Maigret's Holiday (2 page)

Here, he did nothing but wait; wait for the
half-hour to come to an end. After a few minutes, Madame Maigret picked up her knitting
to give an impression of composure. Since she had to put up with Mademoiselle
Rinquet's presence all day and all night, she treated her with consideration. If
she spoke, she would hastily add:

‘Isn't that so, Mademoiselle
Rinquet?'

Then she winked at Maigret. He guessed what
that
meant. Women hate letting their petty anxieties show, especially
Madame Maigret, and there they both were confined to bed.

‘I wrote a card to my sister …
Will you be so kind as to post it for me?'

He slipped the postcard with a picture of
the convent hospital with its pretty white façade and green door into his left
breast pocket.

Now for a stupid detail. Left pocket or
right pocket? That question was to come back to haunt him at eleven o'clock that
night.

For years and years, each of his pockets had
always had a clearly defined purpose. In his left trouser pocket, his tobacco pouch and
his handkerchief – so there were always wisps of tobacco in his handkerchiefs.
Right pocket, his two pipes and small change. Left back pocket, his wallet, which was
always stuffed with useless bits of paper and made one buttock look bigger than the
other.

He never carried keys on him. Whenever he
took them by mistake, he would lose them. He hardly put anything in his jacket, only a
box of matches in the right-hand pocket.

That is why, when he had newspapers to take
away or letters to post, he slipped them in his left breast pocket.

Had he done so that day? It was likely. He
was sitting by the frosted-glass window. Sister Marie des Anges had come in a couple of
times, darting a furtive glance in his direction each time. She was very young. There
wasn't a crease on her rosy face.

A fool might perhaps have claimed that she
was in love
with him, for she would rush to meet him on the stairs and
become a butterfingers when he was in the room.

He knew very well that there was something
else, something much simpler, more naive and childish.

Like the idea, which had come from her, of
calling him ‘Monsieur 6'. Because he dreaded people's curiosity and
didn't like his name being yelled right, left and centre. He was on holiday,
wasn't he, yes or no?

Did he really hate being on holiday? All
year long he would sigh:

‘Oh to have some peace and quiet at
last, hours and hours to fill as I please …'

Hours completely free, days with no
commitments, no meetings. In Paris, in his office at Quai des Orfèvres, that
sounded like unimaginable bliss.

Was he missing Madame Maigret?

No! He knew himself. He complained. He was
grumpy. But deep down, he knew that this holiday would be just like all the others. In
six months, in a year's time, he would be thinking:

‘My goodness! I was so happy at Les
Sables d'Olonne …'

And with hindsight, this hospital where he
felt so ill at ease would seem like a delightful place. He would melt at the memory of
Sister Marie des Anges' candid, blushing face.

Never did he take his watch out before
hearing the little chimes of the chapel bell signalling that it was half past three. He
even pretended not to have heard. Was Madame Maigret taken in? She was the one who had
to say:

‘Time's up, Maigret
…'

‘I'll telephone
tomorrow morning,' he would say, rising to his feet, as if this were something
new.

He telephoned every morning. There was no
telephone in the room, but it was Sister Aurélie, downstairs, who answered:

‘Our dear patient had a very good
night …'

Sometimes she would add:

‘The chaplain will be coming later to
keep her company.'

His life was as highly regulated as that of
a prisoner in Fresnes jail. He hated obligations. He cursed at the thought of having to
be somewhere at a specific time. But in actual fact, he himself had created a schedule
that he kept to more scrupulously than a train its timetable.

At what point in the day could the note have
been slipped into his pocket, his left breast pocket?

It was an ordinary sheet of glazed squared
paper, probably torn out of an exercise book. The words were written in pencil, in a
regular handwriting that looked to him like a woman's.

There was no signature. Only those words.
He had slipped his wife's postcard into his left pocket. Had the note been there
already? It was possible. He can't have thrust his hand deep inside his
pocket.

But what about later, when he had posted the
card in the letterbox by the covered market?

Three little words
particularly irritated him:
For pity's sake
.

Why for pity's sake? If someone wanted
to speak to him, it was perfectly straightforward to do so. He wasn't the pope.
Anyone could approach him.

For pity's sake … That was in
keeping with the cloying atmosphere into which he stepped every afternoon, with the
nuns' faint smiles as if effaced with an eraser, with Sister Marie des
Anges' little winks.

No! He shrugged. He found it hard to imagine
Sister Marie des Anges slipping a note into his pocket. Even less Sister Aldegonde, who
contrived to be in the corridor, opposite the public ward, whenever he walked past. As
for Sister Aurélie, she was always separated from him by a window.

That was not quite true. A detail came back
to him. When he had left, she had been outside her office and had shown him to the
door.

Why not the elderly Mademoiselle Rinquet,
for that matter? He had brushed past her bed too. And he had passed Doctor Bertrand on
the stairs …

He didn't want to think about it.
Besides, it was of no importance. It was ten thirty at night when he found the note. He
had just gone up to his room at the Hôtel Bel Air. As usual, before undressing he
emptied out his pockets and placed the contents on top of the chest of drawers.

As on the previous days, he had drunk a lot.
Through no fault of his own. Not intentionally, but because this was the pattern his
life at Les Sables d'Olonne had taken on.

For example, when he came
downstairs at nine in the morning, he was forced to drink.

At eight o'clock, Julie, the smaller
and darker of the two maids, brought him his coffee in bed. Why did he pretend to be
asleep when he had been awake since six o'clock?

Another little habit. Holidays meant
lie-ins. He rose at dawn three hundred and twenty days of the year and more, and each
morning he promised himself:

‘When I'm on holiday, I'm
going to catch up on my sleep!'

From his room he had a view of the ocean. It
was August. He slept with the windows open. The old, heavy, red-silk curtains did not
meet and he was dragged from his sleep by the sun and the sound of the breakers on the
sand.

And then there was the noise from the lady
in number 3, next door, who had four children aged between six months and eight years,
who all slept in her room.

For an hour there was shrieking, wailing,
comings and goings; he could picture her, half-dressed, wearing slippers on her bare
feet, her hair dishevelled, struggling with her tetchy brood, plonking one down in a
corner, another on the bed, slapping the eldest who was crying, looking for the
girl's lost shoe, despairing of ever getting the spirit stove to work so she
could heat up the baby's bottle. The smell of meths seeped under the communicating
door to Maigret's room.

As for the elderly couple on his right, that
was another performance. They talked nonstop in a monotone, their voices
indistinguishable from one another, and it almost sounded as if they were reciting
psalms.

Maigret had to wait until
the bathroom for their floor was free, listen out for the sound of the sink draining or
the toilet being flushed. He had a little balcony. He lingered there in his dressing
gown, and the view was really magnificent, the vast, dazzling beach, the sea dotted with
blue and white sails. He saw the first striped beach umbrellas being planted, and the
first kids arriving in their red swimming costumes.

By the time he went downstairs, freshly
shaven, traces of soap behind his ears, he was on his third pipe.

What was it that prompted him to go behind
the scenes? Nothing. He could, like everyone else, have gone out via the sunlit dining
room, which Germaine, the plump maid with incredible breasts, was busy polishing.

But no. He pushed open the door to the staff
dining room and then that of the kitchen. At that moment, the bespectacled Madame
Léonard was discussing the menu with the chef. Monsieur Léonard would
invariably emerge from the wine cellar. At any hour of the day, he could be seen coming
up from the cellar, and yet he was fairly sober.

‘Beautiful day, inspector
…'

Monsieur Léonard was in slippers and
shirt-sleeves. There were peas, freshly grated carrots, leeks and potatoes in bowls.
Blood from the meats ran on to the deal table, while sole and turbot lay waiting to be
scaled.

‘A little glass of white wine,
inspector?'

The first of the day. A little drink with
the owner. It was in fact an excellent local wine with a greenish tinge.

Maigret could hardly go and sit on the beach
among all the mothers. He strolled along the promenade, Le Remblai,
pausing from time to time. He gazed at the sea, at the swelling number of brightly
clad figures playing in the waves close to the shore. Then, when he reached the town
centre, he turned right into a narrow street which led to the covered market.

He wandered from stall to stall as slowly
and methodically as if he had forty people to feed. He stopped in front of the fish,
which were still quivering, then he lingered in front of the shellfish and proffered a
matchstick to a lobster which snatched it with its pincer.

Second glass of white wine. Because just
opposite was a little café where you went down one step and it was like an
extension of the market, filled with mouth-watering smells.

Then he walked past Notre-Dame to go and buy
his newspaper. Could he go back up to his room to read it?

He went back to the promenade and sat at the
terrace of a café, always in the same place. He always dithered too, keeping the
waiter standing there ready to take his order. As if he were going to drink anything
else!

‘A white wine.'

It had come about by chance. He would
sometimes go for months without drinking white wine.

At eleven o'clock, he went inside the
café to telephone the hospital, to hear Sister Aurélie say in her syrupy
voice:

‘Our dear patient had an excellent
night.'

He had organized a series of little halts
where he would sit at set times. In the hotel dining room too, he had his special
corner, by the window, opposite the table of his two elderly neighbours.

On the first day, after his
coffee, he had ordered a glass of Calvados. Since then Germaine invariably asked
him:

‘Calvados, inspector?'

He didn't dare refuse. He felt drowsy.
The sun was scorching. At times the asphalt on the promenade melted underfoot and car
tyres left their imprint on it.

He went up to his room for a nap, not in the
bed but in the armchair which he had dragged on to the balcony, where he sat with a
newspaper spread over his face.

Anyone seeing him ensconced in his various
favourite spots at different times of day would think he had been there for years, like
the afternoon card players. But it was only nine days since he and his wife had arrived.
On the first evening, they had eaten mussels. It was a treat they had been promising
themselves since Paris: to eat a huge dish of freshly caught mussels.

They had both been ill. They had kept their
neighbours awake. The next day, Maigret felt better, but on the beach Madame Maigret
complained of vague pains. The second night, she had a fever. They still thought it was
nothing serious.

‘It was silly of me. I've never
been able to eat mussels …'

Then, the following day, she was in so much
pain that they had had to call Doctor Bertrand and he had sent her straight to hospital.
Those few hours had been difficult, chaotic, to-ing and fro-ing, new faces, X-rays,
tests.

‘I assure you,
doctor, it was the mussels,' repeated Madame Maigret with a wan smile.

But the doctors were not smiling. They took
Maigret to one side. Acute appendicitis with the risk of peritonitis. His wife needed
emergency surgery.

He paced up and down the long corridor
during the operation, at the same time as a young man waiting for his wife to give
birth, who had bitten his nails until his fingers bled.

That was how he had become ‘Monsieur
6'.

In six days, a man develops new habits,
learns to walk quietly, to smile sweetly at Sister Aurélie, and then at Sister
Marie des Anges. He even learns to give a forced smile to the loathsome Mademoiselle
Rinquet.

After which someone takes advantage of the
situation to slip a stupid note into his pocket.

And first of all, who was the patient in
room 15? Madame Maigret would know, for sure. They all knew one another even though they
didn't meet. They all knew one another's business. She sometimes told her
husband the gossip, discreetly, in a low voice, like in church.

‘Apparently the lady in room 11
who's so kind and so gentle … poor thing … Come closer
…'

She stammered under her breath:

‘Breast cancer …'

Then she glanced over at Mademoiselle
Rinquet's bed and fluttered her eyelashes, indicating that her fellow patient had
cancer too.