‘Well, yes,’ said Mathias. ‘But he isn’t a complete prat.’
‘Maybe not. But still. It’s not an option. There are limits.’
‘Yeah, I know. Although if you push me, Middle Ages and contemporary history, it’s all pretty much the same thing.’
‘Oh, steady, watch what you’re saying.’
‘OK. But I think I heard that Devernois was seriously down on his luck, although he may earn a bit on the side.’
Marc frowned.
‘Down on his luck?’
‘That’s what I said. He left off teaching teenagers in a lycée up north. He’s got a really dead-end job now, teaching part-time in a private school in Paris. Bored, disillusioned, writing, on his own.’
‘So he really is down on his luck, like us. Why didn’t you say so straightaway?’
Marc stood still for a few seconds. He thought fast.
‘That changes everything,’ he announced. ‘Get going, Mathias. Great War or no Great War, let’s turn a blind eye. Courage, men, France expects you to do your duty. You go find him and persuade him. I’ll meet you both back here at seven with the landlord. We’ve got to sign the lease tonight. Go on, find a way, convince him. If all three of us are in such a bad way, we ought to be able to contrive a total disaster.’
Saluting, they went their separate ways, Marc at a run, Mathias at walking pace.
IV
IT WAS THEIR FIRST EVENING IN THE DISGRACE IN RUE CHASLE. THE Great War historian had turned up, shaken hands at speed, taken a look at all four floors, and hadn’t been seen since.
After the first moments of relief, now that the lease was signed, Marc felt his worst fears reviving. The excitable modernist, who had turned up with his pale cheeks, his long lock of hair falling in his eyes, his tightly knotted tie, grey jacket, and a pair of shoes which had seen better days, true, but which had been handmade in England, inspired in him a degree of apprehension. Even setting aside his catastrophic choice of research subject, Lucien was unpredictable: a mixture of stiffness and laissez-aller, bonhomie and seriousness, good-natured irony and deliberate cynicism, and he seemed to lurch from one extreme to the other, with short bursts of fury and good humour. It was disconcerting. You couldn’t anticipate what was coming next. Sharing a house with someone who wore a tie was a new experience. Marc looked over at Mathias, who was pacing around the empty room with a preoccupied expression.
‘Was it easy to persuade him?’
‘Piece of cake. He stood up, twitched his tie, put his hand on my shoulder and said, “The solidarity of the trenches. Theirs not to reason why. I’m your man.” A bit over the top. On the way, he asked me what we were up to these days. I told him a bit about pre-history, selling posters, the Middle Ages, ghostwriting romances, and machines. He pulled a face-maybe it was the Middle Ages he didn’t like. But he recovered, muttered something about the melting-pot of the trenches, and that was it.’
‘And now he’s vanished.’
‘He’s left his rucksack. That’s promising.’
Then the trenches expert had reappeared, carrying on his shoulder a packing case for firewood. Marc wouldn’t have thought he had the strength. He might be OK after all.
So that was why, after a scratch supper, eaten off their knees, the three seriously unemployed historians found themselves huddled before a large fire. The fireplace was imposing and coated in soot. ‘Fire,’ Lucien Devernois announced with a smile, ‘is our common starting-point. A modest example, but common to us all. Or if you prefer, it’s our base. Apart from being out of a job, this is our only known point of contact. Never neglect points of contact.’
Lucien accompanied this with an expansive gesture. Marc and Mathias looked at him, without trying to work out what this meant, warming their hands over the flames.
‘It’s simple,’ Lucien explained, getting launched. ‘For the sturdy pre-historian among us, Mathias Delamarre, fire is essential. He thinks of groups of hairy men huddling around their life-giving fire at the cave mouth, because it keeps away wild animals: the invention of fire.’
‘The invention of fire,’ Mathias began, ‘is a controversial…’
‘Enough!’ said Lucien. ‘Please keep your expert opinion to yourself. I have no interest in who is right and wrong about the caves, but let us honour the importance of fire in prehistoric times. Moving on, we come to Marc Vandoosler, who racks his brains trying to calculate the medieval population and what does he count? “Hearths.” Not so easy either, for the poor medievalists. Swiftly climbing the ladder of years, we get to me, and the firing line of the Great War: men under fire, the line of fire, reaching back to the dawn of mankind. Rather touching, isn’t it.’
Lucien laughed, sniffed loudly and rekindled the blaze in the grate by pushing a log with his foot. Marc and Mathias smiled weakly. They were going to have to reckon with this impossible guy who was nevertheless indispensable, since he would be paying a third of the rent.
‘Well,’ said Marc, twisting his rings, ‘when our disagreements get really serious and our chronological preferences too hard to face, all we have to do is make a fire, right?’
‘It might help,’ Lucien conceded.
‘Sensible idea,’ added Mathias.
So they stopped talking history, and warmed themselves by the fire. In fact they were more concerned about the weather that evening, and for the evenings to come. The wind had risen and heavy rain was leaking into the house. The three of them began to estimate the extent of the repairs needing to be done, and the work involved. For now, the rooms were all empty and they were sitting on packing cases. Tomorrow each would bring his own possessions. They would have to plaster the walls, rewire the electricity, fix the plumbing, prop up the ceilings. And Marc was going to collect his elderly godfather. He would explain that another time. Who was he? Just his old godfather, that’s all. He was actually his uncle as well. And what did this uncle-godfather do? Nothing, he was retired. Retired from what? From his job, of course. What kind of job? Oh, Lucien was a pain with all his questions. He was a civil servant, if you must know. He would fill in the details another time.
V
THE TREE HAD GROWN.
For more than a month, Sophia had been keeping watch from the second-floor window, observing the new neighbours. They interested her. Was there any harm in that? Three fairly young men, no women to be seen, and no children. Just three guys. She had immediately recognised the one who had been pressing his forehead against the rusty gates and had told her at once that her tree was a beech. She had been pleased to see him back in the street. He had brought with him two very different-looking fellows. A tall, fair-haired type, who wore sandals, and an excitable character in a grey suit. She was getting to know them rather well. Sophia wondered whether it was quite proper to be spying on them like this. Well, proper or not, it reassured and distracted her, and it was giving her an idea. So she went on doing it. They had been in perpetual motion for the whole month of Apriclass="underline" transporting planks, buckets, sacks of stuff in wheelbarrows, or boxes on-what do you call those metal things with wheels? Trolleys, that was it. So, boxes on trolleys. Plenty of work going on, then. They had been crisscrossing the garden the whole time, and that was how Sophia had learnt their names, by leaving the window open. The thin one in black was Marc. The slow-moving, fair-haired one was Mathias, and the one always with a tie was Lucien. Even when he was making holes in the walls, he kept his tie on. Sophia touched her neckscarf. Well, each to his own mannerism.