She had already felt like crying, possibly before dinner, before Désiré had come home from the Rue Puits-en-Sock. She had planned everything beforehand, and the scene always took place at the very last moment, when the other two thought that at last they were going to set out.
‘I’d better stay behind. You go with the child!’
‘What should I be doing by myself at your sister’s?’
‘And what about me when I have to shut myself up for hours in the Rue Puits-en-Sock or at Françoise’s?’
‘Oh, come now, Élise! I didn’t say that I don’t want to go to your sister’s. I just said …’
‘No! Leave me alone! You’d better not say any more. Go on! Get out! I’ll stay here with Roger.’
‘You know very well they’re expecting us.’
‘Is it me they’re expecting? No, it’s you. Hubert wants to talk to you again about insurance or heaven knows what, to make you do the work he daren’t give to his accountant. The last time, you stayed shut up in his office for three hours. If you think that’s enjoyable.’
‘You were with your sister.’
Often she undressed and threw herself on the bed, at the end of her tether and at a loss for arguments. Then, a quarter of an hour later, she washed her eyes with cold water, put her dress on again, and stuck her long hat-pins in at random.
‘Can you see that I’ve been crying?’
They set off. They crossed the Pont-Neuf or the Passerelle. They rang the bell. They whispered while the maid came downstairs.
‘You’ll see, the children will have gone out again.’
Why should that matter to Élise? Did she come for the children’s sake? Why did she insist that they were invited as stopgaps because the Schroefs were bored on Sundays, because they had no friends, because they were lonely in their big freestone house and Hubert dreaded being left alone with his wife?
‘Listen, Désiré, if Marthe is squiffy, I’m not staying. You do what you like, I’m going.’
‘Ssh!’
Footsteps. As if in obedience to a signal, Élise assumed her bent attitude and her amiable smile, expressing gratitude in advance.
Hubert came to meet them on the landing and they could tell that he had just got up with a sigh of relief from his leather armchair by the gas-fire in the dining-room. That was his corner. The dining-room smelled of cold cigar: he had a cigar-stub between his moustache and his beard.
‘How are you keeping?’
He shook hands with Désiré but scarcely noticed Élise. As for the child, he had probably never spoken to him and would not recognize him in the street.
‘Marthe must be in her bedroom, or in the box-room.’
‘Thank you, Hubert.’
He was dressed in his weekday suit, a long, full jacket in steel-grey, which looked rather like a frock-coat, over a waistcoat crossed by a heavy watch-chain hung with charms. He was wearing his bowler-hat, which he kept on by the fire, out of force of habit, because his life, his real life, consisted of bustling about downstairs, going into the yard a dozen times to supervise the loading of a wagon, climbing the ladders in the huge warehouses, hurrying in and out, watching his men and picking up a tool himself to open a crate which had just arrived.
‘Sit down, Désiré. Have a cigar.’
The newspapers, which he had read from back to front while he had been waiting, were scattered on the table. He regulated the gas, crossed his short legs, and relit his cigar-stub.
‘Well, what news?’
Élise was right, the children had gone out. They had some little friends of their own age, and each in turn gave a coffee-party on Sunday or Thursday. The maid took them, bringing them home at dusk.
Marthe was not ready. On Sundays she lacked the courage to get dressed. She took the opportunity to open cupboards, to change the contents round, to arrange and sort things, without any taste for what she was doing, without any enthusiasm, her feet in soft slippers.
‘Sit down, Élise. I’ll have finished in a minute.’
‘Do you want me to help?’
The street itself was calculated to upset the Schroefs, that street which was so busy during the week, full of wagons unloading quarters of various animals in the din from the meat market, and which all of a sudden, on Sunday, was utterly deserted, with not even a cat in it, so that you might have thought that the houses were empty.
‘Is Marthe keeping well?’
Hubert heaved a sigh and looked as if he were going to touch wood.
‘She’s in a good period.’
Nobody took any notice of Roger. The women half disappeared into the cupboards stuffed with linen and clothes.
‘You aren’t expecting anybody, are you, Marthe? I’m always so afraid of being in the way.’
‘You know very well that you’re never in the way, silly. Who do you think we’d be expecting? Apart from Van Camp …’
He might come along, by himself or with his fat pink wife, his infantile wife as Marthe called her.
‘I assure you she’s really infantile. You feel like giving her a sweet to suck.’
In a few minutes they would be sure to hear the two men leave the dining-room to go downstairs to the office where Hubert always had some papers to show Désiré. Schroefs would fall ill if he could not go downstairs to the office.
Finally, when little Monsieur Van Camp, with his shining pate, arrived, he would be shown upstairs with his wife, they would sit down in the dining-room, and Marthe would call out through the half-open door:
‘I’ll be with you in a minute! Excuse me, won’t you?’
Léontine would make the coffee in the kitchen.
‘Léontine, take the child with you. He’s bored here.’
The house was like a garment too big for the wearer in which he feels more uncomfortable than in one which is too small. Nobody knew where to go. At the far end of the kitchen there was a door which led to a world which was literally infinite, the world of the warehouses where the goods were stocked.
It was a three-storeyed block, with big rectangular holes in the floors, ladders, pulleys, walls of crates, mountains of sacks and bales. There was straw lying about on the concrete floor, coffee beans and bits of cinnamon, and when you leaned out of one of the unglazed windows, you could see, in the stables at the back of the yard, behind the shed where the wagons were kept, the five horses with their strong cruppers and the groom shaping a piece of wood or repairing a whip.
‘Léontine! Go and tell Monsieur that the coffee is ready.’
All this time, Élise had been trotting along behind her sister, trying to make herself useful and speaking in odd snatches.
‘Talking of Eugénie, just imagine, she’s working in the district, so that we risk meeting her any day in her old things and without a hat.’
Tomorrow it would be over, and a new week of real life would begin. Hubert Schroefs would be the first to go downstairs, at seven o’clock, in his frock-coat jacket, with his bowler-hat on the back of his head and his cigar in the corner of his mouth. He would walk round the office, the yard, the stables and the warehouses. He would go on living his life until the evening, and when he finally came upstairs again, he would slump into an armchair. Then, after dinner, he would stretch his legs out in front of the gas-fire and bury himself in the newspaper.
‘Coffee’s ready, everyone.’
Tarts. Cakes. Van Camp could scarcely speak French. In any case, he did not talk much. He was satisfied like that, breathing in the atmosphere which surrounded Schroefs, the great man of his village.
At home, he was unhappy. He had made the mistake of selling his cheese factory too soon and now, alone with his wife in a flat in the Rue Neuvice, he was bored.
The two men had arrived at Liége together; the difference between them was that Schroefs was educated, a qualified school-master, and that he had started work as a book-keeper at Mme Winand’s, the grocer’s in the Rue Sainte-Marguerite, while Van Camp, in a white smock, was pushing carts load
ed with cheeses through the streets.
Both men were now rich. Schroefs was the richer of the two. They were short and stocky. They had kept their accents. Now and then they exchanged a few words.
‘You remember little Kees who had freckles?’
‘The postman Pietke’s son? What became of him?’
‘I don’t know.’
They enjoyed talking about those days, recalling the long journey through the mud and the snow when they went to the school in their village, in Campine, wearing clogs.
Now Schroefs had a big drawing-room which he did not bother to open for Van Camp and Désiré.
Hubert was talking about coffee, his favourite subject. He knew every kind of coffee in the world, and could identify them by biting on a single bean. Élise bent her head, watching her son.
‘Now, Roger. Don’t eat so much. You’ll make yourself sick again.’
And Marthe said:
‘Leave him alone, Élise. Let him eat, the poor little darling, seeing that he likes it. Don’t look at your mother, Roger. Eat up. When you are at your Aunt Marthe’s, you must never look to see if your mother’s looking disapproving.’
‘Incidentally, Marthe, we shan’t be able to come next Sunday. We have to go and see Désiré’s sister who’s an Ursuline nun at Ans.’
Out of politeness, because the Schroefs might be offended, she felt obliged to imply that she considered this visit to the convent a tedious business.
They had put a couple of cushions under the child, who looked all around him. He would not forget certain things which the others had probably never noticed. For instance, all the pictures in the house were inscribed with gilt lettering on the frames, for they were free gifts distributed by the leading manufacturers of biscuits, tinned goods or chocolate. Opposite Uncle Hubert’s armchair there hung a picture which was darker than the others, showing some people in black hats standing round a naked man who was a greenish yellow colour.
Roger would have liked to ask:
‘What are they doing?’
It was a reproduction in colour of The Anatomy Lesson. These men in black standing round a corpse were associated in the child’s mind with the hard, grey silhouette of Uncle Schroefs, with his bowler-hat which he had taken off only to sit down at table, and with the spicy smell which filled the house, mixed with the smell of the rough wooden crates.
Aunt Marthe kept stuffing things into his pockets, sometimes things which he could not eat, not only chocolate or biscuits which crumbled straight away but tins of anchovy fillets.
Why did his mother take them from him? Why did she scold him when they had scarcely turned the corner of the street?
‘You mustn’t accept anything from Aunt Marthe. You must say: “No, thank you, Aunt.” ’
And this no thank you became a sort of proper name for him.
‘Nothankyou.’
Why did he have to say: ‘No thank you’? Why, when the two women were together in the bedroom or the box-room, especially the box-room, did they start crying, wiping away their tears quickly if anybody came in? And why, when they met, did they nearly always say:
‘Poor Élise.’
‘Poor Marthe.’
Yet it was the most beautiful house in the world. When the grown-ups wanted to be by themselves, Léontine took Roger away. She was a queer girl, very thin, very flat-chested, who had a habit of squeezing him too tightly when she kissed him. She took him round the warehouses. She let him touch everything. She had taken him to see the horses; and the man who was in the yard—or in the stables when it was raining—a shabbily-dressed old man, had made him a whip, a real one, with a string which cracked.
When the daylight began to fade, Élise looked at her husband and tried to attract his attention, making signs to him which everybody understood.
‘But no! It isn’t late,’ Marthe or Hubert protested.
It was time to lay the table for supper. The children would be coming home soon. They were in the way. Couldn’t Désiré feel that they were in the way?
For the past quarter of an hour, Schroefs had had enough. He was only just managing to restrain himself from yawning, and, now that the day was nearly over, he wanted to settle down in his corner, in front of his gas-fire, and to look through his papers, sighing all the time.
Désiré believed everything he was told. If somebody said to him: ‘But no, do stay …’—he stayed!
At last! Van Camp had got up, though he would have liked to stay. Everybody went towards the door. They said good night two or three times, once before putting on their outdoor clothes, then on the landing, then again downstairs.
‘Come this way.’
The shop door was opened a little way, revealing the violet shadows of the street, the silence outside, the trams in the distance.
‘A week on Sunday, then. Thank you, Marthe. Désiré, carry the child. We’ll be able to walk faster like that.’
A few steps.
‘They made him eat three pieces of tart again.’
Désiré did not understand, did not manage to feel indignant or offended.
‘I’m sure Hubert’s going to say that you come on purpose to smoke his cigars.’
‘I smoked two.’
‘Let’s buy a bit of ham for supper. The fire will have gone out.’
The child, on his father’s shoulders, saw the gas-lamps go by almost on a level with his head. In the Rue Puits-en-Sock, he saw, one after another, all the dimly lit shops which stayed open on Sunday and would stay open until ten o’clock at night, with the shopkeepers eating behind a curtain or behind the glass panes of a back room, and goods of all colours in the windows. And he saw the tram which suddenly emerged from the shadows of the Place de Bavière.
‘Désiré, mind the tram!’
The Mamelin hat-shop had kept a gas-jet burning as if somebody was going to come and buy a hat at that late hour.
‘Father!’
Roger had to shout. He was perched too high up. Élise was carrying her husband’s hat, because the child used to knock it off by clinging with both hands to Désiré’s head.
‘What are we going to do at home?’
Roger would have liked to stop in the Rue Puits-en-Sock. He knew that once they got to the Rue Pasteur, the day would be over. They would give him his supper, then he would be put to bed straight away, and for a long time he would hear the murmur of his parents’ voices in the kitchen.
‘We aren’t going home yet, are we?’
‘No, darling.’
‘Where are we going?’
He asked again:
‘Where are we going now?’
‘We’re going for a walk.’
‘Where are we going for a walk?’
And he knew that it wasn’t true, since they were turning into the dark Rue Jean-d’Outremeuse which led to the absolute calm of the Rue Pasteur.
CHAPTER TWELVE
THERE was nobody in the Rue Pasteur but Monsieur Lorisse, the gentleman from next door, who had just been gently pushed outside after his muffler had been tied round his neck, and who was being watched from the loggia. He was standing motionless on the kerb, his hands behind his back, with a plaited leather whip in the right one; he was looking vaguely at his dog, a Pyrenean sheep-dog with long fawn and white hair which, with its stiff hindquarters, looked as impotent as its master. The dog ran along for three yards, sniffing the ground, picked its cobble-stone, and lifted its leg or squatted down, but it did nothing and went off to start again a little further on, while Monsieur Lorisse too covered three yards and took up his former attitude, so that the two of them looked like those fretwork toys you see in the middle of sheep-pens.
From the loggia, Madame Lorisse and her daughter—who was forty years old and a very gentle soul—watched him. They were people of independent means. Monsieur Lorisse might go as far as Madame Pain’s, or even as far as the Place du Congrès, but he would not turn the corner, for he knew that that was forbidden.
‘What an idea
, Désiré, to call their dog Lorisse like themselves!’
For the dog was called Lorisse like its masters and that shocked everybody, even though it was the handsomest dog in the district.
If he had been down in the street, what would have excited Roger would have been the battle which had already begun, the battle between the shadows and the sunshine which was as mysterious as the thing which went past the kitchen window in the sky.
This battle took place in the neighbouring streets. He had never noticed it in the town, in the Rue Léopold, for instance, or in the Place Saint-Lambert, when they went on Thursday to say hullo to the ladies at L’Innovation.
In the Rue Pasteur, it was fought minute by minute; the deserted street was always divided into two camps by a clearly defined line which advanced or retreated and which sometimes, at half-past eleven, when the boys came out of the Friars’ school, left only a narrow corridor of shade running along the houses.
Roger, sitting on his chair, was not paying any attention, for the moment, to what was happening in the street. Consequently nothing was happening there. The kitchen window was shut but the bedroom window was open, so that it was the air from the street which was puffing the curtains out like balloons. They were yellow. Everything was yellow at that hour of the day, because of the sun: a yellow of a delicate pinkish hue. There was nothing bluish except the kitchen window-panes; it was tomorrow, Saturday, that the kitchen was cleaned, and today the window-panes were dirty.
‘What do you want me to do, Désiré? Should I ask her not to come again?’
Élise had asked that question again that morning. It was Friday. It was Madame Smet’s day. Every week since Roger had been born she had spent every Friday at the Mamelins’. She sat all day by the fire without moving. In the evening, when L’Innovation closed, Valérie came and joined her, and Désiré took the opportunity, after dinner, to go and play whist at Velden’s. So that Friday was to some extent his day too.
What they had not foreseen was that there would be the Universal Exhibition, that Élise would take a season ticket, that the summer would be glorious and that it would be a crime to keep a child indoors all day long.
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