Ring Roads (2 page)

My
father’s head nods. The bags under his eyes are puffy, which makes him look immensely tired. What is he playing at, exactly, with Murraille and Marcheret?

It’s getting late. Maud Gallas turns out the big lamp, by the fireplace. Probably a signal to tell them it’s time to go. The room is only lit by the two sconces with red shades on the far wall, and my father, Murraille and Marcheret are once more plunged into semi-darkness.

Behind the bar, there is still a small patch of light, in the centre of which Maud Gallas stands motionless. The sound of Murraille whispering. Marcheret’s voice, growing more and more halting. He falls heavily from his perch on the stool, catches himself just in time and leans on Murraille’s shoulder to steady himself. They stagger towards the door. Maud Gallas sees them off. The fresh air revives Marcheret. He tells Maud that if she gets lonely, his big Maud, she must telephone him; that Murraille’s daughter has the prettiest arse in Paris, but that her thighs, Maud Gallas’s, are ‘the most mysterious in Seine-et-Marne’. He puts his arm round her waist and starts pawing her, at which Murraille intervenes with ‘Tut-tut . . .’ She goes in and shuts the door.

The three of them were in the main street of the village. On either side, great, sleeping houses. Murraille and my father led the way. Their companion
sang
‘Le Chaland qui passe’ in a raucous voice. Shutters opened and a head looked out. Marcheret vituperated the peeping-tom and Murraille tried to calm down his future ‘nephew’.

The villa ‘Mektoub’ is the last house on the left, right at the edge of the forest. To look at, it is a mixture between a bungalow and a hunting-lodge. A veranda along the front of the house. It was Marcheret who christened the villa ‘Mektoub’ – ‘Fate’ – in memory of the Legion. The gateway is whitewashed. On one side of the double gate, a copper plate with ‘Villa Mektoub’ engraved in gothic script. Marcheret has had a teak fence erected around the grounds.

They part in front of the gateway. Murraille thumps my father on the back and says: ‘See you tomorrow, Deyckecaire.’ And Marcheret barks: ‘See you tomorrow, Chalva!’ pushing the gate open with his shoulder. They walk up the driveway. And my father remains standing there. He has often stroked the name-plate reverently, tracing the outline of the gothic characters with his finger. The gravel crunches as the others walk away. For a moment Marcheret’s shadow is visible in the middle of the veranda. He shouts: ‘Sweet dreams, Chalva!’ and roars with laughter. There is the sound of French windows shutting. Silence. My father wanders along the
main
road and turns left onto the Chemin du Bornage, a narrow country lane that slopes gently uphill. All along it, expensive properties with extensive grounds. He stops now and then and looks up at the sky, as if contemplating the moon and stars; or, nose pressed against the railings, he peers at the dark mass of a house. Then he continues on his way, but meandering, as though headed nowhere in particular. This is the moment when we ought to approach him.

He stops, pushes open the gate of the ‘Priory’, a strange villa in the neo-Romanesque style. Before going in, he hesitates for a moment. Does the house belong to him? Since when? He shuts the gate behind him, slowly crosses the lawn to the steps leading to the house. His back is bowed. He looks so sad, this overweight man shuffling through the darkness . . .

Certainly one of the prettiest and most idyllically situated villages in Seine-et-Marne. On the outskirts of the Forest of Fontainebleau. A few Parisians have country houses here, but they are no longer around, probably ‘because of the worrying turn of events’.

Monsieur and Madame Beausire, the owners of the Clos-Foucré inn, left last year. They said they were going for a change of air to their cousins’ place in
Loire-
Atlantique, but everyone realised that if they were taking a holiday, it was because regular customers were increasingly scarce. Which makes it difficult to understand why a woman from Paris has taken charge of the Clos-Foucré. Two men – also from Paris – have bought Mme Lamiroux’s house at the edge of the forest. (It has stood empty for nearly ten years.) The younger of the two – apparently – had served in the Foreign Legion. The other was the editor of a Paris newspaper. One of their friends had moved into the ‘Priory’, the Guyots’ country-house. Is he renting it? Or is he taking advantage of the family’s absence? (The Guyots have settled in Switzerland for an indefinite period.) He’s a chubby rather oriental looking man. He and his two friends obviously have very large incomes but they seem to have acquired their money fairly recently. They spend the weekend here, as middle-class families did in happier times. On Friday evening, they come down from Paris. The one who was in the Legion roars down the High Street behind the wheel of a beige Talbot and screeches to a halt in front of the Clos-Foucré. A few minutes later, the other’s saloon is also parked up at the
auberge
. They usually have guests with them. The red-haired woman who always wears jodhpurs, for instance. On Saturday mornings, she goes riding in the forest and when she gets
back
to the stables, the grooms hover round her and take particular care of her horse. In the afternoon, she walks along the main road followed by an Irish setter whose russet coat (is it deliberate?) matches her tan boots and her red hair. Very often she is accompanied by a young woman with blonde hair – the daughter, apparently, of the magazine editor. This one always wears a fur coat. The two women call in for a minute at Mme Blairiaux’s antique shop and choose some jewellery. The red-haired woman once bought a large Louis XV lacquer cabinet that Mme Blairiaux had despaired of selling because it was so expensive. When she realized her customer was offering her two million francs in cash, she looked scared. The red-haired woman put the wad of banknotes on a whatnot. Later a van collected the cabinet and delivered it to Mme Lamiroux’s house (since they have been occupying it, the magazine editor and the ex-Legionary have christened it the ‘Villa Mektoub’.) This same van has been seen taking
objets d’art
and paintings, the red-haired woman’s haul from local auctions, regularly up to the ‘Villa Mektoub’; on Saturday evenings, she arrives back from Melun or Fontainebleau in the car with the magazine editor. The van follows, loaded with every kind of bric-a-brac: rustic furniture, china, chandeliers, silver, which are all cached at the villa. Gossip among the
villagers
is rife. They would dearly like to know more about the red-haired woman. She is staying at the Clos-Foucré, not at the ‘Villa Mektoub’. But you can tell that there’s a close relationship between her and the editor. Is she his mistress? A friend? There are rumours the ex-Legionary is a count. And that the heavyset gentleman at the ‘Priory’ calls himself ‘Baron’ Deyckecaire. Are their titles genuine? Neither is exactly what one thinks of as a genuine aristocrat. There’s something odd about them. Perhaps they are foreign noblemen? Wasn’t ‘Baron’ Deyckecaire overheard one day saying to the editor in a loud voice: ‘That doesn’t matter, I’m a Turkish citizen!’ And the ‘Count’ speaks French with a slight working-class accent. Picked up in the Legion? The red-haired woman seems to be something of an exhibitionist, why else does she wear so much jewellery, which is so out of keeping with her riding clothes? As for the young blonde woman, it’s odd that she wraps herself up in a fur coat in June. The country air must be too much for her. She had her photograph in
Ciné-Miroir
. The caption read: ‘Annie Murraille, 26, star of
Nights of Plunder
.’ Is she still an actress? She often goes walking arm in arm with the ex-Legionary, with her head on his shoulder. They must be engaged.

Other people arrive on Saturdays and Sundays. The
editor
often invites as many as twenty guests. You get to know most of them in due course, but it’s difficult to put a name to each face. Bizarre rumours are widespread in the village. That the editor organizes a ‘special’ kind of party at the ‘Villa Mektoub’ which was why ‘all these strange characters’ come down from Paris. The woman running the Clos-Foucré while the Beausires once ran a bordello. In fact, the Clos-Foucré was beginning to seem more like a brothel, given the curious clientele now staying there. People wondered, what underhand means had ‘Baron’ Deyckecaire used to get his hands on the ‘Priory’? The man looked like a spy. The ‘Count’ had probably joined the Foreign Legion to avoid being prosecuted for some crime. The editor and the red-haired woman were engaged in nefarious trafficking of some sort. There were orgies being held up at the ‘Villa Mektoub’, and the editor even got his niece to take part. He was more than happy to push her into the arms of the ‘Count’ and anyone else whose silence he wanted to buy. In short, the locals ended up convinced that their village had been ‘overrun by a mob of gangsters’. A reliable witness, as they say in novels and police reports, looking at the editor and his entourage, would immediately think of the ‘crowd’ who frequent certain bars on the Champs-Élysées. Here, they are completely out of place. On evenings when there is a
crowd
of them, they have dinner at the Clos-Foucré, then straggle up to the ‘Villa Mektoub’ in small groups. The women are all red-heads or platinum blondes, the men all wear brash suits. The ‘Count’ leads the way, his arm wound in a white silk scarf as if he had just been wounded in action. To remind him of his days in the Legion? They clearly play their music loud since blasts of rumba, hot jazz and snatches of song can be heard from the main road. If you stop near the villa, you can see them dancing behind the French windows.

One night, at about 2 a.m., a shrill voice screamed ‘Bastard!’. The red-haired woman came running out of the villa with her breasts spilling out of her décolleté. Someone rushed after her. ‘Bastard!’ she shrieked again, then she burst out laughing. In the early days, the villagers would open their shutters. Then they got used to the racket the newcomers made. Now, no-one is surprised by anything.

The magazine was obviously launched recently, since the current issue is number 57. The name –
C’est la vie
– is emblazoned in black-and-white letters. On the cover, a woman in a suggestive pose. You would think it was a pin-up magazine were it not that the slogan – ‘A political and society weekly’ – didn’t claim more high-flying aspirations.

On
the title page, the name of the editor: Jean Murraille. Then, under the heading: features, the list of about a dozen contributors, all unknown. Try as you might, you can’t remember seeing their names anywhere. At a pinch, two names vaguely ring a bell, Jean Drault and Mouly de Melun: the former, a pre-war columnist, the author of
Soldat Chapuzot
; the latter a starving writer for
Illustration
. But the others? What to the mysterious Jo-Germain, the author of the cover story about ‘Spring and Renewal’? Written in fancy French, and ending with the injunction: ‘Be joyful!’ The article is illustrated by several photographs of young people in extremely informal dress.

On the second page, the ‘Rumour & Innuendo’ column. Paragraphs with suggestive titles. One Robert Lestandi makes scabrous comments about public figures in politics, the arts and the entertainment world and makes oblique remarks that are tantamount to blackmail. Some ‘humorous’ cartoons, in a sinister style, are signed by a certain ‘Mr Tempestuous’. There are more surprises to come. The ‘editorial’, and ‘news’ items, not to mention the readers’ letters. The ‘editorial’ of number 57, a torrent of invective and threats penned by François Gerbère contains such phrases as: ‘It is only one short step from flunkey to thief.’ Or ‘Someone should pay for
this.
And pay they shall!’ Pay for what? ‘François Gerbère’ is none too precise. As for the various ‘reporters’, they favour the most unsavoury subjects. Issue 51, for instance, offers: ‘The true-life odyssey of a coloured girl through the world of dance and pleasure. Paris, Marseilles, Berlin.’ The same deplorable tone continues in the ‘readers’ letters’ where one reader asks whether ‘Spanish fly added to food or drink will cause instant surrender in a person of the weaker sex’. Jo-Germain answers these questions in fragrant prose.

In the last two pages, entitled ‘What’s New?’, an anonymous ‘Monsieur Tout-Paris’ gives a detailed account of the murky goings-on in society. Society? Which ‘society’ are we talking about? The re-opening of the Jane Stick cabaret club, in the Rue de Ponthieu (the most ‘Parisian’ event of the month according to the columnist), ‘we spotted Osvaldo Valenti and Monique Joyce’. Among the other ‘celebrities listed by ‘Monsieur Tout-Paris’: Countess Tchernicheff, Mag Fontanges, Violette Morriss; ‘Boissel, the author of
Croix de Sang
, Costantini, the crack pilot; Darquier de Pellepoix, the well-known lawyer; Montandon, the professor of anthropology; Malou Guérin; Delvale and Lionel de Wiet, theatre directors; the journalists Suaraize, Maulaz and Alin-Laubreaux’. But, according to our correspondent, ‘the
liveliest
table was that of M. Jean Murraille’. To illustrate the point, there is a photograph showing Murraille, Marcheret, the red-haired woman in jodhpurs (her name is Sylviane Quimphe), and my father, whose name is given as ‘Baron Deyckecaire’. ‘All of them’ – says the writer – ‘bring the warmth and spirituality of sophisticated Paris nightlife to Jane Stick.’ Two other photographs give a panoramic view of the evening. Soft lighting, tables occupied by a hundred or so men in dinner-jackets and women with plunging dresses. The first photograph is captioned: ‘The stage is set, the curtains part, the floor vanishes and a staircase, decked with dancers, appears . . . The revue
Dans notre miroir
begins’, the second is captioned ‘Sophistication! Rhythm! Light! Now, that’s Paris!’ No. There’s something suspicious about the whole thing. Who are these people? Where have they sprung from? The fat-faced ‘Baron’ Deyckecaire, in the background there, for example, slumped behind a champagne bucket?

‘You find it interesting?’

In the faded photograph, a middle-aged man stands opposite a young man whose features are indistinct. I looked up. He was standing in front of me: I hadn’t heard him emerge from the depths of those ‘troubled’ years long
ago.
He glanced down at the ‘What’s New?’ section to see what I was reading. It was true he had caught me poring over the magazine as though inspecting a rare stamp.