Cloudless May (46 page)

Huet's vanity may have been fed, but his suspicions were, too. His drowned blue eyes became further submerged, and Labenne saw, with cynical amusement, that he had only made Huet decide to do much less for him, since clearly he needed it so badly.

And here was the Loire salmon, cooked as only Mme Leglard knew how to cook it, in freshly churned butter. There were two. It blunted the edge of Labenne's joke: “A host is either a fool or a knave, a knave if he keeps the middle for himself, a fool if he doesn't.” At the same time Mme Leglard fetched in six bottles of the Quarts de Chaume: it rose suavely in the glasses, a foreigner would not suspect its strength. Labenne began to talk about Bergeot. For the first time he talked with brutal contempt. Bergeot, he said, was dangerous, a fool who could be trusted to burn Seuilly for the honour of France. As if honour would be saved, as if peace could honourably be thought of, only when the French had burned all their own towns and killed all their young men in a pretence at war.

Thiviers looked up. “A pretence?”

“Of course a pretence,” Labenne grinned. “How can it be anything else when one side is armed and the other naked—armed, as fools say, with their honour? Can you tell me how many dead Frenchmen, how many towns wiped out, is enough
for an honourable peace? Perhaps we ought to sacrifice another million? Or burn Paris? So that other people—the Americans, perhaps—can't say we didn't try! Eh!”

He opened his mouth to its widest and threw in a heap of salmon. Speaking through it, he said,

“We must ruin Bergeot before he can ruin us.”

“In what way?” Huet smiled.

Labenne shrugged his shoulders. “A way can be found.”

“Surely,” the deputy said, “we need Monsieur Bergeot?”

Now he wants to show us his Richelieu, Labenne thought. He was delighted. Well, let him.

“What?”

Huet's nose quivered. “We shall want him to take responsibility for releasing Derval and Edgar Vayrac. My idea, my modest idea, was to force him to do it. I confess—for the moment—it seems to me a little difficult. I don't know what force to use——”

“I do,” Thiviers said.

He had cut the deputy's eloquence in mid-air, and he left him hanging between curiosity and hurt vanity until Huet was almost choked. Clearly he was not going to say anything more. His curiosity was too much for Huet, who cried,

“My dear Thiviers, how remarkably interesting. And what do you propose to do?”

Thiviers hesitated. “At the moment, nothing.”

He had not glanced at Labenne. At most, his pupils had made a scarcely perceptible shift. But Labenne made two guesses—they were of the kind on which he acted, because they came to him with that jerk of his mind he obeyed as blindly as his ancestors obeyed twitches of their peasant bones. Thiviers could ruin Bergeot. And he was not going to explain himself, now, because he distrusted—whom? Me, Labenne thought, swelling with stifled laughter. Me!

Mme Leglard brought in a tureen of mushrooms stewed in cream. Helping himself, he pushed the tureen towards Thiviers.

“They're not toadstools,” he said, with a clown's grin. “You can eat them quite safely.”

Thiviers was talking about Mathieu, using words a crusader might have used about the infidel in the holy places. Under
Labenne's smile, he became confused and broke down. It gave Huet his chance to boast that next time he went to Paris he would see to suppressing the
Journal.
Weaving with both his long hands,

“I shall speak to the Minister. I flatter myself that I have an influence. . . . Our poor Prefect is, if I may coin a phrase, the tool of war-mongering Jews, Mathieus who have done well for themselves.” Lowering his voice, he added zealously, “He's no friend of yours, my dear Thiviers. He has been urging the Government to take over your factory, he says you're incompetent.”

Labenne felt certain this was a lie. It sprang from nothing but Huet's sensual pleasure in treachery. Glancing at Thiviers, he saw from his resigned smile that he was rapidly covering this new irritant with a layer of bruised self-pity. At this moment Mme Leglard came in with the dish of young chickens fried in butter, and flavoured—it was the sole fault of her Angevin cooking that she did not know when enough was enough—with herbs. Labenne opened a fourth bottle of the Quarts de Chaume. He had drunk most of the other three. Exalted—but not so much as he pretended to be—he talked about the future of France as if France equalled Labenne. He bragged about his great-grandchildren. What arms and legs! What brains! Sweat mingled with buttery juice ran down his face. Wiping it, he squinted round the edge of the napkin to see his guests exchanging looks of ironical amusement. Again his inward laughter almost suffocated him. What a pair of idiots! . . . Making a solemn face, he asked Huet if he really hoped that he would be able to give him, the obscure Mayor of Seuilly, an Under-Secretary's place? Huet was patronising and evasive, his nose pointing in an ecstasy of political cunning. But after all, he's not simply a fool, Labenne thought: he may even be astute enough to be dangerous. He looked smilingly at Thiviers.

“Don't be alarmed by the future, my dear fellow. I'll see that the mob doesn't hang you.”

Thiviers smiled. “Thanks.”

I make him uneasy, Labenne thought. He believes that of the three of us he is the power. But he doesn't like my self-confidence or my poor little jokes; when he looks at me he feels slightly giddy, the next minute he puts it down to liver and
decides to take calomel tonight. My friend, you'll need something stronger than calomel to get rid of me. I tell you.

The chicken was followed by a dish of asparagus. Again, Labenne—and by the simplest means, picking up five stalks at once and careless how much butter dropped on his shirt—ate three-quarters of it. Mme Leglard came in, smiling, with her triumph. A vast soufflé, flavoured with a liqueur wine grown in her own vineyard, old in bottle, strong, aromatic, a real
vin madérisé.
She served it, and waited to see them taste it. Labenne flattered her, using all the charm—like the wine, it was squeezed from grapes which had reached “superb rottenness”—in his gross body.

“You've given us the finest meal I have ever eaten, with the most superb wines. Everyone knows that Angevin wines are better than anything in Touraine. So are the great cooks of Anjou the best in France. That is, the best in the world. Very well”—he filled their glasses—“we drink to Madame Leglard of the St. Maur in Geulin. If I could bring Monsieur Goering here for one meal I could stop the war! Monsieur Goering, I should say to him, there aren't two ways of enjoying life, of drinking Quarts de Chaume. Stuffed with your pâté, your Loire salmon, your mushrooms in cream, your chickens, your asparagus and soufflé, he would become a Frenchman. He would make himself king of France—Charlemagne II. What a king, what a court! You would become the Duchesse de St. Maur. . . . In ten, in twenty years' time, France will be the capital of another Frankish empire, and—I swear it—all the best jobs will be filled by Frenchmen. The Germans will have succumbed to our cooking. . . .”

He glanced sideways at his guests. Huet was not listening. His mind, Labenne saw, was following his nose through the undergrowth of his own future. Thiviers smiled—without committing himself. A good little joke, his smile said.

Labenne mopped his face and neck. Directed from the Loire by the long shadows of the poplars, a thin current of air flowed into the room. It was joined by the fragrance of the brandy under his nose.

“But we could do with peace!” Mme Leglard cried. Her eyes, as bold as Labenne's, were looking for it in the most unlikely places, between her breasts held down by a lace
guimpe, in the palms of her hands. “You know we have a camp of nasty fellows at Geulin. Not a quarter of a mile from this room. The scum of Europe. I'm told they're starving. I ask nothing better than to believe it.”

The same evening Mme Vayrac expected to dinner her only close friend. She waited in her usual attitude on the couch, her body comfortable in its loose gown, immobile. She could sit patiently for hours. She was not thinking: her senses rather than her mind were alert in their bolster of flesh. Hearing a sound somewhere in the house, she saw the servant opening a cupboard, feeling in it with blind fingers, striking the iron spoon against the shelf. Moving slightly, her hand broke the skin of the past: rooms, severed faces, even odours, scattered through her like flying sparks. Her eyeballs ached. She rubbed a finger across the lids, and without knowing that it was a gesture of her mother's, moved her thumb across the ends of her fingers—across and across, rubbing away the images for others to come. The surface of her eyes was so scratched that it would not reflect anything new.

When Mme de Freppel came in, she looked up and, from habit, read her mood. She believed she knew Marguerite as well as herself. But what one knows of another person is distorted by the lens, is smaller or greater than the truth. Mme Vayrac had the eye of a servant, sharp enough from its angle.

“Well, my love?” She had seen at once that her friend was quick with an emotion and eager to talk. What horse is she riding now? she wondered, with dry kindness.

“How are you, Léonie?”

Marguerite sat down, pulling the gloves off her hot fingers. She straightened them. She asked other questions. Mme Vayrac was amused by this play. In the old days, Marguerite would not have troubled to set a decent interval between coming in and beginning to talk about herself. Too good-humoured to let it go on, she said,

“You look anxious, my dear girl. What is it?”

Marguerite looked in her face. “Léonie, I want to have another child. I want Émile's son.”

She's forgotten my son, Mme Vayrac thought coldly.

“Well? Why not?”

“When I thought of it and spoke to Émile about it,” Marguerite said quietly, “I was being clever. It came into my head, and I spoke without waiting to think. Yes, I thought it would convince him that he ought to be against this war. As Thiviers and other sensible people are. . . .”

“Well?”

“I don't think of anything else now. I think of it every day. I almost believe that when the idea of having a child came into my mind, I made him. I even hope I've conceived.”

What a way to speak about it, Mme Vayrac thought. She felt a savage wish to jeer. For a moment her love for the younger woman became gall. Smiling, she said warmly,

“If you really want, I hope you have.”

She noticed that Marguerite was ashamed of her emotion. And well she may be, she thought drily.

“Léonie, I've changed. . . . I've made one mistake after another in my life. It's my own fault I've lost Catherine. It's not too late to begin again, with another child—and this time keep him. And keep Émile. We can have our son. And without all this killing, a decent life. It's what I want now.” She looked eagerly at Mme Vayrac.

Léonie would have been put to it to know whether she felt more pity than amusement. . . . Does she truly think she has changed? And supposing she has—suppose miracles—does she think that the way people must live has changed to oblige her? . . . She kept her pity, her shrewd anger, out of her voice.

“Well, my love, I'd help you if I knew how. But what with the war, and investments worth nothing, nothing at all, it seems a poor moment to start a family.”

Marguerite hesitated. It was on the tip of her tongue to say that Thiviers had put money for her and Émile in New York. A primitive caution made her hold her tongue. Looking at her friend, she recalled the evening Léonie stole food for her from a stall in Marseilles, hiding it under her coat. And the nights of pain and fever when Léonie sat up, sponging her and putting
cotton-wool in her ears to deaden the sound of the café piano. Tears rushed into her eyes.

“Léonie, I know I can trust you. No one else. . . . We shall be all right. Thiviers has bought dollars for us in New York; he has some way of doing it. You must never tell a soul, it would ruin Émile. But you won't. . . . I'm beginning to grow old, I'm forty; you're my oldest and only real friend. I can say anything to you.”

“My poor girl. . . .”

“What's past is past,” Mme de Freppel said fiercely: “I think of the future now.”

The older woman smiled. . . . You should think of the present, the one thing you even half see. . . . She said nothing. Since she was looking down, the glint, a servant's shrewd mockery, in her eyes, was hidden. She got up, unlocked a drawer, and took out Sadinsky's diamond.

Mme de Freppel's face changed. Turning the stone round and round in her hand, she held it up so that the light darted from it in fangs. Her eyes became grave and fixed, with the seriousness of lust. Suddenly she threw the stone into her friend's lap.

“Take it, I can't afford it.”

“Nonsense,” Mme Vayrac said, smiling. “You got Schnerb his place, didn't you? Surely he paid up? I thought so. . . . And I have your share of Sadinsky's cheque.”

“Don't talk about it,” Marguerite said in a light voice, “You know, I still owe Caillemer for the fur cape I bought a month ago. I never paid him for it.”

“Why be in a hurry to pay Caillemer? You won't find another stone like this,” Mme Vayrac said. She laid it on the younger woman's knee.

Marguerite still hesitated. She weighed the stone in her hand. For a moment Mme Vayrac thought she was going to refuse it again. She was angry. She would not be able to forgive her friend for turning her back on temptation. It would mean that Marguerite denied their long intimacy, the lies they had told together, the sins they had shared, the tricks both had played to come where they now were. . . . And it would make her own triumph, over her father, empty. . . . Leaning forward, she touched Marguerite's arm.

“What's the matter?” she said in a warm voice.