Pedigree (65 page)

It was not for the chocolates that Roger came. It really was for his aunt's sake. He enjoyed climbing the spiral staircase which started right in the middle of the shop and disappeared into the ceiling. He gaily pushed open the door which had become familiar to him.

‘Hullo, Aunt! Here I am!'

It was another joy for him to see the Rue Puits-en-Sock from a first-floor window, especially on a sunny morning. He made sure that his aunt had hidden her legs under the blanket spread over her knees, for the sight of them made him feel rather sick; she did not seem to realize this, and she showed them to everybody at the slightest opportunity.

‘You promised to come early.'

‘Yes, but I've been to the barber's. Just imagine, Aunt, I wanted to have my hair close-cropped and Raoul wouldn't do it.'

‘What a silly you are, Roger. When you're lucky enough to have such lovely hair! Sit down.'

With her, he did not feel that he was with an aunt. She was a woman. She had three children. She knew life. And yet they behaved together as if they were of the same age; indeed, since she had fallen ill, she had been the more childlike of the two. She looked like a little girl, and occasionally Roger had inadvertently used the familiar
tu
with her.

‘How do you feel today?'

‘Just the same. The doctor says that I'll feel better when summer comes, but I wonder if he knows anything about it. At night, it's in the heart that it affects me. I've told him so, but he says that I'm just imagining things. As if Mother didn't die of heart disease—and she never complained of anything!'

‘The doctor's right, Aunt. You think about it too much.'

‘What have you brought me to read? Is Thérèse at home? The children aren't being naughty? How tiring she must find them, and she isn't any too healthy to begin with! Quite apart from the fact that she doesn't know how to handle them. I don't dare to say anything to her, because she's Marcel's sister and she does what she can. As for me, when they come to see me and they've been here ten minutes, I feel tired out. Why, now, just talking…'

‘Don't talk, Aunt. You know perfectly well that you don't need to stand on ceremony with me.'

‘Is it true that you can hear gunfire again from the heights?'

‘So they say. It depends on the wind.'

‘If only the war could come to an end! I feel that if it did, I'd be able to get up. You wouldn't like a grape? Go on. Do me the pleasure of eating a few. Everybody brings me grapes and I don't know what to do with them. It's Pipi who eats them every time she comes up here.'

Roger was afraid of showing his repugnance for these fat hothouse grapes which had spent some time in the sick woman's bedroom and which Cécile had touched with her moist hands, possibly after stroking her legs as she often did with a mechanical movement. The portraits of Monsieur and Madame Gruyelle-Marquant looked down at them. On the other side of the street, in the narrow houses, you could see people moving to and fro behind the windows. Cécile knew the life which unfolded hour by hour in each household. She had only to stretch out her thin arm to push aside the curtains, and the others presumably studied her from their side of the street as she studied them. Hadn't this promiscuity something reassuring about it? Faces became familiar, life was prolonged.

‘What are you looking at, Roger?'

He gave a start. Noticing this, she in her turn looked at one of the windows and smiled a smile devoid of irony. Over the grocer's shop, to the left of the baker's, a dressmaker lived who had just finished her housework, as she did every morning at this time, and who was calmly making up. She was in her underskirt. Her blouse, which was a crude white, decorated with tiny scallops, left her buxom shoulders bare; her muscular arms, which she held up in the air while she was arranging her bun, pushed out her bosom, and her lips, which were obviously holding her hairpins, were pursed in a fleshy pout.

‘Have you got a sweetheart yet?'

He did not reply straight away, but waited to be pressed.

‘You know, you can tell me everything. I'm not the sort to tell your mother.'

‘Especially seeing that my mother keeps offering up novenas that I may remain pure, as she calls it, until I get married. She tells everybody about it. The other day, she told that old cat Mademoiselle Rinquet who hates me and hates Father almost as much as me.'

‘You don't want her novena to be effective?'

He bent his head and blushed, a prey to complicated feelings. After all, she was his aunt; he derived more pleasure from talking to her about these things than to a schoolmate, for instance. She was a woman. And he trusted her. He was convinced that she would keep his secret.

‘You don't reply?'

He just gave a mysterious smile.

‘Does that mean it's already happened? Tell me, Roger.'

He fluttered his eyelids by way of an affirmative.

‘A long time ago?'

‘Yes.'

‘Last year?'

‘No.'

‘Further back than that?'

‘Three years ago, at Embourg.'

‘Oh, come now, Roger, you were only twelve and a half! It isn't possible.'

‘I swear I'm telling the truth.'

‘Dear God! And your mother keeps on praying for you …'

He was already sorry he had spoken, for Cécile had turned thoughtful. When she mentioned Élise you had the impression that she pitied her.

‘And now?'

‘It depends.'

He could not tell her the truth. The truth on this subject was something he could not admit to anybody, even to those who did the same.

‘I hope at least that you take precautions, Roger?'

‘Yes, of course, Aunt.'

That was not true. He had not taken any precautions. He did not even know exactly what was meant by taking precautions. After the Sunday at the Mondain cinema, a longing had haunted him like an obsession, and if, on his way home from school, he had continued to sneak along the back-streets, it had not been in order to save time; on the contrary, he went a long way out of his way so as to pass, his heart beating wildly, along the narrow streets where, behind the curtains of each house, you could see a woman in a chemise knitting or crocheting.

He knew that these women, who took him for a man in the darkness, tapped on the window-pane as he went by, giving him a smile or making an obscene gesture. But he was incapable of turning round to look at them, and the stench of these streets clung to his body, accompanying him for a long time as he fled home without succeeding in calming his fever.

One evening he had found a less repulsive street near the Passerelle, a street which looked almost as respectable as the Rue de la Loi or the Rue Pasteur, with clean, well-built houses, and women who had struck him as more middle class, even though they lay in wait like the others behind their lace curtains.

He had not dared to ask anybody how much he would have to pay. One evening when he had a couple of marks in his pocket, he had stumbled into one of the houses, his legs aching from having gone round the block at least a dozen times. He could hear the nearby Meuse flowing along between its stone embankments, and the planks of the Passerelle echoing with the sound of footsteps.

A hand had locked the door behind him, and a thick curtain had been drawn across the transparent curtain.

‘Do you want something to drink?'

He had shaken his head. Making a tremendous effort, with his ears buzzing so loudly that he had been unable to recognize his own voice, he had managed to say:

‘I've only got two marks. Is that enough?'

‘Show me.'

She had slipped the two marks into her black stocking, pushed open a door, and poured some water into a china bowl, next to a double bed covered with a counterpane like those in the lodgers' bedrooms, exactly the same in fact as the one that used to be in Monsieur Saft's room.

‘Come and wash. What's the matter? Come along.'

Then she had looked at him and understood.

‘Oh, so that's it …'

She had thought that it was the first time and she had not been far wrong.

‘Don't be frightened. Come along.'

He had left the house five minutes later and rushed towards the embankment, where he had started to stride along, trying to curb his longing to run as fast as he could. All the same, he meant to go back there. Already, two or three times since then, he had gone roaming along the street and the woman had beckoned to him; perhaps she had even recognized him; but he had never happened to have two marks in his pocket again, and one evening—a Monday, he remembered it had been—his desire had been so keen that he had nearly gone in, held out his watch and stammered:

‘I haven't any money on me, but I'll leave you my watch.'

He had not dared.

‘Boys are funny,' murmured Cécile, who was watching him closely.

And she confessed, as to a grown-up, as if Roger had not been her nephew:

‘I've never had any pleasure out of it. And yet I've had three children. Poor Élise! When I think about her novenas … Incidentally, I nearly forgot to pay you for my book. Hand me my purse from the table, will you?'

She gave him the twenty centimes lending fee. Then she held out a fifty-centime piece.

‘Here, buy yourself some tobacco with this.'

‘No, Aunt, no thank you.'

‘Come along, take it! I know that tobacco is dear. Papa scarcely dares to smoke his pipe and he keeps on letting it go out to make it last longer.'

He regretfully accepted, so as not to hurt her, for he did not like money matters to come between himself and Cécile.

‘What's the sweetheart you've got now like? Because I suppose you've got another one? But tell me, how do you get to know them? You meet them in the street?'

‘Yes.'

‘And you speak to them, just like that, straight out?'

Although he had never dared to do that, he said yes.

‘And they listen to you? That's what I've never been able to understand. How girls can let a man accost them when they don't know him from Adam …'

She had said ‘a man' and he felt it incumbent on him to declare:

‘They even like it.'

‘And they let you …?'

‘Not all of them. Most of them.'

‘The same day?'

‘It all depends.'

‘When I think that I've lived all this time without knowing anything about all this! Your mother too, I bet, if I know her. Take care all the same, Roger.'

‘Yes, Aunt.'

‘You know what I mean?'

She was referring to the diseases you risked catching.

‘Yes, I know.'

‘Are you going already?'

‘I promised Mother I'd go and get the bread at the food-centre.'

‘Do you still have to queue as long as you used to? I don't know what things are like outside any more.'

‘You have to wait about an hour, sometimes more. I always take a book with me. Good-bye, Aunt. See you tomorrow. If you don't like your novel, I'll go and get you another one.'

He had a vague feeling that this was a morning which mattered, but as yet he did not know why. He paid greater attention to details, as if he had a presentiment that later on he would need to remember them.

The armchair Cécile was sitting in was Old Papa's armchair which had been brought over from the Mamelins'. The wallpaper was a faded blue. In the middle of each curtain, a stork had been crocheted. The old floorboards had been given a coat of reddish paint which had then been polished and on which three little grey rugs had been placed. The baker on the other side of the street was standing on his doorstep, covered with flour, his hands on his hips and sunshine in his hair; and Roger waited for him to go back into his shop, for he had not forgotten the chocolates he wanted to take on the way out and he was afraid of being seen from across the street.

The shop bell had not rung for a long time, so there was a good chance that he would not meet anybody downstairs. It was the time when Marcel was usually busy in the kitchen.

‘Right. See you tomorrow, Aunt.'

‘See you tomorrow, Roger. Don't come too late. If you only knew how bored I get, all alone! That reminds me, on your way out can you tell Thérèse to bring up my broth? And remind her, if she leaves the children alone in the kitchen, to make sure there's nothing on the stove for them to knock over. I'm always so afraid of that!'

There. The door was shut. He went downstairs, making as little noise as possible, and little by little the whole shop became visible. The baker across the street had presumably gone back to his bakehouse, the passers-by took no notice of Roger, and he was just about to make for the trellis protecting the expensive chocolates when his eyes fell on the half-open till stuffed with banknotes.

It was too short a time since he had conjured up the picture of a certain window, of a hand drawing aside a curtain, of a woman waiting; this picture leapt to his mind, a wave of heat swept over him, he took a few quick steps, leant across the counter, and plunged into the banknotes a hand which he promptly thrust deep into his pocket.

Red-faced, his eyes shining, he made his way towards the kitchen and suddenly gave a start, for Pipi was there, silent and motionless. He stood there for a moment trying to recover his composure, not realizing at first that she had her back towards him and that, moistening a pencil with her saliva, she was too absorbed in searching for something to say in her letter to have noticed anything.

She was scarcely aware of his presence and looked at him un-seeingly, murmuring in a far-away voice:

‘Are you going?'

‘I have to go and get our bread at the food-centre.'

Why did he linger in the kitchen where there was nothing for him to do?

‘I'm going. Yes, it's time for me to go.'

‘Your aunt doesn't need anything?'