Sunday (7 page)

Even poor Big Louis, who was no longer with them, must already have had an idea in the back of his mind when he had written to him.

'You're as green as a new-born babe, Emile!'

It was not in connection with Berthe that they had said that to him, but at bowls, during the early stages. He had determined to become as good a player as the others, he who until then had never touched a bowling iron. At first, when it was his turn to bowl or set the jack, he would pull a face like a schoolboy who had just been asked a difficult question, and they laughed at him because he let the tip of his tongue stick out.

Then he would sometimes practise all alone on the terrace, in order to show them one day that he was as good as they were.

It was Dr. Chouard who, surprising him thus, had made the remark:
'You're as green as a new-born babe, Emile!'

As far as bowls was concerned, at all events, he had proved that that wasn't true, for he had become one of the best players in Mouans-Sartoux.

Sometimes Dr. Chouard would come and join in the game. He lived at Pegomas, in a dilapidated house, where Paola, when she had had to leave La Bastide, had found refuge.

The doctor was as untidy as his servant, his shirt always doubtfully clean, his tie, when he wore one, badly knotted, buttons missing from his jacket and even from his flies.

Like Emile, he had arrived one day as a fairly young man, from another part of the country, from the neighbourhood of Nancy, and no doubt then he had had his ambitions. He had a wife, a well-kept house, the same one which now, from the outside, looked as if it were abandoned.

His wife was said to have gone off with an English tourist. But he had not waited for her departure before taking to drink and neglecting his practice.

For a certain number of years he had been the best bowls-player and had been a member of the four which had won the Provence championship two years running.

His skill came back to him occasionally, by some miracle, since for some time now people had been unable to tell when he was drunk or when he was not.

Paola drank as well. Emile had caught her several times swigging straight from the bottle. He hadn't said anything to her. He had been careful not to mention it to Berthe.

For particular reasons, Emile had reserved an important role for Dr. Chouard in what was about to take place. It could even be said that, without Chouard, everything he had patiently been contriving for the past months would not hold together.

It was not for nothing that he had chosen a Sunday, nor that he had just made sure that Dr. Guerini was safely out at sea aboard his boat.

As for Ada, if she now at all gave the impression of playing a leading role in his life, she was in reality only an accessory, a secondary cause. But that nobody would believe.

The first time he had noticed her she must have been fourteen and she already wore a black cotton dress which might have passed for a school tunic.

He was following the twisty road down, in his van, when he had seen her coming out of the plantation. He had wondered what she was doing there. He was not aware at the time that she was the daughter of Pascali, the old mason, and therefore that she lived on the far side of the pine-forest.

He retained in his mind the picture of a scrawny, dark-skinned girl with long legs, hair like undergrowth, an animal expression.

He had seen her again several times and learned, at Mouans-Sartoux, various details about her father. Pascali, who was not a native of France, had come there young, and started work in the mountains, where there was a new road under construction then.

By a first wife, since dead, he had had two children, a boy and a girl, who were now approaching forty. The boy, who had become an engineer, lived at Clermont-Ferrand. The girl, so the story went, had turned out badly, and although there were few details to go on, some men claimed to have met her in Paris on her beat near the Bastille.

One fine day, Pascali, alone and already ageing, had installed himself not far from Mouans-Sartoux, in an abandoned hut, and had begun working at his craft for people in the neighbourhood.

Then, to everybody's amazement, he had bought a piece of land on the hill and had begun, in his spare time, to build himself a house.

He was never seen at the cafe. He did not play bowls, had no friends. He came to buy his own food and his daily bottle of wine, and everyone regarded him as a kind of savage, some even wondered whether he were not a little mad.

His house finished, he had disappeared for several days and returned with a woman twenty-five years younger than himself, who brought a small girl with her.

Since then, it was still he who did the shopping, the woman virtually never setting foot in the village. One day when the postman had a tax form to deliver, he had tried in vain to open the door. As he heard movements in the house, he had called:

'Francesca!'

She had finally replied with a grunt.

'Open the door, Francesca; I have a letter for your husband.'

'Slip it under the door.'

'Can't you open it?'

'I haven't got the key.'

It was in this way that they learned that Pascali used sometimes to lock his wife in. As for the origin of the rumour that he had disfigured her on purpose, so as to make her ugly and discourage other men, that was more difficult.

Anyhow, before this same Pascali came to present his daughter as a servant at La Bastide, an incident involving a woman had served more or less as a trial of strength between Emile and Berthe.

There were eight residents in the house at the time, including two children from near Paris with their mother, who was the wife of a building contractor.

Had the guests noticed the game that went on?

An Englishwoman had stepped off the bus, at the bottom of the road, and had mounted the slope carrying her own cases. She could have been equally twenty-five or thirty years old, or even thirty-five. As, bathed in sweat, she came up to the bar mounted on the wine-presses, she had ordered in a somewhat hoarse voice:

'A double scotch!'

It was four o'clock in the afternoon and it was Emile behind the counter, in his white jacket. He could remember that it was very hot and he was not wearing his chef's cap. He remembered, too, the large circles of perspiration under the new arrival's arms.

'Do you have a room free?'

She had picked up a spoon to remove the ice which, out of habit, he had put into the whisky.

'For how long?'

'Till I get bored.'

Might one not almost think Berthe had antennae of her own? She was busy doing her accounts at a small table near the window. From where she sat, she nonetheless called loudly:

'Don't forget, Emile, the last room is taken for Saturday.'

It was not entirely correct. The truth was that on certain Saturdays, a lawyer from Nice, who was married, used to come and spend the night with his secretary. It was never definitely arranged. And when there was no room available at La Bastide, the couple had no trouble in finding one in some hotel or other on the Esterel.

'It hasn't been confirmed,' he had replied.

And, to the newcomer:

'If you like I will show you the room.'

Leading the way up the stairs, he had opened a door. The Englishwoman had scarcely glanced inside. On the contrary, she had asked, as though she guessed a good many other things besides:

'Is that your wife?'

IV

A
FTER
twenty-four hours he still did not know whether he was attracted to her by physical desire or whether he was anxious to prove to her that he was not just the small boy she pretended to see in him.

She was called Nancy Moore, and according to her passport was; thirty-two years old. She was really a journalist.

'I write stupid stories for stupid magazines in which wretched women. try to find the path to happiness.'

It was not so much the words which had struck him as the accent, not. merely the English accent, but a disquieting blend of irony, cynicism and passion.

He had had time, on the Riviera, to get to know her compatriots, both men and women, and he divided them into two categories. First, the ordinary tourists who come and spend a certain time on the continent in search of the sun and the picturesque, to look at scenery and different human beings, to sample circumspectly various dishes they have heard mentioned and to leave again, more pleased with themselves than ever.

As for the others, he used a local term to describe them. He used to say they were the ones who had been 'bitten'. They were intoxicated by France or Italy, by a certain way of life, a certain easygoing philosophy, and these ones became more Southern than the Southerners, and in Italy more Italian than the Italians; they would not return to their homes except when it was strictly necessary, and some never went back.

There was one of them at Mougins, an extreme case, a boy of not more than thirty-five who some people said was the son of a lord. He lived the entire year round with his back bare to the sun and rain alike, hatless, with his ash-blond hair, which turned increasingly lighter, falling over the nape of his neck, and he let his beard grow; in winter he used to wear blue linen trousers, and in summer shorts of the same material; his shoes were
espadrilles,
or else he went about barefoot.

He painted. People came across him in vineyards, or at a turning in a footpath, with his easel, but this was probably no more than an alibi. He rarely went down into Cannes, was to be seen even less often on the Croisette, which did not prevent him from entertaining young men from all over the place and, as night fell, taking walks with them hand in hand.

Nancy Moore had almost as much disregard for her appearance as he had. Under her light cotton dress she wore no brassiere and her breasts, which were heavy, sagged a little; one could see their tips moving and brushing against the material as she spoke. Her hair was unkempt, and she did not take the trouble to make up nor, when her face was shining with sweat, to put powder on it.

Nobody before her had ever looked at Emile with so much irony, nor with so much tenderness and avidity all at the same time.

She had at once fixed her daily routine. She spent a good part of her time on the terrace, writing in a large hand slanting not to the right, as with most people, but to the left. From time to time, indeed frequently, she would break off to hoist herself on to a bar stool, even at nine o'clock in the morning.

'Emile! I'm thirsty!'

She had not waited to become an habituée before calling him by his first name. She would change her drink according to the hour, now
vin rosé,
now
pastis,
and finally, especially in the evening, whisky, and her voice was always a little hoarse, her eyes glistening, without it ever being possible to say that she was actually drunk.

One could sense in her an ardent love of life, of people, animals and things. He had seen her caressing, with sensuality, the gnarled trunk of one of the old olive trees on the terrace and she had done the same with the wine presses, their wood splitting beneath the varnish, which held up the bar.

'Are these real, Emile? How old are they?'

'At least two centuries. Perhaps three.'

'So they've been used to provide wine for generations of men and women . . .'

She would go into the kitchen to sample the smells, lift the covers of the pots, feel the fish and the poultry. She knew the different herbs and would rub them between her finger-tips in the way that other women do with scent.

'What do you call those little monsters the colour of corpses?'

'Calamaries.'

'Those are the ones which spit out a cloud of ink when they are going to be caught, aren't they?'

He had shown her the little pocket containing the black liquid.

'With this ink I make the sauce . . .'

She took notes which perhaps helped her articles. She always seemed to be defying him, brushing purposely against him, allowing her breasts to touch his arm; and when she leaned forward they were visible, naked and indecent, bronzed from her sunbathing, in the too ample opening of her dress.

'Your wife is older than you are, isn't she, Emile?'

Barely two years. It wasn't the difference in age which counted. What she meant to say was that Berthe was more grown up.

And Nancy was the most adult person he had ever met. Adult and free. Doing only exactly what she wanted. Accepting no rule and mocking the proprieties.

Between her and Berthe it was war, from the very first moment, and Berthe had turned a shade paler the first evening when they had heard a rumbling sound, at first inexplicable, from the Englishwoman's bedroom. Calmly, without permission or anybody's help, Nancy was busy moving round the furniture, the bed, the wardrobe, the chest-of-drawers, and next day, when they did the room, they had found the engravings which normally adorned the walls piled on top of the hanging-cupboard.

At this period Emile was still under the impression that it was an affair between Nancy and himself. In the end, he had long afterwards discovered that in actual fact it had been an affair purely between Nancy and his wife, and the discovery had humiliated him.

In spite of the other guests—for all the rooms were occupied and there were quite a number of people in for meals—it was as if there were just the three of them in the performance, moving from the shade into the sun and from the sun into the shade, from one room into another and from the house on to the terrace, of a play almost without words, a sort of ballet of which the spectators did not know the plot.

Emile wanted Nancy with a desire which was at times painful, different from any previous experience of desire. When she was sitting at the bar opposite him, or when she came to seek him out in the kitchen, he sensed her smell, could imagine the sweat which, under her dress, ran in great drops over her naked body, leaving marks on the material.

She incited him, and in the way she looked at him she appeared to measure the strength of his lust, which made her laugh, a provocative laugh, as if to say: