Pedigree (20 page)

‘I was waiting to tell you. I could feel there was something wrong…'

‘Do you want me to go to get Doctor Matray?'

‘It would be pointless. It probably won't happen for some time.'

She was being spiteful, and she knew it. She was spoiling his day, his last real Mamelin day, but a devil was urging her on.

‘How long has it been?'

‘Two months.'

‘And you have kept quiet all that time!'

He didn't understand.
At home,
things were managed much more simply. He took out his key, opened the door, and picked up the child who was much heavier than the little push-chair. He felt sorry for his wife, of course. He was worried. All the same, he bore Élise a grudge. He could sense that she was putting on an act in which he preferred not to believe. He turned round to watch her coming upstairs, and he felt sure that it was on purpose that she walked more laboriously than was necessary, stopped on the landing and leaned against the wall.

‘Élise.'

She smiled, that smile which she always put on when she wanted to say:

‘Don't worry about a poor creature like me! I'm used to suffering. When I was only five years old, I was a wretched orphan …'

He lit the lamp, and changed the child who was wet.

‘Oughtn't you to go to bed?'

‘You haven't had your supper.'

Then he exclaimed:

‘
And what about the ham?
'

He was right: there were the slices of ham his mother had given him. The last ham she would have cooked for the whole family, and of which, like this, he would have his share after all. He was the favourite. They were talking about him in the Rue Puits-en-Sock. They were saying:

‘Poor Désiré!'

Bengal lights were going up all over the district and, above the fair, there hung a thick pall of smoke of a reddish yellow colour. The firing in the shooting galleries went on. The music from the various roundabouts intermingled.

‘Élise.'

‘It's nothing. It's already gone.'

She had been lying earlier on. She had felt an urge to take her revenge on the Rue Puits-en-Sock, on the Mamelins who exasperated her. She had been unable to think of anything better than to fall ill, to go off in the middle of the festivities, and, outside, as she had still felt something of a grudge against Désiré, she had taken the opportunity to speak to him about her pregnancy.

She was sorry now that she had. She watched him coming and going, attending to the child, tidying everything up in the flat, and she was seized with a superstitious fear. Why had she talked about a miscarriage? What could she have been thinking about? She had thought that her pregnancy was not enough, she had made up something else, she had wanted to be utterly unhappy, utterly pitiful in face of the coarse joy of the Mamelins.

And if, now, to punish her? …

‘Dear God, please may nothing bad happen to me. Please may what I said just now not come true.'

Suddenly humble, she called out:

‘Désiré.'

Poor Désiré who flew into a panic straight away and did his best to help!

‘Forgive me, Désiré. I've been wicked. I've spoilt your parish feast-day.'

‘Of course you haven't.'

‘Go back to them now. I insist. There's still time. I heard your mother asking if you were coming back. They must be talking about you now. They all detest me.'

‘You just imagine things. Try and rest.'

And, as he had not read the paper yet, he settled down under the lamp, in his shirtsleeves. For a long time she saw him smoking his pipe, in a cloud of smoke, with a sidelong glance now and then towards the bed, then a glance towards the child's cradle. He was no longer as anxious as he had been.

She pretended to be asleep.

‘Dear God, please may … Forgive me for what I said just now …'

She was frightened. She fell asleep frightened, and it was daylight when she suddenly opened her eyes and felt for the body lying next to hers.

‘Désiré … Quick … Run and get Doctor Matray!'

F
RANÇOIS
M
ARETTE
was dead. It appeared that he was not an ordinary police constable but a sergeant.

Since the death of her mother-in-law, Élise had got into the habit of collecting death notifications, and announced each decease in a sorrowful voice:

‘You know, Désiré, that sprightly old gentleman we always used to meet in the Rue de la Commune…'

Were there really more deaths this autumn than in previous years? Or did she think that a long death-roll would make each case of mourning less painful?

She was wearing the veil again, the one she had worn for her mother, a veil which was so thick that you could scarcely recognize her, and so long that when the wind caught it suddenly on a street-corner Élise felt as if her hair were being pulled out.

Désiré had only had to change his tie. Every year Élise bought him one for his name-day, in a distinguished colour, mauve or violet, and she fastened it once for all on a celluloid hanger. They had taken the black tie from the left-hand drawer.

‘People are wondering, Désiré, if he didn't commit suicide. Ever since his son was involved in that business, he had gone all neurotic; he was just the shadow of what he'd been before.'

People said too that Marette had had a cancer of the stomach.

‘Madame Pain's sister lives next door to their house in the Rue du Laveu, a little house which they had built themselves and which they were paying off by annual instalments. It seems it's awful.'

Why should it have been more awful than, say, Madame Mamelin's death in the house in the Rue Puits-en-Sock?

The leaves were falling. Winter overcoats had been taken out of the wardrobes. It was not All Saints' Day yet but already you met people with colds, including Madame Pain whose nose was as smooth and red as a cherry. The streets were brighter and looked dangerous, covered as they were with a fine dust which the wind blew along a few inches from the ground.

‘It's because of the pension…'

Désiré did not understand, and was listening with only half an ear to this story of the Rue du Laveu into which a pension had now been introduced. His mother was dead. It was not a dramatic happening. It was not something people talked about. It was a gap, a gap every day, every morning, for he no longer went round by the church of Saint-Nicolas and the Rue des Récollets to spend a few minutes in the kitchen with the fake stained glass. He could if he wanted to. Cécile, who had married Marcel Wasselin, had stayed in the house with her father.

‘If they proved that he had committed suicide, you see, who knows if his wife would get the pension?'

Was it grief after what his son had done? Was it the cancer of the stomach? Was it because of his resignation, which he had tendered very abruptly, when people had started pointing him out in the street? François Marette had got into the habit recently of going for a walk every day along the Quai des Pitteurs, a long way from his home, in one of the few places where the quays of the Meuse had no parapet. For hours on end, in complete silence, puffing away at his meerschaum pipe, he would watch the anglers.

It was possible that he had had a fainting fit. It was also possible that he had committed suicide.

‘Like that, his wife will have her pension all the same!'

Élise pursued her train of thought.

‘It's not enough to live on. It's scarcely enough for the bare necessities. Luckily the house belongs to them.'

Mourning had made her frailer, more girlish, you might say, with her cloud of fair hair.

‘Madame Pain told me … Are you listening? She told me that Madame Marette had decided to take in some lodgers, some students. She's already found one who's paying thirty francs a month for a room, even though the Rue du Laveu is so far from the University!'

Désiré ate his supper, snuffed out the lamp, smiled at Roger. He did not understand or did not want to understand. He was endowed with an exasperating force of inertia and in a few minutes, in spite of being in mourning, he would play the drummer-boy, marking time round the room with the child on his shoulders.

He did not know Madame Marette who was a widow and was going to take in lodgers. He was not in the least interested in all the local widows he kept hearing about.

Every morning he left the Rue Pasteur a quarter of an hour later, because he no longer dropped in to see his mother; he no longer took her his collars to be washed, and he ate bread from the baker's.

Was Monsieur Marette dead? Monsieur and Madame Marette owned a house in the Rue du Laveu, a little way outside the town, on a hill, a house rather like the one Élise had dreamt of renting for a long time, Élise who was not a widow, who did not know if she would be one one day, but who was already tormented by the idea.

‘Thirty francs for a single room, Désiré! Think what you could make out of a house by letting only three rooms.'

He was not listening, did not believe what she was saying. There were some contingencies which he would always refuse to envisage.

‘Do you think he really committed suicide?'

Who? The policeman? Well, if he had committed suicide, it was because he had thought it was the best thing to do.

‘… And do you think it was because of his cancer?'

‘You have to die of something!'

One sorrow at a time. His own first of all, this gap in his life, this Rue Puits-en-Sock whose corner he no longer turned, this impression that he had suddenly lost an anchor, an impression which was making him work twice as hard at the office.

‘I can't help thinking about the poor woman.'

‘You said just now that she had a pension.'

‘It isn't enough to live on. And what if she hadn't got a pension? What if she wasn't a policeman's wife and he hadn't thought of buying a house?'

Didn't she understand that this drummer-boy hour belonged to him, that it was an hour of profound joy? The child, on his shoulders, shouted:

‘Again!'

Did she want to force Désiré to reply yet again:

‘What are we short of?'

It was no use her trying, he did not want to think, he never would think that she might become a widow like Madame Marette. He sang, for the boy whom he had just put to bed, and whose eyes were still open in the semi-darkness:

‘
There were two lovers

Who dreamed of distant loves.

There were two lovers

Who bade their parents farewell
…'

He was moved. For no particular reason. Because of his mother. Because of himself. Because of his son. And Élise who seemed so sure that she would be a widow one day and would not have a pension!

‘
They sailed away

In a fragile boat:

They sailed away

To the land of exiles
…'

She had backache. She was anything but strong. She had complained to Doctor Matray.

And yet, what was she short of, in this two-room flat which a single fire was enough to heat, a single lamp enough to light?

‘
The lover said: “Dear heart,

I laugh at the storm
.”

The lover said: “My heart

Will have no fear near yours
…”'

‘You're getting tired, Désiré. Shut the door. Leave him.'

‘
The lover said: “Dear heart,

I laugh at
…”'

There were lots of widows, that autumn, in the district, lots of widows in the town. Madame Marette was a widow and had already taken in lodgers to make a living, but Félix Marette, at the back of his shop in the Rue Montmartre, did not know about this, did not know that his father was dead either.

Would it upset him to hear the news? Once, in a fit of irritation, he had told Philippe Estévant and Doms, when they had spent part of the night drinking in a corner of the Café de la Bourse, behind the theatre:

‘I hate them! I hate my district, my street, my home, I hate the school I went to …'

And yet he opened his eyes without any feeling of disgust or impatience, in his attic in the Rue Montmartre. He had no need of an alarm-clock. At seven o'clock, the partition started to vibrate. It was his neighbour, a sempstress, setting to work.

The rain streamed down the sloping windows of the skylight. He pulled on a pair of trousers, put on his slippers, took his pail and went along the corridor to get some water.

Here he did not have that impression of sordid, hallucinating mediocrity—there had been times when he could have screamed at it—which used to overwhelm him when he saw his father in his nightshirt, with his hairy legs, contentedly humming to himself while he trimmed his beard and his moustache in front of the wardrobe mirror.

The sempstress was a fat creature with freckles who had a child out to nurse. Once a week, a man came to see her, and Marette heard everything, without feeling either envy or disgust, he who used to suffer from the insipid smell of his mother's room.

How he hated it, that wallpaper with its little pink flowers, the same flowers for fifteen years, with the same stains, and a dark patch on a level with the bed produced by the sleeper's breaths.

He washed. In the Rue Montmartre, the whitewashed walls were anything but clean. He had just hung up a drawing to decorate them. He had no artistic pretensions, but patiently, starting over and over again, he had drawn a strange portrait of Isabelle, a long, regular oval like that of certain medieval wood-carvings of the Virgin, the two bandeaux, two concave lines, like an accent, which formed the big closed eyes, and the sinuous line of the mouth.

That was all. His gaze was enough to give life to this picture which he could now reproduce in three or four lines by dint of having traced it.

His suit was shabby and worn. When he had a bit of money, he would spend it on a new pair of shoes. He polished them himself. Going downstairs, he smoked his first cigarette. The apartment-house had four staircases
A, B, C
and
D
. His staircase, staircase
D
, which started under the second arch past the courtyard, was the narrowest and the dirtiest of them all; it led to countless cells in which, as you passed, you could catch sight of life being lived, precarious existences being eked out by creatures from all over the world, an Armenian, some Polish Jews, a furrier, a dealer in feathers for hats, an embroideress; and all this was summed up in a few words, black on white enamel, in the main passage near the lodge.