‘I’m lost, dear boy. Head over heels. I must have that Bentley. I know what you’re going to say: it’s not as good as the Rolls …’
‘No, that isn’t what I was going to say!’
‘And actually it isn’t as good as the Rolls, the most beautiful outward sign of wealth that can be imagined, but the Bentley is sensitive and responsive and not quite so noticeable. With a Rolls we wouldn’t get far. With that Bentley we’ll cross France all over again, and no one will notice.’
‘I’d really like to get back to Dieppe.’
‘Agreed, model son, but first a short detour via Deauville, which cost my father so dear that I rarely pass up an opportunity when in the vicinity to recoup a few of the notes he scattered on its green baize …’
Deauville was deserted in midweek, whipped by a wind laden with spray. Palfy explained the town’s topography and pointed out the boardwalk that, as he assured Jean, he had walked up and down a hundred times, clutching his mother’s skirts, around 1910. They pulled up in front of an exceptionally smart restaurant, where their appearance in a Bentley with English registration plates made a doorman snap to attention and greet them with a few words painfully learnt from a small book he kept at the bottom of his coat pocket. Jean had ceased to be surprised and did not even smile as Palfy began to speak with an English accent that was so affected it was hard not to laugh. But the Bentley, and his friend’s blue blazer and flannel trousers, were more than enough to impress a maître d’hôtel.
‘Understand,’ Palfy said, ‘that appearances are all on our side. The car, my clothes … and you …’
‘What do you mean, me? I’m getting to look quite revolting.’
‘That’s what makes it real. I picked you up on the road, now I’m going to feed you, and for them there’s no doubt about the outcome: tonight I shall take you to bed with me. We’re two queers, do you understand? Few things inspire more trust.’
Jean thought to himself that they would have to pay when lunch was over, even so, this restaurant was not the kind of place where you could slip out through the toilets. Palfy seemed not to be worried in the slightest.
‘Do you know how to eat?’ he asked.
Jean was suddenly afraid that he did not know how to hold a fork or knife properly, despite the lessons he had been given over and over again by Marie-Thérèse du Courseau. Obviously he had not strolled the boardwalk at the age of four, clutching Jeanne’s skirts, and faced with Palfy’s poise — he seemed to have spent his whole childhood at spas and luxury seaside resorts — he felt paralysed. Eventually he understood that Palfy only wanted to make sure that the unimpressable maître d’hôtel was left a little surprised by his guests. First the chef was summoned, to take down a recipe for oyster soup.
‘Careful with the onions,’ Palfy reminded him. ‘Diced very fine, above all. Then simmer. On no account let it boil, it will be a catastrophe if you do. Do you have a fresh mullet?’
‘This morning, Monsieur.’
‘Then serve it for us with a hollandaise sauce.’
‘Monsieur means—’
‘I mean a hollandaise sauce: egg yolks, flour, melted butter, a cup of stock. Careful, no boiling there either, or the sauce will turn.’
‘Oh no, Monsieur, of course not.’
‘The sommelier, please.’
Palfy crowned his performance by ordering a single wine, a blanc de blanc. Jean observed the reverse of a ritual he had watched at Mireille’s, in a less refined version, from the pantry. Palfy was suddenly disclosing a whole new world to him. He could no longer be regarded in the same light, this Fregoli brimming with self-assurance. 11 His roguishness had greatness, it had something superb about it. If they were arrested by the gendarmes, he would make sure they knew it. But for how long would his luck hold? The first glass of blanc de blanc swiftly dispelled his anxiety about the final act, and when Palfy, casting a cursory look at the bottom of the bill, took out a cheque book and wrote a cheque drawn on an English bank, he hardly even experienced relief. Everything was turning out so well!
‘Where did you find that cheque book?’ he asked when they were outside.
‘In the glove compartment. There usually is one in that sort of car. If there weren’t, it wouldn’t be much fun borrowing them … Now, I suppose you want very much to see your popa and your moma …’
‘Yes … actually I don’t really know.’
‘Let’s not go overboard. Everything must come to an end. Our little entertainment was a success. Not one snag. Let’s head for Dieppe. Shall we keep the Bentley?’
‘Why not?’
‘I wonder if it isn’t a little too pompous to turn up to your house in. A Traction Avant would be quite adequate.’
He replaced the cheque book in the glove compartment, and they drove slowly through the streets until Palfy spotted a Citroën that he liked the look of. By late afternoon they were at Grangeville. La Sauveté’s gates were locked. They drove along the wall by the hawthorn hedge and stopped outside the door where seventeen years earlier unknown hands had left a basket containing the baby Jean. A woman in an austere black dress, her hair scraped into a bun on top of her head and thin lips made up with a single slash of lipstick, opened the door.
‘What do you want?’ she asked.
‘My parents.’
‘Your parents?’
‘Albert and Jeanne Arnaud.’
‘They don’t live here any more.’
The door shut in Jean’s face. The sun was going down. He could hear the magpies chattering in the park and the first gusts of the west wind that would blow all night, driving the Channel waves onto the high cliffs.
‘I know that person,’ Palfy said behind Jean, who had not moved.
‘Who is she?’
‘The former sub-mistress of Two Two Four.’
‘I don’t know what a sub-mistress is, and I don’t know Two Two Four.’
‘My dear innocent friend, a sub-mistress is the supervisor of a brothel, and Two Two Four is at 224 Rue Déroulède, the smartest whorehouse in Paris. Has she come to retire here, or to open a country annexe? It would be interesting to know. Meanwhile, we ought to find your parents. Who can put us on the right track?’
‘Monsieur the abbé Le Couec.’
‘A shame I chucked my cassock away.’
‘Don’t be an idiot. The abbé is the best man in the world.’
9
Monsieur the abbé, seated on a kitchen chair with his cassock hitched up to his knees, was soaking his feet in a bowl of cold water in which a fistful of rock salt was dissolving, after a hard day: mass at six o’clock, mass for the repose of the soul of Mathieu Follain at eight o’clock, baptism of Célestin Servant at ten o’clock, marriage of Clémentine Gentil to Juste Boillé at midday, a wedding feast that had finished at four o’clock, just in time for him to give extreme unction to Joseph Saindou. The wedding feast had been the most exhausting: seven courses, and so large a number of trous normands12 that the groom had staggered out supported by two of the ushers and Clémentine, a girl who was usually rather reserved, had undone her bodice and let a white breast slip out, goose-pimpled like the skin of a plucked chicken. Monsieur Le Couec was musing about all these people who had been born, got married and died in a single day. He had accompanied them through their lives and to the brink of death, been present at their celebrations and their sorrows, known the fragments of secrets that they gave him during confession, and yet he knew nothing at all of whether they were happy or not. They did not listen to him very much, less and less in fact, and for several years he had been asking himself whether the religion of which he was a minister did not represent a formality for these people, in which God or the sufferings of Christ appeared to them as no more than magic potions. They remained loyal to it in order to guarantee themselves a little good fortune, out of superstition. Had he been right to follow his nature, to be familiar, bon vivant, understanding, sometimes even complicit? His attitude meant that people treated him as an equal, as a good fellow they respected, but knew that a full glass of calvados could make him all-forgiving. Where had they vanished to, those priestly wraths he had been armed with as he emerged from the seminary? Even from the pulpit he thundered no longer, stripped of the illusion that his sermons held the attention of his faithful. And so? He had only ever had a very relative propensity for asceticism, but in his idealistic moments he liked to imagine that his parish’s destiny would have been quite different if he had shown the sublime, intransigent faith of Saint John Vianney — the curé of Ars — if his flock had believed that he was fighting every day against a devil trying desperately to overturn his potato soup or set his cassock on fire. It was true that the war had weighed heavily on him. You couldn’t explain away that gigantic spectacle of filth, heroism and idiocy, and keep your faith intact. Jean-Baptiste-Marie Vianney had very prudently deserted before becoming a priest. The wise thing would have been to follow his example in 1914 …