The Mahé Circle (6 page)

Like Péchade's cheek, it had all suddenly stopped living its usual life. And the most alarming thing of all was that the doctor could see himself, sitting on the bench, leaning slightly to one side, his arm along the back, his legs crossed,
in his khaki breeches and his lace-up boots. He could see himself, feel himself encrusted into the scene, and the scene itself looked like a picture postcard. He could have stood up and gone into his surgery, where, in a drawer stuffed with odds and ends, advertisements, used syringes and
medical samples, there were still at least a hundred old postcards, all depicting the same scene. You could see some of them, yellowish and fading, in the window of Mademoiselle Julie's, the haberdasher's near the station, which also sold toys and seeds for the garden.

They showed a photograph of the house, the very house
in front of which he now sat. His predecessor had ordered the photograph from a perambulating salesman who was in the region taking pictures of churches,
old mills or hotels for visitors.

The former doctor, whose name was Riou, had had a shock of fine white hair. He it was who had trimmed the box trees in the garden into the strange shapes they still had. On the greyish postcard, the old man was shown sitting casually on the same
bench, in the same pose as his successor, while his daughter, Mademoiselle Fernande, who was now almost sixty, but had been hardly more than a girl at the time, pretended to be cutting flowers from the standard roses.

The house was grey, with a dark slate roof, and there were black iron railings round the garden; the white-painted shutters at the windows, a slightly grubby white, made everything else appear all the greyer.

Today was a sunny day, late in June. The air was still and warm. There was no one in sight on the road, apart from two cyclists who had stopped for a chat at the crossroads. What was strange, worrying, even disturbing, was the immutability of the
scene. The sight, for example, over a shop front with closed shutters, of two words written in large black letters: ‘AGAT, ironmonger'.

The women were knitting. It was as if they had been knitting for ever, as if the woollen garments, and the hands mechanically handling the needles, were eternally locked into this fragment of the world.

Perhaps the doctor had over-eaten, and it was making him drowsy? And yet he was quite clear-headed. He'd had
a good day. Early that morning, he had left the house on his heavy motorbike to go catching
crayfish. He'd taken Agat on the pillion, the same Agat as on the sign, the ironmonger, because he didn't like doing anything on his own. They had put down their special nets. By ten a.m. they were already back home. He had gone into the barber's for a shave; on Sunday
mornings he liked not having to shave himself. Then he had gone to high mass with his elder child, the daughter. Afterwards, Péchade, his wife and their three sons had come to lunch.

Perfectly normal. A typical Sunday for the season. Winter was the time for hunting: partridge and hare at first, then rabbits. Once the hunting season closed, there was always fishing in the Sèvre and, as just now, catching crayfish. It had been
a better year than usual too, since he had allowed himself two new toys: a rod for fly-fishing, with a marvellous reel, that had cost a lot of money, and his powerful and noisy motorcycle, on which he liked to do his rounds in the countryside.

Porquerolles had never been mentioned, not by him at any rate. He'd gone back to wearing his thick corduroy breeches, his laced boots and his heavy jerseys. He had gone back to finding his surname – ‘Mahé' – on fifteen or twenty
businesses in the neighbourhood, because the region was full of Mahés, not all related to him, or if so, only very distantly. Mahés and Lansquets. His mother was a Lansquet.

Twenty or fifty times, he had gone past the house where he had been born and raised, another corner house on a crossroads, in a neighbouring village: nowadays it was a café.

So he was solidly rooted. He avoided remembering the Porquerolles holiday, and didn't even want to think about it. Hélène, his wife, sometimes mentioned it, to Madame Péchade, for instance, but always
to complain about the steak fried in oil, the fish soup, the mosquitoes and the scorpions. Because one morning, when turning the children's mattresses, as she did every day, she had indeed found in Michel's bed a big black scorpion, its tail raised threateningly.

They were so far from thinking of Porquerolles that, just last week, he had written to Monsieur and Madame Le Guen, who kept the family boarding house on the Sèvre where the Mahés usually spent their holidays. They had booked rooms for the first
week in July.

And even a moment before, the doctor had not been thinking about Porquerolles at all. He was sure he hadn't been thinking about it. He had been looking at his friend Armand's mouth, listening, without hearing them, to the syllables in
the air, as his gaze rested on the garden, the clipped box hedges, the women in their white blouses – except for his mother, always in black or grey, who was just now mending a pair of the little boy's trousers.

Michel had been ill. Twice. The first time, almost as soon as they were back home, he had had measles. Then in the spring, at the same time as his sister and the doctor, a throat infection had kept them all in bed, so that Péchade, this same
friend who was here today, had had to look after his patients for a fortnight.

Péchade was ill too. He was always ailing, and his complexion was unhealthy. His wife was the only person in
their house in good health, since the three boys had no sooner recovered from one illness than
they caught another.

There were no clouds in the sky, and yet it was a dark blue, verging on violet, and the air seemed to stand still: all the houses round about were grey, plastered in the local roughcast with a few pink bricks round the windows, and the slates on
the black roofs were clearly outlined as if with Indian ink.

‘I think …'

He had been going to say something. Péchade stopped talking and listened. But the doctor fell silent, and motioned to his friend to carry on.

He had blushed, as if caught out in something. And yet he knew, now, that he was going to say it. He was waiting for a favourable moment, forcing himself to listen to his colleague's words, while failing to concentrate on them.

‘Brédecart claims …'

Brédecart had been one of their professors at medical school.

‘… that it's Parisians who come on holiday who start these epidemics. They're not …'

‘I think …' began Dr Mahé again.

He could see himself, hear himself, still encrusted in this world of frightening immutability, and he had to make an effort to escape that depressing sensation.

‘I think we'll go to Porquerolles instead …'

His mother was the first to look up, since despite her age she was more alert than Hélène. She was also the only woman he was afraid of. He had always lived with her.
When he had married, he had not had like
other men, who leave home, a feeling of freedom.

Life had continued, just as when he was a child going to school. It was still his mother, even today, who woke him in the morning, and told him when to change his underclothes.

She had a very gentle air about her. Her voice was soft. She looked after everyone, watched over everything, sat up at night with the children when they were ill.

All the same, he was afraid of her.

‘What on earth do you mean?' she said, in the same voice she would have used in the past to pick him up on some mischief.

‘I said … I'm not sure yet … I wanted to have a word about it with Péchade, that's just it.'

His friend had already understood that they were on delicate ground. As for Hélène, she looked in turn at her husband and her mother-in-law, hoping that someone would put an end to this bad joke.

‘There have been cases of typhoid all along the Sèvre, and especially over by Saint-Laurent and Mortagne … The children have never been exposed to it.'

‘There have been a few cases here too.'

‘Only three, not the same at all.'

Although he could see that Péchade was embarrassed, he called on him to back him up.

‘The children, especially Michel, have had a bad year. Michel hasn't put on any weight for six months. I'm sure that a change of climate …'

His wife risked a word:

‘Last year, in Porquerolles, he was no better, and he had a lot of tummy trouble as well.'

‘When we got back, he picked up again. That's what counts. Don't you think so, Péchade?'

He preferred not to look at them, and not to look at himself.

He had just made a shattering discovery. That he had spoken about this wish to go to Porquerolles as if it were a shameful desire.

That was why, for a year, he had not wanted to think about it. In fact he had never consciously thought about it. True, Porquerolles had never vanished from his memory. On the contrary. But it had shown itself in a different form, like a
photographic negative.

When he went fishing, for example. Even with the new rod! He had felt listless, without energy. He found himself stopping still, as if he were searching his unconscious for some stronger sensation.

It was the same when he rode his big motorbike, past fields where they were beginning the harvest, with heavy ox teams. He would arrive in farmhouses smelling of silage and soured milk. The people spoke to him in patois. Everything was in its
proper place.

Whereas in Porquerolles, things were hostile to him. He had tried in vain to lessen their impact. Down south, all the time, he had felt as if there was a tremendous chaos around him, a kind of life that was too vivid, so that the slightest
contact with it made his blood pulse more quickly, and prompted a rising fever inside him.

All year, he had been determined never to go back there.
It was quite deliberately that he had written last week to book the rooms with the Le Guens.

How could he explain that it had come as no surprise to him when he now announced his decision to go to the south of France?

Because it
was
a decision, no mistake, and the others, who knew him well, were in no doubt about it either. He had lived too long with his mother to tell her:

‘We'll do this or that.'

He came at it differently. He would hesitantly remark:

‘I think it would be preferable …'

If he was contradicted, he sometimes backed off. Not for long. He would return to the charge, head down, brow bent:

‘I wonder whether we should in fact …'

To prove it, this time he was tackling Péchade on a subject he had never raised before. He was talking to him about Michel's legs, his spinal column, his fear that the boy might have inherited weak bones from his mother. Because one of his
wife's sisters had tuberculosis of the bones.

‘Oh, surely, François,' his mother protested, ‘you're not going to suggest that Michel …'

‘No, of course not! I'm not suggesting anything. I'm only saying to Péchade that sea-bathing would be just the thing for the child.'

‘You don't need to go to Porquerolles or any other blessed place for that. Les Sables d'Olonne is hardly any distance.'

‘What do you think, Péchade? In the first place, in Les Sables there are thousands of children. And secondly, I
don't think the change will be enough of a contrast. Well, anyway, we've got
time to think about it.'

It was over. Decided. Now he knew that he would not spend the holidays either at Les Sables, or on the banks of the Sèvre. He needed something else, to detach himself from this landscape which now seemed to him terrifyingly empty.

‘Time for liqueurs perhaps?'

When his wife returned with Mariette, to serve tea for the women and spirits for the men, he saw that her eyes were red. She had been crying, sniffling rather, because she wasn't capable of whole-hearted distress.

‘We'll have to eat fish soup again, then!' she tried to joke.

It hurt him a little, because he felt her objection was less trivial than it seemed. If they had never spoken together about Porquerolles, as one does naturally about a summer holiday, it was because there was a sort of taboo surrounding the
word.

He had nothing to reproach himself with. Nor could his wife reproach him with anything. On the contrary! In the south, he had spent more of his time with her and the children than he would at the Le Guens' place, where he would go fishing
for whole days on end.

In fact he had hardly left her side on the island, except in the early mornings when she was getting the children up and washing them, or when she was putting them to bed. Then he would go down towards the square, feeling the need to
announce:

‘I'm just going as far as the harbour while I wait for you …'

And again, he hadn't done anything wrong. He hadn't spoken to any strange woman. He didn't turn round, as some men did, to stare at the female holidaymakers in shorts.

And yet, if his wife did happen to join him, he would give a start and explain, pointlessly:

‘I was just looking at that boat over there. Do you think …?'

Or if she asked him: ‘Where've you been?' he didn't know what to reply. He hadn't been anywhere, he'd just wandered round the harbour, or strolled past the boules players.

Why was she so instinctively hostile? At home, she never asked him where he was going. And he didn't bother to tell her. He would get on the bike, zoom off through the village, and come home at all hours, often when the women and children
were already at table.

‘Someone has phoned from La Béchelerie.'

‘I know what it's about. I'll go over there tomorrow.'

‘But it seems to be urgent.'

‘It can wait.'

They didn't contradict him. But as soon as it concerned Porquerolles …

His mother too seemed to suspect heaven knew what, some secret.