Pedigree (72 page)

He had nearly spoken, but his face had suddenly frozen as if he had become aware of the gulf separating him from a Gaston Van de Waele.

‘It's none of your business. Go to bed with that fat girl. She smells of beer and whey.'

Why whey? He didn't know. It went with her flesh, which was as white and soft as a cow's udder.

‘Listen, Roger, there's no need to tell your parents you've been out with me. If I know your mother, she'd tell the whole family.'

It was true that at Neeroeteren Gaston said grace before every meal!

‘Have no fear! You can leave me now. I'm nearly there.'

And he zigzagged away from his cousin, who went on watching him, turned the corner of the Rue des Maraîchers, and noticed straight away a little light filtering underneath the shutters. He did not need to take his key out of his pocket, or to tap on the letter-box, for the light had already gone on in the hall. The door opened. It wasn't his father. It was Élise.

‘Where have you been at this time of night, Roger? Aren't you ashamed of yourself?'

The first thing which struck him was the familiar disc of the alarm-clock on the black marble mantelpiece. It gave the time as ten to two. At this revelation, panic seized him, but immediately afterwards he noticed Mademoiselle Rinquet lying in wait as it were in his father's armchair.

Then anger swept over him again, like blood going to his head. Red in the face a moment before, he turned deathly pale, his nostrils twitched, his eyes narrowed, and it was obvious that nothing was going to stop him now.

‘What's the old cat waiting for?'

‘Roger, be quiet, will you? Why, you've been drinking! Mademoiselle Rinquet has been kind enough to wait up with me. We've been up to the Pont d'Amercoeur a score of times and I even asked at the police-station, thinking that you might have had an accident.'

‘She'd have been delighted!'

‘Roger! Go straight to bed. Tomorrow you'll beg her pardon.'

‘Me? Not likely! I hate her. I despise her. She's a spiteful woman who doesn't deserve to live, and you know it. If there were any justice in this world, it's rubbish like her they'd send on to the battlefields instead of killing poor soldiers.'

Élise grew hysterical, trying in vain to silence him and finding no better way than shouting louder than him.

‘You're mad! You're absolutely mad! Mademoiselle Rinquet, my son has gone mad! It's a scandal! What have I done to deserve this? And all this time, his father's been so sick with anxiety that he's had to go to bed …'

At the word
father
, Roger had rushed out of the kitchen. He went up the stairs four at a time and stopped for a moment on the landing to calm down a little. While he was standing there, motionless, with one hand on his pounding heart, a voice said softly:

‘Is that you, son?'

The door was ajar, and the night-light which he had had when he was a little boy was burning. It was all so unusual that Roger shivered, seized by a mortal fear.

‘Is it true that you're ill?'

The worst of it was that drunkenness was still clogging his mouth and he stumbled over the syllables.

‘Your mother always exaggerates. You've come home, that's the main thing. Hurry off to bed now.'

On a sudden impulse, Roger threw himself on the bed with his head on his father's chest. Sobbing, he tried to stammer out an apology, but he had a lump in his throat. A hand stroked his wet hair—he didn't know why his hair was wet—and then he heard Élise's voice, and the kitchen door opening.

And his father murmured, as if there were no need of any further explanations between them:

‘Hurry off to bed. Good night, son.'

The next morning, at the bottom of one of his pockets, he had found a little crackled photograph showing a boy between fourteen and fifteen, in a Tyrolean costume, standing on a mountain covered with fir-trees. The boy was holding the hand of a little girl in a short skirt who must have been his sister.

He remained perplexed for a long time, until at last there came back to his memory the picture of a Feldwebel with a red moustache who was humming a song of his own country and swaying from side to side on a bench, his hand under a skinny woman's skirts.

Mademoiselle Rinquet had rushed around all day to find a room, and in the evening she had come for her things with a carrier.

Then Élise, who had cried all the time she was doing her house-work, had said with a sigh of relief, after shutting the door on the old shrew:

‘Good riddance!'

‘G
IVE
me your arm, will you, Roger. If you only knew how often, when you were little, I told my friends at L'Innovation: “You wait until I go out on my son's arm and people take him for my sweet-heart!” '

Élise made an effort to smile, to rid that smile of anything which might resemble melancholy. Arm-in-arm, they walked along the Quai de Coronmeuse. The next day, Roger would take to school a note from Désiré saying that his son had been ill, although Father Renchon already knew the truth. Roger had told him the day before:

‘I'm going with my mother and some cousins of mine to collect some food about twelve miles away, the other side of Visé, just by the Dutch frontier.'

It was nine o'clock in the morning, the time of day he liked best, when the streets primmed themselves up and the sun still had all its promising brightness. True, as soon as evening came, Roger was drawn by the ambiguous atmosphere of the ill-lit town, and even if he had promised himself not to go out, he only had to see through his window the bluish halo of a gas-lamp or an anonymous couple brushing past the houses to set off for unavowable walks lasting hours at a time.

In spite of all that, he remained essentially a man of the morning. Of all his memories, the best were those of spring mornings, the Passerelle spanning the sparkling Meuse, a thin mist still clinging to things, the noise of the vegetable market in the Place Cockerill, and then, on the river-bank, La Goffe, littered with baskets of sweet-smelling fruit and crowded with big-buttocked women.

‘You tell everybody that I cry and complain because I like it, but it isn't true, Roger. You see, I've had so few good moments in my life! You yourself, you've often hurt me. But we're happy together, aren't we?'

Yes, they were happy together. It touched Roger to sense her trembling on his arm, such a little girl and so vulnerable that he felt he had become a man as a result.

‘If I've taken in lodgers, and if I've clipped them as much as I could, it's been for your sake, so that one day you'd be somebody. And you hurt me so badly when you heap reproaches on me! My only joy in life is to see you healthy and well dressed, to know that you want for nothing.'

‘Yes, Mother.'

And he honestly wondered if he was not going to fulfil Élise's dream. There were several men in embryo inside him and there was still time for him to make a choice. His mother's ideal was Monsieur Herman, the first violin at the Théâtre Royal, who had never married so as to stay with his old mother. She was a dainty little thing, so fresh-faced and so neatly dressed that Élise could not suppress a pang of envy when she looked at their house with the white door in the Rue Pasteur where mother and son doted on one another like sweethearts.

Roger was not a musician. He could probably follow a career like that of Vriens, the Walloon poet whom he met every morning on the embankment, wearing a huge black hat and a loosely tied bow, his eyes dreamy, his smile kindly. He wrote love songs in dialect which everybody hummed, and there was nobody who did not know him, nobody who did not turn round to look at him as he went by, drawing calmly and greedily on his pipe, on his way to work at the municipal library at Les Chiroux.

He knew Roger, who was his most regular customer, or had been until a few weeks earlier. He had been encouraging him to write poetry for a long time now.

Élise also dreamt of a cake-shop where a sturdy, good-natured Roger would toil away in the scented warmth of the bakehouse while she herself, neat and trim in an embroidered white apron crackling with starch, would serve tarts across a marble counter.

‘It's such a fine trade, Roger! Have you ever seen a confectioner who was poor? Besides, all businesses that sell food do well. Just look at the butchers. I wouldn't like you to be a butcher, but there isn't a single one that isn't well-off.'

On mornings like this, it seemed as if the town, in order to win him over, was trying to show him a simple, cordial face. Over there, on the other side of the river crowded with rows of barges, there were the baths where he went every morning with his grandfather and his old cronies. Hadn't a Monsieur Fourneau, for example, always accompanied by his dog Rita, which he sent diving for pebbles, discovered the secret of perfect happiness?

It was sufficient to create for each and every day a certain number of habits, rites, little pleasures, and life flowed along gently, uneventfully, almost without your noticing the passage of time.

In the Saint-Léonard district, people said of Monsieur Fourneau, as they said of Chrétien Mamelin in the Rue Puits-en-Sock:

‘He's such a good fellow!'

Roger had taken another road and occasionally he felt rather frightened, for he did not know where it led. On this road, along which a mysterious force was driving him—his mother would say that it was his evil instincts—there would be nobody to give him approval or assistance, nobody to comfort him in case of failure.

‘It's like my sister Louisa, Roger. I know you can't stand her. I admit she doesn't do anything to make people love her. But one day I'll tell you her life-story and you'll forgive her, I'm sure of that. In the meantime, try to be a little nicer to her, even if it's only to please me.'

He promised. What wouldn't he have promised today? The slightest thing was capable of making him cry. Part of his childhood was smiling at him and timidly trying to hold him back, while he could feel that he was being dragged along in a course on which he had embarked almost without knowing it.

‘You're going to see my friend Éléonore Dafnet, whom you don't know yet. But she knows you well. At L'Innovation, she was on the next counter to mine. She wasn't happy, because her father drank. When you were born, it was she who gave you the little silver bell that bears the mark of your first teeth. She's married a Lanaeken farmer. It must have been awful for a girl as delicate and sensitive as Éléonore. I met her one evening last week in the Rue Neuvice and we fell into each other's arms. Straight away, she said to me:

‘ “You know, Élise, if you're short of food, don't hesitate to come to us. We live rather far away, but you've got a big son now who must be a great help to you.” '

He registered the reproach—an involuntary reproach, for his mother too wanted there to be no more unpleasantness between them. For two months now, he had not once offered to go for the rations. Élise spent her days queueing, now for bread, now for bacon from America, rice, potatoes or coal. On Monday she had hired a handcart which she had pushed through the streets, loaded with a couple of bags of coal, and she had had to ask a passer-by to help her to take them down to the cellar.

‘If it wasn't for the war, we'd be so happy, the three of us!'

He could feel himself being sucked down into warmth and sunshine and reassurance. A few more yards and they had arrived at Aunt Louisa's shop, the glazed door with the transparent advertisements which had never changed, the smell of gin and spices, and the calendar with the two girls on it, the brunette and the blonde.

‘Anna will be ready in a minute. The little Duchêne girls have gone to get some bread. Come in, Élise. Come in, Roger. Dear God, how he's grown! Anna! Anna! Hurry up. Élise is down here.'

They could hear Anna, the eldest of the Jusseaume girls, getting dressed on the first floor, where Roger had never been. They found Monique Duchêne standing in the kitchen, wearing a long, light-coloured dress with a floral pattern and an Italian straw hat with a pale blue ribbon. She had been crying and was still dabbing her eyes with a handkerchief rolled into a ball.

‘Poor Monique,' sighed Élise as she kissed her. ‘You're coming with us, then? You're sure it won't be too tiring for you?'

Tall and slim, she made you think of a frail flower whose stem bent in the slightest breath of air. Everything about her was as delicate and misty as a pastel drawing.

Aunt Louisa broke in:

‘It's no use me telling her that everything will work out all right, that God can't want Évariste to be unhappy, she just goes on tormenting herself. This morning, some neighbours told her that he'd written again to that woman.'

Not long ago, they would never have broached this subject in front of Roger. Probably they considered that he was big enough now to understand.

‘Who knows what lies she may be telling him? But I've written a long letter too, a letter I sent off yesterday with a bargee. When Évariste gets it, he'll realize on which side the truth lies.'

Why was it that on a morning like this, when he was feeling quite relaxed and wanted nothing more than to feel even more relaxed, he had to be bothered with this disgusting family matter?

Monique was a cousin, not of his, although he called her that, but of Évariste who was at the front and had given such an unpleasant reception to poor Jacques Schroefs.

She had two younger sisters, the girls who had gone to get some bread and were going to accompany them to Lanaeken. They lived in the same district, in the Rue Sainte-Foi, just behind the Quai de Coronmeuse. Their father was a doctor, but he had scarcely any patients. He was rarely to be seen and people talked about him as little as possible, for he was a strange man who had a vice: he was addicted to ether. Roger had caught sight of him twice: a bearded man with grey hair and a grey complexion, always dirty and shabbily dressed, with dandruff on the collar of his jacket and eyes as dull as those of the Rue de la Loi neighbour who had died of the sleeping-sickness.