The Scapegoat (33 page)

‘And you did so?’

‘Yes.’

She said nothing. She went on looking at me.

‘That’s why I’ve come to you,’ I said, ‘in self-pity and self-disgust.’

‘Those are things you must deal with in your own way,’ she said. ‘I can’t act as a purge and rid you of them.’

‘You have before,’ I told her.

‘Yes?’

Perhaps it was my imagination. Was her manner harder, more abrupt than it had been that afternoon two days ago? Or merely without interest, unmoved?

‘I wonder how many times in the past,’ I said, ‘I’ve come here to this house, to you, knowing what was going on at home in the château, wanting to forget, and succeeding in forgetting because of what I found here?’

I pictured him leaving the car outside the Porte de Ville, crossing the footbridge, and tapping at the window as I had done tonight, shedding all the guilt and all the care as soon as he passed the threshold, ridding himself of trouble as I wished to now.

‘If you don’t remember,’ she said, ‘let it alone. It doesn’t help the present. Anyway, you told me on Friday that your difficulties and problems were likely to be easier in the future, that you were going to tackle them in a different way. Hasn’t the new Jean de Gué been successful after all?’

Now she was smiling, and the faint mockery in her voice made me realize that she had no faith in him and never would have, and that what I had told her on Friday about wanting to save the
verrerie
and safeguard the people working there had been dismissed as a moment’s idle whim born of a drunken mood.

‘He’s failed,’ I said, ‘in precisely the same way that he’s failed before. He gives his family what they ask for, through cowardice, through evasion, not only his mother but his daughter too. The only difference is that once it was done with gaiety and possibly charm. Now it’s done with reluctance and distaste.’

‘That could be an advance,’ she said. ‘It depends on the point of view.’ And then the smile faded with the mockery in her voice. She came over to me, and took my hand, and said, ‘So you didn’t shoot today. Do you want me to do anything about this? I hear you burnt yourself.’

‘Who told you?’ I asked.

‘One of the
chasseurs,’
she said, ‘whose sport was not as usual, and who, after lunching at the farm, decided to return to Villars.’ She was undoing the bandage as she spoke. ‘I don’t suppose this hurts you any more,’ she added, ‘but it needs re-dressing.
I can manage that for you, if I can’t purge you of your sins.’

She went out of the room, and I wondered how much more Jean de Gué knew of her than I did, whether their intimacy dated back through months or years, and whether the photograph of the man in uniform on the mantelpiece, with ‘Georges’ written across it, was a likeness of a dead husband. Above all, I wondered how much she enjoyed, despised, accepted or tolerated, for money or for love, the man who was not me.

She came back with new dressings, as efficient in her own way as Blanche had been in hers, and as she knelt beside me and dressed my hand I said, ‘I burnt myself on purpose. I did not want to shoot.’ This surely would bring surprise to those candid eyes, so that the Jean de Gué she knew so well, whose character and faults could not disgust her, might take on a new aspect, might at least have some idiosyncrasy hitherto unsuspected.

‘Why?’ she said. ‘Were you afraid of shooting badly?’

The truth, coming from her, was such a shock that I did not answer. I waited for her to finish tying the bandage and then withdrew my hand, discomfited.

‘Once before,’ she said, ‘your eye was out and your hands were hopeless, after a drinking bout like this one in Le Mans. You made some excuse – I forgot what – not to shoot. It was over beyond Montdoubleau, not at St Gilles. Burning your hand instead is rather drastic. But perhaps it was intended as a penance on the part of the man in charge?’ The irony in the voice was back again, and as she rose to her feet she tapped my shoulder in a gesture half mocking, half affectionate. ‘Go on,’ she said, ‘sit back in the chair and finish your cigarette. I understand you had more to drink than to eat at midday, so possibly you can manage an omelette now.’

She must know, then, about the speech as well, the lack of applause, the melting away of the guests. Her informant could be anybody, from the financier to the outraged Marquis de Plessis-Braye.
It did not matter much. Disgrace was well established, and the seigneur of St Gilles had brought no lustre to the day.

I followed her through to the small kitchen and watched her prepare the omelette. ‘At any rate,’ I said to her, ‘I broke my rule, and did not minister to the greed of the guests – on this occasion the greed for flattery and the meaningless banalities one utters on these occasions. I was only trying to be honest. I had no idea it would upset them so much.’

‘The truth is always embarrassing,’ she said. ‘You of all people might have learnt that by now. At a picnic lunch it happens to be misplaced.’

‘I can’t help it,’ I went on, ‘if my truth happened to be theirs as well. I only told them that if I had had a gun some of them might not have been alive by the end of the day.’

She was busy beating the eggs with a fork. ‘Coming from a one-time Resistance leader,’ she said, ‘to a group of well-known collaborators, it must have sounded curious, all the same.’

I stared at her blankly. It was my secret I had come near to blurting out at the farm, not the jigsaw past of Jean de Gué.

‘But that’s not what I meant,’ I said, seeing, through the confusion of wine and smoke and haze that had been the atmosphere of the barn, the scattered uneasy faces amongst others that had kept their serenity. ‘That’s not what I meant at all.’

‘That’s what they understood,’ she said, and the laughter behind her eyes was the same as the twitch at the corner of Gaston’s mouth. She neither applauded nor condemned; what had been said was said. ‘Don’t ask me how far they deserved the dig, intentional or not. I don’t know what was happening here then – I was still trying to get out of Hungary.’

Hungary? That helped to explain the Béla, if nothing else, though why she should bear a man’s name was more than I could guess.

She poured the eggs into the pan and stood looking at me, the empty bowl and the fork in her hand. ‘If your new-found sense of responsibility wants to get things straight,’ she said,
‘surely there’s only one person who can do that for you – your sister Blanche?’

She stared at me a moment, and then turned to the omelette. And the years that were gone, that I had no business to intrude upon, seemed to merge into a single entity, like the eggs and the butter and the herbs. They could never be separated now, or examined one by one. I was responsible for the present, not the past.

‘How long can you stay?’ she asked.

‘Until the morning.’

‘No questions asked? No indignant wife or curious mother?’

‘No. Gaston will see to that.’

She had the omelette on a plate, and the plate on a tray, and the tray in an instant on the table beside the chair in the small salon, the wine uncorked and poured.

‘So this new Jean’, she said, ‘is not possessed by his family any more?’

‘He never was.’

‘That’s where you’re wrong,’ she said. ‘The bond isn’t easily broken. Wait till tomorrow.’

And tomorrow had already come, and the budgerigars sang in their cages on the balcony, the cathedral chimed the half-hour, someone called good morning to a passer-by in the street below, and the idyll I had stolen from Jean de Gué was over.

As I drank my coffee, dressed and ready to depart, on the balcony overlooking the canal, I saw that Gaston, faithful to his word, was sitting in the car outside the Porte de Ville. And my moment in time was like a dream within a dream, for I belonged neither to her world nor to the one that waited for me. The lover Béla had held in the night was a shadow who did not exist, and the master for whom Gaston watched was a ghost, dwelling only in his fancy, loved for what he once had been.

The journey to St Gilles was as silent as the outward one, except for his brief word of assurance that all in the château believed me to be in my room. ‘I let it be known,’ he said, his
eyes straight on the road ahead of him, ‘that Monsieur le Comte did not wish to be disturbed. I even took the liberty of locking both doors into the dressing-room.’ He handed me the keys.

‘Thank you, Gaston,’ I said.

We were coming out of the line of trees and approaching the valley. Below us was the village, the river and the bridge, and the domain, silver-wet from last night’s heavy rain, glistened in the early morning sun.

‘How many times, Gaston,’ I asked, ‘have you pulled me out of a scrape of my own making?’

He swerved left to the lime avenue, disclosing at the further end of it the still shuttered façade of St Gilles.

‘I have never counted, Monsieur,’ he said. ‘It is just something I look upon as part of my duty to Monsieur le Comte, and to his family also.’

He did not take the car through the gateway and on to the drive, but circled the enclosing walls of the moat and so through to the garage outbuildings by a side approach. As I walked under the arch and past César’s run without disturbing him, and stood for a moment under the cedar-tree, it seemed to me the château had never looked more peaceful or more still. The quality it had now, in fresh untempered sunlight, was neither faerie nor austere; the changing shadows of dusk and midnight had vanished with the darkness and the rain, and walls and roof and towers were bathed in the radiance that comes only in the first hours of the day, soft, new-washed, the delicate aftermath of dawn. The people who slept within must surely bear some imprint of this radiance in themselves, must turn instinctively to the light seeping through the shutters, while the ghostly dreams and sorrows of the night slipped away, finding sanctuary in the unawakened forest trees the sun had not yet touched. I wished that this spirit of early morning did not have to turn to day, to the restless clash of will, of movement, of divided heart and mood, but that all of them, inside the château, might stay suspended, as it were, in time, like the courtiers in
La Belle au bois dormant
, shielded from the future by a cobweb barricade.

I crossed the terrace under the shuttered windows and went into the dark, cold hall. In some way my very act of intrusion into the still sleeping château seemed to break the spell of peace and silence brooding there. I was aware of a sense of disquiet, of foreboding, as if when the house woke it would not be to the clear bright day without, but to some inner trouble that already hovered, malign and watchful, in the shadow of the stairs. I crept up to the first floor and along the corridor to the dressing-room, and turned the key in the lock. As I opened the door I stepped on to a piece of paper that had been thrust underneath it. It was pink, with a sprig of flowers in one corner, the kind of paper, I remembered dimly, that was packed in boxes with envelopes to match and given to children on birthdays or at Christmas. It said, in round, unformed letters, ‘My Papa, you told me you would not go away, and I believed you. But you never came to say good-night, and your door is locked. The Sainte Vierge tells me you are unhappy, and are suffering now for wrong done in the past, so I am going to pray that all your sins may be visited upon me, who, being young and strong, can bear them better. Sleep well, and have faith in Marie-Noel, who loves you dearly.’

I put the paper in my pocket and sat down in a chair by the open window. The sense of oppression deepened. Some force had been put in motion which was no longer within my control. I wished now that I had never left the château, never had those hours of release in Villars. There, the community astir soon after five, the casual sounds of morning had rung cheerfully on the ear; but here, as the village church struck seven, the hush continued, and the only living things were the black-and-white cattle moving like wraiths from the enclosing walls of the farm-buildings into the park.

I went on sitting by the window, waiting for the customary time when Gaston would bring my tray. It must have been a
little before eight when I first heard the hurrying footsteps along the corridor, the knocking on the bedroom door – Françoise’s, not mine – and the confused babble of voices, exclamations, cries. Then, on the bathroom door, which I had not yet unlocked, there came a sudden further knocking, a rattling at the handle, and the voice of Françoise herself, urgent, shrill, ‘Jean, Jean, are you awake?’

I leapt from my chair by the window, took the key out of my pocket and opened the door. She was standing there in her nightgown, wan and pale, and behind her Germaine, and beyond, in the bedroom, the gaunt, accusing figure of Blanche, watching me without a word.

I put out my hand to steady Françoise. ‘It’s all right,’ I said. ‘You don’t have to tell me. It’s Maman, isn’t it?’

Her eyes swept me, incredulous, and so over my shoulder to the dressing-room. ‘Maman?’ she said. ‘Of course not. Why should there be anything wrong with Maman? It’s the child. She’s disappeared. Germaine has just been to call her, and the bed hasn’t been slept in. She never even undressed. If she hasn’t been with you then she’s nowhere in the château – she’s vanished, gone.’

T
heir faces were turned to mine. I could see Paul half-dressed, standing at the bedroom door with Renée beside him, both roused by the same summons. As head of the house I was responsible: decisions, plans, must come from me. Françoise, shivering without a wrapper, was my first concern.

‘Get back into bed,’ I said, ‘we’ll soon find her. You can’t do anything about it.’

Blanche led her, crying, protesting, back to bed.

‘She’s probably in the park, or in the woods,’ I said. ‘It’s not so unusual for a child to get up early. Do we all have to become hysterical?’

‘But her bed has not been slept in, I tell you!’ cried Françoise. ‘Germaine went in to call her, and the nightdress was lying folded, the sheets turned down, and nothing had been touched.’

Germaine also was in tears, her plump red face suffused, her eyes swollen. ‘The bed was as I left it yesterday evening, Monsieur le Comte,’ she whimpered. ‘The child has not undressed. She has gone off wearing her best frock and her thin shoes. She will catch her death of cold.’