Sunday Read online

  Big Louis was becoming excited, and finally he played his trump card, the photograph of an old farmhouse, somewhat dilapidated, flanked by two big olive trees and surrounded by a pine wood. Between the hills, on the horizon, could be caught the shimmer of the sea.

  'It's mine, Honore! Too bad if I've made a fool of myself, but I've bought that little lot and I'm going to build it up into something good. There's a fellow on the spot who isn't an architect but knows the business better than if he were one, who's busy drawing up the plans. There will be a restaurant, a bar, five bedrooms for tourists and I will even be able to keep chickens and rabbits, not to mention that I've enough vines to make my own wine.

  'I'm selling the Three Bells. I need hardly add that if you like the idea, I'll give you first refusal and you can have as long as you like to pay for it . . .

  'With two sons . . .'

  Honore Fayolle had limited himself to a nod of the head, without saying yes or no. In the end, after discussions in low voices in the inn at Champagne, it had been no.

  Big Louis had duly sold the Three Bells to someone who had made enough money in a Paris bar and had dreamed of ending his days in a small provincial town.

  The Harnauds, father, mother and daughter, had left the district to set up house at La Bastide between Mouans-Sartoux and Pegomas.

  In actual fact, this was the real beginning, in so far as a beginning exists.

  For four years, Emile had heard no further mention of the Harnauds nor of the Riviera.

  After he had passed his certificate, his father had asked him:

  'What are you planning to do?'

  He had no idea, except that he had decided to leave Champagne.

  'The owner of the Hotel des Flots at Les Sables is looking for an apprentice kitchen-hand for the season.'

  He liked the vast beach at Les Sables-d'Olonne, the swarms of people from the far corners of France. He had scarcely been able to take advantage of it that summer, confined as he was for most of the time in the basement kitchen.

  In October the proprietor had recommended him to a colleague in Paris, who kept a small restaurant near Les Halles, and he had worked there for two years. He had even followed, if somewhat erratically, a course in hotel management.

  He was nineteen and was doing a season at Vichy when he received a letter from his father, which was a rare event. It was written in purple pencil, on writing-paper sold in packets of six sheets with six envelopes at the grocery in Champagne.

  'Your mother is well. She has hardly any more trouble with her rheumatics. Your brother is getting married, in the spring, to the Gillou girl, and they are both setting up house here. I'm just writing to tell you that Big Louis, who used to keep the Three Bells at Luçon, as I am sure you will remember, has had a stroke and is half paralyzed. He has started a good business near Cannes and his wife has let me know he would be pleased if you would like to go and work with them. Their daughter Berthe is not married. They have no son and they are in a difficult position . . .'

  A further link in the chain. He had read this letter in the huge kitchen of a big hotel at Vichy where there were fifteen of them, with napkins around their necks, caps on their heads, bustling round the ovens.

  Was it, perhaps, the change which had attracted him? He did not like the chef, and the chef did not like him. He had left that very day, and on the next he first set eyes on La Bastide, which had become only a part of what it was now.

  Big Louis, who was no longer big, but flaccid, with cheeks which hung like those of an old dog, was seated in a wheel-chair, on the terrace and could utter only barely distinguishable grunts.

  His wife, whose hair had turned white, made an attempt to appear delighted, but the moment she was no longer in her husband's presence began to cry.

  'I'm so glad you've come, Emile! If only you knew how unhappy I have been down here! When I think that it was I who dreamed about it all my life and persuaded Louis to come and spend his holidays in Nice . . .'

  As for Berthe, she was just as she was today, as calm, as secretive, as wanting in softness, and yet she was a pretty, fair-haired girl with a well-rounded figure.

  From the first months everything had gone badly for the Harnauds at La Bastide. First of all the famous Van Camp, who had sold them the property and pretended to understand everything better than an architect, had made plans which, when the masons and carpenters tried to execute them, had turned out to be impossible.

  He had not taken into account the slope of the ground nor the distance from the well, nor the thickness of the existing walls, so that they had to undo part of what was already finished, dig a new well, change the position of the septic tank.

  On the pretext that this was the Midi, Van Camp had not allowed for heating, and the very first winter they had been frozen up, in spite of having electric heaters on so that they blew the fuses.

  Finally Big Louis had discovered, at Mouans-Sartoux, a bistrot where at every hour of the day he could find company, and he had switched over from white wine to pastis.

  At this period Ada must have been about nine years old, and if she were already in the neighbourhood, Emile had taken no more notice of her than of the other children he used to see sometimes on the roadside. Nor had he heard any mention of Pascali, who had, however, taken part at one stage in the building operations.

  That the inn had been finished in spite of everything was almost a miracle, and, with Big Louis now incapacitated, there were only the two women left to look after it.

  Big Louis had lived another two years, part of them in his bed, part in the downstairs room or on the terrace, and Emile eventually succeeded in understanding, as Madame Harnaud and Berthe did, the sounds he emitted.

  It was Emile, at that time, who occupied the attic which had now become Ada's room, and there were already the same iron bed, several of the stains on the wall, but not the coloured print of the Virigin Mary.

  At first guests were rare. They had put up a board on the Route Napoleon, with an arrow indicating the way to the hotel. They also advertised in the Nice newspaper and in the folders handed out by the Tourist Bureau in Cannes.

  On some days, however, there was not a soul to be seen. On Saturday evening, Emile would go by bicycle to Cannes or Grasse, where he would have no difficulty in finding a girl to dance with.

  Oddly enough it was about a month before Big Louis' death that, without any reason, business had begun to pick up. People from Cannes, doctors, lawyers, businessmen, started the habit of coming to lunch or dine in small groups at La Bastide. The idea spread, and on Sundays lunches reached the thirty, then the forty, mark.

  Emile, in white cap, was kept busy in the kitchen where a certain Paola, an old woman from the neighbourhood who was Madame Lavaud's predecessor, peeled the vegetables, prepared the fish and washed the dishes, while Berthe supervised the tables.

  Big Louis had died at the height of the season and they had scarcely had time to bury him. After talking of transporting the body to Luçon, Madame Harnaud had finally decided, to avoid complicating matters, to bury him in the cemetery at Mouans-Sartoux.

  They had three residents, including a Swiss woman who had promised to return for a few months each year, and they could not submit them to the sight of a long period of mourning.

  Without noticing it, Emile had become more or less the master of the house, and he had replaced his bicycle with a motor-scooter, until such time as a van could be afforded.

  He had never made any advances to Berthe. It had never occurred to him. Perhaps because he had known her at school, and because she was two years older than he was, he looked upon her rather as an elder sister. Now he had never much liked his sister Odile, who was even more strict with him than his mother had been.

  One day when he opened the bathroom door he had surprised Berthe stepping out of the bath, her body pink and dripping with water, and he had had the same feeling of embarrassment as when, on two or three occasions, he had seen his sister undressed.
/>   He had felt no real desire nor even wish for any of this, neither the Riviera nor Berthe. Chance had placed him in this house, which had become his, almost without his realizing it. Belonging to a different generation from Big Louis, he had adapted himself better and had discovered the market at Cannes, the fishing folk, the games of bowls; he had even acquired something of the local accent.

  He had gradually changed the menus and the decoration.

  And then, the first winter after her husband's death, Madame Harnaud began to drop increasingly transparent hints to him.

  At first it had been:

  'I shall never be able to get used to this country . . .'

  It was no matter that it rained less than in Vendée: the rain here upset her more than the rain in her own part of the world, and, from her chair in the window, she would stare stony-eyed at the sky.

  The cold also seemed more insidious to her, and she complained of pains in her back, in her neck, in her legs.

  Maubi was already at work on the vines, the kitchen garden and the farmyard, for Big Louis had bought, with the house, a sizable piece of land.

  'That man steals from us. Our fruit costs double what it does in the market. You'll see, Emile, as far as these people are concerned, we will never be anything but strangers good for fleecing . . .'

  She used to write a lot to one of her sisters who was a widow, at Luçon, and who lived with her daughter, still a spinster at forty. In her heart of hearts she dreamed of going to join the two women. She did not refer to it at this stage, but she was preparing the ground.

  'If only I could sell La Bastide again!'

  It was too soon to think of that. They had sunk too much money in it and the business was not firmly established enough to tempt amateurs. While through the agencies they would recover practically nothing.

  Emile was beginning to recognize the pattern. Big Louis was not the only one to have let himself be lured. Hundreds, thousands of others like him, who, after an active, often hard life, hoped for semi-retirement, had yielded to the temptation of the Riviera and put all their savings into an inn, a restaurant, a cafe or some kind of business or other.

  Most of them brazened it out and pretended to be satisfied, but one could see them wandering, in the evening, along the Croisette or around the port, like perpetual strangers.

  They did not belong to the district and yet they were not tourists either.

  'If only,' sighed Madame Harnaud, 'Berthe could marry somebody in the trade!'

  Berthe seemed to escape the torments of other young girls and had no adventures. As soon as she got a moment to herself she would read, alone in the corner, deaf to all that was being said around her.

  It had taken some time. And it had required an attack of bronchitis, in the depths of January, when the mistral was blowing from morning till night, for Madame Harnaud to make up her mind to speak out more clearly.

  'If I don't go back there,' she groaned, 'I feel in my bones that I shall follow my poor Louis, and it won't be long before I join him in the cemetery. When I think of him buried in a country which is not his own!'

  She was forgetting that it was she who had decided on this.

  'My sister insists that I should go and live with her. That's impossible so long as I'm not reassured about what will become of Berthe and La Bastide . . .'

  Emile, who had taken her meaning, was not enthusiastic. For weeks, he had turned a deaf ear, occasionally looking at the young girl furtively and wondering whether, all things considered, the game was worth the candle.

  'You will have to get married one day, Emile . . .'

  The truth is that he had become attached to La Bastide, despite its air of a stage setting, and he was not averse to the sort of life he was leading. Gould he ever again spend his days in the stifling atmosphere of the kitchen of a big restaurant or hotel?

  Here, he was his own master. The customers were rather like friends. He enjoyed, two or three times a week, going to the market in Cannes, prowling among the fishermen just in from the sea, drinking a coffee or a glass of white wine with the market gardeners.

  He was beginning to know the people of Mouans-Sartoux and Les Baraques by their first names and often, in the afternoon, during the slack months, he would go and play bowls with them.

  He felt vaguely that he was being overcome by a form of cowardice, and already he would not have had sufficient courage to live in a hard and gloomy place like Champagne, where one could expect the land to yield nothing easily, and one had to fight with it.

  One evening when Madame Harnaud had retired to bed and he was alone downstairs with Berthe, he had sat down opposite her, and, for a moment, she had gone on reading or pretending to be reading.

  'Has your mother spoken to you too?'

  They had addressed one another familiarly ever since their schooldays, without it creating any intimacy between them.

  'Don't take any notice of what may mother says. She only thinks of herself. She's always been like that.'

  He did not really know her well, even after three years spent in the same house, and he was trying to interpret her reactions.

  'I think it would be better if we had a little talk about it.'

  'About what?'

  She had still not let go of her book and he had the impression that she was moved.

  'About your mother. You know better than I do that she won't stay here long. She dreams of nothing but Luçon. These days she writes to her sister three times a week. Have you read her letters?'

  'No.'

  'Nor have I.'

  It was a difficult conversation and, at this point, Berthe made as if to get up.

  'There would be one way in which she could leave here and still not lose her money.'

  He was afraid she would take it the wrong way, for he had seen her stiffen.

  'It's not for myself that I'm saying this, but for her. For you, too, perhaps.'

  'Nobody need bother about me.'

  'Do you dislike me?'

  She had turned away her head and it was only then that he had suspected her of having been in love with him for a long time, at any rate of having made up her mind that he would belong to her.

  All of a sudden he had felt a little moved by it all. He felt sorry for her. She was proud, he knew, and she was now in a false position.

  He had never paid court to her. Nor had he ever felt the slightest emotion in her presence, as he sometimes felt with other women. The time he had seen her naked, he had withdrawn without a word and he had never mentioned it afterwards.

  'Listen, Berthe . . .'

  He reached out his hand across the table. It would have made it easier to talk if she had put hers out too, but she remained rigid on her chair on the defensive.

  'I don't know if I would make a good husband . . .'

  'You chase all the girls.'

  'All boys do.'

  He was sure, now, of what he had just suspected, and it annoyed him a little; he asked himself whether he would not have preferred a refusal.

  'We could give it a try, couldn't we?'

  'Try what?'

  'I am fond of you.'

  'Fond?'

  He had stood up, because he felt it was necessary, and he did it for her sake, so that she would not be humiliated. Standing, he put an arm around her shoulders.

  'Listen, Berthe . . .'

  Finding nothing to say, he had leaned over to kiss her and had found tears on her cheeks.

  It was their first kiss, their first real contact. When their lips parted, she had murmured:

  'Don't say anything . . .'

  And she had gone and shut herself in her room.

  That was how another phase of his life had begun. On the next day, she was paler than usual and, as she seemed to be ashamed, he had given her comforting glances, trying to instil a certain tenderness in his eyes.

  Meeting her in the corridor, he had embraced her without her protesting, and an hour later he had been surprised to hear her singi
ng like a happy woman.

  Madame Harnaud must have understood, for she took to going up to her room very early, leaving them alone. Berthe would read in the dining-room, while he finished his work in the kitchen, then went round closing the shutters and doors. After a moment's hesitation, he went up behind her and took her in his arms.

  He was disconcerted to find her a woman troubled by emotions, who seemed to expect something more than mere kisses from him. It was she, first, who seized Emile's hand and put it to her breast, and after several days this girl, whom he had believed to be unfeeling, was behaving like a real female.

  The most embarrassing part was the mother's latent complicity. She could not have been unaware of what was going on. Emile was convinced that she was waiting for the irreparable damage to be done so as to be reassured concerning her own future.

  Now the irreparable could not be achieved on the ground floor, where all the rooms were public ones. Emile had no pretext to go into Berthe's room, and she never went up to the attic either.

  It was the period when they were converting some old stables, separated from the main part of the house, in order to put up two or three extra guests during the summer.

  As with the rest of the building they turned it into a typical Provencal place, too much so in fact, and it had already been christened the Cabin.

  One went down a step and the floor was made of large paving-stones like those in old churches. Pascali, the mason, had built a rustic chimney and the windows had small old-fashioned panes, while the ceiling kept its open beams.

  Wooden stairs, which looked rather like a ladder, led to an upper floor divided into two small rooms beneath the sloping roof.

  Tourists enjoy this kind of place, unlike anything else, where they have the impression of being separated from other people. They could house a family with several children there, or young married couples on their honeymoons. On the ground floor the bed was replaced by a large divan covered with flowered cretonne.

  It was in the Cabin that it happened. The alterations were not yet completely finished when Emile had taken to going there after lunch for his siesta.