‘Let them dream. They’ll have a cruel awakening. The French army will retake the Rhineland in a week. In a fortnight it will be in Berlin. The Germans have no petrol or steel, and their army corps have no officers. A fortnight, I promise you, three weeks at the most. You can sleep soundly in your bed.’
That was all Jean wanted to know, even though he disliked the idea of a military excursion to Berlin. What would he do if he ever found himself face to face with Ernst? Shoot? Or throw open his arms? He gave up trying to decide the answer to that dilemma. Circumstances would tell. Meanwhile life felt pretty vile, so vile sometimes that he missed Mireille, her sunny restaurant balcony that looked out over the coast and the blue sea, and the life of relative ease there. He did not see Antoinette again until January. After her confession to him she had disappeared, and at Christmas Madame du Courseau moved into her house, which was finished at last. Albert had a job again: to create a garden where before there had only been a meadow and a few apple trees. Marie-Thérèse had nowhere for him to stay, however, and every morning he had to cover the two kilometres to the house on foot. The way back in the evening was, if anything, more painful. At the slightest effort his orthopaedic leg hurt him badly, and he had developed varicose veins in the other leg. At least at La Sauveté he had had his own place, while at the new house, which was bourgeois and tasteless, he considered himself merely an employee. Not a word of complaint passed his lips.
At the end of January, coming home exhausted from his job at La Vigie, Jean learnt from the abbé that an ambulance had been called that morning to take Antoinette to hospital. The abbé knew nothing more.
‘Go and see her at lunchtime tomorrow, when you see your mother. And let me know what’s wrong. I feel everyone is spinning mysteries around me.’
Jean saw Antoinette the next day. She was in a room on her own, pale and swollen-faced. Lying without a pillow, she was not allowed to raise her head.
‘I was waiting for you,’ she said. ‘I was waiting for you, no one else. Come here. Do you remember when you were a little boy and I adored you? I protected you …’
‘I haven’t forgotten.’
‘I love you even more now.’
‘You had a funny way of showing it.’
‘Maybe. At least it taught me that I really love you.’
‘I’d prefer you to tell me what’s wrong with you.’
‘Do you remember what I said to you that last evening we saw each other?’
‘I didn’t believe it.’
‘It was true, and even if you find it boring I’m going to tell you what happened afterwards. I was pregnant—’
‘You aren’t any more?’
No. Gontran Longuet got me in trouble. He was like you, he didn’t believe me. I threatened him and yesterday morning he took me to Anna, you know, that woman who lives in your old house. She convinced me that it was nothing at all, and then she cut me up like a torturer, the witch, and when she couldn’t stop me haemorrhaging she and her husband got scared. They put me in Gontran’s car, and he drove me to the last bend before the house. It was a hundred metres from the door. I couldn’t make it and I fell down. Michel came out and saw me. If I’m not dead, it’s because of him.’
Jean took her limp hand, lying on the sheet. He studied her face, disfigured like the night she had wept in the deserted house. She was weak and defenceless, and above all she had reminded him of their childhood and the protective love she had wrapped him in then, before all the games that had led to their misunderstandings. Perhaps something else could grow between them now, a brotherly, watchful feeling. He squeezed her hand and kissed her fingers. A smile appeared on her bloodless lips.
‘Promise?’ she said. ‘We’ll tell each other everything—’
She did not finish. Her brother entered the room.
We have not seen Michel for a long time, apart from his recent furtive appearance at mass. Years have passed since his morbidly jealous childhood. He is tall and good-looking, if charmless, and the gaze he directs at others is one of haughty attention. Last December he gave a recital of songs from Fauré to Debussy at Paris, Bordeaux and Lyon, and was commissioned by an art-book publisher to produce twenty plate illustrations for a luxury edition of the Song of Songs. This recognition of his dual talent has contributed in no small measure to the making of the high idea he has of himself, and in a bedroom drawer he secretly keeps a scrapbook bound in red leather, in which his mother has religiously pasted the smallest newspaper cutting about him. His father’s departure seems to have liberated the nervous boy he once was. The house was not big enough for two men, and the day Michel was asked about his ambitions and replied, ‘I’m good at music and engraving,’ Antoine had raised his eyebrows, looked at his son in astonishment, as if he were an impostor, and answered unexpectedly,
‘You want to be an artist? It’s entirely up to you, but artists bore me. They only ever talk about money.’
Michel had shrugged his shoulders, privately dismissing his father as a philistine. He would have been astonished to learn that in ten years Antoine had absent-mindedly purchased, piece by piece, almost never putting a foot wrong, a collection of modern works that was attracting more and more visitors to Marie-Dévote’s hotel. Of course Antoine had seen several of his son’s oil paintings, and noticed some of his engravings and lithographs, but Michel’s talents as a painter were not evident to him and his engraving work, which was always dark, as if dominated by storms and haunted by the atrocities of martyrdom, and unsettlingly peopled by excessively beautiful young men, failed to appeal to a nature that now worshipped the light. He came within a hair’s breadth of rejecting his son’s work outright as old-fashioned, despite usually holding back from definitive judgements and relying purely on his emotions, although his own, more modest word for it was pleasure.
Michel kissed Antoinette and addressed Jean with a nod. Jean’s presence visibly embarrassed him, and the demeanour he had adopted before entering the room no longer suited this meeting of all three of them, largely because Jean tried to catch his eye and in failing to do so discovered the older boy for the first time, so ill at ease with himself and yet so satisfied with his own inner tensions, which he had arrogantly elevated into a Christian quest for the soul. For a long period, until the story of what had happened at the cliff, they had been brought up as brothers. Then they had ignored each other. Now they stood face to face, both men and capable of clothing their feelings in a modicum of courtesy, but Jean identified something so all-enveloping and strange about Michel that he felt deeply uneasy, kissed Antoinette, and left without saying another word.
Jeanne was in a nearby ward. Jean crossed the sunny courtyard, where a few elderly patients were walking bundled up in their coarse blue Assistance cloaks. A ruptured aneurysm had recently affected Jeanne’s faculties, and she had started to see Albert as her father and Jean as her husband, whom she attacked acrimoniously for leaving her a prisoner in the hospital.