Before they left, the teacher and the instructors made more coffee while they discussed what to do about Nicolas. He had remained with them, apart from the other children, having apparently settled into his role as a problem to be solved.
‘Listen,’ said Patrick, ‘there’s no need to agonize over this. If it turns out that his father has completely forgotten about the bag, that he’s a hundred miles away, then if we wait for him to come back, it’ll spoil the kid’s stay here and everyone else’s too. I suggest we take some petty cash and get him the basics, so that he can participate in everything like the others. Okay with you, little guy?’ he added, turning toward Nicolas.
It was okay with him, and the teacher approved as well.
After lunch, during the rest hour when everyone was supposed to nap or read, Nicolas went outside with Patrick. The air was mild; sunlight glittered through bare tree branches. Since he hadn’t seen any other vehicle parked on the muddy driveway in front of the chalet, Nicolas thought that they would get to the village in the bus and that the driver would feel strange about having only two passengers. But Patrick walked past the bus, which sat there like a sleepy dragon, and continued down the chalet’s little service road for about a hundred yards. Slightly off to one side was a yellow Renault 4L, which Nicolas hadn’t noticed when he’d arrived. ‘The carriage is here!’ exclaimed Patrick, opening the door on the driver’s side. He got in and slipped off his neck a long leather lanyard with the ignition key on it. Nicolas made as if to get in the back, but Patrick leaned across the front seat to open the door on the passenger’s side.
‘Whoa, there!’ he said merrily. ‘I’m not your chauffeur!’ Nicolas hesitated: he had always been strictly forbidden to ride up front in a car – his father wasn’t one to break the law. ‘Get a move on, buddy!’ Nicolas climbed in. ‘Anyway,’ remarked Patrick, ‘it’s a pigsty back there.’ Nicolas peered at the backseat timidly, as if scared that a big dog hiding under the ragged plaid blanket was going to leap at his throat. There were some old cardboard boxes, a backpack, a small carrying case full of cassettes, a coil of rope, and some metal objects that must have been climbing gear.
‘Better fasten your seat belt,’ said Patrick, turning the key in the ignition. The engine coughed. Patrick tried again, kept trying … Nothing. Nicolas was afraid Patrick would become cross, but he simply made a silly face and explained to Nicolas, ‘Patience. She’s like that. You have to ask her nicely.’ Turning the key again, he pressed very lightly on the accelerator, and raising the other foot, he murmured, ‘Here we go, here we go … Good girl!’ Nicolas couldn’t hold back a little burble of excitement when the car started up and began rolling down the narrow switchback road.
‘You like music?’ asked Patrick.
Nicolas didn’t know what to say. He’d never asked himself that question. They never listened to music at home, they didn’t even have a record player, and everyone at school considered the music class a drag. The teacher, Monsieur Ribotton, made them do musical dictation exercises: he played notes on the piano for them to mark down on printed staves in special notebooks. Nicolas never got the notes right. He preferred the short biographies of great musicians Monsieur Ribotton dictated to the class, because at least they were in words, with letters he knew how to write. Monsieur Ribotton was a short man with a very large head, and although his pupils cringed before his violent temper, which had even led him – according to school legend – to throw a stool in a child’s face, they thought he was ridiculous. They could tell that the other teachers didn’t think much of him, that no one did. His son, Maxime, a sneaky, sweaty little dunce who wanted to be a police detective when he grew up, was in the same class as Nicolas, who didn’t much like him but felt sorry for him anyway. One day, a boy sitting in the first row had stretched out his legs and accidentally dirtied the cuffs of Monsieur Ribotton’s pants with the soles of his shoes. The teacher had flown into an enormous rage that had inspired neither fear nor respect, only contemptuous pity. With bitter, plaintive fury, he had announced that he was fed up with coming to school just so that someone could get his pants filthy, that he could scarcely afford them as it was, that everything was expensive, that his salary was pitiful, and that if the parents of the student who’d just dirtied his cuffs had enough money to pay for dry cleaning every day, good for them, but as for him, he didn’t. His quavering voice made it seem as though he was about to burst into tears, and Nicolas had felt like crying, too, because of Maxime Ribotton, who had to endure the spectacle of his father humiliating himself in front of his classmates, shamelessly spewing out his appalling resentment at having been treated so cruelly by life. Nicolas hadn’t dared look at Maxime, but afterward, during recess, he had been amazed to hear Maxime refer to the incident in a casual, joking way, assuring his listeners that they shouldn’t be upset when his father threw a fit, that he calmed down pretty quickly. Nicolas had expected Maxime to leave the classroom without a word after that scene and never come back to school again. Then they would have heard that he’d fallen ill. A few kind children would have gone to visit him. Nicolas saw himself going along with them, choosing from among his own toys a present he could give to Maxime without hurting his feelings. He imagined the grateful look in the invalid’s eyes, his wasted face and limbs racked with fever, but the gifts and friendly words would be to no avail. One day they would learn that Maxime Ribotton was dead. The band of good-hearted children would go to the funeral, and from then on it was to the grief-stricken father, old man Ribotton, that they resolved to be kind and to show their good hearts. They didn’t behave rowdily in his classroom anymore or greet the names of the great musicians he pronounced so respectfully with idiotic rhymes: Stuck-in-the-dirt Schubert, for example, or Schumann the Moron.
Outside of those names, Nicolas didn’t know anything about music, but rather than admit this to Patrick he answered evasively that yes, he liked it. He already dreaded the next question, which wasn’t long in coming: ‘And what kind of music do you like?’
‘Uh, Schumann …’ he replied off the top of his head.
Both impressed and amused, Patrick grinned wryly and said that he didn’t have that kind of music, just pop songs. He asked Nicolas to pick out a tape: all he had to do was get the little cassette case on the backseat and read the titles out loud. Nicolas did. He struggled to decipher the English words, but Patrick filled in the rest after the first stammered syllables and, at the third tape, said fine, that one would do. He slipped it into the tape deck and the music exploded, right in the middle of a song. The voice was hoarse, mocking; the guitars slashed like whips. There was a sense of brutality but of suppleness, too, like the lithe movements of a wild animal. On television, this type of music made his parents turn the sound down in distaste. Ordinarily, if anyone had asked his opinion, Nicolas would have said he didn’t care for it – but that day he was thrilled. Next to him, Patrick was tapping out the rhythm on the steering wheel, moving in time to the beat, now and then humming along with the singer, joining in on an exuberant squeal precisely on cue. The car rolled along in perfect harmony with the music, speeding up when it did, sweeping through turns when the tempo slowed, and everything throbbed in unison: the tires gripping the winding road, the shifting gears, and most of all, Patrick himself, swaying gracefully as he drove, a smile on his lips, squinting against the sunshine glinting on the windshield. Nicolas had never heard anything as beautiful as that song. His whole body was caught up in it. If only his entire life could be like that, always traveling up in the front seat, listening to that kind of music. If only he could grow up to be like Patrick: as good a driver, just as relaxed, with the same free and easy way about him.