‘You wanted to get rid of me!’ she shouted as he came to her bedside. ‘I’ll never let you. I’m going to stay alive, and even the spy you pay to inject me with poison every evening knows that I know. I’m not budging from here … At least they protect me …’
More than the senseless things his mother said, Jean suffered from the hostile, watchful silence of her bed companions. Around him toothless old ladies with flabby wattles and eyes clouded by leucomas or glaucomas gave him sly, hateful looks. They had ended up believing in Jeanne’s demented speeches and took her part, pitying her when she broke off from her endless cogitation to dissolve into tears, repeating, ‘Times are hard … times are hard …’
Jean stayed for five minutes, quickly disheartened, no longer recognising in this poor wandering old lady whose hair had gone white in the space of a few months the tirelessly kind woman who had brought him up so indulgently and generously. This was how people deteriorated with age and revealed their bewildered, animal soul. He would have given almost anything not to see her like this, for her to have had the chance to disappear before she deteriorated, leaving behind only noble and generous memories.
That evening as he came out of La Vigie he met Michel waiting for him on the pavement.
‘I’m going to Grangeville. I thought I could give you a lift.’
For the last six months Michel had been driving a Peugeot 201, a present from his mother. When he used it, which was not often, he drove cautiously, with both gloved hands on the steering wheel, neck craning forward, hooting at every bend, and with none of his father’s Bugatti-driving impulsiveness. Jean got in beside him, without thinking to thank him. He had had his fill of the day, whose habitual pointlessness had been increased by the sadness of seeing Antoinette ill and his mother half mad.
‘I much appreciated your visit to my sister.’ Michel said, ‘Such occasions bring us closer. Yesterday I thought she was dying.’
‘She’ll be all right.’
‘I prayed for her for a long time this afternoon.’
Jean refrained from making a comment that would have been repeated to the abbé Le Couec. In any case he found it hard to imagine that Michel seriously believed in the effectiveness of his prayers. Later he realised he was wrong: Michel really had cloistered himself inside a severe faith in which he fought against a forked demon with an angel’s face. The secret of that struggle permitted him, he believed, to cast his implacable gaze over the rest of the world.
‘My mother would like to see you,’ he said.
‘It’s not hard.’
‘There was a misunderstanding.’
‘Who created it?’
‘I did! I know. It took me a long time to find out the truth. I feel deeply remorseful about it.’
‘Remorseful? You?’
‘Why not me?’
‘You always hated me.’
‘Children can’t control their feelings. When I became a man, I understood. Forgive me, Jean. Whenever I’ve thought about your generous and noble character, it has helped me be a better Christian. I want to thank you for the great lesson you’ve taught me. I shan’t forget it.’
‘Let’s not speak about the past,’ Jean said.
Michel disgusted him. He felt sick.
‘There’s someone else who would very much like to see you again,’ Michel added.
‘Who?’
‘Chantal de Malemort. She’s surprised you haven’t been in touch since you came back from Italy.’
‘Aren’t you going to marry her?’
‘No. An artist doesn’t marry. My life will be solitary or it won’t. I see Chantal often. She has a deep, beautiful soul. Pure and Christian. A transparent being.’
They had arrived at Grangeville, and the Peugeot stopped outside the rectory.
‘It was good to see you again,’ Michel said. ‘We shouldn’t lose sight of each other in future.’
‘Does your faith have any room for charity?’
‘Of course. Why?’
‘My father’s sixty. His orthopaedic leg hurts him badly and so does his good leg, every morning when he comes over to you. Go and fetch him in your car and take him home in the evening. It’ll be your good deed for the day.’
‘He’s never said anything to us.’
‘He puts up with pain in the name of peace. He’s a proud man.’
‘I’m perfectly happy to do that, although there are times when my work—’
‘You decide. Good evening, Michel.’
Antoinette recovered, with the sad certainty that she would never have children. Widespread rumours accused the abortionist at the lodge, who would have gone to prison without the intervention of René Mangepain, Madame du Courseau’s brother. The deputy paid frequent visits to the Longuets, who had moved into La Sauveté. When people criticised him for his closeness, he defended himself on political grounds. Monsieur Longuet, despite having retired from business, represented real electoral power. ‘Why,’ René Mangepain asked, ‘abandon men of such influence to a conservative and fossilised Right? Why should it always be the bishops who open their premises to pimps? Why, despite that industry’s unfair contracts, shouldn’t men of progress add their voices to those of the Left, bringing, I might add, a substantial clientele with them? We should have considered all this much earlier. I am now devoting myself to the task, despite my personal feelings of revulsion.’
In March, having saved enough from his pittance of a salary, Jean was able to buy himself a bicycle, and on Sundays he once again met Chantal de Malemort exercising her horse in the forest of Arques. They resumed their conversations, of which we have already offered an outline, full of veiled meanings, sometimes in both directions, and always ingenuous. At night, when the abbé’s grumbling snoring kept him awake, Jean no longer thought of Mireille: it was Chantal’s face he conjured up, her gloved hands on her reins, the smell of fresh grass or hay that she gave off, the seriousness with which she responded to everything. Yet she no longer appeared to be, as she had before, a disembodied creature to be shaken awake in the depths of the wood, but a woman, a desirable woman whose eyes he would have liked to kiss and whose stomach he would have liked to stroke. Where and how could that come about? Their intimacy, such as it was, remained buried, and whenever he glimpsed her unexpectedly in her father’s company, even though the marquis was hardly any different on his tractor or in his stables from any of the other farmers on his estate, Jean was acutely aware of the distance that separated him, a porter at the La Vigie printing works, from a young woman wreathed in a fabulous past, one of her ancestors, Jehan de Malemort, having been the admiral commanding the squadron of Louis XIV that had routed the English in the North Sea. He was not in an entirely inferior position in relation to her, despite his being on foot or bicycle and a gardener’s son and her on horseback and a marquis’s daughter. For Chantal de Malemort had never left Normandy. She sometimes went to Dieppe to an aunt’s house, or to Rouen to meet some cousins, but had not even been to Paris, whereas Jean could talk about Newhaven, London, Milan, Florence, Rome and the south of France. Their memory gnawed at his heart. What use was that first bagful of experience, if he had to spend the rest of his life portering parcels at La Vigie under the permanently furious scrutiny of that shit Grosjean? He was so acutely aware that his journeys constituted his one area of superiority that when he was with Chantal he began making up stories and pretending he was getting ready for another great departure on his eighteenth birthday.