All Our Wordly Goods (18 page)

Rose had arrived at the Hardelots’ house the night before, trembling with fear, pride and love. ‘Don’t send me back,’ she had said. ‘I’ve run away. I wanted to see Guy before he leaves.’

‘My poor child,’ cried Agnès, ‘what have you done?’

‘What
you
did when you were young, Madame.
You
married the man you loved.
You
weren’t afraid of upsetting your family: you can’t send me away, you just can’t.’

They were moved by her words and especially by seeing Guy so happy. Knowing that Guy would be leaving the next day, they were prepared to give their lives for him and even more prepared to take responsibility for any foolish acts their son might commit.
They went into the next room, leaving the young couple alone.

‘This is so awful,’ Pierre said over and over again, ‘so awful … Good Lord … There are going to be hideous complications to face.’

‘But he’ll go away happy,’ said Agnès. ‘Pierre, my darling love, I would have done exactly the same for you, thirty years ago.’

‘But Simone will never agree to this marriage.’

‘She’ll have to now, or there’ll be such a scandal …’

‘Yes, but Rose has very little money of her own. If her mother doesn’t give in …’

‘What can we do?’ said Agnès. ‘They can come and live here.’

Her husband looked at her. ‘You’ve never been jealous where Guy is concerned. It’s odd.’

She shook her head. ‘I have loved you too much to be jealous of my children, my old darling. We’ve had a good life; we’ve been happy. Now it’s their turn.’

‘Happy,’ he murmured bitterly, pointing at Guy’s suitcase, at the sweater and socks, the chocolate and sugar, and the bottle of medicinal alcohol Agnès had laid out on the bed before packing them for his departure, ‘happy, when for the second time …’

Agnès’s hands were shaking, but she said nothing. He turned away, muttered, ‘I’ll go and find out what’s happening.’

In the sitting room Guy and Rose were on the settee, talking quietly, their faces anguished but radiant with love.
Pierre remembered how his son had lain dying on a hospital bed, over a woman he had now forgotten; he shrugged his shoulders, switched on the radio, buried his head in his hands and listened to the news of the negotiations between various governments. It wasn’t good. Another night of torture. And Guy would leave tomorrow.

He refused to allow Agnès to go to the station with their son. ‘You can remember what it was like, can’t you? It’s no place for a woman. It will be him and me, just the two of us.’

But when they came out of the Métro station he couldn’t bring himself to go any further. Suddenly, he was overwhelmed by a moment of weakness. He recovered his composure with difficulty, patted his son on the back and leaned against his shoulder. Guy was a head taller than him. ‘Don’t worry, my boy.’

‘I’m not, Papa. Everything will die down, you’ll see. But there’s Rose …’

‘Yes. Don’t worry. I’ll go and see Simone tonight.’

‘Make sure she understands that we won’t change our minds. We’ll just wait until Rose is twenty-one, that’s all.’

‘Yes. I know.’

They hugged each other. He watched his son walk away and disappear into the crowd. Then head down, dragging one leg along behind him, he stepped into the street. People were waiting for newspapers to be delivered to the empty stands and, even though they didn’t know each other, they started conversations.

‘That’s a bad sign,’ thought Pierre, ‘a bad sign.’

He didn’t want to wait for the newspapers. He had no hope left. He climbed on to a bus. A large gentleman was talking loudly, saying he had it on good authority ‘that the King of Italy would abdicate if his country declared war’. People shook their heads.

‘It’s no surprise, coming from Victor Emmanuel,’ the large gentleman said proudly. ‘I’ve always held him in the utmost esteem.’

The rain kept falling.

After having lunch, Pierre said goodbye to his family and left for Saint-Elme. It was nine o’clock when he arrived at Simone’s house. He waited for a long time in the dimly lit room, next to the yellow lamp with a bronze stand that he knew so well. It had been handed down from one of the Renaudin grandmothers and whenever he had been to see Simone on those formal visits during their engagement they had sat next to each other, beside this lamp, in silence, while the chaperones (poor Marthe and an elderly female cousin of Simone’s) had sat in armchairs, watching them with an expression that was both affectionate and mistrustful at the same time. The memory of those times had been so odious for so long; yet now, it seemed almost sweet and comical. Pierre pushed his fingers through his hair several times; he was going grey. My God, how quickly time passed. How terrifying and strange it was …

He was so immersed in thoughts of the past that he jumped when he saw Simone. He had hardly recognised
the heavy woman in her black dress. He walked over to her and took her hand. ‘Simone, I understand how angry you are, but …’

She cut in. ‘More suffering because of you and your family,’ she said. She was utterly furious. ‘You bring me nothing but bad luck. Wasn’t it enough that everything was your fault, everything that’s happened to me all my life?’

She was choking; she covered her mouth with her handkerchief. ‘Tell Rose to stay where she is. I never want to see her again. Let her marry your son. She’s never to set foot here again. I will not congratulate you; you won’t have an easy daughter-in-law. A young woman capable of defying her mother will not make a good wife. But she’ll get along with your wife, no doubt. You …’

He tried to calm her down. ‘There is nothing to reproach her about. She disobeyed you, it’s true, but her reputation has not been ruined. As soon as she arrived at the station she came straight to our house. And ever since then she has been looked after by my wife.’

‘Your wife! Don’t talk to me about your wife. I …’

She stopped herself, then continued. ‘I hate her,’ she said more quietly, her voice icy with rage, ‘and everything to do with her. Her son, even you, who belong to her and her alone. I …’

‘But you loved me once,’ he said, looking with pity at her enormous, pale, tear-stained face. ‘We’re old,
Simone, all that is in the past. How can you still be so resentful over something that happened so long ago?’

‘It feels like yesterday,’ she whispered.

‘You got married. You didn’t mourn for long. You were happy.’

‘Married for my money,’ she said bitterly. ‘Cheated on, abandoned, and him, dying with your son’s mistress. I’m telling you, you bring me nothing but suffering. Rose can do what she likes. I know her; she won’t give in. Keep her. Let them get married. But she’d better not expect anything from me. You know she has no money. She can wait until I die, if she likes. But as long as I live …’

‘It’s nothing to do with money,’ he said coldly.

They had moved apart. They looked at each other with hatred. A beam of light scanned the dark sky, looking for enemy planes. Pierre’s heart was pierced by the thought of how, perhaps at that very moment, war had been declared and his son would be leaving. If Rose could bring Guy some happiness, even if only when he was home on leave, even for forty-eight hours or one night, nothing else mattered.

‘Guy has been called up,’ he said. ‘He left this morning. You don’t have a son. You can’t understand. We ask nothing of you except your consent. Rose can live with us. Will you oppose their marriage?’

‘No,’ she replied.

‘All right, then …’

He bowed and started to leave the sitting room.
In silence, she walked him to the door and switched on the large white lamp that lit up the street. He found himself once more in Saint-Elme; the town was darker and more silent than ever, asleep beneath the rain.

‘I’m not jealous of
her
,’ Agnès said to her husband, once they were in their room and could talk, while ‘the children’ sat together in the sitting room and made them, the parents, feel like intruders. ‘I’m not jealous of
her
,
she’s
jealous of me.’

‘She’
was Rose, Guy Hardelot’s wife of just a few weeks.

‘If they could have their own apartment, things would be easier,’ replied Pierre as he slowly undressed next to the large bed where Agnès was lying, ‘but everything is so expensive.’

Guy was earning two thousand eight hundred francs a month. Simone Burgères had kept her word: Rose had no dowry. Pierre Hardelot was financially responsible for the young couple. After a brief honeymoon in the Midi, they had to make do with one room in the apartment on the Boulevard de Courcelles. Rose immediately began to feel
she had lost what was rightfully hers and, far from lessening as the days went by, this feeling grew more painful and bitter. Being controlled by her mother had seemed hideous to her; she’d felt that nothing could be more lovely or pleasant than living with the Hardelots. But this was not the case. Even though Pierre and Agnès did their very best to remain in the background, everything reminded Rose that they were in charge: where they sat at the dining table, the menus Agnès chose, the grudging way the maid reacted if Rose asked her to stop doing the housework in the morning and iron one of her nightdresses; most especially, the tender deference Guy displayed towards his family. All these things were constant reminders to Rose of the situation she had been forced into. She did not regret her marriage; she loved Guy with a passion that was exclusive and jealous. But it was exactly because of her ardour and jealousy that she wanted her husband to herself, and to herself alone.

‘I can’t show my love for you freely here,’ she would say when they were in bed, their warm, trembling young bodies holding each other tightly in the darkness. ‘I feel embarrassed. I feel as if Colette and your mother are listening through the wall.’

‘Don’t be silly; that’s madness,’ he’d reply.

Yet he too was trying to find a way to change their lives. But how could they live even reasonably well on two thousand eight hundred francs a month?

‘Your father could give us an allowance,’ whispered Rose.

Guy knew that his father didn’t have enough money to support two households. There was nothing to be done, they simply had to wait.

‘Look, my parents are wonderful, they are so fond of you,’ he would say as he stroked his wife’s strong white neck.

Then she would start to cry. Her tears dripped on to Guy’s bare chest. In the next room Agnès could hear them whispering; she could make out the odd word, an annoyed cry from Rose, stifled by kisses. Her daughter-in-law’s animosity aroused the same feeling in Agnès. One look, a single awkward word, caused icy tension between them. If Rose said something rude, Agnès would snap back at her. Even her voice changed when she was speaking to Rose; her normally measured, sweet tone became shriller, more nervous and clipped. She realised that she was beginning to hate Rose, just as in the past her mother-in-law, deep down, had undoubtedly secretly hated her.

‘How can you say that? Mama was always so nice to you,’ Pierre said reproachfully.

‘Oh,
you
thought everything your parents did was perfect,’ she replied.

Then, because she realised when something was ridiculous, she thought about how she was parroting the discussions between her son and her daughter-in-law and she laughed at herself, but with a hint of bitterness.

So they staggered forward towards summer one day at a time. Beneath the rain and cold wind, the famous Longchamps Races closed the season in Paris.
The Hardelots left for Wimereux. Guy’s holidays began in August, and he and his wife had been invited to stay with friends at Ciboure. But within a few days he received a call to return to the factory in Paris. The colleague who was standing in for him needed an emergency operation. The setback would be temporary and Guy hoped to be back in Ciboure by 25 August.

With their espadrilles drying on the terrace, Guy and Rose lay naked in the sun, their bodies dusted with sand. Guy grabbed a handful of sweet, moist tamarisk flowers, pressed them to his cheek and smiled. He explained to Rose why she shouldn’t be so foolish as to go back to Paris with him.

‘We’ll be apart ten days, two weeks at the most. Firmin,’ (that was the name of the other engineer at the factory) ‘Firmin gets back from his holiday on the 23rd and will take over from me. Think of the cost of two journeys.’

She found him annoyingly logical. Nevertheless, she felt it was a point of honour not to let him see how disappointed she was. Reluctantly, she let him leave.

Right up until the last moment, neither Guy nor Rose believed there would be a war. The year before, war had seemed possible. They had been separated; they had been miserable; the world could be coming to an end. But now that everything was going well, that they were living together, they were husband and wife, they expected everything around them to be as peaceful and loving as it was within them. The news that Guy was being called up again was the worst thing they could imagine.

‘Once more, because of
their
dirty war, you’re going to miss out on your holiday, my beloved …’ wrote Rose.

In Wimereux the Hardelots invited the Hardelot-Demestres from Saint-Elme to come to dinner. Over dessert, they all agreed: it was impossible that there would be a war this year — the Germans had no train carriages left. Everything would calm down again but mobilisation was unavoidable. There had already been two rounds of conscription. Once again the shops in Paris were closing; they lowered the iron shutters, tearing down notices that said ‘Closed due to holidays’ and replacing them with new ones that read ‘Closed due to mobilisation’. One sceptic had even written ‘annual mobilisation’.

At the seaside the weather had been overcast and unsettled, but now it was beautiful. The sun glistened on the little white notices (every day new ones appeared on the gilded walls of the town hall); the conscripts were being called up one after another. The tanned faces of the women grew furrowed with anguish beneath their creams and make-up. Villas were closed up. Spanish children with large dark eyes ruled alone on the burning beach and streets. All the French were leaving. They hastily packed their damp swimming costumes and sandy sandals into their suitcases, and the women shed tears into the folds of organdie dresses they had carefully set aside to wear on September evenings.