The Mahé Circle (10 page)

But why were they whispering in the windowless bedroom where Mariette slept? He listened hard, without opening his eyes, and recognized Hélène's voice.

‘Hurry up, Jeanne, you'll make us late for Mass. Mariette, help her do up her shoelaces. She is just as slow every morning.'

All this in hushed, sanctimonious tones.

‘Michel, don't make so much noise, you'll wake your father.'

Ah, it was so as not to wake him that they had taken all their things into Mariette's room, and were washing and dressing there. They would have to tiptoe through the main bedroom. It wasn't worth opening his eyes, on the
contrary.

He had never been in the habit of sleeping naked. He felt his body, smooth and plump under his hand, and was slightly shocked by it. It was not unpleasant, though. Coming back, he had managed to undress, but not to find his pyjamas, or perhaps he
hadn't been able to put them on. Had he switched on the light? He hoped not. He couldn't remember. If only he could be sure he hadn't walked about naked with the lights blazing, between these beds lined up like dominoes, where his daughter Jeanne, for example, might have
woken up!

‘Jeanne! Prayer book, gloves!'

The door was opening, Hélène was pushing them in
front of her. They had their new shoes on, he could hear the soles creaking, and they all smelled of lavender soap. Were they looking at him as they went
past?

‘Come on.'

Mariette came behind the others. He recognized her smell. Because she had her own personal smell, very different from his wife's.

What was it he had dreamed about weddings? It had just been for a few seconds and he couldn't now remember. But on the other hand, a truth had struck him, as luminous as the window under which he was lying. A truth he had never enquired
about or even glimpsed before. All in the time it had taken Hélène to cross the room on tiptoe.

It wasn't for him that his mother had chosen her – he was thinking of Hélène, of course – it was for herself
. He felt no anger about it. The door closed. On the stairs, they were already speaking a little more loudly. Then, when
they reached the road, they were talking in normal voices. His wife was saying:

‘Hold Michel's hand, Mariette. He's deliberately dragging his feet to get dust on his shoes.'

Yes! His mother had chosen her for her own personal convenience, and when you thought about it in a detached way, you realized the difficulties she must have had to overcome. It was almost a miracle that she had found the right person.

Another woman would have taken up more space in the house, would have wanted to take charge of this and that. Another woman would in any case have kept her husband busy.

But not Hélène. She had come to the grey house with the black railing round it as if entering a convent. Exactly the same way. She'd obeyed all the rules, without ever trying to change a single
one.

So that for his mother, life had gone on as usual, with the advantage that she need no longer feel afraid. Before Hélène, she had been worried that her son might do something stupid, catch a shameful disease, despite being a doctor, or worse,
that he might father a child on some unsuitable girl, whom he would then have to marry, or whose parents would insist on asking for a lot of money.

Hélène helped his mother to look after him, not because she loved him, but because he was the master of the house, because that was the rule, you had to look after the master of the house, the breadwinner.

She was a mild woman. Oh, she didn't have her equal for mildness. Just to see the way she had ushered the children through the room on the way to Mass …

And later on, she wouldn't dare say a word to him. At most – he knew her: he had never known her so well as this morning – she would murmur with her timid little smile:

‘You haven't got too much of a headache?'

Best not to move. If he kept still, he felt fine. He was sweating. He was beginning to sweat all the alcohol out of his body, drop by drop, and it was far from unpleasant, it was almost pleasurable. Nor was he upset to be thinking what he now
thought, to be passing judgement on them all of a sudden, his mother and his wife, with calm lucidity.

They had imprisoned him, without appearing to, all the
while seeming as if they were waiting on him hand and foot, and he, poor fool, had never noticed it.

That was why they hated Porquerolles. His mother would not for any price have left her house at Saint-Hilaire during the holidays. Not to mention that it was the season for stripping beans and bottling fruit. When they went to the Le Guens'
boarding house, she was happy. She had him on the end of a leading rein.

But here, she sensed that Hélène wasn't capable of keeping a proper watch on him. She had tried various roundabout ways to stop them coming here for the third year. And if they had saddled him with Alfred, it was to keep him occupied, to
supervise him indirectly.

He wasn't yet thinking about whether he would continue to allow this to happen. It was already a giant step to have discovered what was going on, and to contemplate it calmly.

Ach! He had moved in bed and felt as if liquid were swilling from one side of his head to the other. He could hear people at breakfast downstairs. Old folk, mainly. The Pension Saint-Charles specialized in elderly couples and aged bachelors
surviving on their own.

The postman. He heard his footsteps stopping at the front door and his voice calling:

‘Post!'

Eva replied from inside the house:

‘Coming!'

Would there be a letter for him? Perhaps. And perhaps Eva would bring it upstairs to him.

And at once lubricious thoughts flew into his head.

Not ordinary male desire. Dirtier thoughts, the kind he had had when he was at boarding school and couldn't sleep. For instance, he tried to imagine Mémé stretched out on the sand, her flesh a violet
colour, when the local men went with her for fifty francs.

He sniffed the odour of his own body. He was pleased to be naked under the sheets. He listened. Someone was coming upstairs. Eva. She knocked at the door of the next room.

‘A letter for you, Mademoiselle Dorchon.'

Now she was approaching his door. She knocked.

‘Come in.'

He opened his eyes at last in the sunlit bedroom, with the white of the unmade beds, the dazzling white of the walls and ceiling, the white shade on the lamp hanging from a wire. Eva too wore a white apron over her black dress. She seemed
surprised to find him still in bed, and alone.

She wasn't scared. She was only nineteen, but a man didn't frighten her. In any case, she expected the occasional approach.

‘Let's have it, my dear.'

She would have to move nearer the bed, and he had already prepared his strategy. He had deliberately let one arm trail on the floor. So that when she came close, he slid his hand up her bare leg and under her dress.

He felt no desire for Eva. She was a fat girl, with solid flesh, as muscular as a man. With his other hand, he had grabbed the maid's hand, and slipped it, with some force, under the sheet.

All she could find to say was:

‘You're not serious, sir!'

Their pose was ridiculous and uncomfortable for both of them. It meant nothing, could lead nowhere. He was disappointed. She objected:

‘Look, the door's open, anyone could come past …'

‘Off you go.'

He waited for her to leave before sitting up in bed and retrieving the letter, which she had dropped on the floor. His head was aching again. Yet he was pleased – relieved, as it were – to have behaved as he had. It was a sort of revenge. Against
whom? He didn't know and didn't try to explore that.

Oh! The letter was from his friend Péchade, who had been unable to find a locum to take his place, and consequently was unable to take a holiday. He had sent his wife and children to Les Sables d'Olonne, and went to join them on
Sundays.

My dear François
 …

Péchade's handwriting was not the usual doctor's scrawl, he had a round, regular hand, like a quartermaster or a postal clerk. A good fellow. Always off sick though, if it wasn't his kidneys it was his liver or some other organ.
And there was forever someone ill in that house. He had become so used to it that he didn't complain, even found it normal. Recently, an X-ray had revealed a shadow at the top of his oldest boy's lung. He had taken him to Nantes for a pneumothorax operation, and intended to send
him to a sanatorium in the mountains for the winter.

The
Cormoran
was pulling into port with its Sunday load,
a crowd packed together so tightly that you feared a whole row of people would fall into the water whenever the boat tilted slightly. Silver
Beach would be heaving. It would be impossible to find their usual place. On such days, Hélène twitched her head about like a worried bird or a mother hen, because of the couples coming over from Toulon, who were not circumspect enough in their behaviour in front of the children.

My dear François,

I hesitated greatly to bother you on holiday, but in the end I think it is my duty to warn you …

That was Péchade all over. Honest and conscientious. But what was the matter this time?

The other day when I went over to your place to pick up the eel-nets you said I could borrow, your mother asked me to stay for a moment, and I could see straight away that she was worried.

Above all, she said to me, don't tell my son, he'll only get ideas.

And she admitted that for a long time now she'd had a pain in her side.

How long? I asked her.

Oh, for years, maybe five years, I've had this little thing on my chest. I would have asked François about it. But you know how he is, he'd panic
.

What an idea! He, who was serenity incarnate!

Finally, after a lot of beating about the bush, she admitted she had a small lump on her right breast. At first she'd thought it was a mosquito bite that she must have scratched in her sleep so that it had become infected. Then as it got bigger instead of going away, she thought
it was eczema.

‘That's why I stopped eating fish,' she told me. It took some time before I could get her to show me her breast. You know her better than me. She told me she could never have undressed in front of you.

And that's how it is, my dear François, I'm getting to the most delicate part. I don't want to take responsibility for a definite diagnosis. You may guess what I immediately thought. In my view, she should be taken as soon as possible to our old teacher,
Charbonneau.

I'm sure she is in more pain than she will admit to. The way she spoke, I would imagine that she too has thought in terms of cancer. She's distressed. She wants to have it treated, but without putting anyone out.

It's up to you to decide what you should do. I hope you will forgive me for writing to you so frankly. I'd noticed for a while that your mother was losing weight, but I just put it down to her age. And the kind of clothes she wears makes it hard to judge anyway. I was
horrified to find that her chest was so thin and that she had an ulcer as big as a five-franc coin.

A large tear fell on the letter and smudged the ink. It wasn't sweat. The doctor could no longer read the lines which danced in front of his eyes in the sun.

Coming out of Mass, his wife gave a start when she found him standing in the square. It was all the more unexpected
as he was wearing a city suit with collar and tie and his dark felt hat.

He hardly noticed a red dress and a flash of blonde hair in the sunshine: Elisabeth, who was also coming out of Mass with the other Children of Mary, holding her little sister's hand.

‘What is it, François?'

‘Bad news about my mother. A letter from Péchade. She consulted him and he is afraid it's serious. I'm going home at once.'

‘You're going back to Saint-Hilaire?'

‘I'm taking the
Cormoran
in half an hour. I've already telephoned ahead to La Tour-Fondue for them to have my car ready. I'll come back to fetch you and the children, or you can come back by train at the end of
the holidays.'

‘We're coming with you.'

He had foreseen it. This was bound to happen. The idea of packing them all up, taking the whole family back in the car, exhausted him in advance.

‘No, you won't have time to get everything ready. And the children need …'

‘No, no, you know perfectly well they prefer it at home. Hurry up, Mariette! Give the children something to eat. We're leaving!'

‘Today?'

‘At once. You pay the bill, François, I'll go upstairs.'

‘You haven't had any breakfast …'

‘Never mind. It won't hurt this once.'

‘What about Alfred?'

‘We can take him with us. If we all squeeze up.'

‘No.'

Then he had a thought. He said:

‘Oh well, if you insist …'

‘Unless he prefers to stay …'

‘No, he can come with us.'

He didn't want to leave his nephew alone on the island. The young man was still asleep when Mahé pushed open his bedroom door. He usually went to the later Mass. Seeing him lying there, his hair ruffled, his mouth open, the doctor detested
him.

‘Get up! We're leaving. My mother is ill.'

‘What's wrong with her?'

‘I don't know. We're leaving in half an hour.'

He felt delivered of a great weight. The idea that his mother was probably suffering from cancer distressed him, but Péchade's letter nevertheless had something miraculous about it.

He bustled about, paid Madame Harmoniaux, who felt obliged to commiserate and tell him stories about people with cancer, and gave a tip to Eva, who disgusted him. From time to time, as he spoke to someone, a glistening teardrop escaped from his
eyelashes.