The Mahé Circle Read Online Free

been very hot. Everyone had damp skin and a sour taste in the mouth. Michel allowed himself to be pulled along. His father picked him up and carried him on his shoulders.
    â€˜Was it something serious?’
    â€˜It was all over by the time I got there.’
    They would soon be back at the Pension Saint-Charles,
with its white walls and blue shutters, its rooms painted a dazzling white, its guests now coming back, as they were themselves, from one of the beaches
or from a boat trip, its waitresses laying the tables, and the smell of Mediterranean food.
    They passed the army huts again on their way back. Some men were coming up the hill pushing a handcart on which the coffin had been placed, a simple box of plain deal, not even body-shaped, being both too wide and too long for the corpse it would
hold.
    The priest came out of the hut and walked away slowly, opening his breviary.
    â€˜Was it there?’ the doctor’s wife asked.
    The local children, now emboldened, had started a noisy game around the buildings. The group of women was larger now, and talking more volubly, one of the dead woman’s small children was eating a piece of bread and jam some kind soul had
given him, and the girl in the red dress must have stayed in her corner inside, since the doctor couldn’t see her.
    â€˜Leave your father’s hat alone, Michel!’ said Madame Mahé to her son, who was drumming on the straw helmet.
    And she turned round to look at her daughter, still dragging her feet in the dust of the path, with the bad grace of tired children.

2. The Legionnaire’s Return
    He fished all night long. It was a matter of life and death. Was that really what the mayor had said, a matter of life and death? It was curious to have lived so long – because he was thirty-two after all, you’re supposed to be a grown-up –
and never known that the real attributes of a mayor are a grocer’s blue overall and a straw hat! Why had people always hidden that from him? Because they were afraid he’d find these accoutrements ridiculous? But they weren’t, not at all.
    Why was it that he absolutely had to catch a
péquois
? There was some pressing reason. Something serious and essential. Never mind, since he knew it was serious, that was all that mattered.
    He just had to. A
péquois
, not any other kind of fish, not a
diable
, obviously, like the ones that had attached themselves to his line to make him look stupid, not one of those pink
sérans
that always free themselves
from the hook before they reach the surface, and not one of those flat silvery fish with black stripes all over like a zebra.
    Was Gène hoping he’d get the wrong fish? Was that why he was watching him with that ferocious irony, all the while giving little tugs on his line? There was a trick, there had to be, a trick that Gène didn’t want to pass on to him.
The islanders were all in it together. You don’t
reveal the trick to outsiders. It’s up to them to discover it, and if not …
    Well, he
would
discover it! It wasn’t for nothing that he had the best-trained dogs in Saint-Hilaire, and that one Sunday, between six a.m. and midday, he had caught three pike and five or six perch on the Sèvre.
    They were doing it on purpose, to make him get worked up and lose his composure. Gène was tugging faster and faster on his
boulantin
. To make him think that was the way to catch
péquois
– surely that had to be it?
    Tomorrow, he’d buy some blue canvas trousers like everyone else, the bright blue that made such a sumptuous patch of colour in the sunlight. They were sold in the grocery store, by the man with the short thick hair. He must have shaved his
head at some point, perhaps because of vermin? Hadn’t he mentioned vermin? And now the hair was growing back, thick and tough, so black and so short that it looked as if it had been painted on to his skull with oil paint.
    What was so