The Scapegoat (46 page)

Two hours must have passed. I had no means of telling, without a watch, but of a sudden the air became more chill, the sun had dipped behind the trees, and I was aware of silence. All sounds from the foundry had ceased. I got up, and, crouching behind the hedge, looked at the orchard. No one was there. The windows of the office in the master’s house were shut; the place seemed deserted. I crossed the orchard, keeping close to the hedge, and stood against the wall of the master’s house. I waited a moment, then, sheltered by the vine, looked in at the office window. The room was empty, Jacques had gone home, and I had the place to myself. I moved along the house to the further end and climbed through the window once again. The room was full of traces of Blanche and Paul. Some of the furniture had already been shifted, tables and chairs pulled forward, pictures moved. She had not wasted time, then. She knew what she wanted to do. The room was no longer a shell, housing the past, but waited, expectant, for her to bring life to it once more.

I sat waiting, too, for the man I meant to kill. Sunlight went from the room, the shadows grew. In half an hour or less it would be dusk, and when he came, knocking on the window or the door, he would find that what happened to him was his own crime in reverse. He, and not I, would go back fifteen years.

I saw the handle of the door turn first, and because of disuse the knob fell to the floor. The door did not open for I had bolted it. I crossed the room, picked up the knob and fitted it back. Slowly I withdrew the bolt, holding the revolver ready. I opened the door, the bottom of it jarring the stone flag, and it was thus, I thought, that Maurice Duval must have opened
the door that night, and found him standing there in the darkness. Then I heard an exclamation from without and a voice – not his – said, ‘Hullo, is there somebody in the house?’ It was not Jean de Gué, it was the curé. We confronted one another, I shaken and nonplussed, he smiling, nodding, until his eye, falling upon the revolver, oddly changed.

‘Will you allow me?’ he said, and he put out his hand and took the revolver from me before I knew what he was about. Then he emptied it, putting the cartridges in the pocket beneath his cassock, and the revolver also.

‘I don’t like those things,’ he said. ‘We had enough of them during the war, and during the Occupation too. They caused a lot of damage, and they could do so again.’

He looked up at me, his head nodding agreement, and because I was without words, unable to speak, he patted my arm and said, ‘Don’t be angry. You’ll be glad that I took it away from you one of these days. You had planned destruction, hadn’t you?’

I didn’t answer him at once. Then I said, ‘Yes, Father.’

‘Very well,’ he said, ‘we won’t discuss it. It’s a matter for your own conscience and for God. It’s not my business to ask you what is wrong. But it is my business to save life if I can. If that is what I have just done I find myself very thankful, and very humble too.’ He looked about him at the darkening room. ‘I’ve been visiting André Yves,’ he said. ‘Happily, in time he may recover the use of his arm. He has great endurance. He said to me a week or so ago, “It might be better if I put an end to myself.” “Not so, André,” I told him. “The future begins today. It’s a gift, to which we wake each morning. Make use of it, don’t throw it away.”’ He paused, and then, pointing to the furniture, said, ‘So it’s true then, what Mademoiselle Blanche told me this afternoon at the château when I called? She may come here to live, and it was your suggestion?’

‘If she told you so, it’s true,’ I answered.

‘Then you certainly would not want to do anything to make
her change her mind,’ he said. ‘There’s an old saying – two wrongs don’t make a right. Perhaps, if I had not happened to pass by, something would have happened to cause grief to all of us. There has been tragedy enough in your family without your adding to it.’

‘I wasn’t going to add to tragedy, Father,’ I said. ‘I hoped to remove the cause.’

‘By destroying yourself?’ he asked. ‘What good would that do, to you or to them? By living, you can create their world afresh. Already I see signs of it, here in the master’s house. That’s what’s needed, not only here in the
verrerie
but in the château too. Life, not death.’

He waited for me to answer. I said nothing. ‘Well, now,’ he hesitated, turning again to the door, ‘I can’t offer you a ride – I came on my tricycle. I don’t see the car outside. How will you go home?’

‘I walked,’ I said, ‘and I shall return that way.’

‘Why not walk beside me?’ he suggested. ‘I go very slowly, you know.’ He drew out his watch. ‘It’s after seven already,’ he said. ‘They may be looking for you at the château. I know one who will be waiting anyway, the child. I’m dull company on the road, but I’d like you to join me.’

‘Not tonight, Father,’ I said. ‘I’d rather be alone.’

Still he hesitated, his eyes anxious. ‘I’m not sure that I’m happy to leave you,’ he said, ‘after what I discovered just now. You might still do something rash that you’d regret.’

‘I can’t,’ I said. ‘You’ve made it impossible.’

He smiled. ‘I’m glad,’ he said. ‘I shall never regret it. As for your gun …’ he patted his cassock, ‘perhaps I’ll let you have it back again, one of these days. It will depend upon yourself.
Bonsoir.’

He went out of the doorway into the dusk. I watched him pass the well without a glance, and so across the ground towards the sheds. I closed the door and bolted it again. The room was now filled with shadows, the day was done. As I went to the
window facing the orchard a figure rose from beneath it, gun in hand, and throwing his legs across the sill climbed in. Laughing softly, pointing the gun at my chest, he said, ‘That’s how I worked it once before, but this was far easier. No sentries on the road, no huts, no blocks, no wire. And instead of a bunch of lads who might give me away under threat, good Monsieur le curé himself, who happened to pass by. You must admit that luck is always on my side. I was right, wasn’t I, to come armed? It was the only thing I didn’t leave you in my valise in Le Mans.’

He pulled forward two of the chairs that Blanche had moved that morning.

‘Sit down,’ he said. ‘You don’t have to keep your hands up. This isn’t a threat, merely a precaution. I’ve always carried a gun since ‘41.’ He sat down in the other chair and straddled it, facing me. The back of it made a resting-place for the gun. ‘So you planned to get rid of me, did you, and stay in St Gilles? The sudden prospect of a fortune was too much for you? I sympathize. I felt that way myself.’

I
couldn’t see his eyes but only his features, dimly, which were mine. The absence of light made his presence, although more sinister, somehow easier to bear.

‘What happened?’ he asked. ‘How did she die? The notice I read this morning said by accident.’

‘She fell,’ I answered, ‘from the window of her bedroom. She had dropped the locket brooch you brought her back from Paris, and was reaching for it.’

‘Was she alone at the time?’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘There was a police inquiry. The
commissaire
was quite satisfied, and the death certificate was signed. Tomorrow they bring her back to St Gilles, and the funeral is on Friday.’

‘I read that in the papers,’ he said. ‘That’s why I returned.’

I made no comment. It was not the funeral of his wife which had brought him home, but what her death would mean to him hereafter.

‘You know,’ he said, ‘I never thought you’d face it. When I left you in that hotel bedroom a week ago today, I imagined you going to the police, telling them your story, and, after many muddled explanations, persuading them to believe it. Instead …’ he laughed, ‘you’ve succeeded in living a lie for seven whole days. My congratulations. What a boon you could have been to me twelve or fifteen years ago. Tell me, has no one had any suspicion?’

‘No one,’ I said.

‘What about my mother, and the child?’

‘They least of all.’

To say this gave me a strange sort of satisfaction that was
almost savage. He had not been missed; no one had regretted him.

‘I wonder how much you learnt,’ he said. ‘It amuses me immensely to think of how you dealt with Renée, for instance, who already, before I left, was becoming a bore. And how you kept Françoise pacified. And whether, with misplaced courtesy, you tried to talk to Blanche. As for my mother, her demands can only be dealt with in the future by a doctor. Not our own, needless to say, but an expert. She’ll have to go to a clinic. I’m already in touch with one, in Paris.’

I watched the muzzle of the revolver on the back of his chair. I should never reach it. Expert in trickery as in all things, he would be too quick for me.

‘There’s no need to send her to Paris,’ I said. ‘Though I expect she will need medical care at home. She wants to stop the drug. I was with her all last night. She’s made the first attempt.’

I could feel his eyes upon me in the darkness. ‘What do you mean?’ he asked. ‘You were with her all last night? What did you do?’

I thought back to the chair beside her bed, to the half-dreams, to the silence, to the threatening shadows that seemed to dissolve and pass. To tell him about the night now sounded trite, absurd. Nothing had been accomplished, only sleep.

‘I sat beside her and she slept,’ I said. ‘I held her hand.’

His laughter, infectious yet intolerable, rang through the dark room. ‘My poor friend,’ he said, ‘do you imagine that is the way to cure a morphine addict? Tonight she’ll be a raving maniac. Charlotte will have to give her a double dose.’

‘No,’ I said. ‘No.’ But doubt assailed me. Already, when I left her sleeping in her chair, she had looked ill and exhausted.

‘What else?’ he said. ‘Tell me what else you’ve done.’

What else? I searched my mind. ‘Paul,’ I said, ‘Paul and Renée. They’re leaving the château, leaving St Gilles. They’re going to travel, at any rate for six months or a year.’

I saw him nod. ‘That will break up the marriage even sooner,’ he said. ‘Renée will find the lover she’s been searching for, and Paul feel himself more inferior than ever. Put him in the world and he’ll look what he knows he is – a provincial boor. What want of tact, if I may say so, how lacking in finesse. Tell me more.’

I remembered, as a boy, playing skittles. One bowled a ball along an alley, and the ninepin at the other end toppled and fell flat. This was what he was doing now to the plans I had conceived through love. It was not love, then, after all, but muddled sentiment.

‘You turned down the Carvalet contract, didn’t you?’ I said. ‘I signed a new one. The
verrerie
won’t close. No one will be out of a job. You’ll have to back the loss with capital.’

This time he didn’t laugh. He whistled. The expression of dismay delighted me. ‘I suppose I can get out of it,’ he said. ‘It may take time. Your other moves were minor blunders, but this is serious. Even with Françoise’s money behind me, propping up a dying business is no fun. Whom did you intend to look after things, with Paul away?’

‘Blanche,’ I said.

He leant forward in his chair, tilting it, and thrust his face close to mine. Now I could see every feature, and his eyes as well. It was as it had been before, in the hotel in Le Mans. The likeness to myself was vile.

‘You actually spoke to Blanche?’ he asked. ‘And she replied?’

‘I did,’ I said. ‘She came down here this morning. I told her the
verrerie
was hers from now on. She can do what she likes with it, she can build it up as a dowry for Marie-Noel.’

He said nothing for a moment. The upsetting of all his preconceived ideas may have shaken him. I hoped it had. More than anything else, I wanted him to lose assurance. He did not do so.

‘Do you know,’ he said slowly, ‘it might, in the long run, work. If Blanche took up designing again, and we could turn
out cheap gimcrack stuff to attract the tourist, not bothering with Carvalet or any of the other good firms, we might attract a market in this part of the country that would undercut everyone else. Instead of every tourist driving through Villars to Le Mans down the
route nationale
, they would make a detour to St Gilles. I believe, without knowing it, you’ve hit upon a plan.’ He paused. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘the more I think of it, the more I like the idea. What an idiot I was never to have thought of it. Blanche’s intolerable attitude to me made it out of the question. How clever of you to flatter her ego, which I suppose you did. She used to think a lot of herself as a designer in old days, she and that pompous prig between them. If she comes down here to live she’ll probably wear widow’s weeds and pretend she married him secretly after all.’ He reached in his pocket for a packet of cigarettes, and handed me one, lighting his own. ‘You haven’t done too badly, on the whole,’ he said. ‘What about Marie-Noel – where’s she in the picture? Has she seen any visions this week, or dreamt any dreams?’

I did not answer. To tarnish the child was surely the ultimate evil. He might desecrate the mother, mock the sister and the brother, but to give him Marie-Noel as a butt for humour, that I would not do.

‘She’s all right,’ I said. ‘She stood yesterday’s tragedy well.’

‘That doesn’t surprise me,’ he said. ‘The two of them never got on. Françoise was jealous of the child, and the child knew it. Now, at last, you understand what it means to have a possessive family. And you were prepared to endure it, for the sake of the money. You came down here to the master’s house determined to kill me, so that you could keep yourself in comfort for the rest of your days.’

He tilted his chair back again, blowing smoke into the air, and his face was in shadow once more. Only his outline remained.

‘You won’t believe me,’ I said, ‘but I didn’t think about the money. I happen to love your family, that’s all.’

My statement made him laugh once more.

‘You have the audacity to tell me,’ he said, ‘that you love my mother, who is without exception the most egotistical, the most rapacious, the most monstrous woman I have, in all my experience, ever known; you love Paul, who is an oaf, a weakling, and a thoroughly disagreeable personality; you love Renée – presumably for her body, which I grant you is enchanting, but she has a mind like an empty box; you love Blanche, who is so twisted with repressed sex and frustrated passion that the only stimulation she gets out of life is to kneel before a bleeding crucifix. And I suppose you’ll tell me that you love my child for her sweetness and her innocence, which, let me tell you, can be put on for effect. What she really likes is being petted and admired.’