The Scapegoat (32 page)

I went back into the bedroom and turned on a light which I found concealed in the hangings of the bed. The woman lying there was not the one who had stood beside me on the
terrace that morning, regal and commanding, but another, grey and old and frightened, her hands restless, her eyes staring, and she kept turning her head from side to side on the pillow in a movement that was horrible and inhuman, like something long imprisoned without food or light or water.

‘What are you waiting for?’ she said. ‘Why are you so long?’

I knelt beside her. My burn did not matter any more, and I put both my hands behind her, and turned her head towards me so that she was forced to look at me and be still.

‘I don’t want to give it to you,’ I said.

‘Why?’

The staring eyes searched mine, and the massive face, grey and sagging, seemed to crumple, becoming twisted and distorted like a paper mask fixed on the battered body of a guy dragged by shrieking children in a foggy London street. It seemed to me, as I looked at her, that she had the same dead texture of skin, that her eyes were not eyes but sockets, her mouth a hoop, the tangled, unbrushed hair, horse’s hair, and the person I held a shell without life or feeling. But somewhere within the shell was a particle of light that flickered more faintly than the last glow of ash from a bonfire. It was concealed from me, but it was there, and I did not want it to die.

‘Why?’

Once again she spoke, this time in anguish, and she pulled herself up in bed and held my shoulders. The mask became a face, and the face hers and mine and Marie-Noel’s. The three of us were together, looking out at me from her eyes, and the voice was no longer deep and guttural but the voice of the child when she spoke to me the first evening and asked, ‘Papa, why did you not come and say good night to me?’

I got up and went into the bathroom. Breaking the neck of the ampoule, I filled the syringe, and came back and prepared her arm with the spirit as I remembered we had done in the war. Then I drove the needle into her arm, pressed the plunger and waited, and she leant back on her pillows and waited too.
Her eyelids flickered, and for a moment, before closing them, she looked at me and smiled. I took the syringe back to the dressing-room, washed it and replaced it in the box, and put the empty ampoule in my pocket. Then I shut the door and went and stood by the bedside once again. The anguish had gone from the face, and the likeness too. She was neither Marie-Noel, nor myself, nor the mother of Jean de Gué; she was something sleeping, unconscious, unaware of pain. I crossed the room to the window and opened the shutters. The pattering rain fell into the leads and the gutters and out of the gargoyle mouth down to the empty moat, and there was no sound anywhere at all but this sound of falling rain. I looked at my bandaged hand, burnt yesterday in the fire through cowardice and shame for what it could not accomplish, and it seemed to me that what it had now done was more cowardly and shameful still. However much I tried to tell myself that what had happened in this room was compassionate and merciful, it was not true. I knew that I had done what the son and the mother had done before me – I had taken the easiest way out.

I went into the corridor and found Germaine still standing there, waiting. I said to her, ‘It’s all right now, Madame la Comtesse is sleeping. I’ve left the light on. She won’t notice it. You had better sit by the stove until Charlotte comes up.’

I went along the corridor, through the swing-door and on to the other landing, and the sound of laughter and music came floating up towards me once again from the back regions of the château. I could hear voices too coming from the salon – evidently the guests had not yet gone – and as I walked on to the terrace the door of the salon opened, the confusion of voices sounded louder, then quietened again as the door closed, and Marie-Noel came out and stood beside me.

‘Where are you going?’ she said.

She had changed into a blue silk frock, white socks, and pointed shoes. She wore a little gold cross round her neck, and
round her cropped fair hair was a blue velvet band. Her face was flushed with excitement. This was her fiesta evening; she was helping to entertain the guests. I remembered the promise made to her on my first evening.

‘I don’t know,’ I said, ‘I might not come back.’ She knew at once what I meant, because the colour went from her face and she made a movement as though to rush at me and seize my hands. Then she remembered my bandaged hand and stood still.

‘Is it because of what happened at the shoot?’ she asked. I had forgotten the futility of the morning, the ridiculous spoiling of the sportsmen’s fun, the cognac and the wine and the ill-timed bravado of my speech.

‘No,’ I said, ‘it has nothing to do with the shoot.’ She went on looking at me, her hands clasped, and then she said, ‘Take me with you.’

‘How can I?’ I asked. ‘I don’t know where I’m going.’

It was raining hard, falling on to her thin shoulders in the blue silk party frock. ‘Will you walk?’ she said. ‘You can’t drive because of your hand.’

The simplicity of her remark brought me to the full realization that I was without thought or plan. How indeed did I intend to get away? I had walked blindly out of that upstairs room and down into the hall with only one idea in mind – that I must leave the château as soon as possible. Instead of which the idiocy of the burnt hand kept me a prisoner.

‘You see,’ said the child, ‘it’s not very easy, is it?’

Nothing was easy, neither being myself nor being Jean de Gué. I was not born to be the son of the woman upstairs, nor the father of the child before me. I had nothing to do with them. They were not my people: I had no people. Being the accomplice in an elaborate practical joke did not mean I must be its victim too. Surely it should be the other way round, and it was for them to pay the penalty, not me? I was not bound to them in any way.

The voices sounded loud again from within the salon. Marie-Noel looked over her shoulder. ‘They are beginning to say goodbye,’ she said. ‘You will have to make up your mind what you’re going to do.’ She suddenly did not seem a child any more, but somebody old and wise whom I had known in a different age, a different time. I did not want it to be like that, because it hurt. I wanted her to be a stranger still. ‘The time hasn’t come for you to leave me yet,’ she said. ‘Wait till I’m older. It won’t be long.’

A footstep sounded in the hall, and someone came and stood in the entrance. It was Blanche. The fanlight above the door shone on her hair, and I could see the mizzle of rain strike slantwise against the light, then fall to darkness on the step.

‘You’ll catch cold,’ she said. ‘Come in out of the rain.’ She did not see me, standing there, she only saw the child, and I realized that, believing herself to be alone with Marie-Noel, she spoke in a voice I had never heard before. It was gentle and affectionate, the hard, abrupt quality gone. She might have been a different person. ‘Everybody is going in a moment,’ she said. ‘You only have to be polite a few minutes longer. Then I’ll come upstairs and read to you, if Papa is still sleeping.’ She turned and went indoors.

The child looked at me. ‘Go on in,’ I said, ‘do what she says. I won’t leave you.’ She smiled. Oddly, the smile reminded me of something. Then I remembered – it was release from pain. I had seen the same smile not ten minutes ago in the room upstairs. Marie-Noel ran back into the château after Blanche.

I heard the sound of a car coming down from the village and passing through the gateway. As it turned in to the archway the headlights must have picked me up, for it stopped and Gaston got out. It was the Renault, and he came across the drive towards me. He looked flushed, a little awkward.

‘I had not realized Monsieur le Comte was below,’ he said. ‘Forgive me, but it was raining hard, and I took Madame Yves and one or two other older people who had been celebrating
with us back to the
verrerie
. I did not ask permission. I did not want to disturb you.’

‘That’s all right,’ I said. ‘I’m glad you took them home.’

He came nearer, and peered up at my face. ‘You look upset, Monsieur le Comte. Is anything wrong? Are you still feeling ill?’

‘No,’ I told him ‘It’s just … a combination of circumstances.’ I gestured with my hand towards the château. It did not matter to me what he thought. I was not sure what I thought myself.

‘Excuse me,’ he said, his manner diffident, yet somehow reassuring, gentle, ‘I don’t wish to be indiscreet, but would Monsieur le Comte perhaps like me to drive him to Villars?’

I kept silent, not understanding, hoping that his next words would make his meaning plain.

‘You have had a hard day, Monsieur le Comte,’ he went on. ‘At the château here everyone believes you to be in bed. If I drove you now to Villars you could spend several hours there in comfort, without anxiety, and I could come back for you early in the morning. I only suggest it because at the present moment Monsieur le Comte cannot drive himself.’

He glanced away from me, apologetic, tactful, and I knew that what he suggested was so profoundly the answer to my turmoil of mind and body and spirit that he expected no comment even, no word of affirmation. He went to the car, reversed it, and brought it back to the driveway below the terrace. He opened the door for me and I got in, and as he drove along the pitch-dark lanes to Villars, the rain beating against the windscreen, neither of us speaking, it seemed to me that there was nothing left now of that former self who had changed identity in the hotel bedroom at Le Mans. Every one of my actions, instincts, weaknesses, all had merged with those of Jean de Gué.

I
thought for a moment it was the rain pouring from the gargoyle mouth, bearing away the silt and debris of the years, and the gargoyle himself, with flattened, evil ears, was cracking at the base, the stone-work crumbling, so that he too would moulder and soften with the flood. Then the horror of the dream departed and it was day, and the sound was Béla’s bath-water running. The darkness had gone and the rain with it, and the early morning sun was turning the rooftops gold.

I leant back, my hand behind my head. Through the open window I could see the shapes and angles of the roofs, the lichened tiles, the twisted chimneys, the dormer windows, and behind and above them all the fluted spire of the cathedral. From the street below came the first movements of the day: shutters thrown back, the sluicing of the pavement, footsteps passing, somebody whistling, the waking to another week of this small, unhurried market-town. The running bath-water merged pleasantly with the bright street sounds and I was filled with a lazy peace, aware of the presence near by, so close that I had only to raise my voice and she would turn off the water and come to me, someone who asked no questions, accepting me as part of a life shared at odd moments, depending upon mood and time – mine, not hers – just as the adult puts aside work and occupation to attend to the child she loves. My hand, untouched the day before, was now re-dressed, re-bandaged, cool in its oiled silk package; and the experience of being waited upon, ministered to, with nothing demanded of me and no show of possessiveness, was novel to both the old self and
the new. It was something I was reluctant to surrender: I wished to savour its delicacy as long as possible.

I could hear her throwing open the shutters in the room across the passage, talking to the budgerigars, putting their cages out on to the balcony, their twittering chatter a variation of the running water. Presently I called to her and she came at once from the other room, dressed in wrapper and slippers, and bent over me and kissed me with the quiet unconcern of someone in charge, whose heart and mind are free of trouble.

‘Did you sleep well?’ she asked.

‘Yes,’ I told her, and it was a delight to feel her arms and her shoulders bare under the loose flowing sleeves, and to be aware of skin smelling of apricots and to know that being with her was stepping into yet a third dimension which was no part of the first world, or the second, but somehow contained them both, like the case of a Chinese puzzle.

‘I’ll make you coffee directly,’ she said, ‘and as soon as Vincent comes I’ll send him for
croissants
from the baker up the street. Your hand doesn’t hurt you? Good I’ll dress it again before you leave.’

Then she was gone, and I gave myself up once more to lassitude and peace.

She had a quality of being surprised by nothing. Last night, when Gaston had deposited me outside the Porte de Ville and driven away, and I crossed the canal by the footbridge and tapped at the shuttered window, she had opened it instantly, without any startled query. Noticing at once my bandaged hand and general appearance of weariness and strain, she gestured to the deep chair where I had sat before, and fetched me a drink. She did not ask one question, and it was I who broke the silence first by feeling in my pocket for the broken phial and tossing it into the wastepaper basket beyond the chair.

‘Did I ever tell you my mother took morphine?’ I asked her.

‘No,’ she answered, ‘but I suspected it.’

‘How?’

She hesitated. ‘From little hints you dropped from time to time. It wasn’t my business to interfere.’

Her voice was practical and cool, warning me that she accepted without praise or condemnation whatever Jean de Gué should choose to tell her, reserving her opinion for herself.

‘Would it disgust you,’ I asked, ‘if you learnt that I supplied her with morphine, bringing it with me from Paris as a gift, just as I brought you the bottle of “Femme”?’

‘Nothing disgusts me, Jean,’ she said. ‘I know you too well to be repelled now by anything you choose to do.’

She looked at me steadily. I leant forward and took a cigarette from the box on the table beside me.

‘This morning she came downstairs and went with us all to Mass,’ I said, ‘and then received about fifty guests on the terrace of the château, in the rain. She looked magnificent. She did it, of course, from spite, to spoil Renée’s day, who wanted to play hostess, Françoise being unwell and in bed. This evening the little
femme de chambre
, Germaine, called me to her – her own personal maid, Charlotte, was below – and I went up and found her …’ I broke off, because it was vividly with me once again, the dark close bedroom, the dressing-room, the cupboard above the washbasin. ‘I found her wanting me to give her that.’ I looked at the wastepaper basket where I had thrown the empty phial.