Michel Déon - The Foundling's War

‘And where is she?’

‘In Lebanon.’

Antoine laughed and hung on to Jean’s arm. They were approaching the shuttered hotel.

‘So, in a nutshell, you’re my grandson. Do you know, I’m almost disappointed. I thought I’d found a stranger to love, someone I’d chosen consciously, a long way from all those family ties — I mean the compulsory sort of love people cultivate within the family circle — and now I discover we have the same blood in our veins. In 1939, back when you met Théo and Toinette, I made up a story for my own amusement: Jean, that nice, straight, honest boy, would be the ideal match for my Toinette … She used to blush when she talked about you. At least we’ve avoided a catastrophe …’

‘Toinette’s your daughter.’

‘Is it very obvious?’

‘Yes.’

Antoine sighed.

‘I’m proud of her. I adore her. We all adore her.’

‘What about Théo?’

‘He can’t have children. You have to take him as he comes: talkative, sly, always with an eye to the main chance, but with a heart of gold. He likes mechanical things. At least we have something to talk about when we’re not talking about Toinette.’

Marie-Dévote had made tea in the kitchen. A cup of hot chocolate for Cyrille, a herbal tea for everyone else.

‘We don’t have any proper tea left,’ she said. ‘We make an infusion with the herbs from the mountain. It’s good for you …’

Jean, watching, compared Claude and Marie-Dévote, the young woman and the older, one reserved and fragile, the other outgoing and in the full bloom of her fairly commonplace beauty; yet a link had instantly united them: the blond child sitting in a high chair (Toinette’s when she had been small) with a napkin around his neck, drinking mouthfuls of hot chocolate and observing, without speaking, these strangers bending over him one after another with an anxious tenderness, because he had coughed twice as he walked into the kitchen. Jean liked the fact that Claude was not an over-anxious mother, with a suffocating tenderness towards her son. Whatever she did for him she did rapidly, skilfully, without words, and if he were honest, it might have made him jealous because she already loved Cyrille like a man, intelligently, not wanting to crush him. The only difference he noticed in Marie-Dévote’s kitchen was that, for once — and perhaps so as not to disappoint Marie-Dévote — she fussed a little more over her son, wiping the corners of his mouth and his hands covered in chocolate.

‘So lucky, you are,’ Marie-Dévote said. ‘Me too, I’d’ve liked to have a child.’

Antoine roared with laughter.

‘Marie-Dévote hasn’t had a child. She’s only got a daughter.’

Toinette smiled. Perhaps she, too, felt, without bitterness, that boys were the only children. Théo protested.

‘If a girl isn’t a child, then the world really has gone mad. In any case Toinette, as you see, wears trousers. And I take my orders from her: Papa, go and deliver the fish; Papa, get some wood for the stove; Papa, wash the truck because it’s dirty …’

*

The weather held. Théo was delighted. In his mind it was always raining at Saint-Raphaël and always good weather at Saint-Tropez. Cyrille had stopped coughing and wandered on the beach like a little naked god, watched over by Marie-Dévote while Claude and Toinette bathed, joined before lunch by Jean, back from fishing with Antoine. The fish he caught were only good for the cat; Antoine mocked him. Fishing is a gift. In the afternoons Théo took Jean out in the truck, whose wood-gas generator struggled on every hill. Armed with his movement permit and well in with the gendarmes (to whom he distributed their share), Théo devoted himself to some discreet black-marketeering, delivering fish to Grimaud, Ramatuelle, Cogolin and Gonfaron, returning with vegetables and firewood for the kitchen stove. Under the firewood there was often a calf hidden, or a kid or a sheep, ready skinned. The risk was small, but Théo liked to put on secretive airs and take precautions, though the evening visits of Sergeant Thomasson made them pointless. The sergeant never left without a leg of lamb or some chops in his haversack.

After dinner they listened to the news, first from Vichy, which taught them nothing, then Radio-Paris which reported Germany’s dominance in the Mediterranean, the fall of Crete and the British Army’s rapid withdrawal to Sfakia. Théo curled his lip. The Mediterranean, German? He opened the window onto the empty sea, the placid shore and the sound of the waves whispering on the sand and lapping against the pilings of the jetty where Antoine tied up his rowing boat. Later on they picked up Radio-Londres, where there was small cause for comfort. The bulletins’ emphasis on secondary operations — raids on the Ruhr, the attack on Syria, the overthrow of Iraqi rulers sympathetic to the Axis — could not hide the way things were going. Their heart was not in it. Although he did not like the Germans Théo admired their ‘sense of organisation’, and though he did not like the English either he acknowledged their ‘bravery and coolness’. Antoine refrained from comment, unless he was genuinely indifferent, which was more likely. He listened with half an ear, busy with a pile of old cigar boxes, making model ships like the ones Jean had seen his uncle, Captain Duclou, making a hundred times on the long evenings of conversation in his parents’ kitchen at Grangeville. Marie-Dévote, Claude and Toinette knitted with rough wool Théo bought from a farm in the Maures where the old women had taken up spinning again. Cyrille would lay his head on the table and fall asleep and his mother would put him to bed. A little later Jean would join her, allowing everyone to think they were lovers, although their relations were still at the point Claude had sworn to herself never to go beyond, even if now she often walked around naked in their bedroom, a freedom Cyrille reproached her for one day.

‘Maman, you mustn’t show your tummy to Jean.’

‘It’s all right with him; he’s a very good friend.’

Cyrille no longer spoke about his father, who was already half forgotten, his face replaced by another that he saw every day. Claude never left his side. Perhaps she felt she would not have the force to resist Jean without her innocent guardian. Even when he was fast asleep in his cot, Cyrille was watching over her. But if her hand slipped outside the sheets, another hand, from the bed next to hers, would grasp it, squeeze her fingers and stroke her wrist, and she had no need for words to understand the meaning of the gesture.

One morning Jean said, ‘Cyrille’s right. Don’t walk around naked in front of me any more.’

She covered herself up, and immediately Jean begged her not to pay any attention to what he had said, to behave as if he didn’t exist. She was turning a warm amber in the summer heat, and her swimming costume left a line at the top of her thighs and above her breasts. She made Jean desperate. There were moments when she realised it and they fell into each other’s arms and wept in silence. Sometimes at night, obsessed and unable to sleep, he got up and slipped out of the window, crossed the garden overlooking the beach, ran to the sea and swam in its phosphorescent water. When he came back he found Claude sitting on her bed, waiting for him.

‘Where were you?’

‘I went for a swim.’

She would touch his damp shoulder and wet hair and kiss his salt-tasting lips.

One night as he left the bungalow, he bumped into Antoine walking across the garden.

‘I can see something’s not right,’ Antoine said, ‘and I don’t like not offering to help. But I’m a selfish man and it’s probably wise if I stay that way. If I don’t sleep, or not much — and badly at that — it’s because I’m getting old. But at your age you shouldn’t be having sleepless nights. Come into my shed — I’ve got a bottle of grappa. It’s not quite calvados, but you’ll get used to it.’