Pedigree (11 page)

‘You've got the key?'

It would be best to wait a little longer. Élise trembled.

‘Listen, Désiré … There's something I have to tell you … You won't be too cross with me? …'

She wept as she walked backwards up the stairs, holding one end of the pram. The gas was alight on the entresol. The jet was sputtering.

She took advantage of the fact that they were jammed in the narrow staircase with the unwieldy pram.

‘
I've taken another flat
.'

Désiré had not said anything. Hadn't he heard? Now they were home again. He struck a match, raised the glass of the lamp, and went over to the stove where there were a few warm, pink embers left.

‘You aren't cross with me? If you only knew how unbearable Madame Cession is …'

Désiré took off his jacket, put on his priestly slippers, adjusted the wick of the lamp. Obviously upset, he looked around him at the kitchen, at the bedroom, at the night-watchman's window which was already lighted, at all this which was his, which formed part of him.

‘Are you terribly cross? Remember there isn't a single place in this district where I can take the baby.'

He did not dare yet to ask to what part of the town, to what unfamiliar setting she was taking them.

She sniffed and blew her nose, taking heart from his silence.

‘First of all, it isn't any dearer: twenty-five francs a month. There isn't any water on that floor, but there is on the landing just below, and the landlady will let us leave the pram in the passage.'

So for weeks on end, while he had thought that she was busy wheeling the child round the church of Saint-Denis, she had been pushing the pram all over the town, looking for ‘to let' notices!

That was why, every evening, she had complained about Madame Cession, or about the noise of the trams which woke Roger up, or about the stairs which were so hard to climb!

Hadn't he felt anything? Was he pretending not to understand?

‘If only you knew, Valérie, how he clings to his habits! Just the idea of moving …'

It was true. He was a Mamelin, and the Mamelins had never moved house. On his arrival at Liége, even before getting married, Chrétien Mamelin had settled in the Rue Puits-en-Sock and he had never budged since. All his children, except for Guillaume, who had installed himself in Brussels, had stayed in the same district.

‘Why should we be any better off somewhere else?'

Those were Désiré's words. What could one say in reply?

‘What are we short of here?'

Élise had trotted all over the town, stubborn and secretive, and only Valérie had been admitted to her confidence. For Élise, one district was as good as another. Nothing attached her to any particular street. She was incapable of looking affectionately at a gleam of sunshine on the wallpaper, or the shadow of the big wardrobe on the ceiling.

She had taken a flat the day before in the Rue Pasteur. She had paid a month's rent in advance. She had even … Yes, she had actually had the nerve to give up the flat in the Rue Léopold. She had told Madame Cession that they were leaving.

‘Good riddance!' the latter had retorted. ‘We won't have your pram on the stairs twenty times a day any more.'

‘Are you cross with me?'

He asked simply:

‘Where is it?'

‘In the Rue Pasteur.'

Then, suddenly voluble, she listed the advantages of their new flat.

‘It's a wide modern street, in a new district, close to the Place du Congrès. The house is brand new and the rooms are bigger than these, with wide windows. The flat is on the second floor, but the stairs aren't hard to climb and the floor is as white as the table. Yesterday I went and rubbed it down with sand.'

Without his knowing anything about it!

‘What did you do with the baby all that time?'

‘The landlady, who's terribly nice, helped me to carry the pram upstairs. There isn't any dust in the district. And you won't have so far to go …'

He was not listening. He was thinking of the way he would have to go from now on, four times a day. The Rue Pasteur was only five minutes' walk from the Rue Puits-en-Sock. He would pass in front of the church of Saint-Nicolas. He would go down the narrow Rue des Récollets, which came out right in front of the hat-shop.

He tried on his route as he would have tried on a piece of clothing, paying attention to the smallest details … Yes …

‘All right.'

But then he suddenly thought of the move itself.

‘We'll have to move everything …'

And he took fright as he looked around him at their few pieces of furniture.

‘By noon tomorrow, it will all be over. I've been to see the chair-mender in the Rue Jean-d'Outremeuse who has a handcart. He's coming at eight o'clock with a workman he knows, and in three trips they'll have taken everything.'

In that case, of course … All the same, he was a little sad, possibly a little distressed … Setting off … Leaving something behind …

‘You aren't cross with me? You see, Désiré, the Rue Léopold has been getting on my nerves so badly that I should fall ill if I stayed here any longer.'

He undressed in silence. She lay down beside him. Only the night-light lit the room into which the glow of the gas-lamps filtered through the curtains.

Élise did not close her eyes. She had won. He had not said anything. He was not cross.

And Valérie had been so frightened! More frightened than herself!

‘You see, Valérie, with men…'

She did not yet add:

‘He's a Mamelin, and when you're dealing with the Mamelins, you have to present them with a
fait accompli
. Otherwise they'd spend the whole of their life in the same place.'

She did not think this quite so clearly as yet. She did not fall asleep straight away, for she was vaguely aware of the importance of this day. Only the day before, when she had gone to see the chair-mender, she had scarcely been able to breathe, and yet it had all been so easy.

‘Are you asleep?'

He said:

‘Yes.'

She would have liked to say thank you, to squeeze the tips of his fingers. But she mustn't. He would have thought that she was sorry.

He was a man. He was a Mamelin. If you didn't push him … For instance, at Monsieur Monnoyeur's, didn't they take advantage of him? It was Désiré who organized everything and he was paid little more than young Daigne. He did not dare to complain. When Élise spoke to him about asking for a rise, he changed the subject.

He was too attached to his habits. He was always satisfied. He did not want to see that they had just enough for the bare necessities of life.

The bare necessities
… Those were the words she had used three days before to her sister Félicie, who had dropped in on her unexpectedly. Félicie had only to dip into the till when she wanted some money. Nobody ever counted. People bought their meat without looking at the scales.

Now that the Cession question had been settled, Élise kept repeating the two words:
bare necessities.
They took on a definite meaning. They became something like the programme of a new stage to be covered.

‘You see, Félicie, Désiré earns just enough to pay for the bare necessities.'

At Monsieur Monnoyeur's, three years before, the work had been divided into two sections, fire-insurance on the one hand and the new life-insurance on the other. It was Désiré who had been given the choice.

He had chosen fire-insurance, as a matter of routine, because it was not much trouble, and it was Caresmel, who was far less intelligent, who had obtained the life-insurance section.

And now life-insurance paid well. Caresmel made up to two hundred francs commission a month and, when his wife had died, he had been able to send his two daughters to an Ursuline boarding-school.

‘All that, Valérie, just to avoid changing his little routine. We Peters, we'd go to the ends of the world to make five francs extra.'

She fell asleep. At two o'clock, for the last time in the Rue Léopold, Désiré got up to warm the bottle and he addressed a melancholy farewell to the night-watchman whom he would never see.

I
T WAS
the end of March and there was still ice on the duck-pond near the Boulevard d'Avroy; footsteps crackled along the paths of dark box-trees in which pale statues stood gesticulating.

The town was empty, as dull as a penny postcard; like a postcard too, it seemed all black and white, barely relieved by a sickly pink tint in the west.

People walked fast. They stopped. They set off again. They felt awkward, though they could not say why, possibly because of the extent of the pavement, of the boulevard, of this empty world, of this silence they were disturbing, and they unconsciously adopted poses as if they were at the photographer's, the men adjusting their ties, pulling their shirtsleeves out half an inch, strutting along as if posterity were looking at them.

They said half-heartedly to their children:

‘Give your bread to the swans.'

They slipped crumbling pieces of bread into their woollen gloves or mittens, and stopped them from climbing the green railings or picking up pebbles.

The swans were not hungry. It was Sunday. As soon as he was dressed in his Sunday best, Désiré was in the habit of tucking his right hand under the lapel of his black overcoat, holding his cigarette between two fingers of his left hand, lifting his bearded chin high in the air, and looking straight ahead, while Élise pushed the pram in which the child was sitting.

Around the bandstand, which was not being used this particular day, a few people, here and there, had made so bold as to occupy a dozen or so yellow chairs among the thousands of folding chairs over which no attendant had thought of mounting guard. Both men and women wore black, whether they were people of independent means, craftsmen or workers: those who went walking on Sunday along the Boulevard d'Avroy were always dressed like that, with sometimes a mourning band, or a widow's veil which the wearer lifted in order to blow her nose.

Françoise's house, that is to say Charles-the-Sacristan's house, had been empty that afternoon, at the far end of the courtyard which a cold sun barely touched. Élise and Désiré had pulled the brass ring, plunged through the warm, silent canal of the porch, crossed the courtyard, and found the door locked, without any message, without any note such as Françoise usually left when she went out.

‘Your sister's angry,' Élise had sighed, turning the pram round with a thrust of her belly.

Angry because Désiré and his wife had not been to see her for two Sundays in succession. Élise had warned Françoise:

‘When the weather's fine, we ought to take the children out.'

‘Charles has his Benediction and his Vespers.'

He would have them all his life, his Benediction and his Vespers! Was that a reason for never taking out little Loulou, who was as white as chalk? Élise had tried to insinuate as much. Perhaps she had said something about musty bedrooms? This was the result. Where could Françoise have gone? The Daignes didn't know anybody. In any case, they could have left a note to say: ‘Come and join us here or there.'

‘She's forgotten!' said Désiré, without really believing it.

They had pushed the pram along the Boulevard de la Sauvenière and then along the Boulevard d'Avroy, and they had gone round the duck-pond three times. They were not alone. Other families were circling round just as they were, the men solemn and impassive, the women in their Sunday best, turning round to look at a dress or a hat, the children not being allowed to play but forced to keep walking. The sound of footsteps echoed along the boulevard. The air was unnaturally crisp and there was an atmosphere of indefinable melancholy which made Élise want to cry.

It wasn't because of Françoise. Certainly not! If Élise went to Françoise's every Sunday it was for Désiré's sake. Not once had she failed to pay for her share of meat and chips, and every time she had offered to help with the washing-up.

It went back further than that. It was something like an inner void which she did not feel on weekdays because of all her work but which on Sunday suddenly became perceptible, as annoying as a question which nobody can answer.

A little earlier they had crossed the Pont-Neuf for a change, and they had gone along the Rue des Carmes, past the Schroefs' big house with its door and shutters all closed, a house of such an impressive appearance, built of such immutable freestone, that it was like a monster crushing the street beneath it.

Élise did not envy her sister. Not for anything in the world would she have married a Hubert Schroefs who had neither heart nor breeding. All the same, that freestone, that door which, during the week, saw the wholesale grocer's wagons rolling by, those four shop windows with their iron shutters, that loggia on the first floor and those windows with the petrified curtains were an impressive sight. What were they doing inside? How did they spend their Sunday?

Désiré had been unable to refrain from reminding her:

‘They treated you like a maid, less than a maid, because they took advantage of the fact that you were the little sister not to pay you anything. And you slept in the attic!'

It was true. All the same, she protested.

‘Don't say that, Désiré!'

How she had wept in the days when they had been engaged and he had taken her home from L'Innovation in the falling dusk!

‘They insist on me living with them on the pretext that it isn't decent for a young girl to live on her own. But it's really because when the shop-girls have gone home in the evening they need somebody to look after the children … Then it's Élise here, Élise there, always Élise … The others can go to the theatre … But little sister has to earn her keep…'

They had been the only ones, absolutely the only ones in the Rue des Carmes when they had passed first the mass of ironwork and glass of the Meat Market and then the proud citadel which Schroefs, a former schoolteacher and the son of a Maeseyck peasant, had built; and yet, when Désiré had opened his mouth, Élise had said, just as if they had been in church: