Cloudless May (17 page)

“Half Corap's troops weren't even there,” he said at last.

“Corap is an idiot,” Ligny said.

“You think that,” Piriac said coldly, “because in June 1925 he did better than you.”

“In 1925?” Ligny said.

“At the exercises.”

“Good heavens,” Ligny said. “Does that give him the right to open a door into France for all the Boche tanks? Do you realise that the hinges are gone, broken? Do you realise that the Maginot has been turned?”

“The Maginot forts can't be taken,” Piriac repeated.

Ligny smiled. It was the nearest expression to anguish Rienne had seen on his face since he knew him.

“The Meuse,” Piriac said, “is a difficult river. Hard to defend.”

He dragged himself from his chair and went to press a finger, one of his long shaking fingers, on the map. He pressed it between Sedan and Namur, as though he were staunching a wound. Apparently he came to the conclusion that he was doing no good, and turned away. . . . He frowned when he saw that Ligny had picked up the despatch and was reading it.

“What's all this about disguised German officers?” Ligny said.

“Fairy tales,” Piriac said sternly. “Bogeys they frighten themselves with in Paris.” He turned to Rienne. “You can go.”

As Rienne left the room he saw the two generals draw closer together, even in their antagonism able to understand each other better than either would understand a politician or a banker or a man who threw his money about. On General Ligny's face a flicker of irony came to light up the anguish, but the other's was calm, as placid and reserved as though he were at a review: the news had not made an impression on his finely-veined cheeks. . . .

Rienne's silence intimidated young Sugny.

“Perhaps I oughtn't to have asked that,” he said awkwardly.

“What was it you asked?”

“If things were serious,” Lucien repeated.

“Yes, it is serious,” Rienne said. He could feel Ligny's smile fixing itself to his face. “But nothing is lost.”

He turned to go away. Lucien took a step towards him.

“What is it?” Rienne said. “What do you want?”

“I can't stay on here, sir.” The young man had turned a deep red. Obstinacy and mistrust hardened his eyes and made him sullen. He looked what he was, the son of a farmer. “I must be in the army.”

Rienne was going to make a discouraging reply. He changed his mind and said,

“Listen to me, Lucien. I promise you, as soon as things are really dangerous, I'll speak to the Prefect and send you myself into the army. Is that good enough?”

He left the young man stammering an absurd phrase, and went into the town. He had not dined. He decided to go and ask Marie to give him soup.

The Quai d'Angers was empty. After he passed the Café Buran there was no sign that people were living in the houses-behind the half-shuttered windows. For the first time, as though he were seeing them after a long absence, he noticed their shabbiness, the balconies eaten by rust, the rotten plaster. On his other side, the Loire was implacably new and glittering. The day's heat was flowing into the warmth of the night; a few stars were barely visible, as young as the Loire. Deceived by changes in the sky, a cock began crowing on the island and another answered him from behind the barracks. Farther off in the country, a third. At this rate it would be half an hour before the last of the sentinels was roused, somewhere on the coast.

The café was still open. Two workmen at the back of the room left when Rienne came in, and Marie hurried to lock the door after them. She came back listlessly and quickly.

“Some soup—sorrel? An omelette?”

“Both,” Rienne said, “if you will, Marie.”

He watched her as she went into the kitchen. She still had her smooth nape and the rounded immature shoulders of her childhood. But she walked like a woman. No child has, even in misery, that heaviness women carry in their bodies, only giving it up when they die. When she came back to his table, carrying the bowl of sorrel soup, Rienne saw that she had been crying like a woman, with dry eyes. She set down the soup and the bread, and turned to go.

“Never mind the omelette for a minute,” Rienne said. “What's the matter?”

Marie looked at him with a hard look; he scarcely knew her.

“You can tell me that, sir. You know what they are up to. You know what's happening up there.” She stepped back. In the glass on the wall behind her, above its advertisement of Cinzano, he could see her thin neck, advertisement of youth
and docility. “Pierre . . .” she said. She controlled herself. “Excuse me. I know there are others.”

“But he's in the Maginot,” Rienne said. “He's not in any danger yet.”

“Excuse me,” Marie said again. “He was at Sedan. His friend Boutreux came home last week on leave, and he told me. They had been moved.”

Rienne moved the spoon in his soup absently. No more than to Lucien Sugny could he tell her that something was happening which made everything the country had counted on in the last years, its line of forts, its generals, the suavity and toughness of its culture, no more use against danger. Nothing was left between it and disaster but the bodies of its men, and the bodies of their wives and children, backed against a defence older than the Maginot. It was suppleness now against force, imagination against brute audacity, logic against brute dreams. In his mind he had no doubt of victory. He would not have been a Frenchman if in this moment, as in almost every moment, he had not believed in the immortality of France. In almost every moment . . . even in Rienne's mind there were drifts of scepticism, which he had the firmness to avoid. . . . Can I, he thought, tell her that Pierre, that a million Pierres, are as good as killed? He looked with his terrible directness at the young woman in washed-out print overall. She managed to smile.

“You would always tell the truth,” she murmured.

“Your husband has as much chance as the others, my child. And didn't you tell me that his father came home safely in 1918?”

“Do you think these things run in families?” Marie said, with her smile.

“Perhaps.”

Marie crossed her arms on her narrow body. “But Pierre is only young.”

“So were they.”

“True. It's the fatality of wars. Why do we allow them?”

“They happen. And then the country must be defended.”

“Evidently,” Marie retorted.

She looked at him with a hint of mockery, and hurried away to make his omelette.

Earlier in the evening of this day Mme Vayrac was sitting alone in her room—submerged like one of those thick-stemmed aquatic plants, half plant, half animal—under the warmth flowing in from outside. This room faced north, but the heat during these days came from the centre of the sky and turned everything in its claw. Léonie could sit in her thicknesses of flesh for hours, quite placid. Her eyes at this moment were dull. That was because they were showing their reverse side: the other, the living, had been turned to the kaleidoscope of her life. She was sluggishly happy watching it. . . . She was a child in Seuilly. Her father picked her up and plumped her down on a cask of wine. The wood scratched her bare bottom, and he laughed and sent her indoors. How dark and warm in the kitchen, where their servant was roasting eight partridges before the glowing bars; drops of juice fell on to the coarse dish and the child licked them off her fingers. . . . The gig with its two wicker sides creaked and bounced along the track, she tumbled, with a voluptuous joy, against her father and another large odorous man: gusts of scent from the vines reached them. “The child's tipsy,” her father said; he put an arm round her. . . . Between its painted shepherdesses the pier-glass gave back the figure of a communicant in her white dress: with her gloved fingers she could feel the points of her breasts; they ached deliciously, she must either dance or burst into tears. Such a charming round face, and eyes shining with a pure joy. . . .

Mme Vayrac found herself chuckling. “Pure?” she said aloud. “You were a born slut, my girl. What nonsense!”

She spread her hands on her stomach. It was as though fingers plunged into depth on depth of corrupt memory, probing for what? What seed?

Why, after so many years, did I come back here? she asked. She made no effort to answer. A moment had come when the ease and anonymity of her life in Paris bored her. She began asking: What do I want? She moved heavily along the boulevards, asking the shoes in Pinet's. She asked it, smiling at respectable lecherous men, lawyers, old gentlemen from the
provinces, stockbrokers. There was no answer. But a day when Paris was at its most exquisite, the sky a flawless blue, the chestnuts touching their yearly ecstasy, the poverty of the poor smothered in light, the Seine young and serene, she put her house in the Avenue de Suffren into the hands of an agent and went back to Seuilly. Where she was certainly just as bored—this time without the wish to escape. It had never occurred to her yet that she would die, but her body was waiting here contentedly.

Content—except for the amputation of her son. Since he was born she had felt about him as about her hand—which also sometimes did things she failed to check in time. After he was put in prison she began to bleed to death. Any moment as now when she came back to the present, it was to find herself staunching the same wound, which would never heal. With a sort of ferocity, she followed his movements from side to side of his cell, she tried to lick him with her mind, to protect him. She might have been in a cell herself, watching him in an agony of tenderness which hid even from herself a horror. Not that she would recognise it as horror. It was her soul that was horrified at what her body had conceived and brought to its term. She was not in the habit of hearing from her soul.

At this moment Mme de Freppel came in. Mme Vayrac watched her, with a cool curiosity. This cruel coolness was sharpened by affection: in a stranger she would not have noticed the marks of age. But on Marguerite's neck she noted the shadow that would become a knotted tendon. Her eye, a surgeon just touching the skin with his tool, noted a new line between mouth and nose.

“Well, my love?” she said in her rich voice. “Will you have a glass of sherry?”

Mme de Freppel took the glass held out to her, spilling from it in her impatience. She had not made up her face before she came out.

“Have you heard the news?”

“What?” Mme Vayrac asked lazily. “You mean about the Meuse? Yes, I know about it. Well?”

“Léonie, it's the beginning of the end. I feel it. I knew this war was crazier than any other war. Men don't know when to give way. Because they're fools, because war has become a habit.
Because those savages of Poles, who ought never to have been allowed their own government, got into trouble. If only I could run away!”

“Where would you run to?”

Mme Vayrac's voice was as indolent as always. It covered a sudden gross contempt for her friend. Léonie's father, the winegrower, had been so intimate with his vines that lacking rain he would have watered them with drops of his family's and his own blood. His own last of all: he was a sensible man. Somewhere, under the layers of his daughter's loose flesh, a root of this feeling was alive. It forced her to despise Marguerite's panic. Her contempt turned to a simple animal rage: she felt certain as if she had been there, that Marguerite had not spoken about her son to Bergeot.

“Never mind the Meuse,” she said, smiling: “what have you done about Edgar?”

“I talked to Émile,” Marguerite said quickly. “He'll do what he can. But it couldn't be more difficult.”

Her air of candour provoked Léonie. She knew her friend was lying. At another moment, on any other matter, she would, placidly and cynically, have slipped the false coin into her pocket. Her bitterness was too deep for that. She did not speak. She got up, moving her body with surprising suppleness, went over to a cupboard and took some scraps of papers and letters from it. Then she went to a chair and rummaged under the cushion for more letters. Her feet made no sound on the thick carpet. In its black clothes, against the dark heavy furniture, her bulk heaved and quivered—it was as disturbing as though the surface of a bog had moved. Mme de Freppel was seized with alarm.

“What are you looking for?”

Mme Vayrac did not answer. She thrust her hand to the back of a drawer and took out a bundle of letters in a rubber band.

“Léonie, what are you doing?”

The other woman did not look round until she had opened and emptied more letters out of a small box. She walked back with a grave air, an air of dignity and indifference. Dropping the heap of letters and papers into Mme de Freppel's lap, she lolled with crossed arms against an end of the couch.

“What is all this?” Mme de Freppel asked.

“Can you tell me,” Mme Vayrac said, in a terrible voice, “who is going to give me any grandchildren if my son is left to rot in prison for twenty years?”

But who knew you wanted to have grandchildren? Marguerite thought. She was turning over the papers on her knee. They were all in her writing, many of them had been scribbled on Prefecture notepaper in the little room behind Émile's. There were receipts and I.O.U.s. Opening a letter, she saw that it had to do with a person called Pichon. Who was he? She had forgotten completely: he was a broken-down lawyer, or a magistrate with his own reasons for wanting a favour or a decoration, or simply an adventurer. Threads ran, through Mme Vayrac's hands, to the hands with broken finger-nails of the owners of gambling-tables; money-lenders, bookies, pimps, deputies with the respectable faces of sheep; slippery hands into which a Saint-Jouin in need of money confided the ring he had taken from his mother's dressing-table: Pichon was any of these people, with faces borrowed from stock, or all of them; they had, all, greasy eyeballs, dry secretive lips, the air, even in youth, of ill-health. . . . She had her fingers in one of the springs infecting the country. In vain peasants in the Beauce plant sound grain, in vain men living in the Dordogne valley pray for mild frosty winters to strengthen the vines, in vain Marne, Aube, Seine, Yonne, Loire, Cher, Indre, Creuse, Vienne, open their fan of waters against a French sun. A drop from the infected source is certain sooner or later to reach them and spoil the wine and the bread. Sooner or later, under cover of the delicious French light, the suspect will brush against the healthy, who goes home and taints his own children and makes his wife sterile. . . . A pity, and besides it is true.