Pedigree (73 page)

How could a man like that be the father of the poetic Monique whose feet scarcely touched the ground?

Évariste and Monique had been engaged. There had not been an official engagement, but it had always been understood that they would get married one day and that they would make a handsome couple. Évariste was tall and thin, with a rather grim face, for he was a conscientious young man who took life seriously. He had had only a year left to complete his studies for the Bar when the war had broken out.

Another catastrophe, for him, had occurred before the war. A local girl had had a child by him, a working-class girl, whose father, a sturdy little man, was night-watchman in a factory. This man, a stubborn, obstinate fellow, had come to see Louisa, and to all her objections had simply replied:

‘Only marriage will do.'

Louisa had tried everything. She had offered money. She had consulted a famous lawyer. She had even tried to find proof that the Prunier girl had had relations with other men, to show that Évariste was not necessarily the child's father.

It had all been in vain. A dozen times a day, Prunier had returned to the attack, truculent and abusive, shouting and gesticulating in the shop and even outside on the pavement where he threatened to stir up the passers-by, and constantly returning to his perpetual refrain:

‘Only marriage will do.'

They had been married two months before the war, when Thérèse Prunier was four months pregnant. She was a nondescript little thing, puny and pretty like so many others, a girl of the people who worked in a dressmaker's workshop.

Désiré had been the first to know, for it had been to him that Évariste, right from the start, had confided his troubles. Désiré had told nobody, not even Élise. She had wondered why Évariste, whom they never used to see before, came nearly every evening to the Rue de la Loi.

He was given to seeing life in a tragic light. It was in his nature. He liked taking up attitudes and watched himself living. On his wedding-day, in the Quai de Coronmeuse kitchen, pale and red-eyed, he had declared to his mother, who repeated his words as if they were a sacred text:

‘I am going to my wedding as I would to the funeral of my youthful hopes.'

The couple had not lived together. It had been decided that Thérèse should go on living at her parents' home and Évariste with his family until he had completed his studies.

The war had broken out, and Évariste had gone away before the birth of his son, who was a puny, highly strung child. He had had convulsions, and his mother had nearly died in childbirth. Who could say whether Louisa did not pray for things to work out that way?

Since then, Monique Duchêne had got into the habit of coming every day to the Quai de Coronmeuse, where she was treated as a daughter-in-law.

‘You haven't any news, have you, Aunt?'

She did not say mother yet, but the word was implied, and the two women behaved to one another as daughter-in-law and mother-in-law; they did not doubt for a moment that the matter would end like that, because it could not be otherwise, God would not allow it. They went to Mass together and could be seen together at Vespers and Benediction, praying, as Désiré put it, ‘to God at the foot of the Cross'. They burnt candles. Monique took part in all the charitable activities of the parish. She wrote to Évariste nearly every day, even though the opportunities of sending post by way of Holland were somewhat rare.

To begin with, the Pruniers had refused to allow the child to go to spend a day now and then at his paternal grandmother's home.

‘If the mother isn't good enough for them, they don't need the son either.'

The lawyers had been called in once more. The case had been taken to court. Louisa had won. Once a week, Thérèse's mother, who put a hat on only on this occasion, brought the child to the door of the shop, then went away, without a greeting, without a word. And in the evening it was Anna who took the child back to the little working-class house, ringing the bell, but hurrying away before anybody opened the door.

The whole family felt sorry for Monique and admired her heroism.

‘If you saw her with the child, Désiré, it would bring tears to your eyes. Though she's every reason to hate it, she loves it like a real mother because, as she says, it's Évariste's child. The day the little boy comes to Louisa's, she spends the whole day there. It's her that takes him out for a walk. She dressed him up from head to foot and do you know what those people did? They sent all the clothes back in a parcel that they left on the doorstep like thieves.'

Thérèse went on writing to Évariste. As if she could possibly love him!

‘You see, Élise, they've got only one thing in their heads: the idea that we've got money. The fact that Évariste is at the front doesn't stop that girl from running after men. I heard that she'd been seen with some Germans. I wrote to Évariste and told him so. I saw the lawyer again, and he told me that if Évariste wrote a letter that he drafted for me, I'd be given custody of the child. Monique would be so happy!'

And the latter sighed:

‘Évariste won't do it.'

‘Why not, seeing that he doesn't love that woman?'

‘He's too scrupulous. He wants to do his duty in spite of everything, to drain the cup to its dregs. I know that Thérèse has written to him telling the most awful lies about us. He must be so unhappy over there, all alone, and pulled this way and that!'

Anna had come downstairs, solidly built like her mother, with a mannish face. She put on her gloves and started looking for her parasol.

‘Haven't your sisters arrived yet, Monique? And I thought I was late. Good morning, Aunt. Isn't Roger with you?'

Roger had preferred to slip into the workshop which looked out on to the sunny yard, where his uncle, in the blue shadows, was plaiting scented wands in the company of the hunchbacked workman. It felt like another world. You could hear the hammers at Sauveur's, the trams going along the embankment and the Rue Sainte-Foi, the sirens of the tugs, and the buzzing of flies. Roger would have liked to be back in the far-away days when he used to come to choose a willow-wand which he would patiently peel afterwards, or the still more distant time when, a little short-legged fellow, he circled round his uncle, whom he did not know, finally asking anxiously:

‘Tell me, workman, don't people eat in this house?'

The yard had been bigger, the wall higher, the solitary tree enormous—that tree which sprang from between the uneven paving-stones and whose velvet leaves he stroked today, scarcely needing to stand on tip-toe to do so.

‘Roger! Where are you, Roger? We're going!'

He was full of goodwill this morning, as he gave his arm to his mother and tried to imagine her as a young girl lost in the immensity of L'Innovation. He was looking forward to going to Lanaeken with his cousins.

One of them, Colette, who was only a little older than he, was a pretty girl with bold eyes. Her fair hair hung down her back in two heavy plaits. She wore shorter skirts than other girls of her age and she had the gestures of a boy; several times they had pretended to fight so as to have an excuse for rolling about in the grass or the cornfields together.

The year before, when they had got into the habit of going picnicking all together on Moncin Island, two miles from Coronmeuse, he had been in love with Colette, in the right way, without any unhealthy curiosity or any thoughts which could make him blush.

He had admired her sister Monique who had walked nonchalantly behind them with the grown-ups, holding a parasol tilted to one side. Monique had reminded him of the mother of his little friend Jacques at Embourg, under the firs, and the pretty villa among the roses in the park.

Colette, who was still rather dry and angular, would become, he had thought, the image of her elder sister, for she had the same long face and pale blue eyes.

Now, he knew. Colette was like the girls you followed in the shadows of the Carré. She went with boys, let them pull her skirts up, and did dirty things in corners. She was well known in the district. Her other sister, who was not quite fifteen, was even more dissolute than she was. People said:

‘… The little Duchêne girls.'

That was enough. They provoked men, even married men. Respectable girls were forbidden to go out with ‘the doctor's girls'.

If Roger told his mother that, she would not believe it. She never believed anything that was ugly, especially if it had some connection with the family.

‘Will you be quiet, Roger. I don't know where you get ideas like that.'

Simply by keeping his eyes and ears open. Even now, walking beside the canal along the tow-path where the trees cast a diagonal shadow every few yards, he was listening without wanting to. He would have preferred to amble along, day-dreaming as he went, for of all the landscapes of his childhood, this was the one he loved best.

With a knapsack on his back and a stick in his hand, bare-headed and open-necked, he was walking in front with his two cousins. Élise, Anna and Monique followed, talking in an undertone, and stopping from time to time because Monique got out of breath easily.

Now and then they passed a barge gliding with a slight rippling of the water along the canal where, for no apparent reason, bubbles kept rising to the surface. They brushed past the tight cable and climbed the bank to avoid the slow-moving horse, which was followed by a carter or sometimes a child brandishing a switch.

The foliage over their heads formed a fresh, motionless canopy of a dark green colour which was reflected in the water, and less than a hundred yards to the right the Meuse flowed freely, without hindrance, towards the sea, spreading out between low banks and sparkling in the sunshine; there was an angler here and there, motionless under his straw hat, in a flat boat which stakes held in midstream. Everything was so quiet that you could hear the machinery of a lock creaking a mile away; a big bumble-bee went by, or else, far away, at the foot of the hills which were veiled for a moment by a long plume of white smoke, a train whistled frantically.

‘She went to the cinema with young Sauveur. Knowing how dumb he is, even worse than his father, you can imagine what fun she had! I said to her: “My dear girl, if you're going to pick a man …” '

They talked without stopping, breaking off only to burst out laughing.

‘Since Simone broke it off with Georges, she's been going with old men. You remember the one who wears white spats and followed us the whole of one Sunday afternoon? It seems that he's got a bachelor apartment not far from Hazinelle's school. He's a nobleman, but he hasn't got a penny to his name, and his family keeps him on a tight rein. Well, she went along with him. You'll never guess what he asked her to do …'

They whispered together, face to face, darting provocative glances at their cousin.

‘What would you have done in her place?'

Why, for heaven's sake, did Roger descend to asking them, crimson-faced:

‘What did he ask her to do?'

‘I can't tell you.'

‘Why not?'

‘Yolande! He wants to know why not!'

They burst out laughing, and went on keeping him in suspense.

‘Shall I tell him?'

‘Are you mad? If you tell him something like that, I won't stay another minute with you.'

‘Tell me, Colette.'

‘Guess. If you guess right, I'll tell you.'

There he was again with his fever in the blood and his shifty look. There were certain words which he did not dare to utter, even before a schoolmate. He tried to express himself by means of periphrases and vague gestures.

‘Was it that?'

‘You are a silly! If it had been that, Simone would have been only too pleased. Anybody can see that you don't know her.'

‘Then was it with the mouth?'

‘Did you hear that, Yolande? … He wants to know if it was … Say it again, Roger! … If you could see your face now! … Have you tried? … Who with? … Tell us … Where was it?'

He fixed his attention on the pure sight of the canal, longing to shake off the fever which had taken hold of him. He despised his cousins and all the girls they talked about.

‘Tell me what he asked her to do.'

‘Who said he asked her to do something?'

‘Then he asked her to let him do something to her?'

‘He's getting warm, isn't he, Yolande? Shall I tell him?'

‘If you do, I'll tell Monique where you went last night.'

‘Where did you go, Colette?'

They kept him on tenterhooks, playing with him and exchanging conspiratorial glances.

‘Do I ask you what you do with girls?'

He heard, closer to them, the voices of the three women following them.

‘I know that Évariste will never divorce her. Besides, Louisa would never agree to it. She's too much of a Catholic. One case in the family is enough. If you only knew how much it hurt my sister to marry a man who'd been divorced! And yet it wasn't his fault. It was his wife who had gone off with one of his workmen.'

Roger pricked up his ears, realizing that it was Aunt Louisa's husband, that quiet old man with a patriarchal beard, who was a divorced man. So from the religious point of view his aunt was not married; for all that she went to church morning and evening, she was living in a permanent state of mortal sin.

‘Believe me, poor Monique, as my sister says, everything will work out all right, for there's a God in heaven.'

Couldn't Roger, by means of a superhuman effort, manage to shake off this oppressive atmosphere with a tremendous roar of laughter? Were they mad? Were they monsters? Could they possibly be being sincere with themselves?

Aunt Louisa prayed to God to ‘work things out' without a divorce. What could that mean if not that God, in order that Évariste might be happy and marry his cousin, should call to rest the poor little sempstress who had not known how to avoid having a child?