The Pitards, page 6
He looked down on the two small clippers with crushing scorn.
‘It won’t be easy!’ he grunted as he went into the chart house and spread out the maps of the North Atlantic.
He plotted his course, roughly, measured the distances with his protractor and did the sums on a scrap of paper.
‘Almost eighteen hundred sea miles! We make eight knots. Just enough margin to cope with one gale, but not two. But I have to go out again now. Seems our hawsers aren’t strong enough to hold down the heavy pieces in the hold …’
He was back in two hours in a van with new steel cables and hawsers.
It wasn’t raining but it was still cold and the roofs of the houses stuck up in the white air like shards of ice.
Lannec hadn’t asked a single question about his wife all morning. But when he went down to the mess room between errands, he stopped for a few minutes, as if waiting for something. On his third visit, around five in the afternoon, he found Mathilde sitting at the green baize, writing a letter. Before he could open his mouth she got up, picked up her paper and penholder and went back into her cabin without a word.
‘Mathilde!’ he called shyly.
She didn’t answer. He shrugged, feeling out of sorts and angry – with her, but also with himself.
He’d only seen her for a second, but he thought she had lost weight, got paler, and had bags under her eyes. There was a bitter look to her lips.
He remembered the slap. It was more than a slap! He’d hit her with all the strength of his heavy hand and he’d never forget the sound of bruised flesh that it made. What must it be like to be on the receiving end of a wallop like that, to feel defenceless and perhaps expecting more of the same?
He looked at the blotter in the vague hope of being able to read something on it. Was his wife writing to her mother, or to Marcel?
‘Mathilde!’
He said that softly. He didn’t want to be overheard by Campois.
‘The blazes!’ was all that came back from behind the door.
He took off his jacket and went down to the hold so as to supervise the stowage of the freight. North of the Scottish coast, thirty-foot waves aren’t uncommon. In seas of that kind, it would be catastrophic if one of the big items came loose and started waltzing around down below.
Portable arc lights had been switched on so as to get a better view in the hold. Lannec rolled up his sleeves, strode over the axles, lifted steel wheels and secured the cables with his own hands. Now and again he pushed men aside who weren’t working as fast as he wanted and did the job for them, showing his muscular torso and bulging arms.
But that didn’t stop him thinking about other things, and suddenly he could be heard yelling:
‘Call the radio man!’
Shortly after, the flabby head and single eye of Paul Lenglois could be seen leaning over the batten.
‘Come down here!’ Lannec ordered.
The only way down was a stepladder, and Lenglois was a clumsy man. An emotional weakling, he always managed to hurt himself performing even the easiest task.
Down in the hold, with the huge crane hook swinging over his head, Lannec looked Lenglois in the eye.
‘You’re going to go to my wife …’
The radio operator blushed, and Lannec went on:
‘Don’t be stupid. She’s certainly aware you fancy her. You’re forgetting she’s cheated on me already …’
‘She won’t open her door for me,’ Lenglois blurted out.
‘Have you tried?’
He was sure he’d hit the nail on the head. Paul must have hung around her cabin door, definitely not with evil intent, but simply to comfort the young woman.
‘She didn’t open up?’
‘She was crying … I asked her through the door if there was anything I could get for her …’
‘Well then, try again. Insist. And when you do get in to see her, tell her, on your own behalf, that she simply cannot come along with us. Have you done the Iceland run before?’
‘On a trawler.’
‘So you know what it’s like. We’re going to have enough to worry about without her on board!’
‘What if she says no?’
Lannec shrugged and went over towards a set of rails that the crane was lowering into the hold. Lenglois had not been gone three minutes before he raised his eyes, climbed up the ladder, strode quickly along the deck and leaned over the mess-room stair.
He got there just in time to hear the cabin door opening and then closing shut.
So the radio operator had been inside!
‘Where’s the bos’n?’ Lannec asked the steward as he went by.
‘He went to get a new dressing for his wound this morning. One of the dockhands told him about a healer, and he went off half an hour ago.’
Lannec was talking for the sake of it. In reality he was sick with nerves, waiting to find out what they were saying to each other downstairs.
‘How many bottles did we get through last night?’
‘Six, including a bottle of chartreuse. Did you know the ladies came back just now? They wanted to come aboard, but I swore to them that you weren’t here …’
He shrugged his shoulders and did a mental calculation of how long it would take to finish loading. If the stevedores agreed to do overtime, they could be at sea that very evening.
But he would have to pay another call at the harbourmaster’s office, and see the health inspector too.
The radio man still hadn’t reappeared. Had Mathilde decided to pour her heart out to him? Lannec walked up and down the deck. Moinard came into view.
‘What time is high tide?’
‘The pilot said that if we can leave at nine we will still have the ebb tide with us. If not, then tomorrow morning …’
‘Would you mind looking after the paperwork for me?’
He went to see the foreman and promised him a fat bonus if the loading were finished in time.
He would have liked to have ten times more to do. He was boiling with anger. He didn’t feel at ease anywhere he was. When he came back on board, he saw Paul Lenglois coming up on deck at last and trying to hide his embarrassment.
‘What did she say?’
The poor man was scarlet, and his eyes swivelled everywhere except in front of him. His fingers fiddled with the hem of his jacket.
‘She does not want to leave the boat.’
‘Did she say why?’
‘She did not say why.’
‘That’s the last straw! Did you explain we were going to get knocked about?’
‘I even told her the Tonnerre-de-Dieu could go down,’ he sighed.
‘No need to exaggerate. What’s she saying?’
‘She’s not saying anything.’
Lannec stamped his foot on the metal deck.
‘But damn it all! You must have said more than three sentences to each other in the twenty minutes you spent together!’
‘I swear …’
‘She told you I was a monster!’
‘No. She said nothing about you.’
‘Who did she talk about, then?’
‘She didn’t talk about anybody … About the boat … She asked me to bring her a chart and to give her our position on it every day.’
‘What did you say?’
‘I said I would, provided you agreed to it.’
‘That’s all?’
Lenglois blushed an even deeper hue. Lannec realized the radio man was beginning to hate him, but he could live with that.
‘What’s in your pocket?’
‘A letter.’
‘To whom?’
‘I promised to put it in the post without showing it to anyone.’
‘Well, damn you!’ Lannec said before moving off.
He was all the more fraught for having missed his regular nap, and he’d slept three hours at most the previous night. Night had fallen once more. Arc lights illuminated parts of the quay but left others in pitch black. On board there was a persistent racket that made your ears buzz after a while.
‘Shall I go to the harbourmaster’s office?’ Moinard asked as he went ashore in civilian clothes with the yellow briefcase under his arm.
‘Agreed.’
‘Should I book the pilot for this evening?’
‘You can book the bloody devil for all I care!’
He would rather his wife took ten, twenty, fifty lovers! He would rather be the biggest cuckold in the entire merchant navy.
What he could not accept, what unhinged him completely, what unmanned him entirely was the fact that he did not understand.
‘Why the devil is she digging in her heels?’
Even women don’t do things for no reason at all. And it was not a life for her to spend weeks shut up in a cabin on a freighter.
He’d interrogated the steward two or three times, and he eventually confessed that she had thrown up.
So what was she hoping for? In Caen, she could have gone back to her weak-chested idiot Marcel.
Lannec marched up and down the deck, leaned over the forward hold, then over the rear hold. He came across Mathias, the chief engineer, and stood right in front of him.
‘Do you understand it at all?’
‘What?’
‘My wife staying on board! There’s no way of getting her to go ashore!’
‘Perhaps she’s jealous,’ Mathias ventured.
‘How about that! She’s jealous, but she cheats on me!’
He went on repeating the jibe as if he enjoyed it. The bos’n got back from his healer, and Lannec motioned him to come up.
‘What did he say?’
‘He gave me an ointment and a formula to recite.’
‘What’s the formula for?’
‘To recite when I put on the ointment.’
And that was the man who dressed up as a ghost to steal hams from the stores! Maybe he too was scared of spirits or the devil?
‘What’s she got against me? Hey, take it gently down there … You’ll damage the cargo battens!’
He didn’t feel the cold, which was getting ever sharper as the night drew on. And suddenly, as he walked up and down with his hands in the pockets of his capacious jacket, his fingers lighted on a crumpled piece of paper.
He did not need to read it. It was that disgusting anonymous letter he’d found on the table when they’d left Rouen.
‘Don’t try to be too clever …’
But the Tonnerre-de-Dieu had reached her destination all the same! Lannec grinned. Then his laugh evaporated. Maybe it meant he wouldn’t get back to his home port, namely Rouen.
He clenched his fists. Was he going to become as gullible as Campois or the bos’n?
‘A joker!’
Who else could have written the note? An enemy? But he didn’t have any enemies, for heaven’s sake! Someone who envied him? But they all did, tonnerre de Dieu, all the captains he’d worked for who’d not been able to buy their own boats! Because of the economic crisis the shipping companies were sacking them one after another …
But that was no reason to …
‘What does she want to get out of it?’
And his eyes narrowed, because he was beginning to see a possible connection between Mathilde’s obstinacy and that note.
He summoned up names and pictures in his mind: Dame Pitard perched over her shoe shop and running her two blocks of flats like the old miser she was; Marcel, bent over his violin and making gooey eyes at all the sentimental young ladies of Caen; Mathilde, who had not spent twenty complete days with him in two years of marriage and maybe because of that was always fearful of him and treated him almost like a stranger …
But that’s not a reason to …
The foreman of the lading crew came up to him, tipped his cap and asked in broken French:
‘French cognac, yes you have?’
He grinned from ear to grimy ear, and Lannec clapped a hand on his shoulder.
‘Come with me, Fritz! Let’s knock back a glass of well-aged calvados!’
The Tonnerre-de-Dieu left her berth just after nine o’clock. The two clippers were still docked, hoping for another load, and when the French boat was still only half a cable away from them, some stones, bolts and other bits of metal fell on deck, without hurting anyone.
Lannec didn’t go to bed until the pilot had disembarked abreast of the Cuxhaven light at three in the morning.
6
They were three days out of Hamburg, and life on board had changed. From Rouen to the Elbe, the Goddammit had sailed from beacon to beacon like a tram going from stop to stop, and there had hardly been time to settle into the voyage.
But as it was now impossible to stay out on deck, every member of the crew was inevitably obliged to find his own nook, a place where he could hunker down with his own habits and peculiarities at every hour of the day and night.
In the third century BCE the first Mediterranean explorer to reach this stretch of ocean recorded that he had come to ‘those places where land properly speaking no longer exists, nor sea nor air, but a mixture of these things, like a marine lung, in which it is said that earth and water and all things are in suspension’.
Although it was not raining, rivulets of water zigzagged down the side of the black funnel under a colourless sky. The deck was never dry and was in crepuscular shade even at the start of day. The bulkheads, inside and out, were always dripping; and water even dribbled down the stairwell and on to the mess-room floor.
All around the Tonnerre-de-Dieu was a universe of cold and white in which from time to time the hazy black shape of a trawler could be seen as if hanging in space, for there was no horizon.
At night unseen ships filled the sea with the persistent sound of sirens.
There were no colours, other than the red band around the funnel and the yellow oilskins of seamen who sometimes had to cross the deck. Everyone wore wood-soled winter boots, rubber gloves, thick knitwear and scarves.
Lannec had a sore throat, probably because he was smoking too much, or because of his wild night in Hamburg. He couldn’t settle down. Ten times a day he plodded round his boat from stem to stern in a headstrong and grumpy mood, looking for the right place to be.
Around ten that morning he was once more at a loss. When they were sailing the open sea he had more time on his hands, and Moinard did too, because Monsieur Gilles, the bos’n and even the radio operator took turns on watch.
He shook out his pipe over the side and went down to the mess room, already cross about what he would find down there. He hung his oilskins on the coat-rack as he went past, dragged his feet, sat on the bench near the door and coughed.
Mathilde was there. She’d got a new habit of sitting in the mess room to do her sewing and embroidery, and as a result the green baize was cluttered with bits of thread and silk and pockmarked by stray pins and needles.
The lights were on because you couldn’t see well enough to read by the light of day. Moinard was sitting at the other end of the table studying his maths books with a pencil in his hand, writing out equations and formulas on a scrap of paper.
There was nothing surprising about the scene. Moinard wasn’t on watch, and so he had to be somewhere. Yet Lannec bristled as if he’d seen something indecent!
When he came across his wife in such a way, they both pretended not to notice each other and didn’t exchange a word.
This time Mathilde wasn’t sewing but laying out playing cards in columns, thoughtfully. Her husband, who knew the tally of the ship’s stores, wondered where the cards came from.
But what was there for him to do? He couldn’t simply stay there with his wife on one side and Moinard on the other!
Come to think of it, what did he do with himself on his other voyages, when Mathilde wasn’t there? He had no idea. Yet in twenty years at sea, he had never once been bored.
On this voyage, however, it did not feel right! He did not feel at home. His ship didn’t feel like a real ship, that was the reason!
He sighed, stood up, grabbed his oilskins and went into the steward’s glory hole, where he was greasing a pair of boots.
‘Was it you who gave my wife a deck of cards?’
Campois shook his head.
‘She didn’t ask you for any?’
‘I told her the bos’n probably had a pack.’
Lannec went back out into the marine lung, crossed the deck and went up to the bridge, where the bos’n was pacing up and down to keep warm. The light was on up here as well, in front of the steersman with his red nose.
‘So she’s going to play patience!’ Lannec muttered to himself.
He’d never seen his wife reading cards, and it puffed yet more bile into his bad mood.
The bos’n was now free of his bandages, but they had left him with a strange face of shiny, taut skin that he had to powder with talc. For ten minutes and more Lannec watched him without saying anything, something he’d been doing more frequently these last few days. It was as if he was exploring the universe afresh and looking for new meanings in people and things.
‘Bos’n, tell me, was it you who gave my wife a deck of cards?’
‘She asked me.’
Why did Lannec suddenly imagine the bos’n was making fun of him? Yet his face hadn’t moved. Not the slightest trace of a smile on his lips.
‘Do you read the cards as well?’
‘I’m not very good at it. But my wife is famous for it all round the neighbourhood of Saint-Pierre …’
Lannec scowled.
‘Saint-Pierre, in Caen? I thought you two had a grocery in Le Havre.’
‘Not at all! We’ve always lived in Caen. What’s more, Madame Pitard has been one of my wife’s customers for years, and I’ve known Mademoiselle Mathilde – sorry, I mean the captain’s wife – since she was in pigtails.’
‘Where’s your shop?’
‘Between the butcher’s and the tobacconist’s, five houses on from Madame Pitard’s. You’ve been in many times. Also, your sister-in-law comes in to have her fortune told.’
Lannec was obviously wrong, but he had the distinct impression that the bos’n’s eyes were full of the sharpest irony. It was absurd! Despite which, he turned his back and stared at the sea, or rather at the off-white cotton wool through which the Tonnerre-de-Dieu made its way with its rhythmic chugging sound.
