Michel Déon - The Foundling's War

Antoine shut the door behind them and switched on a feeble light after drawing a curtain across the only window.

‘No lights at night on the coast. One evening I came in here and was looking forward to some odd jobs, and suddenly the gendarmes turned up. There’s a rumour that English submarines are landing spies. It could be true and it’s nothing to do with us.’

He took a bottle and two glasses from a cupboard.

‘This reminds me of our last night at La Sauveté. Do you remember?’

‘I haven’t forgotten.’

‘A house emptied by termites and removal men. It made me melancholy for a minute or two. Everyone has their weak points. You didn’t drink. In training, weren’t you?’

‘Yes.’

‘One day I saw you sculling at Dieppe Rowing Club. It gave me a lot of pleasure. Now?’

‘I drink a bit. To be honest, it doesn’t do anything for me.’

‘You mustn’t get too fond of it. It’s hard to stop if you do. I don’t know how our dear abbé Le Couec keeps going … I suppose there’s always another parishioner who needs his help … These stools are really dreadful … Let’s sit in the car.’

He pulled on the tarpaulin, uncovering the Bugatti, melancholy-looking in the light of the single bulb. Jean sat next to him as he placed his hands on the steering wheel and turned it right and left.

‘The steering’s a bit stiff. Bugatti always wanted cars that would turn on a sixpence. But first you had to learn to drive them. By the time the war’s over I won’t know any more.’

‘Do you think it’ll last long?’

‘I fear so.’

Antoine emptied his glass and refilled it from the bottle between his knees.

‘Well?’ he asked. ‘What’s wrong? You love each other, you’re together, and no one’s bothering you.’

‘We don’t make love,’ Jean said in a moment of recklessness.

‘Ouch! That’s serious. Is it you?’

‘Oh no! I’m fine on that front.’

He could have told him about Antoinette, Chantal, even Mireille Cece, whom they had shared without knowing it.

‘Then it must be her.’

‘I don’t know why. It’s a ridiculous situation. It makes me desperate and there are times when I just can’t go on, I feel like bursting.’

‘I can’t be any help to you. I’ve been lucky all my life. It’s true I had money. But when all the money was gone, Marie-Dévote stayed just the same. Of course now I don’t jump on her every five minutes, but I’m very happy, I’ve got lots of memories … Do you like the smell of leather? They won’t upholster cars with hides like this again. You’ll see a whole epoch vanish. If I hadn’t detached myself from everything, I’d find it a hell of a struggle … Tell me, did Claude still love her husband when you met her?’

‘I suspect not.’

‘Do you think she’s ever had a lover?’

‘She swears she hasn’t.’

‘One man in all her life! Good Lord, that’s not something you come across every day. Personally I’d look for the answer with her husband.’

They went on talking for a while longer before getting out of the car, which Antoine then covered up again with its tarpaulin.

Climbing through the window, Jean heard two bodies’ regular breathing. Claude and Cyrille were both asleep. He got into bed and lay there, gripped by the idea that Claude was obeying a pact agreed with her absent husband. What had it meant, then, when she disappeared for three days?

The noise of knocking at the door woke him. It was bright daylight. Théo had brought news that shattered the lethargy of the false peace.

‘It might interest you,’ he said, ‘to know that Monsieur Hitler has invaded Russia. Bang! Away we go. Some’ll be happy about it, others not at all. Uncle Joe isn’t going to be in a good mood this morning. Not like Antoine. He’s already out fishing. And Marie-Dévote says it’s no reason for us to go hungry. Brékefaste is served …’

In the days that followed, the radio broadcast place names no one had heard before. From the Barents Sea to the Black Sea the German offensive gathered pace. Thunder rumbled across Europe, and the beach in front of the hotel remained as calm and empty as before. Cyrille played in the sand, Antoine went fishing, Claude and Toinette swam out until their heads were small specks, and Marie-Dévote, beauty and forty-year-old matron, put a chaise longue out on the beach and knitted. Cyrille would have the best sweaters in all Paris that winter and Claude a wool overcoat. Jean drove away with Théo and they came back laden with olive oil, beef lard that they turned into lavender-scented soap, fresh fruit, goat’s cheese and big, round country loaves. At the wheel of his wood-gas truck Théo was in his element. Jean learnt from him that Antoine had spoken to Marie-Dévote. She, too, now knew that he was the grandson of the visitor from Normandy who had brought prosperity to their seaside café. He also learnt of the pictures Antoine had bought from painters who had passed through Saint-Tropez in the period between the wars. When the Italians attacked in June 1940 Marie-Dévote had prudently locked them away in one of the hotel’s cellars. They showed them to Jean, and he was astonished by Antoine’s taste. He, who had declared himself amazed to have a son who was a painter, had not bought a single bad painting.

‘With those in her trousseau,’ Théo said, ‘Toinette’s never going to be poor.’

‘But who knows you’ve got all these?’

‘Well … everyone who came here. People used to ask for the room with the Picasso or the Dunoyer.’

‘So you don’t know that the Germans are making off with every bit of French art they can find?’

‘The Germans? We’re still waiting for them. Right now, they’re going the wrong way. Saint-Tropez’s not on the road to Moscow …’

Watching Toinette as she hovered, fairy-like, discreet and silent in the background, it struck Jean that he might have found happiness there if … How many ‘ifs’ there were! He understood Antoine, his escape from Grangeville, his leaving everything behind. He had decided to grow old at Marie-Dévote’s side and, despite the situation’s ambiguity — Théo’s semi-acceptance, Toinette whom they shared without a mean thought — he had built himself, without really intending to, an ark of happiness that nothing could destroy. It had been his own wish no longer to have a penny to his name. Arriving at Saint-Tropez in the late summer of 1936 at the wheel of his 57S, with a cheque in his pocket representing all he possessed in the world, which he immediately handed to Marie-Dévote, he could — as one-time sugar daddy, the man who had paid for the hotel and much else besides — have been shown the door or offered a shack and ignored. Such a fate would have corresponded to the unflattering opinion he held of humanity and its gratitude, but Marie-Dévote had accepted the cheque and him, a man who asked for nothing apart from a new family, people who understood him and opened their hearts to him. Peace reigned at Chez Antoine, the renowned hotel, halted temporarily in its rise to fame. Marie-Dévote ruled the roost, in spite of Théo’s pretensions to the contrary. Her understanding of life, for all her mature warmth and sensual attractiveness, was born of a certain harshness. Her personality had developed to the point where two men had not been too many to unbalance her sense of equilibrium: for her dear Antoine she probably felt that vaguely Oedipal love that tugs at every woman’s heartstrings, and for Théo a kind of loving indulgence that fulfilled her maternal aspirations. Her ambitions satisfied, she had at last ventured to show her real generosity. That she might still be a desirable woman never crossed her mind, and she stretched out on her chaise longue in all innocence, hitching up her skirt to bare her long brown thighs which had first caught Antoine’s attention twenty years earlier, when she used to bring him his pan banias and cold carafe of Var rosé. She would have been astonished if you had told her that she could still tempt a man. Who? She never went out and had never been to a big city; twice she had refused to accompany Théo to the Paris boat show. Her curiosity had never even led her as far as Marseille, let alone Nice, which she considered a foreign country, where the English ruled on their promenade. What can you learn outside your four walls if your passion for your family is all you need: your love for your daughter, your husband, your old lover, and a hotel that was the fruit of so much hard work? Nothing.