Joseph was waiting outside the youth club, where he had hired a room at his own expense to show his repertoire of film classics. About a dozen young men were with him, members of the Rowing Club who had come purely to please him and were unimpressed by the supposed interest of old films that had gone out of fashion. Joseph hid his disappointment. Yet another. The bookshop was going downhill, and the film-club venture was going to eat up his last francs. The copy of Hallelujah! turned out to be as scratched and worn as it could possibly be, and the youth club’s loudspeakers were so defective that the film’s moving negro spirituals sounded more like a chorus of flayed cats. Joseph refused to admit the sad truth: with the resources he had available, he was simply vandalising the ‘classics’. When the lights went up and he suggested a discussion about King Vidor’s message, there was a shuffling of feet and every member of the audience had an urgent appointment. Jean stayed behind with his friend, who took him to a bar-tabac at the port for a beer.
‘I’ll get there!’ Joseph declared. ‘I’ll shake them up, get them thinking. You’ll help me.’
‘How? I have to earn a living urgently. I haven’t even got enough to get the bus back to Grangeville.’
‘Good Lord, why didn’t you tell me?’
‘I’m telling you.’
‘Here’s ten francs. It’s all I’ve got on me. Let’s meet during the week. When are you going to start training?’
‘As soon as I can.’
‘You mustn’t give it up, you have a talent. How many press-ups are you on now?’
‘A hundred. Mireille wore me out in the last few days at Roquebrune.’
‘You didn’t pick it up again on the way back?’
‘I’d like to have seen Palfy’s expression, watching me do press-ups every morning.’
‘I didn’t like the man. I expect you noticed. His money doesn’t impress me. He’d do better to spend some time improving his mind. Oh well, you can’t always choose your travelling companions. Drop in at the bookshop during the week, I’ll think about your problem, but these days life is hard, the crisis is hitting everybody.’
That evening, at the rectory, Jean opened his notebook and wrote:
e) It is wise not to mix one’s friends. I should never have put Ernst and Salah or Palfy and Joseph in each other’s presence. Ernst despised Salah a priori because he’s black and Salah despised Ernst’s racism. Even though when you think about it it’s hard to understand why: both are such generous and disinterested natures, they’re made to get on with each other. The same difficulty when Joseph involuntarily made me think how dishonest Palfy is, dishonest in a way that I’d found entertaining up till then. Yes, I was a bit uncomfortable with it for a while, and felt guilty at benefiting from his swindles. So my moral sense was suddenly alerted because of Joseph. On the other hand, Palfy helped me, almost without a word, without comment, to see that despite his posturing Joseph is never going to rise very high. He’s jinxed. Everything he touches turns to dust: today his bookshop, tomorrow his film club, even the Dieppe Rowing Club, where he’s the most energetic and least talented member. Whereas everything works for Palfy: he steals cars without a second thought, finds a cheque book when he needs one. Everything amuses him because everything succeeds, and because success is his only criterion he believes himself justified in acting the way he does. The whole situation is a bit of a catastrophe: my friends don’t get on, and their mutual discord shows both of them in an unpleasant light. It would have been the same if I’d switched them, Ernst face to face with Joseph, Palfy face to face with Salah. It’s a good lesson to remember. Don’t mix your friends. Put each of them in a drawer, and don’t open one drawer without being certain that the others are tightly shut.
At six in the morning the abbé woke Jean.
‘I have no one to serve mass. Will you come, as you used to when you were a pious little boy?’
‘Yes, Monsieur l’abbé.’
In a church numb with cold, lit by two mean yellow bulbs and a few candles, a moving, simple mass took place that was attended by three old women and a young man on his knees at a prie-dieu, his face hidden in his hands. After the ‘Ite, missa est’ the three women stayed behind, telling their rosary, and the young man crept towards the door as though he wanted to hide, but Jean was certain that the devout early-riser deep in prayer had been Michel du Courseau. Jean did not take communion, and when he was in the sacristy afterwards, helping the priest to take off his chasuble and alb, Monsieur Le Couec said to him sadly, ‘That mass was intended for you, my dear Jean. You must have had your reasons for not taking communion, which I respect and shall not enquire further about. Let’s go and have a bowl of coffee.’
The penury of the rectory was such that the abbé heated up his coffee over a spirit lamp, and for breakfast buttered two thick slices of a brown loaf he was given by one of the farmers every week.
‘And now what will you do, my boy? We hoped you would go on with your studies. It’s possible, there are scholarships—’
‘I want to earn a living straight away. But what can I do here?’
‘That is a very good question. Antoine du Courseau has gone, but we could speak to Madame du Courseau.’
‘She doesn’t like me.’
‘You’re wrong. Obviously there was that regrettable story—’
‘I didn’t do it.’
‘Time has passed. She’s a charitable woman.’
‘When she’s sure everyone around her will get to hear about it.’
The priest smiled and nodded his head.
‘At your age it’s a little sad to possess so few illusions. You’re undoubtedly right. So let us make her think that everyone in Grangeville who matters will hear about her tireless generosity towards her gardener’s son.’
They began to list a number of others who might be willing to help Jean.
‘The Malemorts?’ the abbé wondered. ‘Hmm … alas, I fear that their own situation is not very splendid. The marquis has dismissed two farm workers, and I’m not sure I can see you working on a farm. There’s the Longuets …’
Jean snorted, and the abbé reddened. He still had a soft spot for Madame Longuet and felt sincerely sorry for her having a crook for a husband and a future thug for a son. He felt that she was a victim. She had, apparently, pleaded the Arnauds’ cause in vain to her intractable husband.
In the end it was Joseph Outen who found a job for Jean, at La Vigie. The newspaper also printed announcements, handbills, menus and cards. A dozen women made up the orders, and Jean stored them and delivered them in a van. It did not demand great genius, just physical strength and a character sufficiently cheerful to be able to withstand the crudity of the supervisor, a man named Grosjean who had fulfilled Jean’s own role for nearly twenty years and whose promotion at his career’s end, elevating him to the rank of supervisor, had dangerously intoxicated him. Jean left Grangeville on foot at six in the morning, started work at eight, and finished at six. In his lunch break he had a sandwich and went to Dieppe Rowing Club, where he rowed and trained with weights for an hour before going to see his mother in hospital.
Jeanne was not on the road to recovery. In truth she had quickly become used to the relative comfort of the ward on which she lived alongside several women older than she. Driven out of the place she had long considered her home, she found a ready-made community there, and unexpected company. Her neighbours’ chatter delighted her and she realised that until that point in her life she had only ever talked to her family circle. The women’s gossip, their fears and dreams, their nasty comments, opened up an unknown world to her. And for the first time in her life there were people serving her and she enjoyed it. The sound of the trolley that brought her meals — the only interludes of those long days that began with the taking of her temperature and ended with her nightly infusion — filled her with pleasure. It made her quite forget the visitors sitting at her bedside, who suddenly discovered that their charitable gesture no longer interested the patient, who was overcome with joy instead at a very average hospital lunch. She rambled incoherently, especially with Jean and Albert, managed to mix up Madame du Courseau, Antoinette and the marquise de Malemort, and then the abbé Le Couec and Monsieur Cliquet, all of whom left each time with the impression that the doctors were keeping Jeanne captive, and that her stay in bed was making her weaker and weaker. Jean contemplated her with a sinking heart, remembering how often this half-disoriented woman, too unsteady on her feet to walk without help, had been good to him, how she had opened her heart to a baby abandoned in a Moses basket on her doorstep. He would have liked to question her — perhaps she knew the truth — but was afraid to upset her any more than she already seemed to be. Each time he saw her she asked him to tell her again the story of his papal blessing in Rome, and each time he patiently started again and watched her face take on a look of delight and serenity, her hands clasped together on the coarse brown bedspread.