ‘No.’
Sometimes he felt an overwhelming drowsiness come over him. In truth, this meal and his family bored him, but it had to be done. All of it was part of what he considered his obligations. Once again, after four years of war, he found himself in a stable world, ruled by unchanging customs and rules. The foundations were solid and wouldn’t give way. Everything was in its rightful place. He would leave a universe that had finally been restored to peace and wealth. There had been problems, strikes in Saint-Elme, just like everywhere else. There would be others, the old man thought, but the era of great upheavals was over. And besides, he wasn’t overly concerned about the future; for him, the future was particularly restricted. But every now and again a wave of powerful vitality caused him to think, ‘I could live to be a hundred.’ His own grandfather had died at the age of a hundred and three. He had known him well. But he looked at his purplish stiff hands and shook his head. No. No chance that he would make it to 1942. So what was imperative was that everything remained in good order for another two or three years. And then … He looked around at his family with the deeply knowing ironic expression common to certain elderly people and certain very ill people, a look that meant ‘Soon it will be your turn. Let’s see, how do you think you’ll do?’
All Our Wordly Goods Page 9