In four weeks it would be Easter, and Michèle’s parents had obtained permission for her to return to Liège for ten days’ holiday. The four weeks diminished to three, to two and at last to one.
Paul lowered his head on to her check-shirted shoulder, pressed the whole length of her slender body against his own. What would it be like, he wondered, when each morning did not end this way?
Their long-term plans were formulated. Paul would remain in the mountains until such time that Michèle was definitively recalled to Belgium. Then he would return to England and look for work, whilst Michèle would seek parental sanction for their marriage. As soon as possible she would rejoin him, and, if necessary, she too would take a job.
As gestation was a microcosm of evolution, so the ten days at Easter would be a microcosm of the period which would succeed their parting in the late spring—he would experience every foreshortened stage of the cycle which led from anguish through yearning to the rebirth of hope. But in that way, when the only ascertainable terrestrial principle was mutability, was future fulfilment ever in terms of present hope? Their lives, hitherto separated by time and space, had separately evolved to this moment of supreme conjunction when each appeared to be what the other most desired.
Paul took her face in his hands, scrutinised its every facet, obsessed by the knowledge that before his eyes it was changing with the imperceptible inevitability of an hour hand circling the face of a clock. In this face where all was perfection, all change must be decline. He wanted to possess her eternally, but eternally in the present. It was now which mattered. It was always now which mattered.
His hands passed beneath her shirt, under her shoulder-blades, the nails penetrating the cool, sweet-smelling flesh. Usually the more tightly he held her, the more she seemed elusive. But now, inexplicably, miraculously, the pulsations of her heart ceased to echo the passing seconds, responded instead to a deeper organic rhythm in his own body. And suddenly he knew with the force of revelation that his life had entered upon its optimum phase. This was both the meridian and the point of eclipse. In terms of time they could never again be closer.
It was the last Sunday before Michèle left for Belgium. Mme. Anniette had prepared and packed a picnic lunch. Paul and Michèle set off from the châlet as soon as Michèle had returned from mass.
Partly because it would be their last walk for some time and partly because they were already over-familiar with the environs of their own sector of Brisset, they had decided to descend by the cremaillère to the lower village, and from there to penetrate into the surrounding countryside.
“What are you thinking?” asked Michèle, as they walked in silence down the slope from the châlet.
“Nothing.”
“Are you depressed?”
“No.”
They passed the shuttered façade of Les Alpes, as predacious, brooding and derelict as the Colosseum, and as they drew level with the main entrance they saw that standing just inside the portal, like three dehiscent grotesques from a Leonardo cartoon, were Dr. Bruneau, M. Halfont and Emile.
“Bonjour!” called out Dr. Bruneau. “Sanatorium for sale. Do you want to buy one?”
They stopped. The three men, wearing raincoats and slouch hats, left the portal and surrounded them.
“Caught!” cried Dr. Bruneau, playfully seizing Paul and Michèle by an arm. “Where are you escaping to?”
“I am quite alone in the sanatorium,” said M. Halfont, addressing Michèle and screwing up his eyes. “Ten years of hard work and when the sanatorium is sold I have no job. Emile stays with me temporarily as caretaker.”
Emile guffawed and winked at Paul. “There’s less of this,” he said, flexing his knees and staggering a few paces under the weight of an imaginary body. “And there’s more of this.” He raised an invisible glass to his lips.
“Seriously, monsieur, why not consider buying the sanatorium?” demanded Dr. Bruneau, raising his voice to command everyone’s attention and at the same time exchanging sly smiles with his companions. “You have here your nucleus staff—a médecin-chef, a directeur who is also an acknowledged authority on international invalid cookery, and a celebrated multi-lingual concierge.” He put a persuasive arm about Paul’s shoulder. “Write to your distinguished friends in England and borrow enough money to pay the deposit on a mortgage. Then reopen the sanatorium section by section, undercut the Société and before you know what has happened you will have become one of the reigning princes of Brisset!”
“We must be going. We’re catching the train to the village,” said Paul.
“Make your time here count for something,” continued Dr. Bruneau, still clasping Paul’s shoulder. “Have you no hidden talents to develop? Can’t you paint or compose music? Or perhaps there is a secret work of which we know nothing but which, when it appears, will make us sit up in astonishment that we were all so blind!”
“No, I’m afraid not.”
“Well, at least apply yourself to something,” cried Dr. Bruneau, squeezing his arm round Paul’s neck. “When I was ill I composed a thesis on lymphadenitis. There’s an example for you. What sort of student are you meant to be?”
“With students I like always very much to discuss the distinctions in economicals between the countries—is a very nice digression,” said M. Halfont.
“Take a correspondence course, anything. Study semantics, bee-keeping, boot-repairing. Prepare yourself for a diploma in sales promotion at an American university.”
A grinding, groaning sound from the direction of the station announced the arrival of the cremaillère. Paul disengaged his neck from the imprisoning arm. “We must go now. Thank you for all your advice.”
“Come one day to tea—the passages of an empty sanatorium are full of ghosts, it is very interesting,” said M. Halfont. “You can go anywhere, re-see your old rooms, the salle à manger, the Service Médical. And whilst it’s not in use you ought to visit the refrigerated mortuary—a most expensive installation.”
“If you are not able to study do something practical, make artificial flowers, cut out leather purses, address envelopes for Monsieur le Curé,” shouted Dr. Bruneau as Paul and Michèle hurried down the hill.
They caught the train, and eight minutes later arrived at the lower village. They set off from the station, following the mountain road until the main settlements of sanatoria were out of sight.
“Sois gentil. Je pars demain,” said Michèle. It was very strange, thought Paul, as he took her hand. He had dreaded her departure. Nor had he overlooked the danger that once she was back in Belgium her doctor might decide that her condition was sufficiently consolidated and that there was no need for her to return to the mountains. And the extraordinary thing was that without loving her any less, without his love being in any way modified, he felt suddenly, walking at her side in the hard, thin, clear air, emotionally detached and uncommitted. “Could it be that now that we are both better, we no longer need each other?” he wondered. It was an idea which even a few hours earlier would have been unthinkable.
The sun was very strong—the snow had gone from the roads, its periphery was shrinking in the fields and meadows. They passed through a wood, turned up along a path and soon found themselves in a remote and uninhabited area where the only buildings were crude, low-built byres that were used when the cattle were brought to graze in the mountains in the summer. A little after midday they stopped at a ridge above the Arve valley and ate their meal.
“Bruneau is pathological,” said Paul. (It was essential to speak—unquestionably Michèle had registered his malaise.) “Thank God we’re both free of him,” he added as an afterthought.
“You think we are?”
“Well, I am. I can’t say I’ll never have a relapse, but I can say it will never be Bruneau who’ll treat me for it.”
There was another silence.
Then Michèle said: “I wish I’d already been home and that this was my first Sunday back.”
“You won’t feel like that when you get there.”
“Of course I will.”
“You’ll see,” said Paul. He got up from the boulder on which he had been sitting and went to the edge of the ridge. “There is something strange about this place,” he said, looking up the valley in the direction of Brisset. “We all adapt ourselves to it far too easily.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean that it ought to be the most terrible upheaval to come and live in the mountains, to leave everyone and everything one knows and loves, but instead one accepts it, one forgets that one ever lived in any other way and finally one doesn’t even seriously think in terms of leaving—it’s as though one’s past life were something one had once read about in a half-forgotten novel.”
He paused, but, as she interposed no comment, he resumed: “The fact is, of course, that it’s all part of some compensatory mechanism. The day comes when one is better and suddenly, in a flash, one realises that it isn’t the past which is unreal but the present.” He turned about and faced her. “You’ll see the truth of what I say when you get back to your own people. Brisset and all that has happened will seem like an episode from a queer, receding dream.”
Michèle did not reply. “We ought to go now,” said Paul, looking at his watch. He cleared away the paper bags and cardboard cups, stuffing them into an army haversack, which he then slung over his shoulder. In silence, preoccupied with their thoughts, they set off back to the village. After several minutes they found that they had taken the wrong path, but as it appeared to be leading in the right direction, they continued along it. It twisted about the mountainside, in and out of the undergrowth, the village appearing at times to be nearer, at times to be farther away. At last they felt that they were making no progress and that they would do better to turn back.
Suddenly they came out of a wood into a clearing. Like banks of seats in an antique theatre which had been constructed with the Arve valley as its stage, row upon row of tombstones rose above and fell below the path, covering whole acres of the mountainside. And as Paul and Michèle continued, so the vista extended; tombs had been built into every niche, recess or fissure.
So it was here, discreetly beyond the range of any but the best walkers, that they were accommodated, the former comrades of the salle de consultation and of the salle de scopie, of the salle à manger and the midnight corridors; the comrades with good morale, the comrades with bad; the comrades with temperature graphs, weight graphs, pulse graphs, respiration, sedimentation and evacuation graphs, with everything, in fact (except their personal feelings), neatly charted, calculated and calibrated as they shuffled and snuffled their way to the grave.
Paul and Michèle glimpsed the threnodic, brief descriptions of the nearest stones. ‘Né Calcutta 1905. Décédé Brisset 1935”. “Né Milano 1920. Décédé Brisset 1942”. “Né Campden Town 1915. Décédé Brisset 1938”. “Née Lyon 1895. Décédée Brisset 1912”. “Né Hamburg 1901. Décédé Brisset 1912”. Holland, Sweden, Hungary, Greece, Canada, Java, New Zealand—multifarious places of origin, a common place of decease. Ultimate League of Nations—chatterboxes, wise-wives, cretins and saints, the whole tubercular crew, formerly united, rotting in the banality and tedium of a sanatorium existence, still united, rotting undividedly in death. Brisset, known narrowly in every European country as ‘le cimetière de l’Europe’, was in reality ‘le cimetière du monde entier’.
The size not of the graveyard but of the graves abruptly diminished as if patients who had coughed themselves in two had been buried each half separately. Paul and Michèle had reached the toy-town cemetery: cute, lilliputian graves surmounted by permanent wreaths as derelict and bare as the little skeletons beneath; still, sagacious rows of the locataires en perpétuité of the inexpensive boxes in the children’s amphitheatre; little ones who had come from far to breathe the Alpine air and who had terminated their journey in three feet of Alpine soil.
Ideal extension of a sanatorium. Here prognosis hugged diagnosis; here every patient was sage, observed scrupulously his cure, committed no imprudences; here were the model, the absolute patients, the nonpareils of the whole tubercular world. Was there not in Brisset one doctor, composed, conscientious, white-bloused, stethoscope in hand, to make token rounds, from time to time, of all the graves? To ask: “Et comment ça va, cher monsieur?” To praise the bon moral of one and the sagesse of another? Did not they deserve at least this tribute, these mute graduates of the Alpine academies?