Sometimes he forgot the present and drifted back to what remained in his memory of the past, his youth, his parents, whose faces only he now remembered.
Everyone around him could see he was falling into one of those long, deep daydreams from which he would emerge looking lost and confused, as if coming out of a deep sleep.
‘He doesn’t look well tonight,’ they whispered.
After dinner, the young people asked if they could dance. The girls in sky-blue or candy-pink dresses whirled around the room beneath the watchful eye of their mothers, and marriages were arranged. The first shy words were spoken. ‘Your Madeleine’s nearly eighteen now, isn’t she?’ Then, ‘I wonder whether the son of Achille Renaudin will be back from Paris soon.’ Silence, then, ‘I always thought he would be suitable for Madeleine … she’s so refined.’ — ‘I can’t get her to stand up straight; it will improve as she gets older,’ her mother would say, just as a house owner is quick to mention the minor defects of the property, before the buyer points them out and exaggerates them, touching the wall and saying, ‘Look, there’s a little scratch here,’ imagining it might prevent the buyer from exclaiming, ‘But there’s a crack.’
‘The Renaudin lad is serious and works hard,’ someone whispered.
‘It would be nice if … these children …’
And so future events are born out of the darkness.
17
‘I don’t understand this child,’ Pierre said to his wife.
It was a September night, warm and ominous; you could smell autumn and a storm brewing, both at once. The Hardelots were sitting in their garden, as they did every evening at this time of year, before going to bed. They’d had to switch off the terrace light because it was attracting the flies. Their white fox terrier lay stretched out at Pierre’s feet and their ginger cat was on Agnès’s lap. In the house, Colette was playing the piano.
Certain things had changed in Saint-Elme since the night when old Hardelot celebrated his eighty-fifth birthday. He had died a few months later. The factory was now called ‘Factory Julien Hardelot — P. Hardelot and R. Burgères: Partners’. The summer of 1933 was drawing to a close. In Europe, it had already been three years since the final gust of victory had drifted away. A gnawing, worrying sense of anxiety gripped everyone. The world resembled a sick man who awakens with a moan, turns over in his bed and tries to forget his troubles, but in vain. Yet on a personal level people’s lives were peaceful. They read the papers. They sighed, ‘How horrible’. They imagined future wars. They whispered ‘America, the Depression, the USSR’, then tossed the newspapers to the ground. The maid brought the coffee. A shutter was closed in the sitting room. Agnès looked towards the purple and orange gleam of the patch of zinnias growing beside the lawn, still visible in the growing dark. The stars shone dimly.
‘I don’t understand this child,’ Pierre said again.
It was Guy they were talking about. Colette was still too young. Colette only elicited from Agnès the kind of exclamations that a child of thirteen provokes. ‘My God, that girl …’ she would say quietly, annoyed but affectionate at the same time. Or: ‘They’re so silly at this age.’ Where Guy was concerned it was more serious. He was twenty. Inside the house they could hear his footsteps, sometimes quick and urgent, sometimes slow and weary. This was how the younger generation were, thought Pierre, the generation they no longer understood.
‘He never seems to burn with a steady flame,’ Pierre thought, reminded, he didn’t know why, of the oil lamps he’d seen as a child at his grandfather’s house: once lit, their flame would rise, burst upwards, look as if it were about to devour the glass, then, suddenly, it would settle back, grow darker, flicker and almost go out. It took time to adjust it properly, to make sure it was not too strong, not too weak.
‘I completely understand that he’s bored with us; all children are bored with their parents. I know that in the past, I myself …’ he said. ‘But first of all I didn’t let it show,’ he continued rather crossly, for the dampness of the evening was causing the old wounds in his arm and hip to hurt.
Agnès broke in. ‘I can imagine your father saying to poor Marthe’ — she’d died of breast cancer two years earlier and so had earned the title of ‘poor Marthe’ or ‘poor darling mother’, the epithet reserved for the dead or dying — ‘I can imagine your father talking about you, Pierre, saying that he didn’t understand you, that the younger generation was unstable, spoiled and immoral.’
‘Yes,’ Pierre replied quietly. ‘They talked about me when they were in bed. Our rooms were right next to each other, and when Papa got carried away he raised his voice and I could hear him through the wall. I tried to hide under my eiderdown, out of shame, and also because he was making me angry, but I couldn’t help hearing what he said about me. And God, he seemed so very … naïve. You know, Papa wore those long white nightshirts and they had an enormous bed. A veritable monument. They couldn’t get into it without climbing up some steps — they kept them in the alcove; and Mama slept in a night bonnet made of lace, with little purple ribbons, and nightdresses with Valenciennes lace sleeves.’
‘I know,’ Agnès replied, smiling. ‘I make a lot of skirts for Colette out of those nightdresses.’
‘Agnès,’ Pierre said suddenly, ‘Guy must be in love with someone in Paris.’
‘But then, why did we let him go there when he was so young …?’
‘My dear girl, given his passionate, loving nature, Guy could have met a woman in Saint-Elme, any woman, a worker at the factory, a farm girl or a lady from town, and made the same mistakes as in Paris.’
‘But he works so hard at his studies.’
‘He works very hard. Better than I did, at his age. I was a plodder, but Guy, Guy is truly gifted.’
He suddenly fell silent.
‘He’s coming.’
He called out to his son and Agnès made room for him between them on the bench. Pierre offered him a cigarette; he refused absent-mindedly. ‘He doesn’t smoke. He only drinks water,’ thought Pierre. ‘He’s too good, too good for his age … His hands, his eyes, his lips all betray how passionately he feels. It has to be a woman … My God, will there never be an end to my problems? You get married, have children, establish yourself, grow old. You think you’ve managed it all. But no. Everything is just beginning …’
His hip was hurting and he let out an annoyed little groan. He was hoping that Guy would say something, the question he himself wouldn’t have hesitated to ask if his child had sighed and moaned: ‘What’s wrong? Don’t you feel well?’ But Guy said nothing. ‘He’s egotistical,’ Pierre said to himself bitterly, then scolded himself; he was becoming too much like … ‘a parent’. His son hadn’t even heard him groan, the poor child. The confusion in his heart and his senses was undoubtedly so strong that it blocked out anything external, anything that didn’t have to do with him … and her. Her? But who could she be? In the darkness he tried to make out the face he knew so well, a slim face with a delicate, thin mouth, very pale skin beneath a thick shock of hair. ‘Is she a woman who doesn’t give a damn about him? Does she want him to marry her? Is there some complication? I must find out,’ he thought, feeling repulsed by the idea. Until now, he hadn’t been able to make the decision. ‘Grandfather and Papa wouldn’t have had such scruples. But I’m … It’s my duty, but … And besides, whether she’s called Marie or Suzanne, whether she’s a blonde or a brunette, what difference does that make to me in the end? There’s a woman and she’s making him suffer. Those letters he gets … and especially the ones he doesn’t get, that feigned indifference he assumes every time the post arrives and he asks, “Nothing for me?” And the trips away. Oh, his excuses are always so ingeniously selected. I couldn’t have done better myself when I was his age: a friend has invited him to visit, a week in Italy to study a new manufacturing process for making fine paper, sports outings, research … and when he comes home: rings under his eyes, absolute silence. Good Lord, it’s so obvious. And wha
t’s more, Agnès thinks so too,’ he told himself, and that fact, in his eyes, was sufficient proof that he wasn’t mistaken. Agnès guessed everything and knew everything.
Meanwhile, the silence dragged on and all three of them became embarrassed.
Guy was the first to speak. ‘Do you need the car tonight, Papa?’
‘No. Why?’
‘Because … if you wouldn’t mind, I’d like to go for a drive to Le Touquet.’
‘Now?’
‘Yes. It will only take two hours if I drive quickly.’
‘And what do you have to do in Le Touquet at this time of night that’s so urgent?’
‘It’s my last week of free time and I’d like to enjoy myself a little; and besides, one of my friends, the Englishman … I told you about him, James Robinson, wrote to me to let me know he was spending the weekend in Le Touquet, and I’d really like to …’
His father interrupted him abruptly. ‘That’s enough. Don’t bother.’
Guy suddenly leapt up.
Pierre grabbed his sleeve. ‘Tell me. What if I said you couldn’t take the car?’
‘I’d go by bike,’ Guy replied quietly.
‘And what if I forbid you to go?’
He didn’t reply.
‘You’d go anyway. Go on then, my boy, go on …’
‘Guy,’ murmured Agnès, a touch of reproach in her voice.
She and Pierre both felt they weren’t behaving as they should, that they weren’t being firm enough if they really wanted to keep their son from going, nor hypocritical enough if they had really decided to look the other way. My God, how difficult it was to find the right tone, the right balance.
Pierre was tempted to come right out and demand an explanation. He didn’t dare. He let his hand fall back. ‘Go on then, my boy, go on …’
In spite of everything, he couldn’t hold back his bitterness. Agnès was wiser; she said nothing, but women are more patient.
‘You really seem eager to spend time with us. It’s very touching. Thank you so much.’
‘But I haven’t budged from Saint-Elme in three weeks, Papa. And three weeks in Saint-Elme feels like so much longer. You don’t see it, because you’ve lived here all your life, but I …’
‘Since you’re destined to spend your life here too, you’d do well to get used to it.’
‘Well, we’ll see about that,’ Guy mumbled quietly.
‘We’ll see? What do you mean?’ Agnès exclaimed.
‘Oh, don’t worry, I’m not about to tell you that I’m leaving Saint-Elme to dedicate my life to literature or to become a Trappist monk,’ Guy said, forcing himself to laugh. ‘All I’m saying is we’ll have to see, because we’re certainly headed for another war or revolution, or both. A few years from now there might not be a stone left of your Saint-Elme, nor a single bone or pound of flesh of my body.’
‘No! Don’t say that,’ said Agnès, her voice trembling.
‘Be quiet, you fool!’ shouted Pierre.
He was ashamed of his angry outburst. Guy, however, replied with extraordinary kindness and a sort of pity. ‘Please forgive me; I didn’t mean to hurt you. I thought that you could sense, as I do, that everything will inevitably end in a series of violent clashes and that it will be catastrophic, without a doubt. Believe me, there isn’t a single twenty-year-old boy who doesn’t feel that he is facing a destiny which, at best, could be described as uncertain. And that’s really why …’
‘Why what …?’
‘Nothing.’
‘Why you want to enjoy fully the time you have left, that’s it, isn’t it? There’s nothing new about that, you know,’ Pierre continued, annoyed. ‘We felt exactly the same between 1914 and 1918, when we came home from the front.’
‘Yes, but you enjoyed yourselves in a base, vulgar way … Oh, I don’t mean you personally, Papa. I know very well that you were married and a father, it’s not you I’m talking about. I’m talking about your generation, about Burgères, for example. As for me, well, if I’m trying to enjoy life to the full, it’s by making life give me its best, its most ideal, its purest, most intense emotions … But it’s difficult to explain, you wouldn’t understand. When you were young, women weren’t respected …’
‘Now we’re getting to it,’ thought Pierre. He waited.
Guy was aware they were watching him, waiting for him to say something in a moment of weakness. He pulled back.
‘But all these generalisations are so meaningless. So listen, Papa, we agree then, you’ll give me the car. I hope to be back tomorrow around noon. Unless James Robinson …’
‘Invites you to stay for dinner and perhaps also to spend the night. In which case you’ll phone us and, besides, we have nothing to worry about because James Robinson is very nice, a very serious young man, who has an elderly mother and a younger brother … Fine, just fine, as I said, don’t bother. It’s unbelievable how stupid children think we are.’
‘You’re being very sarcastic, Papa,’ Guy murmured, trying to force a smile.
He stood in front of his parents, head bowed, absent-mindedly digging his heel into the gravel, like when he was a schoolboy, bringing home a bad mark in Latin translation, and the way he resembled a child who has just been scolded touched Pierre, made it impossible for him to torment the boy any longer. Agnès had got up and gone inside.
‘And you will do me the favour’, grumbled Pierre, ‘of not predicting all sorts of disasters in front of your mother. You know that she’s had her fair share. You can’t remember, you were too young, but when I think of how we had to flee, the destruction of Saint-Elme, those four years of war, my injury … Ah, my boy, you might very well say never again, that we’ll never see anything like that again, thank goodness, but … Go on then, have a good time. Do you … do you need any money?’
‘Everyone always needs money, but I’ve just had my allowance and …’
‘Never mind. Here, take this,’ he said, handing him two hundred-franc notes and thinking, ‘Maybe if he has this money he won’t do anything stupid.’ But his indifference towards money proved that the woman in question was wealthy …
‘And don’t drive too fast. It’s better if she waits for you and sees you arrive in one piece,’ he said.
Guy ignored the allusion. He put the money in his pocket, kissed his father and left.
18
Pierre was in Paris, trying to get some money.
For three years, now, the machines of Saint-Elme, like those in all the industrial centres of the region, produced expensive merchandise that no one bought. When a supplier finally managed to get some orders, three times out of four the goods were delivered but never paid for: the oldest, most dependable firms were going bankrupt.
‘Ours is only still in business thanks to Simone’s money. But as for me,’ thought Pierre, ‘I have none left.’
A third of Julien Hardelot’s fortune had disappeared when the Digoin Bank collapsed. It had seemed indestructible, that bank, which for two generations had managed Saint-Elme’s money. But it too had died: may it rest in peace. All Pierre’s remaining cash had been spent on the factory three years before, but it constantly demanded more investment, a new pot of gold. Every time the money ran out they had to start all over again with new calculations, new loans, new economies, anguishing over how to hold on to their business. Soon Pierre would be forced to hand over his share of the stock to Burgères — he already owed him a large sum — and then it would be goodbye to the factory. He knew that Simone wanted to get rid of him. ‘It’s because she was in love with you,’ Agnès said. ‘She’s bossy by nature and wants to control you with her money, since she couldn’t manage it in other ways when we were young.’
‘Just what a woman would think,’ he’d reply, but there was some truth in it.
He’d always got along with Roland Burgères. Roland was curiously friendly and respectful towards him; if things had been left to the two of them, it would all have worked out. But Simone! She was fat now, a
heavy old woman with hard eyes. She dressed constantly in black, in mourning for her innumerable cousins from the north and the Pas-de-Calais, each of whom died childless and made her their heir. ‘Money attracts money,’ the Hardelot-Arques and the Hardelot-Demestres said bitterly: they could sense that their reign was at an end, that the sceptre was being handed over. In the sitting rooms of Saint-Elme, the Hardelots were now a diminished lot, a small, frail group of family members, while the ungrateful masses trotted along behind the enormous Madame Burgères (just as they used to follow Julien Hardelot); she walked slowly and, with her ample bosom and vast hips, she seemed to break through the crowd as a frigate breaks through the sea; and behind, in her wake, came her only child, Rose.
‘Yes, there might be some truth in it,’ thought Pierre when he caught Simone looking a certain way, not at him, never at him, but at Agnès.
He felt the victim of a rivalry between women. ‘But if it were only me,’ he thought, ‘if I were the only one concerned …’
What worried him was Guy’s future. He could just picture Guy having to beg for work in the factory that had once belonged to his grandfather. When he told Agnès this she was outraged. ‘You are joking?’ she exclaimed. ‘With his intelligence, coming from the best schools, raised the way he has been.’
It was difficult to make Agnès understand that they were living in a world where intelligence, knowledge and education didn’t count for much any more: ‘Expensive merchandise that no one bought.’ No, he had to hold on, at all costs. Besides, that was the only thing you could do, that was the secret to everything, Pierre said to himself.
He felt weary. He had made many calls with no results. These were days when politics outside France seemed dangerous, and politics within the country even worse. Everywhere people looked grave; he overheard desperate talk, full of strange, mournful despair, as if the world was accepting its death sentence without a single word, without rebelling, with just a low, weak whimper. He had asked his usual bankers for unsecured loans, in vain; he had then offered the deeds to his house as collateral. Nothing worked. The wisest thing would be to go directly to Roland. Simone held the purse strings, but Roland had his own personal line of credit, especially since the doctors had discovered that Simone had a heart defect … Pierre suddenly remembered, in extraordinary detail, those evenings on the beach at Wimereux in 1910, his engagement to Simone. He recalled the engagement dinner and everything that had followed, and he felt a bitter, profound sense of melancholy, like the taste that stays in your mouth after you drink cheap wine. Everything around him was grey and sad. He walked across the Champs-de-Mars: he was going back to Guy’s place. It was a May evening, but freezing cold, with a fine mist that turned into rain, as in deepest autumn. He passed some young people coming home from school, briefcases full of books under their arms; they ran to catch the AX bus and Pierre could hear their laughter.