Three-Book Edition: A Place of Greater Safety; Beyond Black; The Giant O’Brien

‘There’s your old girlfriend,’ Clément said. ‘We’re not supposed to know, but we do.’

Sophie was a doubled-chinned matron now. She looked through him as if his bones were glass. He felt that perhaps they were; even stone seemed to crumble and melt in the scented ecclesiastical gloom. Six points of light on the altar guttered and flared; their shadows cross-hatched flesh and stone, wine and bread. The few communicants melted away into the darkness. It was the feast of the Epiphany; when they emerged, the blue daylight scoured the burgers’ skulls, icing out features and peeling them back to bone.

He went upstairs to his father’s study and sifted through his filed correspondence until he found the letter he wanted, the missive from his Godard uncle. His father came in as he was reading it. ‘What are you doing?’ He didn’t try to hide the letter. ‘That’s really going rather far,’ Jean-Nicolas said.

‘Yes.’ Camille smiled, turning the page. ‘But then you know I am ruthless and capable of great crimes.’ He carried the paper to the light. ‘Camille’s known instability’, he read, ‘and the dangers that may be apprehended to the happiness and durability of the union’. He put the letter down. His hand trembled. ‘Do they think I’m mad?’ he asked his father.

‘They think – ’

‘What else can it mean, instability?’

‘Is it just their choice of words you’re quibbling about?’ Jean-Nicolas went over to the fireplace, rubbing his hands. ‘That bloody church is freezing,’ he said. ‘They could have come up with other terms, but of course they won’t commit them to writing. Something got back about a – relationship – you were having with a colleague whom I had always held in considerable – ’

Camille stared at him. ‘That was years ago.’

‘I don’t find this particularly easy to talk about,’ Jean-Nicolas said. ‘Would you like just to deny it, and then I can put people straight on the matter?’

The wind tossed handfuls of sleet against the windows, and rattled in the chimneys and eaves. Jean-Nicolas raised his eyes apprehensively. ‘We lost slates in November. What’s happening to the weather? It never used to be like this.’

Camille said, ‘Anything that happened was – oh, back in the days when the sun used to shine all the time. Six years ago. Minimum. None of it was my fault, anyway.’

‘So what are you claiming? That my friend Perrin, a family man, whom I have known for thirty-five years, a man highly respected in the Chancery division and a leading Freemason – are you claiming that one day out of the blue he ran up to you and knocked you unconscious and dragged you into his bed? Rubbish. Listen,’ he cried, ‘can you hear that strange tapping noise? Do you think it’s the guttering?’

‘Ask anyone,’ Camille said.

‘What?’

‘About Perrin. He had a reputation. I was just a child, I – oh well, you know what I’m like, I never do quite know how I get into these things.’

‘That won’t do for an excuse. You can’t expect that to do, for the Godards.’ He broke off, looked up. ‘I think it is the guttering, you know.’ He turned back to his son. ‘And I only bring this up, as one example of the sort of story that gets back.’

It had begun to snow properly now, from an opaque and sullen sky. The wind dropped suddenly. Camille put his forehead against the cold glass and watched the snow begin to drift and bank in the square below. He felt weak with shock. His breath misted the pane, the fire crackled behind him, gulls tossed screaming in the upper air. Clément came in. ‘What’s that funny noise, a sort of tapping?’ he said. ‘Is it the guttering, do you think? That’s funny, it seems to have stopped now.’ He looked across the room. ‘Camille, are you all right?’

‘I think so. Could you just tell the fatted calf it’s been reprieved again?’

Two days later he was back in Paris, in the rue Sainte-Anne. ‘I’m moving out,’ he told his mistress.

‘Suit yourself,’ she said. ‘If you must know, I really object to your carrying on with my mother behind my back. So perhaps it’s just as well.’

SO NOW CAMILLE woke up alone: which he hated. He touched his closed eyelids. His dreams did not bear discussion. His life is not really what people imagine, he thought. The long struggle for Annette had shredded his nerves. How he would like to be with Annette, and settled. He did not bear Claude any ill-will, but it would be neat if he could be just plucked out of existence. He did not want him to suffer; he tried to think of a precedent, in the Scriptures perhaps. Anything could happen; that was his experience.

He remembered – and he had to remember afresh every morning – that he was going to marry Annette’s daughter, that he had made her swear an oath about it. How complicated it all was. His father suggested that he wrecked people’s lives. He was at a loss to see this. He had not raped anybody, nor committed murder, and from anything else people ought to be able to pick themselves up and carry on, as he was always doing.

There was a letter from home. He didn’t want to open it. Then he thought, don’t be a fool, somone might have died. Inside was a banker’s draft, and a few words from his father, less of apology than of resignation. This had happened before; they had gone through this whole cycle, of name-calling and horror and flight and appeasement. At a certain point, his father would feel he had overstepped the mark. He had an impulse, a desire to have control; and if his son stopped writing, never came home again, he would have lost control. I should, Camille thought, send this draft back. But as usual. I need the money, and he knows it. Father, he thought, you have other children whom you could torment.

I’ll go round and see d’Anton, he thought. Georges-Jacques will talk to me, he doesn’t regard my vices, in fact perhaps he rather likes them. The day brightened.

They were busy at d’Anton’s offices. The King’s Councillor employed two clerks nowadays. One of them was a man called Jules Paré, whom he’d known at school, though d’Anton was younger by several years; it didn’t seem odd, that he employed his seniors these days. The other was a man called Deforgues, whom d’Anton also seemed to have known for ever. Then there was a hanger-on called Billaud-Varennes, who came in when he was wanted, to draft pleas and do the routine stuff, picking up the practice’s overflow. Billaud was in the office this morning, a spare, unprepossessing man with never a good word to say about anybody. When Camille came in, he was tapping papers together on Paré’s desk, and at the same time complaining that his wife was putting on weight. Camille saw that he was specially resentful this morning; for here he was, down-at-heel and seedy, and here was Georges-Jacques, with his good broadcloth coat nicely brushed and his plain cravat a dazzling white, with that general money-in-the-bank air of his and that loud posh voice… ‘Why are you complaining about Anna,’ Camille asked, ‘when you really want to complain about Maître d’Anton?’

Billaud looked up. ‘I’ve no complaints,’ he said.

‘Aren’t you lucky? You must be the only man in France with no complaints. Why is he lying?’

‘Go away, Camille.’ D’Anton picked up the papers Billaud had brought. ‘I’m working.’

‘When you were received into the College of Advocates, didn’t you have to go to your parish priest and ask him for a certificate to say that you were a good Catholic?’ D’Anton grunted, buried in his counter-claims. ‘Didn’t it stick in your throat?’

‘“Paris is worth a Mass,”’ d’Anton said.

‘Of course, this is why Maître Billaud-Varennes doesn’t advance himself from his present position. He also would be a King’s Councillor, but he can’t bring himself to do it. He hates priests, don’t you?’

‘Yes,’ Billaud said. ‘As we’re quoting, I’ll quote for you – “I should like to see, and this will be the last and most ardent of my desires, I should like to see the last king strangled with the guts of the last priest.”’

A short pause. Camille looks Billaud over. He can’t stand him, hardly likes to be in the same room, Billaud makes his skin crawl with distaste and a sort of apprehension that he can’t fathom. But that’s just it – he has to be in the same room. He has to keep seeking out the company of people he can’t stand, it’s become a compulsion. He looks at certain people these days, and it’s as if he’s always known them, as if they belong to him in some way, as if they’re his relatives.

‘How’s your subversive pamphlet?’ he said to Billaud. ‘Have you found a printer for it yet?’

D’Anton looked up from his papers. ‘Why do you spend your time writing things that can never be published, Billaud? I’m not asking to needle you – I just want to know.’

Billaud’s face mottled. ‘Because I can’t compromise,’ he said.

‘Oh, for God’s sake,’ d’Anton said. ‘Wouldn’t it be better – no, we’ve had this conversation before. Perhaps you should try pamphleteering yourself, Camille. Try prose, instead of poetry.’

‘His pamphlet is called “A Last Blow against Prejudice and Superstition”,’ Camille said. ‘Doesn’t look as if it will be quite the last blow, does it? Looks as if it will be about as successful as all those dismal plays he wrote.’

‘The day when you – ’ Billaud began.

D’Anton cut him off. ‘Let’s have some quiet.’ He pushed the pleadings at Billaud. ‘What is this rubbish?’

‘You teach me my business, Maître d’Anton?’

‘Why not, if you don’t know it?’ He tossed the papers down. ‘How was your cousin Rose-Fleur, Camille? No, don’t tell me now, I’m up to here.’ He indicated: chin height.

‘Is it hard to be respectable?’ Camille asked him. ‘I mean, is it really gruelling?’

‘Oh, this act of yours, Maître Desmoulins,’ Billaud said. ‘It makes me quite ill, year after year.’

‘You make me ill too, you ghoul. There must be some outlet for your talents, if the law fails. Groaning in vaults would suit you. And dancing on graves is always in request.’

Camille departed. ‘What would be an outlet for his talents?’ Jules Paré said. ‘We are too polite to conjecture.’

AT THE THÉÂTRE DES VARIÉTÉS the doorman said to Camille, ‘You’re late, love.’ He did not understand this. In the box-office two men were having a political argument, and one of them was damning the aristocracy to hell. He was a plump little man with no visible bones in his body, the kind that – in normal times – you see squeaking in defence of the status quo. ‘Hébert, Hébert,’ his opponent said without much heat, ‘you’ll be hanged, Hébert.’ Sedition must be in the air, Camille thought. ‘Hurry up,’ the doorman said. ‘He’s in a terrible mood. He’ll shout at you.’

Inside the theatre there was a hostile, shrouded dimness. Some disconsolate performers were hopping about trying to keep warm. Philippe Fabre d’Églantine stood before the stage and the singer he had just auditioned. ‘I think you need a holiday, Anne,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry, my duck, it just won’t do. What have you been doing to your throat? Have you taken to smoking a pipe?’

The girl crossed her arms over her chest. She looked as if she might be about to burst into tears.

‘Just put me in the chorus, Fabre,’ she said. ‘Please.’