‘And what of you?’ she asks, finally drawing breath. ‘You have been somewhere?’
He has some distance still to go. He shoulders his bag, marches down the hill, crosses the stream on the stepping stones, walks warily through the corner of a field where once he was pursued by a white bull. From the woods at the side of him, he smells the smoke of the charcoal-burners’ fires, those mysterious people who belong only to themselves; then he passes the holly tree — thick this year with berries — crosses Farfield, hears the dogs begin their clamour, and there is the house, the yard, the patched outbuildings, all the stone and mud of home exactly where it should be, must be, and yet, at the same time, all of it somehow surprising. He quickens his pace; a figure appears in the doorway. He raises an arm; she raises hers. For the last minutes of the walk he is watched by her. It is as if her gaze was the path he was walking up, as if at the end of it he might walk clean into her grey eyes.
When they have greeted, he sits by the fire, holds his hands to the heat. There is a moment, a little span of seconds, in which he is simply and passionately happy and nothing in the world is any more complicated than a picture in a child’s book. He is home! Home at last! And then the moment passes.
His mother is making things for him, bringing things to him, asking him questions, thanking him for the money he has sent. She looks, he thinks, a little pinched about the eyes and mouth. And is there not more grey to be seen under the linen scallops of her cap? He would like to ask if she has been quite well, but she would only smile and say she has been well enough. Suffering is a gift from God. It is not a matter to complain of.
His sister comes in, Henriette, cold hands tucked under her arms. She has been in the dairy and smells like a wet-nurse. She wants, she says, to know everything. Her interest flatters him and he listens to himself with some astonishment, his fluent refashioning of the recent past. To hear him, anyone might imagine he and the minister spent their mornings together strolling between the fountains in the gardens of Versailles. The Monnards become a simple bourgeois family, amiable, irreproachable, while Armand is exactly the sort of companion his mother — who has always fretted that he will be lonely — would wish for him, and one who could never be suspected of living conjugally with his landlady or having a taste for preserved princesses. About his work at les Innocents he repeats only what he has already said in his letters, that he is charged with improving the health of a populous quarter, and with some structural alterations to an ancient church there. There is no good reason not to tell them everything, nothing forbids it, the work is not indecent, yet when it comes to it, he is afraid he will see something in their faces, will glimpse some imperfectly concealed reflex of disgust.
His sister wants to know if he has seen the queen. ‘Yes,’ he says, the bluntest of his lies so far. Naturally, he is required to describe her, in detail.
‘She was at some distance from me,’ he says, ‘and surrounded by her ladies.’
‘But you must have seen something?’
He describes Héloïse. Mother and sister are delighted, his sister especially.
‘She cannot have been so far away,’ she says, ‘for you have made a perfect portrait of her.’
An hour later, amid the banging of doors, the reckless jollity of dogs, his brother, Jean-Jacques, bursts in on them, as alike in his looks to their dead father as Jean-Baptiste is to their living mother. He leans his gun — father’s old Charleville musket — against a side of the dresser and greets his brother with an undisguised and manly affection that has the immediate effect of strengthening in Jean-Baptiste that sense of strangerhood that has been growing in him almost from the moment he sat down.
‘I hit a rabbit,’ says Jean-Jacques. ‘Just a small one, up by the hollow. Blew the poor thing to pieces. Let the dogs have it.’
‘To have hit anything. .’ says Jean-Baptiste, nodding to the musket.
‘The secret is to aim half a metre to the left. You could calculate it for me, brother. A bit of your Euclid.’
‘It’d be easier to buy a new gun. Something with rifling.’
‘But I’d miss the old one,’ says Jean-Jacques, settling himself on the opposite side of the fire, stretching his legs out in front of him. ‘So what’s the news in Paris, eh?’
‘This and that.’
‘You’ve got skinny.’
‘And you’ve grown a belly. That waistcoat will need letting out.’
‘A belly suits him,’ says Henriette. ‘Don’t you think?’
It does. It suits him perfectly. How well he fits into this Norman world! Big shoulders from working the farm. A good high colour in his cheeks, his dark hair tied with a length of old blue ribbon. A country beau. A man adapted, a man in his rightful place. No wonder he has never shown much envy of his older brother’s success, his education, his being taken up by powerful men. His ambitions were always of a different order — less fancy, more easily grasped. And which of them now is the freer? Which has more pleasure in life? Which, to some clear-eyed judge of such things, would seem like the man arrived, the one whose wheel has risen?
That night the brothers share their old room, are carried into sleep by the calling of owls and wake together in the light of a late-setting moon. In the kitchen — that scrubbed and orderly world where even the light seems to lie like lengths of rinsed muslin — their mother is rousing the fire, dropping small wood onto small flames. She scalds cider. They drink it hot enough to make their teeth ache, put bread and apples in their pockets and set off with the mare to saw a fallen tree, an old elm uprooted in the autumn storms.
It is lovely work, sane work, though not easy for Jean-Baptiste to keep up with his brother. They sweat, laugh at nothing, compete with the saw, hint in their stories at sex, come home, the mare loaded with aromatic timber, their throats parched.
A week of this and he starts to forget about the Monnards, Lecoeur, les Innocents. He discovers in himself a great appetite for forgetting. He lets his accent thicken, rediscovers his country trudge, that considered slowness of movement and gesture that was the mark of the men he grew up among.
On Christmas Eve, they go to mass at Bellême. They put on their best things, compliment each other, though Jean-Baptiste is not wearing his pistachio suit, having, at the last moment in Paris, not quite had the nerve to face his family in Monsieur Charvet’s vision of the future. He had considered, briefly, going back to the place des Victoires and seeing if his old suit was still there (his mother has already asked after it), but let himself be unnerved by the anticipation of Charvet’s scorn, the unvoiced judgement that the young engineer was one of those timorous creatures who leap forward one day only to scurry back the next. Instead, he has on a suit borrowed from Monsieur Monnard, something pigeon-coloured and respectable, the sort of costume that might be worn to the annual Guild of Cutlers dinner. It fits him well; better perhaps than he would have wished it to.
In church, they sit in their usual pew, opposite the chapel of Sainte-Anne. Everyone, except the dying and those who have already drunk themselves into oblivion, is present. The priest, Père Bricard, is popular in the town for the shortness of his masses, his fathomless indifference as to how the members of his flock choose to damn themselves. When it’s done and neighbours have lingered in the cold by the church door and the children can find no more ice to crack with the heels of their boots and the town’s dogs have grown hoarse from barking, the Barattes go home across stream and fields. At the farm, the brothers look to the animals, peer into stable and byre with light held high, make out the shifting of cattle, the stillness of the horses, then come inside and sit and drink and join in the gossiping. (Who was that gentleman with the Vadier family? Did he not show a most particular attention to Camille Vadier? And what a curious little hat Lucile Robin was wearing! Surely she never meant it to look like that?)