Pedigree (44 page)

‘It's too much, Désiré, it's really too much. Thank you.'

She nearly burst out crying.

‘It's much too pretty. For you, all that I've got is…'

A pipe, a pipe with a thin curved stem of the sort Élise liked because they looked distinguished.

‘You like it, though?'

Désiré filled it straight away and lit it, even though he had had nothing to eat. Nothing mattered today. The lodgers were still asleep. The family had gathered together in the dining-room with the shutters closed, and finally they lit the gas as if it were the evening. They still smelled of the bed and they did not notice the cold.

Roger ate a chocolate, a fig and a raisin, and cautiously nibbled the edge of a marzipan cake and the horn of a gingerbread goat from Dinant.

‘Désiré, you ought to go and get your slippers while I'm making the coffee.'

It was even more unreal than the Place du Congrès in the snow. The smell of coffee came from the kitchen, and Élise's voice:

‘Don't eat too much, Roger. We're just going to have breakfast.'

The first workmen's tram went by along the Rue Jean-d'Outremeuse, and the bells of the parish church started ringing for the first Mass. In the church lit by only a couple of tapers, the choirboy would be ringing his bell, or rather no, there was no choirboy this morning and it was the sacristan who served Mass.

In the kitchen, they did not have eggs and bacon as they did on other days, but just sweet things they had chosen from the plates, each according to his taste: the whole house smelled sweet and sickly when Désiré finally went upstairs to wash and dress.

Next door a shrill trumpet could be heard, and at nine o'clock, sitting next to Mademoiselle Frida who was having her breakfast, Roger was still in his nightshirt, with his nose in his plate, his stomach full and his body as sluggish as when he had not had enough sleep.

They had to resign themselves to opening the shutters, revealing a fairy-tale street. The world had disappeared. The Friars' school, although it was so close, was just distinguishable in the distance, through a white fog which clung to the window-panes and which you could tell was icy cold. People went by with their coat collars turned up and their hands in their pockets, and you had scarcely glimpsed them before they had vanished into a pale nothingness. The tram kept on ringing its bell, not daring to move at more than walking pace, and the dust-cart had turned into a mysterious carriage.

It was the only day in the year when you were entitled to live as you pleased, to crawl around on the floor, to dirty yourself, to eat what you liked at any time of the day.

Mademoiselle Frida, for her part, gave just one cold glance at the enchanted dining-room and went off to the amphitheatre where she would spend the morning cutting up corpses.

Roger was washed in the kitchen, with hot water.

‘Come in, Mademoiselle Pauline, it isn't important.'

Élise wetted the comb to put a parting in the child's hair.

‘No you're going to give me your gingerbread and your chocolates.'

They had to be made to last until Christmas. Then it would be the turn of the black pudding and the bouquettes, followed almost immediately by the pale cakes and waffles of New Year's Day, the little glass of Kempenaar which you drank early in the morning in the Rue Puits-en-Sock, for it was there the day began, the claret or port at Schroefs', where whole boxes of biscuits were opened and the contents stuffed into the children's pockets, and finally, in the afternoon, the white wine from Touraine at Coronmeuse.

Tomorrow, at school, Brother Mansuy would already be playing on the harmonium:

‘
Come, sweet Messiah,

To save us today.

Thou art our desire,

So come now, we pray
…'

And probably Mademoiselle Pauline's mother in Warsaw would send her daughter a smoked goose, like the year before.

The brushes, when Roger rinsed them in a saucer of water, left pink and mauve streaks. The boy furtively wiped the bristles between his lips. They had a tart taste which became another St. Nicholas taste.

T
O GIVE
herself a start, she was doing the green room, Monsieur Saft's room, thoroughly; she had already polished the bed and the feet of the table; now and then she could hear Mademoiselle Pauline moving about in her room.

The weather was neither fine nor bad; it was what she called everyday weather, more white than grey, and fairly cold; occasionally a gust of wind lifted up the dust on the zinc platforms. Yet when playtime started at the Institut Saint-André and Roger crossed the street to come to drink the egg beaten up in a glass of beer which his mother prepared for him before going up to the bedrooms and left on the stairs, Élise was reasonably happy.

‘It's me!' the boy shouted, pushing open the door which stayed ajar all morning.

Élise's happiness matched the weather: a little lukewarm happiness which she had manufactured for herself while she was polishing.

‘If you could only see those poor letters, Louisa!'

Élise talked a lot while she was working, as if to give a direction to her thoughts; she needed to address herself mentally to somebody and, although no sound emerged from her lips, her face none the less assumed expressions in tune with her remarks.

Her imaginary companion changed frequently, according to the subject occupying her attention. Just now, it had been Madame Corbion, because the latter had lodgers like herself and could understand certain things. Sometimes she came along in the afternoon, dressed in silk, powdered and perfumed, with a gold chain round her neck and a lace handkerchief tucked in her belt.

‘Just imagine, Madame Corbion, his mother works as a doctor's housekeeper. He isn't ashamed of her. That's what I admire about him. The poor woman, killing herself with work so that her son can become somebody!'

Madame Corbion never got excited, never showed any reaction. What interested her was students like hers, preferably Rumanians or Turks, who had a lot of money and whose love affairs fascinated her. She declared that she did not allow free access to her house, but it was clear that she did not look too hard at who went in and out.

‘If only you could see her letters, Louisa!'

Her sister at Coronmeuse ought to understand, seeing that she made her own children study. Évariste was at the University, training to become a lawyer; Anna, the least gifted of the three, stayed at home but studied music; and Aimée, the youngest, was still at school.

‘… Poor, clumsy writing, the writing of somebody who didn't stay at school for long. I can't read it, because it's in Polish. There are grease spots on the paper, I'm sure it's full of mistakes. Well, I think it's wonderful, and I think it's even more wonderful that Monsieur Saft isn't ashamed of his mother. He could have told me anything, that he was the son of this or that. Because he's always so spick and span! Just imagine, at night he folds his trousers and slips them under his pillow …'

She went to get some water to wash the windows, and, standing in the frame of the open window, she looked down on to the yards and the little gardens shut in between the blocks of houses.

‘He has his meals in the Rue de la Casquette. It isn't a real restaurant, or a boarding-house either. A Polish student who hadn't enough money to go on with his studies had the idea of renting a ground-floor flat and cooking for his friends. They pay him the cost price, or just a bit more. You can say what you like, I admire those people.'

If she had been there, Louisa would have replied:

‘When people haven't enough money to study, they'd be better off learning an honest trade.'

She must have made that remark once. There were a number of ready-made phrases like that which you thought you could hear as soon as you pictured her to yourself. Perhaps they had been talking about Roger, whom Élise too wanted to make into somebody. Élise had almost certainly replied, with that quivering which affected her lips whenever she said something unpleasant:

‘But you make your son and your daughters study all right!'

For after all, Louisa's husband had never been anything more than a basket-maker. He worked with his hands, while Louisa served drinks to any carter who came in and spent her days standing behind a counter. Why shouldn't she want to see other people nursing the same ambitions as herself?

‘Brother Mansuy has told me that, if it wasn't for his age, he'd have him moved up into the second year.

‘ “I can't teach him anything this year. He's too far ahead.” '

The two women in the pub next door, the old one and the young one, were doing the washing in their yard.

‘I bet you don't even know why there are so many poor Polish students …'

The first time that she had brought Monsieur Saft and Monsieur Chechelowski together in her kitchen, they had bristled up so much that she had thought sparks were going to fly. Finally they had controlled themselves. Monsieur Saft, looking very pale, had sat down without a word. Since then, they had never spoken to one another.

‘And that's because, for a hundred years and more, the Poles have been under the Russian jack-boot. They think of nothing and work for nothing but their liberation. Isn't it wonderful? They have holes in their socks, they don't eat enough, but they study so as to be able to rebuild their country one day, and every week Monsieur Saft practises fencing with a teacher.'

There was a portrait of him on the mantelpiece, in tight-fitting white trousers, a padded fencing-jacket, and a mask covering his face. The foils were behind the wardrobe.

The minutes went by like this, the same colour as the weather; the chamois-leather squeaked on the window-panes, setting her teeth on edge; a voice in the hall called out:

‘Coal?'

Élise had not heard the coalman's trumpet. She dashed downstairs.

‘Three buckets.'

While they were being filled, she ran to get her purse in the kitchen. It was Friday. Old Madame Delcour, on the next doorstep, was waiting her turn and said good morning to Élise.

‘Nice and full, please, Monsieur Joseph. The price still hasn't come down?'

‘It's more likely to go up one of these days. Three buckets at forty centimes each: one franc twenty, lady. You haven't the exact change, have you?'

Élise had such sharp ears! She said nothing, but her head cocked imperceptibly towards the upper stories of the house and a bitter smile appeared on her lips.

How could Mademoiselle Pauline stoop so low? It made you wonder if it wasn't on purpose that she hadn't gone to her lectures. Just as the coalman was giving her her change, Élise had heard the first-floor window being carefully shut.

Now the spell was broken. When she went back up to Monsieur Saft's room, it did not occur to her to go on with her calm monologue, and she forgot the mother's letter, the photograph in fencing clothes, the good smell of wax-polish, the rather insipid atmosphere of an ordinary morning.

Élise could sense misfortune a long way off. She could not help it. Not just real misfortunes which you could talk about and which aroused pity, but all those little vexations which made a sensitive person suffer so much.

She could think of nothing but Mademoiselle Pauline, who had not wanted her to do her room that morning because she was working. What had happened was Désiré's fault. She had told him a hundred times that it was a mistake to joke with people who had no sense of humour.

‘Can't you see, Désiré, that they haven't got the same mentality as us?'

He took care not to tease Mademoiselle Frida, who remained ice-cold, showing no reaction, as if you were talking to somebody behind her. Désiré's
bête noire
was Mademoiselle Pauline, who for her part, her eyes shining, went red in the face, puffing out her breasts which her corset pushed up underneath her plump chin.

‘Anybody can tell that you come from the Rue Puits-en-Sock!'

She herself did not understand this game of his—if it was a game —which consisted of saying unpleasant things while pretending to be joking.

Désiré returned to the attack in season and out of season.

‘He doesn't leave her in peace a single evening, Valérie. As soon as she comes into the kitchen, he starts on her. He just can't help it, and he seizes on any pretext he can think of.'

Her hands for instance. Mademoiselle Pauline cared for her hands, which were small and plump, as if they were precious objects; she gazed at them lovingly, making no secret of it, and was fond of telling how she put cream on them every night and wore gloves in bed. When she was eating, with her elbows on the table, she moved her fingers with their polished nails delicately, as if they were precision instruments; she had a way of peeling an apple with exasperating care, or crumbling her bread as you would for a bird. There in the kitchen in the Rue de la Loi, where nobody stood on ceremony, she was as dignified as if she were at a state banquet, and was not in the least embarrassed if everybody else got up while she was still at table.

‘Madame Mamelin, I can't eat with a nickel fork.'

Had she gone, as it would have been so easy to do, to buy some silver cutlery in the Rue de la Régence? Only somebody who did not know her would imagine that she would do that. She had written to her mother and the latter had had to send her some cutlery from Warsaw.

‘If I were in your place, Mademoiselle Pauline,' Désiré had said to her, ‘I'd refuse to eat off anything but gold plate. After all, when you're used to that sort of thing! And then, the food must taste so much better.'

She detested him, she hated him; as Élise used to say, if her eyes had been rifle barrels, Désiré would have been dead long ago. Few evenings went by without a skirmish. One day when she complained that she had been unable to find her usual brand of hand-cream in Liége, Désiré asked: