Antoine broke in. ‘All right! It’s done, it’s over. And may it never happen again.’
He stood up, to put an end to Jean’s ordeal, which he shared. Albert led his son away, grasping his arm as if he was going to try to escape. He himself was too agitated to speak. Jean walked past his mother, who pretended to be scouring a saucepan in order not to see him, and went to his room. Through the open window he caught sight of the Longuets’ villa, which a trellis covered in ivy failed to conceal. Jean shook his fist at the house, an enemy twice over, closed his shutters, and threw himself on his bed and sobbed. Over, it was all over. He would never speak to Antoinette again. A tart, an utter tart, the worst bitch of all the bitches. And how would he ever see Chantal de Malemort again? He wept until midnight, eventually falling asleep, and woke up early the next morning, his only thought that it must all have been a bad dream. But as daylight filtered through the slats of his shutters, he again felt the sinking feeling that had finished him the day before. It was completely true: Antoinette’s betrayal, Michel’s victory, his bike confiscated, and, even worse, perhaps worse than all the rest: he would never be taken to Malemort again, he would never see Chantal again. His life spread out ahead of him like a desert. He cried again briefly, then got up and, his eyes still blurred with tears, pushed back the shutters. Albert was watering marigolds along the boundary wall. Behind that wall lurked his rival, the big pimply lecher, Gontran Longuet, whom he had seen shamelessly hanging around Antoinette since the beginning of the summer. What was he doing with a name like Gontran? None of it would have happened if René Mangepain, Madame du Courseau’s brother, had not re-established relations between the two warring families. Albert, militant as ever in politics, had been outraged. It had almost been enough to make him subscribe to Action française,6 which every morning directed its spotlight on the depravities of the majority-party politicians. After keeping a low profile as a deputy in the Chambre Bleu Horizon,7 René Mangepain had switched to full-blooded radicalism. He spoke of ‘my party’, tensing his already enormous neck. Politics for him was little more than the crumbs of his daily bread, but they were crumbs he clung to with a fierce appetite. No deputy could ever remember him mounting the gallery to address the Chamber, and his rare contributions recorded in the official register provoked hilarity, even among party colleagues. What rottenness connected him to the ghastly Longuet, the sources of whose enrichment Jean was perfectly well aware of? And how adroit they were, these traffickers in human flesh! Hadn’t even the abbé Le Couec taken to repeating ‘To every sin its pardon!’ since Madame Longuet had paid for the repairs to the church roof? Life was truly vile. He would go and punch that Gontran-my-arse in the face. The thought gave him the courage to brave the disapproval of the adults who had condemned him blindly the day before, in the absence of any evidence. And then there was Antoinette: he could already feel the satisfaction of the slap he was going to give her. Jean took one of those decisions one feels one will definitely stick to for ever, and which evaporated at the first application of her charm. Although for a few days he strenuously avoided her, it was impossible for the situation to go on without an explanation, and one morning when Jeanne sent Jean to the grocer’s at Grangeville to buy some butter, he walked straight into Antoinette, stopped on the bend in the path, wearing a tennis skirt, her legs bare, pushing her bicycle. The slap that Jean had promised himself did not happen. Antoinette may have been disappointed. She was expecting a torrent of reproaches, and did not suspect that her sudden appearance, her hair pulled back in an Alice band and her pretty breasts unconstrained under her white sweater, would confuse Jean to the point that he would forget everything he had sworn to himself to say to her. Thus did he become acquainted at the very early age of thirteen with that immense power that women have to disarm us by their innocence even when they are guilty.
‘Hello. Are you still cross with me?’
He said ‘yes’ at the exact moment when he realised that he no longer was, that Antoinette, there in front of him, in all the freshness of her seventeen years, a little plump but so sleek too, and as fragrant as a young peach, still had an inexpressible power that he was far too inexperienced to detach himself from in a single encounter. It was to her that he owed the discovery of wonderful sensations. But how could she give them to someone else, to others? Tears filled Jean’s eyes, and he clenched his fists to keep his emotions in check. Seeing him, Antoinette guessed the reason for his furious silence and tried hard not to show her delight too quickly.
‘Will you come for a walk with me?’ she said.
‘We’re not allowed to see each other.’
‘I know a barn—’
‘Who else have you been there with?’
‘Nobody.’
‘Liar!’
Antoinette’s face hardened, and Jean was overcome by panic. What if he lost her? He wouldn’t be able to bear it, any more than he could bear being with her and her huge dishonesty.
‘I didn’t lie to you,’ she said. ‘I don’t lie to you.’
‘But you said it was me that you did your horrible things with at the bottom of the cliff.’
‘I didn’t say that.’
‘Who said it then?’
‘Do you really want to know?’
‘Yes.’
‘You won’t try to get your own back?’
‘Tell me … you can say anything you like, can’t you?’
‘Michel.’
‘Oh the … I hate him! One day I’ll kill him.’
Antoinette smiled. Jean’s noble vow enchanted her.
‘Just this once, you would be wrong. He really thought it was you. Ever since he started trying to catch us out. He confused you with Gontran.’
‘Have you been doing it with him for a long time?’
‘It was the first time.’
He did not believe her but felt too upset to be angry and make her realise how shameless she was. Besides, he could no longer think about anything except slipping his hand inside Antoinette’s sweater, stroking her sweet girlish breasts, feeling their points stiffen under his hand. A mist passed across his vision, and he bowed his head.
‘Come quick,’ she said. ‘I promised to be home by six.’
Jean cut across the fields while she cycled on. They met up again on a path next to a hedge that ran around an abandoned house. The barn was invisible from outside the hedge. Antoinette hid her bicycle and they climbed over the wooden barrier. Inside they caressed each other in the straw, but Jean sensed that he could not go as far as Gontran. He cursed his inexperience. Antoinette promised that it would be for another time.
‘You’re only thirteen!’ she said. ‘It could be bad for you, and you could make me have a baby.’
Defeated, he accepted his pleasure from Antoinette’s hand as his reward, and afterwards they spent a good fifteen minutes laughing as they pulled off all the stalks of straw that had stuck to their hair and sweaters. Antoinette cycled cheerfully home, reassured and joyful. Jean dashed to the grocer’s and bought the butter.
‘You’ve been away a long time, my boy!’ Jeanne said, busy ironing in the kitchen.
‘I met Antoinette!’ he said impulsively.
‘Oh!’
Jeanne held the iron close to her cheek and put it back on the range.
‘It would be better for everybody if you kept your meetings to yourself.’
‘You know, Maman … it wasn’t me with her, down at the cliffs.’
‘I believe you … but why didn’t you stand up for yourself?’
‘Because of her!’
Jean’s heart was beating madly. The warmth in his mother’s face filled him with remorse. He knew that he was just playing with words, and that what he had been doing an hour ago was the same, apart from one detail, as what Gontran had done with Antoinette. At least I’m not the idiot who gets caught in the act, he thought.