‘I’ve come for my chip-dish.’
The chip-dish which they sometimes left there on Sunday on the way into town and picked up on the way back, thus avoiding the necessity of having to go and fetch it from the Rue Pasteur. This was an excuse she had thought up on her arrival, because, seeing that Guillaume was not here, she could not mention him. She was very tactful.
‘There it is, Élise. Next to the scales. The cloth is inside.’
Cécile was expecting a baby, but this was not noticeable, nothing was noticeable in her, not even her youthfulness, so completely had she adopted all her mother’s gestures and attitudes, so serenely did she reign over that kitchen of the Mamelins in which no child, even after becoming a husband and father, would have dared to alter the position of a single tiny object.
When Élise returned to the Rue Pasteur the notice had disappeared from the house in the Rue Jean-d’Outremeuse, that house which she had been looking at enviously for such a long time.
‘TO LET.’
It was too soon, she knew that. And the house was rather big. You would have to take in at least five lodgers, and for five lodgers it was necessary to have a maid, who ate all the profits.
Dear God! Where could Guillaume have gone with Roger?
She went as far as the Pont de Bressoux, running like a lunatic, and came home to find them quietly installed in the kitchen.
‘Who opened the door to you, Guillaume?’
‘A lady with her hair dyed like a hairdresser’s sign.’
The landlady.
For Madame Smet would never have gone downstairs, even if there had been a fire in the street.
‘Come here, little Roger.’
She would have given a great deal to be able to cry as much as she liked, for it was a feeling of utter disaster which took hold of her at the sight of her son, who looked at her with new eyes, who had just lived through a whole day of which she knew nothing, who had been stuffed with sensations, treats and memories, and who to cap all had been dressed from head to foot in red.
Yet her reaction expressed itself in the form of stammered thanks.
‘Dear God, Guillaume, you’ve been far too extravagant. You shouldn’t have done it! It’s too good of you, Guillaume. Such an expensive suit!’
He could have bought him anything else, even a useless toy! But that red suit! The trousers were already all wet!
‘Thank you, Guillaume. You’ll have a glass, won’t you? Yes, you will! There’s some left, and we never drink. Now that you’re in Liége for once …’
She ached all over, from sheer nerves.
‘Good-bye, Guillaume. A pleasant journey home. Tell your wife …’
What had he to tell his wife, whom she had glimpsed only once, at her mother-in-law’s funeral?
Not a single moment of relaxation, not a single second of solitude. Madame Smet was there, like an expensive doll which could only wag its head with an eternal smile.
Somebody whistled out in the street.
‘It’s Désiré, Madame Smet. I have to throw the key down to him, out of the window. Just imagine, we’ve only one key.’
For Désiré whistled when he came home at night. Then there was Valérie’s discreet ring at the door, and the whispering of the two friends on the stairs.
‘Later on, when he’s gone …’
‘Oh, poor Élise, when I saw them trying that red thing on him … All of us … Even up on the third floor of the shop … We all thought of you, you know!’
Madame Smet was dozing, giving a start now and then at the distant noise of a tram, and Valérie was doing some crochet-work with her ethereal fingers, a piece of delicate lace-work destined to serve no particular purpose. Élise detested her that evening, for her nimble fingers fluttering in the yellow rays of the lamp, for her frail limbs, for her carefree life with her mother and her sister, for letting Marie make her bed and empty her slops. She detested Cécile too, who had not said anything to her, who had gone on quietly ironing in her kitchen, and she detested Madame Pain whose husband earned good money.
Rancour had entered into her and remained there like a ball inside her chest.
‘If you only knew, Valérie, how my back hurts in the evening! It’s my organs. I have to go every week to see the doctor who’s fitted me with a special appliance.’
At the word ‘organs’, Valérie, who had poor health but had never been ill, and for whom the stomach was a mystery she did not want to understand, Valérie went pale.
And yet, this particular evening, Élise had neither stomachache nor backache. She kept talking about it and complaining to keep her fever up. Since the disappearance of the notice, she had had a vague feeling that all the day’s little misfortunes had to be directed to a particular end.
She ironed the red trousers and examined them under the lamp.
‘You know, Valérie, the house in the Rue Jean-d’Outremeuse has been let …’
Valérie knew all about this plot which dated back two years, to the day when Élise had won her first victory by settling in the Rue Pasteur.
Since then, without respite, as tireless as an insect driven by an age-old instinct, she had kept on making plans, saving money, carefully putting aside anything which could immediately or remotely serve her purpose.
‘You know, I’ve already got seven hundred francs in the Savings Bank. Désiré doesn’t know anything about it. It’s for the furniture, you understand.’
A sou here, a franc there, sometimes a big coin. She hid them for a while in the soup-tureen with the pink flowers on it. When she went to Coronmeuse, she used to say to her sister Louisa:
‘What can you expect? He’s a man who would spend the whole of his life living on the bare necessities.’
She complained. It all helped. And today when she was really unhappy, without meaning to be, when she had been forced to hold back her tears all day, she was going to make the most of it.
‘You know those little rolls that cost three centimes each? The baker who supplies the boarding-house in the Rue de la Province has told me that with just a bit of butter on them they cost the students ten centimes. And some of them eat four or five at a time. And listen to this: they have to pay fifty centimes for a bucketful of coal which you’ve only got to carry upstairs and which you buy for thirty centimes in the street!’
How much coming and going these few words represented at the houses where students were lodged, how many innocent questions asked here and there! These students, Russians, Poles, Rumanians and Japanese, who came to study at the University of Liége, she followed them, in the street, with a miser’s eye.
‘I’d only need three, Valérie, not too rich because they would expect too much, but not too poor either. They’d be so happy with me!’
Was it her fault if that was her fate in life? She had just suffered a big disappointment. Just after four o’clock, in the middle of the Place du Congrès, then again at the end of the Pont de Bressoux, she had been the genuinely distressed mother who had lost her child. It was all Désiré’s fault. He was Guillaume’s brother. At two o’clock, when he had known everything, he had been a coward and kept quiet.
‘Men, Valérie! They are so afraid of having their peace disturbed, their little habits changed!’
Désiré, who suspected nothing and who had won at whist—the money went into the kitty—left his friends at the Veldens’ door. Élise recognized his footsteps, awoke Madame Smet, Valérie put her hat on, and the two friends kissed each other good night.
Désiré accompanied Valérie and Madame Smet to the tram-stop in the Place du Congrès. The three of them stood waiting in the soft shadows until the tram, swaying along the rails, braked in front of them with a tremendous din.
The windows of the tram, this fine night, looked pink. The heads inside no longer looked alive, or rather they seemed to belong to a different life, as if they were in a museum.
Désiré lit a cigarette. Everything was perfectly quiet under a sky studded with stars,
the cigarette was good, and he would have been quite capable of sitting down on one of the benches in the square and staying there for a long time gazing at the Milky Way.
He had enjoyed seeing Guillaume again. That faint rectangle of light in the distance was the little café on the corner of the Rue Puits-en-Sock where he had learnt to play billiards. Roger had been impressed to see his father in shirtsleeves, just as he was at home, in the Rue Sohet office. He had drunk from his cup. He had tapped the keys of his typewriter and they had put some bulky year-books underneath him.
Désiré walked along. His forehead creased a little as he drew nearer home, for he suspected that Élise was annoyed with him about the red suit. And now she was by herself, waiting for him. There was a faint halo of light, coming from the kitchen, in the bedroom window.
He had left the door ajar when he had gone out with Valérie and her mother. He climbed the stairs, frowning as he saw a big patch of light, the kitchen door wide open, and heard the familiar sounds of an iron bucket. He found Élise on her knees, scrubbing the floor.
‘What are you doing?’
She had the pale face, the sharp features of her bad days; her chest looked flatter than ever under the apron, and her hair was falling into her eyes.
‘I have to do some of tomorrow’s work tonight, seeing that I’ve got to go to L’Innovation.’
He understood. He did not know what to do with himself. She was doing it on purpose!
‘Can I give you a hand?’
‘It isn’t worth it. Go to bed. It only makes me later than ever, having your legs in the way.’
It was just like certain Sunday afternoons, when she was in a state of nerves and they were due to go out, only worse. She would burst into tears any minute now, but he could never foresee the exact moment, nor what would provoke the crisis. If he spoke, what he said would be too much. If he kept quiet …
‘Listen, Élise.’
‘No! Leave me alone! You can see I’m tired out. It’s ten o’clock and I’m only just starting the cleaning. Not to mention the fact that your loud voice is going to wake the child.’
Wake the child! When it was always Désiré who sent him to sleep by playing the drummer-boy!
Who could find his way along the winding paths taken by Élise’s mind? Did she even know herself by what route she was going to arrive at what she wanted?
‘My back has gone all numb.’
‘Let me go and empty the slops at least.’
‘You’d only get your suit dirty and then I’d have to clean it!’
She scrubbed away as never before. She put a desperate strength into it, ghastly pale, a striking picture of human energy pushed to the point of paroxysm.
‘The doctor told me again last week …’
She started crying. There! Not much. Not sobbing. She was snivelling rather, with something like a quiet gleam of resignation shining through her tears. She was sniffling like a little girl, drying her eyes on a wet corner of her apron with its little blue checks.
‘Élise …’
‘I know it doesn’t matter to you, that you’ll never have an affectionate word or a delicate thought for me. Have you ever once called me darling? You’re a Mamelin, just like Guillaume! You make a good pair of brothers.’
Guillaume … The red suit …
‘When I think that the baby was at the point of death, with its bronchitis, and the carnival in the Rue Léopold, when I dedicated him to the Virgin! And Guillaume, the old fox, so proud of himself, goes and picks a suit in the brightest red there is! And you, you don’t say a thing!’
‘Oh, come, Élise …’
‘Leave me alone. I’ve got to get on with my work. You, you’ve finished at six o’clock. It doesn’t matter to you that at ten o’clock at night I’m still scrubbing the floor or peeling the vegetables: you go off to play cards at the Veldens’.’
Once a week! He never went out apart from that! And then it was only because Madame Smet and Valérie were at home on Fridays!
‘Go to bed!’
Slowly she got to her feet, sat down as if she were at the end of her tether, and leant forward with both arms on the table, sobbing so that he could not see her face, and pushing away the arm which was trying to encircle her shoulders.
‘No, Désiré, no! You’re too selfish. All you think about is yourself, your peace of mind, your little life, and if anything happened to you tomorrow I’d have to go and work as a servant.’
Why as a servant? Had she been a servant when he had met her?
Try as she might, she could not manage to work herself up to a real crisis, to the kind of crisis in which she writhed about on the bed, clutching the blankets. Perhaps the trouble was that she had waited too long? She had better look at the red suit, then at the room all topsy-turvy around her, the bucket on the floor, half the room running with water …
‘I’m tired out …’
‘Well, there’s only one thing to do, we’ll get a charwoman in.’
‘And how can we pay her? We’ve only got enough for the bare necessities.’
‘We’ll have her for two hours a day, for the rough work.’
‘No, Désiré! Don’t bother about me. I was saying just now to Valérie …’
That wounded him. What had she been saying to Valérie about their domestic affairs? Did he ever talk about her at the Veldens’?
She picked up the scrubbing-brush and the floorcloth, still snivelling without actually shedding any tears, and now she felt that the time had come, that a little later the atmosphere would have changed.
‘If only Roger were at nursery school …’
It was so unexpected … And so trivial, such a little thing compared with what he had been expecting!
‘I know perfectly well that for you, your son is sacred. Yet there are some younger ones than him who go to the sisters’ school and Madame Pain herself decided this week …’
It was Élise who had persuaded Madame Pain to send Armand to nursery school. How patiently she had plotted and planned!
‘We’ll talk seriously about it tomorrow. I don’t say no.’
‘But you don’t say yes either! And in the meantime, you’re the one who’s accustoming him to being carried, without worrying about the fact that when I’m alone with him he refuses to walk. As for Guillaume … He struts around with his nephew, dresses him up like a clown … They haven’t got any children … The two of them live only for themselves …’
Without saying a word, Désiré had taken off his jacket and removed his cuffs. He picked up a bucket of dirty water and went to empty it into the sink on the landing downstairs. When he came back, the kitchen looked greyer than usual, emptier too, and Élise really tired, really pitiful. He made an effort to smile.
‘All right then, it’s agreed, we’ll send Roger to school.’
She managed not to look triumphant, to stay weary and touching, and she soaked her floorcloth in the clean water.
‘I’ll go and see Sister Adonie tomorrow,’ she said simply.
There was still a feeling of drying tears, of a scene which had nearly become unpleasant. The boy was tossing about in his bed. And meanwhile Valérie and her mother had arrived at their flat where Marie Smet was waiting for them, working at her sewing machine.
When Roger was going to school, Élise would be able to raise the question of lodgers again and Désiré would no longer reply:
‘But what about the boy? How can you look after lodgers and the boy at the same time?’
As for her backache and stomach-ache, she would take care of all that. That was her affair. She would get better, she would be as strong as anybody else.
Désiré suspected nothing, and when he went to bed, an hour later, after lowering the lamp and tracing a cross on his sleeping son’s forehead, he did not know that the household in the Rue Pasteur had already ceased to exist, that their little home was dead, that after having left the Rue Puits-en-Sock for the Rue des Carmes and the Quai de Coronmeuse, h
e was going to lose that peace by which he set such store, the cosy hours by the fire, in slippers and shirtsleeves, with the child asleep behind the half-open door and the familiar sound of the potatoes which were being peeled falling one by one into the fresh water in the enamel bucket.
‘Good night, Élise.’
‘Good night, Désiré.’
She added, vaguely worried:
‘Aren’t you going to kiss me?’
‘Yes … Sorry …’
She was already running, in imagination, along all the streets in the district, looking for notices; she was counting rolls and buckets of coal at fifty centimes each; and she was peopling her house with respectable Russians and Poles—she was going to pick them carefully—who would not be allowed to entertain women as they were in the Rue de la Province.
Free access to her house, no, never!
PART TWO
CHAPTER ONE
ONE morning when the milkman had not been by eight o’clock, Élise had asked Désiré:
‘You wouldn’t care to take Roger to school?’
And that had been enough to create a new ritual. For with Désiré the repetition of the same action took on a ritual character, and the various stages of the day followed one after another as harmoniously as the priest’s gestures accompanied by the organ.
It was hard to say whether it was the boy who gave his hand to his father, or whether it was the father who took his son by the hand: every morning, at the same time, on the doorstep of the house in the Rue de la Loi, the little fingers nestled inside Désiré’s hand and the boy’s legs tried to take three strides for every stride of the quiet giant.
With half her body hidden by the door, Élise leant out, following them with her eyes until they had turned the corner of the Rue Jean-d’Outremeuse where the barber was raising his shutters. Then, before vanishing into the warm solitude of the house, she made sure that the greengrocer whose trumpet could already be heard had not appeared yet round the other corner.
The nursery school was quite close, at the back of a peaceful courtyard, next to the rectory, an oasis of cobblestones which were noisier and bluer, of air which was clearer; there were geraniums dozing on the window-sills, and the passage leading to the sacristy, as cool and dark as a grotto, gave off a smell of incense.
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