A Life (9 page)

One or two parvenus had bought property here and there and hobnobbed with each other. The Vicomte did not know them.

He took his leave; and his final glance was directed towards Jeanne, as though he were addressing a special goodbye to her of a more cordial, warmer kind.

The Baroness found him charming and, above all, very much the perfect gentleman: 'Yes, indeed, a most well-mannered young man.'

They invited him to dinner the following week. He became a regular visitor.

He would most often arrive towards four o'clock in the afternoon, join Mama in 'her' avenue, and offer his arm while she took 'her' exercise. When Jeanne had not gone out, she would support  the Baroness on the other side, and the three of them would slowly walk up and down the broad, straight path, endlessly to and fro. He barely spoke to Jeanne. But his eye often caught hers, his own having the appearance of black velvet while hers seemed to be made of blue agate.

On several occasions they both accompanied the Baron down to Yport.

When they happened to be on the beach one evening, Père Lastique approached and, without removing his pipethe absence of which would have been even more surprising perhaps than if his nose were missingdeclared:

'With that there wind, yer lordship, 'e could get as far as Étretat tomorrow, and back again, no bother at all.'

Jeanne clasped her hands.

'Oh, Papa, wouldn't you like to?'

The Baron turned towards Monsieur de Lamare:

'Would you join us, sir? We could go for lunch.'

And the expedition was decided upon there and then.

Jeanne was up at dawn. She waited for her father, who took longer to dress, and they set off through the dew, first across open country, then through the wood, which was alive with birdsong. They found the Vicomte and Père Lastique sitting on a capstan.

Two other sailors helped them to launch the boat. Their shoulders against the side of the hull, the men pushed with all their might. Progress was slow across the level part of the beach. Lastique slipped greased wooden logs beneath the keel and then, on resuming his place, drawled out his never-ending 'aaaay hup' by way of regulating the communal effort.

But when they reached the slope, the boat suddenly took off and careered down the smooth pebbles with a great racket, like the sound of rending cloth. It came to an abrupt halt in the shallow foam at the water's edge, and everyone took their seat on the benches; then the two fishermen who remained behind on land pushed them off.

A steady light breeze, coming in off the sea, skimmed the water, wrinkling its surface. They hoisted the sail, which filled a little, and quietly the boat departed, barely rocked by the waves.

First they sailed directly away from the shore. Out towards the horizon the dipping sky merged with the sea. On the landward side, the tall, sheer cliff, indented here and there with sloping, sunlit grass, cast a thick shadow at its foot. Far astern brown sails could be seen coming out from the white jetty at Fécamp, while ahead stood a strangely shaped rock, which bulged out, pierced by a hole, and looked rather like an enormous elephant plunging its trunk into the sea. It was the small Porte at Étretat.
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Jeanne, gripping the side of the boat with one hand and feeling slightly dizzy from the motion of the waves, was gazing into the distance; and it seemed to her that only three things were truly beautiful in the whole of creation: light, space, and water.

No one spoke. Père Lastique, who was holding the tiller and the sheet, would occasionally take a swig from a bottle hidden under his seat; and he went on smoking his stump of a pipe, which seemed to be inextinguishable. A thin wisp of blue smoke rose steadily from it, while another exactly similar issued from the corner of his mouth. No one ever saw the man relight the clay bowl, which was blacker than ebony, or fill it with tobacco. Sometimes he would take hold of it in one hand, remove it from between his lips, and from the same corner of his mouth from which the smoke emerged, would squirt a long jet of brown saliva into the sea.

The Baron, seated aft, was keeping an eye on the sail in his capacity as crew. Jeanne and the Vicomte found themselves sitting side by side, which each found a little disturbing. Some unknown force caused their eyes to meet each time they raised them, simultaneously, as though a secret affinity had alerted them; for there already existed between them that intangible and indeterminate attraction which arises so quickly between two young people, when the fellow is not unhandsome and the girl is pretty. It made them feel happy to be seated next to each other, perhaps because their thoughts were indeed about each other.

The sun was climbing in the sky, as if to have better sight of the vast sea stretched out beneath; but then, in a moment of apparent coquettishness, it wrapped itself in a thin haze that veiled it from its own rays. The mist hung low, transparent and golden, obscur-  ing nothing from view but softening the distance. The astral body darted forth its flames and began to melt this dazzling cloud: when it had reached its full strength, the haze evaporated, vanished away; and the sea, mirror-smooth, began to shimmer in its light.

Jeanne, quite overcome, murmured:

'How beautiful it is!'

The Vicomte replied:

'Oh yes, indeed!'

The serenity of this clear, bright morning seemed to find an echo in their hearts.

And all at once they caught sight of the great arches of Étretat, where it seemed as though the cliff were walking out to sea on two legs, while yet remaining high enough to serve as archways for ships to pass beneath. In front of the nearest of them there rose a needle of pointed white rock.

They touched land, and while the Baron, as the first to alight, held the boat fast by a rope, the Vicomte took Jeanne in his arms to set her ashore without her feet getting wet; then they walked up the steep bank of stony beach, side by side, both stirred by this brief moment of embrace, and all at once heard Père Lastique saying to the Baron:

'They'd make a fine couple, I'll be bound.'

In a little inn next to the beach they enjoyed a delightful lunch. The ocean, dulling mind and speech alike, had left them taciturn; the table made them talkative, like children on their holidays.

The simplest things became a source of endless merriment.

As he sat down to table, Père Lastique carefully hid his pipe, which was still smoking, in his beret; and they laughed. A fly, no doubt attracted by his red nose, came and landed on it several times; and when he chased it away with a flick of his hand that was too slow to swat it, the fly flew off and settled on a muslin curtain, already stained by many others of its kind, where it seemed to be keeping an eye on the sailor's gleaming proboscis, for it would resume its flight anew and return once more to settle thereupon.

With each journey the insect made, helpless laughter ensued;  and when the old man, irritated by its tickling, murmured 'Obstinate bugger,' Jeanne and the Vicomte began to weep with mirth, writhing in their seats, desperately trying not to laugh and pressing their napkins to their mouths in an effort to remain silent.

After coffee, Jeanne said: 'Shall we walk?' The Vicomte rose from the table; but the Baron preferred to sun himself on the beach:

'Off you go, children, you can come back for me in a hour.'

They set off in a straight line between the few cottages in the locality; and having passed a small chateau which was more like a large farmhouse, they found themselves in an open valley that stretched away in front of them.

The motion of the sea had sapped their energy and disturbed their normal sense of balance; the fresh, salty air had made them hungry, then lunch had left them dazed; and the merriment had drained them. Now they felt slightly wild and wanted to run about madly in the fields. Jeanne could hear a buzzing in her ears, stirred as she was by new and sudden sensations.

A pitiless sun shone down on them. On each side of the road fields of ripe corn drooped in the heat. All about them the grasshoppers chattered raucously, as numerous as blades of grass, scattering their shrill, deafening cry amidst the wheat and rye and the gorse covering the hillsides.

No other sound rose beneath the torrid sky, whose shimmering, yellowed blue seemed to be on the point of turning red, like metal too close to a brazier.

Spotting a small wood some way off on the right, they made towards it.

Sunk between two banks a narrow path led in under tall trees that blocked out the sun. A kind of mouldy chill greeted them as they entered, the dampness that makes the skin shiver and penetrates the lungs. The grass had withered, for lack of light and freshly circulating air; but the ground was covered in moss.

On they went.

'Look, we can sit down a while over there,' she said.

Two old trees had died and left a gap in the green canopy  overhead, through which light was streaming down and warming. the earth. It had stirred the seeds of grass, dandelion, and creeper into life, and started small white flowers into bloom like a mist, and foxgloves that looked like rockets. Butterflies, bees, stocky hornets, huge gnats that looked like the skeletons of flies, a thousand winged insects, ladybirds that were pink and spotted, devil's coach-horses, some with a greenish gleam, others black and horned, all thronged this warm well-hole of light as it bored into the chilly shade cast by the dense foliage.

They sat down, their heads out of the sun but their feet still in the warmth. They observed all these tiny, teeming lives, born of a single sunbeam; and, moved by the spectacle, Jeanne kept saying:

'Oh, how good it feels. How wonderful the countryside is! There are moments when I'd like to be a fly or a butterfly and hide among the flowers.'

They talked about themselves, about their habits and tastes, in the low, intimate voice of persons confiding. He said how tired he was, already, of life in society, how weary of his futile existence; just more and more of the same; one never encountered anything genuine, or sincere.

Life in society! She would have liked to experience it; but she was convinced in advance that it could not compare with life in the country:

And the closer their hearts became, the more punctiliously they called each other 'Monsieur' and 'Mademoiselle', and the more also their eyes shone and their gazes met; and it seemed to them both as though some new goodness of soul were entering into them, a more general and widespread fondness, a concern for a whole host of things about which they had not previously cared.

They made their way back; but the Baron had set off on foot for the Chambre aux Demoiselles, a cave suspended beneath the ridge of a cliff and they waited for him at the inn.

He did not reappear until five in the afternoon, having been for a long walk along the coast.

They climbed back into the boat. Gently it left the shore under a following wind, smoothly, without appearing to move forward. The breeze came in warm, lazy gusts, momentarily filling the sail  and then letting it fall, limp, against the mast. The sea was opaque, stagnant-looking; and the sun, drained of its fires and pursuing its curving path, was gently sinking towards it.

Again the torpor of the sea made everyone fall silent.

At length Jeanne said:

'Oh, how I would love to travel.'

'Yes,' replied the Vicomte, 'but there is no joy in travelling alone. There have to be two of you, at least, so that one can share one's impressions.'

She pondered this:

'That's true . . . I like going for walks on my own, though . . . ; and it's so nice, just dreaming away all by myself.'

He looked at her for a long moment:

'But two people can also dream together.'

She lowered her eyes. Was this a hint? Perhaps. She studied the horizon as though trying to see beyond it; then, slowly, she said:

'I would like to go to Italy . . . ; and Greece . . . oh, yes, Greece . . . and Corsica! It must be so wild and beautiful there!'

He preferred Switzerland, for its chalets and lakes.

She said:

'No, I'd prefer places that are quite unspoilt, like Corsica, or else very old and full of memories, like Greece. It must be so comforting to rediscover the traces of peoples and nations whose history we've known about since childhood, to see the sites where the great events occurred.'

The Vicomte, less extravagantly, declared:

'England attracts me greatly. It is a most instructive part of the world.'

Then they began to tour the globe, discussing the delights of each country, from pole to equator, enthusing about imagined landscapes and the improbable customs of certain nationalities like the Chinese or the Lapps; but in the end they came to the conclusion that the most beautiful country in the world was France, with its temperate climate that was cool in summer and mild in winter, its richly fertile countryside, its green forests, its great, placid rivers, and its cultivation of the fine arts to a degree unparalleled anywhere since the great age of Athens.

Then they fell silent.

The sun, having sunk lower in the sky, seemed to be oozing blood; and a broad streak of light ran like a dazzling highway across the water from the edge of the ocean right up to the wake of the boat.

The last puff of wind died away; every ripple vanished; and the sail hung motionless, scarlet red. It was as though a boundless peace had numbed all space, creating silence for this elemental encounter; while the sea arched its gleaming, liquid belly beneath the sky and waited, like some monstrous bride, upon the arrival of the fiery lover descending towards her. He was hastening on his downward course, crimson, as though flushed with desire for their embrace. He joined with her; and, little by little, she consumed him.

Then, from the horizon, a cool air came; a shiver rippled across the heaving breast of the water as if the sun, engulfed, had breathed a sigh of satisfaction upon the entire world.

Dusk was brief; the night unfurled, studded with stars. Père Lastique took hold of the oars; and they noticed that the sea was phosphorescent. Jeanne and the Vicomte, sitting side by side, watched the shifting glints of light moving about in the boat's wake. They had almost ceased from thought and were lost in indeterminate contemplation, breathing in the night with a delicious sense of well-being; and as Jeanne's hand was resting on the bench, her neighbour's finger placed itself, as though by accident, against her skin; she did not move, surprised, happy, disturbed by this merest of contacts.