Sunday (5 page)

She was a stranger to him. But hadn't he made love many times, often with a certain exaltation, with girls whom he did not even know an hour before?

These ones became friends straight away. What they did together, they did for their mutual pleasure. There would come to be a light-hearted complicity between them.

Afterwards it was still possible to make jokes.

'You certainly wanted that, I must say!'

Or else:

'You're a strange one, aren't you!'

To which he always found something to answer back.

It was a game, which had no consequences. If some of them put on amorous airs, and sighed in a melancholy manner, he was not tempted to reassure them or to pay them compliments.

'You're pleased with yourself, aren't you? You're reckoning: another conquest!'

Why not? He was performing his function as a young male. His father had acted the same way in the past, and so had all the others, who spoke about it sometimes with avid smiles as they emptied their carafes in the smoky dining-room at the inn.

With Berthe, who had put a wild ardour into her love-making, it
had a mystic side, as if they were carrying out a ritual sacrifice together.

It was almost a drama that they had played between them; and when she had suddenly bitten his lip, he had had an intuitive sense of a threat.

It was too late. At La Bastide he did not immediately find her. Old Paola, who was peeling vegetables in the semi-darkness of the kitchen, where she always kept the shutters closed, gave him an ironical look.

It was as if everybody knew already, as if everybody had been waiting for what had just taken place, as if everybody, in fact, had more or less participated.

Even before he uttered a word, Madame Harnaud, the moment they met, looked at him with gratitude in her eyes and he wondered if she were not going to open her arms to him.

'I've been meaning to tell you . . .' he began.

He heard Berthe's footsteps overhead, which was all that he needed to make his task more difficult.

'I think, if you still want to, you will be able to go to Luçon quite soon . . .'

She made as if she did not understand, but her face was radiant.

'Berthe and I have decided . . .'

'Is it true?' she could not help crying.

'If you agree, we'll get married . . .'

'Kiss me, Emile. If only you know how . . . how . . .'

She could say no more, for she was sobbing. Only a long time afterwards did she mutter:

'If my poor Louis could only know . . .'

It was another beginning.

III

W
OULD
it have made any difference if they had had children, or if Emile had been older? The time had passed so quickly since he had left school that he still had dreams about it and even at times imagined he was on the playground.

Like most of his classmates, no doubt, he used to play a role for himself when he was a child, more or less conscientiously, trying to show himself to the others as he would have liked to be. And the role he had chosen was that of a little tough guy, a cynical young thug who would not let himself be taken for a ride.

Yet now already, scarcely grown-up, he was married, with a mother-in-law, responsibilities, a considerable business to manage.

He was not one to analyse himself for the pleasure of it, nor to look at himself in a glass. Nevertheless he sometimes had the sensation of floating, ill at ease, as if he were wearing clothes a size too big for him.

On these occasions he felt like a child of thirteen or fourteen whose voice is just beginning to break and who, at prize-giving, sticks on a false beard for the part of a knight, a king or an old beggar in the school play.

The world was not real. His life did not seem clear-cut. On waking up in the morning he could have gone back to being the small boy who thought only of his lessons and his marbles, or the young apprentice sneaking a slice of ham when the chef had his back turned.

There was worse than that. But he did not like to admit it, even in his heart of hearts, for it was too disturbing: in the presence of Berthe he sometimes had the sense of being in the presence of his mother.

The reason was not a physical resemblance. He could not have said what were the characteristics common to the two women. Besides, he paid it as little attention as possible. It was a fugitive sensation, which he tried at once to shake off.

The way both of them had, for example, of looking at him, as if to read his thoughts, as if it were their right, their
duty
to see right through him.

'You will always tell me the truth, won't you?'

That was one of Berthe's remarks. A basis which she had established, unilaterally of course, for their relationship.

'I couldn't bear you to lie to me.'

His mother used to say:

'No one's allowed to tell fibs to his mother.'

She would add, sure of herself:

'Besides, even if you tried, you wouldn't succeed.'

With Berthe, it was tacitly understood. She watched him. From morning until night, she held him as if at the end of a thread and, all of a sudden, when he thought he was alone, he would hear her asking a question.

'What are you thinking about?'

Why did he blush, even when he still had nothing to hide? He felt himself guilty before the event, reacted as he had done with his parents or at school, and it humiliated him, made him clench his fists.

It was at these moments, above all, that it would occur to him that Berthe had bought him. It was not entirely an empty notion. There had been a brief scene, with few words spoken, but which had nonetheless marked him for the rest of his life.

They had just chosen the date for their marriage: the week after Easter. If they waited any longer, in fact, they would have to put the ceremony off until the autumn, because of the summer season. Later, moreover, his own parents, busy, too, with their own inn, would not be able to come to the wedding, and Madame Harnaud insisted on their being there and that things should be done in the proper style.

For her, it was already a disappointment that the marriage would not be celebrated at Luçon, in the sight of all the people she knew.

The two women, he suspected, had a more important reason to hurry things. The mother knew as well as her daughter what had happened in the Cabin, and the one, like the other, was afraid lest Berthe should be too visibly pregnant on the day of her marriage. They did not yet know that there was no danger. And that was another question which would soon cause Emile further humiliation.

Perhaps, after all, they were not too sure of him and asked themselves whether, one fine morning, he might not vanish.

The fact remains that one Friday, a fortnight before the date fixed, Madame Harnaud did not go upstairs to bed in her usual way but remained downstairs with them. Having finished his work in the kitchen Emile had joined the mother and daughter in the dining-room, where they would sit when there were no guests and where, since it was chilly, they had made a fire of two or three vinestocks.

He liked the smell of them. Something surprised him in the demeanour of Madame Harnaud, who to all appearances was knitting peacefully in her normal manner.

'Sit down with us for a minute, Emile.'

In Vendée, and when he was only on the staff at La Bastide, she had used
'tu'
to address him, but instinctively, when he had become the only man in the house, she had taken to saying
'vous'.

'I was wondering if you had thought about the contract.'

He did not understand immediately.

'What contract?'

'The marriage contract. When people do not sign a contract, it means they are marrying under the agreement to divide all their property equally, I don't know how you both feel about it, but. . .'

She didn't finish her sentence; the 'but' sufficed to show what she had in mind.

It was then that Emile had noticed, on the table, a number of letters folded into four, which were not in the handwriting of Madame Harnaud's sister. On the back, moreover, he managed to read a printed letterhead: Gerard Palud.

The name was familiar to him, as it used to be mentioned by his parents, who had had recourse on several occasions to this lawyer. For so he was called, although his profession was an ill-defined one. Not far from the Three Bells at Luçon he kept a grocery store with green-tinted windows where country people used to queue on market-days.

Palud had worked a number of years as a notary's clerk, then had started a business on his own, advising clients about their transactions, whether buying or selling goods, about wills, investments, or inheritances. In a semi-official capacity he also took care of their lawsuits, and he stood roughly in the same relation to real lawyers, real solicitors or notaries, as a bone-setter or healer does to doctors.

'I presume,' Madame Harnaud went on after a silence, 'that the two of you intend to draw up a marriage contract?'

It was then that Berthe had raised her head and looked at Emile with a look he was never to forget, before saying quietly, with a faint tremor of her lips:

'No.'

The mother was taken in, imagined it to be generosity on the part of her daughter, or the blindness of love. The proof is that she had countered, not without a touch of irritation:

'I know what one feels when one is young. All the same, one must look a little further, for none of us can foresee the future.'

Berthe had repeated firmly:

'We do not need a contract.'

He could not have said by exactly what mechanism these words constituted a sort of act of possession of his person. Had not Berthe bought him, much more safely and surely than by any contract duly signed and sealed?

If she disdained any contract, it was because she was sure of herself and she relied only on herself to keep her husband.

'I don't want to insist. It's your affair between the two of you. If your poor father was alive though, I think . . .'

'Did you have a marriage contract, you and he?'

'The case was not quite the same.'

It was worse, since Madame Harnaud, born in a shack on the marshes, had been a maid at the Three Bells Hotel before her marriage, and Big Louis had waited till she was four months pregnant before marrying her. Emile knew the facts very well since he now had the papers in his keeping.

'As far as La Bastide goes and my share in it. . .'

She was withdrawing reluctantly from the positions prepared by herself and Palud, with whom, they discovered, she had exchanged a considerable number of letters over the past few weeks.

'I suppose you would like to take possession right away of your share of your father's inheritance?'

A closed, attentive expression on her face, Berthe listened, taking care not to answer too quickly.

'As far as La Bastide is concerned, I trust the two of you. Emile is intelligent, hard-working, and I have seen the way he manages things. So there is no reason why I should take my money out of it. . .'

She had some idea in the back of her mind, which had perhaps been instilled there by Palud.

'As I am going to live in Luçon and as, now that my poor husband is dead, I shall not last so very long . . .'

The way was tortuous, but she got there in the end.

'For you two it is a nuisance to have to render accounts to me each year. As for me, at my age . . .'

She was not saying that she had only a relative confidence in her son-in-law.

'The simplest thing, to avoid all discussion, is for you to pay me a remittance during my lifetime. In this way you are masters in your own house and I shall have no more to do with the business side . . .'

It was not in fact true. Among the papers folded into four in front of her she picked out a draft agreement in Palud's handwriting. If the deed provided for an annual remittance amounting to well over half the present income from La Bastide it also reserved for Madame Harnaud, in the guise of a guarantee, a mortgage on the house, the grounds and the business.

'I have been given the address of a notary in Cannes, and all we have to do is go and sign in his presence . . .'

To all appearances Berthe had not had any hand in this transaction. She certainly had not been kept informed of the correspondence between her mother and the lawyer in Luçon. For her, the marriage itself was enough, without other documents.

It was, perhaps, partly love. Emile often came to think about it afterwards, and he would ask himself the question. He had scruples about blackening her character. He would be only too glad to allow that she had a kind of love for him. He even used to wonder whether it had not begun before his departure from Luçon, when she was only a child.

There exist girls like that who, the moment they become adolescents, decide that such and such a boy shall become their husband. It was a fact that she had not given herself to anyone else, that she had not gone about with other young men and that when she had come to him in the Cabin she was a virgin.

But didn't Emile's mother love her son, too,
in her fashion!

When the subject had been raised of a marriage contract designed, basically, to defend her against her husband, to safeguard her fortune, Berthe had said no, simply, firmly.

Was she hoping he would be grateful to her for it and see it as a gesture of generosity or blind love?

It turned out in precisely the opposite way. Emile had not protested, nor argued. He accepted. Chiefly because he had no say in the matter, because, up till now, he had in fact been nothing more than the employee of Big Louis, and then of the two women.

The roles, within the two couples, had been reversed. Big Louis had married his servant, after giving her a child.

His daughter was marrying their servant after giving herself to him.

So much the worse for Emile if he were making a mistake. At all events he was sincere: for him, there was no difference between the two cases.

And if the idea of going off, of leaving the mother and daughter there, entered his head for a second, he did not pay it much attention. Perhaps he had suspected for a long time that what did happen was the only logical solution.