The Scapegoat (11 page)

‘Well, that’s enough for now. Good night.’

I went out and shut the door. I listened a moment outside, but there was no sound of movement, so I went down the turret stair, through the baize door, and back along the corridor to the dressing-room.

I felt suddenly very tired. The house was quite still. No one had been awakened by my rush upstairs, or by the barking of the dog outside. I crept into the bathroom and stood by the open bedroom door, listening. Françoise did not stir. I went close to the bed, and from the sound of breathing knew her to be fast asleep. I went back into the dressing-room, took off my things, and got into the bath. It had grown cold, but I didn’t want to disturb her by running hot water. I dried, and put on the pyjamas I had worn at the hotel and the dressing-gown that was lying across the chair. I brushed my hair with his brushes, as I had done in the morning, and then went over to the table and picked up the parcel that bore the initials M-N. It felt like a book. Carefully I undid the string and the wrapping, and it was a book, as I had thought. The title was
The Little Flower
, and with it was a large, highly coloured plate of
St Thérèse of Lisieux, bought separately and slipped inside. On the fly-leaf Jean de Gué had written, ‘To my adorable Marie-Noel, with all my heart, Papa.’ I wrapped the book up again, and put it back on the table with the other packages. He must have chosen his presents with great care. I did not know what it was he had brought back for his mother, but it was something that she needed badly. The locket had dried his wife’s tears and helped her to go to sleep believing in him.
The Little Flower
, when it lay open, as it would do, beside his picture in the turret room, would feed the imagination of his child, so that she might see visions, and dream dreams, and in doing so perhaps nag his conscience less – that is, if he had a conscience, which I doubted. I leant out of the window once again, and the chestnuts still fell from the trees on to the gravel path beyond the moat, and a mist was rising from the grass, spreading in wisps towards the murky trees.

One had no right to play about with people’s lives. One should not interfere with their emotions. A word, a look, a smile, a frown, did something to another human being, waking response or aversion, and a web was woven which had no beginning and no end, spreading outward and inward too, merging, entangling, so that the struggle of one depended upon the struggle of the other.

Jean de Gué had acted wrongly. He had run away from life, he had escaped from the emotions that he had himself created. None of these people under his roof would be behaving as they had behaved tonight but for something he had done to them. The mother would not have turned to me with frightened eyes, the sister would not have left the room in silence, Paul would not have spoken with hostility, Renée would not have cursed me on the stairs, the wife would not have wept, the child would not have threatened to throw herself out of the window. Jean de Gué had failed. He was a greater failure than I. And that was why he had left me sleeping in the hotel in Le Mans and gone away. It was not a jest, but a confession
of defeat. I knew now that he would not come back. He would not even bother to find out what had happened. I could do as I pleased, leave his home or stay. If I had never met him, if none of this had happened, I should have been tonight at the guest-house in la Grande-Trappe, learning there what to do with failure. I should have heard the monks chanting their Office, said my first prayer. Now none of this was going to happen, and I was alone. Or rather I was not alone – I was part of the life of other people. Never before had I been concerned with the feelings of anybody but myself, except for the minds and motives of characters in history long since dead. Now I had a chance to do otherwise, through deception. I could not be sure if anything good ever came through a lie. I thought not – only trouble, war, disaster – but I did not know. If I had gone to la Grande-Trappe they would have told me, but instead I was in another man’s home.

I turned away from the window in the dressing-room, went into the bedroom and took off my dressing-gown and slippers. Then I lay down beside his poor, pathetic wife, who was sleeping peacefully with the locket pinned on her shawl, and I said, ‘Oh, God, what am I to do? Ought I to leave this place, or should I stay?’

And there was no answer, only a question mark.

I
slept heavily, and when I awoke the shutters had been pushed back, daylight filled the room, and my partner had left my side. I could hear voices coming from the bathroom beyond, and I lay still, my hands behind my head, looking about me at the room, whose striped wallpaper seemed out of keeping with the dark woodwork and the massive furniture, which had probably never been moved in fifty years. An effort had been made to modernize the room with bright hangings and a frilly dressing-table in the alcove. The cushions on the chairs were also striped, in an endeavour to match the wallpaper, but they were out of tone, a blend of pink and puce, distressing if the eye lingered upon them long.

The room served as boudoir also, for there was a small secrétaire near the fireplace, a tea-table, a corner cabinet displaying porcelain, and a bookcase, yet oddly the effect was not to make the room more comfortable but the reverse. It gave a certain stiffness and formality to the whole, like furniture on show in a store window, or as though the arranger wished to surround herself with possessions that had once looked well in quite a different setting, but in this room were ill-assorted.

The voices ceased, taps were turned on and off, footsteps went along the corridor. Somewhere there was a banging door, a distant telephone, the sound of a car starting up and driving away, and then, after silence, the brushing movement of someone sweeping the corridor. Sleep had had a strange effect on me. I had awoken in a different vein. The sudden anguish that had come over me the night before had vanished. The people in the château had reassumed their puppet quality, and the jest
was with me once again. Last night I had sensed tragedy, and was so filled with compassion both for them and for myself that it had seemed to me I was destined to make amends for all that had gone wrong in their lives and my own. Now sleep had changed my values. The liability had become an escapade. It was nothing to do with me if Jean de Gué had been possessed by his family, and had then run out on duty. No doubt they were as much to blame as he. The self who had wakened this morning suggested that the whole unprecedented situation was but a prolongation of my holiday, and when it got out of control, as sooner or later it surely must, I could quit. The one embarrassment, discovery, would have happened last night if it was going to happen at all. The mother, the wife, the child, all three had been deceived. Whatever blunders I might make in the future would be put down to whim or freak of temper, for the simple reason that I was above suspicion. No spy in the service of his country had ever been given such a disguise, such an opportunity for probing the frailty of others … if that was what I wanted. What did I want? Last night, to heal. This morning, to be amused. There was no reason why the two should be incompatible.

I looked above my head at the old-fashioned bell-rope, and pulled it. The brushing in the corridor ceased. Footsteps came to the door and someone tapped. I called out
‘Entrez!’
, and the blushing, rosy-cheeked
femme de chambre
who had served my dinner tray presented herself at the door.

‘Monsieur le Comte slept well?’ she asked.

I told her very well, and demanded coffee. I inquired after the rest of the family and was informed that Madame la Comtesse was
souffrante
and staying in bed; that Mademoiselle was in church; that Monsieur Paul had gone to the
verrerie;
that Marie-Noel was getting up; that Madame Jean and Madame Paul were in the salon. I thanked her and she went away. I had learnt three things from two minutes’ conversation. My present to the mother had done her no good; Paul’s business, the family
business, was a glass-foundry; and Renée, the dark woman, was his wife.

I got up, went to the bathroom and shaved.

Gaston brought my coffee to the dressing-room, no longer in uniform and gaiters but wearing the striped coat of a
valet de chambre
. I greeted him as a friend.

‘Things are better this morning, then?’ he said, placing the tray on the table. ‘It is not so bad to be home again after all.’

He asked me what I would wear, and I told him whatever he himself considered suitable to the morning. This amused him.

‘It’s not the coat that makes the morning gay,’ he said, ‘but the man inside it. Monsieur le Comte is all sunshine today.’

I expressed concern for my mother’s health. He pulled a face.

‘You know how it is, Monsieur,’ he said. ‘When one grows old one becomes lonely and frightened, unless there is something very strong within.’ He tapped his heart. ‘Physically, Madame la Comtesse is stronger than anyone in St Gilles, and in her mind as well, but morally it’s a different matter.’ He went to the wardrobe, took out a brown tweed jacket, and began to brush it.

I watched him as I drank my coffee. I thought how different it would be if I were back in a hotel bedroom in Tours or Blois, and he the
valet de chambre
who had come to wait on me. He would ask me, with a hotel servant’s courtesy and indifference, whether the city pleased me, and whether I hoped to return next year, forgetting me as soon as the tip was paid, the luggage carried down by the porter, and the anonymous key replaced in its pigeon-hole. This man was my friend, but I felt like Judas as I watched him.

I put on the clothes he had laid out for me, and it was a curious feeling, like wearing the garments of someone dead who had been close to me. I had not felt like this in the travelling suit I had worn the day before. This jacket was personal.
It had a rough, familiar smell about it, not unpleasant, and I could feel it had been in woods and under rain, had rubbed the ground, had lain on summer grass, been scorched by bonfires. Unaccountably, I thought of the priests of ancient days, who on ceremonial occasions wore the skins of the animals which had been sacrificed, to bestow upon their persons greater power through the strength of the slain beasts, and their warm spilt blood.

‘Will Monsieur le Comte be going down to the
verrerie?’
asked Gaston.

‘No,’ I said, ‘not this morning. Did Monsieur Paul suggest it?’

‘Monsieur Paul will be back for lunch as usual. Possibly he is expecting you to go with him this afternoon.’

‘What’s the time now?’

‘Already after half past ten, Monsieur le Comte.’

I left him seeing to my clothes, while in the bedroom the little
femme de chambre
was busy making the bed. I walked downstairs, the chill, impersonal smell of polish that greeted me at variance with the gigantic crucified Christ upon the wall. I could hear the murmur of women’s voices from the salon, and I crept softly to the open door leading to the terrace, having no desire to join them, and so out and round to my previous hiding-place under the cedar-tree. It was a golden autumn day, no hard brilliance in the sky but soft translucence, the moisture from the ground drawn up into a spongy warmth, making the air gentle. The château, graceful and serene, protected from the outside world by the mellow walls guarding the sunken moat, might have been an island, separated as it was from village and church, lime avenue and sandy road; an island whose way of life went back to centuries long past, having no concern with the postman I saw wheeling his bicycle past the church above the bridge, or the high van bringing supplies to the
épicerie
at the corner.

Someone was singing near the archway leading to the
outbuildings, and walking left, so as to avoid the dog, I looked down and saw a woman kneeling beside a pool of water formed in the crevice of the moat wall and fed by the river. She was scrubbing sheets on a wooden board, splashing the soapy water over the rim of the crevice, and she looked up at me, brushing wispy hair from her forehead with a mottled hand, and smiled and said,
‘Bonjour
, Monsieur le Comte.’

I found a door in the wall, and a narrow footbridge leading across the moat; and turning left, avoiding the garage and stabling, I was at once amongst cowhouses and straw and muddy earth, with a vegetable garden beyond covering three or four acres and enclosed by a rough stone wall, and beyond this cultivated fields surrounded by forest. Here by the cowhouse was a strawstack, tightly packed and golden brown, and beneath it, piled in heaps one upon the other, pumpkins smooth and round like the behinds of little boys, flesh-pink, lemon, lime, and on top of them all a rake and fork, and a white cat blinking in the sun.

Inside the cowhouse the floors were newly-washed, the water running in a groove, but the good cow smell, the manure, the milky tang, clung to the walls and the wooden partition. As I turned, an old woman emerged from some lair at the further end, smiling, toothless, her clogs clattering on the stone floor, bearing the yoke on her shoulders and the empty swinging pails.
‘Benj’ur
, M’sieur le Camte,’ she seemed to say, and proceeded to talk rapidly, jerking her head and laughing, and I was lost for answer, her broad, toothless accent too unfamiliar to my ears.

I left her with a wave of my hand, passing a vast heap of cider apples ready for the press, and on through line upon line of vegetables – the sprouting purple green of root crops, the dew upon them still, their pungent, earthy odour mingled with dried sunflower, tarragon, and raspberry cane – and so out through another door, through another wall, and into the immediate château grounds beneath the chestnut trees, their falling
leaves dappling the sandy path with patterns of green and gold. There was no formality about the grounds, and the dovecot was isolated amidst pasture for the cattle; but the pasture stretched to the woods, and the paths through the woods spread from a single centre, like the hours on a sundial, stretching out to all the points of the compass. The dell in the centre was dominated by a lichen-covered statue, the classic drapery chipped, the right hand of the huntress missing.