At seven that evening Jean walked into the apartment building on Quai Saint-Michel. The concierge appeared from her stew-ridden lair.
‘You’re Monsieur Arnaud?’ she asked.
‘Yes.’
‘Madame Chaminadze has gone away. She left a letter for you.’
‘Gone away?’
‘Yes, gone away. Don’t you understand French?’
‘Yes.’
He took the letter. The concierge did not move, perhaps in the hope that he would open the envelope in front of her and tell her what was in it. She had tried hard to steam it open and had not succeeded. But Jean put the letter in his pocket and went out without hearing her affronted mutter. ‘And not so much as a thank you for it.’
He walked a hundred paces before stopping at an illuminated shop window. His hand was shaking. He felt sick and afraid.
Jean, I have to go away for a few days. Shut your eyes. Don’t try to find me. As soon as I get back I’ll let you know. Loving and kissing you, Claude
‘Already?’ Jesús said when he reappeared at the studio. ‘Hombre! You look like you ’as jus’ been to a funeral. Is you angry?’
‘She’s gone.’
‘Ah the bitch!’
‘Just for a few days.’
He held out the letter to Jesús, who held up his arms to heaven.
‘My friend, ’e’s a crazy. Your Claude ’e’s comin’ back. I tell you is true. Is family business.’
‘Do you believe in those sorts of excuses?’
‘Yes, idiot, I do b’lieve. An’ tonight you is dinin’ with me at old Coco’s. She ’as got leg of lamb for us, real lamb.’
‘There’s no such thing as mock lamb.’
‘Shu’ your mouth, you argumentin’ boy.’
The door bell rang. A pretty, slightly over-made-up young woman stood in the doorway. Jesús kissed her and said to Jean, ‘This is Irma.’
He led the woman onto the landing and Jean saw him press a note into her hand. Irma frowned, sulking, but turned away.
‘Why don’t you have dinner with her?’ Jean asked.
‘’Cause I am ’avin’ dinner with my frien’ Jean.’
So Jean learnt that evening that Jesús was his friend.
So many loose ends need to be tied up, the reader will say, if only from time to time. It’s not fair to introduce new characters into a story when the old ones are still alive and kicking. The author feels the same, and he begs forgiveness for this unavoidable chain of events that leaves Jean no time to meet again those who knew him, helped him and loved him in the early part of his life. All we can do is try to keep up with him, hero that he is of this incredible adventure that we call the birth of a man. An adventure that begins all over again when a woman arrives and blots out her predecessors, when all of a sudden events overtake you that before seemed so distant, of concern only to others … those who don’t suffer in their own lives suffer from the infinite, vertigo-inducing distraction of being in love. So no, we shan’t slide into a pointless universalism but will regret and carry on regretting the fading into the background of so many characters whom Jean, in his discovery of life, is leaving behind, leaving to their emotional (or physical) unhappiness — or even their modest happiness — and will not see again.
So it is with his adoptive father, Albert Arnaud, wounded equally by loneliness, the devastation of his pacifist dreams and of France, by the country’s occupation under those he continues to refer to as ‘the Uhlans’, and by Marie-Thérèse du Courseau’s practical initiative to plant cabbages, carrots and potatoes where there should have been rhododendron beds, azaleas and oriental flowering cherries. Perhaps his reaction was absurd and disproportionate, but let us reflect for a moment on the kind of existence Albert Arnaud had had: a childhood and adolescence that was far from well-off, a coming of age at a local brothel and then marriage to a kind and generous woman who nevertheless could hardly be said to have lived her life with a deep sense of romance. Then had come the four years of the Great War and the loss of his leg at the bottom of a muddy shell-hole. The unexpected arrival of the baby Jean had swiftly turned into a mixed blessing, as Albert had watched his adopted son grow up with the children from La Sauveté, Michel and Antoinette du Courseau, and privately felt that nothing good could come of it. He sensed, not without reason, that Jean would be happy neither at home nor with the du Courseaus, tugged in two directions by different worlds that would both reject him as a hybrid, belonging to neither. And Jean would certainly not become a gardener.
Albert’s accumulated knowledge — his only capital — that he would have liked to bequeath to the boy, Jean did not want. In any case, he did not have green fingers: whenever he planted something, it almost never turned out well. So let us not mock Albert’s disappointment when, instead of his flowers, he sees vegetables growing, and let us compare him to a man who has spent his life reading and suddenly finds himself in a universe purged of books. Without twisting words and their meaning, let us say that flowers are his culture. Without flowers, existence lacks the one gratuitous element that justifies it: the creation of beauty. They are his poetry, the thoughts he can’t manage to articulate, the pictures he dreams of and that the earth has given him, perfect and complete, the symbols of a world of exquisite grace.
Jean had not wanted flowers, or political ideas; instead, in 1939 he had enlisted. Albert had felt deeply wounded and the wound had been, in the larger sense of destiny, like a denial of justice. The abbé Le Couec’s patient explanations were to no avail. The facts were there. Albert did not reproach Jean. His elevated and democratic notion of individual liberty forbade it. Adoptive father and adopted son will not see one another again. Jean writes phrases of such banality that even he finds them depressing. From Antoinette, their go-between, he gets conventional answers: ‘Your father’s in good health and hopes you are too.’ She faithfully writes down these sentences, adding as a PS, ‘He’s sad, grumpy, stoical and never smiles.’
When Jean finally has an opportunity to travel to Grangeville, it happens to be on 19 August 1942, the morning a commando unit of Cameron Highlanders from Winnipeg lands at the foot of the cliffs, slips between the German bunkers and reaches the village. At Puys and on the esplanade at Dieppe the remaining commando units are pinned down by the German defences. But at Grangeville and a little further south, at the Pointe d’Ailly lighthouse, Lord Lovat’s № 4 Commando at the foot of the cliff — at the spot where Antoinette first showed Jean her bottom — and the Cameron Highlanders have met no resistance. They blow up a coastal artillery battery, the one placed in the former garden of Captain Duclou, Jeanne Arnaud’s uncle, and for a time their advance is practically a victory parade as they hand out cigarettes and sweets, pat children’s cheeks and then, joining up with the South Saskatchewan Regiment which has surrounded Pourville without succeeding in taking it, return to their landing craft. Albert is at the roadside. He recognises the khaki uniforms and the soldiers in their tin hats.
His memories of 1914 are like a lump in his throat. Forgetting his neutrality, he limps as fast as he can towards them, waving his arms to stop them turning onto a path where a Wehrmacht patrol is lying in wait. German and Canadian bullets riddle his body, easily a hundred or more, for no one counts the bullets when they’re waging war. Let us merely record that when it is over, there is nothing left of Albert. The pieces of him are collected with a fork and spade and tipped into a sack.
Jean is turned back at Rouen without explanation. He nevertheless manages to get through to Antoinette by telephone and from her learns that Albert, according to his oft-expressed wish, has been buried without a religious service. The ceremony is attended only by the du Courseaus, Captain Duclou, stunned and muttering and making no sense, Monsieur Cliquet who repeats over and over again, ‘That’s what happens to pacifists’, and the abbé Le Couec, who is wearing an ordinary suit so as not to disturb his friend’s soul’s rest but who, through the long night that follows, will pray for him at the foot of the altar. It is all over for Albert, and we shall miss him. He will no longer pitch his stubborn ideas against an unreliable and inconstant world in which men and women of his ancient stamp have no place. A little of France as she once was has been extinguished with his passing.