‘Your father’s been very upset. He says he no longer dares to look Monsieur Antoine’s family in the face. We thought about giving up our place here, but then we’d be penniless: when you’re fifty-five and you’ve got one leg less than everyone else, there’s no work to be had.’
Jean was appalled that he had not, for a single moment, considered the extent of what had happened.
‘I’ll talk to him,’ he said.
‘Try, my child … but there’s none so deaf as those who don’t want to hear.’
‘And I’ll talk to Monsieur du Courseau.’
‘Madame would be better.’
‘No, not her.’
Jeanne smiled indulgently.
‘You owe her a lot.’
‘To you, to Papa, I owe a lot. Not to her.’
‘One day you’ll understand.’
Jeanne kept so much goodness hidden inside her that it was enough to tell her there was no such thing as evil for her to believe it and for her pious, honest soul to rejoice that she lived in an unblemished world. Albert might have been the same, if the horrors of war and the sacrifice of his leg had not produced an authoritarian outlook that mistook itself for intelligence. He had ideas: firm, clear-cut, and to a certain extent immovable. Jean had little hope of convincing him by a confrontation. On the other hand, something told him that Antoine du Courseau might show himself to be understanding. He had to be brave enough to talk to him, but Antoine was a man who discouraged conversations that he had not initiated. At the first sign of difficulty he climbed into his Bugatti and vanished for several days, returning when those who had stayed behind had dealt with the problem for him. Jean would have continued to hesitate if he had not been so angry about being deprived of his bike for the rest of the summer. Not daring to go to the house, he resorted to a letter, which he rewrote ten times over before he was sure that it was short enough for Antoine to deign to read it and not throw it straight into the wastepaper basket.
Monsieur,
May I permit myself, in the name of our very old pact, agreed when I was a small boy, to ask you for an interview. I will explain to you that I am not guilty and why I have allowed people to think that I am. I will say it to you because you are the only person whose opinion matters to me. Your
Jean Arnaud
He posted the letter at Grangeville, and the next morning the Bugatti, nosing out of the park, took the drive that led past the lodge. Jean had been looking out for it, and ran down and jumped in beside the driver. Antoine put his foot down, and they sped to the Dieppe road; reaching the docks, they halted at a café where hot shrimps, washed down with an honest sparkling cider, were served around the clock.
‘Thank you, Monsieur!’ said Jean, after Antoine urged him to start.
‘I suspected you weren’t guilty. But to tell you the truth, and I’ll say it only to you, I wouldn’t care if you were. Antoinette is seventeen … Some girls are like that. She has my temperament …’
Jean did not know exactly what he meant by temperament, but guessed it had something to do with a predisposition to forbidden pleasures, and he smiled so understandingly that Antoine smiled back, then said, ‘What do you want to do when you grow up?’
‘Uncle Duclou wants me to take the merchant navy examinations, but I’m not very good at maths … and Uncle Cliquet is pushing me to work on the railways—’
‘And you think it’s boring!’
‘Really boring.’
‘And you don’t have any idea of your own?’
‘No. All I know is that I’m not going to be a gardener, and I am going to travel.’
‘Ah!’ Antoine said casually, buttering a slice of brown bread.
Jean, on the brink of other confidences, stopped short at Antoine’s rapid loss of interest.
‘I suppose,’ Monsieur du Courseau went on, ‘that you took the blame to spare my daughter from getting into more trouble.’
‘I like her a lot. Sometimes I even think she’s my sister.’
‘What about Michel?’
Jean looked down and did not dare to answer.
‘I see,’ Antoine said. ‘You know, I feel exactly the same about him. What a strange idea to have gone and told everyone what he saw. He turned the house upside down. You and I are obliged to hide to talk to each other, and my wife is not about to forgive you in a hurry.’
‘I’m even more cross that my father won’t forgive me. He’s so upright and so good. I feel ashamed.’
‘I’ll do my best to fix that. Man to man, you can say what you want.’
‘You won’t punish Antoinette?’
‘Punish Antoinette? I’ve never done such a thing. And in any case, my little Jean, I’m not blameless myself. I have another life … Far away …’
He broke off to watch an English couple who had walked into the café, a tall, slim blonde woman and a man in a tweed jacket and grey trousers. All his attention was taken up by the young woman. She sat down and attempted to decipher the menu that she had been given by a good-humoured waiter. Her husband took the menu from her and ordered mussels and white wine without consulting her.
‘They’re aliens!’ Antoine said.
‘Yes, they’re English.’
‘No, no, I mean they weren’t born on the same planet as us. Like the Chinese, the American Indians, the Arabs or the Africans. Our planet is here, Normandy. They’ll leave it behind on the midday packet, and tonight at six o’clock they’ll be at Newhaven, where they’ll drink tea and eat ham squashed between two pieces of rubbery bread with the crusts cut off.’
‘I’d still really like to go to England.’
‘There’s an idea! Would you like to go and explore? Geneviève is living in London at the moment. I can write and tell her you’re coming.’
‘Papa will never let me go!’
‘Leave that to me.’
Antoine drank the last of his glass of cider and called the waiter to ask for the bill. When he had paid, he walked out, climbed into the car and drove away, forgetting Jean, who had gone back to fetch his cap, which he had left hanging on a peg inside. Without a centime to his name, he could not even catch a bus, and so he walked back to Grangeville that warm August day, seething every time a cyclist passed him. He was arriving at La Sauveté when he met the abbé Le Couec, huge and red-faced, striding along.
‘Jean! Heaven has sent you to me!’
‘Father, you were looking for me?’
‘Yes, I need you.’
The priest’s iron hand clamped the boy’s biceps, and for a second he thought he had been taken prisoner.
‘My parents will be thinking that I’ve run away …’
‘That is indeed what’s happening! Let us go to the rectory. I need to talk to you and to introduce you to a hero.’
‘They’ll punish me.’
‘I’ll square that, don’t worry.’
‘I’ve already lost my bike for the whole summer.’
‘You’ll get your bicycle back. Come along … time presses.’
We shall call the man hidden at the rectory Yann, for the sake of convenience. Jean saw a tall Celt, with yellow, wavy hair, eyes of a clear blue and hollow cheeks, who shook his hand and immediately addressed him as a man.
‘Jean Arnaud, the abbé has told me about you. Just by looking at you, I know that I can count on your discretion and your loyalty.’
‘Yes, Monsieur.’
‘The police are looking for me. Don’t ask me why, but a false move, a word in the wrong place, will put me in prison for many years. We have to be certain of your discretion and your complicity.’