The Red Collar (11 page)

The major's annoyance made him react, for once, without consideration for the defendant. He took his leave curtly with the words, “Be prepared to sign the written statement of your hearing tomorrow.”

Once he was back outside on the Place Michelet, which was still warm from the sun that had bathed it, Lantier rubbed his hand over his face and stared around him, like someone waking from a nightmare.

The first living thing he saw was Wilhelm, who had resumed his post under the trees. The dog didn't bark, but tracked him with his eyes until he turned at the end of the street.

 

* * *

 

Valentine didn't smoke, usually. But her initiative had unsettled her and she'd chosen this means of unwinding. Lantier had passed her his packet of shag, and she coughed as she inhaled deeply on her badly rolled cigarette.

He'd come across her as he stepped into the hotel lobby, and she'd asked to speak with him again. This time, however, it was not for a brief conversation. She wanted to tell him something confidentially and, with the brazenness of the shy, she barely disguised her hope that he would invite her to dine with him. He couldn't care less what people said and neither, apparently, could she. He'd taken her to the restaurant where he'd met the attorney-at-law. The place was completely empty this time. She was desperately trying to look detached but her eyes shone brightly. She stroked the smooth, white fabric of her table napkin like the soft pelt of an animal.

“It's not like me to confide in a man in uniform. You must have done some research. You know my background.”

She'd drunk half the bottle of Bordeaux in a quarter of an hour. Lantier definitely didn't want her to think he was trying to get her drunk. But she knew what she was doing. Strange though it might seem, she was still perfectly in control of herself, perhaps more so than when she'd had nothing to drink.

“When I met him he'd hardly set foot outside his farm.”

The subject was Morlac, clearly. Lantier would cheerfully have done without this. He wanted to be on his own and forget the whole business. But there it was; he wasn't done with it. He might as well see it through to the end and listen to what she had to say.

“What did I like about him? Why did I take an interest in him?”

He hadn't asked her anything. It was this sort of supposition that proved to him she was a little tipsy. She was actually talking to herself.

“He didn't look like a country type, that was it. There are people like that, who don't live in their true class. That's quite reassuring, wouldn't you say? I'd had my head filled with stuff about the class struggle. All through my childhood my father talked of nothing else. I accepted the idea. It's the truth; there's no denying it. But when he died and I ended up here, in the country, I thought that wasn't enough. There were individuals, too. The things that happen to them can make them change class, like with me, for example. And then there are those who seem to live outside all that, sort of just by being themselves.”

She'd hardly touched her beef and onion stew. She probably wasn't used to eating meat, or sauces.

“When we met, Jacques could only just read. He learned to read properly to please me, I know that. It embarrassed me but at the same time I liked the thought that he'd gone to that trouble for me. It was proof of his love. He didn't know how to talk about love but he'd found this way of saying what he felt.”

“What did he read?”

“Anything. Mostly novels. He didn't say what sort of thing he liked but I saw the gaps on the shelves when he left. I've always known where my books are. You wouldn't think so to look at them. They don't look organized. But I know.”

In this hot weather it was more obvious how thin she was. She wore a clumsily knitted little cardigan over her dress but, what with the heat of the wine, she'd taken it off and Lantier could see her neck with its clearly defined muscles, and the hollows around her collarbones where the straps of her bodice slid over them.

“I had
The New Heloise
, because it was Rousseau and my father saw him as the great thinker of the Enlightenment. But I knew that Jacques was keeping it such a long time for another reason. He was romantic, without realizing it. And I liked that.”

“Did you not talk to him about politics?”

“Never, at that point. When war was declared we talked about the situation one time. He was incredibly naïve. To be honest, he didn't know anything. In that way, he was definitely a country boy. He just accepted that one day they'd come and get him to fight, even though he didn't like it. When he left I tried to talk to him. But I realized it was pointless. I found myself doing things I would never have imagined. I knitted him a scarf. I wanted him to go with something of me. I was really happy when my dog left with him.”

“Is Wilhelm your dog?”

“That wasn't his name then. He was my great-aunt's dog, or rather the son of her old Briard bitch. We'd drowned the others but my aunt kept that one for me. I called him Kirou.”

She was laughing now but, mindful of her appearance, she never showed her teeth for long because she had one missing on the side and she knew it didn't look pretty.

“That dog really liked men. Every time the postman came he followed him, and it was often several days before he came home. When Jacques started coming over Kirou would make a fuss of him.”

“Did you tell him to take the dog to war with him?”

“As if! He went of his own accord. And I was glad of it.”

“Did he send you news?”

“While he was in France I received letters every week. And one day he came back.”

The bottle was empty. Lantier couldn't make up his mind to buy another. She was breaking up her piece of bread and nibbling on bits of crust.

“It was late December. The weather was very cold. That damp cold we get here. We stayed inside in the warm all day and all night. I burned all the wood I'd put aside for the winter. It didn't bother me. I wanted him to be comfortable.”

“Had he changed?”

“Completely. He was like a tree with no leaves, all hard and dried out. He'd stopped smiling. And talked a lot.”

“About what?”

“About the fighting, even though he wasn't at the front at that point. About all the men he'd met in the army. About the unbelievable weapons that had been invented to kill people. He didn't understand any of it. The war was a mystery to him. He'd never imagined it could exist. He wanted to know. Politics, economics, peoples, nations, he'd started thinking about everything.”

She had picked up her glass and was looking forlornly at the dregs of wine left in it. Lantier ordered another bottle.

“I didn't want to talk to him about abstract things like that. It might be difficult to understand. But, you see, I was in love and that was all I wanted to think about. I knew he wouldn't be here long. I wanted to be happy. I wanted to kiss him and touch him and hold him close to me. So I settled for recommending books to him. He started reading political material he hadn't been interested in till then. And while he read I watched him, I smothered him with kisses, I basked in his warmth.”

“How long did he stay?”

“Two weeks. Obviously I was pregnant. I knew it would happen. I wanted it to. I could almost tell you when our child was conceived. But I didn't say anything to him.”

The waitress had come back with the new bottle. She filled the glasses with a surly expression and spilled some wine on the tablecloth without apologizing.

“He took three books with him when he left.”

“Proudhon, Marx, and Kropotkin.”

“He told you.”

For the first time since their conversation started she looked intently at Lantier and he felt she was only now acknowledging he was there.

“After that,” he said, “he went to join the Oriental Expeditionary Force.”

She suddenly looked very weary. Her whole face crumpled as if an intense pain had come back to grip her insides.

“That's what he wrote and told me. I felt helpless. You see, so long as he was in France I felt he was still near. But with the war in Greece it was completely different. I had this feeling he'd never come back. I sent him a letter to tell him I was expecting a child. I felt he had to know before he left. Maybe deep down I was hoping he'd find some way to stay close to me.”

“How did he take the news?”

“He wrote to say it was a good thing, and told me to call the baby Marie if it was a girl and Jules if it was a boy, in case it was born before he came back.”

She gave a nervous laugh. “Like I said, he doesn't know how to express his feelings.”

Lantier thought he saw a tear glistening in the corner of her eye but she flicked her head to toss her hair back, and everything disappeared.

“So then I realized there was only one hope: for the war to end as soon as possible. I'd distanced myself from my father's former friends. I didn't want to hear any more about them. Politics had done us enough harm. But I suddenly changed my mind. The only people fighting against the war—the ones who'd immediately pronounced it a disgrace, who'd dissected what had caused it and wanted to deal with the problem at the very root—were these utopians and socialist agitators, and I'd been wrong to look down on them. I wrote to one of them, a man called Gendrot, who was my godfather. He'd tried to see me after my father died but I'd never answered his letters. Luckily he was still at the same address and my letter reached him.”

Three men had come into the bar, which was cut off from the restaurant by a frosted glass partition that stopped short of the ceiling. They could be heard chatting loudly with the landlord.

“This Gendrot worked closely with Jaurès. After Jaurès's assassination, Gendrot stayed faithful to his pacifist ideas. He had problems with the army.”

Lantier was glad to see that she no longer seemed to identify him with the army. She was confiding in him and making allowances.

“He carried on running a very active group against the war. They had official activities, with a newspaper that was pretty much censored. But he also took care of supporting pacifist militants, particularly foreigners who needed to hide.”

“Weren't you afraid you might have trouble yourself by contacting him?”

“What sort of trouble? I've always been watched, you know, because of my father. But the police know I don't do any harm. I didn't say much in my message, anyway, except that I wanted to see him again because he was still my godfather, after all.”

“Did he reply?”

“He sent someone. A miner from Creusot who traveled sixty miles on foot to come and talk to me. He stayed two days. He saw where I lived and realized how I could help them.”

“Didn't they want you to move into town?”

“Absolutely not. They needed hideouts deep in the country for boys on the run or who needed to be forgotten.”

“Did you write and tell Morlac this?”

They'd ordered coffee, she'd let two sugar lumps dissolve slowly in hers and was now stirring it.

“Unfortunately not. I didn't want him to worry. I was doing it for me, you see, so that I felt useful, to contribute, just a bit, to cutting short the war.”

“Had he already left for Greece?”

“I didn't know. The mail was getting very irregular. Jacques was trundled from one camp to another, farther and farther south. In the end they took them to Toulon. But the sailing kept being postponed, because of the submarine war.”

She pulled a face. The drunken cries from the bar were growing louder and smothered her words from time to time because she was speaking quietly.

“Anyway, Gendrot didn't waste any time. He had packets of clandestine tracts delivered to me, and I had to hide them until they were distributed. He sent a couple of Belgians who'd escaped from an internment camp. For those six months there were people in the house practically the whole time.”

“And Morlac still didn't know?”

She looked down. It was clearly painful for her reliving this time. She was wringing her fingers agitatedly.

“I didn't tell him anything. Now that I was actually doing something I couldn't possibly give away any details in my letters. There was military censorship . . . But it's true, I should have warned him all the same. It would have stopped him finding out for himself.”

“Finding out? How could he possibly know when he was so far away?”

“He came back.”

“You mean he had a second period of leave?”

“In July, shortly before they sailed, he managed to get three days' leave. He didn't say where he was going; they'd never have allowed it. He performed miracles, jumping onto freight trains, stealing a horse, walking the last few miles till his shoes fell apart. I only found all that out later . . . ”

She was laughing in admiration, regret, despair.

“He arrived at dawn. He hid behind the little wall around the vegetable plot. Do you know where I mean? He wanted to surprise me.”

She sniffed and straightened in her chair, to gather her composure.

“At the time Gendrot had sent me a laborer from Alsace who was being hunted down for sabotage. He was a great tall gentle boy. He didn't say much but helped me a lot. With the pregnancy there were some jobs in the garden I couldn't do. This Albert knew how to work a vegetable patch. I didn't even have to tell him what needed doing.”

“You only have one room. Where did he sleep?”

She looked up, defiantly.

“With me. We didn't do anything. I wasn't far off my time anyway. But, you see, I don't know if a man can understand this, I needed someone there. I huddled up against him. I was no longer alone. And my child was no longer alone either. It feels strange saying it.”

“And was he happy with that?”

“I think so. He was very gentle. He covered me with kisses. Sometimes I could feel he wanted me, but he never forced me. He told me a bit of tenderness was enough for him. It pained him terribly being away from his family. A family of women, as it happens, his mother and four sisters.”