The Scapegoat (15 page)

‘You would not be losing quite so much today if a little more trouble had been taken in the past to look after what belongs to you. Forgive me, I am being frank. I have no business to say this. How can I put it to you, Monsieur le Comte?
A business is like a home: it must have a head, a core, a centre, and depending upon that centre so it either thrives or falls to pieces. As you know, I never worked for your father, it was before my time, but he was much respected, he was just and fair, and Monsieur Duval was another like him. Had he lived he would have made his home here in the house, and there would have been a sense of continuity. He understood the workmen, he would have known how to adapt himself to the changing conditions, but as things are …’ He looked at me apologetically, unable to finish his sentence.

‘Are you blaming me or my brother?’ I asked.

‘Monsieur le Comte, I blame neither. Force of circumstance has been against us all. Monsieur Paul has a great sense of duty, and he has devoted himself to this small business since the war, but after all he has been fighting a losing battle against costs and wages, and you know as well as I do that he is not at ease with the workmen, and sometimes that makes things very difficult.’

I thought how unenviable was this man’s position, the buffer, the go-between, cursed probably by employer and employed, yet bearing on his shoulders the real sweat and toil of the business – checking orders, pacifying creditors, working overtime, trying to keep some sort of balance, the last prop and support of a tottering system.

‘What about me?’ I asked. ‘Come on, be frank. Aren’t you trying to tell me the failure’s mine?’

He smiled, with a deprecating, indulgent shrug of the shoulder that explained a world of feeling without words.

‘Monsieur le Comte,’ he said, ‘everybody likes you – no one ever says a word against you. But you are not interested, that’s all. The
verrerie
could fall to pieces tomorrow for all you care. Or, at least, so I believed until you told us the news this afternoon. We all imagined you were going to Paris simply to amuse yourself, instead of which …’ he gestured with his hands, ‘as Monsieur Paul said, you’ve achieved the impossible.’

I looked away from him to the open door, and I saw Julie
plod back across the waste ground outside the sheds to her little lodge at the entrance. Some of the workmen called to her, laughing, and she shouted back to them, chaffing them, her hoe over her shoulder.

‘You are not offended, Monsieur le Comte, at what I said?’ Jacques asked with a touching humility.

‘No,’ I answered. ‘No, I’m grateful.’

I went out, crossing the short distance to the main foundry shed. Inside, near the furnace, the men were working stripped because of the heat. All round me were vats and tubs, rods and connecting pipes, and there was a roar and a clanging and an odd pungent smell which was not unpleasant. When I advanced to watch what was going on, the men stood back smiling, the same welcoming smile that I had noticed before, half familiar, half tolerant, the smile that adults assume sometimes to a child, indulgent in the sense that if the child wishes to amuse himself he might as well, since whatever he chooses to do can never be anything but play.

Presently I went out again into the cool air, to the other sheds, where men in overalls were working with different tools, with moulds and mixtures, and I turned in my hands the blues and greens and ambers of rejected glass that seemed to me perfect, little flacons and bottles of every shape and size. And so to the sorting and the packing sheds, with consignments ready to be dispatched, and never for one moment was there an impersonal, automatic, factory feeling. What I saw was individual, intimate, a little industry possessed by and possessing the people who worked there, having an enduring quality which the passing of time could not change.

‘Amusing yourself, Monsieur Jean?’

I looked up from the glass I held in my hands, and there was the broad smiling face of Julie, the woman from the lodge.

‘You can put it that way if you like,’ I said.

‘Leave the solid work to M’sieur Paul,’ she said. ‘It has always been like that. Will you come and see André now?’

She led the way through the entrance and down the sandy road past the line of cottages. They were yellow-washed, like the house inside the
verrerie
ground, with the same mottled tiled roofs and dormer windows, separated one from another by small plots of garden and broken fences. She took me into the third cottage, which was living-room and kitchen and surely bedroom in one, for a man was lying there before the hearth on a tumbled wooden bed, while a bright-eyed boy about the age of Marie-Noel played with a broken truck in another corner.

‘Now then,’ said Julie, ‘here is Monsieur le Comte come to see you. Sit up and show that you’re alive at least.’

The man smiled, hollow-eyed, pale, and I saw that he was bandaged from the neck down to the arm.

‘How are you?’ I said. ‘What happened?’

Julie turned from scolding the boy, who had not risen when I came into the kitchen.

‘What happened?’ she said. ‘He nearly burnt his right side off, that’s all. So much for your modern furnaces and machinery. You can have the lot. Sit down, Monsieur Jean, sit down.’ She threw a cat off the single chair, and dusted it. ‘Haven’t you anything to say?’ she asked the man, who looked too ill and wan to speak. ‘Here is Monsieur le Comte back from the gay life in Paris, and you can’t even raise a smile for him. It’s enough to send him straight back there again. Wait, I’ll make some coffee.’

She bent over the stove, rattling the fire with a bent poker.

‘How long will you be laid up?’ I asked the man.

‘They won’t tell me, Monsieur le Comte,’ he answered, a wavering eye on the woman, ‘but I’m afraid it may be some time before I am fit to work again.’

‘That’s all right,’ said Julie. ‘Monsieur Jean understands that perfectly. No need to fuss. He will see you get paid all right, and compensation too. And nobody is going to be out of work, either, for a long time to come, isn’t that so, Monsieur Jean?
We can all breathe again. Those sharks in Paris know better than to say no to us. Now then, drink your coffee. You like a lot of sugar in it, I know. You always did.’ She fetched a small packet of sugar cubes from a cupboard, and the boy, seeing this, came to beg one from her, calling her grand’mère.

‘Get off with you,’ she said. ‘Where are your manners? Ah, since your mother went there’s no holding you,’ and aside, in a loud hiss that the child must obviously have heard, ‘The trouble is he misses her, poor little one, and with André laid up I’m obliged to spoil him. Go on, drink your coffee. It might bring some colour into your pale city face.’

It was André on the bed who needed colour, not I, and coffee too, but she did not offer him any, and looking above and about me I saw that the plaster was coming off the walls, and there was a great patch of damp on the ceiling that would spread with the first rain. She noticed my glance, with her shrewd brown eyes.

‘What can one do?’ she said. ‘I must try and patch it up one of these days. It’s a long time since any of these cottages were repaired, but what’s the good of coming to you with our grumbling? We know you’re short of money, like the rest of us, and you have enough on your hands already. In a year or two, perhaps … How is everybody at the château? Is Madame la Comtesse well?’

‘Not very well,’ I said.

‘Well, there it is. We are all getting older. I will go up to see her one of these days, when I can get away. And Madame Jean, when is she expecting?’

‘I’m not sure. I don’t think it’s very long now.’

‘If you have a fine boy a lot of things will be different. If I were younger I would come up and nurse him – it would remind me of the old days. They were good times, you know, Monsieur Jean. People are very different today, nobody wants to work any more. If I didn’t work I should die. You know what is wrong with Madame la Comtesse? She hasn’t enough
to do. Drink your coffee. More sugar. Here, another lump.’

I saw André watch me drink, his wan eyes fixed upon my cup, and the boy too, and I knew that they both wanted coffee and sugar and would not get any, not because Julie wished to keep it from them but because there was not enough to go round. And there was not enough to go round because they had no money to buy coffee or sugar in any quantity. André did not earn enough at the
verrerie
, and the
verrerie
belonged to Jean de Gué, who did not mind whether it closed tomorrow. I put the cup and saucer back on the stove.

‘Thank you, Julie,’ I said. ‘It’s done me good.’

I got up, and without protesting, the ritual visit over in fitting fashion, she went with me to the door.

‘He won’t work again,’ she said to me outside. ‘You understood that, of course. It’s no use telling him, he would only fret. Well, there it is, that’s life. Luckily, I’m here to look after him. My respects to Madame la Comtesse. I’ll cut her some grapes from the vine: she used to enjoy them in the old days. After you, Monsieur le Comte.’

I let her go back alone, though, to the foundry, telling her I had to fetch something from the car, and watched her cross the rough ground, passing the dumps of waste glass, crunching the scattered powdery fragments with her sabots, her stolid, powerful figure in its dark shawl and apron part of the background, merging against the grey-washed sheds. When she had disappeared into the tangled garden behind the old house I got into the Renault and drove back along the high road, the way we had come, with the forest on either side. About four kilometres west, before the road dipped, I drew up at the side of the road, lit a cigarette, got out and looked down to the country below.

The little community of the glass-foundry was tucked away in its clearing in the forest behind me, and now below, out of the line of forest, stretched acres of fields and scattered farms and distant villages, each village crowned with a church spire,
and beyond them again further fields and further forest. Immediately below me was the village of St Gilles, and I could see the church spire, but the château was hidden by the mass of trees. Only the farm buildings showed, chrome-coloured, mellow, under the autumn sun, and the enclosing walls of the domain, a line of grey against the dark alleyways and trees.

I wished I could feel detached: I wished I could look down on the village of St Gilles and the walls of the château with dispassionate eyes. My morning mood had somehow gone awry. The amusement, the schoolboy sense of fun, was missing; playing at spies hit back, like a boomerang. The feeling of power, of triumph that I was outwitting this little group of unsuspecting people, had turned again to shame. It seemed to me now that I wanted Jean de Gué to have been a different sort of man. I did not want to discover at each step that he was worthless. It might have been an inspiration to take on the role of someone fine – the change of skin would have acted as a spur to endeavour. Instead, I had exchanged my own negligible self for a worthless personality. He had the supreme advantage over me in that he had not cared. Or had he, after all? Was this why he had disappeared?

I went on gazing at the quiet, secluded village. I could see a line of black-and-white cattle, prodded by a child, ambling past the church, and then from behind me I heard a voice. Turning, I saw the smiling, nodding face of the old curé, riding, of all things, a tricycle, his long cassock hitched above black buttoned boots. It was an oddly touching sight, moving because it was ridiculous.

‘It’s pleasant there in the sun?’ he called.

I felt a sudden urge to confide in him, and I went up to the tricycle and put my hands on the handlebars and said to him, ‘Father, I’m in trouble. I’ve been living a lie for the past twenty-four hours.’

His face puckered in sympathy, but the nodding head was so much like a mandarin figure in a china shop that I lost faith
the instant I had spoken. What could he do, I asked myself, here on top of the hill, astride his tricycle, for someone like myself, caught up in deceit and trickery?

‘When did you last make your Confession?’ he said to me, and I was reminded of my schooldays, when the matron, having asked me a somewhat similar question, followed up her query with a purge.

‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I can’t remember.’

He went on nodding, in sympathy, and also because he could not help it, and said, ‘My son, you had better come and see me later on this evening.’

He had given me the answer I deserved, but it was no use to me. Later on would be no good. I wanted to be told now, on the hillside, whether to drive away and leave the people at the château to get on with life as best they could.

‘What would you think of me,’ I asked, ‘if I left St Gilles, went off and disappeared, and did not come back?’

The smile returned to his old pink face, and he patted me on the shoulder. ‘You would never do it,’ he said. ‘Too many people depend on you. You think I would condemn you? No, it would not be my place. I should continue to pray for you, as I have always done. Come on, now, enough of your nonsense. Remember, if you are depressed and low in spirit, it’s a good sign. It shows that the
bon Dieu
isn’t far away. Go and finish your cigarette in the sun and think about Him.’

He waved his hand and rode off, his cassock catching in the pedal, and I saw him free-wheel down the hill, enjoying his little spin. I watched him turn into the village, avoiding the cattle, and then he dismounted by the steps of the church, placed his tricycle against the wall and disappeared. I finished my cigarette, climbed into the car and drove after him, through the village and over the bridgeway to the château entrance. I saw Gaston by the archway to the outbuildings, and called to him to take the car back to the
verrerie
for Paul. Then I went indoors and up the stairs to the dressing-room, and on the table
I found the packet of letters that I remembered seeing in the pocket of the valise.

Among them was one with the name and address of the Carvalet people stamped on the back. I read it through, and it was as I feared. They said that they regretted their unfavourable decision, in view of so much business between us in the past, and especially after the last personal interview they had had with me, but on further consideration they found themselves unable to renew their contract.