Michel Déon - The Foundling's War

‘Listen,’ Jesús said, ‘we’ll try. Come tomorrow. It’s Christmas. No need fo’ explanations. Laura will find that natural. Then, well, we see …’

Nelly was leaving for the south-west to spend the holidays with her parents.

‘You know,’ she said, ‘my dear papa’s so happy I’m back at the Comédie Française, he begged me to come. My rehearsals start on the second of January. I shall submerge myself in nature. Maman has made a confit d’oie and pudding. We’re going to drink some of Papa’s reserves of Corbières with a cassoulet. Until you’ve tasted Maman’s cassoulet, you haven’t lived. One day, if you’re a very good boy, I’ll take you with me. This year you have to spend your Christmas with the love of your life, but don’t forget your girlfriend. And don’t worry about me: Maman warms my bed every night before I go to sleep. No need for a chap at all. No fucking under my parents’ roof is my motto!’

Palfy was leaving for Switzerland. Julius and Madeleine were going to Spain and Rudolf was returning to his wife in Berlin. Christmas was separating them all, as it did in peacetime. They were travelling in private carriages, sleeping cars. Madame Michette was the only one travelling third-class. They were preparing a surprise for her homecoming at the Sirène. After so much emotion and so many journeys she longed for a family atmosphere. As for the gallery whose management Jean was finally to take on, it would not open until the beginning of January. He was free.

Jesús was waiting for them at Gif station in the pouring rain. They took refuge in a café, next to a glowing stove. Certain scenes haunt us for a long time, with no explanation, and Jean was not to forget the two hours they spent in the café, its marble-topped tables, its zinc counter, the posters advertising aperitifs and the grubby waitress who refilled their glasses of red wine. Labourers came in, dripping with rain and smelling of wet leather and wool. They shook themselves like dogs and hung up their oilskins on the coatstand, under which a rivulet formed. On the door Jean read backwards

Jules! But he was Jules-who too. The memory of Nelly tugged at his heart. He would have sworn that having Claude back would erase the other’s presence so completely that he would not think of her. But Jules-who was thinking of Nelly, and the previous night they had slept together. You can’t separate everything. It’s impossible. Somehow something is always left behind. Studying Claude as she talked to Jesús, he was surprised by her face’s transformation. Her changed features bore witness to the suffering she had gone through, to an anxiety she needed constantly to be distracted from. The smallest thing upset her. Whenever someone came in, an unfamiliar face, she suddenly tensed for several seconds, hugging Cyrille to her as if the stranger had come to take him from her. Jean realised that morning how much she had truly changed. The taut skin of her gaunt face exposed the veins at her temples and the base of her nose. She clasped her hands together to hide her trembling fingers, flinched whenever someone ordered a drink too loudly, and shivered constantly despite being next to a glowing stove. The waitress laid their table and brought soup bowls, a basket of bread and a small carafe of wine. A young woman with coarse hair that was as straight as straw, wearing a black schoolgirl’s blouse, collected their food coupons and placed them in an old metal cigarette box. The waitress returned from the kitchen with a steaming pot and a ladle. Ignoring the labourers’ banter and complaints, she filled the bowls to the brim. The soup steamed and a silence fell as they sipped the first spoonfuls, after which the men served themselves bread and wine. Jesús started sketching on a drawing book Cyrille had brought with him. Jean put his hand in Claude’s and her smile of artificial gratitude revealed to him how far removed from the present she was, how much she was still beating her lovely forehead against an imaginary barrier. During the last two days in Paris she had seemed better, but Jean suddenly gauged the fragility of her recovery: the smallest thing could break her — even the heavy atmosphere of this country bistro might be enough, the smell rising from wet clothes in the room’s Turkish bath-like heat, the man at the next table who was pouring a spoonful of red wine into his soup, a ritual that reminded Jean of his own childish disgust when Albert had sharpened his soup the same way, greedily contemplating his wine-laced bowl. The rain ran in sheets down the bistro’s windows and there was nothing to be seen of the village except, from time to time, the outline of a hastening figure. The waitress stationed herself behind the counter and opened Le Petit Parisien . The front-page headlines announced the British retreat in Malaysia, Japan’s attack on Hong Kong, and two battleships sunk in Alexandria harbour by Italian frogmen. The waitress closed the paper again. She only skimmed it these days, since the censors had forbidden the horoscopes because spies used them to exchange secret messages using the signs of the zodiac.

As abruptly as it had started, the rain stopped. Sunshine spread across the street, a white light so intense it was blinding on the other side of the window. Jesús hoisted Cyrille onto his shoulders and was the first to leave, singing. Jean carried a suitcase in one hand, holding Claude’s arm with the other, but he did not need to hold her up. In the crisp air her colour and will returned.

‘How it’s all changed!’ she said.

In three weeks the countryside had been transformed, shedding the last of its green. The skeletal trees in the forest stood in a thick carpet of dead leaves of beautiful shimmering gold and dark red. From the bare fields a bluish mist rose like a smoker’s breath. The house appeared at a bend in the road, set back, sheltered by an avenue of ash trees whose enormous roots clutched at the leaf mould like the talons of a bird of prey. Jesús had replaced the wobbly front door with one made of oak and two cramped ground-floor windows with a wide bay that let a golden light into the single downstairs room. The fire had gone out while Jesús had been away, and only glowing embers remained. Claude pressed her cheek to the still warm stonework around the hearth, then dropped into a tattered Louis XIII armchair whose springs poked through its torn upholstery. Jesús revived the fire with small pine logs, and flames suddenly rose so intensely that the rest of the room felt glacial.

Jesús wanted to make ‘real’ coffee. He battled with the wood stove.

‘You should help him,’ Claude said to Jean, who had sat on the floor at her feet and was playing with Cyrille.

Jean helped him. All through her life Jeanne had battled with a wood-burning stove, refusing in her latter years to switch to the bottles of gas that were taking over on the farms from the archaic stoves that used branches and small logs of resinous, scented wood. So he got the cooker going again, and they heated water for coffee. Claude dozed. Jean lay at her feet, his head turned to her, watching for the slightest movement the face of a woman who still hid the truth of herself from him and whom he had now decided he had to know completely, even if it meant becoming obsessed by her. The leaping flames coloured Claude’s features, lessening the pallor of her cheeks and her temples’ transparency. Jesús coaxed Cyrille outside.

‘We are collectin’ mushrooms and pickin’ up snails!’

Cyrille let himself be wrapped up and put on the mittens Toinette had knitted for him, and they disappeared into the birch forest. Claude opened her eyes and saw Jean looking at her.