The Scapegoat Read Free

flanks with a hay-fork.
    Two black-shawled women argued beside an open cart, one of them holding by the feet a squawking hen, whose fluttering, protesting wings brushed the wide wicker basket, heaped with apples, on which the woman leant; while towards them came a great hulking fellow in a nut-brown velvet coat, his face purple with good cheer from a near-by bistro, his eyes blurred, his walk unsteady. He grumbled to himself as he peered down at the coins in his open hand, fewer than he had expected, too few – he must somehow have miscalculated in that vanished hour of heat and sweat and tobacco, whence he now came to quarrel with his mother and his wife. I could picture the farmstead which was his home and had been his father’s before him, two kilometres from the road up a sand-track full of pot-holes, the low house a pale lemon wash, the roof tiled, the farm and outbuildings a smudge amidst the flat brown fields heaped now with line upon line of pumpkins, lime-green or salmon-pink, rounded and firm, left to dry before they were fed to the beasts for winter fodder or to the farm people themselves as soup.
    I walked past the lorry and across the Place to the brasserie at the corner; and suddenly the pale sun shone from the fitful sky, and the people thronging the Place, who had seemed black smudges in the rain, crow-like, bent, impersonal, became animated blobs of colour, smiling, gesticulating, strolling about their business with new leisure as the sky fell apart, turning the dull day to gold.
    The brasserie was crowded, the atmosphere thick with the good smell of food, soupy and pungent – of cheese upon sauce-tipped knives, spilt wine, the bitter dregs of coffee – and rank, too, with the wet cloth of coats heavily rained upon, now drying, the whole scene framed in a blue smoke-cloud of Gauloise cigarettes.
    I found a seat in the far corner near the service door, and as I ate my omelette, the herb juice splaying the plate, satisfying, warm, the swing door kept bursting backwards, forwards, pushed impatiently by waiters heavily laden with trays piled high with food. At first the sight was an
apéritif
to my own hunger, but later, when my meal was over, it became somehow a deterrent to digestion – too many fried potatoes, too many pork chops. The woman who ate beside me was still forking beans into her mouth as I called for coffee, and she expostulated to her sister upon the cost of living, ignoring the pallid little girl who sat on the husband’s knee and demanded to be taken to the
toilettes
. The conversation never ceased, and as I listened – for this sort of thing was my one relaxation when preoccupation with history left me free – my former depression returned to nag beneath the surface of enjoyment. I was an alien, I was not one of them. Years of study, years of training, the fluency with which I spoke their language, taught their history, described their culture, had never brought me closer to the people themselves. I was too diffident, too conscious of my own reserve. My knowledge was library knowledge, and my day-by-day experience no deeper than a tourist’s gleanings. The urge to know was with me, and the ache. The smell of the soil, the gleam of the wet roads, the faded paint of shutters masking windows through which I should never look, the grey faces of houses whose doors I should never enter, were to me an everlasting reproach, a reminder of distance, of nationality. Others could force an entrance and break the barrier down: not I. I should never be a Frenchman, never be one of them.
    The family sitting beside me got up and left, the clatter ceased,the smoke thinned, and the
patron
and his wife sat down to eat behind the counter. I paid, and went out, and walked aimlessly along the streets, my lack of purpose, my shifting gaze, my very clothes – grey flannel bags, tweed jacket too well worn over a span of years – betraying me as an Englishman in this jostling crowd of provincials on market day,