Sunday (14 page)

It wasn't he who had started it. He had never tried to oppress anyone. The proof was that everybody in the country had adopted him and liked him, while Berthe remained not only an outsider but an enemy.

He was defending what was most precious to him, no matter whether it was called vanity, self-esteem or pride, and as far as he was concerned he knew that he was not proud, that he asked simply to be allowed to live the life of a man.

Berthe went on watching him, not to say spying on him, as she had always done. Though it had exasperated Emile so much in the past, before his decision, now it acted as a kind of spur.

Not only did she thus render the outcome still more inevitable, but the game became more difficult and therefore more exciting.

He sensed that she was intrigued by his change of mood, and every time he began humming, not to irritate her, but because he really was in a good humour, she could not prevent herself from giving a start, then looking at him to try to understand.

She was acquiring the habit of coming into the kitchen a dozen times a day, though she had no business there, and she occasionally opened the store cupboard, the refrigerator, lifted the lids off the saucepans.

Was she thinking of poison? It was quite likely. And the moment came when he went a step further, when he wondered whether she wasn't planning independently to poison him. Isn't poisoning, in most cases, a woman's crime? This, too, he had learned in Marseilles.

As he was in charge of the kitchen and he seldom took a regular meal, it was more difficult for her to do than it was for him.

As for guessing the reasons behind his actions and behaviour, cunning though she was, Berthe would never be able to do it.

Chance—doesn't chance always back the one who is in the right?—had brought him to the discovery of another treatise, a book he had not seen on the shelves of the Marseilles bookshop and which dealt in more precise terms than the others.

One morning, as he was cleaning the fish, a hogfish spike had caught under his thumb-nail, and he had tried in vain to extract it with the point of a penknife, then with a pair of pincers. Madame Lavaud had tried too. Now everybody on the Riveria knows that cuts caused by hog-fish have a tendency to turn septic.

In the afternoon, instead of taking a siesta, he had decided to go and see Dr. Chouard, who would have the necessary instruments. So he had gone to Pegomas, where he had been surprised to find the house, which was usually so dilapidated, looking almost clean. He had rung the bell. A girl of about thirty, well formed and attractive, whom he didn't know, had opened the door.

'Is the doctor in?'

'You're the owner of La Bastide, aren't you?'

He wondered how she had recognized him, and was pleased.

'Come in. The doctor has gone to take a patient to hospital, but he won't be long.'

So Chouard had replaced old Paola, who had probably become useless, with this pretty girl who had managed to clean the house from top to bottom. Was she his mistress? It was possible, probable even.

And that pleased him, ultimately, for it proved . . .

No matter what it proved. He understood himself. He was not like Chouard, was not the same age and, moreover, he was not a drunkard. All the same there were points in common, or to be more accurate there might be one day.

'Come in, Monsieur Emile.'

She knew his first name as well. She did not leave him in the almost gloomy waiting-room, but opened the padded door of the consulting-room.

'I'll ring the hospital and tell him you're here.'

She dialled the number. She was very different from Ada, who never seemed to have washed. Her bosom was ample, her hips and thighs well-covered, and she smelled of cleanliness and soap, while her rather full lips parted naturally in a smile.

'Broussailles Hospital? Is Dr. Chouard still there? . . . Yes . . . I'll wait . . .'

She explained to Emile:

'When he left he told me he was just going in and coming back in the bus.'

And, into the receiver:

'Hello ... Is that you, sir? . . . It's Germaine here ... I wanted to know if you were coming back, because Monsieur Emile is here in your consulting-room . . . From La Bastide, yes . . . What? . . .'

She turned to Emile.

'Is it for yourself?'

He nodded.

'It's for himself . . . No, he isn't in a hurry ... All right! I'll tell him . . .'

Then, hanging up:

'He is catching the bus in five minutes. I must go upstairs to finish doing the bedroom. You will find some magazines . . .'

The shutters were three-quarters closed, as in most houses on the Riviera, and the shade was cool. The shelves on the wall overflowed with books, and he ran his eyes mechanically over their titles.

It was in this way that he came across a large volume, bound in grey cloth, with a blue title-label reading:
Legal and Judiciary Medicine.

Curious to see whether it mentioned arsenic poisoning, he soon found some sections far more explicit than the ones in Marseilles.

Here there was nobody to watch him. Chouard would be a good half-hour reaching Pegomas in the bus, and this gave Emile time to commit to memory what he needed to know.

'. . . The peracute form {arsenical cholera) produces the symptoms of a choleraic type of gastro-enteritis: painful vomiting, at first alimentary, then
consisting of bile and blood, is followed by colic; abundant serous diarrhoea, in rice-water particles; violent thirst; constriction of the throat; anuresis; cramp; petechiae; sensation of cold in the limbs; hypothermia; quickening, weakness and
irregularity of the pulse, ending in collapse in a few hours, 24 at the maximum . . .'

He was amazed to find that he understood almost everything. 'Rice-water' no doubt had something to do with rice. 'Hypothermia' meant a general lowering of the temperature. Practically only 'anuresis' and 'petechiae' remained wrapped in mystery.

This information confirmed that the symptoms resembled, only in more serious form, those which Berthe had shown after eating the tinned
cassoulet.

And wasn't it Chouard himself who had spoken of her bad liver and gall-bladder?

'Acute form.— The symptoms develop an hour or two after ingestion of the poison, with gastro-intestinal disorders, accompanied by a burning sensation, violent thirst and ptyalism . . .'

He didn't understand the word 'ptyalism' either, but the rest still held good.

He glanced through the pages, pausing now and then at a paragraph, his lips moving as when he learned his lessons as a schoolboy.

'
The difficulty of making a precise diagnosis explains the frequency of successive
acts of poisoning by the same individual, who can trust that he will not be brought to account until the day when the recurrence and similarity of the episodes provide a clue for the diagnosis.'

That was the most interesting sentence of all. Didn't it prove that by poisoning only one person, in favourable conditions—which was the case with Berthe, who had already shown symptoms almost identical— and by taking all possible precautions, he was running no risk?

He made sure he put the book back exactly in its place, and he opened a magazine long before Chouard's return. If his new servant had put some order into the house, the doctor himself remained the same, with a faint smell of wine still hanging round the thick, reddish hair of his beard.

His hand trembled a little, with the trembling of alcoholics, as he pulled the spike from Emile's thumb.

'How are things up there? It's a good while since I called.'

He gave a wink, with a jerk of his head towards the door, to explain that it was on account of Germaine. He was lascivious by nature, and there were stories of scandals with women patients he had made undress without any reason. There had even been talk of bringing him before the Medical Council.

At the stage he had reached, it made no difference to him; nothing made any difference to him; he laughed at everything, like a faun or a satyr, and he probably had no more faith in medicine than in humanity.

'How is our charming Berthe?'

The irony underlining the word 'charming' delighted Emile.

'Still a bit seedy. Every so often she complains of pains, sometimes her stomach and sometimes her throat.'

This gave him an idea, which he forthwith put into practice. When he went to play bowls at Mouans-Sartoux, people asked after his wife, even people who knew her only by sight. They had even given her a nickname, which a few of them risked using to his face.

'How's the frigidaire?'

Instead of replying carelessly that she was all right, he now found a short phrase which he would let fall lightly.

'The same old liver trouble . . .'

Or else:

'She still has her colic . . .'

And, to ring the changes:

'If she did what the doctor told her, she wouldn't eat anything except spaghetti and boiled vegetables.'

It all fell like drops of water. Which advertisement is it that says every drop counts? It would all come back to people's memories one day and would help them to regard the outcome as natural.

He was lost in the technique of the thing, and anybody would have thought he was refining it for the pleasure of doing so. He was convinced, in his own mind, that none of the precautions he was taking was superfluous.

He had read, like everybody else, accounts of poisoner's trials in the newspapers. Nine times out often, if they were finally convicted, it was by discovery of the way the poison had been obtained.

At La Bastide there were vines, fruit trees, fields in which it was normal to destroy meadow-mice, and only recently Madame Lavaud had reported the presence of rats in the cellar.

He could have gone to the chemist in Mouans-Sartoux, or Les Baraques, or any chemist in Cannes to buy arsenic, and nobody would be surprised at the time.

That was what nearly all the others had done before him and what, in the long run, had been their undoing.

There was a product with an arsenic base in the tool-shed. In the normal course of events Emile virtually never set foot there. There was nothing, apparently, to stop him going in there under some pretext or other, and even without pretext, since the shed was part of the estate.

He preferred to take his time. And he took advantage of an incident of two years ago, for one must know how to take advantage of everything. One Sunday when he had been busy and there was no basil left in the house, he had rounded on Maubi.

'I've been asking for a plot to be kept for herbs in the kitchen garden for months now. I spend my time buying them in the market, as though we didn't even have a patch of land . . .'

Since then Maubi had contented himself with planting some thyme, which had soon died, near the low wall.

Emile chose a morning when Berthe was busy with her accounts in the dining-room, where she always sat at the same table near the window. The kitchen door was open, as usual.

'Have you seen to my magic herbs yet?' he asked Maubi in a loud voice.

'Not yet, but

'Don't bother. I'll do it myself. . .'

He was known to be handy at most things. He was also known to be happy to work out of doors, and one year it was he who had copper-sulphated the vines.

'I'll prepare the ground and tomorrow I'll go and see the nurseryman . . .'

It was entertaining. Berthe was listening. Did she wonder what he was up to? However sharp she might be, he defied her to divine his exact intentions.

He did in fact go and prepare some ground, which meant he could enter the shed to fetch the necessary tools.

He made no pretence. He worked with care. Finding two frames which had not been used for a long time and were missing several panes, he decided to prepare a forcing-bed as well.

Thus all winter he would have chives, parsley, chervil, sorrel, and purslane.

The tin box was half full of arsenical paste and he removed a little more than a cubic centimetre, which he wrapped in greaseproof paper and stuffed into his pocket.

In the kitchen he would have to be careful, not only on account of Madame Lavaud who was nearly always there, but because of Berthe who, walking soundlessly, would come in and prowl about with a falsely innocent air.

But he found an opportunity to make a meat ball and insert the greyish paste, and took it off with him one afternoon. He was generally supposed to have gone to Mouans-Sartoux to buy some panes of glass and putty to repair the frame.

In fact, wanting to leave nothing to chance, he had resolved to make an experiment. The treatises on poison spoke of of 20 grammes as a fatal dose, but this referred not to a compound but to the pure product, which was not what he had.

A little short of Mouans-Sartoux, not far from Pascali's house, there was a shack on the side of the road by a turning, inhabited by an old man who worked at the quarry. He was a widower, who lived alone with his dog, a large yellowish animal, scarcely able to walk and half blind.

A hundred times Emile had seen it on the roadside, sprawled in the shade, with red circles round its eyes, dragging itself reluctantly to its feet to retreat a few paces as the sun advanced.

Opposite, the hedge was thick. On the side of the house there was nothing to prevent people seeing if there was anybody in the vineyard.

He made sure as he passed that there was nobody about and, without slowing down, threw out the meat ball, which landed almost at the dog's feet.

He bought his glass panes and his putty, made use of the opportunity to play a game of
petanque
with the landlord of the Golden Grown. The postman and the cobbler watched the game. The weather was fine, fairly cool, and he drank two glasses of white wine before going back up the hill to La Bastide.

He had seen the dog again as he passed. The meat ball had disappeared.

Next day the dog was in its usual place. The following day as well. He tried the experiment again and got the same results.

The proportion of arsenic in the compound was evidently too slight. Though he knew how to remedy this, it introduced new complications, new methods of approach, and this was why, two days later, he began lighting a fire, in the afternoon, in the hearth in the Cabin.