Malevil

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  It was true, it was up.

  I took just enough time to eat a slice of ham, which La Menou was very sour about cutting for me because I’d given my share to Marcel, and then Peyssou led us all down with enormous strides toward the field by the Rhunes: Colin, Jacquet, myself, and of course Evelyne, who refused to stray a step from my side. We all had our guns slung over our shoulders. Just because we no longer feared La Roque was no reason to relax our security regulations.

  From a distance, as we walked down the pebbly track at the bottom of the old river bed, there was nothing to be seen but a patch of cultivated land. A patch of good well-tilled dark earth that had certainly lost its dusty dead look of the months before the rain. But we had to get up really close before we could make out the shoots. Oh, they were tiny, so tiny! A few eighths of an inch at the most. And yet those minute pale green points sticking up out of the earth were enough to make you weep for joy! It was true that we had really worked at that patch of ours, and that we hadn’t begrudged the muck either. But considering that the rain had come only four days before, and the sun scarcely three, and that in such a short time the seed had germinated and was actually showing, we were just staggered by the speed of its growth. I felt the earth with the back of my hand. It was as warm as human flesh. I was almost ready to believe that I could feel the blood beating under its surface.

  “It will be all right now,” Peyssou said with an air of jubilation.

  The “it,” I imagined, referred to the earth, or to the field, or to the harvest.

  “Well, maybe, yes,” Colin said. “It’s growing, there’s no saying it isn’t, but... And even it won’t be long getting away now.”

  “Two weeks,” Peyssou interrupted confidently. “Two weeks to a good full leaf.”

  “Two weeks then, we’ll say two weeks. But the thing is, all the same, we’re late in the season now. Maybe it won’t have the time to ripen, our wheat.”

  To Peyssou this remark was pure sacrilege. “No fool talk, Colin, please,” he said sternly. “When wheat gets off to a start like this, that means it’s set on making up that lost time.”

  “As long as...” Jacquet began.

  Peyssou turned his great peasant face, hardened by intolerance now, around to look at him. “As long as what?”

  “As the sun keeps on with us,” the serf spoke up boldly.

  “And the rain,” Colin added.

  This skepticism was a further irritant to Peyssou. He shrugged his massive shoulders. “The least we can be expecting, what with all the rest we’ve had here, is a little sun and rain.” And raising his rough-hewn head, he gazed up at the sky, as though calling upon it to bear witness to the modesty of his demands.

  Standing there beside the wheat patch with my companions, Evelyne’s tiny paw in my big one, what I felt was the same vague but powerful feeling of gratitude that I had felt before when the rain began to fall. I know that someone will say that this gratitude of mine postulates the presence of some benevolent force hidden in the universe. And it’s true, but a little everywhere, so it seemed to me, not all radiating from one point. For example, if I hadn’t been afraid of looking foolish I would gladly have knelt down beside our wheat patch and said, Thank you, warm earth. Thank you, hot sun. Thank you, green shoots. And from there to symbolizing the earth and the shoots in the form of beautiful naked girls, like the Greeks, is really only a step. I was very much afraid that the new Abbé of Malevil was not going to be a very orthodox one.

  During the course of the day everyone at Malevil took time to go down by the Rhunes to stand and admire the wheat, even Thomas and Catie.

  We had found it was just as well not to get in our two lovers’ way by now; they just bumped into you without seeing you. Since our arrival Thomas had been showing his fiancée around, and that took a long time, because the castle was so large and there were so many nooks and corners, and so many reasons for lingering in them.

  That afternoon I was unsaddling Malabar, with Evelyne with me in the stall. She was leaning with her back against the partition, her straight pale hair over her face, the dark hollows under her blue eyes deeper still. She looked thin and tired, and she kept coughing. It was only a tiny cough, more like a clearing of the throat, but it was worrying me because Catie, returning to earth for a moment, had warned me a few minutes earlier that it was the sign of an approaching asthma attack.

  Thomas appeared, flushed and anxious.

  “What’s this?” I said. “Without Catie?”

  “Yes, as you see,” he said awkwardly.

  Then he fell silent. I emerged from the stall, carrying the saddle, and walked through into the harness room. Thomas followed me, still without saying a word. Ah ha, an embassy. And an embarrassing one too, since he was alone. It was Catie who had sent him, that was for sure.

  I closed the stall door, leaned my back against it, thrust my hands into my pockets, and stared down at my boots.

  “There’s the matter of a room,” Thomas said at last in what he intended to be an offhand tone.

  “Do you want mine?” I asked, half jesting and half in earnest.

  “No, of course not,” Thomas said indignantly. “We’re not going to turn you out of your own room.”

  “A room? How do you mean, a room?”

  “A room for Catie and me, when we’re married.”

  “Miette’s then?”

  “No, no. Miette needs her room.”

  Well, at least that hadn’t slipped his memory. But he had already become slightly aloof from Miette, I could tell from his tone. And from me too, on another plane. How he had changed, our Thomas. I was happy for him, saddened, and jealous. I looked at him. His face was all anxious furrows. The teasing had gone far enough.

  “If I understand you rightly,” I said with a smile, and his face lit up immediately, “you would like the third-floor room next to mine. Is that it?”

  “Yes.”

  “And you would also like me to ask the others to vacate the premises and move permanently up to the second floor of the gate tower.”

  He gave a little cough. “Yes... But ‘vacate the premises’ isn’t exactly the phrase I would have used.”

  I laughed at this tiny hypocrisy. “All right then. I’ll see what I can do. Is your embassy now concluded?” I asked jovially. “There’s nothing else you have to ask me?”

  “No.”

  “Why isn’t Catie with you?”

  “You intimidate her. She finds you cold.”

  “With her?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, it wouldn’t do for me to start wooing your future wife, would it? Since wife it has to be!”

  “Oh, I’m not jealous,” Thomas said with a chuckle.

  Well, well, just look at him, how confident he is our young cockerel.

  “Off you go,” I said. “I’ll see to it.”

  And off he went, leaving me standing, I’m not sure how, with a warm little hand in mine.

  “Do you think that my breasts are going to grow?” Evelyne said, anxious face turned up toward me. “Like Catie’s. Or like Miette’s, because hers are even bigger.”

  “Don’t fret yourself, Evelyne. They’ll grow.”

  “Do you think so? It’s just that I’m so thin,” she said despairingly, laying her left hand across her chest. “Look, I’m as flat as a boy.”

  “That’s got nothing to do with it, being thin or fat. They’ll still grow.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “Quite sure.”

  “Oh, good,” she said with a sigh that ended in a cough.

  At that moment someone very discreetly rang the gate-tower bell. I started. I was at the gate in a flash and slid the Judas open a fraction. It was Armand, riding one of the La Roque geldings, a glower on his face, a gun slung over his back.

  “Oh, it’s you, Armand,” I said in a friendly voice. “I’m afraid you’re going to have to wait a moment. I have to go and fetch the key.”


  I slid the Judas shut. The key, needless to say, was in the lock, but I wanted a short breathing space. I walked quickly away across the enclosure and said to Evelyne, “Go up to the house and tell La Menou to bring glasses and a bottle of wine to the gate tower.”

  “Has Armand come to take me back?” Evelyne said through a cough. She was looking very pale.

  “Of course not. Anyway you needn’t worry. If he wants to take you back we just put him to the sword right away.”

  I laughed, and she laughed too. But it was a thin little sound, followed by a cough.

  “Listen, tell Catie and Thomas not to let him see them. And you stay with them.”

  She left me and I went on up to the storeroom on the ground floor of the keep. They were all there, Thomas excepted, putting away Colin’s tools and stock.

  “We have a visitor. Armand. I’d like Peyssou and Meyssonnier down at the gate, both with guns. Only as a precaution. He doesn’t look as though he’s going to make trouble.”

  “I’d like to see the look on his ugly face,” Colin said.

  “No. Not you or Jacquet or Thomas, and you know why.”

  Colin laughed merrily. It was pleasant seeing him so gay. His little conversation with Agnès Pimont had done him good.

  As I was crossing the inner courtyard I saw Thomas hurtle out of the house. “I’m coming with you.”

  “What do you mean?” I asked curtly. “I sent you a message specifically saying not to come.”

  “She’s my wife, isn’t she?” he said, his eyes glittering.

  I could tell that I wasn’t going to win that one.

  “You can come on one condition: that you don’t open your mouth.”

  “That’s a promise.”

  “Whatever I say, you don’t open your mouth.”

  “I’ve already said I promise.”

  I wasted no more time getting back to the gate. Once there, I moved the key to and fro in the lock before unlocking it, then pulled open the door. Enter Armand. I shook his hand—the hand with my signet ring on the little finger. Enter Armand with his pale eyes, his white eyebrows, his horrible face, his pimples, and his quasimilitary uniform. Beside him I recognized my beautiful, my poor Pharaon. I stroked him and talked to him. I say poor Pharaon because any horse is to be pitied when subjected to a rider who ill treats its mouth to that extent. I found a lump of sugar in my pocket for him, despite our strict rules of economy, and his soft lips snapped it up without even a sniff. And since Momo appeared at that moment accompanying La Menou with her glasses and bottle, I handed Pharaon over to him, telling him to remove the poor beast’s bit and give him a bowl of barley. A piece of prodigality that set La Menou muttering immediately.

  We went and sat in the gate-tower kitchen, where Meyssonnier and Peyssou joined us, very affable and carrying their weapons. As soon as Armand had a full glass in his hand—looking rather ill at ease, though not because of the glass, needless to say, but on account of what he had come to say—I moved in to the attack, determined to get the thing over as quickly as possible.

  “I’m very glad to see you, Armand,” I said as I touched glasses with him. (I had no intention of finishing my glass, I never drank at that hour of the day, but Momo would be only too delighted to gulp down what was left in it later.) “Because I was just about to send someone over to reassure Marcel. Poor Marcel, he must be very worried.”

  “So they’re here then?” Armand said, hesitating between factual inquiry and accusation.

  “Well, of course they are. Where else could they be? Oh, they laid their little plan very cleverly, the little minxes! There they were waiting for us at the Rigoudie turnoff with their suitcases. And the big one says, ‘Hallo, I’m just coming to spend a week or two with my granny.’ Put yourself in my place. How could I have the heart to send them back?”

  “They had no right to go,” Armand said savagely.

  It was the moment to rap him over the knuckles, but lightly, still keeping things jovial. I raised my arms to the heavens. “No right! No right! That’s a bit strong, isn’t it, Armand? No right to go and spend a week or two with your granny?”

  Thomas, Meyssonnier, Peyssou, and La Menou all glared at Armand in silent disapprobation. I did the same. The sacred ties of family were all on our side!

  To conceal his embarrassment, Armand pushed his broken nose into his glass and emptied it.

  “Another, Armand?”

  “I don’t mind.”

  La Menou began grumbling but poured a second glass. Again I touched glasses but did not drink.

  “Where they were in the wrong,” I said, very fair, very reasonable, “was in not asking Marcel’s permission.”

  “And Fulbert’s,” Armand said, already halfway through his second glass.

  But I wasn’t going to concede that. “Marcel’s. So that he could have informed Fulbert.”

  Armand was not so big an idiot that he didn’t grasp the distinction. But he couldn’t quite bring himself to talk about the decrees of La Roque inside Malevil. He drained his second glass and set it down. Momo wasn’t going to get so much as a drop out of that one.

  “Right,” he said. “So what are you going to do about it?”

  “So in two weeks’ time,” I said, getting to my feet, “we’ll bring the pair of them back to La Roque. You can tell Marcel for me.”

  I didn’t dare even glance toward the corner where Thomas was sitting. Armand gazed contemplatively at the bottle, but since I made no move to offer him a third glass he eventually got to his feet and without a word of thanks or goodbye walked out of the kitchen. It was just sheer awkwardness on his part, I felt certain. It was just that if he wasn’t actually terrifying people he had no idea what other kind of relation with them was possible.

  Momo was just fitting the bit back into the mouth of a very happy horse. The bowl at his feet could not have been emptier or more thoroughly licked. Rider and steed were both departing well ballasted, and the steed at least was full of gratitude. He would not forget Malevil.

  “Goodbye, Armand.”

  “Goodbye,” the rider grunted.

  I didn’t close the door immediately. I watched him ride away. I wanted him to be out of earshot when Thomas exploded. I swung the gates slowly shut, methodically pushed the great bolts home, and turned the enormous key in the lock.

  It was even more violent than I’d expected. “What is the meaning of this rotten, filthy trick?” Thomas was almost screaming as he advanced on me with his eyes starting out of his head.

  I straightened up, looked at him without a word, then turned my back on him and set off up toward the drawbridge, leaving him standing there.

  Behind me I could hear Peyssou putting him straight. “Hey there, lad, not so loud. What’s the use of all that education if you’re going to act the ass, eh? You don’t think Emmanuel’s going to let them have the girls back, do you? You just don’t know him if you do!”

  “Then why all these damn silly games!” Thomas yelled.

  “If you asked him quietly I’ve no doubt he’d tell you,” Meyssonnier said very curtly indeed.

  I heard the sound of running footsteps. Thomas appeared in my peripheral vision as he fell into step beside me. Not that I noticed him, of course, because my eyes were fixed on the drawbridge. I kept up my pace, hands in pockets, chin up.

  “I apologize,” he said in a quiet voice.

  “I don’t give a damn for your apologies. We’re not in a drawing room.”

  Not a very encouraging start. But what else could he do but persist? “Peyssou says you won’t give the girls up.”

  “Ah, well Peyssou’s wrong then. I intend to marry you two tomorrow, then in two weeks’ time send Catie back to La Roque so that Fulbert can screw her rotten.”

  Though in doubtful taste, this remark nevertheless succeeded in reassuring him. “But why all this pretense?” he asked in a plaintive tone very untypical of him. “I just don’t understand it at all.”

  “You don’t under
stand it because you are only thinking of yourself.”

  “I’m only thinking of myself?”

  “What about Marcel? Have you thought about him?”

  “Marcel? Why should I think about him?”

  “Because he’s the one who’s going to suffer.”

  “Suffer? What will he suffer?”

  “The reprisals, reduction in his rations, and so on.”

  A short silence.

  “I see,” Thomas said in some contrition. “I didn’t realize that.”

  I went on: “That’s why I shook hands with that great dungheap and tried to persuade him it was just a childish escapade. To clear Marcel.”

  “And so what happens in two weeks’ time?” Still a little uneasy, the idiot.

  “Oh, come on, surely it goes without saying! I write to Fulbert telling him that Catie and you have fallen in love, that I’ve married the two of you, and that Catie must of course remain here with her husband.”

  “And what’s to stop Fulbert from taking reprisals against Marcel then?”

  “Nothing, but why should he? The whole incident has been turned into something fortuitous, unpredictable. There has been no collusion, no plot. It has nothing to do with Marcel, so Fulbert can have nothing against him.”

  Then I added with a slight chill in my voice, “And that is the reason for all these silly games, as you put it.”

  Long silence. “Are you angry, Emmanuel?”

  I shrugged, left him standing there, and walked back toward Peyssou and Meyssonnier. There was still the matter of the bedroom to be got out of the way. They were wonderful about it. Not only did they accept being thrown out on their ears, but they accepted it with joy.

  “For those two young things, well of course,” Peyssou said sentimentally, quite forgetting that only a moment ago he’d been calling one of them an ass.

  They were all even more emotional next day when I married Catie and Thomas in the great hall of the house. We’d arranged the room in the same way as for Fulbert’s Mass. This time I stood with my back to the two windows, the table served as an altar, and on the far side of it, facing me, my companions were seated in two rows. La Menou, in an act of quite incredible prodigality, had set two of the big candles on the table, even though the weather was quite clear and the sun was streaming in through both great mullioned windows, creating two impressive black crosses on the stone floor. Everyone’s eyes were glistening, even the men’s. And everyone, Meyssonnier included, took communion when the time came. La Menou was weeping copiously, I will explain why later. But Miette’s tears were very different. She wept in silence, the great drops rolling down her fresh young cheeks. Yes, poor Miette, you have cause to weep, I thought. I too could discern something unjust in all this pomp and glory falling to the lot of a girl who had not shared herself.