goddesses. Which might lead you back to the same point about the Orient deviating from the line of progress, but it summoned something else for me too, about origins, primitive form. It sparked a thought, anyway. I must blow, and see if it catches fire.”
In the driveway, the car windows were collecting dust.
“Bonsoir Georgine.”
“Bonsoir Monsieur.” She curtsied as they entered. “Ma’amoiselle Jeannette et Monsieur Midhat sont sur la terrasse.”
Frédéric led Patrice into the blue salon and saw them through the glass, his daughter and the Arab. The firelight shot long shadows down the lawn. Jeannette was smoking a cigarette, and as she turned to look back at them a rush of wind pushed her hair over to one side, exposing a tender white spot of scalp. She held the cigarette away and opened the door.
“Is it time for dinner?”
“Almost. The girls aren’t here. Nor Sylvain.”
She stepped back to let Monsieur Midhat pass into the room.
Midhat bowed. The black robe he was wearing signified, Frédéric knew, that he had visited the clinics that morning. It was strange, even amusing, that he had not changed out of it for dinner. Perhaps the boy was proud of his education and wanted to parade it. But as he sat down and responded flatly to Nolin’s questions about his day, Midhat’s overall solemnity became conspicuous. He must have seen something terrible at the hospital. Or perhaps he was simply worried about his upcoming examinations. Certainly he would need to do well if he was to pass into the second year. At least that was something Frédéric could look forward to: it was going to be very interesting to see how Monsieur Midhat performed.
Frédéric was almost correct. Both the prospect of the first year assessment and the scenes of the war-wounded and dying at the hospital were causing Midhat anxiety, and he was feeling increasingly uncertain about his capacity to become a doctor. But Frédéric had failed to identify the overriding factor, the one that eclipsed the others; for despite his knowledge of the human brain and of society, in which like any anthropologist he knew the structural significance of marriage, Frédéric never dwelled much on the part played by love in the life of man, outside his own experience of it. Love was something else entirely, little studied in anthropology precisely because it was capricious and often eluded diagnosis: it might appear to its victims like an illness, or be experienced as a state of grace. Often it manifested itself simply as anxiety. Thus Frédéric could not at sight diagnose the maj or cause of Midhat’s suffering, since it never occurred to him that the young Arab might be in love.
A week had passed since Midhat’s exchange with Jeannette on the lawn, during which she had continued to avoid him at every turn. In the daytime the house seemed empty, except when Georgine clattered along a passageway with her bucket of sudsy water. Apparently Jeannette spent all day in her bedroom, for Midhat only saw her at mealtimes, and then briefly: always she arrived after him and left before and looked down at her plate throughout, so that the impression of the whole was a rustle of skirts and an impassive face onto which Midhat could paint nothing. Apparently she even managed to cross the hallways when he wasn’t there. Sometimes he thought he heard footsteps and would quickly open a door, but it was eternally too late, or it was Georgine, who started, alarmed, the bucket in her hand rocking drips onto the floor. In moments of deep anguish he felt he might reach her only if he broke all bonds of propriety, and all the laws of host and guest, and stood at the top of the stairs and cried out her name.
His jealousy that day over Laurent was unwarranted to be sure, perhaps even insensitive, but it was only because he loved her. He could not comprehend what had so gravely caused offence. Was it the fact that, as with Laurent, Jeannette simply did not return Midhat’s love, and so his jealousy had embarrassed her? Or, was his frankness inappropriate in and of itself, the kind of blunder that destroyed delicate webs of peace and decorum? That much was surely true, even he knew that; but he also felt certain that indelicacies were where real life resided, and that people usually forgave a blunder if it turned out well in the end. Or was it that Jeannette loved Laurent after all, and