Pedigree (33 page)

‘Oh, poor Léopold. I don't talk about this to anybody, least of all to Désiré. If you only knew how women …'

Was it because she did not dare to be more explicit that she left her sentence unfinished? Was it because she and her brother had no need to be explicit? Or was she still preparing the atmosphere with a preamble of vague words, words which did not tie up with one another?

‘I've got three lodgers now. Well, you know, I don't mind doing Monsieur Saft's room, for all that he smokes in bed and throws his cigarette-ends all over the place. But the women! … Last Friday, I nearly spoke to Valérie about it. Luckily I remembered in time that she has a smell too. Once I had to sleep with her, and it turned my stomach.'

Léopold gazed at the reddening disc of the stove, and now and then you could hear the gurgle of his pipe. He let his sister go on talking. Élise did not bother to find out whether he was listening to her or whether he was thinking of something else.

‘The first time I did Mademoiselle Frida's room, I didn't think I'd be able to finish it. How a woman, a girl, can have so little pride in herself is beyond me. As for me, the thought of leaving another woman to make my bed and empty my slops …'

Poor Élise! The day she was talking about—it was a month ago now, but she could remember the smallest details to the extent of suffering from them—that day had probably been the richest in misfortunes in the whole of her life. She had worked so hard, calculated so carefully, worked everything out to within a centime or so, and suddenly she had found herself face to face with a reality so different from her dreams that she had felt herself weakening and had wondered whether she ought not to begin all over again.

The smell of another woman, of a stranger, when she had pushed open the entresol door after Mademoiselle Frida had left for the University; the sight of that unmade bed, still warm and damp, and then, on the filthy grey surface of the soapy water in the basin, those little balls of dark hair floating about.

That time, Élise had opened the window and, since there was nobody there to see her and she did not need to smile, the corners of her mouth had dropped in a grimace of weariness and disgust.

‘Mademoiselle Pauline isn't any cleaner, and I don't think she ever washes herself all over, but possibly because her room is bigger and there are two windows, the smell isn't so obvious. If you could see their powder-puffs, Léopold! Madame Corbion was right, you know, when she told me about women students, and she was right too when she said that all Russians are still savages to some extent.'

Léopold emptied his pipe by knocking it on the edge of the coalscuttle. Élise was afraid that he was going to get up already, for he did not usually stay much longer, but this particular morning, he sank back into the armchair again and heaved a sigh.

‘Am I boring you, Léopold?'

He grunted. That meant that she could go on.

‘I don't know why it's you I tell all my little troubles to, even those that only women can understand …'

She did not interrupt her work for a single moment, or stop looking through the glass panes at the street door, which was letting in a thin ray of sunshine. She peeled an onion and put it in a frying-pan, walking backwards and forwards between the stove and the table.

‘You know, those people haven't the same reactions that we have.'

Now things were going better, and Mademoiselle Frida had been practically tamed. All the same, Élise still felt aggrieved at the memory of the Russian woman's first day in the house. She had arranged that room so lovingly and now you could scarcely recognize it! Why had her lodger removed the tablecover which was spotless and as good as new? On the deal surface there was nothing but a pile of books, and on the dressing-table a broken comb, a toothbrush reddened by an unfamiliar toothpaste, and some little bits of cotton-wool.

Élise looked up and noticed a gap: the gilt frame containing an enlarged photograph of Valérie had been taken down, and so had the two little pictures with white lacquer frames showing a lily-pond and some deer in a forest.

On the black marble mantelpiece, there was nothing left, neither the embroidered mats, nor the vases, nor the big shell from Ostend: knick-knacks of no particular value, it was true, but which brightened up the room.

A photograph had been slipped into the frame of the mirror: a single-storeyed wooden house—a real savages' house—and a family lined up in front of the door, a fat woman with grey hair, a younger, very ugly one, holding a baby and leaning to one side, two little girls and a fifteen-year-old girl who was none other than Frida.

No men. Élise did not know that old Stavitsky, a country schoolmaster, had been in a Siberian prison for the past five years.

Anxious and vexed, she hunted around for her vases, her souvenirs and the portrait of Valérie. In the wardrobe she found nothing but a dirty chemise, with no embroidery, lace or inset, a pair of stockings with holes in them, and some slippers which she would not have dared to wear to do her housework.

Anxiety engulfed her. On the landing there were two doors, the lavatory door and the door of the cupboard where she kept her buckets and brushes. It was behind this latter door that she found her possessions, thrown in anyhow.

‘Would you have behaved like that, Léopold? If you'd seen that bare room!'

She had not said anything to Désiré. She had found time, before going to fetch Roger from school, to run over to the Rue Puits-en-Sock and buy a few flowers, carnations they were, lovely hothouse carnations she would always remember. She had done that with a bitter taste in her mouth, as if to overcome at any price the despair which was stifling her, to push her goodwill to the limit. She had chosen the most precious vase in the dining-room, a narrow vase in iridescent crystal, and she had put it on Frida Stavitskaïa's table.

The latter had come back about half past eleven. Wouldn't she come into the kitchen to say hullo, or at least give a wave in the direction of the glazed door as she went along the hall?

She went past as if she were going along the street where nobody knew her. Did she even know that Roger existed, or wonder whether her landlady had a husband?

Mademoiselle Frida was holding a little white packet and Élise had understood why: she was going to have a cold meal in her room where there was no stove and the fire had not been lit.

‘I just couldn't help it, Léopold, and I'm sure that you would have done the same …'

Taking advantage of the fact that Désiré was not there, she had taken up a bowl of soup. Outside the entresol door, she had stopped short at the sight of her vase, which had been put on the floor, with the flowers. She had knocked all the same.

‘What is it?'

‘Open the door for a minute, Mademoiselle Frida.'

She turned the handle, but the door had been bolted.

‘The idea, Léopold, of locking herself in as if the house wasn't safe, or as if she had something to hide!'

The door finally opened a little way. On the table, among some open lecture-notes, there was a hunk of bread and a hard-boiled egg.

‘Excuse me, Mademoiselle Frida … I thought … I ventured to …'

The dark eyes settled on the steaming bowl.

‘What's that?'

‘I thought that a bowl of hot soup …'

‘I didn't ask you for anything.'

‘At your age, especially if you are studying, you need to keep your strength up. I'm sure that if your mother were here …'

‘I know better than anybody else what I need.'

‘I put some flowers in here so that the room shouldn't look so cold.'

‘I don't like flowers.'

‘The portrait that was on the wall was a photo of my best friend.'

‘She isn't mine.'

Élise had not betrayed herself in front of Désiré. It was the first time, after a long month, that she had spoken to somebody about it.

She never forgot the time. Even when she neglected to shoot a glance at the hands of the alarm-clock, she remained alive to everything which marked the passage of time: the hammer at Halkin's—which you didn't hear as clearly here as in the Rue Pasteur—the boys coming out of the Friars' school, the siren at Velden's.

In twenty minutes it would be time to go and fetch Roger from the Rue Jean-d'Outremeuse. Léopold was still there. It was the first time he had stayed so long. Élise frowned:

‘You hadn't anything to say to me, Léopold?'

He grunted.

‘Eugénie's keeping well?'

‘She's at Ostend for the season.'

All the same, he had come for a particular reason, she could feel that, and he wasn't happy.

‘I get on your nerves with my stories, but you know, you're the only person I can tell them to.'

‘Yes, my girl.'

She made an effort to be brighter, and almost overdid it.

‘You know, since then, Mademoiselle Frida has been a lot better. As for Monsieur Saft, he's so well-bred! He's a Pole. He didn't want me to carry up his coal-bucket or brush his shoes. It seems that in his country no woman would ever brush a man's shoes, even her husband's. Did you want something?'

He had opened his mouth as if to speak, but then he had put his pipe back in it straight away and had started shuffling his feet, a sign that he would be going before long.

‘To finish with Mademoiselle Frida …'

It was no longer a drama now, or at least it was no longer Élise's drama, and she was having her revenge.

‘If anybody had told me a story like that before, I wouldn't have believed it. Just imagine, one morning I didn't see her go out. To begin with I thought that she hadn't any lectures and she was taking advantage of the fact to have a morning in bed. In the afternoon, after Désiré had gone, I began to get worried; because I knew there wasn't anything to eat in her room. It was a Thursday and Roger was at home. I put him in his chair, I went upstairs, and I knocked on her door.

‘ “Mademoiselle Frida!”

‘No answer. No noise.

‘ “It's me, Mademoiselle. I'm a bit worried. You aren't ill, are you?”

‘ “Go away.”

‘And the door was bolted again!

‘ “Mademoiselle Frida, tell me at least if you need anything and I'll put it on the landing. Don't worry, I'll go away afterwards.”

‘I had to go downstairs again. I wasn't able to go out to L'Innovation with Roger as I usually do on Thursdays. The child was restless and, over the kitchen, I kept hearing a sort of rattling cough.

‘When Désiré finally came home, I told him about it and he shrugged his shoulders.

‘ “If she's ill, she's only to say so. After all, we can't break the door down.”

‘ “She's got nothing to eat.”

‘ “That's her affair.”

‘You know what Désiré's like, Léopold.'

She speeded up the telling of her story, for fear that Léopold would go before the end, and also because Sister Adonie would soon be throwing open the doors of her chicken-coop to the sunshine in the yard.

‘The next day, seeing that things were just the same, I went to see Doctor Matray without saying anything to anybody. Seeing how pale I was, he teased me about it.

‘ “Why, Madame Mamelin, your lodger is just a hysterical young woman.”

‘She stayed locked in for three days, like Marthe when she's having a novena …'

She bit her tongue. Dear God, there she was talking about Marthe's novenas in front of Léopold who drank too! She didn't know where to look. She put some more coal on the stove. It would be time soon, it was time already.

‘I'm afraid I've been boring you, poor Léopold.'

She would have liked to ask him again:

‘You're sure you hadn't got something to say to me?'

For there was no deceiving her. She knew. Unfortunately she had to go.

‘I'm not throwing you out. You can stay if you like. I've just got to go and fetch Roger and I'll be back straight away.'

No. He left her on the doorstep. Out of tact, so as not to force his company on her in the street, he pretended to have some business in another direction.

‘By the way …'

There, hadn't she been right?

‘You haven't had any news of Louis of Tongres?'

‘You know I never see him, Léopold. Since mother died, the only time he's remembered my existence was when he came to collect our parents' furniture. Yet he's in Liége every Monday, because Hubert Schroefs meets him at the Stock Exchange. Once when I was passing with Roger, I caught sight of him in the Taverne Grüber, looking at people with those little eyes of his.'

He was a queer fellow, Léopold. He stayed at his sister's for nearly two hours. He listened to her while puffing his pipe and drinking a cup of coffee which he allowed to go cold, he waited until they were out in the street before asking a question, and now he went off without saying anything, not even good-bye; he was already far away when Élise was still talking and she could see nothing of him but his round back brushing past the houses.

She was going to be late. Monsieur Saft, so fair haired and so well dressed, turned the corner of the street and solemnly greeted his landlady as if she were a great lady. She smiled as she quickened her pace. The first day he had kissed her hand, bending in two like a puppet.

That day, which was a Monday in May, a man with hulking shoulders, a greenish bowler-hat and an old-fashioned overcoat, went to and fro, with a bearlike gait, among the groups of stockbrokers standing on the left-hand terrace of the Place Saint-Lambert, between the Café du Phare, the Populaire and the Taverne Grüber. His black beard gave off a strong smell of alcohol, for instead of having dinner he had been drinking in every pub in the Rue Gérardrie, and his walk was sometimes so unsteady that people drew back as he passed.

What did Léopold care about the contempt of these fat, shining, self-satisfied men doing business, calling out to one another, taking notes, and occasionally plunging into the cafés where the big pots were majestically enthroned while other people were standing and gesticulating between the rows of tables?