All Our Wordly Goods (12 page)

The young Hardelots waited for the car beneath the glass awning. They only had to go up the road to the château, but Saint-Elme, like all provincial towns, had its own tacit code of behaviour, customs that had to be rigorously followed. No one walked anywhere after dark. And besides, Agnès’s satin shoes might have got dirty along the road. It was a winter evening, damp with no wind. The smell of sea fog was in the air, wafting inland from the Channel across the flat countryside. Agnès was wearing a dress of black tulle with the long transparent sleeves in fashion that season.

Even though he wouldn’t let it show, Guy was very excited by this invitation. He could sense something strange in the relationship between his mother and his grandfather, but this didn’t really surprise him. Vague rivalries divided all of Saint-Elme. Court cases, inheritance issues, old quarrels, political disagreements. These things were taken for granted from childhood, as if they were a necessary counterbalance to the much vaunted familial spirit. As soon as a child was old enough to speak, its ears were filled with whispered
warnings during the New Year’s Day visits: ‘Now, when we’re at Aunt Adèle’s house, don’t mention the electric train that Cousin Jules gave you.’ — ‘Why not?’ — ‘Because.’ Other things were said in front of the children: ‘Why just picture it! I was with Georges when Marie happened to pass by.’ — ‘What did you do?’ — ‘Oh, it was embarrassing; they haven’t spoken to each other since 1911.’

The war, and especially the years immediately after the war, had made all this bitterness even worse.

The car pulled up. Pierre was driving. None of the families in Saint-Elme had a chauffeur: a car was necessary; a driver was a luxury. The art of living and saving money was summed up in such subtle distinctions.

‘This is just like the night when I went to the château in 1914,’ Agnès whispered in Pierre’s ear.

‘They’ve rebuilt the house exactly like the old one. You’ll see. All in all, nothing much has really changed.’

They passed Jault’s Inn, the police station and the town hall, whose new stonework shone brightly in the car’s headlights. Nothing much
had
really changed, Pierre thought peacefully. He forgot about the terrible injury to his hip that had nearly crippled him for ever, that still caused him so much pain. He forgot that in each of these houses one, two, three men, sometimes more, had not returned.

The car stopped. Agnès got out.

‘Be brave,’ her husband said, teasing her. He always teased her, she thought tenderly. He went to park the
car so she had to go inside alone; Guy had run on ahead with his little cousins.

The elderly man looked shrivelled, shrunken; his cheeks were a deep reddish colour, almost black in places, the colour of dried blood. He held out two fingers to Agnès, without saying a word, and almost immediately turned towards Simone. Every Sunday, at Mass, Simone and Agnès saw each other, said hello and asked after each other’s children. But now, beneath the bright lights and without their hats on, they could get a better look at one another. Each woman, a murderous expression in her eyes, noted the defects of her rival in great detail, instinctively homing in on the very feature that time had spared least. For Agnès, it was the fine wrinkles on her forehead and a few grey hairs; for Simone, it was the broken veins on her cheeks and nose, and especially her stoutness that made her look older.

‘What a frump,’ Agnès thought, but she would have liked to be more beautiful, more elegant herself. ‘People age so quickly in the provinces.’

The two women shook hands.

‘Isn’t Monsieur Burgères here?’

‘No. He’s gone to Paris for two days. He has to see a client, for your grandfather,’ said Simone, knowing full well that Roland had gone to be with his mistress in Paris.

‘Oh, really?’ said Agnès, who also knew the truth.

The guests were standing around the fireplace, admiring the gift that the factory’s workers had given
Julien Hardelot that morning. It was a clock of grey marble depicting a stark-naked warrior wearing a Roman helmet, and a scantily clad damsel, her hair crowned with a Phrygian bonnet. These two figures were cast in bronze and their crossed spears rested on the enamel face of the clock whose numbers and hands were gold. The guests looked at the marble and metalwork, trying to assess its value, then respectfully declared, ‘It’s beautiful. It’s heavy.’

Through the darkness you could make out the workers’ houses that had sprung up at the foot of the factory and now surrounded the Hardelots’ street in every direction. Little lights shone in the windows. They lived right next to each other, but they didn’t know each other and didn’t like each other. When Agnès had first arrived in Saint-Elme she had wanted to set up a health centre and a day nursery near the factory, but her father-in-law had told her that ‘it was pointless’, that Julien Hardelot looked after the welfare of his workers himself. Hardelot looked upon everyone born in this place as family. He made sure that the intelligent children were educated and, when they had finished their studies, he gave them jobs. But woe betide anyone who wanted to leave Hardelot’s factory! A tacit agreement between the industrialists of the region meant that all doors would be closed to him. Even Hardelot’s rivals respected this decree. Hardelot had built inexpensive housing and a school when the workers had asked for them, but refused their request for a swimming pool and a sports stadium.
‘The factory is the only place where you need to tire yourselves out,’ he’d told them when they’d asked about the stadium; as for the swimming pool, to him it was a pointless luxury. The salaries were low at his factory, but the members of the family (Pierre and the young cousins who also worked for him) were not better treated than anyone else.

‘My grandfather’s very clever,’ Pierre always said. ‘He’s in charge. He knows that to the ordinary people the misery of everyone is preferable to the happiness of a few. After he has told me off in front of the workers (and Lord knows he can go on!), everything he says to them seems sweetness and light.’

Pierre had just come into the room. He kissed his grandfather and congratulated him; then he went and joined the men standing in front of the fireplace. The ladies were sitting on the settee and the large expanse of the reception room separated the two sexes. The men talked about their cars; it was a topic of conversation they never tired of. They described them lovingly. They passionately compared them to other people’s cars. They told gleeful tales of the accidents that had befallen them.

‘That hill, you know the one, when you’re leaving the village …’

‘Oh, I know it all right; it’s dangerous.’

‘It was in 1921 … no, January 1922. A truck was parking. There was clearly a red light, but …’

The ladies, meanwhile, talked about giving birth. Like
soldiers remembering the wounds they suffered at the front, they recalled the event with pride and a shudder. ‘With Jean, you know, they had to use forceps …’ ‘Well, when Suzanne was born,
I
…’ The older ones recounted their stories with a touch of nostalgia. They were like war veterans who say with a sigh, ‘When they cut off my leg on the battlefield …’, implying: ‘Those were the days.’

They went in to dinner. All these respectable people leaned over their soup: the men with their heavy, ruddy-cheeked faces, the women, mostly sweet-looking and ageing. The meal was copious and excellent. Old Hardelot looked from left to right along the two rows of guests. He had tucked the corner of his napkin between his chin and his detachable collar. For some time, now, his eyes had been clouded over with a kind of film, like you find in very old dogs. Pierre wondered if his grandfather weren’t going blind. But the old man fiercely hid this failing. He wanted to pick up his wine glass; he felt around the tablecloth but couldn’t find it.

Pierre pushed the glass towards him. ‘Would you like your wine, Grandfather?’

He shot Pierre a vicious look. ‘No.’

Sometimes he felt an overwhelming drowsiness come over him. In truth, this meal and his family bored him, but it had to be done. All of it was part of what he considered his obligations. Once again, after four years of war, he found himself in a stable world, ruled by unchanging customs and rules. The foundations were
solid and wouldn’t give way. Everything was in its rightful place. He would leave a universe that had finally been restored to peace and wealth. There had been problems, strikes in Saint-Elme, just like everywhere else. There would be others, the old man thought, but the era of great upheavals was over. And besides, he wasn’t overly concerned about the future; for him, the future was particularly restricted. But every now and again a wave of powerful vitality caused him to think, ‘I could live to be a hundred.’ His own grandfather had died at the age of a hundred and three. He had known him well. But he looked at his purplish stiff hands and shook his head. No. No chance that he would make it to 1942. So what was imperative was that everything remained in good order for another two or three years. And then … He looked around at his family with the deeply knowing ironic expression common to certain elderly people and certain very ill people, a look that meant ‘Soon it will be your turn. Let’s see, how do you think
you’ll
do?’

Sometimes he forgot the present and drifted back to what remained in his memory of the past, his youth, his parents, whose faces only he now remembered.

Everyone around him could see he was falling into one of those long, deep daydreams from which he would emerge looking lost and confused, as if coming out of a deep sleep.

‘He doesn’t look well tonight,’ they whispered.

After dinner, the young people asked if they could dance. The girls in sky-blue or candy-pink dresses
whirled around the room beneath the watchful eye of their mothers, and marriages were arranged. The first shy words were spoken. ‘Your Madeleine’s nearly eighteen now, isn’t she?’ Then, ‘I wonder whether the son of Achille Renaudin will be back from Paris soon.’ Silence, then, ‘I always thought he would be suitable for Madeleine … she’s so refined.’ — ‘I can’t get her to stand up straight; it will improve as she gets older,’ her mother would say, just as a house owner is quick to mention the minor defects of the property, before the buyer points them out and exaggerates them, touching the wall and saying, ‘Look, there’s a little scratch here,’ imagining it might prevent the buyer from exclaiming, ‘But there’s a crack.’

‘The Renaudin lad is serious and works hard,’ someone whispered.

‘It would be nice if … these children …’

And so future events are born out of the darkness.

‘I don’t understand this child,’ Pierre said to his wife.

It was a September night, warm and ominous; you could smell autumn and a storm brewing, both at once. The Hardelots were sitting in their garden, as they did every evening at this time of year, before going to bed. They’d had to switch off the terrace light because it was attracting the flies. Their white fox terrier lay stretched out at Pierre’s feet and their ginger cat was on Agnès’s lap. In the house, Colette was playing the piano.

Certain things had changed in Saint-Elme since the night when old Hardelot celebrated his eighty-fifth birthday. He had died a few months later. The factory was now called ‘Factory Julien Hardelot — P. Hardelot and R. Burgères: Partners’. The summer of 1933 was drawing to a close. In Europe, it had already been three years since the final gust of victory had drifted away. A gnawing, worrying sense of anxiety gripped everyone.
The world resembled a sick man who awakens with a moan, turns over in his bed and tries to forget his troubles, but in vain. Yet on a personal level people’s lives were peaceful. They read the papers. They sighed, ‘How horrible’. They imagined future wars. They whispered ‘America, the Depression, the USSR’, then tossed the newspapers to the ground. The maid brought the coffee. A shutter was closed in the sitting room. Agnès looked towards the purple and orange gleam of the patch of zinnias growing beside the lawn, still visible in the growing dark. The stars shone dimly.

‘I don’t understand this child,’ Pierre said again.

It was Guy they were talking about. Colette was still too young. Colette only elicited from Agnès the kind of exclamations that a child of thirteen provokes. ‘My God, that girl …’ she would say quietly, annoyed but affectionate at the same time. Or: ‘They’re so silly at this age.’ Where Guy was concerned it was more serious. He was twenty. Inside the house they could hear his footsteps, sometimes quick and urgent, sometimes slow and weary. This was how the younger generation were, thought Pierre, the generation they no longer understood.

‘He never seems to burn with a steady flame,’ Pierre thought, reminded, he didn’t know why, of the oil lamps he’d seen as a child at his grandfather’s house: once lit, their flame would rise, burst upwards, look as if it were about to devour the glass, then, suddenly, it would settle back, grow darker, flicker and almost go out. It took
time to adjust it properly, to make sure it was not too strong, not too weak.

‘I completely understand that he’s bored with us; all children are bored with their parents. I know that in the past, I myself …’ he said. ‘But first of all I didn’t let it show,’ he continued rather crossly, for the dampness of the evening was causing the old wounds in his arm and hip to hurt.

Agnès broke in. ‘I can imagine your father saying to poor Marthe’ — she’d died of breast cancer two years earlier and so had earned the title of ‘
poor
Marthe’ or ‘
poor
darling mother’, the epithet reserved for the dead or dying — ‘I can imagine your father talking about you, Pierre, saying that he didn’t understand you, that the younger generation was unstable, spoiled and immoral.’

‘Yes,’ Pierre replied quietly. ‘They talked about me when they were in bed. Our rooms were right next to each other, and when Papa got carried away he raised his voice and I could hear him through the wall. I tried to hide under my eiderdown, out of shame, and also because he was making me angry, but I couldn’t help hearing what he said about me. And God, he seemed so very … naïve. You know, Papa wore those long white nightshirts and they had an enormous bed. A veritable monument. They couldn’t get into it without climbing up some steps — they kept them in the alcove; and Mama slept in a night bonnet made of lace, with little purple ribbons, and nightdresses with Valenciennes lace sleeves.’