Michel Déon - The Foundling Boy

‘Do you think we’re going to lose it?’

‘Who can doubt it?’

Palfy drove slowly back down to Cannes. The cool night air, the engine turning over in near silence, the Austro-Daimler’s overpowering majesty, produced a heady sense of freedom. It would have been so pleasant just to go on living like this, not to see the clouds massing on the horizon. They stopped outside the building where Madeleine lived. There was no light at her window.

‘She can’t be asleep already,’ Palfy said.

They walked up two floors and rang her bell, but there was no answer. Palfy had a key. The apartment was in disarray, the bed unmade, the cupboards and drawers empty and wide open. A light had been left on in the bathroom. They looked at each other. Did they have to find out what had happened?

‘We risk coming across a truly revolting spectacle,’ Palfy murmured.

He was pale and calm, concentrating on how best to conduct himself, and Jean realised that this time the age of fun, the age of carelessness and excess, was over. A terrible shadow passed over them both, all the more threatening for remaining secret and invisible, for only having been hinted at. They still had time to wipe their fingerprints off everything they had touched and silently tiptoe away.

‘A little courage!’ Palfy said, his voice shaking.

He opened the bathroom door. Empty. The bath still full of water. On the glass shelf above the washbasin some perfume bottles still stood unstoppered.

‘Phew!’ Jean said.

They went back to the bedroom, and on a corner table found a sheet of paper folded in four, in Madeleine’s large round handwriting.

Constantin, I like my life. My little place in Rue Lepic’s worth more than your big place in Cannes. ‘They’ warned me. They was nicer than I expected. Usually its curtains straight away. If I was you, I’d get out fast. No hard feelings

Madeleine

‘They have been quick,’ Palfy said, a trace of admiration in his voice.

The telephone rang. It was a ‘customer’. He sent him packing.

‘The annoying thing,’ he said, as the car wound down towards the port, ‘is that I put money into the idea. The car? I won’t get a penny for it. All those panic-stricken millionaires have gone off and left dozens of unsaleable monsters behind. I settled my bill at the Carlton yesterday. I should be able to stay there another couple of weeks if I leave the weekly bill unpaid for a while, and thenmake myself scarce. A real shame that I couldn’t patent my little invention and sell it to the Americans. More difficult than the last time around. A question of morals. Very punctilious, you know, the Americans, about morality. In ten years’ time you’ll see I was right. One should never be ahead of the morals of one’s time, whether one’s selling toothpaste or pleasure. That will be my consolation: to have been a pioneer. What about you? Are you happy with your job at the agency?’

Jean agreed that it was bearable, that he had known worse and that, going out nearly every day with the tourists he looked after, he was less bored than he would be sitting behind a desk. Even so, the future seemed limited. He had no chance of getting a better job until he had done his military service, and actually the necessity for that seemed to be fast approaching. He was twenty and he could go early, before he was called up.

‘Dammit!’ Palfy said. ‘That could be a way out.’

They stopped beside one of the quays. Both French and foreign yachts were moored there. Crews were sitting drinking and eating in their cockpits, by the light of storm lanterns.

‘Usually there are ten times as many foreigners,’ Jean remarked. ‘Have they all gone? Yesterday I heard a man in the crowd say, “The rats are leaving the sinking ship!”’

‘They’re fools! A lightning war, and Europe will be German, or French. Great business opportunities are coming. It’s a good sign that the rats are leaving. Let us stay, and swear that if, in two weeks’ time, I have failed to come up with a new scheme, we shall enlist in the French army.’

‘My father won’t be able to bear it.’

‘Oh come on … he’d be ashamed if you wriggled out of it. One military march, and the most hardened onlookers have tears in their eyes.’

The next fortnight flashed past. The agency closed. Cannes was emptying. The fine summer was dying gently away, indifferent to the preparations for the great upheaval. Jewellers were selling off diamonds, banks dollars. From the horizon in the early morning came the dull, rhythmic crump of artillery. The French navy was exercising out at sea. A regiment from Marseille marched through the town. Troops were taking up defensive positions on the Italian frontier. Mules pulling mountain cannons followed. A regiment of Senegalese garrisoned at Fréjus left for the north. At the harbour master’s a queue formed of foreign yacht owners waiting to have their papers stamped to leave for Spain or Gibraltar. Shops began to run out of sugar, coffee, tea and jam. Jean and Palfy went for drives in the country behind Cannes, where a soothing indifference reigned, sampling the last of a summer that had been heartbreakingly tranquil and delightful. In the cafés, between games of cards and boules, people listened to the wireless as it broadcast with undeniable and vindictive skill its news digest preparing the population for war. Jean was tempted several times to go as far as Saint-Tropez to see Théo and Toinette and confirm that the Norman uncle was really the man he thought he was. He made do with calling Théo on the telephone on his last day to tell him that he was enlisting.

‘In the Train des Équipages?’18 Théo asked with a trace of anxiety.

‘No, no. Infantry.’

‘But you’ll be on foot, and Berlin’s a bit far for marching.’

‘I’ll hitchhike.’

‘All right then. You’re a brave one. I’m just in the GVC.’19

‘The GVC.?’

‘Guarding the lines of communication. When you’re past forty they don’t let you go to war, especially when you’re a father. Anyhow, it’ll be short, I’m telling you … Théo is telling you. We’ll expect you back at Christmas to slosh down some champagne with us. And come back with a Croix de Guerre. That’ll please Toinette.’

‘Send her a kiss from me.’

‘Send her a kiss!’

Jean felt Théo was taking himself a little too seriously as a father, and being excessively strait-laced. Of course he wished Toinette nothing but well. Come to think of it, why shouldn’t she be his wartime godmother? Théo said he would have to think about it.

‘I don’t want her to get any ideas. At her age, for heaven’s sake!’

‘Ask her uncle Antoine what he thinks. Tell him it’s for Jean Arnaud.’

‘Why? He hasn’t got a clue who you are!’

‘Yes he has, I promise he has. I’m a friend.’

The second week’s bill from the Carlton resembled, as foreseen, one of those ultimatums that had been echoing around Europe for the past three years. It was impossible to misread its tone. Palfy had already safely hidden several suits and some underwear, basic necessities for a future hoax that he was already applying his mind to. In the meantime he needed to disappear as fast as he could. Posters on town-hall doors were inviting him to do just that: ‘Enlist. Re-enlist. Beat the call-up.’ Despite having been discharged at twenty, he requested to take a new medical board. The medical officer noted his hollow chest, but in the face of his intense feigned patriotism passed him ‘fit for active service’. Jean was passed fit without reservation. A fifty-franc note slipped to the orderly secretary in charge of the allocation of recruits to training depots got them onto the same list. They were each issued with directions, but Palfy tore up their travel warrants. After a final tour of the town’s nightclubs, where age-exempt saxophonists blew up a storm on empty dance floors, they climbed into the Austro-Daimler and headed west and north, towards the Auvergne.