Pedigree (48 page)

Marie, Valérie's sister, who always trailed a smell of dress-making behind her, had come one Friday to collect her mother. She was an ardent churchgoer, forever haunting the confessionals and exhausting the religious orders one after another, from the Jesuits to the Dominicans and the Oblates.

‘If you only knew the Redemptorist Fathers of the Rue Neuvice…'

The next day, as she was feeling more than usually upset, Élise had gone there, furtively and with a certain embarrassment, for she had always contented herself with performing her religious duties in her own parish church, without indulging in the excesses which she called affectations.

‘Father, I confess to …'

On her return, she brought back in her shopping-bag some provisions she had bought at the Vierge Noire, by way of an alibi, and her eyes were all red, though Roger was the only one to notice this.

Finally, this very morning, Léopold had come to sit down in the Rue de la Loi kitchen. She had not seen anything of him for a long time. He looked tired. The spring sunshine made his threadbare overcoat look greener, his complexion underneath his beard dirtier.

For the first time in her life, Élise had studied him as if he had not been her brother but a stranger, and she had felt sadder than ever. After hesitating for a long time, she had murmured in an embarrassed way:

‘I sometimes wonder, Léopold, if, in our family, we aren't quite like other people.'

He had not protested, had shown no indignation over this question which would have sent Louisa of Coronmeuse into a tantrum.

‘Last summer, I went to Louis's, at Tongres, for their son's first communion. It was the first time he had invited me and I still don't know what had got into him. I didn't know whether I ought to accept, especially seeing that he hadn't thought of Désiré or the child. I can still see Désiré standing there, looking terribly sad, holding Roger's hand, when the train left the station …'

She had even bought a first communion present, without saying anything, a mauve rosary in a leather case.

‘Louis lives in a proper castle, with a park and woods. All the nobles and rich men of Limbourg, whom he invites to the hunt every autumn, were there that day. Well, Léopold, you can believe this or not as you like, it was me that Louis kept looking at. It was as if he felt the need to talk to me, as if he had something on his mind.

‘ “Are you happy, Louis?” I asked him.

‘Instead of answering, he looked around him with a sigh, then, seeing that somebody was coming towards us, he squeezed my arm and said:

‘ “Hush!”

‘You know, nobody'll ever convince me …'

What was nobody ever going to convince her? She didn't really know. She was trying to find out. She had been trying to find out for a long time now.

‘It's like Franz. Last Sunday, we went to his house with Désiré and Roger. We had met Poldine at Hubert Schroefs' and she had invited us.'

They lived in a little house of blackened bricks, in a suburb full of little gardens, of hen-huts or rabbit-hutches, of wires stretched between clothes-posts. The neighbours were mostly workmen who, after the day's work, gardened in shirtsleeves or trained racing pigeons.

Why had Franz, who was an educated man, married, without saying a word about it to anybody, a girl who worked at the Linière, that huge dark factory which made the Quai de Coronmeuse so ugly?

At their house, they had drunk some coffee and eaten some tart; there was a piano in the tiny drawing-room; Poldine kept hens and spent her time talking for hours on end, standing in shops or on doorsteps; their son played in the streets with the boys of the district. Franz had scarcely opened his mouth all afternoon, and Désiré had done most of the talking.

Élise had come home feeling terribly sad. Franz had little eyes like his brother Louis; they sparkled brightly but shifted as soon as you looked at him. He didn't complain. He had not a single friend in the National Arms Factory where he worked. Nor had he any in his district.

He went walking most of the time, all by himself, at an even pace, without hurrying. He drank. Not like Léopold, nor like Marthe. He did not go on ‘novenas', never got drunk. It was just that his walk included a few ports of call, which were always the same; he would go into a pub without sitting down, empty his glass, and go as he had come, his smile looking slightly more sarcastic.

‘Do you understand what I'm getting at, Léopold? It's as if there was something driving us on, as if we just couldn't help it…'

For example in the Rue de la Loi there were periods of absolute calm, days when nothing happened, empty hours, like those clear skies which give you the impression of living under a cloche. A Cécile would go on ironing her washing without noticing. Juliette, Arthur's wife, would go on pushing the pram of her latest baby, to the end of the world if the pavement led there.

‘Élise, for her part, on days like that, held out as best she could, with a tight feeling constricting her chest, but a time would come when she could not stand it any longer, when she stood up and shook herself, desperately looking for something to feed her anguish, when it seemed to her that there was something inside her which was going to break from the effect of revolving in a void.

She felt like doing almost anything—seizing Désiré by the shoulders, begging him to take her out, to go somewhere, to beat her if need be.

She had a morbid fear of a great many things, and above all else of poverty. That was why she had had a shock just now, looking at Léopold, who, today, reminded you of a poor man begging in the street. At the recollection of certain hours she had lived with her mother in the nearby Rue Féronstrée, sweat broke out on her forehead and she would have stolen, despite the fact that she was fundamentally honest, rather than know similar hours again.

It was the fear of poverty which had led her to take in lodgers. She blushed at herself when, finding herself alone in the house, she furtively opened their tins to take out a few lumps of sugar or a slice of sausage.

‘Look at Louisa, Léopold … She's my eldest sister. She doesn't talk much to me, because she still regards me as a little girl. But I'm sure that, for all her apparent calm, Louisa isn't happy. Otherwise why should she have married a man twenty years older than she is, a man who's got a white beard now? He looks as if he was her father. Some people think he is.'

It had been a gloomy winter, this winter which had just finished and during which her mind had travelled all alone through a frightening maze of underground passages. It was not tiredness, as Désiré thought, that made her nervy and sensitive. Désiré always explained things too simply.

Rather like Madame Laude, with whom they had spent their holidays, at Embourg. Élise envied her. She was a woman who was never embarrassed or moved by anything. She ate, drank and slept, always happy, always ready to laugh her vulgar laugh. Once when they had been walking with Roger in the woods of the Fond des Cris, they had suddenly heard the sound of water, looked all round them, and finally noticed that it was Madame Laude who was urinating, standing up, without bothering to hitch up her skirts. Her husband's job was unloading wagons in Chênée Station. At night he used to come home as black as coal. He stood stark naked in a tub at the bottom of the garden, and Madame Laude threw big bucketfuls of water over his body.

There were people who lived like that and who were happy. Mademoiselle Pauline had hurt Élise badly, too. Perhaps it wasn't her fault. But why was it that some women, who were no better than others, could live as they liked and study in comfort, accepting the services of others with a queenly air, while mothers were forced to act as their servants? If only she emptied her slops and remembered now and then to say thank you!

It was Mademoiselle Pauline that Élise detested and yet it was Mademoiselle Frida that she had tormented ever since Monsieur Charles had started coming to the Rue de la Loi house! She attacked her in a sly, underhand way, but not for anything in the world would she admit that she was sly and underhand.

‘Is it true, Mademoiselle Frida, that the people of your country are preparing a revolution?'

She laughed nervously, and trembled as children do when they touch something of which they are frightened.

‘Tell us what you are going to put in the place of what is there now. Are all the rich going to become poor, while the poor are going to be in command?'

She did not understand her lodger's icy contempt, and gave a forced laugh when Mademoiselle Frida replied:

‘The rich won't become poor. We shall kill them.'

‘Would you be capable of killing somebody?'

‘Yes.'

‘And after the revolution, do you expect to become a person in authority?'

Frida sighed:

‘In your country, people talk and talk. They don't know how to do anything but talk and laugh. You have never been sufficiently hungry.'

‘And you, Mademoiselle Pauline, would you kill people too?'

To which the latter replied, from the heights of her serene paradise:

‘It's too dirty!'

At night, after these conversations, Élise was like a boy who had run too fast, played too hard, breathed too much fresh air. Her temples throbbed, she could not sleep, and she tossed about restlessly beside Désiré's big body.

She did not like the rich. She detested Hubert Schroefs. She could not forgive Louis of Tongres, even though he had invited her to his son's first communion.

Of all her brothers and sisters, it was Léopold that she preferred, now that Félicie was dead.

But she respected the houses in freestone where there were servants, and for her a doctor was a doctor, a lawyer was somebody, and she tip-toed across the solemn porch leading to Françoise's little courtyard.

When Roger had misbehaved himself, she told him:

‘You behave like a workman's child.'

She had gone to Poldine's once, because she could not avoid doing so, but she was determined never to set foot there again. Poldine had worked at the Linière, where in the evening you could see a crowd of slovenly girls pouring out whose language was so coarse that Élise went out of her way to avoid them when she was coming home with Roger.

Élise was kind-hearted. She wanted to be kind-hearted so badly! It was a need with her. She would give all that she had, like poor Félicie, but she suffered when people failed to give it back to her a hundredfold. She was honest and yet she cheated from morning till night; only the day before, she had put another twenty francs in the Savings Bank, unknown to Désiré, who no longer smoked his Sunday cigar because it was too dear.

Was it really true that she was not like other people? When she had presented herself at L'Innovation, at the age of sixteen, and had claimed to be nineteen, Monsieur Wilhems had looked at her in a peculiar way. There had been surprise in his eyes, amusement, and also a little bit of pity, as if he had been looking at a strange animal. He had pretended to believe her.

Now, two men looked at her in roughly the same way: Brother Médard and Monsieur Charles, especially Monsieur Charles, with another feeling too, lately.

It was impossible for them to guess what she was thinking, and she never had a smut on her nose to make them smile like that.

Did they realize that she kept on going forward, heedless of the obstacles in her way, driven on by a force over which she had no control?

Valérie did not understand her.

‘I sometimes wonder where you get all your ideas. You'll end up by making me think you're all romantic.'

Romantic, her!

Mathilde Coomans, whose business was on its last legs, had told her husband, who had repeated it to his cousin who worked with Désiré at Monsieur Monnoyeur's:

‘Élise is too complicated for me. She'd make me take a gloomy view of life.'

Because Élise had talked to her once about the Russians. She tried to understand them, to imagine that huge country which you could not enter without a passport and where you travelled about in sledges, and those families in which the father worked in Siberia while the children lived only for the revolution—families like Mademoiselle Frida's.

On certain evenings, Désiré's calm refusal to worry about such matters irritated her so much that she became unfair to him and said the most unpleasant things she could think of.

‘I wonder why you ever married me. You'd have done much better to stay in the Rue Puits-en-Sock.'

He bought her some soluble iron filings to fortify her. That was Désiré's reply. He had forced her to engage a charwoman to do the washing every Monday.

That was another unfortunate idea. Madame Catteau, the woman whom Élise had chosen without knowing anything about her, had had her husband in prison for the past six months. He had been sent to prison for interfering with his nine-year-old daughter.

While they were doing the washing in the yard, the two women chatted together.

‘If you could have seen the little girl, Madame Mamelin …'

In a common voice which carried a long way—and the walls of the backyards were not very high—she proceeded to furnish such coarse details that Élise had to remind her of the existence of neighbours.

‘Oh, I know what men are like, all right! It pays me to know. If you knew the half of what goes on in my street…'

She lived in the Rue Grande-Bêche, one of the poorest streets in Outremeuse, a real court of miracles where Désiré, as a charity visitor, went once a month.

In the early days of their marriage, when Élise had questioned him about the poor people he helped, he had just replied:

‘We aren't allowed to talk about that.'

‘Not even to your wife?'

As if the others were as scrupulous as he was!

‘There are some bedrooms, Madame Mamelin, which stink, saving your respect, bedrooms you couldn't go into even if you held your nose. There are ten or twelve of them to a room, boys, girls, all together, with the father and mother doing you know what in front of the boys, who watch them at it and then try it on their sisters …'