One morning, while he was studying in his bedroom waiting until it was time to meet Jeannette in the hall, he heard crying downstairs. He hesitated, then resolved to remain where he was and pretend he had not heard anything. The wailing became more intense. An upstairs door creaked, and Jeannette’s voice said:
“What on earth is going on?”
Midhat opened his door to see Georgine, face aflame, bursting out of the salon. She grasped the balusters at the bottom of the stairs like the bars of a jail cell.
“Please,” she said, rattling the bars.
Docteur Molineu came after her, and raising his hands, which were full of letters, directed a dark look up at Midhat and Jeannette in the gallery.
“I’m sorry but we just cannot afford it,” he said. “I’m really sorry, Georgine.”
“What’s happened?” said Jeannette.
Glancing at Midhat, Molineu said, with apparent reluctance: “They are reducing funding at the university. I’ve looked at the numbers and we can’t keep the staff anymore. We are only three, we don’t need—”
“No,” said Georgine. Her mouth stretched wide, and fresh tears ran down her cheeks.
“Any day now they will start rationing.”
“I can ask my father,” said Midhat.
“No no no no.” Molineu flapped his hand.
“Where is your family?” said Jeannette.
“She’s from Normandy,” said Molineu. “Georgine, listen to me.”
“Shall I go?” Midhat mouthed at Jeannette.
She shook her head, and held out her hand, low down, to indicate that he should stay. This hand, being hidden, seemed to Midhat to refer to their secret walks, and it pulled taut a bond between them.
“Are you worried about your family?” said Molineu.
Georgine took a shuddering breath and nodded. “Please, professor, master, please—”
“Let’s talk about this calmly. For God’s sake, Georgine,” he added, as she erupted again and covered her face, “you must calm down.”
Gradually, she did. Then, to their collective amazement, she proceeded to convince Molineu—still addressing him by a variety of hyperbolic titles, which may have helped her case—to keep her employed at a low rate of pay until further notice.
Midhat and Jeannette did not go walking that day. Jeannette helped Georgine to close off the cream salon, the guest bedrooms, and Pisson’s apartments, where they threw white sheets over the furniture. They ate dinner together in weary silence, Georgine serving them with swollen cheeks and glossy eyes.
The dead stacked up. Every morning they read the tableaux d’honneur: John Bertrand from Port-Marianne on April 28th, Maurice Carrignon on the 30th, Jean Rival the dentist’s son at St. Julien in early May, Basile Vallon at Ypres a few days later. Convents, seminaries, colleges, high schools—every large building in Montpellier was crammed with beds and wounded soldiers. Jeannette volunteered to read to convalescents. She began walking into town with Midhat after lunch carrying books and magazines, and from the main roads they heard the singing of the peasant women bearing stretchers. Sometimes they caught sight of their swinging brigades: four women to a pallet, their skirts knotted to keep their legs free.
A matter of months, they had said last year, and the posters in town were peeling; some of the older ones had ripped through. A soldier kissed a child, a buxom woman triumphed in a kitchen. A tattered Tricolore waved as an elderly man passed packages to a trench. There were few gatherings or parties now in Montpellier, and at those few, news from the Front was all.
In the Molineu house, death had its old way of unbuttoning the truth and loosening tongues. Under the general sadness Jeannette found she could no longer bore herself into unfeeling. Her thoughts returned to her mother, and she let them. And she began to confide in Midhat.
They were sitting on the terrace one morning in May, holding books they had no intention of reading. Wildflowers interrupted the lawn ahead, and where the lip of the terrace met the grass, the spears had cracked the grouting to poke up between the flagstones.
“No, it had nothing to do with the supernatural,” she said. A brief spring cold had left a croak in her voice. “It was all her. I think she made herself ill on purpose. I think it gave her something to focus on. Because the moment she was well again she would do something extreme, like make herself vomit by eating too much, or starve herself and leave the house on a rainy night with no shoes on. They called her a hysteric afterwards, but that never seemed right to me.”
“Hysteria,” said Midhat, resting his jaw on the heel of his palm. “Yes.”
“My mother was all I wanted, and I couldn’t touch her.”
“I had the same. I felt the same about my father.”
“Not about your mother?”
“Well, I was two when she died. Sometimes I think I have a memory of her. But it’s blurred, and I’m not certain. I remember her sitting on the floor, doing something with her hands. I don’t know.”
“All my memories of my mother are of her lying pale in bed. She was happiest when she was ill, I’m sure of it. I used to visit her bedside when she had the flu, and so on. Isn’t that strange? And when she wasn’t ill she was a terror, a ghost, and those were the times I hated her. The house was in disarray, she used to whip up the … the servants, they were all over the place, my father … But illness—that was when she thrived. I mean it’s difficult now even to try to imagine these things. I don’t have anything to hold, it’s just little bits my father told me. And some things I remember. But even then, how can we know if it’s real or not, or if we made it up ourselves, as you say.”
“Will you explain it to me though,” said Midhat, shifting along so he could face her. “Because I still don’t understand exactly. Psychiatry is not until the third year.”
Jeannette chuckled, then sighed and looked serious. “They called it a nervous illness,” she said. “Which meant it was neurological, in the brain. Which part did you not understand?”
“The part about her being happiest when she was ill.”
“Ah, well—nor do I. It’s just that, as far as I can remember, her time was divided between being sick, physically, and healthy. Only when she was sick was I allowed to see her. Do you see? I mean, this woman stayed more or less the whole time in her bedroom. Then there was a certain period when Sylvain used to come, and she seemed to get better again. She wasn’t in bed. He was there for dinner quite often, Maman would be there, and he would bring me little gifts. I remember these glass grapes, like this, they were purple, and the stem was carved from wood. Anyway, Sylvain came for a few years. And then I don’t remember what happened exactly. But it was unexpected, certainly, her suicide. I was sixteen, I think I told you.”
“Yes. I am so sorry, Jeannette. Really. It is a tragedy.”
“Well. There was a time when I thought about it a lot, trying to work it out. Then I realised there wasn’t much point in becoming preoccupied with these things. I had this idea that when she was ill it was as though she was filling up a doorway with stones, so that she couldn’t leave the house, then spending days pulling out stone after stone, until she could see the street outside. But then the moment she would have been able to walk out freely, she would just pick up new stones. I do think … I think it’s true she distracted herself … I think being alive was hard for her. I don’t know, I don’t know anything, this is only from what my father told me, and some things Laurent was reading about a few years ago.”