‘Not only is M. Mignon, père, a Radical Socialist of the deepest dye – Canari doesn’t go to our school, I would have you observe, but to the Instituteur – but he is actually a Freemason.’
‘Well, in that case, it’s a pity my father’s not here to have a word with him. They could wear their aprons, and do whatever it is together.’
Charles-Edouard tried to kick Grace under the table, but she was too far for him to reach her. She went blandly on.
‘Papa is one of the top Freemasons, at home, you know. Couldn’t we tell M. Mignon that? It might help.’
Silence fell, so petrifyingly cold that she realized something was very wrong, but couldn’t imagine what.
Madame de Valhubert’s black eyes went with a question mark to Charles-Edouard. Madame Rocher and M. de la Bourlie exchanged glances of mournful significance; M. le Curé and M. l’Abbé gazed at their plates and Charles-Edouard looked extremely put out, as Grace had never seen him look before. At last he said to his grandmother, ‘Freemasons are quite different in England, you know.’
‘Oh! Indeed?’
‘The Grand Master, there, is a member of the Royal Family – is that not so, Grace?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Grace. ‘I don’t really know much about them.’
‘With the English anything is possible,’ said Madame Rocher. ‘What did I tell you, Sosthène?’
‘Oh no, but all the same,’ muttered the old man, ‘this is too much.’
There was another long silence, at the end of which Madame de Valhubert rose from the table, and they all went into the little salon. The evening dragged much worse than usual, and the party dispersed for the night very early indeed.
‘What have I done?’ said Grace in her bedroom.
‘It’s not your fault,’ said Charles-Edouard, crossly, for him, not knowing that it was entirely her fault for neglecting the information Sir Conrad had put at her disposal, ‘but I must beg you never again to speak of Freemasons before French people. Take a lover – take two – turn Lesbian – steal valuable boxes off your friends’ tables – anything, anything, but don’t say that your father is a Freemason. It will need ten years of virtuous life before this is forgiven, and it will never be forgotten. La fille du francmaçon! Well, I’ll see my grandmother in the morning and try to explain –’ He was laughing again now, but Grace saw that he was really very much embarrassed by what she had done.
Madame de Valhubert having rushed to the chapel, Madame Rocher went down with M. de la Bourlie to his motor, and they stood for a moment on the terrace together.
‘You see!’ she said, ‘daughter of Freemasons! What did I tell you? No wonder she was married by a mayor, all is now plain as daylight. Can they, I wonder, really be considered decent people in England? I must find out. Poor Charles-Edouard, I see his path beset by thorns. Terrible for the Valhuberts, especially as they have had this sort of trouble in the family once – well not Freemasonry, of course, but that dreadful Marshal. All so carefully lived down ever since. No wonder Françoise is upset – she will be on her knees all night, I feel sure.’
M. de la Bourlie was greatly shocked at the whole affair. Even were he not over eighty, even were Madame de la Bourlie not still alive, a beautiful English wife now ceased to be any temptation to him. He had learnt his lesson.
Grace’s blunder had one good result however. Sigi got back into the Canari set, from which he had been expelled, had he but known it, on grounds of clericalism. His adherence to M. l’Abbé had been doing him no good among the maquisards.
M. le Curé was unable to keep the extraordinary pronouncement of young Madame de Valhubert to himself; he told one or two gossips, and the news spread like wild-fire, causing the greatest possible sensation in the village. The Catholics, adherents of the M.R.P. and so on, were very much shocked, but the rest of the population was jubilant. The daughter of a Freemason was an unhoped-for addition to the Valhubert family. Nanny, whose resistance to M. l’Abbé stiffened every day, came to be regarded as the very champion of anti-clericalism. The position of Charles-Edouard remained anomalous, a certain mystery seemed to surround his opinions, and nobody knew exactly where he stood. On one hand there was the Freemason wife, on the other it was he and nobody else who had summoned M. l’Abbé to teach his child. Since he was popular, jolly, and a good landlord, since his war record was above reproach, and they knew, from his own voice on the radio, that he had been one of the very first to join General de Gaulle, he tended to be claimed as one of themselves by all sections of the community while they awaited further evidence from which to draw further conclusions.
Charles-Edouard did manage to convince his grandmother that Freemasonry in England was regarded by decent, and even royal, families as perfectly correct. It took some doing, but finally he succeeded.
‘Very well then,’ she said. ‘I believe you, my child. But as we are on disagreeable topics, why this marriage by a mayor? Why not a priest?’
‘Ah!’ he said. ‘You know?’
‘Yes, I know.’
‘The fact is I was not quite sure. I married this foreign woman after a very short courtship, I was off to the war, perhaps for years, she was engaged to somebody else when I first met her, and might have – I didn’t think so, but there was no proof – an unstable character. And she was a heathen. The English, you know, are nearly all heathens, like Freemasonry, it is a perfectly respectable thing to be, over there. Should she have got tired of waiting and gone off with somebody else, I
