Pedigree (53 page)

Greenery, more greenery, still more greenery, the white patches of cows lying down, then some quickset hedges, more grass in the narrow lane, and a gate they went through in September to go to pick mushrooms in the Piedboeufs' meadows.

Élise was so tired!

Just off the road, where the ground sloped gently down towards the woods, they finally came to a quadruple avenue of chestnut-trees into which you went as you would into a cathedral and where little breezes caressed your cheeks. Opening her folding-stool, she got out her nickel-plated crocheting-hook and the plain white cotton to which a bit of lace was still attached as if by an umbilical cord.

With her head bent over her work, and her lips moving as if she were talking to somebody or saying her prayers, she looked up now and then at the end of the avenue where you could see a pink building surrounded by clumps of flowers and painted railings.

She was already explaining, as if Madame Dossin were sitting beside her:

‘This is the nephew I told you about, the one whose poor mother…'

Where they were, it was as if they were in a jewel-box, with the big trees standing around them to conceal from their gaze the alarming immensity of the horizon. Élise and Roger knew these trees as if they were human beings. Each one had its own physiognomy, its own character: the third was as hollow as a sick old man, another held out horizontally a low branch on which Roger liked swinging, and there was one right at the end of the row which had been struck by lightning and which was no longer anything but a pale skeleton of a tree.

Madame Dossin's salmon-pink scarf was floating around the garden whose perfume reached them in whiffs, alternating with smells of moss and damp earth.

She would not come straight away. She would call out first:

‘Jacques! Where are you?'

She did not call her son like the women of Outremeuse who cracked the crystal of the air with their piercing voices. She chanted his name, lingering a little on the first syllable, something which gave an added charm to the word.

‘Such a lovely name, Madame Laude! If I could have another son …'

For her, Jacques was not just a child; he was the gentle shade of the chestnut-trees and the grass which was softer here than anywhere else; he was a new villa, pretty and comfortable, where everything was neat and tidy; he was Madame Dossin who did not fall upon Élise like poverty on poor people, but went on strolling a little longer among the roses in her garden.

‘Where are you, Jacques?'

The latter had joined Roger under the trees, and only now did his mother appear at the end of the avenue, wearing a light-coloured dress and carrying a parasol in one hand; she came forward unhurriedly, and looked surprised to see Élise sitting there on her folding stool.

Neither of the two women was taken in by this ritual which had gradually been established and now constituted a secret and unchanging ceremonial. Madame Dossin, who had at her disposal a luxurious veranda and a garden full of flowers which an old gardener in a huge straw hat spent the whole day watering, Madame Dossin who possessed, within the perimeter marked out by the white railings, oaks, limes and copper beeches which were artistically grouped with shaded benches placed in the best places, Madame Dossin had no reason to settle down outside, and, unlike Élise who had only a couple of rooms at Madame Laude's, she could not bring along a folding-stool to sit on. She would have dirtied her dress if she had sat down on the grass, and she accordingly remained standing, looking around for her son.

‘Take my folding-stool, Madame Dossin. I assure you that I prefer the grass.'

In that case, why did she bring along a folding-stool?

‘I'm not tired.'

She was young and pretty, rather melancholy but with sudden flashes of good humour. For two winters now the doctors had sent her to the mountains. Élise knew what that meant.

‘Such a distinguished, simple person, Madame Laude! Her son is so well brought up!'

How was it that you could tell at a glance that he was a rich couple's child? He took after his mother. The oval of his face was extremely long, his complexion diaphanous, and long eyelashes gave a languorous quality to a gaze full of charm. It was impossible to say in what way he was differently dressed from other children, and yet no other child was like him. He had been born to live in that new villa with a young and graceful mother.

‘This is the son of my sister-in-law who is dead, Madame Dossin, the one I told you about. His father brought him this morning, because he's going to spend his holidays with us. Don't climb so high, Roger. Stay near Jacques. But do me the pleasure of taking the folding-stool, Madame Dossin.'

Madame Dossin was tired. She was probably bored. One fine day she would go off as Françoise had gone off, but would there be the same terror in her eyes? She knew that her son would never go short of anything. He already had a governess, for he was considered too delicate to go to school.

‘His little brother is with one of his aunts. The eldest child, a girl of ten, is staying with her father and keeping house for him like a little woman. If you'd seen her with her veil!'

Did Madame Dossin sometimes think that she would die soon, that it was perhaps her last summer in the house which her husband had made as bright and colourful as a new toy?

Élise did not envy her. She was sorry for her. And yet, today, she bore her a grudge, and evil thoughts started fermenting inside her which she tried to conceal but which came to the surface in spite of everything.

‘For the rich, don't you agree, a misfortune is never an absolute disaster. You understand what I mean?'

She had noticed the collar of genuine Flanders lace, the gold brooch, the heavy ear-rings.

‘Do you think, for instance, that the death of a husband is as tragic for somebody who has got money as for those poor women at Souverain-Wandre?'

The newspapers had been full, the last few weeks, of the pit disaster at Souverain-Wandre, where eighty-five miners had been buried by a fire-damp explosion; the covers of the illustrated Sunday papers had shown their wives and children waiting among the gendarmes around the shaft down which teams of rescue-workers in leather helmets were going.

Funds had been opened. But what good did that do? The women were none the less widows, with children to feed. Many of them were pregnant. They would go to work as charwomen in the town or else they would become scavengers and you would see them, with handkerchiefs tied round their hair, sacks on their backs and iron hooks in their hands, climbing the spoil-heaps of the blast furnaces to look for a few lumps of coal among the smoking cinders.

This hurt Élise. She suffered when, in the evening, she accompanied somebody to the top of the Thiers des Grillons and saw the chimneys belching fire with a terrifying gasping sound.

She was sorry for Madame Dossin who had tuberculosis. She behaved humbly in front of her, instinctively, because Madame Dossin was rich, but she disliked her on account of this humility, she disliked her because she had offered her her folding-stool, because she had insisted, because she herself had sat on the ground. She could not help it. She had been brought up like that.

She said things which could appear quite ordinary:

‘It seems to me that Jacques has already got more colour in his cheeks.'

She was tempted to be really spiteful. Because she felt ill. It was not just her back and her stomach that were hurting. In the oppressive peace of the countryside, the feeling of her impotence in the face of destiny affected her more painfully than in the haven of the Rue de la Loi.

At Saint-Denis they were celebrating a Requiem Mass for Mademoiselle Tonglet, the daughter of the pork-butcher in the Rue de la Cathédrale. She had suffered from a bone-disease. People died every day. Who wasn't ill in one way or another?

‘Roger! If the branch breaks, you'll fall and hurt yourself badly. He's so lively, Madame Dossin. It's true that I'd rather see him like that than too quiet.'

She had better stop talking. Jacques, for his part, was always quiet, timid and awkward in his movements, and although he was bigger and taller than Roger, he watched his friend climbing trees with admiration in his eyes. The previous winter, he had broken an arm falling off a chair.

‘Are you happy, Jojo, to be in the country?'

She would make no more allusions. She even decided to win Madame Dossin's forgiveness and forced herself to smile her friendliest and humblest smile.

‘What pretty lace you've got there, Madame Dossin! How delicate it is!'

The shadows of the trees lengthened, the cool of the evening fell on the women's shoulders, and Jacques' mother shivered.

‘You ought to have brought a shawl.'

‘I must go, Madame Mamelin. It's time.'

They retraced their steps in the disquieting light, the inhuman calm of the declining day. On the main road they joined Désiré, who was walking along at an even pace, reading his paper; and while Roger threw himself against his long legs, Élise thought about Charles Daigne who a little earlier had followed the same road in the opposite direction, about the women whom the gendarmes had been forced to push away from the pit-head of the stricken mine, and about the interminable funeral which the King had attended.

They sat down at table, in the garden where you could feel the shadows hemming you in. The frogs were croaking in the ponds, and unseen crickets were beginning their irritating concert.

From the tangled skein of her thoughts, Élise had retained only one thread, one idea which became more precise while she was helping Madame Laude to clear the table and listening to Désiré putting the two children to bed.

Some soldiers went by along the road, on their way back to the fortress of Embourg whose glacis extended to within eight hundred yards of the pump. Frédéric, who had come home and gone round the house without showing himself, was washing noisily and doubtless stark naked behind a screen of old planks.

It was the time when, every evening, Élise and Désiré walked up and down the road, coming and going between one point and another, invariably turning round when they got to the gnarled tree growing out of the bank where Roger had once buried his canary.

Désiré was smoking his pipe, whose smell mingled with the smell of the night. When he had finished his meal, Frédéric, still wearing his cap, would come to sit outside the house and gaze vacantly into space, deaf to his lodgers' murmured conversation.

Élise had taken Désiré's arm. Even if they had looked at each other, they would scarcely have seen one another. Feeling her tremble all of a sudden, he asked:

‘Are you cold?'

‘Listen, Désiré …'

She had to say it. She could not keep quiet any longer.

‘Don't you think you ought to take out a life-insurance policy?'

She believed, she had always believed, that he had no antennae. She had said so countless times to Valérie, to Louisa, to poor Félicie. He went on walking along in silence and she was a long way from suspecting that this question, which she had finally put after a long shudder of her whole body, was a question which he had been expecting for a long time, for months, perhaps for years, and that his blood had frozen in his veins.

All the same, he managed to say in a normal voice, with scarcely any sign of strain in it:

‘Why are you asking me about that today?'

‘I wanted to talk to you about it before.'

How could she explain that it was the sight of Charles in mourning, the memory of Françoise's eyes, and her conversation with Madame Dossin who was suffering from tuberculosis, which had given her, by means of heaven knows what circuitous associations, an unbearable longing for security? It all went much further back, in fact, to the years spent in a dirty back-street with her mother, to the empty saucepans they used to put on the stove, to Monsieur Marette's suicide, to the hours spent with Madame Pain on the bench in the Place du Congrès. Even the newspapers, which no longer talked of anything but war and catastrophes, had helped to crystallize her fears; even Mademoiselle Frida and Monsieur Charles' visits.

Her back hurt this evening. Her flesh was sick.

‘I always hoped you would think of it yourself. You never know what may happen. What would I do, if I were left alone with Roger?'

Her husband's arm had stiffened. Désiré had gone rigid, as if he wanted to walk by himself.

‘You'd work.'

He had said that in such an expressionless voice that she wondered whether it was really he who had spoken.

‘But, Désiré, what if I wasn't strong enough to work?'

They were five paces from the twisted tree which formed a dark, almost human patch against the sky, a wounded body with its arms stretched out in despair. The stars were shining above them, a light breeze was playing in Élise's hair, a train whistled in the valley.

How could she have known that Désiré's eyes were fixed in a stare, that his teeth were clenching the stem of his pipe, that he would have given anything, yes, literally anything, for her never to speak about that? And yet he found a gay tone of voice in which to answer:

‘Oh, knowing you, I know you'll always manage!'

She had detached her arm from his. She remained standing in the same place, while he took another couple of steps, but he did not dare to turn round for fear of showing his face, even in the dark.

‘Are you coming?'

‘Never, Désiré, never, do you hear, would I have thought that a man would be capable of saying to his wife …'

She would have liked to twist her arms like the branches of the tree, to roll about in the dust, to be beaten black and blue; she would have liked almost anything to happen, and she stood motionless in the darkness, with nothing to help her, nothing to support her, longing to collapse all of a piece and stay there for ever.

‘And you go on smoking your pipe! You're pleased with yourself!'