On the other side of the water they could hear the noise of the first trains. It was the time that Élise came downstairs to light her fire and grind the coffee. The other schoolchildren were still in bed and most of them would wake up grumbling, looking for excuses for putting off the time to get up.
Under their bare feet, the bricks were cold at this time of day, even at the height of summer. The water was cold too, as Roger found when he tested it with one toe before making for the diving-stage of the big pool. Monsieur Effantin, the police-superintendent, had a skin as white as chalk, and Roger always looked away in embarrassment from his big thin body in which you could count the bones.
The old men went on fighting and laughing on the diving boards, and in the water they jostled Monsieur Repasse, who had a sour character. Only Chrétien Mamelin walked slowly to the edge of the pool, slipped gently into the water, on his back, taking care not to get his head wet, and floated downstream like that, scarcely moving his hands at each side of his body. This was because of his heart disease. He was the first to go back to the bathing-hut, walking at an even pace, with drops of water on his skin; and Roger, swimming beyond the ropes, could see him putting on his clothes with the same meticulous gestures with which he ironed the hats on the wooden heads in the back-shop in the Rue Puits-en-Sock.
For hours afterwards, you kept the taste of the baths on your lips, the taste too of the mouthful of coffee laced with rum which Roger was allowed to drink from his grandfather’s cup, for he always dropped into the shopkeeper’s kitchen for a few minutes.
On your way home, you saw more open windows and more women sweeping their doorsteps, so that you felt that for most people life had scarcely begun and that they were still sticky with the moist warmth of their beds.
‘Late again, Van Hamme!’ Monsieur Penders, the school-master, would be saying soon. ‘Ask Mamelin how long he has been up. Ask him what he has been doing before coming to school.’
Thus Roger’s day began in an exceptional way. Alone of all the pupils, he was allowed to leave the school at ten o’clock to cross the street, push open the door which had been left ajar, and drink the glass of egg-and-beer which was waiting for him on the stairs.
‘It’s me, Mother.’
‘Wipe your feet properly. The hall has been cleaned.’
Alone, because he lived nearby, he had seen the fire. Alone, at half past eleven, he would not join the line of pupils whom Monsieur Penders led as far as the corner of the street, because his house was right opposite, and everybody knew already that he was Brother Médard’s white-headed boy.
The proof of this was that his mother joined the latter on the pavement where he was standing.
‘Tell me, Brother Médard, do you think we are going to have a war?’
Wasn’t he afraid that, if he reassured her too quickly, he would lose some of his importance?
‘Who knows, Madame Mamelin? It all depends on the French Government’s attitude. No doubt we shall know this evening.’
Piles of chips were waiting by the fire, ready to go a second time into the crackling fat.
‘Eat up quickly, Roger. The lodgers will be here in a minute.’
Roger, this particular midday, would have a fresh roll which Monsieur Bernard had left from his breakfast.
CHAPTER TEN
AS USUAL, Élise had got up at six o’clock in the morning. There was no wardrobe or coat-rack in the little whitewashed room whose two windows looked out on to the road and a horizon of meadows. Désiré was still asleep, and Roger was asleep in the next room, which was on a lower level and fitted with red tiles like a kitchen.
How bare it all was! Clean, of course. Every year, Madame Laude covered the whole house, inside and out, with whitewash. It was a poor house for all that. The walls bulged out here, went in a little further on; a beam crossed the room without supporting anything, and nobody knew why it had been installed; the crucifix was so vulgar that Élise would have been incapable of saying her prayers if she had looked at it; and the glass of one of the two or three colour-prints framed in black, the one showing Napoleon at Austerlitz, had been cracked for several generations.
‘Isn’t it queer, Doctor, that I’m even nervier in the country than I am in the town?’
Doctor Matray, whose square face was rather hard by nature, had looked at Élise with a certain tenderness, without answering.
‘I’ve tried everything, iron, tonics, those pills you prescribed for me …’
Nothing did any good, and it was as if the doctor knew that nothing ever would do any good. Had he discovered that mysterious taint which Élise was more and more convinced that she had inside her and which prevented her from being like other people?
The bed was clean. She had unpicked the mattress. However, stuffed as it was with vegetable horsehair, it impregnated you, especially when you were sweating on a hot summer night, with a smell of mouldy hay. Désiré called that the smell of the country-side, like the vague scent of sour milk which you could smell all over the house even though it was a long way from the nearest dairy.
Like a conjuror, Élise picked up her underwear from the round table and the two straw-bottomed chairs; her chemise, her drawers, her corset, her camisole, and her petticoat. She had a wash and then did her hair in front of the speckled mirror in which your nose looked as if it were askew, and all this time the cows were lowing, facing the Piedboeufs’ farm from which some women were coming out to milk them.
However often Élise might tell herself that the country air was good for her, she was never at her ease there, and everything shocked her, even frightened her a little. She went down the few steps leading to the kitchen, whose door was open to the cool morning air from the garden, and found Madame Laude and Frédéric sitting at table facing each other over bowls of coffee and huge slices of grey bread.
She always had the impression that she was in the way; she apologized, and made the coffee in her own coffee-pot, as Mademoiselle Frida did in the Rue de la Loi, although Mademoiselle Frida never thought that she was in the way. Frédéric, with his thick, fair moustache, kept his cap on from morning to night, not even taking it off at mealtimes. He was a workman. All the previous week he had been on strike, and they kept seeing him go off in his black Sunday suit to attend some meeting or other.
‘Come here, Frédéric.’
Madame Laude called him like a child, and, as to a child, she handed him his pocket-money, for he gave her all that he earned.
Désiré got dressed, singing to himself, and awoke his son by tickling his nose. Frédéric went off on his bicycle, his haversack on his back, with the sandwiches and the flask of coffee. After that Madame Laude disappeared in her turn, with two buckets hanging from a sort of pack-saddle fitted with chains which she carried on her shoulders, to go to fetch some water from the pump at the crossroads.
Then Élise, who had eaten standing up, while she was working, made the beds, did the dusting and peeled the vegetables for dinner.
‘Hurry up, Roger. Let me see if your shirt is still clean.’
A wet comb had put a parting into the boy’s flaxen hair. He was wearing a tussore jumper his mother had made for him. They were in mourning again, but in the country she let him wear out his blue trousers. She herself was wearing a white blouse with a round collar over a black skirt—a grey serge skirt which she had dyed.
They made their way slowly towards the Thiers des Grillons, in a world where they could have imagined themselves to be alone. Élise was sad, and when she was sad she felt more than usually tired. Recently she had suffered a great deal from her prolapsus of the womb. Once again there had been talk of an operation; the specialist had insisted, but Doctor Matray, for his part, had declared:
‘You’ve got a child, Madame Mamelin. Take care of yourself, rest as much as you can, but don’t have an operation.’
For Roger’s sake, he had said! That meant that she might die. They would come for her with a carriage like Félicie, and take her to h
ospital or to a clinic. Her family would come to see her, Désiré leading Roger by the hand along those pale corridors where the smell of sickness and death took you by the throat. There would be oranges and grapes on a painted table, next to the medicines; then they would put her to sleep, and when the child and his father came again …
‘No! No! I don’t want to!’
She dreamt about it at night and thought about it in the sunshine, even on this wonderful morning dressed in pale green and haloed with gold dust.
‘Play, Roger.’
He played, that is to say he banged a stick in the thick dust which covered the road and had already whitened his boots.
Françoise had died in April. She had lingered on for a month when everybody knew that there was nothing to be done. The doctors had given her up. Élise went round to see her every time she could escape from the Rue de la Loi, to find her sisters-in-law there and neighbours looking after the children. Françoise herself, alone in her bedroom, gazed at her with an expression which Élise had never seen before in anybody’s eyes and which she would never forget, even if she lived to be a hundred.
The blinds were always lowered, for the daylight tired the sick woman. Very thin, with her black hair spread out on the pillow, her jaw already jutting out like that of a dead person and her breath coming jerkily, all that you could see of her was her big dark eyes, eyes of a frightening stillness.
She was thinking about the children. Élise knew that. She did not reply when somebody said:
‘She didn’t know that she was dying.’
In that case, why did her eyes express that boundless fear every time the voice of one of her children was raised in the kitchen? Why did she refuse to see them? People took them in to her sometimes, thinking it would please her, and with a tremendous effort, she would turn away from them; everybody said that she had lost her wits.
Only Élise had understood what was happening in Françoise. That was why her sister-in-law’s death had upset her more than Félicie’s, even though the latter had been her favourite sister.
A few moments before she died, Françoise had sat up in bed and uttered a cry like a roar, there was no other word for it, staring so fixedly at the door that it was as if she could see through it. It was just before dawn. The baby was crying in the next room and a strange voice, that of the beadle’s wife, Madame Collard, was trying to coax it back to sleep.
‘You’re going to tear your clothes, Roger.’
He was trying to squeeze through a gap in the hedge. Surprised by his mother’s voice, he looked at her and noticed that her eyes were misty, but he said nothing and went on playing by himself.
The foliage of the trees met above the steep slope of the Thiers des Grillons and formed a dark ceiling which the sun penetrated only here and there, casting bright patches on the uneven cobble-stones. The air was humming with noise. The town, down in the valley, was like a bluish lake covered with mist, with factory chimneys poking into the air and railway engines whistling spitefully. You could make out the sounds of trucks bumping into one another, dredger buckets emptying their loads into space and monstrous hammers striking white-hot metal. Shriller notes in this powerful symphony came from the bell of the tram which stopped at the bottom of the hill and from the shouts of children in a nearby school; a clumsy bee brushed against Élise’s face and a bird started twittering, perched on a strand of barbed wire, its beak open and its crop puffed out.
Élise sat down on the grass after covering it with her handkerchief. Roger hunted around for nuts. The rays of the sun, which had been pale and light in the early morning, turned the dark yellow of ripe corn and were filled with buzzing life.
The lodgers were on holiday. Mademoiselle Frida herself had gone to spend a month in Geneva, which proved that Monsieur Charles was right.
‘Look, Mother.’
The boy came every now and then to show Élise nuts, acorns and strawberries he had found in the wood.
‘Perhaps Uncle Charles has taken the main road?’
She was beginning to think the same, for it was eleven o’clock at least, judging by the sun, and she was on the point of going back to the house when, right at the foot of the Thiers des Grillons, she caught sight of three figures in a patch of sunshine.
‘Dear God!’ Élise sighed sadly.
Why did Charles Daigne make his daughter wear a veil when she was only ten years old? Loulou was in deep mourning, just like a woman, and it was only half-way up the hill that the poor little girl, who must have been extremely hot, stopped to throw back the black crape.
Roger had already gone running to meet them. They were holding the hands of a two-year-old child, Joseph, who, dressed in black trousers at an age when other boys still wore pinafores, was climbing the stony slope with his little legs.
Mathilde Coomans, who lived on the corner of the Rue de la Loi and whose business was in a bad way, had taken charge of the youngest child whom Élise had wanted to take herself, a baby of five months who was being fed on cow’s milk.
‘How could you manage, with your lodgers?’
It hurt her to see the baby with Mathilde who was utterly unmethodical, was never dressed before ten in the morning, and kept looking round with a dazed expression as if she did not know her way about her own shop. If a customer asked her for a pound of flageolets or split peas, she was completely at a loss.
The little group had come to a halt, for Joseph could not go any further. His father, trying to carry him, had to stop every few yards to get his breath back.
‘Dear God, Charles, you must be dripping wet. Give him to me. Good morning, poor Loulou.’
‘Good morning, Aunt.’
They were alone on the long road which went down to the town, and Charles and the children seemed to have come from another world, in their black clothes which still smelled new.
‘How pale she is, Charles.’
Loulou had always been pale. Her thin face was a matt white emphasized by the crape of her veil which had been cut out of one of her dead mother’s mourning bands.
‘You ought to leave her with me too, Charles. Even if it was only for a month. The air would do her so much good.’
To which Charles simply replied:
‘I need her at home.’
Élise could have cried. It hurt her to see them looking so calm and natural after the catastrophe, as if they had not understood. Charles had not changed. His face still had a gentle, sheepish expression which was positively exasperating. He had not been able to come the day before because it was Sunday and on Sunday there were the offices. Not once, since he had become the sacristan at Saint-Denis, had he had a Sunday off; not once had he seen the colour of a Sunday anywhere but in the cloister with the silent porch where he lived and in the nave lit by tapers.
‘I didn’t think I’d be able to come today, on account of Mademoiselle Tonglet who died on Friday. Luckily they ordered the Requiem Mass for three o’clock.’
‘You’ll only just have time for dinner.’
How could he still go on making arrangements for funerals and Requiem Masses? There were moments when she felt like shaking him. He was too gentle, too resigned. You would have sworn that he did not appreciate the disaster which had overtaken him and his family.
‘So it’s you, Loulou, who’s looking after your papa?’
‘Yes, Aunt.’
‘You do the cooking and the washing-up?’
‘Yes, Aunt. Madame Collard comes and helps me with the beds.’
Loulou was so beautiful, so delicate! She had been rigged up in skirts which were too long for her and which made her look, not like a child, but like a dwarf. Everybody turned round to look at her when, in the procession, dressed in white and sky-blue, she played the part of the Virgin.
‘Take your jacket off, Charles. It’s too hot.’
It did not matter. He was hot, but he would not make himself comfortable, even when there was nobody there to see him. You did not know what to say to him. It
was agony getting a word or a sentence out of him. He walked along, looking neither at the countryside nor at Madame Laude’s house, which he entered as he would enter any place into which you chose to push him.
‘You see, I’ve sent for the cot Roger had when he was little.’
Joseph already took after his father. He had not opened his mouth once. He had allowed himself to be kissed by huge Madame Laude and, if he had been frightened, he had not shown it.
‘You’ll enjoy yourself here, won’t you, Joseph?’
As if they couldn’t have found him a nicer name than that!
‘Have you brought his clothes, Loulou?’
A tiny parcel wrapped in grey paper and tied with red string. There was practically nothing light inside for the summer.
‘It doesn’t matter. I’ll fix him up with something.’
For two pins she would have picked up Charles Daigne like a pawn to move him into the next square. At table he kept looking at his watch, thinking of nothing but his church, his funerals, his offices. Did he even know what he had been eating? Loulou looked after him as she looked after her little brother.
When the time came for him to go, he bent down and kissed his son on both cheeks, very simply, and it was on his nose that a tear suddenly appeared.
‘Will you be coming to see him, Charles?’
‘As soon as I can.’
Joseph did not cry.
‘Say good-bye to your father and sister, little Jojo.’
She had just found a name for him. The child did not open his mouth, and watched them go with such a gentle look in his eyes that Élise had to make an effort not to burst out sobbing. It struck her that here was a child destined to suffer in life.
‘If you only knew the effect it had on me, Madame Laude!’
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