Pedigree (45 page)

‘Why don't you try some cheese?'

That Herve cheese which smelled so strong that it could not be put on the table except under a cover and which made Mademoiselle Pauline run a mile as soon as she saw it.

Élise could not manage to summon up a smile at this memory, nor at the thought of Désiré's description of his lodger to Hubert Schroefs:

‘The fact is, her fingers look like diseased sausages.'

Suddenly she listened, then called out:

‘I'm coming down, Léopold.'

She bent over, but could not hear anything more in the hall. She went down a few stairs and bent over the banisters again.

‘Oh, it's you … I'm coming …'

It was the poor old man who came every Friday.

‘You couldn't give me two weeks' money at once, could you? I shan't be able to come next week.'

Élise could not forget that slight noise which had made her look up when the coalman was giving her her change. She could not have been mistaken. While trying to banish that memory from her mind, she was already getting ready to defend herself.

‘We may be poor, Mademoiselle Pauline, but in this family we have always been honest.'

She felt tempted to add—and would if she were driven too far:

‘Our parents didn't make their fortune selling stockings and underpants in the poorest suburb of Warsaw.'

For that was the case with the Feinsteins. They were none the less proud and haughty for all that, and when Mademoiselle Pauline's mother had come to Liége the year before, she had imagined that she deserved every consideration. She had bustled round the house, giving orders as if she were speaking to servants; and not for anything in the world would she have got up if a sauce-pan had started boiling over, forgetting that she had spent her life behind the cash-desk in a porter's lodge converted into a shop.

Monsieur Saft had known them and had told Élise all about them. He seemed to hate the Jews even more than the Russians.

‘They aren't Poles, Madame. You must never say that they are Poles, because it would be insulting us. In Poland, they live in special districts, where real Poles never go.'

Mademoiselle Pauline was studying to become a mathematics teacher and was incapable of boiling an egg. She mended her stockings with wool of any colour—what did it matter since it was on her feet and could not be seen?—and she would have mended them with red string if she had had nothing else to hand.

‘How will you manage when you have children, Mademoiselle Pauline?'

For Élise, who scolded Désiré for poking fun at their lodger, could not restrain herself sometimes from telling her a few home truths.

‘I shan't have any children.'

‘Then you must be cleverer than most. Because men …'

‘No man is ever going to have any rights over me.'

Her calm self-assurance was exasperating. She was full of love and admiration for herself. Once when Désiré asked her if she didn't sometimes kiss her reflection in the mirror, she had replied: ‘Why not?'

Roger had already come home. It was time to lay the table. Élise rushed around, thinking all the time of the unpleasantness which was going to happen; she felt so impatient and annoyed that for two pins she would have gone to meet the attack halfway and knocked on the door of the pink room.

‘Well, Mademoiselle Pauline, say what you have to say to me. I know that you opened your window like a thief. I know why, too. I've been expecting this for a long time. Speak up, now. I'm listening.'

For it was true that Elise had been expecting what was going to happen or some other attack. One day, she had been unable to refrain from saying to her lodger in front of everybody:

‘Here are three francs sixty, Mademoiselle Pauline.'

The other woman, who had understood, had chosen to feign surprise.

‘You've got a mania for leaving money around all over the place. This morning there was even a twenty-centime piece under the rug by your bed. You'd be doing me a favour if you put your money on one side.'

A word to the wise is enough! Monsieur Chechelowski had smiled behind his moustache. Mademoiselle Frida had looked hard at her landlady.

‘It's true. You always seem to suspect people of being after your money. You think of nothing but your money. I'd better tell you, Mademoiselle Pauline, that there aren't any thieves in this house.'

‘I never said there were.'

‘But you put marks on your bottle of eau de Cologne and you weigh your bag of coffee in your hand before putting it back in your tin.'

Élise blushed to herself, for once or twice, running short of coffee and not wanting to go to the Vierge Noire, she had taken a little coffee out of each of her lodgers' tins. As for the coal …

‘You know, Madame Corbion, what makes me angry is that she could easily afford it. To begin with, she had her meals at the boarding-house in the Rue de l'Enseignement, where they charge you a franc for a meal. If it wasn't that Désiré won't let me have people here for meals, I know how much I'd make by doing the same …'

She bustled about, her forehead creased with worry, regretting her good day which had been ruined by Mademoiselle Pauline, and remembering all the little disappointments and the petty vexations which fate took care to reserve for her. Yet heaven knows that she did her best.

Why, from the very start, had she had only poor lodgers?

‘What can I do about it? I told Mademoiselle Frida: “Give me your stockings and your linen and I'll wash them for you.” I charge her scarcely anything for the soap. I charge five centimes a pair for mending Monsieur Saft's socks and I provide the wool. And when for once a lodger turns up who could pay, she has to be miserly and suspicious, forever doing her accounts in a little notebook which she always carries with her. She even goes to the extent of counting her lumps of sugar.'

When Mademoiselle Pauline had seen that the others ate in the kitchen and were given boiling water for their coffee, she had worked out that this would cost her less than having her meals outside. Her mother sent her sausages, hams, smoked goose and cakes from her own country. She had never offered anything to anybody, not even to the child. Élise had had to steal a bit of goose to find out what it tasted like. It did not matter to Mademoiselle Pauline if she made the others feel sick; on the contrary, she spread out her provisions, installed herself in the best place, stayed a whole hour at table, and, if there was nobody in the kitchen during the day, she came downstairs with her books and her lecture notes to save on the fire in her own room.

‘Mademoiselle Pauline, you've let the milk boil over on to the stove. Didn't you smell it burning?'

‘I'm not here to watch your saucepans.'

She was spiteful, Élise knew that, and she envied everybody, because she was ugly, because she was a Jewess, because her father had been born in a ghetto on the Russian frontier, an old Jew with a long beard who, back there, stole humbly along the streets, keeping close to the houses. That was why there was not a single portrait of her father in her room: she was ashamed of him.

She would take her revenge, that was only to be expected, for Désiré's jokes; she would take her revenge on Élise who made a distinction between her and the other lodgers, and who, for washing her linen, charged her two centimes a piece more than she charged Mademoiselle Frida.

Now here she came, sitting down without a word, and twisting her napkin while she waited until Monsieur Chechelowski and Mademoiselle Frida were at table. Tense and feverish, Élise gave her son his dinner without looking at them. She could feel the attack coming, and eventually it came, soft and sugary.

‘Tell me, Madame Mamelin, how much does the dealer who comes along the street charge for a bucket of coal?'

‘Forty centimes, Mademoiselle Pauline. Coal went up five centimes last month because of the strikes.'

Silence. The plump little hands delicately removed the transparent skin from a slice of garlic sausage stuck on the silver fork.

‘Why do you ask? Is it because I charge you forty-five centimes a bucket? Don't forget that I have to carry it up to you, that I provide the wood and the paper, that I light the fire. If you consider that five centimes is too much to pay for my trouble, there's nothing to stop you …'

‘I didn't say that. I've a right to ask questions, haven't I?'

‘Of course, Mademoiselle Pauline, you've every right, including the right to carry the coal up to your room yourself.'

‘You are getting angry.'

‘I'm not getting angry. It's you who are insinuating …'

‘I am not insinuating. I am what I am.'

You might have thought that it was all over. But no, it wasn't all over, for Élise, who had cheated again, was anxiously wondering whether Mademoiselle Pauline realized this.

It was true that she charged only five centimes more than old Joseph for the coal. What she failed to add was that the coal scuttles in the bedrooms held a good third less than the coalman's buckets.

‘You understand, Valérie, it wouldn't be worth all the trouble I take if I didn't make a profit.'

That was why this was not just a mere skirmish. It was a real drama. Élise was honest. She would not take a ten-centime piece which her lodgers might leave lying around. But she cheated in all sorts of ways, for two centimes here, for three centimes there, and Mademoiselle Pauline suspected as much, perhaps more than she said.

Had the others, for their part, noticed anything? Just now, Mademoiselle Frida had darted a peculiar look at Élise, as if an idea had occurred to her.

‘Me who's always looking for ways of being useful to them!'

That was true. And that was just the trouble which nobody, apart from Élise, could understand. It upset her when Mademoiselle Frida had got nothing but some bread and butter for dinner and she tried to persuade her to accept a plate of soup; it was she too who, when she went out on Thursday afternoon with Roger, suggested:

‘Come downstairs to study in the kitchen, Monsieur Saft. You'll be by yourself and it's warmer there.'

Unfortunately, afterwards, she counted the cost. Every week she had to take some money to the Savings Bank to put it into Roger's account; she hid small sums all over the place, in the soup-tureen, in her linen-drawer.

Did anybody ever give her anything for nothing? Why, seeing that they were all students, shouldn't she be entitled to make a student out of her son?

‘If only she could leave the house!'

Now Mademoiselle Pauline's presence oppressed her, as if it represented a constant threat. She could not talk about it to Désiré, because she cheated him too. She even cheated with the gas and water for he never thought of checking the meters.

‘When I take in some new lodgers, I'll make sure they are Belgian,' was all that she said, while he in his turn was having his dinner in a ray of sunshine which had finally pierced the clouds. ‘However nice they are, foreigners are foreigners. They don't feel things as we do.'

‘Who wanted them in the first place?' he retorted, without thinking any more about it …

‘Mind you, I'm not complaining. I'm just saying …'

How could such a futile incident upset her to such an extent? She was as feverish as if she were sickening for an illness. However much she reasoned with herself, she remained uneasy, waiting for some fresh misfortune. She had started to clean her brasses, the task she liked best, the one she did on Friday afternoon; all the brasses in the house were gathered together on the table: candlesticks, flower-pot cases, ashtrays, saucepans, and the oil-lamps which they kept partly in case the gas failed but chiefly because they were used to seeing them on the kitchen shelf.

Désiré went off. He could not have got as far as the Rue Puits-en-Sock before there was a violent ring at the door. She gave a start, for she usually recognized people from the way they rang the bell, and this was a ring she did not know.

Just in case, she opened the dining-room door as she went past.

‘Monsieur …'

A well-dressed man greeted her politely, came in without a word, and walked calmly into the front room, which always smelled musty even though it was aired every week. Did he notice that Élise had her hands tightly clenched on her apron, that she smiled thinly as she pushed forward an Henri II chair for him, and that she threw an anxious glance in the direction of the door of the Institut Saint-André, as if she were looking for the reassuring silhouette of Brother Médard?

‘I must apologize for troubling you, Madame Mamelin.'

His voice was soft and cordial; everything about him was cordial, kindly, almost familiar; he reminded you of a family doctor or a prosperous businessman.

Élise did not suspect that soon she would be calling him Monsieur Charles and that he would walk into the house in the Rue de la Loi as naturally as Léopold, sit down on this chair which she had given him today and carefully light a handsome meerschaum pipe.

‘Your lodgers have all gone out, haven't they?'

While he was saying this, he turned towards the door of Monsieur Chechelowski's room, as if he were familiar with the habits of the house.

‘Why do you ask?'

‘Have no fear, Madame Mamelin. We have had the best possible reports about you. I'm from the police.'

She remained standing by the door which she had left open.

‘I'm particularly concerned with foreigners, including of course, Russians, and I should have come here a long time ago to have a little chat with you.'

He was rather plump and pot-bellied, with a fresh complexion and thinning fair hair brushed back from the forehead, and she noticed that he was wearing a wedding-ring; this detail, for no particular reason, reassured her.

‘You were probably busy, I suppose. I should be sorry to have picked my moment badly.'