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 woke up alone: which he hated. He touched his closed eyelids. His dreams did not bear discussion. His life is not really what people imagine, he thought. The long struggle for Annette had shredded his nerves. How he would like to be with Annette, and settled. He did not bear Claude any ill-will, but it would be neat if he could be just plucked out of existence. He did not want him to suffer; he tried to think of a precedent, in the Scriptures perhaps. Anything could happen; that was his experience.
He remembered – and he had to remember afresh every morning – that he was going to marry Annette’s daughter, that he had made her swear an oath about it. How complicated it all was. His father suggested that he wrecked people’s lives. He was at a loss to see this. He had not raped anybody, nor committed murder, and from anything else people ought to be able to pick themselves up and carry on, as he was always doing.
There was a letter from home. He didn’t want to open it. Then he thought, don’t be a fool, somone might have died. Inside was a banker’s draft, and a few words from his father, less of apology than of resignation. This had happened before; they had gone through this whole cycle, of name-calling and horror and flight and appeasement. At a certain point, his father would feel he had overstepped the mark. He had an impulse, a desire to have control; and if his son stopped writing, never came home again, he would have lost control. I should, Camille thought, send this draft back. But as usual. I need the money, and he knows it. Father, he thought, you have other children whom you could torment.
I’ll go round and see d’Anton, he thought. Georges-Jacques will talk to me, he doesn’t regard my vices, in fact perhaps he rather likes them. The day brightened.
They were busy at d’Anton’s offices. The King’s Councillor employed two clerks nowadays. One of them was a man called Jules Paré, whom he’d known at school, though d’Anton was younger by several years; it didn’t seem odd, that he employed his seniors these days. The other was a man called Deforgues, whom d’Anton also seemed to have known for ever. Then there was a hanger-on called Billaud-Varennes, who came in when he was wanted, to draft pleas and do the routine stuff, picking up the practice’s overflow. Billaud was in the office this morning, a spare, unprepossessing man with never a good word to say about anybody. When Camille came in, he was tapping papers together on Paré’s desk, and at the same time complaining that his wife was putting on weight. Camille saw that he was specially resentful this morning; for here he was, down-at-heel and seedy, and here was Georges-Jacques, with his good broadcloth coat nicely brushed and his plain cravat a dazzling white, with that general money-in-the-bank air of his and that loud posh voice… ‘Why are you complaining about Anna,’ Camille asked, ‘when you really want to complain about Maître d’Anton?’
Billaud looked up. ‘I’ve no complaints,’ he said.
‘Aren’t you lucky? You must be the only man in France with no complaints. Why is he lying?’
‘Go away, Camille.’ D’Anton picked up the papers Billaud had brought. ‘I’m working.’
‘When you were received into the College of Advocates, didn’t you have to go to your parish priest and ask him for a certificate to say that you were a good Catholic?’ D’Anton grunted, buried in his counter-claims. ‘Didn’t it stick in your throat?’
‘“Paris is worth a Mass,”’ d’Anton said.
‘Of course, this is why Maître Billaud-Varennes doesn’t advance himself from his present position. He also would be a King’s Councillor, but he can’t bring himself to do it. He hates priests, don’t you?’
‘Yes,’ Billaud said. ‘As we’re quoting, I’ll quote for you – “I should like to see, and this will be the last and most ardent of my desires, I should like to see the last king strangled with the guts of the last priest.”’
A short pause. Camille looks Billaud over. He can’t stand him, hardly likes to be in the same room, Billaud makes his skin crawl with distaste and a sort of apprehension that he can’t fathom. But that’s just it – he has to be in the same room. He has to keep seeking out the company of people he can’t stand, it’s become a compulsion. He looks at certain people these days, and it’s as if he’s always known them, as if they belong to him in some way, as if they’re his relatives.
‘How’s your subversive pamphlet?’ he said to Billaud. ‘Have you found a printer for it yet?’
D’Anton looked up from his papers. ‘Why do you spend your time writing things that can never be published, Billaud? I’m not asking to needle you – I just want to know.’
Billaud’s face mottled. ‘Because I can’t compromise,’ he said.
‘Oh, for God’s sake,’ d’Anton said. ‘Wouldn’t it be better – no, we’ve had this conversation before. Perhaps you should try pamphleteering yourself, Camille. Try prose, instead of poetry.’
‘His pamphlet is called “A Last Blow against
