‘What’s a secret?’
‘Something you only share with one person.’
‘Yes.’
‘All right … you and I are going to have a secret. Michel won’t be punished for his naughtiness, but you and I will be friends for ever. We’ll never argue. We’ll tell each other everything, and when one of us has a sadness he’ll tell the other one, who’ll cheer him up.’
Jean watched Antoine, concentrating carefully. He did not understand everything he was saying, but the friendly sound of his voice made enough of an impression on him that afterwards this scene never left his memory, and nor did Antoine’s affectionate hug that accompanied it and smelt of cigars, calvados and embrocation. As Jean was leaving, Antoine called him back.
‘Let me look at you again. You remind me of someone, but I don’t know who.’
‘Someone?’
‘Yes, we’ll try and find out who. Goodbye, Jean. Come up and see me when you get bored. We’ll talk.’
In September, from his bedroom, Antoine followed the days’ rhythm. The rose bushes faded to make way for autumn flowers. One morning, the last horse they kept in the stables, which took Marie-Thérèse in her tilbury to church at Grangeville on Sundays, was led away on a long rein behind a knacker’s cart. A few minutes later, Madame du Courseau appeared at the gates at the wheel of a Model T Ford, in which she turned two circles in the drive before parking in the loose box belonging to the Bugatti. Antoine rang his bell. Marie-Thérèse appeared, her cheeks pink, a little out of breath.
‘Did you see?’ she said.
‘I saw, and you have three minutes to take your heap of junk out of my Bugatti’s garage and put it somewhere else.’
‘But the Bugatti’s not there!’
‘All the more reason. Would I put another woman in your bed when you’re not there?’
‘I must say I think you’re being extremely fussy to include a car in your respect for the conventions.’
‘Then you respect them too!’
‘I knew you were attached to your car … but to such an extent … more than to your wife, more than to your children …’
‘Have I ever specified the degrees of my passion? No. So stop making things up and go and get the woodshed behind the outhouse cleared out. You can park your dinosaur there.’
Marie-Thérèse did as she was told, and the Model T Ford did not cohabit with the Bugatti, which returned from Molsheim one afternoon with a mechanic in white overalls at the wheel. Antoine, who had been brought down to the ground floor on a chair, studied his car, its engine still ticking from the road and its bodywork spattered with squashed mosquitoes. He had it washed as he sat there, with a sponge, warm water and hose. The blue paintwork and spoked wheels gleamed in the warm afternoon light. Everyone came to watch: Adèle, Jeanne, Marie-Thérèse, Albert, Jean, Michel, Antoinette and two other servants, whose names I shan’t bother with because they were only casual staff. Hands caressed the bodywork, the chrome and the oak steering wheel, felt the still-warm bonnet secured with a leather strap, the gear lever and oil pump lever. Antoine managed to squeeze himself into the passenger seat, and the mechanic took the wheel again. They did a lap of the park to the sound of eight cylinders firing like organ pipes, raising a delicate cloud of white dust behind them. When they arrived back at the front steps, the abbé Le Couec was waiting, a handkerchief in the neck of his cassock.
‘The golden calf!’ he said in his rich, gravelly voice. ‘How we love the golden calf! And the sinners they do increase … Pity the heavens as they empty!’
He nevertheless helped Antoine to extricate himself from the cockpit and get back upstairs to his room, where they remained alone with the carafe of calvados and the box of cigars. A strong smell rose from the abbé, who did not always take great care of his cassock. Domestic matters did not preoccupy him. He lived in one room of the rectory, which functioned simultaneously as bedroom, library and kitchen and which, very occasionally, he allowed a female parishioner to sweep and dust. But as a former infantryman, trained by the Manuel d’infanterie, he paid very particular attention to the health of his feet. The faithful souls who visited him often found him sitting in a chair and reading his breviary with his cassock hitched up to his knees, revealing his sturdy legs and hiker’s calves and his feet soaking in a bowl full of water, in which he had dissolved coarse salt collected from the hollows of the rocks. Grangeville’s parish priest needed this treatment: he walked a great deal. To walk to Dieppe and back did not trouble him in the slightest. He had walked to Rouen in twelve hours once, to answer a summons from his bishop, and returned the following day at the same pace, relieved of a number of bitter feelings after a stormy audience.
Antoine, whose nose was sensitive, offered the abbé a cigar, which the priest lit after clearing his throat.
‘Not bad! So how goes it? I’m not talking about your knee, naturally.’
‘Another fortnight and I’ll be as nimble as a deer,’ Antoine responded, pretending not to understand.
‘It’s been two months, hasn’t it?’
‘Yes, two months.’
‘Two months without sin! Some people up there will be very interested in your soul.’
‘How very kind of them.’
Antoine recounted the story of Jean and Michel, of the punctured hosepipe and the cut-up headscarf. The abbé listened less than attentively. The first glass of calvados, drunk a little too quickly because he had been thirsty, distracted his attention. He would have liked to know its vintage, but when Antoine began to think aloud he was not to be interrupted.
‘I’m very drawn to Jean. If you could see how serious he is, how closely he looks at you, if you could read his thoughts as they pass across his face, you’d be asking yourself the same question as I do: where does he come from? And it is doubly frustrating that when I look at him, I say to myself every time: I know that face, I’ve seen it somewhere before. In a dream? In the real world? Impossible to tell. Will we ever know?’
The abbé maintained a prudent silence. He knew, but no one would make him betray a confidence. Or possibly later, if circumstances demanded it. He poured himself another glass of calvados and sipped.
‘One thing at a time. Don’t get too interested in Jean Arnaud. Your son has priority, and he needs it. Jean, on the other hand, has all sorts of advantages: a mother of admirable virtue, a father who is both a hero and an idealist …’
‘You’re suggesting that Michel doesn’t have those advantages?’
‘I’m not suggesting anything. By the way, how are matters at Saint-Tropez?’
‘Excellent,’ Antoine replied, put out and instantly withdrawing into himself in the wake of his rebuff. Quite understandably, he did not hold with a priest reminding him, in conversation, of things said in the confessional. But the abbé Le Couec, a man of excessive integrity, could not forget words murmured in an unguarded moment. Antoine’s life, both internal and external, belonged to him, and he intended to maintain his right to oversee it outside the church as well as inside.
‘You’re fortunate,’ the abbé said. ‘You might have been a lot less lucky.’
‘I’m obliged to you!’ Antoine said drily.
‘As a matter of fact, I have never understood what drove you away from Madame du Courseau.’
‘If only I knew myself!’
‘She has great qualities.’
‘I shan’t contradict you on that point.’
‘She’s an excellent mother.’
‘Without a doubt.’
‘She is beyond reproach.’
‘Who would dare say anything to the contrary?’
‘So?’
‘She bores me,’ Antoine said wearily.
The abbé did not know what boredom was, and supposed it to be some sort of illness that a healthy man would fight with prayers, calvados and long, strenuous walks. Perhaps Antoine’s illness was the result of him never going out without his Bugatti.