The Scapegoat (26 page)

I did not answer him. There was nothing I could say. The butterfly made another limp struggle to free itself from the cobweb, and, as I put my hand to it again to save it from the death it refused to avoid, my line of vision was caught by the rusted wrought-iron of the ancient well, the stonework defaced, nettles at the base.

‘No,’ I said slowly. ‘You are right, of course.’

I turned and left the room and went along the stone passage to the kitchen, and thence to the office, which was impersonal
because of the furniture, and the smell of stale cigarette smoke, and the files and papers. I stood by the desk for a moment, looking down at the bills and receipts and letters, but there was nothing further for me to do. I knew now about the figures – as much, probably, as I should ever know. The
verrerie
would continue to run until somebody, some day, discovered there was no more money to pay the wages or the bills.

‘If you will give me an envelope addressed to Monsieur Mercier at Carvalet,’ I said to Jacques, who had followed me, ‘I can post their copy of the contract on my way back. I’ll keep the duplicate.’

But his camaraderie had vanished. We were both thinking of the empty part of the house, and a return to finance and business was out of the question.

‘I only came down about the figures,’ I said. ‘There is no need to mention it to Monsieur Paul.’

‘No, Monsieur le Comte,’ he replied. He took an envelope out of the desk drawer and addressed and stamped it. As he gave it to me he said, the friendliness once more in his voice, ‘You are expecting me tomorrow? I think it’s going to be fine. They gave a good forecast on the radio this morning. Half past ten, then, at the château.’

He stepped forward to open the door for me, and I said, ‘Till tomorrow,’ and went out into the yard. Tomorrow was Sunday. Perhaps he and his wife came to Mass at St Gilles and, with Dr Lebrun, joined the family afterwards.

Something made me turn left outside the house and pass through the small gate into the neglected orchard where Julie had been hoeing the vegetables the first afternoon. Viewed from this side, with none of the sheds visible, surrounded by creeper-covered walls, the house might have been any peaceful, late seventeenth-century manor-farm set down in green fields and bounded by forest. Mellow beneath the sun, it surely belonged to another time; and what I had seen scarcely five minutes before, the broken well with the rusty chain standing
in isolation amongst nettles, should belong to the same time too, remote and peaceful, giving life to the inmates of house and foundry from a pure spring deep in the earth, not serving as a charnel-house for murder and destruction. The chain was broken now that had drawn water from the well, and perhaps there was no more water either; perhaps the spring was dry or had turned its course elsewhere, leaving only dust and rubble and broken glass, and the links that had bound the
verrerie
and the master’s house to the château of St Gilles had also snapped, the unity had gone, the one no longer drew strength from the other. I wondered why I should mind, and why the thought of the murdered Maurice Duval, who had once been master here, should personify for me the virtues of permanence, a carrying over of the best of one generation to the next; and why the nature of his death, ugly, cruel, symbolic of all hatreds between people of the same race divided against each other, should suddenly seem my responsibility, something whose memory must not be allowed to suppurate unseen, but should be opened up and cleansed.

I left the orchard and went back past the sheds to the entrance of the
verrerie
, and there, standing by the small lodge, was Julie, her arms full of greenstuff. I called good day to her, and once again I was struck by the honesty of her face, the warmth and shrewdness of the brown eyes, the solidity and strength of her body. I knew that it was not sentiment on my part which made me trust her, but some intuition deep within myself that made me respond to her instinctively, as I had responded to Béla of Villars.

‘You’re an early one, Monsieur le Comte,’ she called. ‘It’s not often we see you at the
verrerie
on a Saturday morning, either. How are you? And how is the young Comtesse? Not so well yesterday, they told me.’

News must travel fast in a small neighbourhood. Then I remembered how she had taken Marie-Noel back to the château from Villars, and had talked no doubt to the servants afterwards.

‘She has to take things quietly,’ I said. ‘She was better last night when I got home. I must apologize, Julie. The child went and bothered you yesterday in Villars. I didn’t realize where she was or what she intended to do – they gave me a muddled message in the bank.’

She laughed and gestured with her hands. ‘It’s not for you to apologize, Monsieur Jean, but for me to thank you. We were just returning from the station, and there she was, running out of the Porte de Ville like a piece of quicksilver. Naturally I made young Gustave stop the lorry. I couldn’t understand why the child was alone, and then she told me that her Papa was in the bank, and nothing would content her but to come with us. We were only too pleased to have her, a sunbeam in the dark lorry. She never stopped talking from Villars to St Gilles.’

I had followed her to the patch of ground beside the lodge, where the few square yards were crammed with vegetables and flowers, and I watched her feed some rabbits in a hutch, talking to them all the while. I thought of the comtesse at the château feeding sugar to the terrier dogs. Suddenly it seemed to me that both women were strong, virile, tender, fundamentally the same; and yet one of them had grown awry, twisted, and in a strange way maimed, and it was because of something within herself that had never flourished.

‘Julie,’ I said – and I knew that what I was asking would seem strange to her, coming at this moment, and was anyway something that Jean de Gué would have known and therefore never asked – ‘Julie, how was it, here at St Gilles, during the Occupation?’

Oddly, she did not seem surprised at the question. Perhaps, then, de Gué might have asked it: perhaps he might have felt, as I did, that this peasant woman, so close to the heart of things, might add a corner to the picture which no one else could.

‘You understand, Monsieur Jean,’ she said after a moment or two, ‘that for a person like yourself, who was away fighting in the Resistance, war is something that is planned and carried
out by the intellect. It is rather like a game that either succeeds or fails. But to those who are left behind it is very different. It is like being in a prison without bars, and nobody knows who is the criminal, who is the jailer, who is telling lies, which person has betrayed whom. People no longer have faith. If something you thought strong turns out to be weak, you are ashamed and wonder who is at fault. Is the weakness mine, is it yours, you ask, but nobody knows the answer and no one will take the blame.’

‘But you,’ I persisted, ‘what did you do, Julie? What did you think?’

‘Me?’ she asked. ‘What could I do but go on living here, as I had done for years, growing my vegetables, feeding my hens, looking after my poor husband, who was still alive, and saying to myself, This has happened before, it will happen again, it has to be endured?’

She turned away from the hutch, wiping her broad, strong hands on her apron. ‘You’ve seen them in the fields dying of myxomatosis?’ she said. ‘Pretty, isn’t it? We have come to this now, that for an animal to be free he has to be kept in a cage. I have no great opinion of the human race. It is just as well, now and again, that we have wars, so that men know what it is to suffer pain. One day they will exterminate themselves, as they have exterminated the rabbits. So much the better. The world will be peaceful again, with nothing left but the forest over there, and the soil.’

She smiled at me and added, ‘Come in the lodge, Monsieur Jean, let me show you something.’

I followed her into the small building, about the size of the dovecot on the château lawn. There was a stove in one corner, with a pipe to the roof, a wooden table, a chair, and a cupboard the full length of the wall. A hen was sitting fluffed before the stove. She shooed it with her foot and it ran squawking from the door.

‘If she thinks she can lay in here she is mistaken,’ said Julie.
‘She is very cunning, that hen; just because she is old she tries to take advantage of me. Now wait, while I find you a snapshot.’

She took a key from a pocket in her skirt beneath the apron, and reached up to the locked cupboard. It was full of papers, books, and crockery, but neatly arranged, not huddled together in disorder. ‘Wait,’ she said, ‘I have it here somewhere.’ She searched among some papers and then brought out an exercise book, opened it, took an envelope from the middle, opened that, and from the envelope brought out a snapshot.

‘There,’ she said, ‘you asked me about the Occupation. They accused me of being a collaborator because of this boy.’

The snapshot was of a young soldier in German uniform. There was nothing very striking about him. He was not posing, or smiling, merely young.

‘What did he do?’ I asked.

‘Do?’ she said. ‘He did nothing. He was simply here for a few months, with many others. He was in trouble one day. There was to be an inspection, and he had stained his uniform messing with some dye. He came to me and asked, in his sign language with a few words mixed in, if I could clean it, so that he would not be punished. Monsieur Jean, I thought of my own two boys, André who was a prisoner and Albert who was killed, and there was this boy of the same age standing there, far from his home, asking me, who could have been his mother, to clean the stain on his jacket. Of course I cleaned it for him. And he came back afterwards and thanked me and gave me this snapshot. It made no difference to me whether he was German or Japanese or had fallen from the moon. He was no doubt killed later, like many others – they were all born to die, those boys, ours as well. But because I had cleaned his jacket the mayor of St Gilles and many others did not speak to me, no, not for two years. So you see, when war comes to one’s own village, one’s own doorstep, it isn’t tragic and impersonal any longer. It is just an excuse to vomit private hatred. That is
why I am not a great patriot, Monsieur Jean, and why I do not care to discuss the Occupation in St Gilles.’

I gave her back the snapshot and she replaced it with the rest of the letters and papers and books in the cupboard. Then she turned to me, her lined, weatherbeaten face calm and impassive.

‘So,’ she said, ‘everything is forgotten in time. That’s life. But if I had shown you that snapshot some years ago, Monsieur le Comte, I wouldn’t be here today, would I? A cord round the neck for old Julie, and the nearest tree in the forest out there.’

I said nothing because I could not. War had never touched my country as it had hers. Hatred, cruelty, terror, these were emotions I had never known. I had only experienced failure and futility in my own person. I could understand the Jean de Gué who had run away from his responsibilities, leaving me to shoulder them: Jean de Gué, officer of the Resistance, eluded me. Did he believe, in those days, that if he was to survive he must minister to greed? What private conflict had driven the gay, laughing figure of the photograph album to cynicism and indifference? I felt within me a sudden absurd and impassioned desire to tell her, in the name of the Jean de Gué whom she believed me to be, of my sorrow for everything that had happened to her over the years, for bitterness and poverty and suffering and loss, for whatever might have come her way to cause her distress. But it would, I knew, have startled and embarrassed her if I had said anything of the sort, and instead I put my hand on her shoulder and gave it a pat. Then we went out together to the car, and she opened the door for me and stood smiling, her arms crossed under her shawl.

As I waved my hand to her and drove away, I thought that life would surely be delectable always and purged of pain, if it could be spent in the company of Julie of the
verrerie
and Béla of Villars, and perhaps. Gaston thrown in for good measure. But as I pictured them all three in some house together, ministering to my needs, I realized that each one was too self-assertive
and too individual to like the others, and in twenty-four hours their quarrels would have torn asunder the harmonious pattern my sentimentality had sketched. Which means, I thought, as I drove along the forest road once more, that relationships between people are largely valueless, because those to whom we are drawn never like one another, so that the chain dissolves, the message is lost. My compassion for Françoise, lying in bed in the château, cannot help the mother, likewise solitary, cutoff, brooding on the past in her room in the tower. Nor can my instant appreciation of Marie-Noel, with her grace and youth and beauty, embrace the hard, embittered shadow that is Blanche. Why should Béla of Villars bestow her person as a gift, demanding nothing, and Renée of St Gilles throw tentacles round her lover like an octopus? When is the first seed of destruction sown?

I had learnt three things from my morning. First, that through my telephone conversation to Carvalet I had committed the glass foundry to a course which could only bring about its ruin; secondly, that the last, well-loved master of the foundry had been butchered on his own doorstep and his body flung down the well; and thirdly, that the people of St Gilles, like everyone else in the world, had seized defeat as an excuse to turn upon their friends.

Before I reached the village I stopped the car and felt in my pockets for the contract and Jean de Gué’s wallet. In the latter was his driving licence, and I took it out and opened it. The signature, as I had expected, was a typically flowing French one: I had seen it, or its like, on hundreds of French documents in my travels and studies. A dozen attempts at copying it were enough to give me confidence. When I took up the contract again and, in a sudden change of mood, wrote his name with a flourish at the bottom of the page, de Gué himself would have hesitated to denounce it as a forgery. Then I drove down the hill to the village and through the gateway to the château, stopping only to post the contract.