Jean worked hard to erase his memories of recent weeks and was relieved to find that Mireille was easily forgotten, although her image nagged at him on certain nights so violently that it produced a real, physical pain. He did his utmost, walking, rowing and lifting weights, discovering that his youth required an almost demented expenditure of physical energy to resist the temptations of memory and imagination. He still had not seen Chantal de Malemort, and in a way he dreaded their eventual inevitable meeting, as if she would instantly be able to see on his face that he was no longer the same, that some inner torment had devoured him and left him changed, even after it subsided. Antoinette on the other hand used every ruse she knew to meet him, and he could not avoid her. On the pretext of visiting the house her mother was building at Grangeville, she walked over from Malemort every afternoon and waited for Jean at the top of the hill. He would see her at the last bend and slow his pace. As night fell they walked on side by side, Antoinette talking volubly, Jean saying little, answering with a yes or no. He could not understand why she now came looking for him after having behaved so casually towards him before, but Antoinette, who was more perceptive, had guessed without him saying so that something had happened, something that had spoilt the memory of her joyous reward for his bac. Now she wished she could forget him, for the bitterness of other flings whose short-lived pleasure had never come near the state of sweet tenderness she had felt with him had torn away the veiclass="underline" it was Jean and no one else that she loved, fled from, and tempted back, and the certainty of being able to lure him back every time had concealed the one fact that makes love insistent and nearly unbearable: its fragility. Jean’s absence, which was now no longer a physical absence but the absence of a response, profoundly distressed Antoinette without her being able to name the feeling that drove her to look for him every time she could slip away without attracting her mother’s attention.
One evening she succeeded in persuading him to come with her to visit the new house. It smelled of fresh plaster, varnish and paint. The electricity had not yet been connected, so she lit a candle which they took with them as they pushed open squeaking doors and wandered through deserted rooms. The new floor creaked sharply under their feet. Antoinette led Jean by the hand through the labyrinth of bedrooms and bathrooms to a room that faced north for Michel to paint in and set up his printing press. Jean said nothing, and his silence put Antoinette into a state of panic. She could not understand, she did not understand anything any more, and looked desperately for the slightest sign that might bring back the closeness they had had before. Why didn’t he speak, why didn’t he hold her hand more tightly? In one of the rooms a bed had been set up for a cabinetmaker from Caen who had worked there for several days. Antoinette pulled Jean down onto the bare mattress. Despite the discomfort and the chill of the unheated house, she felt a pleasure so intense that afterwards she burst into tears. The candle’s harsh glow lit her wet face with grimacing shadows and Jean was touched to see her suddenly ugly, stripped of her attractiveness.
‘Why are you crying?’
‘I can’t tell you.’
He sat up, irritated. The guilt that had once weighed on him in his games with Antoinette had disappeared, and he felt only repulsion and sadness and even a sort of resentment towards her.
‘Well, don’t cry in front of me then. Let’s get out of here. I hate this house.’
‘Why?’
‘It reminds me that my parents don’t even have a roof over their head for their last years on this earth.’
‘It’s not my fault.’
‘No, it’s nobody’s fault. Nothing is anyone’s fault. I’m beginning to believe the whole world is under the spell of some sort of total irresponsibility. It’s really comfortable, and I wonder why there are still a few idiots who worry about other people. Let’s get out of here, I said, I hate this place.’
In a childish gesture, she dried her eyes with her cuff. She couldn’t understand Jean’s bitterness. What was he talking about? About a roof over someone’s head, about ageing parents without a penny to their name, while inside her was a sorrow she didn’t dare utter, and her distress felt to her like the greatest and the only distress in the world. Outside the rectory, Jean said goodnight to her. She picked up her bicycle, pedalled a few metres, turned round and came back.
‘Don’t you know what’s happened to me?’
‘No.’
‘I’m pregnant.’
He did not move and watched her pedal away down the road, lit by the flickering yellow glow of her light. No. No, Jean repeated to himself. No. I’m not getting caught like that. He would not fall into her trap, and if she ever had the nerve to repeat those words to him he would just say, ‘By whom? Anyone I know?’
Albert was waiting for him, chatting with the abbé, the bottle of calvados between them. He no longer foresaw any kind of future. His world was dying; he could not see what would follow this chaos. Jeanne’s condition did not preoccupy him greatly. He had got used to it and refused to sink into a sentimentality that, as he claimed, was the undoing of men as well as governments. It was the spoilt peace, once more in jeopardy, that obsessed him. He could no longer bear Monsieur Cliquet’s prognostications about the state of the railways or Captain Duclou’s optimism about the navy. The abbé was the only man who understood him, and these two men who, ever since their return from the front, had not ceased to hurl brickbats at one another and cross verbal swords at every opportunity, had, in the current disastrous situation, rediscovered a comradeship that had something of the trenches about it. Albert had also watched with relief as his son got a job. He was now a worker, as he, Albert, had been, not a student, with all the distance that that would have created between them. Jean would forge his future on his own, if he had one, so long as they did not sacrifice him blindly to the Moloch of war.
‘Well, my boy? You’re late,’ he said, seeing Jean come in.