Michel Déon - The Foundling Boy

‘Don’t you know what’s happened to me?’

‘No.’

‘I’m pregnant.’

He did not move and watched her pedal away down the road, lit by the flickering yellow glow of her light. No. No, Jean repeated to himself. No. I’m not getting caught like that. He would not fall into her trap, and if she ever had the nerve to repeat those words to him he would just say, ‘By whom? Anyone I know?’

Albert was waiting for him, chatting with the abbé, the bottle of calvados between them. He no longer foresaw any kind of future. His world was dying; he could not see what would follow this chaos. Jeanne’s condition did not preoccupy him greatly. He had got used to it and refused to sink into a sentimentality that, as he claimed, was the undoing of men as well as governments. It was the spoilt peace, once more in jeopardy, that obsessed him. He could no longer bear Monsieur Cliquet’s prognostications about the state of the railways or Captain Duclou’s optimism about the navy. The abbé was the only man who understood him, and these two men who, ever since their return from the front, had not ceased to hurl brickbats at one another and cross verbal swords at every opportunity, had, in the current disastrous situation, rediscovered a comradeship that had something of the trenches about it. Albert had also watched with relief as his son got a job. He was now a worker, as he, Albert, had been, not a student, with all the distance that that would have created between them. Jean would forge his future on his own, if he had one, so long as they did not sacrifice him blindly to the Moloch of war.

‘Well, my boy? You’re late,’ he said, seeing Jean come in.

‘I met Antoinette, and she took me to see Madame du Courseau’s house.’

‘Was that her leaving on her bicycle?’ the abbé asked.

‘Yes.’

‘Why doesn’t she come to see me any more lately?’

‘I don’t know,’ Jean said evasively.

Unless there was an explanation, and she really was pregnant. The abbé saw the shadow pass over Jean’s features. It saddened him. The boy knew and would not say anything. All these children he had baptised, whose confessions he had heard, to whom he had given communion and nurtured in the principles of a solid religion, free from the sort of fine distinctions that risked misleading them, all of them were slipping away from him one by one. The only one who remained attached to him, Michel du Courseau, was also the only one he didn’t truly care for. Which left Jean, but Jean dissembled.

‘How’s your work?’ Albert said.

‘You call it work, Papa? I don’t. I carry parcels all over the place, and there’s always a donkey braying at my heels, that Grosjean …’

‘What a blockhead! Fifteen years a lance-corporal. A record. To get him to leave the army they had to promise to promote him to corporal.’

‘One day I’m going to punch him in the face.’

‘Stay calm, Jean!’ the abbé said.

‘If he goes on behaving like a swine, I will, I promise.’

Albert filled his pipe to avoid replying. For some time he had been asking himself whether his son wasn’t right. Why had he himself not rebelled earlier? His life would have been different if he had.

‘You protest too much,’ the abbé said, to change the subject. ‘And you don’t eat enough. How goes the rowing?’

‘At lunchtime I’m all in. Knocked out … At this rate I’ll be good for nothing by next spring.’

‘A society that has nothing but unskilled manual work to offer a boy like you is indefensible,’ Albert concluded. ‘Sweeping—’

With an expansive hand gesture he made as if to sweep around him, knocking the calvados bottle over, which the abbé, whose reflexes were always prompt, caught just in time.

‘If they force another war on us,’ Albert added in a loud voice, ‘I hope we lose it.’

‘You may not say such things!’ the priest thundered, banging his fist on the table.

‘I say them!’ Albert declared placidly.

‘Well, say them then … You don’t believe a word of them.’

‘I believe every word.’

The abbé raised his arms to heaven, opened his mouth to utter some imprecation that stayed in his throat and, suddenly calm, said, ‘Mother Boudra brought me a dish of salt pork this afternoon. Jean, why don’t you warm it up for us?’

Jean lifted the cast-iron pot onto the spirit stove. The aroma of the salt pork filled the room and the abbé fetched two bottles of the new season’s sparkling cider from the cellar. They ate in silence, conscious that the slightest political allusion was likely to spoil the taste of the shoulder of pork and the lentils that went with it. In truth, sparkling cider was not the perfect complement to salt pork. They would all have preferred a solid red wine, and for an instant the abbé regretted being so poor, living from gifts and invitations. It was, none-the-less, a pleasant moment that justified the silent reflections of each of them on life and what was worth living for in this very lowly world.

After dinner Jean accompanied his father back to Monsieur Cliquet’s. Albert had been walking with difficulty for some time. His orthopaedic leg hurt his groin, and to save money he refused to see a doctor, having decided that since he was no longer useful to anyone, he was not worth anyone’s consideration.

‘You’re a good boy, and determined,’ he said after a silence, as they were about to part at the gate of the cottage.

‘I don’t know if I can stand it much longer.’

‘I wouldn’t hold it against you. But what next?’

‘Yes … exactly, what next.’

‘I was careless, I didn’t think I needed to make provision for a twist of fate like this, and now the Assistance Publique are paying your mother’s hospital bills. We’ve become beggars.’

‘It’s not your fault, Papa.’

‘Your mother and I’ll come through it; I don’t want you to worry about us. You keep pushing ahead. Make a life for yourself. Don’t respect your elders too much, apart from our dear abbé. I was wrong to talk like that in front of him; I hurt him.’

‘Not badly. He knows what you’re like.’

‘He’s the only one you can rely on. It must be his religion. You see, I’ll end my days believing there’s something to be said for religion after all. What about you, do you feel religious?’

‘No, Papa, I don’t. But because of the abbé, who’s been so good to me, I’ll never say anything against it.’

‘There’s another thing I want to ask you. You know I’ve believed in peace ever since the armistice. I’ve voted socialist, because I thought socialism meant peace. Well, I was wrong. Socialism doesn’t mean peace any more than the Right does. There’s going to be a war, in two or three years at most. You have to promise me that you won’t fight. How? I haven’t a clue. But you’ll see. When you were born, that was the vow I made: that this little lad would not be cannon fodder.’

Jean hesitated and murmured, ‘When I was born?’

Albert seized his arm and gripped it violently.

‘You know?’

‘Yes.’

Despite the darkness, Jean knew that there were tears rolling down his father’s lined cheeks and that, despite being so tough and reluctant ever to complain, he was silent now because he could not speak without his voice breaking. They parted after kissing each other goodnight. Albert disappeared into the shadows of the small garden and reappeared against the light of the glass-panelled front door, a limping silhouette whose left shoulder had started to drop some time ago, hunching his back. Jean returned to the rectory, where the abbé was already snoring. There was nothing to do but go to bed, worn out by the long day, and try to banish the image of Antoinette, her dress still rucked up above her bare stomach, sobbing into the mattress ticking.