The Mahé Circle Read Online Free PDF

to take them away. My sister-in-law would have taken the little ones … And the priest’s housekeeper would have taken Elisabeth.’
    â€˜Is that the older girl? In the red dress?’
    â€˜Yes. But she wouldn’t have it. She clung on to her brother and sister. She kicked up a terrible fuss. In the end we just had to leave them there.’
    â€˜Alone?’
    â€˜Well, she was the one who wanted it. Look! Polyte’s on board, I can see his cap.’
    A white peaked cap with a gold badge, like an officer’s or a yachtsman’s. Gène was there too, and he greeted the doctor with his habitual ironic smile.
    â€˜So doctor, what about those
péquois
?’
    He was back from Toulon, bare feet thrust into espadrilles, wearing the same tight-fitting white T-shirt he had worn yesterday, and casually swinging his jacket in his hand. A crowd of visitors spilled off the boat. The bellboys from the hotels
took hold of their luggage.
    A man came down the gangway last of all, Frans surely, and by the look on his blank face, he had a serious hangover.
    â€˜Go on down … Move …’
    Polyte was pushing him along, like a gendarme pushing a prisoner, all the time winking and telling people:
    â€˜He’s not sobered up yet. We made him drink plenty of
cups of coffee, but they all came back up. Then we tried ether, but that didn’t work either. What do we do with him,
Gustave?’
    Gustave was the mayor, and he was giving priority to getting his empty boxes loaded on the
Cormoran
. As he waited, Frans stayed standing in the sun, unmoving. It was true that he seemed ageless. A thin man, lean and sinewy. His skin had
been fair, but was now tanned by the sun, and he had the same cornflower-blue eyes as his daughter, and light-coloured hair, once blond perhaps, streaked with white.
    He wore a dirty faded blue battledress and rope-soled espadrilles. He gazed at the bustle around him. He must have seen it all. He showed no impatience, nor did he seem surprised that Polyte had abandoned him and gone over to report to a group of
locals.
    Exactly like a prisoner. Like the convicts the doctor had once seen lined up in the tug taking them from La Rochelle to Saint-Martin-de-Ré, from where they would be dispatched to Guyana: they had shown the same indifference. No doubt it had often
been Frans’s lot to be put in a train carriage or a boat, for some unknown destination, then to be set down at a station, an army barracks or a hospital, with a number attached to him.
    He was stronger than the men surrounding him. The doctor could sense that. He felt vexed by it, but was nevertheless sure that Frans dominated all of them. The others came and went, chatted, burst out laughing, and he, standing alone in the sun,
isolated by a formidable invisible barrier, neither trembled nor moved a muscle.
    â€˜I thought we’d find him by the station,’ Polyte was explaining. ‘Funny that. Most men, they want to get drunk, they head for the harbour, with all the cafés and the music. Or they
try the whorehouses on the ramparts.’
    The doctor was eavesdropping, without joining the group.
    â€˜But him, no! I wonder if he even notices women. Say, Frans, do you ever go to see the tarts in Toulon?’
    Frans, who must have heard this, did not stir.
    â€˜Anyway, where I found him wasn’t much fun. This little bar, nobody else there, just him in his corner, and the barman who wanted to go to bed … I can tell you, he was far gone!’
    â€˜â€œFrans,” I says to him, “your wife’s dead!”
    â€˜And I was shaking him and shaking him, and shouting:
    â€˜â€œHear me? Your wife’s dead!”
    â€˜Well, he just looked at me and Gène – Gène was with me – just like he’s looking at us now.
    â€˜â€œYou got to come with us,” I says. “Understand?” I says. “We’ve got to bury her, your