Pedigree (38 page)

‘When shall we go to see her?'

‘Tomorrow if you like. Listen, Isabelle …'

What was the use of recalling what they had decided? What else could they have done, in the circumstances?

He had waited on the horrible old woman's landing. It had been raining and the whole house had smelled of onions. A bat's-wing gas-burner had been sputtering on the floor below. Tenants had passed him on the landing, and Miette had turned his face towards the wall, like a man surprised in a place of ill repute. When Isabelle had come out of the flat, in which he had caught sight of some armchairs upholstered in crimson velvet, she had been pale and unsteady on her legs. They had gone home keeping close to the walls, and Félicien, in the stationer's shop, had been unable to look Monsieur Brois in the face any more.

For Léopold had not sent the money. It was Monsieur Brois who had lent it. Miette had gone to see him at his home in the suburbs, where he lived by himself in a little house built of grey stone. He had told him everything, in a violent, tragic speech, and since then, every day, Isabelle had walked past Monsieur Brois.

‘What's the matter, my love? What's bothering you?'

He flew into a temper with himself, with the whole world which was doing its best to curb his impatience.

‘You think this room's mine, don't you? Well, it isn't. With what I earn on the
Gazette du Centre,
I can scarcely afford a sordid room in the most sinister hotel in the town.'

He was lying, cheating all the time. He could not help it. With what he earned, he could have taken a fairly decent room, and indeed he had found one in a widowed lady's house, but his cross-grained character could not put up with neatness and tranquillity, and it was on purpose that he had chosen the disreputable hotel to which, every evening, the local prostitutes brought their casual customers.

‘Don't you understand? It's because your parents were supposed to be coming that I borrowed this room from Chapelle, an absolute fool, the assistant editor of the
Gazette.
We are in his house. He has taken his wife and children to the flying display. At this very moment, they are picnicking somewhere on the grass.'

She looked at the untidy bed; he guessed what she was thinking and felt ashamed. On his return, his friend would know what purpose the key he had lent had served, and his wife would stop short in horror at the sight of the crumpled sheets.

Isabelle, who was slowly getting dressed again, made no reproach.

‘And even if he knows, what of it?' Miette asked in a truculent voice.

‘Who are you talking about?'

‘You know. You're ashamed of being my mistress. You're afraid that people will know.'

‘No.'

There was a difference which he pretended not to see between knowing and being suddenly confronted with the crude revelation of that ravaged bed.

‘You know, Isabelle, you're like all the rest. Whereas I …'

He put his head in his hands. He was suffering.

‘I'm all alone! I've always been alone! I'll go on being alone all my life! Nobody tries to understand and yet if you only knew …'

She was about to say ‘I know' when he bridled angrily.

‘You yourself, you don't believe me when I tell you that I'll get to the top, that one day I'll hold them all in the hollow of my hand, like that, look!'

And clenching his fist until the knuckles showed white, he hit the wall in a convulsive gesture so that the bricks echoed with the noise.

‘I assure you, my love, that I've got confidence in you.'

‘If you really had confidence in me, if you really felt what I feel, you wouldn't start worrying whether a mediocre idiot who's lent me his bedroom and his fat fool of a wife know or don't know that we sleep together…'

‘Forgive me … No, Félicien, don't cry!'

The tears were inevitable. Crying helped him to relax; she stroked his hair and talked softly to him.

‘You'll see, my love, everything will work out all right. Everything is practically settled already, seeing that my father …'

He sneered:

‘Your father!'

‘You've got to admit that he has been more understanding than we could reasonably expect.'

‘Because he was afraid of a scandal. He imagined …'

‘He imagined the truth.'

He did not like seeing that shady part of their past resurrected, and later on he was determined to erase it completely from their memory. Dark streets, the winter, rain, figures gliding along in the slimy shadows, and that disreputable hotel in the Rue Coquillière where he had not hesitated, one evening, to push Isabelle in front of him, past that huge woman who had been soliciting the passers-by from the next doorway.

He had had to have her at all costs. He had had her, icy, docile.

‘I wonder how you can love me. No, it isn't possible.'

Who could understand that it wasn't his fault, that some strange force was driving him on, forcing him to go forward in spite of everything?

‘Don't you see, it's because I love you, I love you more than everything else in the world, because I've only you, nothing but you.'

‘Yes, that's it.'

He had fallen on his knees, that evening, in that sordid bedroom, and begged her forgiveness. He had cried there too, out of fury, and he had beaten on the wall with his clenched fists.

‘I'd like life to be beautiful, everything to be beautiful, our love …'

Had Monsieur Vétu already followed them in the darkness of the streets? They had never known. One evening, when Isabelle had pushed open the door of the shop, she had been surprised by the light. Her father had been there, with his hat on, very pale, standing with his back to the shelves filled with green files.

He had looked at his daughter, then turned his eyes away and sniffed before saying:

‘Go up to your room.'

Miette, calmer now, his eyelids rather red, was tying his cravat in front of the mirror and Isabelle murmured with a smile:

‘It suits you!'

The long curly hair, the black suit, the loosely tied cravat and the sombrero gave added emphasis to the tense and fervent side of his character. Monsieur Boquélus, for his part, the editor of the
Gazette du Centre,
when he had seen his young reporter dressed like that for the first time, had shaken his head; then, with a deliberate candour more insulting than a reprimand, he had said:

‘I see that you're an artist.'

Félicien preferred not to think about that any more. He asked:

‘You're sure? You like it?'

She seized the opportunity to make the bed and, if he noticed, he took care not to say anything.

‘Come along. Now you're going to tell me all about your paper.'

Outside they found the street again, the greengrocer dimly visible behind her shop-window, the hot sun and the stone bridge, and Miette's arm returned automatically to its place round Isabelle's waist.

‘At the moment, all they pay me is a hundred francs a month, plus a commission on any advertisements I bring in.'

He was watching her unobtrusively, as if she were going to give herself away.

‘It may be some time before they give me a rise, a year or more.'

She knew perfectly well what he was thinking. She had seen his ingenuous trap. She could read his thoughts without having to look at him and she was not irritated by what she discovered that was childish or deceitful.

He waited, as if he had just asked a leading question, and to avoid exasperating him any more, to avoid a fresh scene, she said, gazing at their shadows in front of them:

‘We'll get married when you want to, my love.'

To begin with, Monsieur Vétu had declared:

‘When he gets a job, we'll see.'

Then:

‘When he's earning two hundred francs a month.'

Miette would state that he was earning two hundred francs. Isabelle would say the same. Monsieur Vétu would believe it. He believed everything. He had not come to Nevers today, to see for himself, as he had announced that he was going to, and possibly his stomach trouble was just an excuse.

In less than a year, Félicien had obtained everything he wanted. One morning, when he had gone into the shop, his employer had not given him time to put on his grey overall.

‘Will you come upstairs for a moment, Monsieur Miette?'

It was the first time he had been invited to climb the spiral staircase, the first time he had entered that huge, dark, low-ceilinged room which served as both drawing-room and dining-room, and his gaze had been drawn straight away by Isabelle's piano. Madame Vétu, who had not yet gone downstairs, had disappeared as if in obedience to a silent order.

Monsieur Vétu, for his part, had opened a drawer and Félicien had had a shock on recognizing his letters which had been held out to him without a word.

‘I must ask you to leave this house immediately.'

Where had Isabelle been? Probably behind a door which must have been that of her bedroom.

‘I must explain to you, Monsieur…'

Nothing had stopped him, neither the simple dignity and sorrowful reserve of the sick man standing in front of him, nor the unfamiliar atmosphere enveloping him, nor the bell ringing in the shop.

‘You can't throw me out without listening to me. I love your daughter. Isabelle loves me.'

‘Go on.'

How long had he gone on talking, his throat full of suppressed sobs, his eyes shining wildly?

‘I'll leave here. I'll go anywhere you like. On the other hand you must, you simply must leave me some hope, I must know that one day …'

He had obtained this reply:

‘Perhaps.'

And he had experienced the blackest of weeks, so black that he could remember it only in outline, with aimless comings and goings, interminable waits outside the Rue Montmartre house from which Isabelle no longer emerged. Sometimes he had pressed his nose against the window-pane like a poor man trying to arouse pity.

He had run after Monsieur Brois.

‘She hasn't said anything to you? Please, Monsieur Brois, give her this letter. I'm capable of anything at the moment. A dozen times I've nearly thrown myself in the Seine.'

Monsieur Brois had handed the letter to Isabelle. In the evening he had brought back a reply.

‘My father is very unhappy. I feel ashamed of the sorrow I have caused him. He was ill for two days. He does not speak to me any more, and does not dare to look at me. We must wait, my love, wait patiently …'

Then he had found pathetic words with which to counter, in Isabelle's heart, the sight of her father's unhappiness.

Unshaven, with his clothes in a pitiful state, he had hung around under her windows in all weathers.

‘Have no fears. You will soon be rid of me and your father will be able to breathe again …'

Eight days? Ten days? He could no longer remember. It was a black hole, as black as the memory of the Rue Coquillière and the five hundred francs.

And then one morning he had seen her come out of the shop, in broad daylight, and walk up to him.

‘My father says it is all right for you to come to the house this evening. He makes no promises. He doesn't know you.'

They had given him a cup of coffee, a cigarette and a biscuit, and after that, every evening, he had spent a couple of hours in the big low-ceilinged room while Madame Vétu did her housework and Monsieur Vétu brought his invoices up to date on the table after it had been cleared of the dinner things.

‘Later on, when you've found a job, we'll see.'

Monsieur Brois had sent him to the Stock Exchange Press where they were looking for a proof-reader. He spent his days in a glass cage, bent over proofs still wet with ink, with two rows of linotype machines as his horizon. Journalists came and went, looking busy and important.

‘Tell me, my boy …'

And at night, his lower lip quivering with pride, he wrote:

‘Your poor father imagines that I am going to take over his shop one day and manufacture rubber stamps!'

He used to accompany the Vétus, on Sunday, to their little country house on the banks of the Marne, feeling impatient and disgusted with their calm, empty existence.

‘When we are just the two of us …'

He had written a long letter to Léopold.

‘
It is absolutely essential
that you should get me a birth-certificate form, either from Liége or from a nearby village, preferably a small village.'

And triumphantly, without admitting that it was Doms who had taught him how to forge identity papers, he had filled in the blanks himself. As for the rubber stamps with the arms of the borough of Huy—he remembered his brief acquaintance with that town and the painter's clothes which he had taken off in the station lavatory—he had made them himself with his own hands, with the help of materials taken from Vétu's shop.

‘You see! Nobody will ever write to the Huy town hall to check the authenticity of this paper. Henceforth I'm officially called Félicien Miette and I'm twenty-one years old, so that I've finished my military service.'

He had no remorse. It was
absolutely essential,
as he had written to Léopold, that his fate should be fulfilled. So much the worse for those who did not believe in it. And if the obstacle was too stubborn to be overcome, he went round it, without any false sense of shame.

‘Once I get going, you'll see, Isabelle, what sort of a life I'll give you.'

One day, two journalists had been talking together at the door of the glass cage.

‘I've had a letter from Boquélus to say that he's looking for a young fellow for his Nevers rag who doesn't expect too much. You don't know anybody who would do?'

‘Excuse me, Monsieur. Did you say that somebody was looking for a journalist?'

‘Why, do you want to be a journalist?'

Going to the police-station, reporting lectures and charity bazaars, fairs and accidents, putting on the earphones and taking the telephone calls from Paris—this had been his work for the past month.