‘Did you see that?’
‘Yes. Strange. Very strange. I’m surprised at Michel. At Sunday school he’s a very attentive and devout little boy. A good Christian in the making. He’s very talented, you know. On Sunday he sang a solo in church, in a marvellous soprano. I would have given him absolution without confessing him. If you give him modelling clay, he’ll sculpt you miniature saints that are little masterpieces. I intend to ask him to make the Nativity models for me at Christmas.’
‘An artist in the family? That’s all we need. Where does he get it from? I have nothing to hide. Not a creative bone in my body. Generations of unambiguous Normans going back as far as you like. I’m the first of my line who’s even dreamt in his sleep. Nothing on the Mangepain side either. Not a glimmer of sensitivity anywhere.’
‘Let’s not make too much of Pasteurian inevitability. It’s a perfect case of spontaneous generation. We should wait … all children are gifted. It’s afterwards that it goes wrong.’
They carried on talking as the dusk fell, one of those long conversations containing many overtones, peppered with Antoine’s occasional acid and cynical remarks and the abbé’s stolid common sense. When the latter stood up to go, the house swayed a little around him. The room stank of cold cigar smoke. The carafe was empty. On the stairs the abbé missed his footing and travelled the rest of the way on his bottom, laughing like a lunatic. Marie-Thérèse offered to drive him back to the rectory.
‘No, thank you, my dear. I’ve filled my tank and I need to burn it off.’
‘You talk like my husband, Father. Like a mechanic.’
‘They don’t yet have their saint, but they will. They deserve him. If need be, I shall go to Rome personally to petition His Holiness Pius XI. Actually, you’ve hit on something, I shall go and make my request this instant.’
He caught his foot on the doormat inside the front door and nearly fell over again.
‘Father!’ Marie-Thérèse said in a voice full of reproach.
‘My dear penitent, one does not dictate his conduct to a priest such as myself. I have certainly overdone the calvados in your husband’s company, but it is when the spirit elevates itself and is released from material contingencies that ideas come in their multitudes. On which note, the Lord bless you and keep you.’
Taking down his wide-brimmed hat from the coat hook, he placed it on his head with an energetic gesture and strode out into the darkening night. She watched him until he was past the gates and was surprised to hear him, just as he presumably thought himself out of earshot, let go two crisp and substantial farts that rippled through the evening air. But with what circumlocutions could she report that to his superiors, especially when the abbé couldn’t care less? He had two more calls to make, before returning to the rectory and a dinner of cold potatoes and a bowl of curd cheese.
The purchase of her Model T Ford changed Marie-Thérèse’s life profoundly, and even her appearance. She abandoned her Lanvin for a more sporty look, exchanged high heels for flats, bobbed her hair and started smoking two packs of caporal cigarettes a day. Her stubbed-out butts filled the ashtrays at La Sauveté, and when she spoke her breath, laden with cold, sour smoke, hit you in the face. She drove prudently and without haste along the region’s narrow roads, venturing twenty-five or thirty kilometres from Grangeville but never overstepping the confines of her self-imposed kingdom. She often took the children with her, including Jean, to show them churches and ruined abbeys and the châteaux of friends, where they were invited in to nibble snacks in large, gloomy rooms that smelt of furniture polish and old ladies. The château that fascinated Jean Arnaud the most was the Malemorts’: an elegant residence in red brick, flanked by two turrets and a pretty dovecote. The Marquis de Malemort, who had recently turned thirty, was struggling valiantly against the hard times. He had razed three-quarters of his parkland to turn it into fields and taken back his two tenanted farms to run them himself. Each year this solid Norman with his highly coloured complexion lost a little more of his aristocratic manner and looked a little more like a peasant, but on Sundays, dressed in grey and wearing white gloves with a carnation in his buttonhole, at the reins of his trap, in which sat the marquise and their daughter, Chantal, he still possessed a definite style. People bowed low to him not from servility, but as befitted a proud picture of the past in an era without pity.
You will be saying: what is all that doing in here? Why don’t you tell us about Antoine’s road trips instead, about Marie-Dévote and Théo, about Charles Ventadour, about the man with the mangled face at Roquebrune, about Geneviève? My answer is to beg you, please, to allow me a little time. This is a long story and the Malemorts have their place in it, especially Chantal, who is exactly Jean’s age and a ravishing child, with black hair and eyes of forget-me-not blue. At four years old Jean would willingly stand in front of her and just adore her, or if he could would stroke her porcelain cheeks and her long and graceful neck; but the Malemorts were intimidatingly grand, and Chantal was a shy child who spoke in a quiet though not affected voice. Marie-Thérèse, of course, occasionally daydreamed of marrying into the family, and with her tendency to long-range calculation had already mentioned it to Michel.
‘What a gorgeous girl she’ll be! And how well you’ll get on together! Next time you ought to bring her one of your little sculptures. They have a piano. I’ll accompany you and you can sing “Auprès de ma blonde” …’
‘But her hair’s black!’
Madame du Courseau was not so easily discouraged.
Albert hated ‘lending’ Jean and consented reluctantly, under pressure from Jeanne who said, over and over, ‘Our little boy needs to see the world.’
The ‘little boy’ had already decided to see it. The closed universe behind La Sauveté’s high walls made him feel uncomfortable. At every step he encountered either the traps Michel set or Madame du Courseau’s smothering affection, and if it was neither of those it was the haughty disdain of the governess who, like clockwork, a fortnight after taking up her post, turned into the biggest snob in the house. At least when they were in the car Michel felt car-sick as soon as they started moving and spent the best part of the journey throwing up out of the window, and the black woman was never invited. And sometimes out on the road they would see the blue Bugatti overtake them or pass them going the other way, and for a split second they would make out Monsieur du Courseau at the steering wheel, his cap back to front and his big mica goggles shielding his eyes from the wind and dust. As soon as his plaster cast came off he had started training again, criss crossing the country to get back into condition. One day, on a bend he was deliberately taking as tightly as he could, he nearly collided with the Ford. Wrenching the wheel over to avoid him, Marie-Thérèse put her nearside wheels into the ditch. Antoine reversed back to her.
‘Nothing broken?’ he asked, not getting out of the car.
Antoinette was crying with laughter, Michel was moaning. Madame du Courseau, pale and furious, snapped, ‘No!’
‘I’ll ask them to send the oxen then.’
An hour later a farm worker hauled the Ford out of the ditch, but that evening Antoine was not to be found at La Sauveté. He had left for the Midi.
For three years his route had not changed by a kilometre. The only difference was that he now followed it less madly, no longer sleeping in ploughed fields, stopping instead to rest at Montargis before pushing on to Lyon where, at the same bistro each time, a sausage and a jug of Beaujolais were waiting for him. At Montélimar he stocked up on nougat, and at Aix he stopped to have dinner with Charles and listen to his stories of an imaginary war so much more glorious and heroic than the one they had lived through that it was almost a pleasure to recollect it. Charles’s skill lay in never merely going off into fables of his