The Pitards, page 7
It wasn’t the time of day when he usually thought about Caen, because his memories were essentially of the afternoons. But when all the lights were put on at around four and made haloes in the damp haze, he would suddenly feel his hometown coming back to him. In his mind’s eye he could see the Saint-Pierre tram right up against the pavement, the shop windows misted with condensation, and the women from country villages all dressed in black, dragging their offspring from lamp post to lamp post down the street.
That’s when he also thought about the Pitard clan, with regret and with remorse.
How had he managed to get involved with that family? All he’d done was drop into Chandivert’s of an evening and smile at a girl eating cake and listening to music!
And now he had a mother-in-law, a brother-in-law, a sister-in-law and a sickly nephew with a rickety leg they were trying to correct by enclosing it in a steel and leather device!
Mathilde had an architect brother, Oscar. Madame Pitard had given him the best apartment in the building.
‘Your brother has to receive clients. It is only fair for him to have a better apartment than you do …’
But he didn’t have any clients, or hardly any. The fact of the matter was that Madame Pitard gave him money to live on, but that didn’t prevent her swooning with admiration for her son.
Why did the bos’n have to make him think about those dismal puppets? He could see the Pitard apartment, where they gathered every Sunday, he could hear himself saying, just to fill the time:
‘When we were in Holland, where they’re Protestants …’
Oscar Pitard would interrupt him:
‘Holland is not a Protestant country. It is …’
‘Have you been there?’
‘I don’t need to go there. I know!’
‘You see, Émile, Oscar does know!’ Dame Pitard would say. ‘You keep on contradicting him, but he’s a learned man!’
It was idiotic! Even Mathilde used to put her oar in!
‘If Oscar says …’
Those weren’t memories to be stirred on board a boat. They ruined it all for him. He didn’t feel as if he was at sea. He didn’t feel at home.
Just to think that Moinard was sitting below opposite Mathilde telling her fortune with playing cards …
That was something else he hadn’t known! Now the bos’n had told him about his shop, he could see it clearly again. It had an ill-lit, narrow front window, squeezed between two larger shops. It sold everything – vegetables, smoked fish, pickled herring, groceries, and there was even a bar where you could have a drink, for women in Normandy weren’t averse to a glass when they were out shopping.
There must have been an overheated back room where the bos’n’s wife read cards, and coffee grounds as well.
Old Madame Pitard was a regular! And so was Oscar’s wife, an anaemic woman the family disparaged for having given birth to a weakling!
Mathilde must have been a customer too …
Whatever put the idea into her head of coming on board? When she first told him of her plan, he thought nothing of it. He’d even felt flattered. He told himself it was out of love, and in any case he didn’t think it would last and that one trip would be quite enough.
But now he was more suspicious. He was looking for impossible explanations, and he turned twice towards the loitering bos’n with suspicion in his eyes.
There was a noise on deck, to starboard. He leaned over the balustrade and saw a seaman hauling in a line with an invisible catch thrashing wildly in the water a hundred metres out.
‘Ahoy! I need help!’ the sailor yelled, for he couldn’t manage it on his own.
Nobody heard, so Lannec clattered down the ladder to lend a hand. It was a relief to grab hold of the line, though it could cut his hand, and to grunt:
‘Go get the harpoon.’
The beast on the line pulled so hard that Lannec had to lean back on his heels. There was always some sailor who would bait a line with chicken feathers, and now and again a dogfish would bite.
Campois heard the noise and came running. The two of them wound in the line as the sailor held the harpoon up high.
It was warm work, it warmed the body and the soul. Lannec stopped thinking, clenched his teeth, tugged in turn with Campois, and the line cut into the palms of his hands.
‘Heave! … Ho! … Keep in time, Campois!’
The thrashing came closer, and when it was three metres from the side, the sailor stood on the rail and threw the harpoon. It dug into the flesh and stayed upright in the water like a flagpole.
‘Tug! … Tug! …’
After a few minutes’ struggle, the three of them could relax and smile, as a two-metre-long rock salmon flopped on to the deck. Its mouth was open and it was bleeding from the side, and it was still flaying about, trying to hit something in the void.
Didn’t Lannec sometimes seem like a man who’d been thrown out of his own home? He passed by the bos’n once again, who was still on watch. Then he drank a glass of spirits in the chart house, had a look at the map and, for want of anything else to do, went to see the radio operator.
As he approached the room he heard the clacking of a typewriter. Paul Lenglois had a portable that he used at sea to type up the stories he wrote.
Where Moinard studied Einstein’s theories, the radio operator wrote adventure stories for children’s magazines.
Lannec pushed the door open.
‘Are you working?’
Sometimes he used the familiar form of address with Lenglois and sometimes he was more formal. When he spoke informally, as he did now, it was because he needed friendship, though he wouldn’t have admitted it. He sat down on a chair facing the radio equipment.
‘What are you writing?’
Lenglois looked as if he felt embarrassed. Lannec noticed a typed sheet lying on the table and picked it up.
The police believe they are on the tail of the Villefranche murderer. The suspect is …
Lannec understood it was a news item Lenglois had transcribed from a radio broadcast.
In Rome it has been stated that the airmen …
He filled his pipe and let his eyes wander round the room.
‘So now you’re actually typing the news?’
Normally, Lenglois recited the day’s events to the other officers at dinner and if anything sensational happened, he would communicate it verbally to the captain.
But these sheets were neatly typed up.
‘It’s for my wife, isn’t it?’
He’d guessed. He pretended to laugh, but he was furious.
‘How long have you been providing this service?’
‘Since Hamburg. I thought I could …’
‘Like hell you did!’
Beside the typescript was the pad Lenglois used to take notes on the news broadcasts as they came in. Lannec glanced at them, out of a sense of propriety.
Saõ Paulo de Luanda. – The German freighter Stadt von Düsseldorf is on fire thirty miles off the coast of Africa and has been broadcasting distress signals throughout the night. The fire started in a load of raw wool from Australia. At four a.m. the whole crew, less two men unaccounted for, had taken refuge on the forecastle, and the radio operator said he could not hold out much longer as the smoke was so thick he could not see his switchboard. Since then there has been no signal from the Stadt von Düsseldorf. The nearest ship is the Delmas Line’s Agen, but she is still ten or twelve miles away.
Lannec’s face was stony. He knew the coast in those parts, on the other side of the Equator, and he’d even sailed on the Agen. He could imagine what it all looked like, in the heat haze of the tropical sun.
‘You aren’t typing that one up?’
‘Probably better not to,’ Lenglois muttered. He was getting more timid by the day, as if each day he had more reason to be ashamed.
‘Copy it up!’
‘You think I should?’
‘I’m telling you to! And give it to my wife with the rest of the news.’
His voice betrayed stifled anger. Was he master of this ship, or was he not?
‘From now on, you type up all the interesting news items and give them to me to read first.’
He slammed the door shut and stood on the landing deck on his own for a few minutes.
What if the Tonnerre-de-Dieu caught fire? Given where they were, it would be less dangerous than in the South Atlantic. To port, the coast of Scotland was barely more than forty miles away, and to starboard Norway was not far either.
You couldn’t see anything, neither land nor shipping, but all around the freighter there were other steamers, mostly fishing trawlers, since the herring season had started. They would respond very quickly to an SOS.
Lannec smiled to himself, thinking how stressful Mathilde would find the news from Luanda.
It served her right! Why hadn’t she stayed behind in Caen and spent her afternoons fainting over that idiotic Marcel and his violin?
That’s what really wound him up: all of them, Marcel no less than Oscar Pitard, were idiots and small-town trash, but they had the gall to poison his happy life!
For he had never been happier than on his departure from Rouen. At that time, for him, the Tonnerre-de-Dieu was the most beautiful boat in the world, despite its funnel, which was as narrow as a stove-pipe and as obsolete as a crinoline.
So what! He was proud of his crinoline! He would prove to anyone who cared to listen that nowadays nobody could build a boat as sturdy and as manoeuvrable as his!
He was happy, tonnerre de Dieu! And when he was happy he could talk about anything to anybody with equal enthusiasm and the eloquence that went with it.
The marine lung did not make him sad, or even melancholic, quite the opposite, in fact. He’d been to Archangelsk many times without being bored for a minute. Only, he’d felt he was on his own boat. He had his position. He would smoke his pipe looking vaguely into the distance. Then he would have a glass, read the small ads in a three-week-old newspaper, have a nap for an hour or two, then chat with Tom, Dick or Harry …
Days passed so quickly with that routine that it was a real surprise when all of a sudden you found you had arrived at your destination.
To think that Mathilde was in the mess room telling her fortune with playing cards!
Could you imagine that to get to his cabin he had to cross the mess room under the disparaging gaze of his wife?
Because she was the one who did the disparaging!
And she hadn’t just brought herself on board, she’d brought the whole Pitard clan – with the Rue Saint-Pierre, the shoe shop, the know-all brother-in-law and his handicapped son, and even the bos’n’s wife and her coffee grounds!
He could not get all those images out of his mind. What’s more, people were making fun of him and keeping an eye out to stop him from depleting the fortune of the Pitard clan!
That was the reason! He’d made the mistake of requesting a guarantee for the bank loan.
‘Tonnerre de Dieu!’ he suddenly bawled out.
Something else occurred to him. He hadn’t paid attention at the right time. It’s true that it happened when he was all tied up with buying the ship. He was making trips back and forth between Rouen and England to hold meetings with the sellers and the ship certification people at Bureau Veritas.
‘Oscar said something very true,’ Dame Pitard had sneered. ‘If anything should happen to you, we need to be sure your partner won’t be able to take advantage. You never know …’
So he’d been obliged to take out a life insurance policy, with a medical exam and a 5,000 franc premium.
‘You still have relatives in Brittany. If there were a misfortune, it wouldn’t be fair for them to …’
So he’d signed another piece of paper that the family notary drew up, which stipulated that on his death all the assets of the marriage would pass to his wife.
‘What a joker!’ he groaned.
That was something he often said, about anything and everything. It reminded him of the note he’d found on the table, and he shoved his hands deeper into his pockets.
He would not have got angry if someone had stolen money from him. For example, he’d not said anything to the bos’n when he’d tried to steal a ham.
What he could not accept, what drove him mad, was having his pleasure stolen from him! It had taken him too long to have the joy of being master of his own boat to be able to pass it up.
‘What is it?’ he grunted as he saw the radio operator coming up to him.
‘A trawler is requesting us to give him a one-mile berth, because of his nets.’
‘Did you hear that, bos’n?’
‘One point to port!’ the bos’n ordered the steersman, for he still used the old language of sail.
‘Did you give my wife the news?’
Paul Lenglois nodded.
With his hands in pockets and his pipe between his teeth, Lannec gave himself the treat of going down to the mess room to find his wife and Moinard poring over a map together.
It was the big track chart of the South Atlantic. Moinard was using a pencil to point to the place where the burning freighter was about to go down.
Lannec chuckled loud enough to be heard. Mathilde raised her eyes and looked at the captain with the icy stare she would have given an intruder. The table was cluttered with maps and maths books. Campois was in the gangway, waiting to lay the table for dinner.
Lannec went to his cabin, took off his oilskins, sighed, and kicked off his boots. He massaged his over-hot feet and then put on carpet slippers.
The sharp change in temperature made blood rush to his head. Over his bunk there was a photograph of Mathilde that had accompanied him on all his voyages these past two years.
He shrugged his shoulders, cast his mind back to Rue Saint-Pierre, imagined he could see the haughty figure of Dame Pitard sneaking into the grocery shop, trying to keep up appearances yet needing a soothsayer to advise her.
Come to think of it, who had taken on the bos’n? He couldn’t recall. The last weeks on shore had been chaotic. Moinard had the job of hiring part of the crew.
Lannec hadn’t switched on the lamp, and his cabin was as murky as dirty water at the bottom of a flask. He sat on the edge of his bunk and drew on an unlit pipe, letting figures pass before his mind’s eye. They didn’t seem to be in any particular order and yet they were connected to each other in ways he couldn’t quite grasp.
‘When Oscar can get on with building his great monument …’ Dame Pitard was saying …
… and the lad with his leg wrapped in leather and shiny steel, a poor boy of four with a head too big for his twisted body …
… and his sister-in-law who’d bought a fur coat that made Mathilde jealous …
… and the bos’n who played at ghosts …
He stood up, stretched and then turned to the mirror and yelled at himself:
‘A plague on them all!’
7
The air was so still and the grey so intense that you could separate the dots of light from the dots of dark, and it made you want to make them run through your fingers like grains of sand.
Lannec’s oilskins were hanging on the coat-rack behind the enamelled door, and now and again a drop of water fell from them on to the linoleum floor.
The captain’s watch hung on a nail near his head. He only had to open one eye to see the dial and the hands, and he could hear the racing pulse of his little silver device.
A slower and stronger pulse overlaid it – the sound of the engine going full steam ahead.
And on top of that there was the rocking of the sea, at times gentle and slow, at other times jagged and fast.
They had passed through Fair Isle Channel at night, in the howling noise of wind and backwash, and now the Tonnerre-de-Dieu was riding waves six to seven metres high, falling into such steep-sided troughs that the freight in the hold rattled around like nails in a tin.
Lannec was having a snooze after spending sixteen hours on the bridge. The wind and the cold had at long last given him a mild temperature, which he savoured in his drowsy state, licking his blistered lips with his tongue.
The radiator next to his bunk gave off great waves of heat, and the cabin’s two portholes were covered in condensation.
He felt really comfortable in the melting warmth of the cabin, listening to the full-throated rumble of the engine keeping time with Atlantic rollers …
Now and again Lannec thought in pictures, and the violent contrast between the cold and the warmth was probably what brought back his memory of Honningsvåg, a Norwegian village far beyond North Cape, on the Arctic Sea. He smiled with his eyes closed. He felt hotter. He thought he was once again on his way to deliver coal to Archangelsk and going ashore for an unscheduled port call at Honningsvåg.
It was deepest winter. They had been sailing for four days in the polar night, but there they were, all of a sudden, putting in at a wooden jetty lit by powerful electric lights.
Other lights shone in all the windows of the little houses dotted around a snow-covered mountain slope.
It was as magical as a Nordic Yuletide or a German nativity scene.
Children dressed in furs slid headlong down the slope on skis and came to a perfect halt right at the side of the black ship. Little sleds hauled by small horses that didn’t look real ran around in all directions.
Lannec went ashore and wandered around with his hands in pockets as if in a dream. On the right-hand side of the street was a hairdressing salon, a hairdressing salon that looked like a toy. Everybody’s noses were red and cold. Beneath your feet the snow crackled like new shoes.
And coming from far away where there were few lights to be seen, Lannec could make out the sound of music, and he went up to a house that seemed warmer than the others. He went in and was instantly enveloped in the ‘Blue Danube’ played on violins, on a gramophone record.
There was a smell of cake, spirits and tea. A man in a fur coat was sitting at a table opposite a girl with a mane of hair who was smiling as she listened to him.
