Free The Mahé Circle by Georges Simenon; Translated by Siân Reynolds

mother …’
    The younger girl was clean, and well-kept. So was the house. You could tell from a distance. As for the boy, the young brother, he took the
Cormoran
every morning, a violin case under his arm, because a musician who had settled in
Hyères, a famous man apparently, had taken it into his head to teach him the violin.
    But what had any of that to do with the doctor? Nothing. Nowadays he had been admitted among the islanders. He was no longer entirely considered a stranger. Several times, when his local colleague had been ill or away, he had been called upon to
treat patients.
    People expected him to buy his round of drinks or join in a game of boules.
    Every morning, his wife would join the procession, laden with swimming costumes, bathrobes, rubber balls for the children and sandwiches, making its slow way to Silver Beach. She came back at noon, at the same leisurely pace. And left again after
lunch. For some time now, the doctor had been accompanying her only rarely, or joining the family for an occasional quick dip.
    He had regularly been out fishing with Gène or Polyte,
or some of the others. He drank with them in a little café where holidaymakers rarely went. From its doorway, he picked up all the island news.
    â€˜The nuns have taken her in hand.’
    Because Elisabeth took the youngest child every morning to the convent school. Then she did her shopping, holding herself very straight in her red dress. She returned home, where she saw to the housework. Her father’s blue trousers were
clean and mended. Her brother was as well dressed as any other boy on the island.
    â€˜People say he has a gift for the violin, that he could become a virtuoso.’
    Some evenings, when Frans didn’t come home, Elisabeth would walk down to the harbour and calmly go up to her father. The other men would nudge each other.
    â€˜Watch! You must see this!’
    And they did see. They saw Frans taking money out of one of his pockets and docilely giving it to his young daughter. She didn’t let him fool her. She insisted. Without gesticulating or shouting. And Frans, shamefaced, would reach into
another pocket, where he had kept back some money.
    So he never had any left to go off on a spree to Toulon.
    â€˜If his wife, her that died, had acted like that, he’d have let her have it! Once, dunno what she said to him, probably something about money, he knocked her down and pulled her along by the hair. But with his daughter, he never lifts
a finger.’
    He just tried to cheat. He must have managed it sometimes. They said that he hid money in cracks in the harbour wall, enough to allow him to get drunk once in a while.
    He would be back after that, looking ashamed. For the next day or two, he wouldn’t dare go up to the house but slept on any boat he could find, or on a public bench, like old Mouchi. And she would come
calmly down to find him.
    And what in heaven’s name did any of that have to do with the doctor? Was he in love? Absolutely not! He certainly couldn’t have fallen in love with a little girl, hardly out of childhood, to whom the most he could have done was
prescribe her some fortifying medicine.
    So why, when he had arrived on the island for the third time, with that lanky half-wit Alfred, a boy with a shadow of down on his upper lip, why had he taken him, as if by chance, up to the army huts?
    Alfred painted in watercolours. He carried on his back a pretty varnished wooden box holding his paints, his portfolios and his brushes, and even loaded himself down with a portable easel and folding stool.
    At first he had tried to paint the harbour and had taken up his position in the same place as all the visiting painters, with the local kids around him.
    â€˜You’d be more peaceful up there.’
    The doctor was still not aware of any ulterior motive. He had simply always been attracted by this corner of town, with its cactuses and Barbary figs. It was bad luck