Pedigree (69 page)

Chabot and Leclerc went past on their bicycles without stopping. Anybody might have thought it was on purpose that there was not a single pupil from the third form in Mariette's that day. The elder Neef must have had money, but he did not give any to his son. The tall young man stood there, ill-at-ease, working out the price of the ice-cream he was licking with a respectful tongue while Roger affected an off-hand manner, saying ‘Mariette' like an old customer, and sampling sweets which he took here and there from the bowls.

‘How much do I owe you, Mariette? The chocolate-almond ice was terrific.'

He pulled all the notes out of his pocket at once, pretended to select one at random, and picked up his change with an indifferent air.

‘See you tomorrow, Mariette.'

On the way out, he looked at his reflection in a mirror and made an effort to smile at himself.

‘You're sure she gave you the right change? You didn't even look. I don't know how to pay you back, but if you'd come to Beaufays one Sunday my sisters would be delighted. I talk to them about you so often that they know all about you and keep asking me when you're going to come to see them.'

His sisters probably looked like him. They were all three older than he, none of them was married, and one of them, the eldest, Laurence, had a slight squint. Neef had already told him all this, and also that since his mother had died, his father had taken to drink.

Roger went along the Rue de la Cathédrale on purpose to see the posters of the Théâtre de la Renaissance at the corner of the Rue Lulay.

‘That's funny! I'm going there this afternoon.'

‘They say it's very good.'

‘I know. I've been already.'

‘And you're going again?'

Come now! He had to. He could not help it. He knew that it was ridiculous, but he started talking about the little dancer, whom he had seen only from a distance, as if she had already granted him her favours, mentioning the second-act flowers and the box which was practically on the stage.

While he was talking away like that, in front of an admiring and envious Neef, there was not a single moment that he did not feel unbearably sad.

I
T MUST
have been between three o'clock and four, about the time when the rain was falling so hard that they had heard all the traffic come to a stop in the street and they had had to light the gas. Roger had a very clear recollection of what had preceded the rain. The sun was shining, but its bright rays, of a deep reddish yellow, boded no good; you could feel a menace in the air, and now and then a big, fast-moving cloud intercepted the light for a few seconds, casting a great, shifting shadow over the town.

He could recall in all its sordid details his cousin Gaston's room, on the second floor of a house in the Rue Gérardrie. He was sitting at the table, from which they had removed the cover, and the mirror on the wardrobe door showed him his reflection, without his jacket, his shirtsleeves rolled up, his hair already untidy. His gaze was rather set, his movements brusque and jerky, but you could not say that he was drunk.

He had never been drunk in his life. The only memories of his which bore a vague resemblance to memories of drunkenness were those of New Year's Day, when, at his grandfather's, he had been entitled, like the men, to a drop of Kempenaar. At the beginning of the afternoon, you hurried over to Coronmeuse, where, in Aunt Louisa's drawing-room, next to the open piano, you drank some sweet Touraine wine and ate some crescent-shaped biscuits. Sometimes you had to stop again, on the way home, at the house of some distant relative. It depended on whether you managed to slip past without being seen. It was already dark. You drank quickly, standing up; you ran for the tram, whose light, travelling through the darkness of the town, struck Roger as sicklier than usual; and then, in the Schroefs' drawing-room, you still had to sip the warm wine with a sparkling ruby trembling in the middle of the glass.

Coming back to Outremeuse, he was heavy with a feeling of well-being. He had hardly any supper and soon sank into the infinite softness of his bed.

It was entirely different this time. He had begun by being pale, tense and aggressive, and putting the exaggerated confidence of a music-hall juggler into his gestures, he had first of all smashed a glass, and then stamped on the pieces on the floor.

‘Pass me the Chartreuse, Gaston, so that I can taste the difference between that and the Benedictine.'

There was madness in the air; he could feel it and it excited him. There they were, Gaston Van de Waele and he, in a furnished room in the Rue Gérardrie, a room rather like those in the Rue de la Loi, but shabbier and not so clean. Lined up on the table were the oddly shaped bottles and glasses which they had just bought; on the floor there was a demi-john in a wickerwork casing.

The air was saturated with alcohol, but they did not dare to open the window, for fear that the people across the street would see what they were doing. The door was locked and bolted, and they gave a start when they heard footsteps on the stairs; but the callers invariably knocked on the door of the fortune-teller who lived on the other side of the landing.

One after the other, using the same glass, they sipped a greenish drink, smacked their lips, and looked unsmilingly at one another.

‘Is there any difference?'

‘Of course there is! This one has a smell of toothpaste the other hasn't got, but the taste is the same.'

‘What if we added a few drops of essence?'

So far, Roger was aware, even distinctly aware, of the place where he was. The Rue Gérardrie was a peculiar street which he did not know very well. Right in the centre of the town, a stone's-throw from the Rue Léopold where he had been born, it attracted only country people, principally on account of its restaurants furnished with bare tables where you could bring your own food and buxom waitresses served eggs and bacon and tarts as big as cart-wheels. The shops sold material for farms and poultry-yards, and in the windows you could see plaster eggs, packets of powdered pig-food, and strange-looking baskets whose purpose was a mystery to the townsfolk.

It was here, very naturally, that this Fleming, Gaston Van de Waele, had settled on his arrival from Neeroeteren. Although he had money, pretensions to smartness, bought the most expensive suits and wore patent-leather shoes, it was only here that he felt at ease.

Unlike Roger, who grew steadily paler, he became redder and shinier in the face as the afternoon wore on. He began to look positively repulsive. Though he was only eighteen, he looked older; he was already a man, a sort of bull so full of sap that it oozed out of every pore. His highly coloured skin was stretched over bloated flesh, his thick lips looked like freshly cut meat, and he had protruding eyes and a big, shapeless nose with flared nostrils under a low forehead where the hair practically met the eyebrows.

An animal tormented by crude instincts. And when, dressed in his navy-blue suit, with an excessively white collar round his neck, he capped everything by putting on kid gloves, it seemed that this civilized shell was bound to crack under the pressure of his muscles.

It was he who lived with his mother and his brothers and sisters in the house at Neeroeteren where Élise's parents had lived and of which Léopold had done an oil-painting. His father had been deported to Germany for doing some smuggling at the beginning of the war, because you only had to cross the canal in front of the house to find yourself on Dutch soil.

Was everything already beginning to get confused? There was a clap of thunder, just one. There would be no more. As if it were some sort of signal, the hail started falling, hailstones bouncing on the window-sill and the sky growing so dark all of a sudden that in every house people rushed to light the gas. The proof that Roger still had all his wits about him was that he said:

‘Pull the blind down, Gaston. With the light on, they can see us from across the street.'

After that, however, he lost track of time and began to get the succession of events mixed up. He was living in an increasingly incoherent world, and now and then, seeing himself all of a sudden in the mirror, in the midst of a chaos of glasses, he burst into frenzied laughter.

‘I say, do you think the chap will want to try all the bottles?'

His cousin Gaston had brought in from Neeroeteren, in the course of several tram-rides, one hundred and fifty litres of alcohol which they had made out there by distilling rotten potatoes and corn. Instead of selling it fairly cheap as industrial alcohol, he had had the idea of turning it into brandy and liqueurs.

They had gone together into a shop in the Rue de la Casquette where an Armenian sold essence which, so he declared, made it possible to manufacture at home, without any special apparatus, brandy or rum, Benedictine, Chartreuse, bitters and curacao.

Luckily Roger was there, for Gaston would have been incapable of making head or tail of the leaflet which they had been given together with the tiny bottles; and now they were making liqueurs as fast as they could, trying out all the various essences, moving about in a fog of alcoholic fumes, taking a sip here and there, and discovering in all their concoctions the same underlying taste of rectified alcochol.

What did that matter? Roger had already found a buyer, for Gaston, who showed plenty of confidence in other respects, was afraid of approaching people. He had stayed outside in the street. It was Roger who had gone into a dozen little cafés.

‘Excuse me, Monsieur. You wouldn't be interested in buying some brandy, rum or liqueurs, would you?'

Since the beginning of the German occupation, spirits had been strictly prohibited, and they were served only to trusted customers in back-rooms, at the bottom of a Bovril cup.

‘How much?'

He made only one mistake. For fear of bungling the sale, or of being taken for a profiteer, he always quoted a price which was too low and which he promptly regretted.

‘Fifty francs a bottle.'

Most of the café proprietors had been suspicious of this youth who was too well dressed and too polite. Others had haggled, asking for time to think it over. This evening, the two cousins were due to deliver ten bottles to a bar in the arcade near the Pont des Arches, next to the shop where, when he was a child, Roger used to go with his mother every week to buy butter.

What could Gaston have done without him? Why was he giving him only a third of the profits, instead of half?

He thought about that and about various other things which got jumbled up in his mind, and he remained fully aware only of the strange place where he was, hanging as it were above the town whose noises could be heard down below. On the other side of the lowered blind, he could sense a dark expanse of swarming activity, hundreds of little cafés and shops, people walking fast and others sheltering in doorways, their shoulders hunched, looking like wet dogs.

‘You aren't feeling ill, are you, Roger?'

‘No.'

‘You look pale. Perhaps you ought to be sick.'

‘I don't want to be sick.'

He knew one thing, and that was that he hated Gaston. He hated Verger too, and Father Van Bambeek. They were cowards. Verger was a coward. Roger remembered his pale face, with a deep crease across the forehead, in the box at the Renaissance. He had not laughed once. He never laughed. Only his lips moved, stretching like india rubber. To think that all the way through the show, and during the intervals when they had gone to have a drink in the bar, he had been turning the same idea over and over in his head! It had had to come out, afterwards, in the darkness of the Carré.

‘I thought you'd been given complimentary tickets.'

‘Well?'

‘I saw the tickets. You got them at the box-office.'

‘What's that got to do with you?'

‘How did you get hold of the money?'

‘Mind your own business.'

‘I could lay my hands on some money too.'

‘What are you waiting for?'

‘I know where I can find some old accumulator jars for next to nothing. I can get hold of some lead plates and acids too.'

Roger had blurted out:

‘At your father's!'

‘Never you mind. Just now, accumulators are worth a lot of money, anything up to a hundred and eighty francs. I've heard there's somebody in the Rue de la Madeleine who buys them at that price.'

‘Why don't you go there?'

‘I don't dare. I'm afraid of being recognized. If you like, we could come to an arrangement.'

‘What sort of arrangement?'

‘We'd carry them together, and you'd go into the shop.'

‘While you waited outside in the street!'

‘I'd give you twenty-five per cent. I've enough material for at least ten batteries. At forty-five francs each, that would give you four hundred and fifty francs.'

That had been three weeks ago and they had sold the ten batteries. They had taken two at a time, because they were heavy. Verger had stayed in the street, paralysed with fear, casting worried glances at Monsieur Gugenheim's shop.

Roger had not been frightened, not even the first time. Now, on the other hand, possibly on account of the alcohol he had drunk, it all seemed a nightmare to him and he bore a dreadful grudge against Verger. He would not go out with him again; in any case, he had nothing left to sell and Roger did not enjoy his company, for he always looked as if he were being tormented by shameful ideas, took fright easily, and thought he was being followed in the street.

‘Look behind you.'

‘Well?'

‘Don't you think that fellow looks like a plain-clothes detective? Have you spent all your money already?'

‘What about you?'

‘I'm keeping it to buy a motor-bike for the holidays. I'll hide it somewhere in the town. My parents won't know anything about it.'

‘And what if they meet you on it?'

‘I'll say it belongs to a friend who's lent it to me.'