Michel Déon - The Foundling Boy

At Roquebrune things are no longer quite as they were, and Antoine has given up stopping there since the day when he arrived unannounced and found Mireille in bed with a customs officer. Throwing herself at him, she cried, ‘Why didn’t you come sooner? He seduced me. He hits me. Defend me.’

The customs officer (his trousers meticulously folded on a chair and his képi hung on a coat hook) opened his eyes wide. He could have sworn that it was the other way around, and thus did he become rudely acquainted with Mireille’s impressive impudence. Antoine sighed: it is always unpleasant to be on the receiving end of infidelity, but with Théo he had got used to it and it no longer wounded him so much. As the naked Mireille, still clinging to his neck, continued to sob, and the customs officer retrieved his long underpants from the floor, a ruthless calculation surfaced in Antoine’s mind. To break it off would have several advantages, chief among them that he would save a good deal of money, and then there were also Mireille’s amorous demands, which were beginning to exhaust him. At fifty-eight, well, he was no longer a young man. He thus assumed a dignified and offended air, held up his hand to the customs officer, who was pulling on his braces, and begged him to stay as he was. Mireille flew into a terrible fit of temper, but Antoine was immovable and, having forcibly detached her, he walked out, slamming the door behind him, through the restaurant full of diners finishing their lunch. A Parisian designer had transformed the bistro into a country restaurant that was more Provençal than Provence. Poor Léon would have found it unrecognisable. He had done the right thing by dying.

As for Charles, he is the agent for an important car manufacturer, running his own garage, and has launched a political career: for the moment he is merely a radical-socialist departmental councillor, but the future is bright, or at least he believes it is.

Such was the situation as Jean boarded the ferry at the end of August 1932, his pockets full with his thousand-franc note, return ticket, Mademoiselle Geneviève’s address and another that Monsieur Cliquet had given him of a friend of his, a retired employee of one of the British railway companies. Captain Duclou had likewise showered him with introductions for the crossing, which, though it lasted barely six hours, would without the shadow of a doubt awaken Jean’s vocation as a sailor. The ferry captain was a former officer of Uncle Duclou, and when Jean had stowed his bicycle in steerage, a sailor led him to the bridge, where the captain, having looked him up and down with a great pretence at severity, pointed to a place next to the helmsman that he was not to leave at any price. It was from there, with a beating heart, that Jean followed the difficult manoeuvre of the ferry as it left the quayside and turned into the channel leading to the harbour mouth. The boat hardly seemed to move, although he could feel the vibrations of its engines, whose speed the captain held back by spluttering into a sort of large tube fixed to the deck of the bridge. They had scarcely inched past the harbour mouth when he ordered the engines full speed ahead. Jean had the impression that the ferry was sitting down in the swell, then hurling itself forward at the long green waves. I am sorry, for the sake of the story, to have to report that the crossing was perhaps the most uneventful of the year. After departing at ten in the morning, the ferry was at the quayside at Newhaven at six that evening. Not once did anyone shout, ‘Man overboard!’, and there was no mustering of passengers on deck to sing ‘Nearer, my God, to Thee’ as the ship sank. Jean had lunch at the captain’s table. The fat, rotund man with pink cheeks disappointed him a little. There was nothing of the master mariner about him, and it was difficult to imagine him as a young lieutenant rounding Cape Horn in a gale aboard a mixed cargo of the Messageries Maritimes, as Uncle Duclou had related. Did he even remember those days? Jean told himself that the monotonous Dieppe — Newhaven crossings through the Channel shipping lanes, jammed with traffic, had gradually erased all spirit of adventure in this man, who kept two canaries in his cabin and talked about the flowers in his garden. At Newhaven the captain entrusted Jean to one of the ferry’s officers, who led him to a bungalow with a sign outside saying ‘Bed and Breakfast’. An old lady with curly grey hair opened the door, letting out a smell of Brussels sprouts. Yes, she had a room, and tomorrow morning she would serve him a nice big breakfast before setting him on his way to London. Jean thanked the officer and stepped into the smell of Brussels sprouts. The few words of English he had remembered from the lycée were enough for him to be able to ask questions the answers to which he did not understand. In any case the lady had a slight pronunciation defect as a result of her loose dentures clicking as she spoke. Whenever she moved, she gave off a smell of cheap face powder that quickly became nauseating. Jean’s small but pretty bedroom at La Sauveté made this one look hideous. Everything in it smelt of cold sprouts. The sash window looked out onto a yard full of rotting horse-carts. As the sun set, lights began to go on in the houses that backed on to his bungalow, and Jean caught sight of mothers and children gathered around tables laid with teapots and plates of sandwiches. A radio, louder than the others, broadcast a stream of unintelligible words into the yard. It was a funny country, this England, with its low houses built of brick and its sky blackened by the smoke of ships entering and leaving port. It didn’t look anything like what he had read about it in class. He consoled himself: he had not seen anything yet. The old lady knocked and walked straight in without waiting for him to answer, and started gibbering. He understood that she was saying ‘tea’ and followed her. In a living room decorated in flowery cretonne, she had laid a low table with a light meal of sandwiches, tea and chocolates. She smiled, delighted to have this young guest to banish her solitude temporarily. Lipstick had run into the wrinkles around her thin lips. Jean still understood nothing, fascinated by the movement of her dentures in her mouth and the fantastic feet in front of his own, wearing patent leather shoes with buckles. She showed him a photograph in an oval frame of a soldier with tapering whiskers, wearing a beret with ribbons. Was it her husband, her father, her son? Thinking what would be best, he said, ‘Husband?’

She nodded her head and tears rolled down her cheeks, creating two channels in her make-up. When he had finished eating, she disappeared for a moment into the kitchen, to return wearing an irresistible three-cornered hat and carrying a small handbag in green needlepoint. She smiled and pointed at the door. Jean was alarmed. Was she going to leave him alone amidst the flowery cretonne, watched over by a soldier who had met death on the battlefield?

‘I come!’ he said.

The handbag twirled with pleasure on the old lady’s arm. She knew exactly where she was going, and forged ahead between indifferent passers-by along pavements lined with identical houses of red brick. The weather was exceptionally mild, and men in shirtsleeves were trimming their box hedges in their minuscule gardens and mowing their meagre lawns. Jean was finding it hard to keep up, and wondered where she was leading him with such lightness of mood and a mysterious smile at the lipstick-smudged corners of her mouth. No one at home having apprised him of the bizarre customs of this exotic people, he felt no anxiety and concluded that his landlady’s athletic strides must be her preferred form of exercise before going to bed. Night was falling and everything looked darker. A succession of enormous protuberant eyes peered out at the edge of the street, the bow windows whose yellowish glow was reflected on the road surface, and he felt as if he was walking between the tentacles of an enormous slumbering octopus in a town that was being crushed in the darkness. After more than ten minutes of this brisk walk, the old lady turned into a street that was better lit, with illuminated signs and shop windows. Jean just managed to dash in behind her as she entered a smoke-filled pub, in which all he could initially make out was the men squeezed together around the bar, each holding out a hand full of change. Behind the counter a barman in a striped waistcoat, bald but with a face embellished by a fine waxed moustache, lowered and raised steel levers, handed out large glasses of beer, and took the money immediately, without a smile or a word. The old lady did not seem in the least frightened by the bustle and unselfconsciously elbowed her way through to the holy of holies, from which she returned with a glass of cider for Jean and a whisky for herself. They drank standing up, resting against a pillar and exchanging smiles. When he refused the third glass of cider she seemed to think he needed a ‘just so you know’, because she led him towards a swing door marked ‘Gents’. A constant flow of men was emerging, buttoning their flies as they did so. Out of politeness Jean followed suit. The old lady meanwhile had moved on to drinking beer and brandy alternately, a swig of one followed by a swig of the other. Everyone seemed to know her. They greeted her good-humouredly, without the slightest mockery. Jean learned her name: ‘Eliza’ or sometimes ‘Mrs Pickett’. At the rate she was going, it was evident that she would soon be completely drunk, but she bore up very well, if a little red-faced beneath her make-up, which was beginning to crack in the heat of the room. An unintentional elbow nudged her hat. Thinking she was putting it straight, she replaced it completely askew without losing any of her dignity. At about eleven o’clock the barman stopped serving drinks, and Mrs Pickett gestured to Jean that it was time they went back. She had spoken to him several times without his being able to say anything in response apart from ‘yes’, which was about the only word in English he felt more or less sure of. He told himself that in any case she wasn’t listening. When she left the support of the pillar, which had held her up since the beginning of the evening after each of her sorties to the bar, the pub spun in front of her and she had to grip onto Jean’s arm. They set out down the street, but she could hardly place one foot in front of the other. Repeatedly tripping over herself, she finally stopped, pulled off her buckled pumps, handed them to her companion and walked a little more steadily in her cotton stockings. Jean saw her swaying more and more and offered her his arm. For the last five hundred metres he had to half-carry her. She weighed nothing, a little package of mummified skin and bones. Thanks to Jean the key was turned in the lock. Mrs Pickett tossed her three-cornered hat onto a coat hook, did a little dance, and sat down heavily on the ground, where she began to laugh madly. Jean picked her up, without force, and laid her, still cackling, on the living-room sofa and piled some cushions on top of her. Eliza Pickett shut her eyes immediately, but as he was about to turn out the light and go to his room, she sat up and said in French, ‘Would you give me a glass of water, my dear?’