The Mahé Circle (12 page)

They often surprised her writing in a little notebook which she took great care not to leave lying about. But it was in the linen cupboards that she spent most of her time, as if she wanted to compose an inventory.

They joked about that, without suspecting that it was the truth.

For the previous two months, she had refused to contemplate an operation, even when Professor Charbonneau had come in person from Poitiers to persuade her.

‘Why put me through all that, when there's nothing to be done?'

But it was precisely because the disease was terminal that it was thought necessary to try the operation. They wove a veritable conspiracy around her. Dr Péchade was in on it, of course, and the whole family, their friends, and any local people
who called to see her. They were told about it. She knew. She would see them come in and as soon as they opened their mouths:

‘Get along with you, I know what you're going to say.'

Everyone had an uncle, aunt, sister-in-law or cousin whose life had been saved by an operation in a much more serious case.

In the end, she gave in.

‘Just to have a bit of peace!' she sighed.

She was certainly in great pain. But when it came to arranging the trip to hospital, they met fresh resistance, more determination than ever. In this struggle, she truly exhausted the remains of her strength.

She clung on to the house and they were obliged to look away, during the last days, as they saw her staring hard at the walls, the ornaments, the familiar furniture. From cellar to attic, into every nook and cranny, she trotted round as if making
a kind of mournful pilgrimage, giving a start and looking embarrassed if she was caught
unawares, pretending to be searching for something, inventing some final excuses.

On the day before she was due to leave, Madame Papin turned up, and it was a shock for Hélène, who was in the house and opened the door to her. A little old woman, thin and white-haired, whose speciality was laying out the dead, not as a
professional career but because she had chosen it. She was comfortably off. She lived alone in a house which no one was ever invited to enter. She claimed that she never slept. The grocer's wife said that at any rate she didn't eat much, since she bought hardly anything, and only
in tiny quantities, ‘as if for a bird'.

As soon as one of the local people was known to be dying, she would come running and would wait, indifferent to any cold-shouldering, confident that in the end she would be entrusted with the last duties towards the body. She was unparalleled at
her job, knew exactly what she was doing, and could turn over unaided a man weighing eighty kilos, like old Soudard, who had died of a stroke.

‘Your mother-in-law is expecting me!' she said to Hélène, who was about to send her away. ‘Don't look at me like that. She was the one who sent for me, she had Guérin come to fetch me.'

And it was true. The two women spent almost an hour whispering together in the bedroom.

Madame Mahé also had the priest summoned, and her son didn't know what to do with himself, so upset was he by these careful preparations.

It was a shock to see the ambulance draw up at the gate one morning. They helped the patient to get dressed, as
she continued to give orders, paying attention to the smallest details.

‘I don't understand why they are all so determined to make me die somewhere else, my dear,' she said to Hélène. ‘I would have been so much better off in my own bed.'

She began shaking with fear as they crossed the garden. She didn't want the children to see her go.

‘It wouldn't be good for them to have such a sad memory of their grandmother.'

She had also insisted that they should not come to the hospital.

The air was fresh, birds were singing in the trees, the flower beds round the bushes were bright with double daisies. Péchade accompanied Mahé in the vehicle with its red cross.

They took her up in the lift to a little room with white walls, where tears sprang to her eyes. Towards the end of the morning, just before being wheeled into theatre, she was left alone for a moment with her son:

‘I don't know what will become of you when I'm gone, François.'

He thought she was going to extract a promise from him. And he was ready, sincerely, from the bottom of his heart, to give it. And he probably would have kept it religiously.

But the door opened. A nun came in.

‘My turn, is it?' his mother asked, with a pale smile.

They had brought a famous surgeon down from Paris. Charbonneau and Péchade were to assist him. The doctor saw them one last time, when they were already gowned up, with their surgical gloves and masks.

He went to sit on a chair in the immaculate corridor where the sun was streaming in. A few times, he approached the door, but could hear nothing. An hour went by. Then almost another hour, and he knew this
for a bad sign.

Finally the door opened, and the sinister little trolley covered with a sheet was wheeled out by a nurse. Péchade came up to him looking sad and serious.

‘Well?'

‘No, not yet …'

‘Is there any hope?'

Péchade could only raise his eyes to heaven. She had been unable to withstand the shock of the operation. An hour later, it was all over, without her having regained consciousness. The nuns were preparing her for burial when the doctor heard
raised voices in the corridor.

It was Madame Papin, carrying a suitcase, and demanding to be allowed in.

‘Please tell them, Monsieur François, that it was your mother herself who asked me to come. And I've brought all the things she told me to.'

He nodded, without being able to speak. And Madame Papin remained a long time in the room with one of the sisters.

That night, the body was brought back to Saint-Hilaire, as Madame Mahé had foreseen. The old Papin woman swelled with importance.

‘Now, Monsieur François, she told me you are not to do anything before looking in the notebook under a pile of linen in the chest …'

And it was only then that they realized how carefully
the dying woman had taken care of every detail. Down to where to find the candles, or which candlesticks to use for the wake – the two silver ones from
the sitting room.

There was a complete inventory of the contents of every piece of furniture in the house, and she had thought of everyone, made small legacies to each of them, including distant female relations they hadn't seen for twenty years. They also
found a list of people to be informed, instructions for the notary. She had remembered about inheritance tax, and taken measures to reduce it to a minimum.

It was a magnificent funeral. The whole of Saint-Hilaire turned out, as well as people from neighbouring villages, and even from Bressuire and Cholet. They came in cars and on bicycles. From the next village, where there was a railway station,
they came on foot and formed a long line walking along the road, wet after a recent shower.

The doctor's eyes were red-rimmed, and it was as if he could hardly see, since he bumped into things, shook hands with mourners without seeming to recognize them, stammering automatically:

‘Thank you … thank you.'

Following his mother's instructions, he had ordered a meal for close on a hundred people at the inn, fifty metres from the house.

And that night, when bottle after bottle had been emptied, everyone agreed that they had never seen such a successful funeral in the region.

He went on doing his rounds to the farms on his motorbike. On market days, he saw patients in his surgery and
the waiting-room queue spilled out into the garden. Péchade tried to distract him, and invited
him over with his wife and children every Sunday.

He was grateful to his friend, certainly. All the more so since Péchade, being in poor health himself and rather gloomy by nature, had to make an effort to try to cheer people up in conversation.

Always these days, the doctor saw him as he had that one sultry afternoon in the garden, with grey stubble on his cheeks, the right one fleshier than the left, and that mouth which kept moving.

They had been as close as friends could be. He had no criticism to make of Péchade at all, on the contrary, since his friend had devoted himself to him as no one in the immediate family would have done, neglecting his patients and his own family,
to be on hand whenever he was needed.

It was not his friend's fault that the bond had broken. He went regularly to Péchade's house. As he arrived, he would smell food cooking. The children would be sent out of doors. The adults would sit in the sun, by the window, and he
would be exhausted at once by the chatter that would begin, words falling like monotonous and endless rain, as he watched the women whispering in a corner, showing each other some needlework, or patterns for a frock that they planned to have made up by a little dressmaker they had
discovered.

He would eat without appetite. He felt heavy, clumsy, as he looked at the children: Péchade's three boys, the image of their father, so much so that it was almost caricatural,
his own daughter Jeanne,
almost ten years old, and his little boy who was just starting school.

It was his daughter who looked most like him. When she was little, with her ringlets and big eyes, she had been pretty, but now one could already see some inborn vulgarity. It must come from her grandfather, the famous Mahé who had tried to carry
his mare on his shoulders when he had had too much to drink, and had died of it.

Her skin was coarse-grained, her face too wide, her mouth without shape.

He felt no disappointment. He didn't feel anything. Everything around him left him quite cold.

As for his son, you sometimes wanted to shake him to see if he could act like a normal boy, he was so quiet. He had the mildness of his mother, her calm and resigned expression. No, it wasn't even resignation. He couldn't see far
enough ahead for that. He would stay where you put him and could keep himself amused for hours on end with some simple object, an old box, a piece of metal, a handful of rags, just as Hélène could sit by the window for hours sewing.

The very week of the funeral, only three days later, Mariette had got married. They were all shocked. They had imagined that since she had lived with them for four years – she was very young when she had been hired – she would share in the family
mourning. But they were now discovering a new Mariette, a Mariette with a life plan laid out inside that little round head, a plan which she meant to put into practice.

‘You must understand, the wedding's all fixed, my
fiancé's waiting, we've got relations in Paris who asked long ago for time off work so that they could come. I wasn't to know
that madame would choose this week to die.'

So in the midst of their distress, they had to train a new maid, a girl who was brought up on a farm and broke everything she touched. She was a stolid, stiff kind of girl, with frightened eyes. She trembled if you asked her for anything and
looked at you as if to say:

‘Do you think I can manage?'

It wasn't too important, obviously, since Hélène was taking care of the housekeeping. She had been doing so before, but then she had had her mother-in-law beside her.

Suddenly she seemed to look insignificant in a house that had become too big for her. At times she went endlessly to and fro, as if she had lost something. At table, in the dining room which looked on to the terrace, the gap was more perceptible
than ever. In the early days, the doctor was unable to eat. Even without looking at his mother's place, he would feel unwell, and many times he had to get up and go out before the end of the meal.

Everything got on his nerves.

‘You should be more patient with the children, François. They can't help it.'

And he asked himself, yes, he asked himself what right she had to speak like that, what right she had even to be there at all …

During his mother's lifetime, he had grown used to seeing her round the house, because she had only held a subordinate position.

He had been right, in Porquerolles, when he had discovered that his mother had chosen Hélène for her own benefit, not his.

And now? Now that his mother was no longer there?

He was afraid of letting his indifference show and causing her pain, since really she was blameless. It was simply stronger than him. The greater the effort he made, the more irritated he became at any contact with her.

He knew that she talked about him with the Péchades. He had not overheard any conversation, but he could guess at it from certain words, details or advice he heard from his friend.

‘François needs distractions … I don't know what to do,' she must have said to them.

First, Péchade had tried to drag him off to a medical conference in Paris. He had refused. He had no wish to go to Paris, or to be distracted.

Life had lost its savour, that was all. He was like an old man whose appetite has gone. Medicines won't help him get it back again. There are deeper causes, and it was precisely those causes that he did not wish to recognize.

‘Why not come out and try to catch a few crayfish?'

‘It's too early …'

‘Yesterday Agat caught a three-pound pike.'

Why couldn't they just leave him in peace? Didn't they realize how crude and clumsy they were being? They were only making worse the emptiness he felt all round him.

It wasn't just since his mother's death. He was thirty-five years old now. Until this point, one could almost say that other people had been living his life for him.

He had been turned into a doctor. He had obediently studied everything they put in front of him. Then he had allowed himself to be enclosed in this grey house, which they wanted him to think was now
his.

He hadn't reacted, he'd played uncomplainingly with all the toys they suggested, he'd gone hunting and fishing, he'd learned bridge to make Péchade happy.