Pedigree (55 page)

‘In life, you know, Léopold, it's a mistake to expect people to give you anything, even if it's only the consideration you wouldn't refuse to a dog.'

Léopold's gaze was disapproving. Perhaps he had never expected to be given anything? He was tempted to push away the ritual cup of coffee, it was so obvious that Élise's life was no longer anything but a passionate calculation.

Once Désiré made the mistake of murmuring:

‘You don't think you're working too hard?'

She had darted her familiar look at him.

‘You dare to say that to me—you! Must I remind you of what you said to me a certain evening?'

They lived in the same house and slept in the same bed, as in the past. She looked after him to the best of her ability. Often she was gay, even when they were alone together. She dressed smartly. They all three went out together on Sundays. Thanks to Roger's scholarship—or so she said, for she was answerable to nobody—they would be able to send him to grammar school.

And yet sometimes she had the impression that she was living in a void, making gestures which meant nothing, moving her lips to produce sounds without any significance. On Sundays especially. Élise had taken a dislike to Sundays, those empty streets in which the three of them walked along as if they did not know where to put themselves, the long insipid progress towards Coronmeuse, the Ursuline convent, or some other objective. She used to come home with a heavy head, and nothing more urgent to do than to revive her fire, take off her Sunday dress and make sure that the lodgers were back.

She had two thousand francs in the Savings Bank and Désiré knew nothing about it. She wanted much more, she wanted so much that it seemed to her that she would have to slave away all her life to fill that little book whose pages were slowly being covered with pink and blue stamps representing money.

Like Madame Marette, like so many widows whom she knew, whom she collected so to speak, she wanted to have her own house; she would never feel secure until she had a house all to herself…Like that, when something happened to Désiré …

Why did she suddenly feel an urge to burst out sobbing, all by herself in her kitchen, as if the thing which was eating away at her inside had already destroyed her equilibrium, as if a big bubble of air, trying to force its way through her constricted throat, were lifting her up bodily?

Her features had just begun wrinkling up in preparation for tears when the street door opened: like a flash she pinned on her smile and straightened her bun.

‘Come in, Monsieur Jacques. Monsieur Bernard had to go out. He asked if you would wait for him in his room. He'll be back soon.'

She just had time to lay the table. She would cry another time, later on. Sometimes she wished that the time would come quickly when she would be able to cry to her heart's content and give way to her fatigue.

This was something nobody knew, nobody suspected. She lived very few hours by herself; the moments of crisis were brief, interspersed, so that she could stand them, with long periods of everyday life. When the lodgers were finally gathered together in the dining-room, Élise, fresher than ever, her complexion coloured by the heat of the stove, and wearing a pretty flared apron over her skirt, came in to put the soup-tureen in the middle of the tablecloth and to make sure that there was nothing missing from the table, neither a glass nor a fork, nor the salt-cellar nor the jar of pickled onions.

Never had Roger known a more radiant summer, lived such a long succession of grave and delicious hours, of a fullness which recalled the perfect fullness of an egg, of a depth which was equalled only by certain night skies peopled with stars to the very bounds of infinity.

Everything partook of everything else, things were transfigured, gestures were transposed, and the pink room which Mademoiselle Lola had left two days before to go on her holidays was so hot and colourful, so palpitating in every nook and cranny, that the child found himself being lulled to sleep by it, suspended between dream and reality, and filtering what he absorbed of the outside world through the grating of his lowered eyelashes.

Noises reached him, the smallest familiar sounds, the secret whispering of things, but for the past fortnight he had escaped from the ordinary rules of life; alone among the members of the household he was not obliged to submit to the discipline of the passing hours; he was living on the fringe of everyday life, which slipped around him with the fluidity of water.

The day before, the Institut Saint-André had had its solemn prize-giving, an event all the more memorable in that Roger had finished his sixth year and that in the autumn he would be going to the Jesuit college. He was first. He had been first in his class every year, except in the fifth, when he had been beaten by Van Hamme, a pale boy with a stubborn forehead, the son of a Bressoux wood-carver, who spent his life studying, with his head in his hands, and whom nobody had ever seen at play.

Perhaps, this year, Brother Médard had cheated a little so that Madame Mamelin's son should be first in spite of Van Hamme? In any case the headmaster had certainly cheated.

Roger was in the hall, among the parents, on account of the leg he had in plaster. He had had to be carried in.

‘Ladies and gentlemen, my dear children,' the headmaster had said, ‘I must now pay a well-deserved tribute to the exceptional conduct of one of our pupils …'

A shiver. Roger waited, and an eternity went by before his name was finally uttered, before the other heads turned in the direction of his blushing face.

‘…one of our pupils, Roger Mamelin, whom an injury has prevented from taking his place among his fellow pupils, but whom I am delighted to see, loaded with prizes, in the front row of the audience …'

The headmaster read out the report which Brother Médard had written.

‘One morning at the beginning of this month, when the stifling heat forced us to close our schools …'

That was true. All the schools in the town had been closed for three days, and it was on the third day that Roger had gone to play on the drill-ground with some friends from the Place du Congrès. In the blazing sunshine, next to the shining torrent of the Meuse and the thundering weir whose foam was scattered into bright specks of spray, the soldiers were drilling, and guns and artillery wagons drawn by four horses were bumping up and down among the ruts and hillocks of the plain.

‘…Frightened by a rearing horse,' the headmaster went on.

That wasn't true. The truth was simpler, so simple that it was impossible to tell it on a day like this, when the children were wearing golden crowns on their heads. There had been four of them, their cheeks flushed with excitement, throwing stones into the river like filthy little brats, when one of the boys had shouted:

‘Étienne! … There! … There! …'

And they saw a straw hat sailing by, floating further away from the bank, swept along by the swift current from which an arm emerged now and then.

Roger had jumped into the Meuse, almost without realizing. He had swum after the other boy. Twice he had nearly given up, because Étienne had clutched hold of him and he had been frightened.

Finally he had saved him, heaven knows how, and he had pushed the dripping, twitching body on to the stones on the bank. After-wards, they had walked over to the only house nearby, a peculiar pink building standing by itself on the drill-ground, a café for the troops, and there they had been made to drink some rum. Roger had gone home by himself, talking in a whisper, a pitiful sight in the clothes which the people in the café had lent him and which were far too big for him.

It was the first time in his life that he had worn men's trousers, which were so long that huge turn-ups had had to be made in the legs and kept in place with safety-pins.

The headmaster avoided giving these details.

‘As a consequence of his bravery, Roger Mamelin is confined to his chair today, when he had been looking forward so much to playing the part of the Month of May in
The Round of the Months
which we have just presented to you….'

How could a friar of the Christian Schools, and a headmaster too, lie like that?

The real and the false were so confused in the stifling heat that soon Roger would end up by thinking that he had sprained his knee while rescuing his friend.

In fact, it had been the next day that he had fallen, over a line of bricks bordering a flowerbed in the friars' garden. He had been running along with one foot on each side of the bricks, like a little street-urchin; he had had a premonition of the accident but he had continued all the same.

He had been alone in the kitchen-garden. Brother Médard, during the rehearsal of
The Round of the Months
, had sent his pet to fetch something from the classroom, giving him the key.

What did it matter? It was much prettier the way the headmaster told it and it was best not to admit that pupils of the Institut Saint-André amused themselves throwing stones into the water.

Everybody was nice to him. He had been solemnly presented with a Bayard in gilded zinc. Most of the pupils' mothers came and kissed him.

At home, there were three medical students to look after him, to bring dressings and plaster bandages which they had scrounged from the Bavière hospital where they worked as assistants.

Was Roger still in pain? Was his knee still swollen?

He was so comfortable like this, on a chaise-longue in Mademoiselle Lola's pink room, his legs stretched out, his arms on padded elbow-rests, and on a chair within easy reach, his egg-and-beer, some coloured sweets, and a collection of illustrated papers which smelled pleasantly of printer's ink.

He read a little, looked at the pictures, lazily followed the progress of a fly or the patterns of light and shade on the weird floral wallpaper, and listened to his mother's comings and goings, the trumpet of the greengrocer turning the corner of the Rue Pasteur, the hammers at Halkin's, the silence of the school which had closed for two long months.

Wasn't it extraordinary that he should already have covered this first stage of his school life, which had seemed so long to him when he had set foot for the first time in Brother Mansuy's classroom? That classroom had been gloomy on that far-away autumn morning, and yet his memories of school were nearly all sunny memories, except for one perhaps, or rather two which cast a grey shadow over the bright light of his reverie: first his perverse whisperings in corners with the clownlike Ledoux about the difference between boys and girls; then the business of the new catechism.

Ever since that business he had hated Brother Mansuy, or at least avoided him, because Brother Mansuy knew. His mother had bought Roger a second-hand catechism and its cardboard cover was a faded blue, the corners were broken, and you could see the threads of the binding and reddish stains on certain pages. Roger wanted a new catechism with a shining cover so badly that one day he had gone to see Brother Mansuy.

‘My mother says you are to give me a new catechism.'

How little he must have been at that time! He could not get over having been so bold. He had had his catechism. He had enjoyed it in secret, for he did not dare to show it at home, and every night, in his bed, he was tormented by the thought of the inevitable catastrophe. Before the Easter holidays, his parents would be sent, together with his marks, a list of books and stationery supplied during the term. It was a matter of urgency for him to speak to his mother. A dozen times he nearly did so, but in the end he did not dare. He had gone into the classroom at playtime, his catechism in his hand, and it was to the friar that he had spoken, heaven knows how, so nervous that his eyes had seen nothing.

‘My mother has told me to give it back to you. She has found the old one.'

Brother Mansuy had not looked surprised. It was as if he had guessed the truth. He had kept his gentle smile and perhaps he had even given the child a sweet.

Even now Roger still bore him a grudge, precisely because, having guessed the truth, he had been generous enough to keep quiet, to avoid humiliating a child.

That did not matter any more, since it was all over and Roger would never go through the big green gate as a pupil again. Except for Mademoiselle Lola, who did not take her studies seriously and had gone home, the lodgers still had one or two examinations to sit for. After that they too would go home for the holidays and the Mamelins would go to Embourg.

Roger sucked a sweet, and read the story of
Onésime Pourceau, sportsman
, which every week occupied the two centre pages of the
Petit Illustré
. He breathed in the smell of the tomato soup, looking forward to going downstairs for dinner, with one leg in the air, hopping from one step to the next and holding on to the banisters. Every minute of life was good, and yet he wondered if his knee would go on hurting much longer or if he would go to play in the street for a while.

It was already eleven o'clock. A tram went along the Rue Jean-d'Outremeuse, Élise started laying the table, you could hear the clatter of the plates, and a draught slammed the kitchen door shut. Mademoiselle Frida was studying in her room, with the window and the door open, facing the white wall of the yard where for some days a column of ants had been crawling around whose nest had been deluged in vain with boiling water.

Could anybody suspect that, from one second to the next, this peaceful state of affairs would be shattered? Did Élise herself guess that the anxious frenzy driving her forward was suddenly going to reach its fermata?

The street door opened. She looked through the glass pane. Why, it was Monsieur Bernard coming home early! What was the matter with him? He seemed to be in a hurry, rushed upstairs, leant over the banisters and shouted:

‘War, Madame Mamelin! It's war! The Germans have invaded Belgium. There's fighting going on around Visé.'

Visé, where they sometimes went on a Sunday to eat waffles with Aunt Louisa's family? Élise smiled incredulously.