‘That’s it, it’s done,’ he said to himself, heading back to the lodge, where Albert would soon be getting up, strapping on his wooden leg and making his coffee before starting his first round of morning’s watering. Jean’s body was on fire; he was bruised all over and exhausted. In a few days he would be seventeen. It was not too early or too late. He spared a thought for Bergson and creative evolution, which had inspired such a brilliant philosophy essay that Antoinette had finally granted him the reward he craved. Thank you, thank you, Bergson! As that summer began, life was starting to open up for Jean. In future all women would be like her, except that perhaps they would not often have the same fresh and creamy taste, and going to bed with them would not be such a glorious act of bravado. That night, the two of them had exorcised La Sauveté, they had got their own back on Marie-Thérèse and Michel, and even though Jean slightly regretted having used Antoine’s bed, he would never forget their last lovemaking on the hard, threadbare rug in the hall.
Jean slept, recovered his strength and, waking, wanted Antoinette all over again, but she remained invisible. He thought himself liberated from desire the following day, taken prisoner again the day after, freed once more when he saw her with Gontran Longuet in his car, a Georges Irat two-seater convertible, an inept copy of the famous English Morgan. How dare the daughter of a Bugatti-lover agree to park her bottom on the seat of such a phoney sports car? He felt sorry for her inability to appreciate the gulf that separated the two machines.
At Dieppe Rowing Club he asked his coach what he thought about women. The coach answered, ‘Jean, physical love is physical exercise like any other. Certainly it tires you, and I wouldn’t recommend it the day before a competition, but I’m not as rigorous as many coaches I know: there are muscular exertions a man can’t do without. Love, on the other hand, is a catastrophe: I mean being in love. I’ve seen first-class sportsmen reduced to crybabies because some salesgirl stood them up. Everything that happens below the belt is healthy. Everything that attacks an athlete’s competitive concentration is unhealthy. I hope you understand what I’m saying.’
‘Yes, Monsieur.’
So how, from this point onwards, should he think of Chantal de Malemort? Jean reflected that she had never tormented him nor beguiled him with false hopes, that when they met in secret in the forest of Arques they talked to each other as friends would, with genuine sincerity, though when she left him he always felt slightly light-headed. The meetings had become increasingly important during the summer of 1936. Early in the morning Jean would get on his bicycle and ride to the forest, where he would put on his spikes and set off on his training run, heading for an intersection of two paths marked by a handsome clump of beeches. It was unusual for her not to arrive at the same time as he did, on her bay mare. They would push on together, further into the underbrush, he running, she at a trot, for half an hour before returning to the cross-way, where they would finally sit down together on a stump, catch their breath and talk. Chantal had not disappointed expectations. She remained the same pretty, frail-looking creature, although I say frail-looking because you only had to see her on a horse to judge her energy and her strength. Her hair had darkened and the healthy life she led at Malemort, on horseback and on her father’s tractors, had put some pink into her complexion. Her voice was no longer small and shy, which at her age — the same as Jean — would have sounded vapid and sentimental.
What did they talk about? We might be surprised to learn that two such young people, feeling a more than negligible attraction, never confided to each other what they fretted about when they were apart. The subject remained taboo. An invisible barrier separated them, of which they were not even aware. Yet the more they believed they were talking about nothing in particular, the more they were confiding to each other.
‘Have you noticed,’ Chantal said, ‘how sad a season summer is? The days are shortening, and we’re getting ready to go into the dark. The weather is lovely, but it’s an illusion. I prefer winter, when the trees have no leaves, the woods are full of skeletons, and the days are lengthening again. You feel as if you’re coming out of a tunnel.’
‘I don’t know any more, I can’t decide. I think I’d like to live in the tropics: six months’ wet season, six months’ dry. You know exactly where you are. Spring and autumn are both silly seasons, neither one thing nor the other.’
Or:
‘What are you going to do after your exams?’ she asked. ‘My father says studying is no use, you need to get to grips with life very early. Apparently the world is full of specialists and you can’t find anybody who knows how to do everything: harvest the wheat, drive a tractor, buy a horse, cook, sail a yacht, help a woman give birth on a desert island, or fix a tap.’
‘I completely agree with your father, but mine is self-taught, so knowledge fills him with suspicion and secret desire in equal amounts. He hoped he’d make a gardener out of me, but flowers bore me, and now he has decided that I should be, as he says, a “scholar”. You can see what he’s doing: it’s his dream, to make up for what he never had.’
‘What sort of scholar? You’re not very good at maths, are you?’
‘Do you suppose my father really makes a distinction between maths and literature?’
‘Well …’
‘I don’t think so!’
Having plucked up courage, he burst out, ‘I’m not Albert and Jeanne Arnaud’s son. I’m a foundling they adopted.’
‘I know.’
‘Does everybody know?’
‘Everybody? No. Some people.’
‘So I was the last to find out.’
‘Does it upset you?’
‘No, I’m just asking myself questions all the time. And I’d like to know everything about where and how I came into the world. Who’s going to tell me?’
‘You shouldn’t think about it.’
‘I can’t help it.’
Sometimes they liked to talk about their favourite sport.
‘Don’t you want to ride sometimes?’
‘No. I like having my feet on the ground. Or wheels. Or maybe a scull. In a scull I fly over the water. Speed isn’t everything, because there are ways of going a lot faster, but in a scull I feel weightless. The oars skim the surface. You can’t imagine the delicacy of what you’re doing. The drive, the catch, the recovery are all calculated to the centimetre. I’m the machine. I’m proud of that.’