Pedigree (78 page)

Roger ate his supper without being aware of it. He ate, but he was not hungry, and he listened attentively to the words his cousin pronounced, words which were promptly translated into pictures.

The Quai de Coronmeuse was familiar enough. He could see Monsieur Sauveur's house too. And Alice, panic-stricken, at the doctor's across the way. For it was Alice. Marie would not have thought of telephoning. She would not have known how to set about it.

‘It was another stroke of luck that they were at home. They'd just come back when the doorbell rang. They looked out of the window and saw an ambulance outside. It was your father whom they were bringing home from the Rue Sohet. He'd had an attack at the office. They did what they could for him there, and then Doctor Fischer, a specialist Monsieur Monnoyeur had sent for, brought him here himself. Just when your mother wasn't at home! We ran here as fast as our legs could carry us. I do believe we got here quicker than the tram. The doctor was still here when we arrived.'

‘What did he say?'

‘Eat up, Roger.'

‘I want to know exactly what he said.'

‘You understand, he can't say anything definite yet, but he thinks it won't be serious this time. The worst is over.'

‘Why do you say this time?'

‘Because there may be other attacks.'

‘Attacks of what?'

‘Your father's got a weak heart. Doctor Fischer's coming again tomorrow. He knew what it was beforehand, because Désiré had already consulted him several times. You're a man now, Roger. You must be a man, because your mother has to be able to count on you, whatever happens. Your father needs to take it easy. He must have a quiet life, without any excitement.'

Élise's voice, up above, called softly:

‘Can you come upstairs, Anna?'

His mother came down and slumped on to a chair as if her legs would no longer carry her. With her head in her hands, she started crying soundlessly. Roger went over to her and put an arm round her shoulders.

‘Don't cry, Mother.'

He murmured anything that came into his head. The words did not matter. He stroked her hair. Then, kneeling in front of her like the little boy of old, he put his head in her lap.

‘We'll take care of him and you'll see, we'll cure him all right. Don't cry. I'll be a man, I promise. I'll work. You see …'

How could he express what he felt, when he did not even dare to think it? And yet there was within him so to speak the certainty that this had been bound to happen. Nobody had known this, but it was something which had been decided beforehand. It was a horrible thing to say. There were no words to express an idea like that. It was inconceivable that it should be true. And yet, just now, when he had gone into the bedroom, it had seemed to him that his father could have murmured to him:

‘You see, son, I've set you free …'

For Roger was saved now. He was sure of that. He squeezed his mother's hands in his and gazed intently at her tear-stained face.

‘Anna says it isn't a serious attack…'

‘There'll be more of them. I know that. Doctor Fischer told me. He asked me if I was strong enough to bear the truth. He isn't one of those doctors who go on lying to a family to the very end. Désiré has been suffering for a long time from angina pectoris, but he kept it from us so as not to frighten us. And I was so cruel to him!'

‘What are you saying, Mother?'

‘You can't know. I'll never forgive myself. When I think that I reproached him for not worrying what would become of me if something happened to him! Now I know, from Doctor Fischer, that he applied for a life-insurance policy a long time ago and that his application was turned down.'

She glanced automatically at the alarm-clock.

‘I must give my lodgers their supper all the same. It's too late for Anna to go back home. You'll let her have your bed and sleep on the chaise-longue in the dining-room. It seems he'll be able to get up in two or three days. He may go on for years without another attack, but on the other hand he may be carried off from one minute to the next. It really is the most horrible disease there is. To think that from now on I've got to live with the idea that I may be called to the telephone at any time to be told …'

She laid the table, performed the usual everyday gestures, made up the fire, poured the boiling water on the coffee.

‘Where are you going, Roger?'

He did not know where he was going, possibly into the dining-room where nobody ever set foot and the shutters stayed closed from one year's end to the other. He wanted to be alone. His head was spinning. He thought that he had detected a reproach in his mother's voice and he stayed to reassure her.

‘You'll see, I'll help you. I'll go and find a job tomorrow.'

But no, it wasn't possible! Was it true that he felt a sort of relief at his father's illness? He experienced a need to protest and the protest itself hurt him. He would do anything for his father to be well again and for the threat hanging over his life to disappear for ever.

Yet now, from one minute to the next, everything had been settled of what had previously been so heavy with potential misfortune. Nobody had said anything about the horrible scene the day before. Perhaps nobody would ever say anything about it again, at least for a long time to come. He was going to leave school. He would not have to sit for his examinations, or suffer the humiliation of the inevitable failure.

His mother called out automatically at the foot of the stairs:

‘Mademoiselle Alice! Mademoiselle Marie!'

They came and sat down at table, rather self-consciously. Élise tried to look on the cheerful side of things.

‘You'll see, it won't be anything serious. The doctor says that a week from now, it will be just a bad memory. You must have been frightened, Mesdemoiselles. It would have to happen when you were alone in the house! It's a good thing that you knew where I was and that you thought of telephoning me.'

All that time, Roger had been playing billiards, over the Palace, circling with other dummies round tables lit by reflectors. Then he had accompanied Stievens to his house and had wandered interminably through the streets.

‘I'm going upstairs to relieve Anna,' he announced. ‘Are there any drops to be given?'

‘Nothing more until eleven o'clock. What he needs now is absolute rest. He must sleep too.'

It was Roger's night-light which was being used again. Walking on tiptoe, he motioned to Anna, who got up to give him her seat. The door-hinges creaked slightly, then there was nothing to be heard but a gentle murmur of voices and the sound of plates clattering in the kitchen. With his chin in his hands, Roger gazed intently at his father, who was sleeping and whose moustache quivered with every breath.

C
ONTRARY
to what he would have imagined in the past, it was the passers-by who were in the aquarium and it was he who, through the bookshop window, watched them with a curiosity tinged with pity.

The most astonishing thing was the serious, not to say solemn expressions which people's faces assumed, just as they were indulging in their most ridiculous gestures.

The frame—the aquarium—was bigger or smaller depending on whether Roger was standing near the window or at the back of the bookshop. When he was in the back-room, which was known as the office, this field of vision, framed in the communicating hatch lined with books, was reduced to the proportions of a cinema screen.

Well, in spite of what you imagined when you were in the street yourself, the passers-by had exactly the same jerky walk as the characters on the screen, particularly the comic characters, those who gesticulated more wildly than the rest.

Whether they came in from the left or the right, they looked as if they had been hurled by a catapult into this piece of world which was barely sixty feet long, and as if they were racing each other across it, their eyes set, their jaws jutting fiercely, to disappear again into nothingness.

All day long, Roger could read on the window, the wrong way round, the words:
Germain's Bookshop
, and, in smaller enamel letters:
Lending Library
. All day long, on the other side of this frontier, people stopped short, as if a spring had broken inside them.

You could then see them from the front, in close-up. They did not move, but stayed there side by side, sometimes five or six in a row, not knowing one another, lost in the contemplation of the yellow-backed books in the window-display.

It was inconceivable that they should be thinking, in spite of their tense features and the often dramatic expression on their faces. They were simply waiting for the reverse switch to work, which would send them back into their jerky walk and carry them off the stage.

The yellow trams, which went past minute by minute making a tremendous din, were not to be taken any more seriously, with the driver rigid on the platform in front, the conductor on the one at the back, and two rows of wobbling heads inside; and it would be no surprise if, like a toy which was out of order, they went hurtling against a real wall.

The patterns of light and shade changed from hour to hour, almost from minute to minute. Over the way, there was a shoe-shop with two elegant windows and a door which was open all the time. The shop-girls, who wore white collars over black dresses, went to and fro in the half-light, and now and then one of them, showing a customer to the door, leant outside, on the point of crossing the frontier into the street. She was within an ace of being caught up in the mechanism, but she sensed the danger and plunged nimbly back into her world of white boxes piled up like bricks.

All that was tiny and unreal. The solid world began near the window of the bookshop with Mademoiselle Georgette sitting behind a high desk. Roger, perched on a bamboo ladder, coughed to attract her attention and said in a voice which he had not known he possessed before, a voice which he had acquired in this shop:

‘843.'

At her cash-desk, Mademoiselle Georgette, the bookseller's niece, turned the pages of a register in search of the figure 843, which was the number of a customer's subscription. When she stopped going through the book and lowered her pen on to one page, he knew that he could go on:

‘Returned: 2656.'

She repeated in an undertone, without looking up:

‘2656.'

That was the catalogue number of a book. The books in the lending library were distinguished from those which were for sale by being bound in black cloth, with a tiny label at the bottom of the spine bearing a number in purple ink.

‘Borrowed: 4562.'

Who could say why this was a pleasure? For it was a pleasure for him, just as it must be a pleasure for a juggler to see his white balls fall into his hand at the right moment like obedient, well-trained, living creatures. A customer asked for a book? In the twinkling of an eye Roger had reached the special catalogue which hung between two sets of shelves. O … O … Here was O …
Le Maître des Forges
… 4562. That pleased him, for he had remembered that it was in the four thousands … The third set of shelves on the left, going from the corner of the counter …
Le Maître des Forges
had been brought back the day before, he was sure of that … Two shelves down from the ceiling … He slid the bamboo ladder along on its rod and climbed up, scarcely touching the rungs and not touching the uprights at all … He balanced up there, without holding on with his hands, and took the opportunity, by means of an acrobatic feat, to put 2656 back in its place. An Halévy probably … He could have sworn it was an Halévy …

The proof that it was a pleasure was that Monsieur Germain had come out of his den.

‘Why don't you come down?'

‘I am coming down, Monsieur.'

‘Make sure it isn't a new book, Georgette.'

Roger said:

‘No, Monsieur. It's a Georges Ohnet.'

He was in the wrong. Try as he might, he was always in the wrong, and Monsieur Germain made that clear to him with an angry glare.

‘Have you finished cutting those pages?'

‘Yes, Monsieur.'

‘Have you stuck on the new labels?'

‘Yes, Monsieur.'

How could an old man like Monsieur Germain, who was over seventy and was considered the most serious bookseller in the town, get up to tricks like that? There he was, exasperated, annoyed, unhappy, because he could not find anything to give Roger to do in order to keep him away from the customers. And that simply because he could feel that Roger enjoyed serving them.

People were not in this world, still less in Germain's Bookshop, to enjoy themselves. Work was a punishment from Heaven.

‘Go and write out a new set of labels, from 1 to 10,000.'

There were already three sets ready for use, and the labels on the spines of the books were changed only when they came unstuck. Never mind! Roger would be deprived of the pleasure of serving subscribers and balancing like a monkey on the ladders.

‘Why, Monsieur Hiquet, didn't
you
serve that lady?'

‘I beg your pardon, Monsieur …'

Well done! Unlike Roger, the chief assistant got suitably flustered, looked even unhappier than usual, and ended up by stammering like a criminal caught in the act:

‘I was in the smallest room.'

Everybody knew that he had to go there twenty times a day on account of his faulty bladder, that it was sheer torture for him, and that he always came back looking ill. Now, Monsieur Germain also had trouble with his bladder, like most men of his age. Seeing Hiquet go pale, he could constantly assure himself that his complaint was mild in comparison with his employee's sufferings.

All this was true. Roger had discovered it long ago. Outwardly, Monsieur Germain was a grave, impressive figure. His thick white hair was cut short. All the white hairs on his face grew horizontally and his eyebrows were as long and as thick as his moustache. You never heard him coming, and he obviously wore special shoes which made no noise. Broad-shouldered though he was, you had the impression that inside his ample clothes there was just a body with no bones or muscles, floating silently in space.