The Scapegoat (17 page)

I let the bank statements go. A glimpse at the past was irresistible. The album bore a crest on the first page, a hound’s head and a tree, and underneath was written ‘Marie de Gué’ in a long sloping hand. When I turned the page there was the mother, unmistakably, a young woman in her mid twenties, the present heavy jowl a rounded and determined chin, the shock of grey hair blonde, profuse, set in waves by tongs, a frilly blouse adorning the sloping shoulders that were now hunched and covered with a multitude of wraps; and the photograph might have been one of myself decked out in female dress, impersonating, with wig and props, some feminine character in charades. Beside it was the date, 1914. Then followed, one by one, the others: Jean de Gué, the father, suggesting Paul but with a bristling moustache, the eyes alert, taken against an impossible studio background of draped hangings and false flowers; the two of them together, gazing down with fond paternal pride at what must have been a much cosseted and beribboned Blanche; and then friends and relatives of an older
generation, an uncle this, an aunt that, an aged grand-père in a wheeled chair. The dates were not always given, and often I had to guess for myself what summer it was when a small boy and a girl straddled a pony, or what winter, the dovecot shrouded in snow, the same pair posed in mufflers, their arms round each other’s necks. The couple were seldom apart. Wherever one stood, holding fishing-rod or gun, the other would be lurking; and with a little shock of surprise – even, oddly, of distaste – I saw that this second hovering figure, Blanche, was as a child almost a replica of the Marie-Noel of today, with the same long legs, thin body and close-cropped hair. It was only later, when she must have been about fifteen, that she began to change, the oval face lengthening, the expression in the eyes becoming more watchful, more solemn; but even so I could not recognize in that grave and surely sympathetic face the tight-lipped spinster of today.

The young Jean was never solemn. Every snapshot showed laughter, or a comic attitude, or some mockery of the camera that seized him, and I thought how different they were, though our features were identical, from snapshots taken of myself as a boy, glassy-eyed and anxious. Paul did not figure much in the album. He was often out of focus, the dimmest figure in a group, or bending to tie a shoelace when the camera clicked. Even the clearest photograph of all three children in their teens, which was thrust loose in the album, showed him half-obscured by Jean’s robust shoulder and eclipsed by Jean’s devastating smile.

I recognized odd figures here and there in groups: the curé, slimmer, younger, yet cherubic then; and, flicking back the pages to the baby days, there was surely Julie of the
verrerie
, nursing Paul. There was one man called Maurice who appeared often in the latter pages of the album. He was amongst groups at the glass-foundry, and at the château, and there was one of him and Jean together, standing by the stone statue in the park. Then, abruptly, the snapshots ended. Three or four empty pages remained, waiting to be filled. Whether the elder Jean de Gué
had died, or the war had come, or the mother had grown suddenly tired of taking snapshots, it was impossible to say. An era was over, a cycle closed.

I shut up the album with a curious feeling of nostalgia. Long used to delving in the historical past, familiar with old letters, documents, and records of centuries ago, this furtive glance at a family background of my own time, my own generation, was oddly moving. I minded, not that the handsome countess at the beginning of the album should grow old and the blonde hair turn to grey, but that she had aged in the way she had, those dominating, confident eyes turned searching, restless, the proud mouth voracious, the rounded neck and shoulders slumped to useless fat. I minded that Blanche, so lithe and winning as a child, so serious and watchful as a growing girl, could become warped out of recognition, crude as a caricature. Even Paul, smudged in his snapshots, hidden behind the laughing Jean, had been somehow touching as a child, standing on one foot at the end of groups, a lock of hair always falling in his eyes. Yet today he was unsympathetic, heavy, betraying emotion only when I had probed a hidden sore and mocked – heaven knows without intention – the failing that he felt was shameful.

These pictures of a past when all seemed well were disturbed by an intrusion from the present. I heard someone fumble with the double doors that led into the dining-room, and pushing the album back into the desk I turned, and there was Renée, who had no part in the faded snapshots, any more than Françoise. These two belonged to the bleak aftermath, the drabness of St Gilles without the charm. She closed the doors behind her and stood watching me.

‘I heard the car,’ she said, ‘and I thought Paul might be with you. Then I met Charlotte in the passage, and she told me you were alone. Françoise is still resting in the salon, and I guessed you would be here. Well, aren’t you going to apologize for your behaviour at lunch?’

The wretched mishandling of the gifts was to be thrown up at me again. No doubt, in her judgement, I deserved it. I sighed and shrugged my shoulders.

‘I’ve already apologized to Paul,’ I said. ‘Won’t that do?’

Pent-up emotion showed in the tense body, the nervous hands, and she looked at me with an expression half-baffled, half-distraught, that was disturbing and irritating all in one, so that I felt instant sympathy for Paul, who must surely bear the brunt of all her moods.

‘Why did you do it?’ she said. ‘Isn’t it difficult enough without making them suspicious, and above all hurting Paul? Or were you deliberately setting out to make a fool of me as well?’

‘Listen,’ I said. ‘I had so much to drink in Le Mans that I couldn’t remember what I had put in those packages. For all I knew I had brought everybody books.’

‘You expect me to believe that?’ she asked. ‘There was no mistake in what you gave Françoise, was there? However much did it cost, or haven’t you paid?’

Here, surely, was the worst sort of feminine spite, the grudge of a gift from husband to wife. I was glad that Françoise had the locket with the miniature, and not Renée.

‘I gave Françoise something I knew she would value,’ I said. ‘If you are disappointed in your own present, it’s too bad. Give it to Germaine. I don’t mind in the least what you do with it.’

If I had hit her I could not have moved her more. She stared at me, colour flooding her face, and leaving the door she came slowly across the room to the desk, which I had now locked again, pocketing the key. Before I realized what she was about she had her arms around me, her face against mine, and I was standing stiff and wooden like a third-rate actor in a provincial play.

‘What is it?’ she said. ‘What’s the matter with you? Why are you so changed? Are you afraid to make love to me?’

So that was it. Perhaps I should have guessed, but her words came as a shock and filled me with dismay. I did not want to
kiss her. The clinging arms repelled, and the seeking mouth, too eager, froze response. Whatever Jean de Gué might have done in idleness was not to be practised now by his surrogate.

‘Renée,’ I said, ‘someone may come in …’ – weak, futile excuse of every cowardly lover not in immediate stress – and I backed ungallantly from this unexpected and embarrasing proximity. But even now, half hunched as I was against the desk, she followed me, her hands striving to caress, to cling, and I thought how lacking in grace and dignity is the male under assault. A woman, if she is attacked by a bully, has at least feminine frailty to lend charm.

My show of appeasement was not convincing: the clumsy pat on the shoulder, the muffled kiss in the hair, must have seemed poor fare, and I sought to keep her off by a flow of words.

‘We have to be careful,’ I said, ‘and not lose our heads about this. I think Paul understands about that piece of nonsense I gave you. I made very light of it, and I can do the same to Françoise. But we mustn’t go on meeting in this way. The servants might see us, and once suspicion got into their minds there would be no end to every sort of complication.’

As I listened to my own voice pouring out a torrent of excuses in her ear I realized, hopelessly, that I was actually committing myself more deeply. I was taking intrigue for granted, and letting slip in the most cowardly fashion the blessed opportunity now given me to say frankly and brutally, ‘I don’t love you and I don’t want you. That’s final.’

‘You mean,’ said Renée, ‘that we must meet somewhere else? But how? Where are we to go?’

No tears from her. No touching demand for affection. One thing and one thing only in her mind. What Jean de Gué had doubtless started as a pastime had turned to a liability. I wondered to what extent he had been committed, and how deeply, after the first excitement, bored.

‘I’ll think of something,’ I said, ‘but remember what I say,
we must be careful. We can’t risk future happiness by stupidity now.’

Jean de Gué himself could not have spoken with greater duplicity. How easy it was, after all, to be a cad. My words had calmed her, and the contact, brief as it had been, must have eased the tension and given her release. Then, to my relief, I heard the child’s voice in the room beyond. Renée, with an exasperated shrug, moved from my side.

‘Papa? Where are you?’

‘In here. Do you want me?’

She burst into the room. Instinctively I opened my arms, wondering, as she sprang into them monkey-fashion, whether I could use her from now on as a buffer against the demands of an adult world.

‘Gran’mie is awake,’ she said. ‘I have been in to see her. She wants us both to go to her room for tea. I have been telling her about the presents, and how disappointed uncle Paul was in his. And do you know, Papa, you made a mistake with the one for my aunt Blanche? She would not open it, so Maman and I unwrapped it for her, and inside was a note, “For my beautiful Béla, from Jean,” not Blanche at all, and it was an enormous bottle of scent called “Femme”, in a lovely box wrapped in cellophane, and the price upon it still, ten thousand francs.’

A
s we went upstairs together hand in hand, Marie-Noel said to me, ‘It’s a funny thing, but everybody seems to be in a bad mood about those presents. Maman was so pleased with hers this morning, and then after lunch she took it off and put it with the rest of the things in her jewel-case. As for aunt Renée, she scarcely looked at hers, and just now, when I told you about the mistake with aunt Blanche’s present, I thought she was going to hit us both. Who is Béla, Papa?’

I was thankful I did not know. It saved further complications. Yet Jean de Gué might have had the foresight to scribble more than the initial B.

‘Someone,’ I said, ‘who likes expensive scent.’

‘Does Maman know her?’

‘I doubt it.’

‘I doubt it too. When I asked her she crumpled up the note and said it must have been some business friend in Paris who had asked you to dinner, and the scent was a return of politeness.’

‘Possibly,’ I said.

‘The trouble is, you know, your memory’s getting worse. Fancy making such a muddle and giving it to aunt Blanche instead. I knew there was something wrong. Why, you haven’t given her anything as long as I can remember. I’ve never quite understood why – grown-up people behave in the strangest way. But even I can see there is not much point in giving aunt Blanche a present when she hasn’t spoken to you for fifteen years.’

Fifteen years … This sudden piece of information, dropped in so casual a fashion, made me pause half-way up the stairs to
stare at the child, forgetting my role, and she tugged at me impatiently. ‘Come on,’ she said. I followed silently, profoundly shaken. What I had taken to be temporary disapproval was so deep-rooted that it must affect the relationship of the entire family. The casual love-affair with Renée, if it could be called that, was nothing in comparison. No wonder the giving of a present had been out of character. The revelation was disturbing, even sinister, especially when I remembered the snapshots of the two children with their arms about each other. Something personal and bitter had come between Blanche and Jean de Gué, yet it was accepted by all, even by the child.

‘Here we are,’ said Marie-Noel, throwing open the door of the vast bedroom, and once again, as on the evening before, a wave of heat engulfed me from the stove. The small terriers, absent earlier in the day, were back again. They leapt from the bed, barking shrilly and refusing to be quietened by the scoldings and patting of the child.

‘It’s fantastic,’ said Marie-Noel. ‘The dogs in this place have all gone off their heads. César was the same this morning, barking at Papa.’

‘Charlotte,’ said the comtesse, ‘did you take Jou-Jou and Fifi for their walk or were you gossiping below all afternoon?’

‘Naturally I took them, Madame la Comtesse,’ said Charlotte, at once pricked to self-defence. ‘They came with me up and down the park for nearly an hour. Am I likely to neglect them?’

She darted a look at me, as though I had been the one to accuse her, and I thought how unfavourably she compared with the honest, stalwart Julie of the
verrerie
, the small beady eyes, the narrow frame, even the niggardly way she poured out the tea suggesting something crabbed and sour.

‘Go on, get out,’ commanded the comtesse angrily. ‘The child will look after us.’ Staring up at me from her bunch of bolster and pillow, the face still grey and flabby, deep shadows beneath her eyes, she put out her hand and pulled me down beside her. As I kissed the sagging cheek I thought how odd it was that
this filial embrace, which should have been repellent, was somehow comforting, while the brush with the handsome Renée had been distasteful, crude.

‘Mon Dieu,’
she whispered, ‘how the little one made me laugh!’ Then, pushing me away, she said aloud, ‘Sit down and drink your tea. What have you been doing all day besides getting your parcels mixed up?’

Once again I was at ease with her; I could talk, I could laugh, she conjured a gaiety out of me I did not know was there. We made a trio perfectly at ease with one another, the comtesse, the child and I, the comtesse slopping her tea into a saucer and sipping it in gulps, the last drop lapped by the begging dogs, while the child, enthroned as pourer-out, picked fastidiously at toast, her eyes upon us.