The Scapegoat Page 9

  The room served as boudoir also, for there was a small secretaire 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 chateau 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 Gue 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 Renee, 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 chateau, 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 epicerie 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 de
w 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 chateau 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.

  I walked up one of these long rides and looked at the chateau from the furthest point, seeing it now as a picture within a frame. The blue-black roof, the turrets, the tall chimneys, and the sandstone walls had shrunk to fairy-tale proportions: it no longer held living, feeling people, but was a plate turned over in a book of illustrations, or something glimpsed on the walls of a gallery, noted momentarily for its beauty and then dismissed.

  I retraced my steps past the seeking Artemis, down the ride to the dovecot, now filled with hay but still a nesting-place for cooing fantail pigeons, who preened and postured, strutting in and out of their narrow entrances, bowing and spreading their tails. Then the long windows of the salon opened, folding against the shutters, and the figures of Francoise and Renee appeared on the terrace, waving to me, and from between them the child came running, calling, 'Papa ... Papa ...' regardless of her mother, who scolded her to return. Crossing the footbridge spanning the moat, she sprang over the grass to join me, leaping high when almost on top of me so that I had to catch her in mid-air like a ballet-dancer.

  'Why didn't you go to the verrerie?' she asked, hanging round my neck, rumpling my hair. 'Uncle Paul had to go without you and it made him in a bad temper.'

  'I was late to bed through your fault,' I said, putting her down. 'You'd better go back indoors - I can hear your mother calling you.'

  She laughed, pulling my hand, dragging me to the swing by the dovecot. 'There is nothing the matter with me today. You are home,' she said. 'Now mend the swing for me. The rope has broken.'

  I fumbled with the contraption, clumsy-handed, while she watched me, chattering of nothing, asking questions that demanded no answer; and then when I fixed the seat for her she stood on it for a moment, working it with energy, her thin legs springy as a monkey's beneath the short frock, the bright checks draining from her face any colour she might otherwise have had.

  'Come on,' she said suddenly - I had gone to the back to push her, thinking she wanted to swing higher - and we walked off aimlessly together, hand in hand, she stooping to pick up chestnuts when we came to the path, filling a small pocket in her frock and then throwing the rest away.

  'Do people always like boys better than girls?' she asked me inconsequently.

  'No, I don't think so. Why should they?' I replied.

  'My aunt Blanche says they do, but there are more women saints than men, for which there is great rejoicing in Paradise. Will you race me?'

  'I don't want to race you.'

  She ran on ahead, skipping and leaping, passing through the garden door to the front terrace, through which I had gone the night before. Glancing up at the small window in her turret room, I saw how formidable was the height from that sill to the ground below. I followed the child towards the stabling and outbuildings. She had sprung up on to the wall above the moat and was now picking her way along the top of it, amid tangled ivy. Then she jumped down again close to the archway, and the dog, which had been sleeping in the sun, stretched himself, wagging his tail, and she opened the gate of his run and let him out. He barked as he saw me approach, and when I called out, 'Come here, then, what's the matter, old fellow?' he kept his distance and growled, standing beside Marie-Noel as though to guard her.

  'Stop it, Cesar,' said the child, jerking at his collar. 'Have you gone blind suddenly that you don't know your master?'

  He wagged his tail again and licked her hand, but he did not come to me, and I stood where I was, with an intuition that if I advanced he would growl again, and my efforts to make friends would increase his suspicion rather than allay it.

  'Leave him alone. Don't excite him,' I said.

  She let go his collar and he loped towards me, still muttering, sniffed, and then left me, without interest, and went off nosing at the ivy around the moat wall.

  'He didn't give you any welcome,' said Marie-Noel. 'How extraordinary. Perhaps he isn't feeling well. Cesar, come here.'

  'Don't bother him,' I said. 'He's all right.'

  I began to walk towards the house, but the dog did not follow me. He stood uncertainly, watching the child, who ran to him, and patted his great flanks and felt his nose.

  I looked across the precincts of the chateau to the bridge and the village beyond, and I saw a woman turn down the hill from the church and come to the gateway between the entrance towers. She wore black, with a little old-fashioned toque on her head, and she was carrying a prayer-book. I recognized her for Blanche. Looking neither to right nor to left, seeming to be unconscious of the day, she walked stiff and straight up the gravel driveway to the terrace steps. Even when Marie-Noel ran to meet her, her frozen face never relaxed an instant, the hard, set expression remaining unchanged.

  'Cesar growled at Papa,' called the child, 'and didn't seem pleased to see him. It has never happened before. Do you think he is ill?'

  Blanche glanced across at the dog, who now advanced towards her, wagging his tail. 'If no one is taking him for a walk he had better be put back in his run,' she said, and came up the steps, apparently unconcerned at the dog's behaviour. 'As you are now well enough to be out of doors, you are well enough to come for your lessons with me after lunch.'

  'I don't have to do lessons today, do I, Papa?' the child protested.

  'I don't see why not,' I said, believing I might ingratiate myself with Blanche. 'You had better ask your mother what she thinks.'

  Blanche made no comment. She walked straight past me into the house: I might not have been there. Marie-Noel took my hand and shook it crossly.

  'Why are you in such a bad humour with me today?' she said.

  'I'm not in a bad humour.'

  'You are. You don't want to play with me, and it isn't anything to do with Maman if I have lessons this afternoon or not. You know that very well.'

  'Am I supposed to give the orders?'

  She stared at me, her eyes round. 'You always do,' she said.

  'Very well then,' I said firmly. 'It won't hurt you to have lessons, if your aunt can spare the time. Now come upstairs - I have something for you.'

  It occurred to me suddenly that the giving of the presents would be much simpler if it were done at the table, while we were all assembled there having lunch, than if I gave them to each one individually. But the child might have hers now, as a sop, because I had taken an unpopular attitude over the lessons.

  She followed me up to the dressing-room, and I went to the table and gave her the book in its wrappings. She tore them off, and when she saw what the book was she exclaimed in delight and hugged it to her.

  'It is just what I wanted,' she said. 'Oh, my darling sweet Papa, why do you always guess the right things?'

  In her enthusiasm she flung herself upon me, and once again I was forced to undergo the arms round the neck, the cheek thrust against mine, the random kisses falling anywhere. This time I was expecting it, and as I swung her round in my arms it was like playing with a lion cub, or a long-limbed puppy, or any young animal that attracts one because of its youth and grace. Instead of being awkward with her I found myself responding. I pulled her hair and tickled the back of her neck, both of us laughing, her very naturalness with me making me unafraid, confident of myself and of her. It was stimulating to realize that if this attractive clinging object knew I was a stranger she would be repelled and scared, withdrawing herself immediately, and we should hav
e no point of contact, that she would be totally indifferent to me, just as the dog had been.

  'Must I do lessons?' she said, sensing intuitively my sudden response, trying to turn it to advantage.

  'I don't know,' I said. 'We can decide that later.'

  Putting her down, I stood beside the table again, looking at the other packages.

  'I'll tell you something,' I said. 'I've brought presents from Paris for everyone. I gave your mother hers last night, and one to your grandmother too. We'll put these in the dining-room, and they can open them at lunch.'

  'For uncle Paul and my aunt Renee?' she said. 'Why, it's not either of their birthdays.'

  'No, but it's a good thing to give presents. It shows appreciation. I have one for your aunt Blanche too.'

  'For my aunt Blanche?' She stared at me, amazed.

  'Yes, why not?'

  'But you never give her anything, not even for Christmas or the New Year!'

  'Well, I'm giving her something now. It might make her better tempered.'

  The child went on staring at me, and began biting her fingers. 'I don't think it's a good idea, putting the presents on the table,' she said, her voice worried. 'It's too much like a fete or a celebration. Nothing is going to happen, is it, that you haven't told me?'

  'What do you mean?'

  'My little brother isn't going to be born today?'

  'No, of course not. That's got nothing to do with it.'

  'The Wise Men from the east brought gifts ... I know what you gave Maman, because she was wearing it. She told my aunt Renee that it cost a lot of money, and it was very naughty of you, but it showed how fond of her you were.'

  'What did I tell you? It's a good thing to give presents now and again.'

  'Yes, but not in front of everyone, when it's special. I am glad you did not put my Little Flower in the dining-room. What have you brought for the others?'

  'We'll see later.'

  She opened her book, crouching on her knees to do so, with the book laid out on the floor of the dressing-room, and I remembered dimly how as a child one never adopted an adult position, but invariably read lying flat, drew standing up, and for preference ate walking about instead of sitting down. It struck me that I ought to go upstairs and inquire after my mother, and I said to Marie-Noel, 'Come and see if your grandmother is better,' but she went on reading, not taking her eyes from the book, and said without lifting her head, 'She is not to be disturbed. Charlotte said so.' Nevertheless I went upstairs, oddly confident now about everything I did.