The Scapegoat (28 page)

‘I was. The smoke got in my eyes. I couldn’t see properly – that was part of the trouble.’

‘I’ve telephoned for Lebrun,’ said Paul. ‘He’s coming out right away. The first thing he said was did Françoise know? I said no. He warned me she shouldn’t be told. Just the kind of thing to upset her.’

‘I shall be all right,’ I said. ‘It’s not hurting now. Blanche has worked wonders.’ I looked round for Blanche, but she had disappeared. She had taken away the pain and gone.

‘One thing’s evident,’ said Paul. ‘You’ll be in no shape to shoot tomorrow.’

‘That’s the first thing I thought of,’ I said.

They stared at me in sympathy. Gaston made a little clicking sound of vexation. ‘It’s what you most enjoy, Monsieur le Comte.’

I shrugged my shoulders. ‘It can’t be helped,’ I said. ‘The rest of you will enjoy yourselves. Anyway, I saved the watch. It’s out there somewhere in the ashes.’

‘All that trouble for a watch,’ said Renée. ‘I’ve never heard of anything so stupid, so unnecessary.’

‘And it’s not even his gold one, Madame,’ said Gaston. ‘The gold one is still in Le Mans, being repaired. Monsieur le Comte has been wearing his old steel watch, the one Monsieur Duval gave him on his twenty-first birthday.’

‘That’s why I didn’t want to lose it,’ I said. ‘Sentiment.’

There was an odd silence. Nobody said anything. Gaston put the glass of brandy down on the table, and after a moment Paul offered me a cigarette.

‘Anyway,’ he said, ‘it’s a good job it wasn’t worse. The back of your hand caught the damage – you haven’t even singed your coat sleeve.’

Marie-Noel hadn’t said a word all the time. I was sorry if I had frightened her. ‘Don’t look so solemn,’ I smiled. ‘I’m all right now. I’ll get up in a minute.’

‘Here’s your watch,’ she said.

She had been holding her hands behind her back. Now she advanced and held out the watch, blackened by the fire. I had not noticed her run to find it. She must have done it in a moment.

‘Where did you find it?’ asked Renée.

‘In the ashes,’ she said.

I held out my left hand for the watch and put it in my pocket. ‘Now let’s forget it,’ I said. ‘I’ve caused enough commotion for one morning. Why don’t you start lunch? It must be after one.’ I thought a moment. ‘Françoise will wonder why I haven’t been in to see her,’ I said. ‘Better say I’m out with Robert, and am not yet back. And somebody stop that woman Charlotte from blabbing everything to Maman upstairs. Now clear out and leave me. I don’t want any lunch. I’ll see Lebrun in here when he comes.’

I was now tired, and sick inside. My hand hurt in a different way, not so much physically as in my mind, which was vividly aware of the raw tender flesh. I closed my eyes again and they all went away. Some time later there was a bell, and in a minute or two the elderly bearded face of Dr Lebrun was looking at me, pince-nez on the bridge of a large nose, side by side with the impassive Blanche.

‘What have you been doing to yourself?’ he asked. ‘They tell me you’ve been playing the fool with a bonfire.’

Resigned to it now, and bored, I went over the story again, and to justify myself I pulled the blackened watch out of my pocket.

‘Well, well,’ he said, ‘we all do foolish things now and again.
Let’s have a look at the damage. Mademoiselle Blanche, just unwrap this for me.’

Blanche, cool and calm, took my hand again between hers, and together they looked at the hand. The doctor anointed it with some ointment he had brought and did it up again in a kind of bandaged packet, and to my intense relief they had neither of them hurt me. The pain was with me, but no longer active.

‘There,’ said the doctor, ‘now you’ll be more comfortable. It’s not too serious, I assure you, and in a few days you won’t be able to see where you hurt it. These dressings to be renewed night and morning, Mademoiselle Blanche, and I think we shall have no trouble. What concerns me most is that you won’t be able to shoot tomorrow.’

‘Don’t worry,’ I said. ‘You’ll do quite as well without me.’

‘I’m afraid not,’ he smiled. ‘You’re like the mainspring of the watch there. If that’s out of action the rest of the works collapse.’

I saw Blanche looking at the watch, and from the watch to me. Our eyes met, and there was something questing, searching, in her expression that made me feel, during one instant of fear, that she knew the truth, and this was the reason why she had come to bandage my hand and relieve me of pain – because she did it to a stranger. Guilt made me drop my eyes, and then she turned to the doctor and asked him to come with her to the dining-room and have something to eat. He thanked her, saying he would follow her in a moment.

She left us alone and he began to talk about Françoise, repeating what he had told me on the telephone. I tried to absorb what he was saying, but while he talked, emphasizing his points with his pince-nez, stabbing them in the air, I was still thinking about Blanche and the expression in her eyes, and wondering how and why she could have penetrated my disguise. Or was it after all imagination on my part?

Gaston appeared with a tray of food, but I waved him away.

‘This evening you will feel like eating, not now,’ said the doctor, and he gave me some tablets from his bag with instructions about one every two hours, and two if my hand pained me, and then went off to join the others having lunch.

Gaston hovered about me still, a rug for my legs, another cushion, and I thought how his devotion and concern would turn to bewilderment and then to disbelief and finally to contempt if he should know the truth – that I was a shadow mimicking his master and then deliberately maiming myself for fear of discovery. It would be beyond his comprehension, and that of all of them at St Gilles. People did not behave like that. What was the point of the deception if it brought so much trouble to the deceiver? What did he gain by it? Here was the point indeed. What did I gain? I lay back on the sofa, looking at my bandaged hand, and suddenly I laughed.

‘You are feeling better, then?’ said Gaston, his kind face broadening in sympathy, laughter a release for both of us.

‘Better from what?’

‘Why, better from your burn, Monsieur le Comte,’ he said. ‘It’s no longer hurting you as it did?’

‘It hurts in a different way,’ I told him, ‘as if it wasn’t I who had burnt my hand, but somebody else.’

‘Pain can be like that,’ he said, ‘or else you feel the hurt in another spot. You remember my brother who lost his leg in the war? He always said he felt the pain in his arm. My grandmother was Breton. In the old days they wished pain or illness on to animals. If someone had smallpox they took a fowl and hung it up in the room alive. And at once the sickness left its human victim and went to the fowl, and in twenty-four hours it was rotted, dead, and the sick person had recovered. It might be a good idea if I sent for a fowl and hung it up beside Monsieur le Comte.’

‘I’m not so sure,’ I said, ‘it might work the other way round. The fowl could be diseased and pass its sickness on to me – if not smallpox, something equally disagreeable.’

The question was, which of us had escaped, Jean de Gué or myself?

When the family had finished lunch they came flocking back into the room to inquire after me, and I put the second part of my plan into action. ‘Paul,’ I said, ‘you can arrange everything for tomorrow with Robert. Now I’m out of it I prefer to be quit altogether. You can organize the whole thing between you.’

‘Oh, nonsense,’ exclaimed Paul. ‘You’ll be feeling more like it in an hour or so. You know you’ve always done it. If Robert and I run it you’ll only criticize us and say we’ve wrecked it.’

‘I won’t,’ I said, ‘you go ahead. If I can’t shoot I’m not interested.’

I got up from the sofa, telling them that I wanted to rest alone in the library, and I could tell by their faces that they believed my decision came from bitter disappointment, and also because I was still in pain. I saw Renée draw the doctor aside and question him, and he shook his head. ‘No, no, I assure you, he’s quite all right. It’s just a question of shock. A burn like that is a very painful thing …’You’re right, I thought, especially when it’s self-inflicted and totally unnecessary. For, my first panic at the prospect of the shoot over, I knew that all I need have done was to say that I did not want to take part. They would have swallowed it, they would swallow anything, because it never entered their heads for a moment that I was not the man they thought.

As I went into the library the heavy sloth of afternoon descended upon the château, and I realized then that my penance worked both ways. I was spared the preparations for the shoot, only to doom myself to inactivity, and after ‘resting’ I should be at the mercy of the inquiries I wanted to avoid. To make the hours pass I pushed a chair over by the desk, and, struggling one-handed with the drawer, pulled out the photograph album once again. This time I had no interruption. I could take my time, and after looking again through the earlier snapshots I passed on in leisurely fashion to the adult pictures.
I noticed things that had escaped me in my previous hurried glimpse. Maurice Duval appeared quite early in the groups at the
verrerie
. He was standing in a back row, a youngish man, in a group that had the date 1925 beside it; and then, rather like house groups at school, he advanced year by year to a more prominent position, until, towards the end of the album, he was promoted to a chair beside the Comte de Gué himself, looking confident, at ease, the captain of the house beside the housemaster. I liked his face. It was strong, wise, trustworthy, a face that surely would command affection and respect.

I closed the album and pushed it back into the drawer. Perhaps there were others, but with one hand useless I could not rummage for them. I still had the new contract in my pocket – I wondered what Maurice Duval would have thought of it … I must have slept in the chair, because suddenly it was six o’clock, and it was not Paul or Renée or the child who had come to disturb me, but the curé. He had switched on the light beside the desk and was peering down at me, his old head nodding in concern.

‘There now, I’ve woken you. I didn’t intend to do that,’ he said. ‘I just wanted to make sure you were not in pain.’

I told him all was well and the sleep had done me good.

‘Madame Jean has also slept,’ he said, ‘and your mother too. All the invalids at the château have been resting quietly. You have nothing to worry about. I took it upon myself to explain about your little accident, making light of it, as I thought best. You don’t mind my having done that?’

‘On the contrary,’ I said, ‘I’m very grateful to you.’

‘Good. They are neither of them anxious, only sorry that you won’t be able to shoot tomorrow.’

‘That’s nothing. I’m perfectly resigned to it.’

‘Now you are being brave. I know what it must mean to you.’

‘I’m not brave, Monsieur le curé. Quite the opposite. A physical and moral coward, to be perfectly frank.’

He smiled at me, still nodding. ‘Come now,’ he said, ‘it’s not as bad as that. Sometimes it’s a sort of indulgence to think the worst of ourselves. We say, “Now I have reached the bottom of the pit, now I can fall no further,” and it is almost a pleasure to wallow in the darkness. The trouble is, it’s not true. There is no end to the evil in ourselves, just as there is no end to the good. It’s a matter of choice. We struggle to climb, or we struggle to fall. The thing is to discover which way we’re going.’

‘It’s easier to fall,’ I said. ‘The laws of gravitation prove it.’

‘Perhaps,’ he said. ‘I don’t know. The love of God doesn’t always concern itself with the laws of gravitation, though both are miracles. Now I think we might both give thanks that you were not more seriously burnt by the fire.’

He knelt down. He was a big, heavy man, and it was not easy for him. He folded his hands, bent his head, and began to pray, his head nodding all the while, and thanked God for preserving me from harm, for sparing me pain, and added finally that because I liked the shoot so much and to miss it was such a deprivation, would God in His goodness send His grace to me as consolation, so that I would not consider the accident as a bitter disappointment but as a blessing?

As he struggled from his knees I thought about his analogy of the pit, and I wondered how much further I had to fall, and if the sense of shame that overwhelmed me was merely wallowing in darkness, as he had suggested. I got up from my chair and accompanied him to the hall, and watched him disappear across the terrace and down the steps to the drive. It was beginning to spit with rain, and he went off under an immense umbrella, like a bent gnome under a mushroom.

I had played the coward long enough: I could at least show the others that I was not in pain. I found Françoise sitting up in bed, reading
The Little Flower
to Marie-Noel. The curé had done his mission well. She was sympathetic but not concerned. She seemed to think I had singed my fingers and no more, and kept lamenting over and over again how disappointed I
must be that I could not shoot, and how glad she was that it was not her fault, that it was not her delicate health that had caused the trouble.

Marie-Noel was oddly quiet and subdued. She did not join in the conversation, but when her mother began to talk she took the book and went and sat in a corner, reading it to herself. My mishap must have worried her, and she had not yet got over it. I went downstairs for dinner, Charlotte having sent word that Madame la Comtesse had gone to bed early and was not to be disturbed – for which I was thankful, since it would not have been easy to answer her questions.

Paul and Renée were both full of the arrangements for the shoot, the time the guests were to arrive, the names of some of them, the plans for lunch at a farmhouse if it was wet. It was as though, in some fortunate way, my ridiculous action had given them purpose and authority. Paul obviously enjoyed his part of organizer, and Renée, with Françoise out of the way, saw herself, through Paul’s promotion, suddenly acting hostess. She said something about receiving the guests on the terrace, wet or fine; she kept asking Paul if he had remembered this or forgotten that, reminding him that last year such-and-such a thing had not been done, referring to me for approval; and there was something touching about their enthusiasm and their keenness, like understudies cast at a moment’s notice into leading roles.