The Scapegoat

  Charlotte thought for a moment. 'I'm not sure, Monsieur le Comte. I think it was a little before ten. She rang for me, but she did not want anything to eat. I told her about the child. She shrugged her shoulders; she wasn't interested. She sat in her chair, and I made her bed, and presently, seeing she did not need me, I went below again. I was still below in the sewing-room, ironing, when the accident happened. Both Gaston's wife and I heard Berthe the cow-woman scream, and we ran out ... but you already know that, Monsieur le Comte.'

  She lowered her eyes and her voice and bent her head. I told her curtly she could go, and as she was leaving the room I said to her, 'When you broke the news of the accident to Madame la Comtesse, what did she say?'

  Charlotte paused, her hand on the door, then turned and looked at me. 'She was horrified, Monsieur le Comte, stunned. Because of that I sent at once for Monsieur le cure. I could not give her anything; it would not have been wise. You understand me?'

  'I understand you.'

  When she had gone, I went upstairs to the dressing-room and through the bathroom to the bedroom. Someone had closed the shutters here as elsewhere, and the window too. The bed had not been made, only the sheet and blankets pulled back. I went to the window and opened it, and the shutters too. The base of the window came to my hip. It was possible to sit on the sill, lean out, and lean too far. Possible, but not probable. Yet it had happened ... I closed the window and the shutters once again. I looked around the bedroom that gave no clue to what had passed, no hint of tragedy, and then went out and shut the door behind me. I walked along the corridor, up the stairs, through the door to the other corridor, and so to the room in the tower at the far end.

  21

  I did not knock. I opened the door and went straight in. The room was shuttered like the others, the window closed, but here even the curtains were drawn too. No daylight penetrated; it might have been winter. A lamp was turned on by the bedside, and another on the table by the stove, and the fact that the sun shone brightly at four o'clock on the late, lingering, autumn afternoon made no difference to the changeless room in the tower, which was always dark, always barricaded against the day.

  The dogs had been banished elsewhere, and the only sound was the low murmur of the cure, praying, and the echoing response from the opposite chair. Both had their rosaries in their hands; the cure was kneeling, head bowed, the mother sat huddled in her chair, shoulders hunched, chin touching her chest. Neither stirred when I entered, but I saw the mother's hand holding the rosary tighten an instant, then relax, and the Amen that followed the Pater and the Ave became louder, more fervent, as though the voice was conscious of a more earthly audience.

  I did not kneel - I listened and waited. The murmur of the cure ran on, monotonous, soothing, stifling thought, and it seemed to me that this must surely be his purpose, whether he was praying for the living or the dead. The spirit of Francoise, lying in the hospital room, did not wish to be reminded of what had happened to her in the world she had deserted, and the mind of the mother here, who echoed the prayers, must not waken suddenly with a question. The cadence, smooth and toneless, the humming of a bee inside the petals of a flower, dulled interrogation, and my senses and my nerves, which had been strained, ready to snap, became gradually numbed, tuning themselves to the atmosphere and tempo of this room without life.

  When the last Gloria was said, and the last Amen, there was a pause before the world took charge once more, the speaker became corporeal, the voice became the cure with his gentle old baby face and his nodding head. Rising to his feet, he came to me at once and took my hand.

  'My son,' he said, 'we have been praying so hard for you, your mother and I, and we have asked that you may be given courage and support in this terrible moment of affliction.'

  I thanked him, and he continued standing, holding my hand and patting it, his face troubled for my sake, yet serene. I envied him his singleness of purpose, his belief that we were all of us erring children or lost lambs whom the Good Shepherd would gather in His arms or into the fold, whatever our omissions and our sins.

  'The child,' he said, 'would you like me to tell her?' - going straight to what he felt must matter most to me. I replied no, I had asked Julie to tell her, but that presently both Paul and Blanche would be home, and perhaps he would arrange with them the many things that must be done.

  'You know,' he said, 'that now, tomorrow, and always I am at your disposal, ready to do all in my power for you, and Madame la Comtesse, and the child, and everyone at the chateau.'

  He blessed us both, took his books and left the room. We were alone. I said nothing. Nor did she. I did not look at her. Then suddenly, on impulse, I crossed to the window and pulled back the heavy curtains. I opened the windows wide and the shutters too, flinging them back against the wall, and air came into the room, and light. I went and turned out the lamps, and it was day. Then I stood beside her chair, and the sun of late afternoon shone down on her so that nothing was hidden; neither the grey pallor of her face, nor the hooded eyes, nor the raddled cheeks, nor the massive jowl, and as she raised her hand to shield her eyes from the sun the sleeve of her black wool coat fell back, showing the puncture marks between wrist and forearm.

  'What are you doing? Are you trying to blind me?' she said, and she moved forward in her chair, trying to escape the light. Her rosary fell to the floor, and her missal too, and I picked them up and gave them back to her, and then stood between her and the sun.

  'What happened?' I asked.

  'Happened?' She repeated the question after me, raising her head and staring, but she could not see my eyes because I was in shadow. 'How do I know what happened, imprisoned here as I am, useless, nobody even answering a bell? I thought you had come to tell me what happened, not I you.' She paused a moment, then she added, 'Close the shutters and draw the curtains. You know I hate the light.'

  'No,' I said.

  She grimaced, and shrugged her shoulders. 'As you wish. It's a strange moment to open them, that's all. I gave orders for Gaston to close the chateau. I presume he has done what he was told.'

  She settled herself back in her chair, and taking up her rosary put it between the pages of her missal, as though to mark the place, and then laid both on the table by her side. She eased the cushions at her back and moved the footstool under her feet.

  'Now the cure has gone,' she said, 'I could tell Charlotte to bring back the dogs. They always make a nuisance of themselves when he is here. Why do you keep standing? Why don't you draw up the chair and sit down?'

  I did not sit down. I knelt on one knee beside her chair, my hand on the arm of it. She watched me, her face a mask.

  'What did you say to her?' I asked.

  'What did I say to whom? To Charlotte?'

  'To Francoise,' I said.

  Nothing happened, except that she sat more still. Her left hand ceased to play with the fringe of her shawl.

  'When?' she asked. 'I did not see her after she became unwell and went to bed. I had not seen her for several days.'

  'You're lying,' I said. 'You saw her this morning.'

  My reply was sudden. She did not expect it. I saw her whole body stiffen in her chair.

  'Who says so?' she demanded. 'Who's been talking?'

  'I say so,' I answered, 'and nobody's been talking.'

  Purposely I kept my voice low. There was no accusation in it, or in my words.

  'Did she recover consciousness? Did she say anything to you in the hospital before she died?'The question was sharp, abrupt.

  'No,' I said. 'She said nothing to me, or to anyone.'

  'Then what does it matter? Why do you want to know? Suppose she did come here this morning, how can it help you now?'

  'I want to know how and why she died,' I answered.

  She gestured. 'What's the use? None of us can know. She became giddy and fell. Berthe saw her, didn't she, as she was crossing into the park with the cows? That was what Charlotte told me. Weren't you told the same story?'
br />   'Yes,' I said, 'I was told the same story. So was Blanche. So were Paul and Renee, I imagine. So were the people at the hospital. I don't believe it, that's all.'

  'What do you believe?'

  I stared at the face that told me nothing. 'I believe she killed herself,' I said, 'and so do you.'

  I expected a denial, or an outburst, or an accusation - or possibly a crumpling of defence and a plea for sympathy. Instead, unbelievably, she shrugged her shoulders, and then she smiled and said without emotion, 'And if she did ...'

  This answer, cold, inhuman, dismissing sudden death so casually, was yet a confirmation of all I had most feared. Indifference towards Francoise I had sensed from the beginning, but with something else as well, never spoken: a wish on the part of the mother that her daughter-in-law might die. Whatever the reason - possessiveness, malice, greed - the countess had wanted Francoise out of the way, and had believed, in her inmost heart, that her son wanted it too. Illness in pregnancy might have achieved this end: today's disaster made a swifter finish. It roused no pity in her that Francoise, unhappy, neglected, had perhaps surrendered on impulse without the will to live. Death, or the birth of an heir - either meant release from poverty; and Jean's mother felt only relief that matters were now resolved.

  'Whatever happened,' she said, 'there can be no blame on you. You were not here. Therefore forget it. Play your part and mourn.' She leant forward in her chair and took my face between her hands. 'It's too late to develop a conscience,' she went on. 'I told you that the other evening. And if you thought that Francoise would survive the birth of the child, what made you gamble on her death?'

  'What do you mean?' I asked.

  'The day after you returned from Paris you telephoned Carvalet,' she said. 'Charlotte told me - she listened on the extension in Blanche's room, as she always does if there's anything being said below worth listening to, and then reports to me - and when I heard what you had said to the firm, the nonsensical agreement to their demands, I knew at once that it was a gamble. You were counting on the fortune that might come. Without an increase in capital you'd ruin yourself. No wonder you had qualms the next morning, and went off to Villars to the bank, and down to the safe to look through the Marriage Settlement. You could have spared yourself the trouble. There are duplicates of everything in the library, if you had taken the trouble to search for them. It was more amusing to go to Villars, wasn't it? You have a woman there. You told me so that evening when you returned.'

  The pattern of events was plain and could not be denied. My motives, misconstrued and twisted, were unimportant now.

  'Francoise knew about the contract,' I said. 'I didn't keep it from her. I told her the truth.'

  'The truth?' The eyes that looked into mine were cynical and hard. The pain and anguish of the night before had gone. She might never have asked for my help, might never have suffered. 'We all of us tell the truth when it happens to suit us,' she said. 'Francoise told me the truth this morning, when she came in here. Oh yes, you're right. I did see her. I was probably the last to do so. She came up dressed, ready to search for the child. "What's upset Marie-Noel?" she asked. "Why has she run away?" "What's upset her?" I answered. "She's afraid of being supplanted, that's all. None of us likes to be deposed. She wants you out of the way, and the baby too." That started it. She told me she'd never been happy here, she'd always been homesick, lonely, lost, and it was my fault, because I'd been against her from the start. "Jean was never in love with me," she said. I agreed. "Even now he only wants the money," she went on. "Naturally," I replied. "Does he want me to die so that he can marry someone else?' she asked at last. I told her I did not know. "Jean makes love to everyone. He has made love to Renee, even, here in the chateau, and he has a mistress in Villars," I said. She told me she had suspected both these things, and that your kindness to her, the last few days, had been a blind, to make her believe otherwise. "So the child isn't the only one to want me out of the way," she said. "Jean does, too, and so do you, and Renee, and the woman in Villars." I didn't answer her. I told her to stop being hysterical, and to take herself downstairs. That was all. Nothing more was said. She asked for the truth and got it. If she was not brave enough to face up to it, that was her affair, not mine. Whether she threw herself out of the window or fell because she was giddy is beside the point, and something we can't ever prove. The result is the same. You've got what you wanted, haven't you?'

  'No,' I shouted, 'no ...'

  I pushed her back in the chair, and her expression changed. She looked bewildered, frightened, and the sudden switch from cynicism to apprehension at the sound of my voice, roused in anger against her, as she believed, and not against myself, made me realize the hopelessness of explanation, the useless wasted effort of trying to make her understand. Whatever she had said to Francoise, however truthful, however harsh, had been said for her son's sake. I could not accuse her.

  I got up and went to the window, and stood there staring out across the park to the trees. Dear God, I thought, there must be an answer to this, there must be a way out - not for me, the impostor, but for them, for the mother, for the child, for Blanche and Paul and Renee. If Jean de Gue had fostered jealousy, dissension, animosity, he had the excuse of the past. I had no such pretext. I had followed him because I wished to remain hidden, to lose identity.

  The night's rain had cleared the debris from the leaded guttering. A pool of water glistened on the gargoyle's tongue. Something else in the gutter shone like glass. It was a morphine phial, empty, thrown out by Charlotte and now revealing itself because the leaves had gone. Seeing the phial lying there in the gutter I wondered, had I not used the syringe the night before but had stayed here in the room, what might have been achieved, what hope, what understanding. I should not have gone to Villars, nor the child to the well. The tragedy would have been averted. Francoise would have lived. I turned away from the window, and looked back at the woman sitting in the chair, and I said to her, 'You've got to help me.'

  'Help you? How?' she asked. 'How can I help you?'

  I knelt beside her chair and took her hand. Whatever wrongs there had been in the years that were gone, they could not be righted by a stranger. I could only build the present. But not alone.

  'You told me just now that I had got what I wanted,' I said. 'Did you mean the money? For the glass-foundry, for all of us, for St Gilles?'

  'What else?' she asked. 'You'll be a rich man, you can do what you like, and you'll be free. That's all that matters to you, isn't it?'

  'No,' I said, 'you matter to me. I want you to be the head of my house, as you used to be. And you can't as long as you take morphine.'

  Something fell apart, the layer upon layer of defence protecting every individual from assault so that no challenge can be heard, no signal seen; the core, left untouched in isolation, crumbled for one brief moment as I spoke, and I felt, in the hand that tightened on mine, the loneliness of years, the numbed senses, the mocking mind, the empty heart. It was as though, touching her then, these things became part of me and were now mine, and the burden was intolerable beyond belief. Then she withdrew her hand from mine, the armour folded about her once again, the face formed into features, and she became a person who had chosen a way of life because there was no alternative, and the man who knelt by her side, whom she believed to be her son, was trying to take away from her the only solace, the one method of oblivion.

  'I'm tired and old and useless,' she said. 'Why should you grudge me something that makes me forget?'

  'You're not tired or old or useless,' I said. 'To yourself, perhaps, but not to me. Yesterday you came downstairs and stood on the terrace, receiving the guests. You wanted to stand beside me, as you stood beside my father, you wanted to be the person you were once, long ago. But it wasn't just clinging to the past, or pride; it was also an attempt to prove to yourself that it could be done, that you were not dependent on the box of ampoules in there, and the syringe, and Charlotte. You could defeat them, and you did. You
would have gone on defeating them but for me.'

  She looked up at me, watchful, guarded. 'What do you mean?' she said.

  'What did you think about,' I asked, 'yesterday morning, after the guests had gone?'

  'I thought about you,' she said, 'about the past. I went back over the years. What does it matter what I thought? I began to suffer, that's all. When I suffer I have to have morphine.'

  'I made you suffer,' I said. 'I was the cause.'

  'What if you were?' she said. 'All mothers suffer for their sons. It's part of our life. We don't blame you for it.'

  'It's not part of a son's life,' I said. 'They can't stand pain. I'm a coward and always have been. That's why I want your help, now and in the future, much more so than in the past.'

  I rose from my knees and went into the dressing-room next door. The box of ampoules was still in the cupboard above the basin, and the syringe, and I took them out and brought them into the bedroom and showed them to her.

  'I'm going to take them away,' I said. 'Perhaps it's dangerous to do so - I don't know. You told me I gambled on winning a fortune when I made that new contract with Carvalet. This is another gamble, a different kind.'

  I saw her hands tighten on the chair, and for a moment a look of terror, of despair, came into her eyes.

  'I can't do it, Jean,' she said. 'You don't understand. I can't deprive myself suddenly, like this. I'm too old, too tired. Once, perhaps, but not now. If you wanted me to stop, why didn't you tell me so before? It's too late.'

  'It's not too late.' I put the box down on the table. 'Give me your hands,' I said.

  She put her hands in mine and I pulled her up from the chair. As she stood beside me she steadied herself, tightly clutching my bandaged hand, and I felt the pain shoot from my fingers to my elbow. She went on holding me, not realizing, and I knew that if I took my hand away something would be lost to her, some confidence, some strength, which for the moment was part of her and gave her courage.

  'Now come downstairs,' I said.

  She stood between me and the window, massive, huge, blocking the light, trembling a moment as she gained her balance, the ebony crucifix which she wore round her neck swinging against her breast like a pendulum.