Pedigree (29 page)

She did not weigh heavily on the earth. She was like a strange little princess who was neither pretty nor a princess, an unsubstantial creature with a plain face, a big head, and the hair of a Chinese doll, who, apart from her silks and laces, was unfit for everything, even for living, and there was no doubt at all that she and her mother would have allowed themselves to starve if they had not had Marie, the elder daughter, the dressmaker, to do their housework for them before going out to work.

Élise was fond of Valérie, but it made her suffer all the same to see a woman as young as that sitting impassively beside a tub full of dirty crockery. In her place, she would have stood up long ago and said:

‘Give me a dishcloth, Élise.'

This evening, Élise kept asking anxiously:

‘Do you really think they'll take it back?'

The door was half-open. Roger was asleep. It was nine o'clock. As happened every Friday, Désiré had gone to play whist at the Veldens'.

He was happy over there. He was the most skilful person there, just as in the Rue Puits-en-Sock he was the most intelligent. He was also the gayest. He joked and smiled all round with a smile which was almost condescending.

Yet the Velden brothers, the coppersmiths, were one of the oldest families in Outremeuse and they had a score of workers whom the siren—you could hear it from the Rue Pasteur—called back to work at one o'clock. There was also Émile Grisard, who was a government architect and whose brother was a traveller for a big champagne firm. And there was Monsieur Reculé, a chief clerk on North Belgian Railways, who travelled first class free of charge.

They needed Désiré so badly, people like them, that if he was a quarter of an hour late, they came ringing the bell in the Rue Pasteur!

‘You'll see, Élise, when it's dry and ironed, it won't show any more.'

They made up a tremendous fire. The suit started drying, the irons warmed up, red clinkers rained down into the ashtray inside the stove and all this sent Madame Smet to sleep. She dozed off, giving a start every time the whispering grew a little louder.

When he had come home at two o'clock, Désiré had not said anything. Élise could not forgive him for it. He had arrived delighted with his meeting with his brother, full of that good humour which she so detested in the Mamelins.

She had not noticed anything at first. He had teased Madame Smet, as usual, and had sat down to table with a merry appetite.

‘You haven't seen Guillaume, have you?'

‘He dropped into the office just now with Roger.'

‘Where are they?'

‘We came back together on the No. 4 tram.'

She could see them, she could swear she could see them, on the platform of the tram which went right round the town; they had not gone inside so as to be able to smoke, and also because it was gayer outside; Roger had remained standing between their legs while they told their stories.

‘Where's Roger?'

‘Guillaume left me and got off the tram in the Place du Congrès. He wanted to show our son to an aunt of his wife's who lives in Bressoux or Jupille.'

Thoughtlessness! There was no other word for it!

‘What were you thinking of, Désiré?'

‘But Guillaume is perfectly capable of looking after a child.'

She had not cried, on account of Madame Smet. Perhaps it was because she had not cried once all day that she was in such a state of nerves.

Now it all came back to her, all that had been done to her, all that she had suffered, all that she sometimes brooded over for hours on end while looking after the child in the Place du Congrès, when Madame Pain was not there.

Désiré had had his dinner. He had drunk his coffee, had wiped his moustache with an air of satisfaction, had picked up his hat and stick. He had not told her everything. She had been a long way from suspecting that at that moment he had already seen the red suit and that, like a coward, so as to enjoy his dinner in peace, he had said nothing about it.

Worse still, she remembered murmuring:

‘I wonder what surprise he's going to spring on us.'

And with a vague gesture he had replied:

‘With Guillaume, you've got to be ready for anything …'

He had known all the time! And he had gone off, as stiff as a ramrod, his conscience at peace. And Élise had been left alone with Madame Smet, with whom you always kept wondering what to say and whether she was listening.

Three o'clock … Four o'clock … Guillaume had promised to bring the child home at four o'clock and the hands of the alarm-clock on the mantelpiece already stood at twenty-past.

‘Listen, Madame Smet …'

She apologized, begged the old lady to forgive her. She did not know this relative of her sister-in-law's, a person who was said to live at Bressoux, on the other side of the Dérivation, right out in the suburbs and even outside the town.

‘All I'm asking of you is a quarter of an hour. It's because of Roger …'

She did not know where to go looking for him. For quite a while she stood hesitating in the middle of the Place du Congrès, looking at all the streets leading off the square and trembling at the approach of every tram.

Finally, without any valid excuse, she dashed off in the direction of the Rue Puits-en-Sock. Generally speaking, she did not go there without a hat, just wearing a shawl. She felt embarrassed. It always made her feel queasy to breathe in that smell of saltpetre, in the whitewashed passage in which a creaking gate had been installed to stop the children from rushing out under the wheels of a tram.

She had never been able to breathe freely in that house. Everything in it shocked her, especially the stench in the yard, that smell of poverty, of slops, which you found only in certain lower-class districts. Even when she and her mother had been at their poorest, they would never have agreed to live in the midst of smells like that.

She knew that she had already been seen through the fake stained-glass windows. She knocked. She went in.

‘Good evening, Cécile.'

And once again it was a mute hostility which she encountered, which struck her as being aimed personally against her, that atmosphere in the kitchen which had remained the same for all that Madame Mamelin was dead and Cécile had taken her place. To think that Désiré had lived until the age of twenty-four in that house!

The lamp was not lit until the last possible moment. All the objects in the kitchen were in the same places, where they had always been, and the least among them had gradually acquired a physiognomy like a human being, the coffee-mill for instance, the wooden chicory-pot, the matchbox, the pendulum of the clock, everything, even the warmth of the room which was not the same as anywhere else.

And Cécile! It was ironing day. As far back as anybody could remember, Friday had always been ironing day in the Rue Puits-en-Sock, and Cécile was duly ironing, with her mother's heavy laundry irons in which embers were burned; the brackets were in their usual place on the blanket on which the burnt patches served as guide marks.

You felt that you were in the way, that you were disturbing an eternal harmony. Cécile had been ironing all day and would go on ironing like that until the end of time without giving any sign of surprise or impatience if, by some miracle, Friday were to last forever.

Élise had not seen Old Papa when she had come in. It was too dark and she gave a start as she caught sight of that stone statue in its armchair.

‘It's only me, Old Papa.'

‘I know, my girl.'

Through the windows, on the other side of the yard, Chrétien Mamelin could be seen in his workshop, slowly and solemnly steaming a hat, and that ill-lit picture too had a dreadfully eternal appearance.

‘I've come for my chip-dish.'

The chip-dish which they sometimes left there on Sunday on the way into town and picked up on the way back, thus avoiding the necessity of having to go and fetch it from the Rue Pasteur. This was an excuse she had thought up on her arrival, because, seeing that Guillaume was not here, she could not mention him. She was very tactful.

‘There it is, Élise. Next to the scales. The cloth is inside.'

Cécile was expecting a baby, but this was not noticeable, nothing was noticeable in her, not even her youthfulness, so completely had she adopted all her mother's gestures and attitudes, so serenely did she reign over that kitchen of the Mamelins in which no child, even after becoming a husband and father, would have dared to alter the position of a single tiny object.

When Élise returned to the Rue Pasteur the notice had disappeared from the house in the Rue Jean-d'Outremeuse, that house which she had been looking at enviously for such a long time.

‘
TO LET
.'

It was too soon, she knew that. And the house was rather big. You would have to take in at least five lodgers, and for five lodgers it was necessary to have a maid, who ate all the profits.

Dear God! Where could Guillaume have gone with Roger?

She went as far as the Pont de Bressoux, running like a lunatic, and came home to find them quietly installed in the kitchen.

‘Who opened the door to you, Guillaume?'

‘A lady with her hair dyed like a hairdresser's sign.'

The landlady.

For Madame Smet would never have gone downstairs, even if there had been a fire in the street.

‘Come here, little Roger.'

She would have given a great deal to be able to cry as much as she liked, for it was a feeling of utter disaster which took hold of her at the sight of her son, who looked at her with new eyes, who had just lived through a whole day of which she knew nothing, who had been stuffed with sensations, treats and memories, and who to cap all had been dressed from head to foot in red.

Yet her reaction expressed itself in the form of stammered thanks.

‘Dear God, Guillaume, you've been far too extravagant. You shouldn't have done it! It's too good of you, Guillaume. Such an expensive suit!'

He could have bought him anything else, even a useless toy! But that red suit! The trousers were already all wet!

‘Thank you, Guillaume. You'll have a glass, won't you? Yes, you will! There's some left, and we never drink. Now that you're in Liége for once …'

She ached all over, from sheer nerves.

‘Good-bye, Guillaume. A pleasant journey home. Tell your wife …'

What had he to tell his wife, whom she had glimpsed only once, at her mother-in-law's funeral?

Not a single moment of relaxation, not a single second of solitude. Madame Smet was there, like an expensive doll which could only wag its head with an eternal smile.

Somebody whistled out in the street.

‘It's Désiré, Madame Smet. I have to throw the key down to him, out of the window. Just imagine, we've only one key.'

For Désiré whistled when he came home at night. Then there was Valérie's discreet ring at the door, and the whispering of the two friends on the stairs.

‘Later on, when he's gone …'

‘Oh, poor Élise, when I saw them trying that red thing on him … All of us … Even up on the third floor of the shop … We all thought of you, you know!'

Madame Smet was dozing, giving a start now and then at the distant noise of a tram, and Valérie was doing some crochet-work with her ethereal fingers, a piece of delicate lace-work destined to serve no particular purpose. Élise detested her that evening, for her nimble fingers fluttering in the yellow rays of the lamp, for her frail limbs, for her carefree life with her mother and her sister, for letting Marie make her bed and empty her slops. She detested Cécile too, who had not said anything to her, who had gone on quietly ironing in her kitchen, and she detested Madame Pain whose husband earned good money.

Rancour had entered into her and remained there like a ball inside her chest.

‘If you only knew, Valérie, how my back hurts in the evening! It's my organs. I have to go every week to see the doctor who's fitted me with a special appliance.'

At the word ‘organs', Valérie, who had poor health but had never been ill, and for whom the stomach was a mystery she did not want to understand, Valérie went pale.

And yet, this particular evening, Élise had neither stomachache nor backache. She kept talking about it and complaining to keep her fever up. Since the disappearance of the notice, she had had a vague feeling that all the day's little misfortunes had to be directed to a particular end.

She ironed the red trousers and examined them under the lamp.

‘You know, Valérie, the house in the Rue Jean-d'Outremeuse has been let …'

Valérie knew all about this plot which dated back two years, to the day when Élise had won her first victory by settling in the Rue Pasteur.

Since then, without respite, as tireless as an insect driven by an age-old instinct, she had kept on making plans, saving money, carefully putting aside anything which could immediately or remotely serve her purpose.

‘You know, I've already got seven hundred francs in the Savings Bank. Désiré doesn't know anything about it. It's for the furniture, you understand.'

A sou here, a franc there, sometimes a big coin. She hid them for a while in the soup-tureen with the pink flowers on it. When she went to Coronmeuse, she used to say to her sister Louisa:

‘What can you expect? He's a man who would spend the whole of his life living on the bare necessities.'

She complained. It all helped. And today when she was really unhappy, without meaning to be, when she had been forced to hold back her tears all day, she was going to make the most of it.

‘You know those little rolls that cost three centimes each? The baker who supplies the boarding-house in the Rue de la Province has told me that with just a bit of butter on them they cost the students ten centimes. And some of them eat four or five at a time. And listen to this: they have to pay fifty centimes for a bucketful of coal which you've only got to carry upstairs and which you buy for thirty centimes in the street!'