Sunday (16 page)

Wasn't it only natural to regret that there hadn't been any witnesses?

VIII

W
HILE
he was at the wheel of his van, threading his way amongst the obstacles and the commotion of the Rue Louis-Blanc, and then, higher up, as he skirted the cemetery wall on his way to Rocheville, yet another wave carried him forward.

He was not posing to himself, not putting on airs. If that had happened to him occasionally during the course of the past few weeks, rather as some people burst into song in the dark, he had rediscovered today, ever since waking up, the same contact with people and things which he had known in his childhood.

On the kitchen doorstep, for example, with his cup of coffee in his hand, he had taken in the scenery, had become one with it, and since then, along the road, at the market, in the harbour, he had not ceased to be an integral part of a fine Sunday.

On his way he looked at the old, reddened stones of Mougins on the hill, a new petrol pump beside which a small girl was playing with a doll, peasants in their Sunday best coming down the road as far as the bus stop.

Everything was linked together, living in an ample and serene rhythm. He turned to the left, and along the pebbly road which led off up the hill, pine trees sprang into the air, here and there allowing a glimpse of the Flat Stone which evoked a warm memory for him.

He did not hurry towards his destiny, and it was without haste, without feverishness that he drew up, singing in snatches, in the silver-coloured van, opposite the kitchen door.

He climbed out. Only four yards separated him from the door. There was nobody on the terrace. He did not expect to see anyone on it at this hour, and he had caught sight of the straw hats of the two residents, Mademoiselle Baes and Madame Delcour, floating along hedge-high in the lane to Pegomas.

As usual the two leaves of the olive-green painted shutters were scarcely ajar, so as to let in just enough light, while at the same time forming a barrier against the heat.

He opened one of them. He almost spoke, said a name, any name, the name of the first person he would see, so accustomed was he to there being someone there, male or female, to help him unload the crates.

For once, the kitchen was empty. It struck him all the more forcibly that the only sign of life, a strange vibrating life, was the lid of an enormous saucepan in which water was boiling.

He went into the dining-room, where the bar was, which occupied almost the whole of the ground floor. He had been expecting to see Berthe there busy writing out the menus, in her corner by the bay window.

There was nobody there, and on one of the tables lay the pale blue jumper he had seen Mademoiselle Baes knitting.

Disconcerted, he strode over to the foot of the stairs, cocked his head to listen.

He couldn't understand it, anyway didn't stop to think. This, in fact, was the only moment of real panic, which had no connection with what had been planned.

It did not occur to him that this was the hour at which, especially on Sundays, La Bastide appeared at its emptiest. A hotel is like a theatre, with its life in the wings on the one hand, and life in the auditorium on the other. On both sides of the curtain a certain time is needed for everything to get into step, and, for instance, when the first spectators came into the half-lit auditorium, an uninitiated person would scarcely be able to believe that a quarter of an hour later all the seats would be filled.

In the wings, too, among the stage-hands bustling about, the actors waiting in their dressing-rooms, a sort of miracle has to take place each night to ensure that everybody is on stage when the curtain goes up.

At La Bastide, everybody had more or less his fixed task. It was possible that Maubi had gone to fetch some vegetables from the kitchen garden, that Eugène, the new waiter hired the week before, was changing and combing his hair before everyone went to his post.

For each one in particular their absence was explicable, but what gave the house an unreal, disquieting atmosphere was the absence of everybody at the same moment.

For a few seconds he genuinely lost his hold on himself.

'Madame Lavaud! . . . Ada!'

He bounded up the stairs, opened the door of the first bedroom, then the second, which was the two Belgian women's. Finally, in the next room, he came across Ada dusting.

'What's happening? What are you doing?'

She could not understand what he was so excited about.

'There was a telephone call from some people in Marseilles to book two rooms. They are on their way and Madame told me . . .'

'Where is she?'

'Isn't she downstairs?'

'And Marie?'

The one with the squint, who was really called Bertha and whom they had rechristened. Not he. His wife, annoyed at a servant having the same Christian name as herself.

'I thought she was in the kitchen.'

He went down, found Marie in her usual place, looking as if she had never moved.

'Where were you?'

'In the toilet.'

It was idiotic. He was annoyed with himself.

'And Maubi?'

'He's gone to get some tomatoes.'

'Eugène?'

'He must be there . . .'

She didn't say where. There was nobody besides himself who had noticed the momentary void and been affected by it.

'Help me unload the van.'

He was busy carrying the crates when Berthe and Eugène came out of the Cabin, and for a brief moment his sense of unreality returned. Because the Cabin served as his meeting-place with Ada, an association of ideas had just taken place in his mind.

His wife ignored him. Standing in front of the building, she was giving orders to which Eugène was listening attentively.

It was simple. Everything was simple and he had been wrong to allow himself to be thrown off his balance. In fact there had been not one, but two telephone calls from people to say they were coming. Berthe made no mention of them to him, merely announcing later, as she sat down at her table to copy out the menus:

'Seven extra.'

Apart from the couple from Marseilles, a family with three children was on its way from Limoges, and must at that moment have been somewhere on the road between Toulon and Saint-Raphaël.

Berthe had gone to make sure the Cabin was in order for the new guests, bringing sheets and towels, and taking not only Madame Lavaud but Eugène as well to help her make the beds.

Emile finally came back to reality again, annoyed at having been afraid without any reason, regretting it all the more because Berthe appeared to have noticed. There were a thousand nuances in her way of looking at him. At times, as with Emile's mother, it resembled the studied attention of someone with weak eyes trying to read small print. At others, it carried a trace of suspicion.

On some mornings she affected an air of melancholy and dignity, and one might have thought she was ready to trample on her pride so as to forgive him and take up their former life.

Her most common expression was one of loneliness bravely borne, the attitude of a woman who is doing her duty towards, and in spite of, everyone, and bears without complaint the burden of the entire household.

There was resignation, too, and more seldom a touch of indulgence, which irritated Emile even more. On these occasions she seemed to be calling the world to witness:

'My husband is young. Men remain children for a long time. He is infatuated with this girl and it will take time for it to pass. He is not responsible. One day, he will come back, and then he will find me again.'

Today it was another note again, which he knew too, one tinged with irony:

'My poor Emile! You think you are a man, without realizing that you're just a schoolboy, that I can read your thoughts behind your stubborn brow, that I know all . . .'

Madame Know-All! Usually it sent him beside himself with rage. This morning, he had been too disconcerted by the emptiness of the house.

Thank God she would not be looking at him much longer with one of those expression of hers, and he was going to prove that, however superior she might feel to others, she had been mistaken all along the line.

He went up to change, and on the stairs he met poor Ada, who must have been wondering how he was going to do it. Emile's decision having been taken, in fact, on the Sunday of the episode of the
cassoulet,
when Berthe had been so ill, it wasn't so difficult for Ada, whose eyes met his at that moment, to guess the method he had chosen.

She knew the date which had been fixed. He had begun by counting in months.

'In three months . . .'

'In two months . . .'

Then in weeks.

'In three ... in two weeks . . .'

And he had ended by murmuring soothingly:

'On Sunday!'

He hadn't mentioned the time to her, nor the risotto. Wasn't she something of a witch? At heart, she sometimes frightened him. She seldom spoke a complete sentence and often, when she came to him during the siesta hour, she did not utter a word.

She expressed herself principally with her eyes. People who didn't know her took her at first for a deaf-mute, and when he had seen her in the early days in the pine-wood this had been his first impression as well.

She belonged to a different world, the world of trees and animals, and he suspected her of knowing things which the common run of mortals do not know. He would not have been surprised to learn that she could foretell the future, or that she knew how to cast a spell.

Who knows if she hadn't cast a spell on Berthe, if it were not because of her that, unknown to himself, Emile was acting in the way he was ?

Fortunately he had become drawn, little by little, into the mechanism, into the routine of summer Sundays. From his kitchen, where he cleaned the calamaries with his own hands, so as not to lose any of their ink, he could hear the first cars drawing up. It wouldn't be long now before somebody called out gaily:

'Is Emile there?'

The customers enjoyed calling the landlord by his first name, putting their heads round the kitchen door, and, in the case of the more intimate ones, coming in and handling the fish.

'Well Emile, what's good today?'

It was worse for the ones who came with friends who didn't yet know the place. The latter used to try and show they felt at home.

'Come and have a glass of
rosé
with us, Emile. Come on!'

He would wipe his hands on a cloth, slip round behind the bar. It was all part of the job.

He had to make three trips that morning, gaining a brief respite from the heat of the oven.

Six customers, out of the ordinary run, arrived early, young people from Grasse on their way to Cannes for a football match, who had decided to have something to eat on the road. They had been misdirected and, dressed in their Sunday clothes, they were trying to affect an air of self-assurance, aware at the same time that they had come to the wrong hotel.

Seeing the menu and the prices, they had almost gone away. Then they had held a whispered council and had ended by ordering some
bouillabaisse
and
vin rosé.

They were on their third bottle and were talking and laughing loudly, determined to have their money's worth.

The two Belgian women were at their usual table, while the family from Limoges, after a look round the Cabin, had installed themselves on the terrace. Emile had slipped a little packet into his pocket, which he had only to open at the right moment.

He knew the motions he had to go through. It was now a purely mechanical affair. The moment for reflection was past, let alone the moment for hesitation.

The empty packet would burn in a second in the flames of the range and there would be no trace left.

There would be three of them permanently in the kitchen, for a good hour more, Madame Lavaud, Marie and himself. Ada and Eugène were waiting at the tables. Maubi was dealing with the wine, sometimes outside, sometimes in the cellar.

Once or twice, before finally sitting down, Berthe would come in to glance, without saying a word. The best thing was not to look in her direction.

In any case, it was too late.

'Three bouillabaisses. Three!'

Maubi had just passed through the kitchen to go down to the cellar, and it was then, as Emile was serving out the portions on to the dishes, that a thought struck him, so simple, so obvious, that he wondered how it had not occurred to him during the previous eleven months.

Madame Harnaud!

He had foreseen everything, except her. In his mind's eye he had placed her in Luçon with her sister and her niece, as though she were destined to remain there eternally.

Now this was wrong. He knew her well enough. Berthe had not been alone in buying Emile. The mother had taken part in the transaction and perhaps, even, she was the one who first had the idea.

Already, when he was in Vichy and it had been suggested that he should go . . . Big Louis had written the letter, certainly, but hadn't his wife prompted it?

She knew her husband was ill. They were going to be alone, two women, in this Bastide with the fittings not yet finished and the clientele non-existent . . .

Emile remembered Madame Harnaud's discreet way of going upstairs, each evening, after the death of Big Louis, so as to leave him alone with her daughter.

What hope was there that this woman, once her daughter was dead, would stay on in Luçon without coming to defend what remained partly her property?

She would come running, no doubt about it. For the moment, she trusted Berthe to keep an eye on Emile. With Berthe gone, she would be forced to take on the task herself.

All this imprinted itself in his mind in the space of a few seconds. His forehead was bathed in sweat, because of the heat from the range, but it seemed unhealthy to him now, like the sweat when one has a fever.

With Berthe, there existed a kind of pact, and he no longer needed to hide from her to make Ada come to the Cabin.

His mother-in-law, on the other hand, was not in the pact and he had deluded himself in imagining that he could simply bring Ada down one floor and put her in his bed.