‘Human foolishness knows no limits,’ Blaise Pascal said, put out that Jesús dared to steal his thunder with such a picturesque anecdote.
‘That’s exactly wha’ I sink of you!’ Jesús answered calmly. ‘You don’ do anythin’. You are simply afraid. And fear is no’ pretty.’
‘But you also—’
‘Me, señor, I don’ make somebody else’s war …’
‘What do you mean? It’s always somebody else’s war! I’ve only ever understood one war, and that’s civil war. At least one knows why one’s beating and killing one’s brother. But the Germans? Why? I don’t know them. I wouldn’t go and live with them for anything in the world. Their philosophy bores me. Musicians? Well, yes, certainly. Alas, I’m not fond of music. Their women? I’m sorry, I like — or rather I used to like — petite women with brown hair. You see, I’ve no reason to be angry with them. They leave me cold. That’s all!’
Jean tried to catch Claude’s eye. He sensed that she was not listening and was overcome by tiredness. Her eyelids were heavy and her head kept slowly sinking then starting up suddenly. He leant towards her.
‘Do you want to go to sleep?’
She answered so quietly that he could hardly hear her.
‘Yes … but you will fuck me, won’t you?’
Neither Jesús nor Blaise Pascal seemed to have heard. He took her arm and went upstairs with her, followed by Cyrille, who got undressed on his own and snuggled into his sleeping bag.
‘Will you both kiss me, please?’
Claude, sitting on the edge of the bed, smiled and blew him a kiss.
‘Go to sleep, darling.’
Jean kissed him. The boy was dog-tired.
‘He’s funny, the man in the woods, don’t you think, Jean?’
‘Yes, he is pretty funny.’
‘Will he come back tomorrow?’
‘I suspect he probably will.’
Rising from the ground floor, the muffled voices of Jesús and Blaise Pascal were still audible.
‘Jean, undress me,’ Claude said.
‘All right.’
He laid her down on the bed. Cyrille turned over.
‘Good night.’
Claude did not even appear to hear him. She raised herself fractionally to let Jean take off her trousers and sweater, then murmured something so indistinctly that at first he hardly heard her and was then shocked as he understood.
‘Be quiet,’ he said.
The Light 11 stopped at the entrance to Allée des Acacias. Palfy got out before the chauffeur had a chance to open his door. He spread his arms wide, inhaled a lungful of cold air and, catching sight of Jean waiting for him, turned to the chauffeur.
‘Émile …’
Jean hated him calling a man Émile whose real name was Jean (‘You understand,’ Palfy had said, ‘that I had to unbaptise him, because of you’).
‘Émile, no need to stay with us. I’m just going to the Cascade and I’ll be back. You can switch off the engine …’
Turning to Jean he said, ‘Émile is a splendid chauffeur. My mother called hers “my mechanic”. In those days chauffeurs knew how to keep their cars on the road. Modern engines have killed off the enterprising mechanic. I doubt if Émile knows how to change a spark plug, but he’s like a father to me. Let’s walk, shall we, I could do with some exercise. We’ll talk in vapour bubbles like the heroes of comic strips. But if we meet anyone else, they won’t be able to read them. They’ll be written in invisible ink.’
He wore a fur-lined coat with a black astrakhan collar, and a soft grey hat. His tanned complexion was a sign of wealth in an era of pallor.
‘Where did you get your tan?’ Jean asked. ‘I thought you were in Switzerland.’
‘I was. In the mountains. Wonderful sunshine. Snow and the simple life. Gstaad is a little paradise, despite meeting mostly people who are waiting for the end of the war. Anyway there weren’t only people like that there. I also met a very charming woman and we talked about you.’
‘Don’t make me laugh. I don’t know a charming woman: if I did I’d remember her …’
‘What about Claude?’
‘I’ll tell you later. But you didn’t meet her at Gstaad.’
‘No, you smart alec. I met your mother.’
Jean was silent. An image from the past suddenly came to him: the yellow Hispano-Suiza on the quayside at Cannes. Geneviève, the prince in a wheelchair, and Salah getting out. They were deserting Europe. Geneviève, in a pale dress and wearing a beret, a light coat over her arm and carrying her jewellery bag, had turned to glance at the families and curious onlookers crowding around the landing stage. Jean remembered the sadness on her hardly made-up face. She was already missing Europe, her friends, her sparkling, clever London where she had been so happy. She was leaving, resigned but not yet convinced of the necessity of her going.
‘The prince is dead,’ Palfy added. ‘Geneviève is finding it difficult to obtain a residence permit for Switzerland. But with money everything can be worked out …’
The reader has the advantage over Jean of having known this piece of news for a long time. He or she also knows that Albert Arnaud will die the following summer at Grangeville, during the Dieppe raid. The state of war, Europe’s isolation, and within Europe the isolation of every nation forced back onto its own hardships and hopes, the censorship that weighs on every letter as much as on the press, muddle our chronology. The past, discovered so long after the event, is as hard to understand as the present. It is already hedged around with forgetting, with resignation. Its freshness is suspect; its emotion has lost its savour. It possesses almost no surprise, and to some degree it is not hard to think of it as an importunate interloper, reminding you indiscreetly of his existence. The saddest news comes so late that it is already consigned to history, minor, insignificant, cold, overtaken. The anguished longing to know what tomorrow will bring pushes yesterday back further than it should be. Trifling distances, which yet seem unmanageable, deaden the horror. No one spills old tears. They hold them back with little pity. Life expectancy numbs the most acute notes of the funeral march. The survivors take pride in still being alive when the weakest and unluckiest have vanished. It would not take much for them to accuse the victims of cowardice.
At the moment of hearing of the death of the prince who so influenced his own life, Jean is too obsessed by Claude’s state to feel more than a swift stab of sadness. As for the news of his mother being in Switzerland, it leaves him cold. He has decided that Jeanne was his mother, the housekeeper at La Sauveté, the person who gathered him up in his Moses basket, adopted him, loved and protected him. Geneviève, whatever he feels, is a mother like the one a child creates in a burst of romantic invention: beautiful, charming, intelligent, loved by everyone and more or less virtuous. When they had met in London he had fallen a little bit in love with her, and she too had probably fallen a little for him. It was nothing. Something that did not count, and yet had had some magic and that afterwards — when he had known that she was his mother — he had enjoyed mulling over like the sort of incest to be found in a popular romantic serial.
‘I hope,’ he said to Palfy, ‘you didn’t tell her I was her son.’
‘You and I had already decided that it would be out of place. If she finds out, it won’t be from us. In any case, it would age her overnight. I suspect she has decided that she’ll always be thirty. An excellent age that she’s right to stick to. She hardly looks it. The mountains suit her fragility. She’s remarkably lovely.’