The Pitards, page 3
When he went back down, Campois was clearing the table. Lannec said nothing but stood at the porthole, drumming his fingers on the pane. The steward got the point and hurried up so much that he broke a glass.
‘Joker!’ the captain grumbled.
His quarters were on the right, but he didn’t go in. He carried on waiting until the steward had left and then locked the outside door, which he never did. He went up to the door of his wife’s cabin.
‘Mathilde!’
No answer. But she wasn’t asleep yet, he could hear noises in the cabin.
‘Open up. I have to talk to you.’
‘I’m listening.’
‘Not like this. Open the door for a minute …’
Something like a smile came back to his face, and a lustful thought made his upper lip curl. It struck him that they hadn’t even had a kiss since they’d been on board their own ship!
‘Open the door, Mathilde!’
He put on a soft voice, leaned down to the keyhole and heard footsteps approaching.
‘Don’t be mean! I want to tell you that …’
He’d forgotten the incident at lunchtime already. That was the past! He was ready to take his wife in his arms.
‘Open up, quickly.’
The bolt was drawn, the door opened a few inches, and in the gap there was Mathilde, looking stern.
‘What’s the matter?’ she uttered.
His smile froze on his face. He made an effort nonetheless and stammered:
‘Don’t be cross. I promise you …’
The door was shut and bolted, and Lannec heard shoes fall to the ground. He raised his fist. For an instant that fist was on the point of hitting the door, but it carried on further up until it met the gimbal light that was used when the electricity was out. It had a green shade.
Lannec grasped its mounting, paused for a second, then tugged on it as hard as he could. He had to try twice, as it was firmly fixed to the bulkhead.
It made a thunderous noise in the mess room. Outside, there was alarm, presumably from Campois, who didn’t know what disaster had befallen the ship.
Lannec for his part went into his cabin, shut the door and lay down on his bunk fully dressed.
For a while he didn’t pay any attention to what was going on on the other side of the partition. Once quiet returned he could hear his wife’s voice and realized that she was helping the steward repair or take stock of the damage.
3
He slept for two hours and by five p.m. he was seated in the mess room by the light of the now shadeless gimbal, which had been put back on the wall. Because it was a ritual action, Campois put Lannec’s bowl of coffee on the table with its green baize cover now on it without saying a word.
Just as Eastern soothsayers can fall into a trance by gazing at a crystal ball, Lannec, like servants and housekeepers, had the capacity to abstract his mind entirely over a bowl of coffee.
It was a huge earthenware bowl, half an inch thick. He poured condensed milk into it himself from a tin with two holes in it.
At this point he was still drowsy, halfway between sleep and waking. He was yawning, and his legs were numb. The smell of his hot, sweet drink chased away another smell that also had its place in the unchanging order of his days – the smell of the bunk he’d just left. He would never have dared admit this to anyone, but when he lay down for his afternoon nap he enjoyed that smell, like a horse happy to be back in its stable, and when he spent a few days ashore, he was disoriented by sleeping in another bed, even if it was his wife’s.
‘Campois!’
He didn’t raise his voice because he knew the steward was nearby.
‘Has the wind changed?’
Even dreaming over his milky coffee didn’t stop him from following the ship’s progress. Even when he’d been asleep he’d registered that the wind had slackened and given way to squalls of rain drumming on the portholes.
Now he was lending his ear to the rush of sea on the hull, and the sound of the waves told him there was an upwind.
‘North-west,’ Campois confirmed.
Night had just fallen. The two electric lightbulbs that Mathilde found too weak lit the mess room. Lannec put his elbows on the table and leaned over his steaming bowl of coffee for the ten minutes that he allowed himself after getting up.
A nor’wester while they were still over the Flanders Banks meant they would have a foul night, possibly with mist into the bargain. It would soon be time to think about that.
A newspaper that had been used to wrap something was lying on the green baize, and Lannec pulled it over, without thinking and without meaning to read it. It was a local paper from a Seine estuary town, open at the classified advertisements page.
Brasserie-Restaurant Chandivert
The most modern and the most fun
Live music every day
Lannec looked at his wife’s cabin door and then at a porthole streaked with rain that was getting ever heavier.
Caen … The Brasserie Chandivert … Rain … Mathilde … Their engagement.
Rain, especially, and particularly evening rain … He went into Chandivert’s one rainy evening when he was skipper of a boat that was unloading at Caen.
Ghostly figures swept along the ill-lit pavement, but the huge brasserie was warm and lively, full of laughter and talk, with music playing, billiard balls clicking and glasses clinking. It smelled of beer, coffee and grilled sausage.
To be honest, Lannec was looking to pick up a woman when he saw Mathilde sitting there with her mother. He even remembered they appeared to be eating their cake at a snail’s pace so as to enjoy it for as long they could.
Why did he play around making eyes at the girl? She smiled. Then he laughed. Her mother didn’t get what was going on and looked at the other tables.
‘Go to the toilets,’ Lannec’s eyes said.
He was wearing his best captain’s uniform and had just had a shave. In the end the girl got up and went to the toilets, where he caught up with her.
‘Can’t I ever see you on your own?’
She was so taken aback by his boldness that she burst out in a nervous laugh.
‘Won’t you answer me?’
‘I don’t know you …’
‘Well, I’ll find out who you are! I’ll find out where you live and wait for you at the door.’
He didn’t really believe he would, but all the same, out of idleness and just for fun, he followed them to an address in Rue Saint-Pierre, where they lived over a shoe shop.
‘Campois!’
The steward emerged from his store room, where he sat like a spider in the middle of its web.
‘Is my wife asleep?’
‘I don’t know, sir.’
Lannec drank a sip of coffee and lit the pipe he’d just filled. Some memories, even if they were stupid ones, made him sentimental: long waits in a dark street in the evening, Mathilde turning up to say she could not go out with him, or a letter she threw to him from a window that he had to pick up out of the mud.
He downed the remainder of the coffee, sighed, stood up, took his oilskins off the hook and wrapped his neck in his blue wool scarf. Just before leaving the mess room he glanced at the cabin door, and it opened.
‘Émile!’ his wife called out.
‘Yes.’
‘I want to inform you of one thing: I shan’t set foot in the mess room again unless we eat together alone.’
‘But …’
‘The others can easily have their dinners separately.’
Upon which, she shut the door. Lannec slowly went up the staircase, and once he got to the deck he scowled on seeing the way the sea was getting heavier. Two men ran past in the dark and he grabbed one of them – the bos’n.
‘What is it?’
‘We’re tying down the cows. One of them almost broke a leg already.’
The Tonnerre-de-Dieu was a good ship, no doubt about that. But like all old English vessels she was long and narrow, which made her roll a great deal.
Lannec got to the bridge and saw the shape of Georges Moinard and behind him that of Monsieur Gilles. He said hallo in his usual way, with a grunt. Then he looked out for the lighthouses in range, glanced at the compass and, if need be, at the chart.
‘South Foreland?’ he queried as he pointed through the drizzle to an intermittent light.
In making that suggestion he was taking the upwind into account, because with the following current they should have been much further on.
‘I think it’s Dover,’ Moinard replied with furrowed brow.
If it was Dover, then they had so to speak been standing still since two o’clock.
‘Aren’t you sure it’s Dover?’
‘Look! There are two lights …’
For the last fifteen minutes the first mate and Monsieur Gilles had both been watching those two on-and-off lights where there should have been only one.
‘Must be a ship’s light, for sure.’
‘Yes, but which one is it?’
The three of them spent the next ten minutes staring at the same point in the sea until the lights separated sufficiently to enable them to be identified.
‘Wheel to starboard!’ Lannec ordered. ‘About time, too!’
With the wind now athwart, the ship started rolling as if in a real storm, and the cattle were soaked in spray. For a moment Lannec’s mind turned to his wife in her cabin, no doubt lying down and waiting for each successive roll and yaw.
‘What’s that ahead of us?’
‘A fishing boat, I think. Those men never light their masthead lanterns.’
‘By the way, Moinard … I’ve got to tell you something … about my wife.’
He spat and shook out his pipe.
‘She’s asked to take her meals separately, with me. If it doesn’t bother you, you’ll have a sitting together with the other officers after we’ve had our meal.’
‘It doesn’t bother me.’
He was lying. It bothered both men equally. It was so inappropriate that it even made them feel embarrassed for the ship.
‘You know something? I don’t think she’ll come with us again …’
‘It’s up to her.’
That was the way Moinard was. He took things as they came without trying to change the course of events, unlike Lannec, who was up in arms over the slightest change.
‘It’s getting thicker!’
Rain had turned to drizzle, and the drizzle was now gradually turning into a fog that put a ring of haze around the lighthouse and made it seem further away.
‘Gilles! Sound the siren!’
The three of them were very calm, just a bit more grumpy than usual, because they’d have to spend the night on lookout, trying to distinguish the lighthouse beams through the fog and having their eardrums pummelled by the fog horn.
The radio operator came up for a turn on the bridge and after only a few minutes without saying anything he let drop as if it were a matter of no consequence:
‘It’s really bad further up. There’s a boat off Ijmuiden that’s already asking for radio assistance to find her course.’
Lannec didn’t know why, but he looked at the man askance. What was happening wasn’t unusual. It was just seasonal weather. He’d done this trip a hundred times in far worse conditions, when visibility was so near to nil that you had to listen out for the sound of waves breaking to guess where the sandbanks were.
He rang for Campois and spoke to him from the top of the bridge ladder.
‘You’ll serve dinner for me and my wife, then do a second sitting for the officers.’
Two hours went by.
‘Aren’t you going to take a break?’ Lannec asked Moinard.
He knew very well that he wouldn’t. Two men were better than one, and three were better than two at finding the lights in this filthy fog. Lannec took the bearings of the South Foreland light every thirty minutes. When he’d done the calculations in the chart room, Moinard looked at him inquiringly.
‘Barely more than three knots!’ the captain answered.
They had not just the wind but the tide against them. The steersman had to reset the course of the Tonnerre-de-Dieu at every lurch, as the sea was constantly pushing her in the wrong direction.
‘My wife can’t be enjoying this!’
He said it out of revenge, but he didn’t really mean it, or rather, he took no pleasure in imagining Mathilde writhing with seasickness.
When the dinner bell rang, he turned to Moinard.
‘I’ll be back up in ten minutes. If there’s any need …’
He could have wept in fury at the idea that on his own boat, and on its first voyage to boot, every tradition of the merchant navy was being thrown overboard. He therefore put on his most ponderous gait and his harshest face as he entered the mess room, shook out his oilskins and hung it up on its hook.
‘My wife isn’t …’
He hadn’t got past the start of his sentence before Mathilde came out of her cabin and took her place at table as straightforwardly as she would have in their dining room in Caen. She was wearing a modest black silk dress and had combed her hair, powdered her face and put on a touch of lipstick.
‘Aren’t you seasick?’
‘What do you care?’
He took his napkin from its ring and unfolded it without a word while Campois served the soup. He was lost, suspended between feelings of humiliation and fury. He felt as if the entire crew were laughing at him and looking down on him with disapproval.
He had had to inform the chief engineer, the radio operator and everyone … that madame wished to take her meals alone with monsieur!
Mathilde looked a bit pale but she ate nonetheless. Yet the sea was so heavy that they had had to set up the side boards to stop plates sliding off the table.
‘Not even a bit queasy?’
‘I’ve told you, no.’
Lannec suspected there was a smile in Campois’ blue eyes, and that made him even angrier.
‘There’s never been anything like this,’ he grunted after noisily slurping down his soup and pushing away his empty plate.
‘There’s nothing wrong with a new start.’
He was powerless. It felt out of kilter, almost indecent. He felt ridiculous sitting on his own with his wife while his officers, and especially Moinard, waited to eat after them, like servants!
In his eyes, it undermined the order and harmony of the whole boat and crew.
‘Why ever did you think of coming along?’
He wasn’t yet saying it, but the answer was in his mind: ‘Because your mother wanted you to keep an eye on her money, didn’t she?’
He hated Dame Pitard, as he called her, along with all the lady aunts and cousins who bore the same name.
‘A fat lot of good it’s done you!’
‘So you have a better time when you leave me behind?’
She said that just as Campois was serving the vegetables. Lannec waited for him to leave the room, put his fork down and looked his wife in the eye.
‘What are you insinuating?’
‘Do you imagine Marcel doesn’t take advantage of your being away?’
She didn’t need to look at Lannec to know that his face had turned crimson. For above Dame Pitard and the lady aunts, Lannec hated one person even more, a man with a name whose very syllables caused the captain to boil with rage.
Marcel! She hadn’t wasted any time! The second time he’d seen Mathilde, in Caen, in the street, she’d made sure to ask him:
‘Do you know Marcel?’
‘Marcel who?’
She uttered the name like Jesus Christ or Napoleon, as if the whole world knew who Marcel was.
‘The violinist.’
‘What violinist?’
‘At Chandivert’s.’
He had seen plenty of Marcel since then, because during their engagement he’d had to go to Chandivert’s with Dame Pitard almost every evening to listen to the music.
Mathilde always managed to get seats near the rostrum, and there was always a flush on her cheeks. She would whisper to Lannec:
‘Can’t you see how passionate he is?’
But the fiancé was more furious still at the way she was constantly fussing about that sickly young man with wavy hair who made eyes at her as he plied his bow.
‘If he tries anything, I’ll smash his face in, I will!’
‘You’re being beastly. He can’t help being in love with me, can he?’
To top it all, Marcel made eyes exactly the same way at every little miss in his audience.
It was even worse when, aboard his own boat, at sea, she started talking about that Marcel!
‘Say that again!’ he said, slowly.
‘Do you imagine Marcel doesn’t take advantage …’
‘To do what, precisely?’
‘To pursue me.’
‘Nothing else?’
‘A woman without a husband for weeks on end …’
‘And that’s all?’
‘Why should he stop there? Do you stop short when you’re in Antwerp or Hamburg or wherever and collect photos of girls you leave in your jacket pocket?’
‘That’s something else. I’m talking about Marcel …’
Lannec was all the more furious because he knew Campois was in his cubbyhole in the gangway and could hear every word.
‘Marcel came round to comfort me. You’re the one who’s asking, right? You’re the one who’s blaming me for coming on the trip …’
‘Have you got the cheek to claim that …’
‘Yes!’
‘… that the two of you …?’
‘Yes, we did, and so there! And if you really want to know, I can tell you we’d done it before I ever met you! Serves you right, so …’
She didn’t finish her sentence. Lannec got up and brought the flat of his big hand down on her cheek so hard that Mathilde’s head hit the back of the bench seat.
He was aware of the impact, of the pain he’d caused, and of Campois’ fright, but he strode to the door taking no notice of the steward with his back to the bulkhead and went out on deck.
‘Campois! Bring me my oilskins and sou’wester!’
