Perhaps because there was an empty chair, Robert suddenly said that Brigitte was immensely sociable and liked to entertain. She played first-class bridge. She had somehow managed to obtain a transfer to Paris after all. They would be getting married in October.
“How did she do it?” Aymeric asked.
“She knows someone.”
They fell silent, admiring the empty chair.
“Who wants the last strawberry tart?” said Monique. When no one answered, she cut it in three.
“We will have to rearrange the space,” said Robert. He traced lines with his finger on the polished table and, with the palm of his hand, wiped something out.
Aymeric said, “Try to find out what she did with that snuff box. I wanted to give it to you as a wedding present.”
“I’ll look again in the oven,” Monique said.
“Ask her carefully,” said Aymeric. “Don’t frighten her. Sometimes she remembers.”
Robert went on tracing invisible lines.
Walter came back in September to find his kitchen under occupation, full of rusted sieves and food mills and old graters. On the stove was a saucepan of strained soup for the old woman’s supper; a bowl of pureed apricots stood uncovered in the sink. He removed everything to the old woman’s kitchen.
I was brought up so soundly, he said to himself. He had respected his parents; now he admired them. At home, nothing had made him feel worried or tense, and he hadn’t minded his father’s habit of reading the newspaper aloud while Walter tried to watch television. When his father answered the telephone, his mother called, “What do they want?” from the kitchen. His father always repeated everything the caller said, so that his mother would not miss a word of the conversation. There were no secrets, no mysteries. What Walter saw of his parents was probably all there was.
After cleaning his rooms and unpacking his suitcase, Walter called on Robert. He had meant to ask how they had spent their holidays, if in spite of the old lady they had managed to get away, but instead he found himself telling about a remarkable dream he’d had in Switzerland: A large badger had burst into the gallery and taken Walter’s employer hostage. Trout Face had said, “You’re not getting away with this. I’m not having anybody running around here with automatic weapons.” It was not a nightmare, said Walter. He had seen himself, aloof and nonchalant, enjoying the incident.
Robert said he would look it up. That night he made a neat stack of the books Walter had lent him — all that he could still find — and left it outside his locked front door. He wrote on the back of a page torn off a calendar, “Dream of badger taking man hostage means a change of residence, for which the dreamer should be prepared. R.” He rewrote this several times, changing a word here and there. In the morning, after starting the record and opening all the windows, he sat down and read his message again. He kept running his finger over the note, as he had traced new boundaries on Walter’s table, and seemed to be wondering if there was any point in trying to say the same thing some other way.
Luc and His Father
To the astonishment of no one except his father and mother, Luc Clairevoie failed the examination that should have propelled him straight into one of the finest schools of engineering in Paris; failed it so disastrously, in fact, that an examiner, who knew someone in the same ministry as Luc’s father, confided it was the sort of labour in vain that should be written up. Luc’s was a prime case of universal education gone crazy. He was a victim of the current belief that any student, by dint of application, could answer what he was asked.
Luc’s father blamed the late President de Gaulle. If de Gaulle had not opened the schools and universities to hordes of qualified but otherwise uninteresting young people, teachers would have had more time to spare for Luc. De Gaulle had been dead for years, but Roger Clairevoie still suspected him of cosmic mischief and double-dealing. (Like his wife, Roger had never got over the loss of Algeria. When the price of fresh fruit went high, as it did every winter, the Clairevoies told each other it was because of the loss of all those Algerian orchards.)
Where Luc was concerned, they took a practical course, lowered their sights to a lesser but still elegant engineering school, and sent Luc to a crammer for a year to get ready for a new trial. His mother took Luc to the dentist, had his glasses changed, and bought him a Honda 125 to make up for his recent loss of self-esteem. Roger’s contribution took the form of long talks. Cornering Luc in the kitchen after breakfast, or in his own study, now used as a family television room, Roger told Luc how he had been graduated with honours from the noblest engineering institute in France; how he could address other alumni using the second person singular, even by Christian name, regardless of whether they spoke across a ministerial desk or a lunch table. Many of Roger’s fellow-graduates had chosen civil-service careers. They bumped into one another in marble halls, under oil portraits of public servants who wore the steadfast look of advisers to gods; and these distinguished graduates, Roger among them, had a charming, particular way of seeming like brothers — or so it appeared to those who could only envy them, who had to keep to “Have I the honour of” and “If Mr. Assistant Under-Secretary would be good enough to” and “Should it suit the convenience.” To this fraternity Luc could no longer aspire, but there was still some hope for future rank and dignity: he could become an engineer in the building trades. Luc did not reply; he did not even ask, “Do you mean houses, or garages, or what?” Roger supposed he was turning things over in his mind.
The crammer he went to was a brisk, costly examination factory in Rennes, run by Jesuits, with the reputation for being able to jostle any student, even the dreamiest, into a respectable institute for higher learning. The last six words were from the school’s brochure. They ran through Roger Clairevoie’s head like an election promise.
Starting in September, Luc spent Monday to Friday in Rennes. Weekends, he came home by train, laden with books, and shut himself up to study. Sometimes Roger would hear him trying chords on his guitar: pale sound without rhythm or sequence. When Luc had studied enough, he buckled on his white helmet and roared around Paris on the Honda. (The promise of a BMW R/80 was in the air, as reward or consolation, depending on next year’s results.) On the helmet Luc had lettered “IN CASE OF ACCIDENT DO NOT REMOVE.” “You see, he does think of things,” his mother said. “Luc thinks of good, useful things.”
Like many Parisian students, Luc was without close friends, and in Rennes he knew nobody. His parents were somewhat relieved when, in the autumn, he became caught like a strand of seaweed on the edge of a political discussion group. The group met every Sunday afternoon in some member’s house. Once, the group assembled at the Clairevoies’; Simone Clairevoie, pleased to see that Luc was showing interest in adult problems, served fruit juice, pâté sandwiches, and two kinds of ice cream. Luc’s friends did not paint slogans on the sidewalk, or throw petrol bombs at police stations, or carry weapons (at least, Roger hoped not), or wear ragtag uniforms bought at the flea market. A few old men talked, and the younger men, those Luc’s age, sat on a windowsill or on the floor, and seemed to listen. Among the speakers the day they came to the Clairevoies’ was a retired journalist, once thought ironic and alarming, and the former secretary of a minor visionary, now in decrepit exile in Spain. Extremist movements were banned, but, as Roger pointed out to his wife, one could not really call this a movement. There was no law against meeting on a winter afternoon to consider the false starts of history. Luc never said much, but his parents supposed he must be taking to heart the message of the failed old men; and it was curious to see how Luc could grasp a slippery, allusive message so easily when he could not keep in mind his own private destiny as an engineer. Luc could vote, get married without permission, have his own bank account, run up bills. He could leave home, though a course so eccentric had probably not yet occurred to him. He was of age; adult; a grown man.