Pedigree (77 page)

The lodgers lived in the same room, the handsome corner room which had been Mademoiselle Rinquet's. Roger had the room on the right, looking out on the boulevard, and his parents the one on the left, on the Rue des Maraîchers side.

The communicating doors between the three rooms were all bolted. What is more, in the girls' room, a wardrobe blocked Roger's door.

The latter had not been able to go out the day before, for want of money. He had not wanted to stay in the kitchen and had gone upstairs straight after supper, a prey to angry thoughts. He had stayed for a long time stretched out on his bed in the dark, his eyes open, his gaze fixed on the lace curtains whose complicated pattern stood out sharply in the moonlight.

Then he had heard Marie and Alice coming upstairs and whispering in their room. One of them had started tapping on the wall while they had tried to bottle up their laughter.

‘Are you asleep?'

At first he had maintained a sulky silence, but he had ended up by replying:

‘No.'

‘What are you doing?'

‘Nothing.'

They were in high spirits. He could still hear their voices and their laughter. Then he had heard a dull rumble and realized that they were trying to move the wardrobe.

He had been frightened, really frightened, sensing that nothing would stop them and that, for his part, he was ready to take any risks.

‘Are you there, Roger? Can you hear me?'

‘Yes.'

‘Would you like to come and eat some chocolates with us?'

They nudged each other, on the point of bursting out laughing, as girls always were. The bolt was pulled back and the door opened; he could only just make out the two figures in the dark room, which had a different smell from his own room, and he had the impression that the girls were as frightened as he was.

It was a gesture of defiance. Downstairs, just below them, Élise and Désiré were sitting in the sluggish atmosphere of the kitchen, and the house was so quiet that now and then you could hear the ‘poof' of the stove and you had the impression of hearing Désiré turning the pages of his newspaper.

Was it conceivable that Élise was not cocking her ears at the furtive movements of Roger and the two girls?

‘Where are the chocolates?' he asked, with a lump in his throat.

‘There aren't any. It was a trick to make you come.'

Why were they laughing like that? They were mad. Anybody would have thought that they had been drinking or that they had an idea up their sleeves.

‘Well, Marie, are you happy now?' asked Alice. ‘Don't take any notice of me, you two. I'm going to sleep.'

And the redhead lay down on the bed while fat Marie protested, probably going red in the face.

‘What are you talking about, Alice? You mustn't believe her, Roger. I didn't say anything.'

‘Are you pretending that you didn't tell me that you'd give a lot to have him kiss you?'

‘Shut up!'

‘What are you waiting for, Roger? I swear it's true. She's mad about you. She talks about you from morning till night. The other day, she tried to pinch your picture from your mother's album.'

There was still time. Roger had only to go away, but he did not dare to, restrained by self-respect and perhaps also a more complicated feeling. Not for anything in the world did he want to show that he was afraid of his mother, and yet, just now, he really was afraid of her. She was busy peeling carrots, he knew that; he had the impression that he could see her using the paring-knife, and his father sitting in the wickerwork armchair, holding his newspaper in front of him.

‘Wait a minute, Roger. If she's going to pretend she doesn't want to, I'll hold her for you.'

And Alice sprang to her feet and ran after her, the two girls rushing from one corner of the room to another on tip-toe, hushing each other and finally rolling on to the bed.

‘You can come now. I'm holding her. Don't scratch me, you big silly! Seeing that you want to! You know, Roger, I do believe that she's never been kissed by a boy, and I've known her a long time.'

Roger had found himself lying between them in the dark. His lips had pressed against the lips of the amorous Marie while his hands were searching for the other girl's hands, and their fingers had intertwined as if to say:

‘It's all a joke. We're making fun of the poor girl. She's such a ninny!'

‘Are you happy, Marie? Is it good?'

And Roger's hands let go of hers to slip into her bodice. He bore down on them with his full weight. The laughing stopped. Perhaps all three of them felt rather ashamed, but their faces were invisible and they did not know how to extricate themselves from the situation they had got into. Now and then the springs creaked and then Roger cocked his ears, holding his breath, convinced that he was going to hear the kitchen door open at any moment.

Alice's hands were as bold as his. He stayed face to face with Marie, but it was on to her friend that he gradually slipped his body.

Earlier on, when he had come into the room, he had not meant to do anything whatever. Even now there was no desire in him. Why then did he insist on undressing the fat girl, whom he ended up by stripping to the waist and who, as her only defence, kept her hand desperately over her sex?

‘Go on!' Alice whispered to him. ‘Do her up!'

Then, impelled by heaven knows what complicated desire of vengeance, it was on Alice that he did a mime of love. He did not make love to her. The idea did not occur to him. But he exaggerated the pretence, and Marie lay there beside them, her belly bare, not understanding and suffering while the other girl, to complete the illusion, started heaving sighs.

The kitchen door had opened. There had been a silence. They could imagine Élise standing in the hall, her face turned towards the staircase well, listening. All three held their breaths while she finally came upstairs and put her ear to the door.

‘Did you call me, Mesdemoiselles?'

It was Alice who managed to reply in a toneless voice:

‘No, Madame.'

Then Élise had opened Roger's door. There was nothing separating them, since the communicating door was open. They could distinctly hear her breathing. She had hesitated, obviously tempted to go in.

Finally she had gone downstairs, and after a long period of silent immobility Alice had given a hysterical laugh.

‘What's she going to say? You don't think she'll throw us out, do you?'

‘No fear. She's far too keen on her lodgers!'

He was ashamed of this uncalled-for piece of spite, but he had to say something. Marie started crying and finally got up, pulling her dress down.

‘I think I'd better leave you two by yourselves.'

‘There's no need to now,' the other girl replied. ‘We've finished. All you had to do was let him get on with it. Isn't that so, Roger?'

‘Of course.'

All this set your nerves on edge. Roger was keyed up and he would have liked to have a fit of hysterics like his mother to ease the tension.

‘Where are you going?'

‘To bed.'

Marie was fool enough to light the oil-lamp and the three of them looked like ghosts. Downstairs, they could hear Élise's monotonous voice and, now and then, Désiré's bass trying to calm her down in a murmur.

Roger had not gone downstairs. He had slept badly. He had walked in his sleep twice, something which often happened to him now, just as it had when he was little. He must have called out, for his parents had got up. He remembered his father, in his night-shirt and barefoot, gently taking him back to bed. His night-light had been left burning on a corner of the mantelpiece.

In the morning, he had deliberately gone downstairs when everybody was already at table. Marie was as red as a tomato, incapable of swallowing a single mouthful. Alice, on the other hand, was chattering away, and Élise was answering her while trying to assume a friendly expression.

He had kissed his mother as he did every morning. She had not returned his kiss. All the same, she had given him his breakfast and a franc for his dinner. She had announced that she was going to spend the afternoon at Aunt Louisa's and asked the lodgers to have a look at the fire when they came home.

He had scarcely seen his father. He had preferred not to see him. If he had been only a year older, he would have crossed the frontier to enlist, for youths had been accepted who were under seventeen. What was he going to do in two months' time, when the results of the examinations were announced? He did not want to pass. It was a futile humiliation, if only with regard to Father Renchon who pretended to have forgotten that he existed.

Now he was playing billiards with Stievens whose ambition it was to look like a fashion-plate. He circled round the green cloth with a mechanical walk, envying the others in the room, all those placid men who were not forced to face problems like his.

They were notabilities of the town, solicitors, big business men. Nearly all of them were fifty or more, and they had not a single glance to spare for those two adolescents carefully copying their gestures and attitudes.

‘What are you doing tonight?'

‘I'm going to bed,' replied Stievens, who was a great sleeper.

Gaston Van de Waele had gone off for a few days to Neeroeteren, where soon he would be saying grace, in all seriousness, at the head of the table.

Roger had rarely felt his solitude so keenly. It seemed to him that his fate was like no other and that consequently nobody in the whole world was capable of understanding him.

‘Shall we have another game?'

‘No. My mother has some guests this evening and I promised to be home early.'

Even Stievens was deserting him! They crossed the auditorium of the Palace just as the orchestra was playing its finale and a thousand people were all hurrying at once towards the door with the same sound of shuffling feet as at the end of a High Mass.

Outside, it was still light. The sun, although it was no longer visible, was still filling the streets with that uniform light which comes from nowhere. A red gable became as bright as a fire, and an attic window in the middle of a slate roof blazed with a thousand flames which hurt the eyes.

‘You're coming my way?' asked the surprised Stievens, who lived in the opposite direction from Roger.

‘I'll walk with you part of the way.'

When he left his friend at his door, he was even more at a loss, not knowing what to do or where to go, and putting off the moment of pushing open the kitchen door in the Rue des Maraîchers.

He had not a single centime left. He had not dared to ask Stievens to pay for him and had just had a glass of beer. He was not really hungry, despite the fact that he had had nothing to eat since the morning. It was a heavy feeling, an uneasiness which he could not place.

Surprised to find himself back in the middle of the Passerelle, he gazed at the Meuse, which was taking on a metallic colour, and at the pink faces of the passers-by, flushed by the setting sun.

At home, everybody would be at table. It had been a mistake to dawdle. In front of the lodgers, Élise would probably not have dared to say anything and that would have given him time to eat. He quickened his step and ended up by almost running. There was no doubt about that, and later on he would be tempted to believe that it was a presentiment.

He opened the door with his key. Straight away, he felt there was something unusual about the house. He could not see anybody through the curtain hanging over the glazed kitchen door, and the table was not laid. As panic-stricken as a child, he shouted:

‘Mother!'

There was some movement up above, and he rushed upstairs. A door opened, the door of his parents' room, but it was his cousin Anna who appeared, very upright, very stiff, one finger at her lips, and said:

‘Ssh, Roger.'

Some misfortune had occurred. The mere presence of Anna on the threshold of that room was a sign of misfortune. Roger's first idea was that his mother had committed a desperate act. He pushed his cousin to one side and stood motionless, a prey to a terrible feeling at the sight of the bedroom filled with the pink light of evening.

Désiré was lying on the bed, his head supported by several pillows. On the bedside table there were some medicine bottles, and a strong hospital smell was floating in the air. Élise was standing by the bed, snivelling, and trying to smile so as not to cry.

‘Come in, Roger. Shut the door, Anna. Don't make any noise. Come here very quietly and kiss your father.'

Désiré looked at him and there was such happiness in his brown eyes at the sight of his son that you could tell straight away that he had thought that he would never see him again.

Roger kissed him, close to the stiff moustache which still smelled of tobacco.

‘It's nothing, son. Don't cry.'

‘No, it's nothing,' Élise hurriedly declared. ‘An attack of intercostal neuralgia, that's what the doctor told us, isn't it, Anna? It's frightening when it happens, but a week from now there won't be any sign of it.'

She was talking as people talk to the sick, to reassure them. Roger could feel that his father did not believe her. He would have liked to stay alone with him. Désiré was in a feeble condition, and his voice sounded like Cécile's.

‘Go and have your supper, son. They've given me something to make me sleep. Above all, you must have enough to eat.'

It was Anna who went down to the kitchen with him and served him on a corner of the table, while at the same time telling him what had happened.

‘Just imagine, your mother was at our house when they came from Sauveur's to say that she was wanted on the telephone. We'd just sat down at table to have some coffee. Monique, who was there too, had a feeling straight away that something had happened and she wouldn't let your mother go by herself. It was one of your lodgers, I don't know which, who was telephoning from the doctor's across the street from here.'