Léon and Louise (10 page)

‘What about Louise?' asked Léon.

Everyone in the town, she said, had assumed that Léon had somehow got mixed up in the German offensive of 30 May, which was why – she hated to tell him this – his position as assistant Morse telegraphist had had to be filled by someone new – the work couldn't wait, she felt sure he'd understand – not that that must prevent him from coming home this minute – there would always be some soup and a place to sleep at Madame Josianne's. Everything else would sort itself out in due course.

‘What about Louise?' Léon insisted.

‘
Merde,
' sighed Madame Josianne. She spun out the vowel sound of the uncharacteristically unladylike expletive as if to delay her inescapable answer.

‘What's happened to Louise?'

‘Listen, my treasure: little Louise was killed in an explosion.'

‘No.'

‘Yes.'

‘
Merde.
'

‘Quite so.'

‘Where?'

‘I don't know, sweetheart, no one does. They found her bag and her identity card on the road between Abbeville and Amiens. No idea what she was doing there. People say her bag was empty except for a float and four scallops, and there were spots of blood on the identity card. I don't know if that's true. You know what people are, my angel, there's always a lot of talk.'

‘And her bicycle?' asked Léon, instantly embarrassed by his irrelevant question. Madame Josianne, too, fell silent in surprise, then went on in a tactful, gentle voice.

‘We're all very sad, my little Léon. Everyone in Saint-Luc was very fond of Louise. She was a saint – yes indeed, that's what she was. Léon, are you still there?'

‘Yes.'

‘Come home now, my pet, will you? And make sure you get here in time for supper, it's ratatouille.'

Léon really did get to Saint-Luc station in time for supper. He suffered Madame Josianne to kiss and feed and shower him with endearments, then dress him in clean clothes and scold him for looking as pale and gaunt as death itself. While she was doing the washing-up in the kitchen, Stationmaster Barthélemy, for his part, wanted to inspect Léon's scars and hear all about the German warplane that June morning, and the shell-holes in the road, and the length of the Canadian nurses' skirts.

However, because neither he nor Josianne could tell him anything about Louise, Léon excused himself after coffee and went for a walk along the avenue to question the gasbags in the
Café du Commerce.
When he entered the café they hailed him as if he had risen from the dead, all vociferating at once and ordering rounds of Pernod which none of them later wanted to pay for; but, when he brought the conversation round to Louise, they became monosyllabic, avoided his eye and busied themselves with their cigarettes and pipes.

The mayor, whom Léon called on next morning, was just as unable to give him any information. ‘I speak on behalf of the entire town and the War Ministry when I tell you that we deeply regret the passing of little Louise,' he said in his usual, statesmanlike tone, using both hands to smooth a non-existent tablecloth in a thoroughly housewifely fashion. ‘The dear girl did a great deal for our country and our war heroes' bereaved loved ones.'

‘Yes indeed,
monsieur le maire,
' said Léon, who was already becoming irked by the old man's pompous manner. It struck him for the first time that the mayor of Saint-Luc had a neck like a turkey and a blue-veined nose like his opposite number in Cherbourg. ‘But is it known for sure that – '

‘Alas, my boy,' said the mayor, who was finding the young man's interest in his little Louise out of place, ‘the facts speak for themselves. There can be no doubt.'

‘Did they, er, find her body?'

The mayor subsided into his chair and emitted an audible sigh, partly in mourning for little Louise's shapely breasts and partly in annoyance at this young pup's persistence and jealousy at having to share her fond memory with him.

‘You must resign yourself, my boy.'

‘Did they find her body,
monsieur le maire
?'

‘We ourselves continued to hope to the last – '

‘Did they,
monsieur le maire
?'

‘I trust you don't doubt my word,' the mayor retorted with unaccustomed asperity. And in order to silence the young man and have the last word, he impulsively informed him that they had gathered up all they could find of Louise within a wide radius of her handbag, and that her remains had, according to the Ministry of War, been interred in an anonymous mass grave.

‘Thank you,
monsieur le maire,
' Léon said in a low voice. All the blood had left his face, and his body, so tense with expectation until a moment before, had gone limp. ‘Can you tell me where the grave – '

‘No,' said the mayor, who now felt sorry for the boy and was already ashamed of his inglorious triumph. He hadn't actually told a lie, he told himself, just pretended that an assumption bordering on certainty was a copper-bottomed fact. Being a fundamentally honest person, however, he would have given a lot to be able to retract the words that had slipped out. He now strove to salvage what could still be salvaged.

‘Everything's at sixes and sevens in wartime, you know? Chin up, that's what I always say. Let's forget the past and look to the future, life must go on. Do you need a new job? Can I help?'

Léon didn't answer.

‘They had to fill your position at the station, as you can understand. Do you need a new job? Can I be of assistance?'

Léon stood up and buttoned his jacket.

‘Let's see, I received the War Ministry's new list of vacant positions by this morning's post. What can you do, tell me?'

It turned out that the Quai des Orfèvres headquarters of the Police Judiciaire urgently required a specialist with many years' experience of Morse telegraphy, starting at once. The mayor picked up the phone, and next day Léon caught the 8.07 to Paris.

T
en years had gone by since that day. At twenty-eight, Léon was still a young man. His hair might not be quite as thick, but his figure was lean and youthful and he still took the steps to the Métro two and sometimes three at a time, even when he wasn't in a hurry.

He dropped some coins in the brass bowl and took his ticket, then went through the automatic barrier and down the steps to the white-tiled tunnel. This was the hour at which his wife Yvonne, who was to become my grandmother thirty-three years later, would be preparing supper while his first-born son, who grew up to be my Uncle Michel, lay sprawled on the living room's parquet floor in the golden trapezium cast by the setting sun, playing with his tin locomotive. Léon pictured them both enjoying their strawberry tarts and hoped that this evening would pass off peacefully.

Peaceful evenings had been few and far between in recent weeks. Scarcely a night went by without some domestic drama breaking over them for little or no apparent reason and against their will, and the weekends had been one long series of bravely concealed unhappiness, spurious gaiety and sudden fits of weeping. While the train was pulling into the station, Léon recalled last night's scene. It had started after he'd put the child to bed and read him a goodnight story, as he did every evening. When he returned to the living room and got out the box containing the bits of the Napoleon III wall clock he had bought at the flea market and spent months trying to restore to working order, Yvonne, seemingly out of the blue, had called him monstrously indifferent and emotionally frigid before running downstairs and out into the Rue des Écoles, where she had stood forlornly in the twilight, blinded by tears, until he caught her up and shepherded her back to the flat. He had led her over to the sofa, draped a blanket round her shoulders, shovelled some briquettes into the stove, got rid of the wall clock and made some tea, then half sincerely, half falsely begged her pardon for being inattentive and asked how he had distressed her so. Receiving no answer, he had returned to the kitchen to make some hot chocolate while she continued to sit on the sofa feeling useless, stupid and ugly.

‘Be honest, Léon, do you still find me attractive?'

‘You're my wife, Yvonne. You know I do.'

‘My complexion's all blotchy and I wear compression stockings for my varicose veins. Like an old woman.'

‘It'll pass, my dear. It isn't important.'

‘You see? You don't care.'

‘Nonsense.'

‘But you just said it isn't important. I quite understand, in your place I wouldn't care either.'

‘But I
do
care. What are you talking about?'

‘In your place I'd have left me long ago. Be honest, Léon, do you have another woman?'

‘No! I'd never cheat on you, you know that.'

‘Yes, exactly, I do.' Yvonne nodded bitterly. ‘You'd never do such a thing for the simple reason that it would be wrong. You always do the right thing, don't you? You're always so self-controlled, my conscientious Léon, you couldn't betray me however much you wanted to. It would never suit you to do anything you didn't consider right.'

‘You think it's wrong for me not to want to do something wrong?'

‘I sometimes wish I could throw you off-balance, don't you understand? I sometimes wish you would once, just once, lose control – hit me and the child, get drunk, spend the night with a prostitute.'

‘You wish for things you don't want, Yvonne.'

‘Tell me something: Why do you treat me as if I were your mother?'

‘How do you mean?'

‘Why do you never put your arms around me? Why have you been lying on the edge of the bed for weeks?'

‘Because you flinch when I kiss you. Because you burst into tears and call me a hypocrite when I stroke your hair. Because you accused me of acting like a lecherous chimpanzee in bed and told me to leave you alone. I've done so, and now you burst into tears for that very reason. Tell me what I'm supposed to do.'

Yvonne laughed and wiped away her tears with the back of her hand. ‘Poor Léon, you really don't have an easy time of it. Let's not quarrel any more, all right? But let's not lie or pretend to each other either. Let's be absolutely honest. What I want I can't expect of you, and what you want I can't give you.'

‘That's nonsense, Yvonne. You're my wife, and you're a good wife to me. I'm your husband and I do my best to be a good one. That's all that counts. It'll all work out in the end.'

‘No, it won't, you know that as well as I do. What won't work out, won't. One can do one's best, but one can't help what one wishes for.'

‘So what
do
you wish for? Tell me.'

‘Forget it, Léon. I can't expect you to give me what
I
want, and I can't give you what
you
want. We get on pretty well and we don't make each other's life a misery, but we aren't really
together.
We'll have to live with that to our dying day.'

‘Why bring death into it, Yvonne? We're only twenty-eight.'

‘Do you want a divorce? Tell me, do you want a divorce?'

And so it went on. It came as a positive relief to them both when Yvonne's emotional outbursts at night were succeeded by attacks of morning sickness. Subdued and filled with remorse after visiting the gynaecologist, she had begged Léon's pardon, regarded her stomach with a kind of wonder, and expressed the theory that this baby would be a girl. She said she distinctly remembered that, when pregnant with little Michel three years earlier, her mood had been one of self-satisfied, self-absorbed contentment. Léon had benefited from this to the extent that it had been spiced with frequent spasms of animal lust such as she had never displayed before.

That there could be no question of animal lust on this occasion, Léon bore with fortitude. Having matured into a man with some experience of life, he knew after five years of marriage that a woman's psyche is connected in some mysterious way with the peregrinations of the stars, the alternation of the tides and the cycles of the female body; possibly, too, with subterranean volcanic flows, the flight paths of migratory birds and the French state railway timetable – even, perhaps, with the output of the Baku oilfields, the heart-rate of Amazonian humming-birds and the songs of sperm whales beneath the Antarctic pack ice.

For all that, these constantly recurring scenes about – when you came down to it – little or nothing were gradually sapping his strength. He did, admittedly, know that Yvonne's moods were transitory, and that it was conducive to his marital happiness if he could occasionally ignore or quickly forget her temporary fits of irrationality. ‘You mustn't hold it against them,' his father had once impressed on him when asked for advice by phone in an hour of need. ‘They can't help it, it's like a mild form of epilepsy, you take my meaning?'