Cloudless May (13 page)

The Minister was startled when his car, taking him to the outskirts of Seuilly, shook him out before a delicious Renaissance château. In the clear dusk he stared up at slender turrets marking off the corners of the two wings, at the dreaming statues between the windows of the first floor, at pillars turned as though between the fingers. Heavens, he thought, how foolish dear Andrée must look inside this—like a cow in the Louvre. But Mme Huet at the head of the superb staircase gave him another shock. She was wearing an eccentric dress of no style, cut so that her body, ludicrous in modern clothes—she had flat wide thighs and narrow shoulders—was almost seductive. She became impressive and handsome. The Minister realised that he was seeing her for the first time in her own surroundings—a provincial salon in which the loot of centuries was secured by a solid base of new wealth. Glancing at the walls, he saw her long nose and pale blue eyes repeated in the portraits of ancestors. As though to make up for the anonymity of Paris, she signed herself here on every panel and every piece of silver.
She even led him to a window and showed him, scratched on the glass,
Andrée 1659.

“My great-great-grand-aunt,” she said.

“Why on earth do you live nine-tenths of the year in Paris?” the Minister said, exasperated. “This is where you ought to live.”

“My dear man, I like to be able to use my tongue. I can't put up with the sediment that passes for conversation in a province. Besides—my husband's career is in Paris, and I must help him.”

She was not inventing her loyalty. Quite apart from her own wish to be married to an ambassador or a Cabinet Minister, she was attached to her husband by firm strings. They were both egoists, both longed to be conspicuous—Andrée had trances and wrote poetry—and they admired in each other their quite different faults. Huet admired and envied his wife's arrogance—the arrogance of a provincial aristocrat and wretchedly bad poetess. And she praised his subtlety—his enemies called it his vanity and want of principle. It was probably true, as her friends said of her, that whenever she made a dear friend he had to agree that she loved her husband. As indeed she did. They were admirably suited to one another.

“You'll meet our generals this evening,” she told the Minister. “I want you particularly to talk to General Woerth. I'm quite certain he has a future.”

“My dear Andrée, he's seventy if he's a day!”

“Sixty-four.”

“And he's been parked down here. . . .”

“Yes, yes, I know.” Mme Huet's pale eyes sparkled. She leaned her yellowish-white shoulder towards the Minister. “But has it never occurred to you that they need a man they can trust down here? After all, our reserves are here, south of the Loire. Suppose, just suppose, there were trouble—riots, you know—suppose the socialists made an attack on liberty! We should need someone, with a cool head and the right ideas, to make proper use of the troops down here.”

“And has Woerth the right ideas?” the Minister drawled. He knew Woerth very well—but gossip is often useful.

“I can assure you he has! He detests the Left. And then, he's very sound about the family and discipline and that sort of thing, and he detests Jews.”

“My dear good Andrée!”

“Oh, I know, I know—you're going to tell me about all the generous noble Jews you know. You're a politician, my good man. I'm only a patriotic Frenchwoman, and I tell you that the Jews have ruined the country. They'll finish it off if we don't get rid of them. All. I wouldn't spare one. Send them to Madagascar. But of course, keep the money they've made out of us.”

To talk to him, she had taken him into an ante-room of the large drawing-room, leaving her husband to greet their guests. Now, with a brutality she would never have been capable of in Paris, she pushed him into the centre of another room, full of people standing like seaweed in the light flooding over them from immense chandeliers. She left him. He made his way through, moving an affable smile to left and right: his eye caught on splinters of ribbon in buttonholes, bald or grey heads, middle-aged and half-naked women with innocently used faces: he was ankle-deep in a current of boredom, curiosity, mistrust. He had the feeling he had sometimes when he was driving through the centre of France along deep lanes, without even a farm in sight; of being smothered under the weight of provincial lives, life on obscure life folding down on him, airless, endless, crushing. With relief he saw Mme de Freppel coming towards him. She had a charming girl with her.

“My daughter. She had hidden herself this morning when I wanted to introduce her to you.”

He bowed very slightly over the girl's hand, realising just in time that she would make fun of him afterwards if he kissed it. He wanted to say something that would astonish her by its youthfulness. But the moment he opened his mouth only platitudes came out. He told her she was at the beginning of her life, that she was unfortunate, no, lucky, to be young now, that Paris was not France.

“Why do you live in Paris?” she asked, smiling at him.

“My work is there.”

He hoped she was going to say, How wonderful to be guiding the nation now. He knew the response to that. Instead, she smiled and looked past his head, with a polite lack of interest. In despair he turned to her mother.

Mme de Freppel talked to him in her attractive and slightly
common voice about Bergeot. She was the only woman in the room whose dress would have passed muster in any capital city, but she was not elegant. She had not that air of wearing under her dress—at most—a strip of satin. She was clever—he had discovered that already, during the reception that morning at the Prefecture, where she made it clear to him that she was the hostess. He suspected that she was greedy and ambitious. She's determined to make her man at least an ambassador, he thought. He began reckoning up the number of Ministers who had been invited to Seuilly during the past year for this function and that. Guided by her, the Prefect was putting his lines out. . . . He admired and disliked her; she was too intelligent, too grasping, too devoted. Her voice when she said, “Monsieur Bergeot is hard-working, and so well-informed,” was nearly a purr—and reminded him of those formidable strong-minded cats who live by hunting in granaries.

“We think very highly of him in the Department,” he said.

“I'm so glad.”

She lowered her voice to talk shrewdly about politics. The Minister listened. All this time he was conscious of the young girl standing quietly, without fidgeting her hands, unmoved, apparently, by inquisitive glances. Her thin body was bent forward in a pretence of listening.

In fact Catherine was thinking about the road between Mme Huet's house and the Manor House, joyous when she suddenly remembered a tree she had overlooked. It was the trick she had thought of to keep at a safe distance any interest strangers felt in her. She was determined not to give away her doubts or her ignorance.

Mme Huet began to come towards them.

“Here comes the crane,” Mme de Freppel said, with a smile. She moved quickly away, followed closely by Catherine. That child knows no one, the Minister reflected. He would have felt sorry for her—if she had taken the trouble to smile at him when she left.

Mme Huet introduced him to her sister-in-law, whose arm she caressed as she talked. He was not in the least surprised to see that the Baronne de Chavigny was a Jewess. Tall, bouncing, good-humoured, she dazzled him by the criss-cross of lights from diamonds holding her aigrette, encircling her bosom, her
fingers, her bare arms. He felt as though he had run into the headlights of a car.

“I'll leave you and Léa to talk,” Mme Huet said. “You must make friends with her. She has the finest collection of Russian ikons in the world and I know you're keen. . . . Tell him about them, Bobo,” she said to her sister-in-law, in an affectionate voice.

She walked away to speak to another guest. Her movements, her narrow sloping body fastened to long legs, were very like a crane. The Minister turned to Mme de Chavigny.

“You collect ikons?”

“I simply adore them. . . .”

She talked in a noisy frank voice, pouring out a stream of phrases she must—unless she always gave strangers her views on life, politics, religion—have prepared. They were ordinary enough in all conscience. The trouble is this desire for luxury, this greed for showing-off. Society is rotten. The Church must lead us back to religion. The Jews must go to Madagascar. . . . There was no rancour in her, she repeated words she had heard from people she could not suspect of needing anything of hers; that was all.

Ernest Huet joined them. Léa twitched his tie straight, then trampled across his feet at the sight of Abbé Garnier. She began deafening Garnier with the same good-humoured zest.

Even talking carelessly, in the middle of a crowded room, the deputy looked as though he were conspiring. He spoke in a confidential voice, keeping his pale eyes on the Minister's shoulder. At last he said,

“We can't talk here. Come into another room.”

He edged his way through the crowd, keeping his guests at a distance by his absent gaze. In the doorway, he turned back a few steps to tell a footman to bring claret and cold chicken to the library. The Minister heard this uneasily. He realised that he was going to be probed and sifted for any grains of influence he might have.

As soon as they were in the library, an immense room, Huet began to walk up and down. He talked with a solemn enthusiasm for himself which would have embarrassed the Minister if he had been able to take it seriously. It was a relief when he turned to discuss the political situation. But just as boring.

“You know as well as I do,” he said, after a sentence lasting a quarter of an hour, “that we can't conceivably win this war——”

“Oh, come,” the Minister interrupted lightly.

“My dear fellow, why not give yourself the pleasure of speaking frankly? We're alone. We're not in the corridors of the Chamber. You won't be overheard. . . .”

Except by you, the Minister thought pensively. He was not in the habit of confiding his secrets to a leaky bucket. Huet would not hesitate to betray him if it suited his ends—or simply for pleasure. . . . But the disorder and the frightful enmities in the government—not to speak of the war—made anything possible. Even a triumph for Ernest Huet. The Minister reflected—He is in disgrace now because he and Andrée were ardent friends of the Nazis. It was to their house in Paris that Abetz hurried when he knew he was going to be expelled; Mme Huet tried to save him, only dropping him when she knew how dangerous the effort was. Suppose Huet's discreditable past turned heels over and became a credit? Suppose it were to become a question of making terms with the Germans? One must be prepared for anything during a war—even for defeat. . . .

He looked at the deputy with a friendly smile.

“If I knew anything likely to be useful to you, I would tell you. I like to have your opinion. A mind such as yours. . . . I've always had the greatest respect for your courage. . . . But in fact I don't know more about the position than you do.”

Disappointed, but believing—he was forced by his vanity to think that people told him the truth—Huet took him back to the drawing-room. There he was seized by Abbé Garnier, who plunged at once into politics. He explained lightly that they did not interest him, they never could—apart from the unwisdom and fatuity of a cleric trying to irrupt into what was not his province—and if at any time, in any line of one of his doctrinal works, he had seemed to touch on the things that were Caesar's it was always and purely inadvertent.

“. . . the note I wish to strike, the note of a-a-ah social reconciliation, is not, perhaps, always easy to strike—it needs forethought, tact, it needs integrity on both sides. If the opportunity is given me, if—let us say—I were called, as it
seems within the bounds of possibility I might be, to, let us say, Euxerre ...”

Warmed by the Minister's look of sympathy, Ganrier felt himself very much the adept in influencing statesmen. He began to expound a delicate problem of scholarship; from that he drifted to printing in Paris in the sixteenth century. His scholarship was genuine. Inflated by his own voice, he did not see the Minister's jaw twitch as he yawned without opening his mouth. In another second, he thought, I shall be asleep. . . .

The heat in the room was becoming unbearable. Communicating doors were folded back at either end of the room; one eddy set towards the buffet—a set piece of glass, silver, cold dishes, creams, whorls of cherries, strawberries, forced peaches—and a second into the room where the orchestra went on fluting behind flowers arranged in tiers like a village show. The mirrors in the dining-room reflected old gentlemen in the frock-coats which had taken part dutifully in every official function since the last war: the frock-coats ate and chattered; their wives, leaning forward so that nothing should fall on the bosom of their silk dresses, tried to keep an eye on them for signs of over-excitement and at the same time catch every gesture of the county families who had come to help dear Andrée with “my fatigue party.” Some of the important guests were just arriving. Met, at the head of the stairs, by a ground-swell of perfume and smells of food, they had to fight their way between footmen bolting from room to room with trays of glasses, decanters, ice.

General Piriac was seated in a corner of the drawing-room—behind a console covered with dishes he had not touched. He was keeping himself awake by running over in his head the speech he intended to make on Saturday. He had never been able to think of Joan of Arc as a living, let alone a young woman. Invariably when he heard her name, he saw the edge of the copse where, a child, he had picked up a young owl: he was taking it home, overjoyed that at last he would have a companion at night: his guardian met them at the gate, took his friend from him and wrung its neck. During the time it took him to by-pass this memory, the young peasant-soldier had moved on out of sight, taking with her the suffering and salt of France. He could only speak of her deeds as though they were things
that had happened to himself. He might easily begin his speech with—“The day I entered Orléans . . .”