Hedi Kaddour - Waltenberg

De Vèze’s father fought in the 1914-18 war, was in it until 1917, the year he lost a leg, never talked to him about the war, military medal, croix de guerre , Legion of Honour, mentioned in despatches many times, and never a word about the war, a silent hero, the house was all silence, his mother even more silent than his father.

All de Vèze knows about the First World War he has got out of books and from a handful of tales told by friends of his father, away from the house, there were also a few personal reminiscences of his junior schoolteachers or masters at his lycée , men who had gone to fight, the need took them sometimes, towards the end of the afternoon, instead of teaching the syllabus they’d look out of the window and start to talk, it was always the same thing, in the end we stopped paying much attention, we felt they had an urge to tell true stories, but at the same time they didn’t want to put us off, and even when they’d started with a note of anger in their voice, anger against war, wounds, dying, the screams, the stupidity, that pointless war, it nevertheless always ended by sounding like what got printed in the newspapers on the eve of 11 November, no one was going to say we fought this war for nothing, we owed it to the dead not to admit anything of the sort, anger against war, anger against Germany which hadn’t wanted to pay up, still hadn’t paid up, nothing very specific about the war itself, de Vèze’s friends knew his father, were proud of having a friend with a father like that, they also were proud of boys who were orphans, but that was less tangible than the wooden leg and walking stick of de Vèze senior when he crossed the school yard to go to his class.

One of his father’s friends told him a tale or two of charges launched by the French cavalry at the very start of the war, follies perpetrated by dragoons, what a joke, an embryonic charge cast in brass on the desk of a minister who can’t ever have been on a horse in his life, or picture the Minister sitting backwards on the horse, the sabre in one hand and the gee-gee’s tail in the other, think Daumier, an urge to chuck it all in and shoot off for a week in Dinard with Little Miss Jealousy, he’ll have to earn forgiveness for the disgraceful words she used, all his fault, a room with a view of the sea, a good way of getting it all back together again, breakfast in bed, croissants, she slices her croissant open, spreads red-current jelly, closes it and dunks.

And once she’s finished, she stretches and waggles her legs.

She brings up their quarrel again, he replies:

‘Bad language? You used bad language the other day? I don’t remember, oh yes, what was it that woman did to me? What did you call her?’

And she would say:

‘It was because I love you, you laugh when I get angry. That day, when you went off to see your Minister, I knew exactly what you were thinking.’

She would like to provoke him into saying something hurtful, she dreams of having a scene, I’m the only one she can have scenes with now.

‘Henri, I’m sure you were thinking it was better when I was still married, I know you, I can read you like a book, you can come right out with it.’

No way! Dinard, you mustn’t go there together, she’d have time to stock up on good intentions, besides in a railway compartment she can be unbearable, putting a hand on his thigh, fooling around, laying her head on his shoulder, getting all hot and bothered with her eyes shut, in full view of the other passengers, she doesn’t see them, she knows they’re looking at her, that they’re looking at de Vèze, that it makes him feel uncomfortable, she loves it, she whispers:

‘I don’t care what other people think, I’m in love!’

Once she pulled a similar stunt in a cinema queue, she clung to him, said over and over I love your neck, I love your back, she was whispering but there were people not fifty centimetres away, she slips her hand round to de Vèze’s back, under his jacket, her hand slides down, her fingers pull the tail of his shirt up, fingers on his skin, on his buttocks, she said I love stroking you there, they were going to see Apocalypse Now ! There’s nothing she likes better than putting him in that sort of situation.

This Dinard arrangement. Very nice is Dinard, families, dark blue sea, not too many pretty women about, they tend to go south, so not much danger of getting told off because you looked at one of them, like the other evening at Marty’s when Muriel decided she wanted to swap places:

‘What for?’

‘Because I have no intention of allowing you to spend the whole evening ogling those two tarts sitting behind me.’

Or during an interval at the Comédie Française:

‘Don’t tell me you didn’t see her!’

In the end he realised that a woman in a trouser-suit had stood next to him when he’d gone to fetch the drinks, she had smiled at him, he’d stepped aside, let her go first and replied to whatever it was she’d said. When he got back with his two bottles and two glasses, he’d had his ear well and truly chewed:

‘Henri, if you want, I can go home and leave you here to carry on flirting, I see it’s the mannish type now, she’s flat-chested, go and check for yourself, but I won’t be here when you get back.’

Dinard, swimming, there’ll be breakers, watching the kites on the beach, there are more and more of them and they get bigger and bigger, a genuine sport now, with proper handgrips, great brutes with a span of three or four metres, forget all this talk of a mole, the kite nose-dives, finds lift just before hitting the sand, climbs whirring up into the sky, the boy standing next to his father, roaring with laughter, the wind, a rip in the canvas red yellow, some kites tear easily, others slip their lines, hurtle down and crash, the laughter too is extinguished, walking along old excisemen’s paths, pass families on the way, see the craziest, the sweetest houses and think sweet thoughts. The most attractive houses belong to the English, large picture windows with blue shutters, there’s also a place that sells pancakes, that has photos of the twenties and thirties in dark brown beaded frames, the front page of a newspaper, also framed, with an article about the resistance in Madrid in 1936, the republicans with one gun for every two men, the article is signed Saint-Exupéry, also photos of a giant seaplane, something de Vèze had dreamed of when he was a boy, a Yankee Clipper, four engines, transatlantic flights in real sleeping berths, Dinard would be good, long walks, the waves crashing on the rocks.

Sometimes a squall there can be frightening, the air makes you dizzy, within moments you can’t see the houses, the path is on a grassy slope, when a strong gust of wind comes along sometimes you have to sit down and hang on to a gorse bush, you don’t have to but you never know, it can last a quarter of an hour, she nestles into my shoulder, her arms are around my waist, then we go on with our walk, I look at the gorse, I must take up botany again, then dinner for two, let Muriel choose for them both from the menu:

‘Guess what I’d like.’

She’d answer:

‘Oh, I know what you like.’

She would be terrifyingly tender, four days, don’t suggest making it a week, say four days, maybe you could add a fifth at the last minute, days without braces or incident, until it’s time to come back, which she doesn’t like.

And instead of that, the strutting cockerel, Colonel Berthier, to be precise, but still in civvies.

That’s why, two days ago at a reception, Maurice and Jacques told de Vèze:

‘They promised you wouldn’t make difficulties.’

Jacques added:

‘Augustin, don’t be daft!’

Augustin, his code name, a ridiculous name now but when he was young all the boys had wanted to be called Augustin, and all the girls dreamed of being Yvonne and smiling at some Augustin, that was when they were between thirteen and seventeen, in the Sologne, Jacques took him to one side leaving Maurice, who looked like a neurotic poodle, talking to the widow of a marshal.