The Mahé Circle (7 page)

And he felt himself blushing.

A little later, he overheard his wife saying in a whisper to Madame Péchade:

‘I don't know what's brought this on. I've never seen him so touchy as when we were down there. Everything
got on his nerves, he would blow up at the slightest thing … And
now he seems determined to go back there!'

As usual after having Sunday lunch together, the two men got up and went for a stroll down the road. Mahé felt the need to explain to his friend … but what was there to explain exactly?

‘It's going to be hard!' he sighed, nevertheless.

‘This Porquerolles business?'

‘Yes. We'll have to have a talk tonight when you've gone. They'll gang up on me.'

‘Your wife doesn't look too pleased about it.'

‘Oh, if we listened to her, we'd never go on holiday at all, we'd never leave the house, she's capable of sewing away behind the curtains here all year long.'

In the shady café interiors, dark-clad men were playing cards, and they too, like the weathered benches and the varnished tables, seemed to have been sculpted into the solid scene.

Sometimes, especially on Sundays, he felt repelled by them, every single one, with their black serge suits, their ruddy faces and their clean white shirt-fronts.

‘What about you? Are you going to your in-laws as usual?'

Péchade didn't seem troubled by the prospect. The milestones stood out harsh and white on both sides of the road. Hedges, fields with cows in them, cyclists starting to return with bunches of yellow broom on their handlebars, girls in their
Sunday best, linking arms and strolling in groups that blocked the road.

Further down the road, less than two kilometres away,
was that other grey house, with its barns and stables, his father's house, the Mahé who was still talked about in the region, and who was gradually
becoming a legend.

‘A giant of a man, he had to bend his head to come through the door … Built like a wardrobe.'

François had scarcely known him, since he was only three when his father had died.

‘On market days, I've seen him line up ten beers on the table and knock them back faster that it would take you to drink one.'

He was a horse dealer, And they also remembered the famous piebald pony that …

Why did even these memories appear to him as if they were cut-out scenes, in crude colours, with the vulgar and embarrassing clarity of picture postcards?

One day at the fair … Yes, he had heard this story a hundred or even five hundred times. They would appeal to him:

‘That's right, ain't it, doctor? … We were just talking about your father … He'd done it two or three times before, mind. He'd get the piebald pony by its front legs and cross the road carrying it
across his back. And one day, the November fair it was, St Andrew's Day, he'd bet I don't know how much with his pals he could do the same with his old grey mare. He'd had a skinful, seeing as it was five in the afternoon. But you know, you could get him to drink as
much as you wanted, he never lost his wits, and he could strike a mean deal with anyone … So they're out on the road, and someone fetches the grey mare … He gets hold of her front legs like the pony, but
of course the mare was
heavier by, oh, a quarter. And someone says to him:

‘“Leave off, Isidore, you'll do yourself a mischief!”

‘But the others, they're egging him on. So anyway, he lifts her up, true as I'm standing here, and when he moved off you could see his legs bending under him. But he went on with it, three steps maybe four, seems his veins were
standing out blue. And then he fell down, without a sound. Dead! What a man, though, eh!'

But François had been brought up in that house, all the same. They had continued to sell horses. There was always a little room where they served drinks. His mother was already as slight and thin as she was today. He heard her telling off the
stable lads from morning to night. It was no trade for a woman. People said: ‘She'll have to sell up one of these days.' But what would she have done, when there was no money left in the house and a boy to bring up?

She had soldiered on, serving up drinks, going to the customers in the stables, locking the stable lad in at night when he had drunk too much, and in the end her son had been able to go to medical school.

So it was over. She had brought him up, made a gentleman out of him, had bought him a house and Dr Riou's former practice, and had found him a wife. Because she it was who had arranged his marriage.

And she was still running the household.

What more could he ask for? He had a quiet life, plenty of free time to go hunting and fishing whenever he wanted to. Good dogs. And anyone from the village would readily keep him company.

So?

What was all this about Porquerolles, where he had been the first to complain about the food and the beds?

‘Do any fishing down there?' Péchade was asking, as he walked along with him.

He didn't know what to reply. He had only been fishing the one time, with Gène. Every time the man met him, he'd say:

‘What about tomorrow, doctor?'

‘Maybe some other day.'

The weirdest thing was that what had been holding him back was some kind of shyness. He felt awkward, out of place. For a couple of days he had gone round wearing blue trousers, bought at the mayor-grocer's, rope-soled espadrilles and a
white shirt with its sleeves rolled up.

That was what the locals wore, and quite a few of the holidaymakers who were working hard at playing boules.

He had felt, when he was dressed like that, that his wife was sneaking glances at him. Sometimes, from a distance, she didn't recognize him. Was he too fat? There were plenty as fat as him, or more so, among the fishermen.

His skin was too white, certainly. He got sunburnt. His skin turned brick-red and peeled, and he pulled off long, transparent strips of it.

He had stopped wearing the blue trousers all of a sudden. Sometimes he wore a collar and tie, as he had always been accustomed to.

Not once had he had occasion to speak to Frans Klamm, and yet he had seen the man almost every day. Klamm was always round the harbour, barefoot, with a gait that
distinguished him from everyone else, at
once stiff and supple. You never heard him approaching. He didn't displace any air, and one was surprised to see him passing close by.

Under the blazing sun, he would be hailed by cries:

‘Frans! Hey Frans! Come over here. Get a hold of this net.'

And he would obey, as docile as a beast of burden. He did what he was asked. He was the servant at everyone's beck and call. People threw him coins. Or invited him on board a boat to finish up the remains of a stew. He would eat slowly,
always sitting very still, and his gestures were oddly delicate, even if he was eating with his fingers.

Truthfully, the doctor hadn't thought about him for a year, nor about his daughter in the red dress, who was so thin, nor about Polyte sleeping peacefully on a bench in the café, in the blue shadows, untroubled by the noise around him.

Now, if he asked himself scrupulously – and it was because he was doing so unwillingly that he felt embarrassed – he admitted to himself that he had not needed to think about them, because he had always known he would go back.

It was a sort of tacit understanding. Even when he had written that letter to the Le Guens.

What would Armand Péchade say, if he told him: ‘I wrote to the Le Guens to book rooms, but I knew we wouldn't be going there'?

He would be accused of duplicity. And yet there was no duplicity in him.

He just knew. That was all.

But why? That was another matter. When they had been aboard the
Cormoran
, approaching the island which they were seeing for the first time, he would willingly have turned back, like his wife, but for different reasons.

It was beautiful, certainly. Magnificent, in fact. Was it because he was leaning forward in the bows of the boat watching the water dividing as the keel thrust forward? He could see the seabed. And the seabed loomed vertiginously close, with its
rocks, valleys and feeding grounds, since he now knew the fish had feeding grounds. From that moment, he had felt the same vertigo he had experienced much more powerfully when he was out fishing with Gène.

The bottom of the Sèvre, and the fish in the Sèvre, had nothing like the same effect on him.

Down there in the south was a hostile world, a world so foreign to him that he felt quite lost. The island itself. Its throbbing heat as if in a belljar under the sun, the scorpion in his son's bed, the deafening sound of the cicadas.

Well! Just now in the garden, it was that sound that he had suddenly missed, a year later. The air had seemed empty, the road deserted, the village entirely dead.

He wanted to be walking out of the Pension Saint-Charles and down to the harbour, alone, to watch someone hauling up, on the end of a line, a great octopus, its tentacles pulsing with indifferent life.

He both longed for that and dreaded it. He knew that he would be unhappy there, that he would feel an outsider.

His wife was jealous! Because her distrust, her hostility,
reflected nothing other than jealousy. But what had she to be jealous about?

He gave a start, surprised to find he had walked a hundred metres with his friend Péchade at his side without saying a word, and that Péchade too had been quite silent.

‘Perhaps we should turn back?'

‘If you like. Anyway, we must be getting along. I wonder if I left the car in the sun.'

And yes, he had: the black car was sitting in the sun, in a little side lane. The three boys had to be dressed for going home, roses had to be cut for Madame Péchade (whose own garden was full of them). At the last minute, they remembered a
recipe she had been promised, but which had been forgotten. The women started looking in drawers.

‘I tell you,' the doctor's mother was repeating to her daughter-in-law, ‘you lent it last week to Madame Delépine.'

‘Never mind, Hélène, I'll take it next time …'

Sunday evenings tasted of dust, perspiration and alcohol. They all clustered round the car, checking that the doors were properly shut, winding down the windows to shake hands one last time.

‘You're not coming to Bressuire this week?'

‘Possibly … I may have a patient to see in the hospital.'

The car disappeared down the road. They walked back through the garden, after closing the black iron gate which squeaked on its hinges. The children went ahead, Jeanne holding her little brother's hand. Her hair had been curled into
ringlets, which hung down silkily on either side of her face, and she wore a large bow on top of her head. The doctor sensed that the two women were stealing
glances at him. He walked heavily, dragging his feet, and took time over emptying his pipe,
tapping it against the heel of his boot.

As they were going up the stone steps, his mother said:

‘So it's decided, is it?'

She knew him. He contented himself with a nod, a yes that dared not yet come out into the open.

‘As you wish. You'll have to write straight away to the Le Guens. You might even telephone them perhaps?'

To get rid of her, he replied:

‘I'll do it right away.'

And he went into his surgery to ask for an outside line. Behind the door of an open cupboard was an enamel washbasin and a diamond-shaped mirror. He looked at his reflection. He had a round head, a low brow and firm flesh, reddened by either his
blood pressure or the sun.

And as he stood looking at himself, his lips parted in a smile, a smile he had not seen for a long time, literally the smile of a little boy who has got his way.

‘Hullo, Madame Le Guen? … Yes, of course I recognized your voice. All well with you? … A lot of visitors … Yes … Now, I have to tell you that we will be unable to come to you again this
year … '

The telephone was on his untidy desk, encumbered with objects: a blood pressure cuff, medicines, a stethoscope, spoons for pike fishing … He had to restrain himself from leaning on one elbow as he talked, and sweeping everything off
with a lordly gesture.

In a week's time …

Unless they left on the Saturday, which would give two
days extra? Yes! The women would complain that there wasn't enough notice to do the packing … But they'd have two more days.

He stood up after finishing the call and, standing alone in his surgery, filled his pipe as sounds of whispering came from the kitchen.

He was sitting, or rather sprawling, huge thighs apart, on the blue-painted bench between two shutters of the same blue, in front of the Pension Saint-Charles. The windows were open and he could distinctly hear the sound of forks on plates.

It was early evening. Too soon for the lamps to be lit. Outlines were still clear, too clear, but the light had lost its shimmer, it had dulled. At this moment, at this time of year, in thousands of seaside boarding houses and hotels, families
were hastening at the sound of a dinner gong or a little bell to take their seats around identical tables. Thousands of children, whose mothers were desperately trying to hush them up, were asking in their shrill voices, as they fidgeted with everything: