A day of the purest pink was breaking behind the trees. Antoine kissed Jean.
‘We shall meet again. I shan’t forget you.’
‘How will I know where you are?’
‘You and I don’t need an address. You’ll find me.’
The abbé, standing, stretched out his arms. He looked like a scarecrow. A strong smell came from his threadbare cassock.
‘I have a mass at seven o’clock.’
‘See you later, Father,’ Jean said.
‘See you later, my boy.’
Jean walked past Albert, who pretended not to see him. Antoine stroked the Bugatti’s bonnet, damp with dew.
‘We shall see the priest home, and then set out for the south!’ he whispered to his car.
‘I shall walk, if you don’t mind,’ the abbé said. ‘Some gentle jogging, that’s the way to stay healthy.’
‘I didn’t know you spoke English.’
‘Neither did I!’
‘Farewell, Albert. Don’t hold all this against me.’
‘I don’t hold it against you, Captain. Jeanne was the one who cried all night.’
‘My family didn’t cry at all.’
‘It’s not the same thing.’
Antoine decided not to pursue the subject. He opened the driver’s door and climbed into his coupé. The Atalante’s starter turned once and was replaced by the engine’s soft rumble. He smiled. He waved joyfully to the gardener and the priest who were watching him, their heads bare, and he did not even glance at the house he was leaving behind him. It meant nothing any longer. He was already thinking about Marie-Dévote’s breasts and Toinette’s cool little arms around his neck. As he drove out of the gates he told himself that he would never see this house again nor, very probably, his children. Life had gone by very quickly, and all that stood out from its colourlessness were the sparkling pictures of the bay of Saint-Tropez as it appeared on the way down the scent-drenched slopes from Grimaud, and of Marie-Dévote as a girl, her skirt hitched up above her long olive-skinned legs, washing the gutted fish in the wavelets that lapped and spread on the flat sand. He was tempted to try to make it to the Midi without stopping, but after making a small misjudgement on a bend he realised how tired he was and decided to sleep just outside Rouen. After dinner, fed and rested, he set out for Lyon as night fell. The 3.3 litres of the 57S accelerated effortlessly to 150 kilometres an hour, and on the straights the speedometer needle ran out at 200.
Let us leave Antoine du Courseau for now. Relieved of all that weighed upon him only the day before, he is driving away to the only life he loves, carrying a cheque in his pocket that represents his last assets. But despite what he says, he is not a man to fear the future. When he is near Marie-Dévote, the future does not exist. Nothing counts apart from her. We are, as you will have guessed, in 1936. Léon Blum has been prime minister since June. Sylvère Maes, a Belgian, has won the Tour de France, and at the Olympic Games Germany, with forty-nine gold medals, has become the leading nation of the sporting world. We French have had to make do with Despeaux and Michelot’s golds in boxing, Charpentier’s in cycling, Fourcade and Tapié’s bronzes in the coxed pair, and Chauvigné, Cosmat and the Vandernotte brothers’ in the coxed four. But cycling has lost its fascination for Jean. Even Antonin Magne’s victory at the World Championship has failed to keep his interest alive. He has abandoned racing handlebars and competition rims for a touring bike with low-pressure tyres. Rowing has taken over as his passion, from the day he saw young Englishmen rowing on the Thames at Hampton Court. With Geneviève’s money and another postal order from the prince, he has bought himself a scull and trains regularly, every Saturday and Sunday. He has taken part in several competitions, so far without success, but he has been noticed and at Dieppe Rowing Club the coaches are keen to team him with another rower in a coxless pair. He is not sure, he prefers to row solo, find his own ideal rhythm, because he has a slow start but always finishes faster than his opponents, despite so far failing to make up all of the lost time. Rowing entirely satisfies his idea of what sport should be. It demands total energy, consummate skill and a permanently alert tactical intelligence. It’s also the most complete sort of athleticism, developing shoulders, biceps, stomach muscles and legs. At seventeen, Jean is a superb young man of almost six foot, broad-shouldered and with long, strong legs; he is not particularly talkative, as if he is afraid of wasting his strength or disapproves of the futile verbal excitement of the world he lives in. When a competition finishes he is not to be seen mixing with other club members, but in the changing room, where he showers at length as part of his rigorous routine of hygiene in both physical and dietary spheres. Lastly, in June he took his baccalauréat in philosophy and passed with distinction. Jeanne was all the prouder because she has no idea what philosophy is, and feels, with her habitual modesty, that it is too late for her to ask Monsieur the abbé to explain it to her. Albert, apparently better informed, grumbled something along the lines of ‘philosophy doesn’t put food on a man’s table’. Albert is ageing, and recent events have given his pacifism a battering. He votes socialist more out of loyalty than credulity, and no longer believes in the slogan ‘Socialism for peace’. Germany is back, united and terrifying. Not yet armed, as a nation it nevertheless represents an enormous physical mass at which no one wants to take the first shot. Its youth and enthusiasm are humiliating in a lamentably weak and divided Europe. Albert no longer knows what to think. There are times when he would prefer to die, so as not to have to see what is going to happen. To be proud of Jean he would have to forget that this handsome, healthy, intelligent boy isn’t his son. He cannot. Jean is so utterly different. And as the months go by, the gulf between them widens, though the boy has never expressed the slightest suspicion or made the least wounding remark about his adoptive parents. Does he know? Albert wonders. Too many people around the family do. Somehow the truth must have come out.
On the evening of his baccalauréat result, after a long series of skirmishes, Antoinette at last allowed Jean to go the whole way. It happened at La Sauveté. Marie-Thérèse du Courseau was away, driving Michel to Switzerland. Antoinette organised things well, and the ceremony took place according to certain rituals that she had imagined for a long time. First they drank a bottle of champagne in the kitchen, and then she said, ‘My bra is awfully tight.’
‘Well, take it off then.’
He could not work out exactly how she managed to undo it without unbuttoning her blouse, but within a minute the bra was on the table and he was touching it, a simple, modest item of girl’s underwear, its only concession to decoration a tiny satin rose stitched between the two cups. He held it to his face and breathed Antoinette’s smell. She smiled and looked down. Her blouse was transparent, and Jean marvelled at the softness and poise of her breasts. He stopped listening to her almost as soon as she began to tell some inconsequential story, no doubt to hide her own confusion, equal to his, now that he knew the moment had come. All the pain of waiting, of being forestalled, was swept away. She was there, facing him, barely protected by the width of the pine table, in which the cook’s knife had scored dark lines that danced before his eyes like cabbalistic signs. The moment was approaching and, having desired it for so long, it was delicious to postpone it a little longer with bold teasing and feigned modesty. A few minutes later, as she walked upstairs, she unhooked her pleated skirt, revealing her soft, prettily rounded bottom encased in girlish white cotton knickers. On the landing she took off her blouse. They kissed each other for a long time, standing up, leaning against the banister rail and stroking each other affectionately until Antoinette pulled Jean into her mother’s bedroom and onto a four-poster bed overlooked by a heavy crucifix. There she undressed him with disarming tenderness and countless kisses. Antoinette was no more beautiful than before, with a fairly ugly nose (her father’s) and dull blond hair (her mother’s), but her creamy skin and well-rounded figure, her deliciously soft thighs, her marvellous breasts, so free and mobile under his fingers, and the scent of her neck filled him with hunger. She was one of those creatures that you want to eat more than penetrate, as if their skin, when you bite it, will satisfy some deep, unacknowledged greed. What a mistake it would be just to enter her! He felt he would like the opposite to happen, for her to melt and disappear inside him, inside his chest, his stomach, his legs and arms, so that they would then be just one and the same being, taking its pleasure from itself. Of course he was clumsy the first time. He wanted her so much, and had so often dreamt of this precise moment, when she would squeeze him between her thighs, that he was unable to wait. Antoinette consoled him, stroking the back of his neck, before leading him into her father’s bedroom, where there was no crucifix, only some prints of the Battle of Hastings. There he managed to be less clumsy, and by the time they began again in Michel’s bedroom he had learnt how to watch for the beginnings of Antoinette’s climax by the way her pink mouth began to tremble. Finally she drew him into her own bed, where they stayed until dawn, repeating their caresses without drawing breath, and then one last time, on the floor in the hall, where she came to see him out and shut the door behind him.