“We were children,” she started to mumble. Tears fell out of her eyes. “When we were children we used to pretend that we were orphans.”
He could not reply. Very soon, he would feel unbearable pain. It was only a question of waiting.
“We all wanted to be Cosette. Or La Petite Princesse.”
The fact was, Laurent remained Midhat’s superior in every way. Laurent, whom he had started to resent, and even—yes, even to hate. And he had even—for a moment, only—wished Laurent would die. He squeezed his fists together and shut his eyes. But perhaps it was not the real Laurent he hated. Perhaps it was only the idea of him. The idea of a person who so exceeded him in virtue, as well as in intellect, and in manner and culture, and even in appearance. Laurent Toupin, his stoop, his blond mop and easy gestures. At the edge of these thoughts was the unmanageable fact that the man no longer existed. He could not face that just yet. He must think about Laurent alive.
Jeannette was still talking, something more about orphans. What did she mean by it? Did she mean that Laurent had been like a parent? He could not face that yet either. He dared himself to picture a bloody corpse, a ruptured arm and chest. It was a horrible image, but it did not move him. Possibly it was difficult to believe in something he had constructed himself. Nothing yet could overpower the picture still beating in his mind: Laurent ahead on the garden path, trouser twisting around the knee, eyes half shut against the sunlight as he murmured some absurdity about human nature.
Jeannette had stopped talking. Midhat spoke aloud, without control.
“He was my friend!”
Even the bitter sound of those words; he hated it.
The gold watch occurred to him in the middle of the night. He woke to the sound of the windowpane rattling in its frame, and as he brought his cold arms under the warm covers his brain flicked awake. The watch. Lost, undoubtedly. He saw it in his mind’s eye, ticking away in the mud. The fragile casing blown off like the wings of a beetle, the heartbeat exposed. Then he remembered that Laurent was killed not on a battlefield but in a bar. He turned over in bed.
In the morning, he was not sitting for long at his desk before he heard a knock on his bedroom door. Jeannette stood in the hall, face as white as it was yesterday. She reached for his hand and gripped it with her dry fingers. They did not say anything. He leaned forward and, gently, touched her lips with his. When he pulled away, her forehead crumpled and her mouth twisted open.
The memorial service was held on Friday. The congregants gathered in an old dome-vaulted church with marble arches, dressed in suits and ties and austere gowns, the furlough soldiers in their blue belted uniforms. Midhat sat with the Molineus in the second pew below a large unlit chandelier. Ahead, plaster mouldings of saints and supplicants leaned out above the altar. Midhat did not listen to the service. He had caught sight of Laurent’s father as they entered: he knew it was him because of his height and posture, although his hair was brown. But now the man was on the other side of the aisle, and there were too many heads in the way. Sobbing at the end of the same pew was a young blond woman who might have been Laurent’s sister, or his cousin, perhaps. Midhat wondered if they had found the watch on Laurent’s body, and if so what they had thought of it. Perhaps that Laurent had stolen it from a dead Turk; that he was a hero, and this was his booty. Heads bowed for the prayer. Beside him, Jeannette started to shake. He wanted to put his hand on her arm, but he restrained himself, lest he appear to be denying her the right.
After the service, Midhat and the Molineus separated from the rest of the mourners to walk back home through the town. The end of the boulevard spread into a manicured square and above them a veering crowd of pigeons alighted on the bronze arms and head of Louis XIV. Out of nowhere, Docteur Molineu announced that they deserved a trip to the beach.
“No question about it,” he said, voice rising as he steered them down the promenade. “Not one of us has left Montpellier all winter. Midhat has not even seen anything but the inside of his university! Ergo, a change of scene,” and he leaned out to look at their faces with an attitude of rebuke, “will be essential. Nothing good comes of being dreary. I don’t care what other people say about it.” He paused. “We mustn’t care. War or no war. It is not healthy to deny ourselves all the time. In fact, Laurent would probably quite like it if we went to the beach. I believe it is just the sort of thing he would prescribe. Was he not always talking about how much he wanted to travel abroad?”
Jeannette sighed, and, unexpectedly, began to laugh. The skin on her cheeks looked tight with dried tears.
“Do you like to swim, Midhat?” said Molineu.
“I have been in the sea.”
“You have been on the sea, certainly, but have you entered it voluntarily. Have you felt the cold salt crossing over your bare back. Because that is a completely different sensation.”
According to Molineu’s decree, the following morning Midhat, Jeannette, and Georgine met him in the hallway dressed in their linens; and equipped with parasols and a bag of pears, they set out for the train to Palavas-les-Flots, where they requisitioned an entire cabin and shut the door. Frédéric insisted that Midhat take the window to observe the view, and they sat as the engine began to moan. This time it was Midhat who could not look at Jeannette, who was opposite him. He spent the journey scrutinizing the contents of the window, the landscape he had not seen since his arrival as it materialised abruptly from behind him and receded slowly into the distance behind the body of the train, the olive groves rattling past and tapping at his memory, that sight of olive groves in France as well as in Palestine, as around them the ligaments of the train clattered and banged.
The news that morning notwithstanding—half a mile advanced at the price of sixteen thousand dead—the shore at Palavas was dense with bathers beneath an obscenely colourful sky. A concrete jetty elbowed far out from the coast and the water thrashed against its walls. Among the thistles bordering the beach, Georgine discovered an unmanned booth stacked with deck chairs, dark green, salt-stained; Midhat volunteered to climb over the counter and extract one for each of them. He and Frédéric carried them to a spot between a tent and a coloured hut. Midhat removed his shoes: between his toes the dune was ice-cool. He unfolded a chair, and pointed it out to sea.
Docteur Molineu was the only one who swam in the end. He tried his best to cajole Georgine but she refused, going redder and redder in the face until finally Jeannette admonished her father for being so insistent, and he let it go, and tore off into the water on his own.
The waves were still breathing in their ears when, speechless and sand-heavy, they took the train back to town. Through the windows the sky glowered purple, and on their way from the station they were forced to take shelter in the awning of a closed café as the clouds suddenly emptied their weight with great force on the city. They waited and watched the rain shiver down the awning. Jeannette paced from end to end. Out on the road the water was falling in dollops that splashed upwards, so copious they looked like bowls of silver. After a while she sighed and upturned a chair, arranging over the damp seat the canopy of a half-closed parasol. She perched, looking uncomfortable.
Molineu, who was peering out with his arms behind his back, said: “I think we should run. We can use the parasols as umbrellas.” He turned to look at them. “What do you think? Otherwise we really will be here for hours.”