On Leave (10 page)

“Yes, it is stupid,” Colette said.

“Come on, let's have a drink,” Madame Valette said, picking up her glass. “Danielle, go and get Granny.”

They stood in silence with their glasses in their hands, waiting. Danielle could be heard shouting at the top of her voice in the room next door, which was presumably the kitchen. “Granny, Granny … Come and have an ap-er-it-if.” Then she came back in with her eyes on the ground beneath their round lenses, followed by a still sprightly, serious-looking woman in her seventies wearing a black dress and a blue apron tied at the waist. Her hair was white, but remained very thick, and contrasted with her ruddy cheeks, glowing from the heat of the oven. In each hand she held a vase containing half of the bright yellow mimosa blooms.

Madame Valette and Colette each took a vase and placed them at the two ends of the dining table. Then Madame Valette shouted in Granny's ear:

“Let me in-tro-duce one of Jeannot's friends! A friend from the ar-my.” Upon which Granny nodded and held out a flabby and hesitant hand for Lachaume to shake.

“Come on!” Madame Valette said. They clinked glasses, still standing (Granny's glass was only half-full and Danielle's just a quarter). “Come on!” Madame Valette repeated. “Let's drink to peace in Algeria!… That's what has to happen in the end!” When she'd had a sip, she added, “And sooner than they think!”

And since Lachaume was standing in front of the convertible sofa and all the chairs were lined up by the wall, the women ended up sitting side by side with their backs to the wall and glasses in their hands.

It was a surprising spectacle: three fair-faced women with an undeniable family resemblance spread over seventy years. But quite apart from the emotion you feel at the sight of the mystery of heredity, what struck you was the naked, almost savage strength they surely possessed from being in league with each other. Lachaume, jolted back into his English-teaching mode by Colette's passionate convictions, was so struck by the sight that he thought to himself that it was “positively Shakespearean.” Admittedly, having a Martini on an empty stomach was giving him dizzy spells and clouding his eyes. The Martini, mixed with his desire to be unassuming, modest, and open. The cocktail was so powerful that, as Madame Valette had promised, the end of the war suddenly seemed to him almost on the doorstep.

“We must be a funny sight,” Madame Valette said, “all in line like jars of gherkins on a shelf! But what are they up to? The roast will be overdone … Granny!” she yelled into her mother's ear, “what setting did you use? What setting? WHAT SETTING?”

Granny looked sternly at her hands and uttered the first words Lachaume had heard from her, in a loud voice and a strong country accent:

“It'll be done at the right time, I reckon … Leave it to me!…” Then she smiled at Lachaume, for no obvious reason.

The smile turned his head completely. On the wall there was a plate decorated by Picasso, from the “Faces of Peace” series that
Les Lettres françaises
sold by mail order for 700 francs. It showed a woman's face that seemed to emerge from the flap of a dove's wing. Lachaume thought it looked remarkably like the three women, especially Colette, who had the same-shaped eyes. But he didn't dare say so, for fear of speaking too loudly or making a wrong move and sending these wonderful women flying off like frightened birds. Sooner or later, because of the joint in the oven, or the vegetables, the wine, or the bread, or some other trivial thing, they would go away and plunge him into darkness. Striving to find ways of keeping them there for another moment, glancing and smiling at one and then the other, he came close many times to crying out: “Let the meat burn! Leave the vegetables raw! Over there, for thirteen months, our stomachs coped with rations of 1,500 calories twice a day! Did it kill us? Are we not still alive?”

“I hope you like celeriac done in the oven?”

“Yes.”

“And as a salad?”

“Yes.”

“And do you eat fried onions?”

“Yes.”

“Well, you're easy to please.” Madame Valette smiled. “Your wife…”

“Yes, yes,” he butted in, noticing her embarrassment, “my wife doesn't have a hard time of it … Anyway, not too hard. I have my faults as well, you know.”

“Ho, ho! We'll find out all about them,” Colette said. “What faults?”

“I'm a soldier,” he said. “And she's like you, she doesn't like soldiers…” Suddenly tears welled up in his eyes. But he felt no shame in allowing them to be seen.

He felt that it was like a secret that they shared, even Danielle, who kept quiet behind her circular specs. The granny stood up sharply and went to the kitchen, where you could hear her opening and shutting the oven door and shifting pots and pans.

“It's nice to have a home,” he said. “The sounds … things in their right places … you know what I mean?”

“Yes, especially a new, clean home,” Colette said.

“I do hope you're hungry,” Madame Valette said.

“Oh yes, very!”

“But what are they up to?… And Luc still isn't here!”

“Oh, Luc…” Colette laughed, as though it were quite normal for Luc to be late. “But in my view,” she added with a slightly supercilious air, “the old man and son Jean are taking a liberty.”

“Ah, here they come,” Madame Valette said, and stood up.

In the same instant the front door could be heard opening and slamming shut—with a kick, most likely—and Jean Valette appeared with a scowl and a tray of shucked oysters.

“Damn!” he shouted from the threshold, “there are dozens of you in there and nobody can be bothered to open the door for me!… Hallo, Prof!” he added as he put the tray down. “You been here long?” Without waiting for an answer, he turned to Colette with an accusing glance: Another one of your bright ideas!

“What's up?” she asked, quite composed.

“Those bloody oysters!”

“And where is your father?” Madame Valette asked in the same calm tone.

“On his way!”

Jean Valette was done up in a striped navy blue suit—rather worn and crumpled—and a pink shirt without a tie, but his shoes were small-checked bedroom slippers. What made him unrecognizable above all else was his moody and angry face. He frowned and blinked all the time, as if the light were too much for him. It's not that Lachaume had never seen Valette in a bad mood or angry. What was surprising was that it seemed to have no discernible cause.

“You having a good time?” he asked Lachaume.

Casual language of that kind was equally unexpected. Lachaume glanced at the women to see if they, too, felt startled. All he could see on their faces was hostile resignation and a decision to say nothing for the time being, which only added to his feeling of awkwardness.

“Where is your father?” Madame Valette asked a second time, still calmly.

“On his way, like I said!” Valette grunted while lighting a cigarette. “Aren't we going to eat, then?” His cigarette showed he was only pretending to be eager for lunch.

“We'll wait for Luc and Dad,” Colette said as she walked across the room in her shimmering blouse.

“No! I'm not going to wait for Luc!”

“You'd do better to pay attention to your friend,” Colette fired back. “He's been waiting for you for almost an hour.”

Then she left the room.

Jean Valette shrugged, and all of a sudden Lachaume saw his good and cheery old face come back, with that special light in his eyes that the women in the family had first made him conscious of.

“My sister's a right'un!” Valette said, with that broad smile that seemed to make his ears stick out even farther.

He sat down next to Lachaume on the convertible sofa, took a Martini from the low table, and then had second thoughts.

“Let's wait for Dad. He's looking forward to meeting you, he's heard so much about you…”

Jean Valette stayed cheerful when the three women came back in the dining room, and it seemed to Lachaume that the sun was once again shining its full light on the two brilliantly colored mimosa bouquets standing in their vases on the white tablecloth.

“Tell me,” Jean Valette asked abruptly, “did you bring those?”

Lachaume nodded.

“So I've won my bet with Dad! I knew you were the sort to bring flowers.”

Soon after, M. Valette got back, holding with great care in both hands another tray of shucked oysters. He was tall, thin, and slightly stooped, and wore thick-lensed glasses, which made his drawn face look cold and a little vague. He shook Lachaume's hand vigorously and stood on one leg in the narrow gap between the sofa and the dining table.

“They hadn't opened the oysters,” he said flatly, with a tip of his chin to the ceiling. Then he tried to get more comfortable and leaned on the table, nearly pushing it over. “The folks around here,” he added, “haven't got the knack, like”—he tried to think where it was that people had the knack—“like in Paris,” he concluded with a quickly suppressed grin. “I bet this is your first time in these parts. Parisians don't know the outskirts.”

Jean Valette tugged him on the sleeve and said, “Have you seen the flowers?”

He glanced at the mimosas and nodded. Jean Valette guffawed, claiming he had “won” something or other. M. Valette took no notice of the noise and made a compliment about the beautiful flowers to no one in particular, maybe to the flowers themselves. But Lachaume realized the game of hide-and-seek he was playing over the “lost wager” and saw through his uncertain look and his flat voice. Something about the man suddenly became dear and precious to him.

“It wasn't a put-up job,” he said with a smile. “Valette didn't tell me he'd made a bet … I'm sorry!” He broke off with a clap of his hands. “I keep on saying Valette instead of Jean.”

“Doesn't matter,” M. Valette said. “After all, he is the son and heir … One day, he will be plain Valette, won't he?” And he grabbed his son by the back of his neck and gave him a good shake, nearly tipping the table over once more.

“Be careful! Careful!” Mme Valette and her daughters cried out in unison as they came back in bearing dishes and bottles.

“Should we start?” M. Valette suggested. “It's nearly one-fifteen.”

“What about Luc?” Mme Valette said in surprise, with a flash of anger that was quickly suppressed. “It would be nicer to wait for him, wouldn't it?”

Her question was addressed less to her husband than to Lachaume, who had no choice but to agree they should wait for Luc.

He was watching Colette and was amazed to see she didn't really care. He'd assumed, unconsciously, that Colette and Luc had something going on between them; now that he was aware of it, he felt a pang of jealousy.

“You see,” M. Valette said in a muffled, almost inaudible tone, “it's on your account he's coming. For you, and for Jean.”

These words went straight to Lachaume's heart. It was hard to understand, and he didn't understand it himself, but when he realized that he'd known all along that Luc was coming “on their account,” a strange emotion weighed heavily on him. Jean Valette was standing with his back to the wall and staring at his cigarette with a mysterious smile.

At that point Luc knocked on the door with three slow, separate knocks. Lachaume was right, it was Luc. Danielle scurried to open the front door. Colette sat up, her face aquiver, and turned her head toward the entrance. At long last Luc appeared.

“Greetings,” he said slowly, casting his eyes cautiously and patiently all around the room, as if he was making a tally of attendance. “I'm late, alas…”

It wasn't a question and it wasn't an apology.

He put his bulging briefcase down on a chair (it was one of those fat leather cases called a calabash), rubbed his hands in a low and mechanical gesture, and gave up his faded brown oilskin parka to Colette.

The first thought that occurred to Lachaume, and he was well aware of its stupidity, was a kind of idiotic relief. Luc wasn't handsome. He wasn't a bruiser in the way Lachaume thought proletarians should be, that's to say, broad-shouldered, like Valette, and as he expected Luc to be. He was a narrow-shouldered weakling of about thirty-five, with his left eyebrow set lower than the right. The slight asymmetry of his lined and drawn face made him look even more worn-out than he was.

He reached out to Colette as she took his parka away.

“I was for-get-ting,” he said, syllable by syllable (anyone else would have made it an exclamation), and took a bottle of wine from the pocket of his parka before looking around the whole room again. “Wine, wine from Romania,” he said with a chuckle as he placed the bottle on the dining table, with a gesture intended to be generous, playful, polite, and casual at the same time, but which struck Lachaume as being almost excessive, for it was obvious that Luc was trying hard to overcome his fatigue and to show he was doing it “on account of the two of them.”

After that, he shook everyone's hand in turn, slowly, giving Jean Valette a friendly slap and a conniving nod, and saying his name, Luc Gi-raud, as he looked Lachaume in the eye and held out a broad, warm, and sweaty hand.

Colette had taken the wine and was reading out loud the lettering on the label:
Tragliduru zona Bucuresti
 …

“That's super!” she exclaimed in a manner that seemed to Lachaume excessively lively. “Where did you get it?”

“A pal of mine who works for the French-Romanian Association gave it to me,” he said slowly. “I thought you would be pleased.” And by “you” he obviously meant the two soldiers. That's how Colette took it, at least, because Lachaume heard a touch of jealousy in her voice when she said that, for her, the bottle was a reminder of the Festival of Youth. But Lachaume couldn't work out exactly what the relationship was between Luc Giraud and Colette. She reacted to him emotionally, but without any of the signs of physical intimacy that you notice between lovers. Yet this was something more than a relationship of minds.