Pedigree (60 page)

Never again would he taste that warm, sticky, ugly yellow paste with which he had sometimes filled his stomach until he could not breathe. It was a sort of revenge he was taking.

He would never come back to the Rue de la Loi. He would come out of school at the same time as the others. He was going to tell his mother so straight away. He had already told Brother Médard, blushing as he did whenever he told a lie.

‘Father Renchon is afraid that my missing lessons, sometimes important lessons, may affect my studies.'

Lord, how dark the school was, and on the green walls, on the shelves, on the desks, how old-fashioned things looked: the measuring-jars for instance, and the maps which had turned almost brown, and the glossy pictures, printed in Leipzig, which showed the seasons. Roger felt a pang as he looked at the one of winter, with the fair in a little town, the man in the bottle-green coat and the girl with the sledge, which had remained in the same position ever since he had left school.

He would have liked to be sure that it was really over, that he would never come back. In the yard he breathed in for the last time the smell of the slate-roofed lavatories, and in one corner he caught sight of the pale sink and the tap to which, in his capacity as Brother Médard's pet, he had held the key.

It was no longer his street, or his district. He crossed the Pont d'Amercoeur, which they had never crossed in the old days except to go once a year to the Robermont cemetery, turned left, and went along a shabby boulevard lined with little houses, ware-houses and strips of waste ground.

The district humiliated him. It was almost on a par with Bressoux, where the little street-urchins came from who used to invade the Place du Congrès and whom the mothers tried in vain to drive away. And if their house on the corner of the Rue des Maraîchers was a handsome one, too handsome and too big for them, it was by chance, almost by charity that they were in it.

Anybody would think that Élise was unable to live like other people, that there was a spell on her. How had she come by this house which had previously been an important post office? She never gave a satisfactory answer to this sort of question, and you always felt there was something suspicious behind it all. In this case an old doctor, who lived by himself in the house opposite and had been given the task of finding a tenant, had accepted a derisory rent for the duration of the war.

There would be a scene, on account of the rolls. For seeing that Roger could eat as much maize gruel as he liked, Brother Médard's rolls were shared out among the family.

As was his habit, Roger repeated as he walked along the phrases he was going to use.

‘I'm not going to help any more at the Institut Saint-André.'

And when his mother asked why not? Would he lie as he had done to Brother Médard? Instead he felt a spiteful urge to state flatly:

‘Because I don't want to.'

‘Why don't you want to?'

‘Because I want to stay at school until four o'clock like the others.'

If his mother insisted too much, he would tell her that he was tired of being a beggar.

He was impatient to be home, imagining that he could already breathe the scent of battle which was going to invade the kitchen whose light he could glimpse as he came round the corner.

He turned the key in the lock, put his satchel down and hung his overcoat on the hallstand. Hullo, there was somebody there! Hanging on one of the brass hooks he saw a woman's coat which he had never seen before and, on top of it, a little old woman's hat with a purple flower.

He frowned, suspicious, jealous of their tranquillity. Pushing open the kitchen door, his mouth already half open to ask a question, he bumped into his mother, who had got up suddenly with a smile which he knew very well, the sweetest smile she could summon up.

‘May I introduce my son, Mademoiselle Rinquet. My Roger who's just come home from the Collège Saint-Servais, where he's studying to become an officer. Come in, Roger. Just imagine, Mademoiselle Rinquet, who is a retired postmistress, is going to live here with us.'

And she smiled more than ever, turning towards Désiré's armchair where a sharp-eyed little old woman was sitting darning a black woollen stocking.

‘Well, aren't you going to say good evening to Mademoiselle Rinquet? It's a surprise for him, Mademoiselle. I hadn't mentioned it to either my husband or my son. But you'll see, you'll be one of the family straight away.'

T
HEY
had come together accidentally, as they did every now and then, on Sunday morning at Aunt Cécile's. In the old days Désiré used to say:

‘I'm going home.'

Or else they went to the Rue Puits-en-Sock. Nowadays, they went to Cécile's, even though Chrétien Mamelin was still there. He took up less space than he used to, his tall figure seemed to have shrunk, and people sometimes started when he appeared in front of them, he made so little noise.

Out of habit, everybody still dropped into the kitchen for a moment, where the smell had changed slightly, had gone sour, on account of Cécile's three little children. It was for their sake too, in order to keep an eye on them in summer when they were playing in the yard, that the coloured paper had been scratched from one of the window-panes.

Cécile was ill. For the first time, that morning, they had found a stranger doing the housework and the cooking, a strapping girl who was a maid at Gruyelle-Marquant's, and all the Mamelin sons were shocked to see her cooking the Sunday stew.

Cécile, wrapped in a shawl, was sitting by the cooker, and when Lucien came in, or Arthur, or Désiré, she explained all over again how it had come over her, lifting her dress up to show her swollen ankles, which were an unhealthy white.

She was disconsolate rather than worried. It was her enforced inactivity which was undermining her and making her feel ashamed. She kept an eye and an ear on everything and followed all the maid's movements; but it seemed to her that everything was going wrong, and she suffered physically at seeing a strapping girl of twenty-two incapable of dressing children properly.

To cheer her up, everybody teased her, Désiré like the others, in his booming voice.

‘Hullo, all! Well, Cécile, how are you? Admit that you just wanted to have a little rest. Hullo, so you're here, Roger!'

Désiré, who had just come out of High Mass at Saint-Nicolas, warmed his hands over the saucepans, breathing in their aroma.

‘I say, everybody, guess what we're going to have for dinner. You first, Cécile … No, you'll never guess. Will she, Roger? Chips, yes, chips! Just imagine, yesterday, at the office, a country client for whom I'd performed a few little services brought me a couple of pounds of potatoes. You can't find them even at fifteen francs a pound in the shops. When I opened the parcel at home, Roger nearly cried. Then I said to Élise:

‘ “We're going to do something silly, but never mind! It will take our ration of lard, but tomorrow we must have chips for dinner.” '

They had gone on chattering a little longer, about this and that, each in his corner, warm and snug, and finally Cécile ended up by forgetting that all the housework was going wrong.

‘Coming, son?'

They went home together, walking at the same pace. It was bitterly cold. That morning, they had had to use the handle of a hammer to break the layer of ice which had formed during the night in the china jugs.

‘Cécile doesn't look at all well,' observed Désiré, who had a marked predilection for his younger sister. ‘When you've a minute to spare during the week, you ought to drop in on her to say hullo.'

He spoke to his son as man to man. They understood one another. They both knew that Cécile's husband, Marcel, was a brute of a man, bursting with health, who could not imagine that his wife might be seriously ill.

‘A cigarette, son?'

The gesture touched Roger, that familiar gesture of the father offering his cigarette-case quite naturally to his son as he would to a friend. Then, walking along side by side, they both thought about something else, the same thing; they wanted to talk about it but hesitated.

It was a grey morning, a hard, biting grey. They both felt the same repugnance for the Pont d'Amercoeur which would always remain unfamiliar to them, and for the shabby boulevard which led to their new house and to which they found it hard to get accustomed.

Mademoiselle Rinquet had spoilt their Sunday morning, the first she had spent in their house. Admittedly it was very cold indeed. The thermometer, when they had got up, had been several degrees below freezing. They had gone downstairs before washing, as they did every Sunday. Standing at the foot of the stairs, Élise had called out:

‘Mademoiselle Rinquet! Breakfast is ready!'

However much they poked the fire, you had to stand right up against it to feel a little heat.

‘She doesn't answer. I hope she isn't ill.'

Élise had gone upstairs, and they had heard her talking through the door.

‘She doesn't want to come downstairs. She says she isn't going to get up until I've lit a fire in her room.'

‘I trust you're not going to do anything of the sort?'

Élise had hesitated. If she had been on her own, she would undoubtedly have given in.

‘Come now. As it is we haven't enough coal for the kitchen, heaven knows when they're going to issue any more, and you'd go and light a fire in that woman's room?'

‘She's an old woman, Désiré.'

‘That isn't a reason for using up all our stocks.'

They had eaten in silence. They had cut the bread into four parts and weighed them on the scales, and, as happened every morning, each person had received his ration for the day.

‘Take the biggest piece, Désiré. Yes, do. You go out to work. You need it most.'

‘No, I don't. Roger does, because he's still growing.'

They had still been at table when Mademoiselle Rinquet had come downstairs. They had scarcely been able to believe their eyes, the sight had been so unexpected. It must have been on purpose that she had not put her false teeth in, so that she had no mouth and the lower part of her face was just something slack and ugly; on the top of her head, which was practically bald, there was a tiny bun, aggressively black, and, to cap all, she was wrapped in a flannelette dressing-gown of a hideous purple colour.

‘Come and warm yourself by the fire, Mademoiselle Rinquet.'

‘I've never been in a house as cold as this. If I'd known…'

‘No, Mademoiselle. It's cold everywhere. Just look at the thermometer outside. You know perfectly well that nobody has had any coal for three months.'

‘You've got some in the cellar. I've seen it.'

‘We've got very little, the bare minimum, and I won't tell you all the trouble we had getting it.'

They had given her Désiré's place by the fire. She had examined her piece of bread, and had got up to weigh it suspiciously.

It had been the same for everything. The stove, for instance, held only three firebricks. The night before, she had taken two of them just for herself, as if she had been entitled to them: Élise and Désiré had had to go without.

Even when she was not hungry any more, when it was obvious that she had had enough, she went on eating spitefully, down to the very last mouthful, to be absolutely certain that she had had the whole of her share.

And Élise had gone on pressing her!

‘A bit more soup, Mademoiselle Rinquet. Yes, go on. I assure you there's enough. I'm not hungry any more.'

They would have to give her some chips, some of those miraculous chips which they had not had for a year and which they had been thinking about all the time since the previous day. At the very idea, Roger went pale with anger.

Meanwhile, all morning, nobody had known where to settle. Without washing, without giving herself even a cat's lick, without putting in her false teeth, and smelling horrible in her purple flannelette, the old woman had stayed glued to the cooker, so that Élise had found it difficult to reach her saucepans and keep an eye on her fire.

Usually it was the best time in the week. You hung about; you waited for some hot water to have a wash; you wandered aimlessly round the house until it was time to go to Mass; Désiré hammered in a nail or mended something.

Roger had preferred to go out and roam through the cold and practically deserted streets. He had heard a bit of Mass at Saint-Remacle, he had wandered round the market in the Place Delcour, and then he had gone to sit down at Aunt Cécile's.

His father, now that they were on their way home, knew so well what he was thinking that he murmured:

‘You'd better not say anything, for your mother's sake.'

Then he added—and this touched Roger much more:

‘She thinks she's doing the right thing.'

That was all. There must be no more talk about that subject.

‘What are you doing this afternoon?'

‘I don't know yet.'

‘Is there anything to read at home?'

‘Some Eugène Sue.'

For Roger went twice a week to borrow some books from the municipal library in the Rue des Chiroux (the one in the Rue des Pitteurs had gone up in flames the day the Germans had shot three hundred people) and from a lending library in the Rue Saint-Paul. He chose books he liked. In the evening, or on Sunday, Désiré would read one of these books, haphazardly, and if his son took it back before he had finished it, he did not even say anything, but just began another of which he might never know the end.

That was what the two of them were like.

‘You'll see,' Roger could not help sighing when they reached the door, ‘the old hag will fill her plate with chips. And Mother will say to her' (here he imitated Élise's sugary servility):

‘ “Take a bigger helping than that, Mademoiselle Rinquet. Help yourself. I'm not very fond of chips.” '