had not seen Henriette, only his mother’s whey-face, and the doctor coming and going. He had gone off to school, to Cateau-Cambrésis, and sometimes he had woken in the night and thought, why isn’t she coughing? When he returned home he was taken into her room and allowed to sit for five minutes by the bed. She had transparent places under her eyes, where the skin shone blue; her bony shoulders were pushed forwards by the pillows. She had died the year he went to school in Paris, on a day when the rain fell steadily and coursed in brown channels through the streets of the town.
His father had given the priest and the doctor a glass of brandy – as if they were not habituated to death, as if they needed bracing. Himself, he sat in a corner inconspicuously, and awkwardly very awkwardly the men revolved the conversation around to him: Camille, how will you like going to Louis-le-Grand? I have made up my mind to like it, he said. Won’t you miss your mother and father? You must remember, he said, that they sent me to school three years ago when I was seven, so I will not miss them at all, and they will not miss me. He’s upset, the priest said hurriedly; but Camille your little sister’s in heaven. No, Father, he had said: we are compelled to believe that Henriette is in purgatory now, tasting torments. This is the consolation our religion allows us for our loss.
There would be brandy for him now when he arrived home, and his father would ask, as he had done for years, how was the journey? But he was used to the journey. Perhaps the horses might fall over, or you might be poisoned en route, or bored to death by a fellow traveller; that was the sum of the possibilities. Once he had said, I didn’t see anything, I didn’t speak to anyone, I thought evil thoughts all the way. All the way? And those were the days before the diligence. He must have had stamina, when he was sixteen.
Before leaving Paris he had read over his father’s recent letters. They were trenchant, unmagisterial, wounding. Between the lines lay the unspeakable fact that the Godards wish to break off his engagement to his cousin Rose-Fleur. It had been made when she was in her cradle; how were they to know how things would turn out?
It was Friday night when he arrived home. The next day there were calls to be paid around the town, gatherings he could not avoid. Rose-Fleur affected to be too shy to speak to him, but the pretence sat uneasily on her restless shoulders. She had darting eyes and the Godards’ heavy dark hair; she ran her eyes over him from time to time, making him feel that he had been coated with black treacle.
On Sunday he went to Mass with the family. In the narrow, sleet-blown streets he was an object of curiosity. In church people looked at him as if he had come from a warmer region than Paris.
‘They say you are an atheist,’ his mother whispered.
‘Is that what they say I am?’
Clément said, ‘Perhaps you will be like that diabolic Angevin who vanished at the consecration in a puff of smoke?’
‘It would be an event,’ Anne-Clothilde said. ‘Our social calendar has been so dull.’
Camille did not study the congregation; he was aware that they studied him. There was M. Saulce and his wife; there was the same physician, bewigged and tubby, who once assisted Henriette to her coffin.
‘There’s your old girlfriend,’ Clément said. ‘We’re not supposed to know, but we do.’
Sophie was a doubled-chinned matron now. She looked through him as if his bones were glass. He felt that perhaps they were; even stone seemed to crumble and melt in the scented ecclesiastical gloom. Six points of light on the altar guttered and flared; their shadows cross-hatched flesh and stone, wine and bread. The few communicants melted away into the darkness. It was the feast of the Epiphany; when they emerged, the blue daylight scoured the burgers’ skulls, icing out features and peeling them back to bone.
He went upstairs to his father’s study and sifted through his filed correspondence until he found the letter he wanted, the missive from his Godard uncle. His father came in as he was reading it. ‘What are you doing?’ He didn’t try to hide the letter. ‘That’s really going rather far,’ Jean-Nicolas said.
‘Yes.’ Camille smiled, turning the page. ‘But then you know I am ruthless and capable of great crimes.’ He carried the paper to the light. ‘Camille’s known instability’, he read, ‘and the dangers that may be apprehended to the happiness and durability of the union’. He put the letter down. His hand trembled. ‘Do they think I’m mad?’ he asked his father.
‘They think –’
‘What else can it mean, instability?’
‘Is it just their choice of words you’re quibbling about?’ Jean-Nicolas went over to the fireplace, rubbing his hands. ‘That bloody church is freezing,’ he said. ‘They could have come up with other terms, but of course they won’t commit them to writing. Something got back about a – relationship – you were having with a colleague whom I had always held in considerable –’
Camille stared at him. ‘That was years ago.’
‘I don’t find this particularly easy to talk about,’ Jean-Nicolas said. ‘Would you like just to deny it, and then I can put people straight on the matter?’
The wind tossed handfuls of sleet against the windows, and rattled in the chimneys and eaves. Jean-Nicolas raised his eyes apprehensively. ‘We lost slates in November. What’s happening to the weather? It never used to be like this.’
Camille said, ‘Anything that happened was – oh, back in the days when the sun used to shine all the time. Six years ago. Minimum. None of it was my fault, anyway.’
‘So what are you claiming? That my friend Perrin, a family man, whom I have known for thirty-five years, a man highly respected in the Chancery division and a leading Freemason – are you claiming that one day out of the blue he ran up to you and knocked you unconscious and dragged you into his bed? Rubbish. Listen,’ he cried, ‘can you hear that strange tapping noise? Do you think it’s the guttering?’
‘Ask anyone,’ Camille said.
‘What?’
‘About Perrin. He had a reputation. I was just a child, I – oh well, you know what I’m like, I never do quite know how I get into these things.’
‘That won’t do for an excuse. You can’t expect that to do, for the Godards.’ He broke off, looked up. ‘I think it is the guttering, you know.’ He turned back to his son. ‘And I only bring this up, as one example of the sort of story that gets back.’
It had begun to snow properly now, from an opaque and sullen sky. The wind dropped suddenly. Camille put his forehead against the cold glass and watched the snow begin to drift and bank in the square below. He felt weak with shock. His breath misted the pane, the fire crackled behind him, gulls tossed screaming in the upper air. Clément came in. ‘What’s that funny noise, a sort of tapping?’ he said. ‘Is it the guttering, do you think? That’s funny, it seems to have stopped now.’ He looked across the room. ‘Camille, are you all right?’
‘I think so. Could you just tell the fatted calf it’s been reprieved again?’
Two days later he was back in Paris, in the rue Sainte-Anne. ‘I’m moving out,’ he told his mistress.
‘Suit yourself,’ she said. ‘If you must know, I really object to your carrying on with my mother behind my back. So perhaps it’s just as well.’
SO NOW CAMILLE
