When Marie-Thérèse du Courseau heard the news of Jean’s departure, she displayed all the symptoms of an attack of nerves, but she was also one of those intrepid, dauntless souls who, in the face of catastrophe, find the means to triumph over circumstances yet again with their composure and coolness.
5
No, no, I have not forgotten Mireille Cece, Marie-Dévote, or Toinette, Théo or Charles along the way. Before I recount Jean Arnaud’s London expedition, it may indeed be a good thing — so as not to displease readers who might be interested in what happens to them — to pass on news of them, even if only in a few sentences. They are still there, although removed from the theatre of our action — Jean’s adolescence — as that becomes clearer; for they belong to Antoine du Courseau’s secret existence, which is a secret we can only draw out by following Antoine south to the Midi. Jean may have left for London, but Antoine will not leave La Sauveté at the end of August 1932. The heat, the crowds on the beach, the packed roads are not to his taste. He no longer recognises the pretty, quiet port where he discovered a little café at the edge of a sandy beach. Hotels have sprung up, the fishermen no longer fish, and everyone hams up their southern accent to charm the tourists, to the point where one might imagine one was listening to some northerners acting in a play by Pagnol. At Marie-Dévote’s hotel, big changes are afoot. She no longer serves in bare feet, nor is she even to be seen at the reception desk, where she has taken on a Swiss clerk to attend to the details. She has instead an office, on the door of which is written ‘Manager’. There are eighty beds in the hotel, a car park, and the beach is more or less for guests’ use only. A lifeguard is on duty, a handsome fellow who rolls his shoulders and whose wandering hands make the more mature ladies coo. The hotel does not interest Théo, who has bought his ‘yacht’, a former submarine hunter with two powerful diesel engines, and from early June to early September he is available for charter. His secret pleasure is his collection of naval caps: caps from every country, with gold insignia he has no right to wear, but he does not care, he is happy. Toinette is eight years old, and we shall have more to say especially about her in 1939. One more thing to add: on the walls of her office Marie-Dévote, now well and truly overtaken by middle-aged spread, has a Picasso and a Matisse. Chez Antoine is featured in the guidebooks for its collection of paintings. Antoine’s early purchases have been added to with work by the Surrealists: Dalí, Tanguy, Magritte, De Chirico, Max Ernst. Antoine still knows nothing about art, but he is a lucky buyer, and has a gallery in Paris to advise him so that he scarcely puts a foot wrong. All of it is in Marie-Dévote’s name.
At Roquebrune things are no longer quite as they were, and Antoine has given up stopping there since the day when he arrived unannounced and found Mireille in bed with a customs officer. Throwing herself at him, she cried, ‘Why didn’t you come sooner? He seduced me. He hits me. Defend me.’
The customs officer (his trousers meticulously folded on a chair and his képi hung on a coat hook) opened his eyes wide. He could have sworn that it was the other way around, and thus did he become rudely acquainted with Mireille’s impressive impudence. Antoine sighed: it is always unpleasant to be on the receiving end of infidelity, but with Théo he had got used to it and it no longer wounded him so much. As the naked Mireille, still clinging to his neck, continued to sob, and the customs officer retrieved his long underpants from the floor, a ruthless calculation surfaced in Antoine’s mind. To break it off would have several advantages, chief among them that he would save a good deal of money, and then there were also Mireille’s amorous demands, which were beginning to exhaust him. At fifty-eight, well, he was no longer a young man. He thus assumed a dignified and offended air, held up his hand to the customs officer, who was pulling on his braces, and begged him to stay as he was. Mireille flew into a terrible fit of temper, but Antoine was immovable and, having forcibly detached her, he walked out, slamming the door behind him, through the restaurant full of diners finishing their lunch. A Parisian designer had transformed the bistro into a country restaurant that was more Provençal than Provence. Poor Léon would have found it unrecognisable. He had done the right thing by dying.
As for Charles, he is the agent for an important car manufacturer, running his own garage, and has launched a political career: for the moment he is merely a radical-socialist departmental councillor, but the future is bright, or at least he believes it is.
Such was the situation as Jean boarded the ferry at the end of August 1932, his pockets full with his thousand-franc note, return ticket, Mademoiselle Geneviève’s address and another that Monsieur Cliquet had given him of a friend of his, a retired employee of one of the British railway companies. Captain Duclou had likewise showered him with introductions for the crossing, which, though it lasted barely six hours, would without the shadow of a doubt awaken Jean’s vocation as a sailor. The ferry captain was a former officer of Uncle Duclou, and when Jean had stowed his bicycle in steerage, a sailor led him to the bridge, where the captain, having looked him up and down with a great pretence at severity, pointed to a place next to the helmsman that he was not to leave at any price. It was from there, with a beating heart, that Jean followed the difficult manoeuvre of the ferry as it left the quayside and turned into the channel leading to the harbour mouth. The boat hardly seemed to move, although he could feel the vibrations of its engines, whose speed the captain held back by spluttering into a sort of large tube fixed to the deck of the bridge. They had scarcely inched past the harbour mouth when he ordered the engines full speed ahead. Jean had the impression that the ferry was sitting down in the swell, then hurling itself forward at the long green waves. I am sorry, for the sake of the story, to have to report that the crossing was perhaps the most uneventful of the year. After departing at ten in the morning, the ferry was at the quayside at Newhaven at six that evening. Not once did anyone shout, ‘Man overboard!’, and there was no mustering of passengers on deck to sing ‘Nearer, my God, to Thee’ as the ship sank. Jean had lunch at the captain’s table. The fat, rotund man with pink cheeks disappointed him a little. There was nothing of the master mariner about him, and it was difficult to imagine him as a young lieutenant rounding Cape Horn in a gale aboard a mixed cargo of the Messageries Maritimes, as Uncle Duclou had related. Did he even remember those days? Jean told himself that the monotonous Dieppe — Newhaven crossings through the Channel shipping lanes, jammed with traffic, had gradually erased all spirit of adventure in this man, who kept two canaries in his cabin and talked about the flowers in his garden. At Newhaven the captain entrusted Jean to one of the ferry’s officers, who led him to a bungalow with a sign outside saying ‘Bed and Breakfast’. An old lady with curly grey hair opened the door, letting out a smell of Brussels sprouts. Yes, she had a room, and tomorrow morning she would serve him a nice big breakfast before setting him on his way to London. Jean thanked the officer and stepped into the smell of Brussels sprouts. The few words of English he had remembered from the lycée were enough for him to be able to ask questions the answers to which he did not understand. In any case the lady had a slight pronunciation defect as a result of her loose dentures clicking as she spoke. Whenever she moved, she gave off a smell of cheap face powder that quickly became nauseating. Jean’s small but pretty bedroom at La Sauveté made this one look hideous. Everything in it smelt of cold sprouts. The sash window looked out onto a yard full of rotting horse-carts. As the sun set, lights began to go on in the houses that backed on to his bungalow, and Jean caught sight of mothers and children gathered around tables laid with teapots and plates of sandwiches. A radio, louder than the others, broadcast a stream of unintelligible words into the yard. It was a funny country, this England, with its low houses built of brick and its sky blackened by the smoke of ships entering and leaving port. It didn’t look anything like what he had read about it in class. He consoled himself: he had not seen anything yet. The old lady knocked and walked straight in without waiting for him to answer, and started gibbering. He understood that she was saying ‘tea’ and followed her. In a living room decorated in flowery cretonne, she had laid a low table with a light meal of sandwiches, tea and chocolates. She smiled, delighted to have this young guest to banish her solitude temporarily. Lipstick had run into the wrinkles around her thin lips. Jean still understood nothing, fascinated by the movement of her dentures in her mouth and the fantastic feet in front of his own, wearing patent leather shoes with buckles. She showed him a photograph in an oval frame of a soldier with tapering whiskers, wearing a beret with ribbons. Was it her husband, her father, her son? Thinking what would be best, he said, ‘Husband?’