Sunday (8 page)

'Dare you?'

The first morning, towards eleven o'clock, she had gone out on foot and not come back until lunchtime. He didn't know which direction she had taken.

'I spent a delicious morning sunbathing in the pine trees. I found a huge stone there . . .'

'The Flat Stone.'

That was the name of the rock on which she was by no means the first person to stretch out, more or less naked, to get bronzed by the sun.

'I don't know if anybody saw me. I heard people in the woods, children's voices . . .'

Her eyes indicated the family having their meal in a corner of the terrace.

'Emile!' Berthe called.

She wanted him for something. She had wanted him for something constantly ever since Nancy had been at La Bastide.

'There doesn't seem to be enough
bouillabaisse
left.'

It was a stifling day. Nancy, who disliked drinking alone, invited him to have a drink with her. And still he felt that shooting desire, as painful as a wound.

He had to show her that he was not a child, that he was not afraid of his wife. For three days this thought had obsessed him. When for some reason or other Nancy went up to her room during the course of the day, she seemed to be expecting him to follow her. He did not dare to do so, sure that a few seconds later Berthe would come and knock on the door on some pretext.

Nor did he dare arrange a meeting with her in the Cabin, where he had already adopted the habit of taking his siesta, since she would be seen entering it from the house.

She provoked him continually, with her lips moist, at times as though she were expecting him to throw her on her back in that very room, on the red tiles, beside the bar.

She had returned to the Flat Stone. At last, after three days of it, he had seized a basket from the kitchen, set off for Maubi's kitchen garden at an almost normal pace.

He did sometimes go there to fetch vegetables or herbs himself. More often, he entrusted this task to Maubi when the latter came, early in the morning, to ask for his orders.

He must not walk too fast, for he would have sworn that Berthe was following him with her eyes, from one window or another.

Fortunately the lower part of the kitchen garden was not visible from the house. It adjoined the plantation. By vaulting a low tumbledown wall, there were only a hundred yards of undergrowth to cross before reaching the rock.

Nancy, who could not but have heard him coming, had not made the slightest move to cover herself. Her clothes, her plaited straw bag lay beside her, and she wore dark sun-glasses which prevented him from seeing her eyes.

He had had the impression of committing rape, awkwardly, clumsily.

He had never plunged with such animal passion into the warm flesh of a female before, and on account of those pupils whose expression escaped him, that mouth half open in a smile which he could not understand, he had raised his fist, at one moment, to strike her.

She had laughed, with a laugh which went on and on, while saying with that note of tenderness usually reserved for children:

'Emile . . . My clever little Emile! . . .'

It was she who all of a sudden had taken the initiative, who had played the man's role, triumphantly, to finish by murmuring, as she allowed her body to relax:

'Happy now?'

Somebody was calling, somewhere in the wood, not Berthe's voice, but Madame Lavaud's, and Nancy had once again put on her pitying smile.

'Off you go! . . . Your wife will be cross . . .'

For appearance's sake Emile had been obliged to put a few vegetables in his basket. He walked with his head lowered. Her face and body looking cool in a light dress without a crease out of place, Berthe was busy writing in the shade, beside the bar.

'I think Madame Lavaud wants you for something.'

Nothing was happening as he had expected. He was being allowed to reach the kitchen and get back into the rhythm of his routine. Then, a short while before lunch, Nancy came in, her straw bag in her hand, went up to the bar without anything happening.

'A drink, Emile! I'm dying of thirst!'

What was Emile afraid of? He reproached himself to find his hand trembling as he picked up the bottle
of pastis.

'Have one too. On me.'

Berthe had not even raised her head. On an impulse, Nancy stretched herself and said ecstatically:

'What a marvellous morning's sunbathing, Emile! Your wife ought to try it. She lives on the Riviera and she's as white as a Londoner!'

What place did this incident have in the whole picture? Was it a cause among other causes ? Next day he was on the point of following Nancy. It seemed essential to him. It was almost an imperative. He had already collected the basket, from a dark corner of the kitchen where Madam Lavaud was drawing the fowls.

'No!' he had heard a voice saying.

It was his wife, of course, standing in the doorway. He had stammered :

'I'm just going to fetch some . . .'

'If you need anything from the kitchen garden Madame Lavaud will see to it.'

Nothing else. He had not dared to insist. But he had not forgotten that humiliation, nor the one that followed the next day.

It was market day. Emile had thought it all out. By hurrying, he would reach the turning, on the slope of the road back, with time in hand to leave his car there for a while, to go and join Nancy at the Flat Stone.

He was so confident about it that before leaving he made a rendezvous with her in a glance. She had understood. They already looked at one another like lovers of long standing.

Gaily he had plunged into the bright commotion and the smells of the Forville market, called at the harbour, then the dairy, the butcher, doing without his usual coffee at Justin's.

The steep track was not wide enough for two cars. The van was enough to block it. If a car came up or down, it would be obliged to hoot.

On foot, he ducked beneath the trees, caught the sound of children's voices somewhere, arrived panting at the Flat Stone, and found nobody there.

He was na'ive enough to wait a good ten minutes, telling himself that Nancy had perhaps been delayed, and he finally turned away to go back to his car, arrived soon afterwards in the hall where his wife was at her place, still making up the accounts, which was her share of the communal work.

She did not raise her head. He didn't question her. In the kitchen, it seemed to him that Madame Lavaud looked a little strange, but, as Berthe could hear them, he asked her nothing.

He would find out in the end. In a moment he would hear the voice of the Englishwoman clamouring for her aperitif. Time passed. The residents were sitting down to lunch. Berthe was seeing to an Italian couple who wanted a table in the shade.

While the hors d'oeuvre was being served, he ran up to the first floor, taking the stairs four at a time, opened Nancy's door and understood. Her cases were no longer there. The furniture had been put back into place, and the room had been turned out and aired so as to expel even her smell.

It was not until towards five o'clock, when Berthe had gone upstairs to show some new guests to their room, that he had looked inquiringly at Madame Lavaud, and she had not misunderstood the unspoken question.

'Your wife threw her out.'

That was all. He had never seen Nancy again. There remained only a somewhat confused memory. Three days, like days of fever, which he had lived without clearly knowing what was happening to him.

Yet those three days were to have their importance, rather like a scratch which turns septic.

He came to reflect more often than before:

'She has bought me.
5

For a month he had had no sexual relations with his wife, who, besides, had not insisted. Sometimes, seeing her head bent over their bills, he wondered whether she loved him, whether she felt anything towards him apart from a sense of ownership. This still troubled him. He would have liked to find an answer to the question. He would have liked above all to be able to tell himself she did not love him.

Everything would have become easier. He would have felt freer. Another six months elapsed, of life without incident, of daily routine, before Pascali appeared one morning in the kitchen doorway, with his daughter at his side.

'Is your wife in, Monsieur Emile?'

'She'll be down in a minute.'

Berthe used to sleep late in the morning, had her breakfast sent up to her room and lingered over her toilet, no doubt realizing a girlhood dream.

Emile, who had recognized the young girl in black whom he had glimpsed occasionally in the plantation, had not wondered about this visit. To be more accurate, he had told himself that Berthe had called in the builder to do some repairs, for it was she who saw to that side of things.

He could still picture Pascali sitting in a corner, cap in hand, with his white hair which, in the gloom, gave him a kind of halo. The girl remained standing.

'Give him a glass of wine, Madame Lavaud.'

It was autumn. The grape harvest was over and Emile was busy preparing a blackbird pate. It was one of his specialities.

He had realized from the beginning that he must concentrate on local dishes and he had studied them with care. If his
bouillabaisse
was nothing out of the ordinary, since he did not always have the right fish to hand, and also because of the cost price of making it, his calamary risotto, for instance, was famous among the gourmets of Cannes and Nice, who often made the trip, on Sundays, just to eat it.

His blackbird pate was no less renowned, as was his stuffed baby rabbit, for which he refused to reveal the recipe.

Had not Nancy, who was very fond of her food, told him seriously and, he was convinced, without a trace of sarcasm:

'If you set yourself up in London, in Soho, you would make a fortune in no time.'

He didn't want to live in London, but to stay here. He had taken root. He felt at home. If only there hadn't been Berthe . . .

She had come down in the end. He had called to her, from one room to the other:

'Pascali's here and wants to speak to you . . .'

She had shown the mason into the sitting-room and the girl had followed them in, walking in a way Emile only noticed now for the first time, the walk normally associated with Indians in Wild West novels, which is also found among gipsies who go about with bare feet. But she was wearing
espadrilles
and he noticed that her legs were dirty.

Without paying any attention to it, he could hear a murmur of voices. Then he saw Pascali going past in the sunlight of the terrace.

A moment later there were footsteps on the floor above, but half an hour elapsed before he found his wife by herself in the dining-room.

'I didn't see Pascali's daughter leave.'

'She's upstairs, arranging the attic which used to be a box-room. I have taken her on as housemaid and that is to be her room.'

He had had nothing to do with it. At first he attached no importance to it. He was pleased on the whole to have an extra pair of hands in the house, for Madame Lavaud couldn't do everything and custom was expanding.

'Has your husband seen a doctor?'

Time was passing, and what marked the passage of the years most of all was still the presence of Madame Harnaud in the house for about a month during the slack season.

She could not reconcile herself to the idea that her daughter had no children.

'You ought both of you to go and see one.'

During the time she was at La Bastide she never ceased to spy on them, without seeming to do so, for to all appearances she was as discreet, as self-effacing as possible.

'Don't worry about me. You get on with what you have to do. I am quite used to being alone and I'm never bored.'

She would knit for hours at a stretch, sometimes in one corner, sometimes in another, attentive to every sound, to voices, to the slightest whispers.

'Is she a local girl? I seem to have see her somewhere before.'

Ada, by now, wore a white apron over the shapeless black dress which she seemed to have adopted once and for all. For a certain time her hair had been the subject of almost daily dispute.

'Go and brush your hair, Ada.'

Ada never answered, which exasperated Berthe. One could not even tell if she had been listening.

'Say: "Yes, madam!" '

'Yes, madam.'

'Well then, go and brush your hair.'

She wore her hair falling over her neck, and it appeared never to have known the discipline of a comb. It was black, thick like the hair of Chinese women.

'Have you washed your hair as I asked you? Don't lie to me. If you haven't washed it by tomorrow, I shall put your head under the tap and soap it myself.'

Madame Harnaud would say of Ada:

'Don't you think she's a bit mad?'

'It's possible. I don't know. Her father is a bit queer as well and her mother passes for an idiot.'

'Aren't you afraid?'

'What of?'

'Those sort of people give me the creeps. I knew one like that, a young man who worked for your father, and one fine morning he had an epileptic fit in the middle of the kitchen. The foam dribbled from the corner of his mouth . . .'

'I asked the doctor . . .'

'Which one?'

'Chouard.'

'He's a drunkard. I hope he isn't the one you call in when you are ill?'

'No. We see Guerini. Dr. Chouard looks in from time to time to have a carafe of wine.'

'A bottle or two, you mean! I remember him. What does he think of~ her?'

'He says there's nothing wrong with her. Just that she is backward.''

'Backward in what?'

'Some people, it seems, never grow up mentally past a certain age.'

'What age has she stopped at?'

Berthe shrugged her shoulders. Ada had the advantage of not costing much. They did not give her money directly. They paid her wages to her father and he had asked that she should not be allowed any freedom. It was a convenient arrangement. She was always available, day and night, winter and summer alike, and only at distant intervals would she go off to pay a short visit to the house Pascali had built on the outskirts of Mouans-Sartoux.