The Centurions (31 page)

“Let's not go over that again. What's more, I hope to bring him back here to dinner and also see Marindelle, if I can . . .”

“I shan't be here. If this goes on, we'll have your N.C.O.s and privates invading this drawing-room.”

“I wouldn't mind at all if they did, but you see, my dear, they're all dead.”

 • • • 

Jacques de Glatigny glanced round the drawing-room with its pictures, suits of armour, standards and coats of arms. On the shelves stood rows of miniature cannons, a complete little military museum.

That stained and tattered old flag had come from Waterloo, and that large sword, which only a giant could wield, had belonged to the Constable. The large crystal chandelier had been looted in Italy, and the sumptuous carpets brought back by General Gardanne, whom Napoleon had sent into Persia to persuade the Shah to side with him against the British. In a glass case hung the starred cloak of a Grand Master of the Knights of Malta, and on a pillar stood the dented breastplate of an officer of the Pontifical Zouaves.

Yes, indeed, what would Bachelier and Bermanju, Moustier and Dupont, Merkilof and Javelle, have said if they had found themselves here, among all these remnants of history? And Cergona with his W.T. set which seemed to be devouring his back? But their bodies were now rotting in the Dien-Bien-Phu basin.

He plucked the children off him as though they were bunches of grapes, and went off to dress. He was going to be late for his meeting with Esclavier. He felt extremely tired. He would have liked to be living alone in a wooden hut in the country, tramping through the forests in hobnailed boots, feeding on bread, wine, raw onions, sardines and eggs . . . in solitude . . . and in prayer . . . searching for the mysterious thread which he needed to guide him through this new existence in which he discovered that generals can be imbeciles and one's own wife a stranger.

Yet he was the first to arrive at the Brent Bar and he almost ordered a whisky, then changed his mind—that was a habit he would have to get rid of. With a captain's pay, a wife with big ideas, five bouncing children and a flat like a military museum, whisky was a forbidden luxury.

“A port, please, barman.”

“You're not going to drink that muck,” Esclavier exclaimed, rushing in. “Two whiskies, please, barman.”

“Good morning, Captain,” said Edouard.

The barman gave Philippe Esclavier a conspiratorial smile.

This was the first time Philippe had seen his friend in civilian clothes: he was surprised. Although dressed with the utmost care, Glatigny looked shrunken, thinner and smaller than he really was, in his rather old-fashioned blue suit which smelt faintly of mothballs. He had put his roll-brim hat and gloves down beside him on the bar and sat astride his stool as though it was a saddle. His features were drawn, his smile melancholy. He had a smelly old pipe in his mouth.

Esclavier put his hand on his shoulder, as he had done up there in the Méo highlands.

“Well, Jacques?”

“Well, Philippe?”

“What was it like getting back?”

“I found my children had grown a lot. I behave towards them like a doddering old papa, dripping with affection; I tremble for them, for they'll be forced to live in the termite world which we once knew. My wife has got used to being alone; she has acquired self-reliance, a certain sense of independence. The great tragedy is that in the Vietminh camps we developed on our own, away from our families, our social class, our profession and country. So coming back isn't so easy.”

“With the Viets, the problem was over-simple. It boiled down to this: survival. Some of us went a little farther and tried to understand it.”

“I've seen Marindelle again.”

“Oh yes?”

“He's happy, he's playing at being happy . . . but . . .”

“Yes, he has a gift for theatricals.”

“He's being accused of turning Communist.”

“Marindelle!”

“I've had to stand up for him, consequently I'm now regarded as a fellow-traveller!”

Esclavier reverted to his dry, scornful tone:

“The army is the biggest collection of dirty dogs and idiots that I've ever come across.”

“Well, why are you in it then?”

“It's also where you meet the most unselfish men and most loyal friends.”

“Have you been home yet?”

“No. I don't know how to put it, but I can't bear the idea. Two more whiskies, please, Edouard: make them doubles. It's true, we've developed away from our homes . . . and for the first time I feel that we army people are ahead . . . for the first time in centuries. Only, there we are, it's mere chance that has pushed us ahead; we weren't prepared for it. Let's go and eat; I need your help to get me in the proper frame of mind to go home to the Rue de l'Université.”

By eight o'clock that evening Glatigny and Esclavier were drunk. They had run into Orsini wandering about the Champs-Élysées in search of a cinema. He never got up until two in the afternoon and spent his time playing poker all night with his fellow Corsicans. Up to now he had been winning.

“They're handing it to me on a plate,” he said. “It's the first time I've ever seen them lose.”

All three of them had gone back to the Brent Bar and a fascinated Edouard listened to them, forgetting his other clients.

“As far as I'm concerned,” said Glatigny, dipping his nose into his glass, “love boils down to a purely social function; religion to a number of senseless gestures; warfare to a form of technology more or less suited to the purpose. Do you realize, you two, why I fought at Dien-Bien-Phu, why I slogged through those muddy trenches with my hands tied behind my back, rotting with fever in the monsoon, do you realize why we waged that war in Indo-China? Just so that the Comtesse de Glatigny could put a new roof on a pile of old ruins.”

“I'm fed up already,” said Orsini. “One ought to be able to spend one's leave with a few friends . . . who, like me, have neither wife nor family . . . I've never been so thirsty as this evening. All the thirst I felt at Camp One is parching my throat. What do you say to ringing up Marindelle?”

“Marindelle is living on love,” said Esclavier. “I think I'm now at last in a fit state to go home.”

He left, with his beret planted firmly on his head and his lips set in a thin, grim line. Glatigny and Orsini went on drinking.

 • • • 

With his hands in the pockets of his raincoat, a cigarette drooping from his lip, his face very pale and thin, Philippe Esclavier stood outside the front door.

His sister Jacqueline opened it and heaved a deep sigh.

“It's you, Philippe. We thought you were dead.”

“Thought or hoped?”

She was shivering, for she felt she was looking at a ghost—the ghost of her father, grimly accoutred. The resemblance was overwhelming.

“Please, Philippe. I'm so pleased you've come back.”

She tried to kiss him. He let her do so, keeping his hands in his pockets and his cigarette in his mouth, then pushed past her through the door.

The muffled sound of a number of voices came from the drawing-room.

“You've got company, I gather. Is Weihl holding forth as usual?”

“Philippe, don't let's have a row. Our opinions may differ . . .”

“It's not just our opinions . . .”

“Everyone will be delighted to see you, including Michel . . . After all, you were both deported together . . .”

“Not for the same reasons . . .”

“Please, Philippe. I've got out your civilian clothes. Would you like me to go and fetch them. Go and have a wash to freshen yourself up. Then change and . . . come and join us.”

“Why change?”

“That uniform you're wearing . . .”

“I might have known it. When I came back from Mathausen, you wanted me to keep on my deportee's uniform. Now that I'm back from Indo-China as an officer . . .”

“A paratroop officer . . . Philippe . . .”

“You want me to disguise myself as a civilian, to slink home in the dark, to kowtow to a dirty little crook and his friends who are mucking up my carpets, to ask forgiveness for failing to get myself killed twenty times over, for miraculously coming out alive after being dumped in a Vietminh hospital. There must be something wrong with you, Jacqueline.”

Jacqueline burst into tears.

“You're an utter savage, and you've been drinking, you reek of drink. Our father never used to drink.”

Philippe stepped into the drawing-room with his beret still on his head, but he had taken off his raincoat, revealing his parachute badge and decorations.

Michel Weihl-Esclavier was speaking with the scornful detachment, the rather precious insistence on the choice of expression, which enabled him to pose as a sensitive soul and writer of wide culture. He was leaning against the mantelpiece under the big portrait of Étienne Esclavier, and one of his hands, which were his best feature, drooped in an attitude of studied negligence.

Ensconced in an arm-chair, Villèle seemed to be hanging on his lips, but he wasn't listening to him and his thoughts were elsewhere. Villèle hated Weihl and his success; he congratulated him on his books, which he signed Michel W. Esclavier, but said behind his back that they were junk, and never read them. He himself would have liked to live in this apartment where generations of professors, men of law, famous doctors and politicians had amassed their tasteful treasures.

The Fantin-Latour hanging on the opposite wall was a fortune in itself.

Since Weihl was not looking at him, he turned his head slightly and saw the charming profile of Guitte, Goldschmidt's daughter. The old professor was asleep in his chair, his mouth wide open. She was lively and attractive, the little minx. What would she be like in bed? Prudish? Bold? A mixture of the two? It was something worth considering . . .

Nothing else of interest in this group: a few activists with thick ankles and short hair; two or three society women as silly as that Françoise Percenier-Moreau who was said to be Weihl's mistress; some badly dressed, shiny-faced female students . . . barely fit for a roll in the hay in an interval between two self-examination periods.

The men were not much better: university people with an exaggerated idea of themselves; a painter who turned up at every meeting because he had been given to think that he might meet Picasso there. But what no one knew was that the painter carried in his pocket a syringe filled with black paint with which he intended to spray the “mystery-monger who had ruined painting.”

He, Villèle, did know and was biding his time . . . One evening he had written a paper, a very good paper, in which he sided with Picasso, of course, but with reservations, extremely subtle reservations. The paper could not appear yet; and perhaps if the incident did occur, the outcome might be entirely different. There was also a stage-manager who was noted for his unnatural tastes. And lastly, a Dominican. There is always a Dominican in the offing.

Not one of the thirty people assembled there found favour in Villèle's eyes, not even the little philosophy mistress from a provincial
lycée
who was blushing with admiration for the master and delightedly dipping the tip of her tongue into a glass of tepid orangeade. How sordid it all was, Weihl and his orangeade!

He caught sight of Philippe Esclavier who had just come in, and recognized him at once. He was the tall captain who at Vietri had given the released prisoners the order to throw away their fibre helmets and canvas boots. Villèle had a photographic memory for faces. He assumed a puzzled expression as a wave of jubilation swept over him. The show-down promised to be a good one.

“Our action in favour of peace,” Weihl was saying, “has met with magnificent results. We raised public opinion against the war in Indo-China, and the outcome was the armistice and the victory of our friends of the Democratic Republic of Viet-Nam. Soon they'll be masters of the South, where the puppet set up by the Americans won't be able to hold out for more than a few days.”

“Still talking away?”

Philippe's voice chipped in, dry as the crackle of a forest tree on a frosty day. He was leaning against the door-post as though to block the exit through which his prey might try to escape.

“I wonder what our country has done to you for you to think of nothing but destroying it, or my family for you to have come and infected them.”

Michel Weihl felt the blood draining from his face, chest and limbs and taking refuge in some mysterious part of his body, a sort of basin into which it always settled as soon as things began to go wrong. He had been expecting this encounter and had prepared for it, but was nevertheless taken by surprise.

The Dominican rose to his feet and tried to make for the doorway. Philippe's voice brought him to a standstill like a butterfly on a pin.

“Back to your seat, Vicar, and stay there!”

Jacqueline tried to come through the door from the other side. She drummed on him with her bare fists but soon gave up.

“She has gone to her room to have a good cry,” Weihl thought to himself. “That's all she's good for—crying like her mother. The Dominican has also sat down again. And that little sod Villèle is secretly laughing his head off! Goldschmidt has woken up at last; he's rubbing his eyes. He's beaming all over his face; he has recognized his little Philippe . . . This is all very interesting. At the moment I am outside the drama, like a spectator, but I am also at the centre of it. This theme would be worth developing, but later, later. I must recover my position on stage, in the centre of the stage. Françoise is trying to look shocked. That won't do any good, my little Françoise; this time it's serious, and Philippe hasn't even noticed your facial contortions. I'm his ‘sacrificial beast.'” Michel suddenly recalled this Persian expression to which he had attached a deep significance: “May I be your sacrificial beast.”