And his father murmured, as if there were no need of any further explanations between them:
‘Hurry off to bed. Good night, son.’
The next morning, at the bottom of one of his pockets, he had found a little crackled photograph showing a boy between fourteen and fifteen, in a Tyrolean costume, standing on a mountain covered with fir-trees. The boy was holding the hand of a little girl in a short skirt who must have been his sister.
He remained perplexed for a long time, until at last there came back to his memory the picture of a Feldwebel with a red moustache who was humming a song of his own country and swaying from side to side on a bench, his hand under a skinny woman’s skirts.
Mademoiselle Rinquet had rushed around all day to find a room, and in the evening she had come for her things with a carrier.
Then Élise, who had cried all the time she was doing her house-work, had said with a sigh of relief, after shutting the door on the old shrew:
‘Good riddance!’
CHAPTER SEVEN
‘GIVE me your arm, will you, Roger. If you only knew how often, when you were little, I told my friends at L’Innovation: “You wait until I go out on my son’s arm and people take him for my sweet-heart!” ’
Élise made an effort to smile, to rid that smile of anything which might resemble melancholy. Arm-in-arm, they walked along the Quai de Coronmeuse. The next day, Roger would take to school a note from Désiré saying that his son had been ill, although Father Renchon already knew the truth. Roger had told him the day before:
‘I’m going with my mother and some cousins of mine to collect some food about twelve miles away, the other side of Visé, just by the Dutch frontier.’
It was nine o’clock in the morning, the time of day he liked best, when the streets primmed themselves up and the sun still had all its promising brightness. True, as soon as evening came, Roger was drawn by the ambiguous atmosphere of the ill-lit town, and even if he had promised himself not to go out, he only had to see through his window the bluish halo of a gas-lamp or an anonymous couple brushing past the houses to set off for unavowable walks lasting hours at a time.
In spite of all that, he remained essentially a man of the morning. Of all his memories, the best were those of spring mornings, the Passerelle spanning the sparkling Meuse, a thin mist still clinging to things, the noise of the vegetable market in the Place Cockerill, and then, on the river-bank, La Goffe, littered with baskets of sweet-smelling fruit and crowded with big-buttocked women.
‘You tell everybody that I cry and complain because I like it, but it isn’t true, Roger. You see, I’ve had so few good moments in my life! You yourself, you’ve often hurt me. But we’re happy together, aren’t we?’
Yes, they were happy together. It touched Roger to sense her trembling on his arm, such a little girl and so vulnerable that he felt he had become a man as a result.
‘If I’ve taken in lodgers, and if I’ve clipped them as much as I could, it’s been for your sake, so that one day you’d be somebody. And you hurt me so badly when you heap reproaches on me! My only joy in life is to see you healthy and well dressed, to know that you want for nothing.’
‘Yes, Mother.’
And he honestly wondered if he was not going to fulfil Élise’s dream. There were several men in embryo inside him and there was still time for him to make a choice. His mother’s ideal was Monsieur Herman, the first violin at the Théâtre Royal, who had never married so as to stay with his old mother. She was a dainty little thing, so fresh-faced and so neatly dressed that Élise could not suppress a pang of envy when she looked at their house with the white door in the Rue Pasteur where mother and son doted on one another like sweethearts.
Roger was not a musician. He could probably follow a career like that of Vriens, the Walloon poet whom he met every morning on the embankment, wearing a huge black hat and a loosely tied bow, his eyes dreamy, his smile kindly. He wrote love songs in dialect which everybody hummed, and there was nobody who did not know him, nobody who did not turn round to look at him as he went by, drawing calmly and greedily on his pipe, on his way to work at the municipal library at Les Chiroux.
He knew Roger, who was his most regular customer, or had been until a few weeks earlier. He had been encouraging him to write poetry for a long time now.
Élise also dreamt of a cake-shop where a sturdy, good-natured Roger would toil away in the scented warmth of the bakehouse while she herself, neat and trim in an embroidered white apron crackling with starch, would serve tarts across a marble counter.
‘It’s such a fine trade, Roger! Have you ever seen a confectioner who was poor? Besides, all businesses that sell food do well. Just look at the butchers. I wouldn’t like you to be a butcher, but there isn’t a single one that isn’t well-off.’
On mornings like this, it seemed as if the town, in order to win him over, was trying to show him a simple, cordial face. Over there, on the other side of the river crowded with rows of barges, there were the baths where he went every morning with his grandfather and his old cronies. Hadn’t a Monsieur Fourneau, for example, always accompanied by his dog Rita, which he sent diving for pebbles, discovered the secret of perfect happiness?
It was sufficient to create for each and every day a certain number of habits, rites, little pleasures, and life flowed along gently, uneventfully, almost without your noticing the passage of time.
In the Saint-Léonard district, people said of Monsieur Fourneau, as they said of Chrétien Mamelin in the Rue Puits-en-Sock:
‘He’s such a good fellow!’
Roger had taken another road and occasionally he felt rather frightened, for he did not know where it led. On this road, along which a mysterious force was driving him—his mother would say that it was his evil instincts—there would be nobody to give him approval or assistance, nobody to comfort him in case of failure.
‘It’s like my sister Louisa, Roger. I know you can’t stand her. I admit she doesn’t do anything to make people love her. But one day I’ll tell you her life-story and you’ll forgive her, I’m sure of that. In the meantime, try to be a little nicer to her, even if it’s only to please me.’
He promised. What wouldn’t he have promised today? The slightest thing was capable of making him cry. Part of his childhood was smiling at him and timidly trying to hold him back, while he could feel that he was being dragged along in a course on which he had embarked almost without knowing it.
‘You’re going to see my friend Éléonore Dafnet, whom you don’t know yet. But she knows you well. At L’Innovation, she was on the next counter to mine. She wasn’t happy, because her father drank. When you were born, it was she who gave you the little silver bell that bears the mark of your first teeth. She’s married a Lanaeken farmer. It must have been awful for a girl as delicate and sensitive as Éléonore. I met her one evening last week in the Rue Neuvice and we fell into each other’s arms. Straight away, she said to me:
‘ “You know, Élise, if you’re short of food, don’t hesitate to come to us. We live rather far away, but you’ve got a big son now who must be a great help to you.” ’
He registered the reproach—an involuntary reproach, for his mother too wanted there to be no more unpleasantness between them. For two months now, he had not once offered to go for the rations. Élise spent her days queueing, now for bread, now for bacon from America, rice, potatoes or coal. On Monday she had hired a handcart which she had pushed through the streets, loaded with a couple of bags of coal, and she had had to ask a passer-by to help her to take them down to the cellar.
‘If it wasn’t for the war, we’d be so happy, the three of us!’
He could feel himself being sucked down into warmth and sunshine and reassurance. A few more yards and they had arrived at Aunt Louisa’s shop, the glazed door with the transparent advertisements which had never changed, the smell of gin and spices, and the calendar with the two girls on it, the brunette and the blonde.
‘Anna will be ready in a minute.
The little Duchêne girls have gone to get some bread. Come in, Élise. Come in, Roger. Dear God, how he’s grown! Anna! Anna! Hurry up. Élise is down here.’
They could hear Anna, the eldest of the Jusseaume girls, getting dressed on the first floor, where Roger had never been. They found Monique Duchêne standing in the kitchen, wearing a long, light-coloured dress with a floral pattern and an Italian straw hat with a pale blue ribbon. She had been crying and was still dabbing her eyes with a handkerchief rolled into a ball.
‘Poor Monique,’ sighed Élise as she kissed her. ‘You’re coming with us, then? You’re sure it won’t be too tiring for you?’
Tall and slim, she made you think of a frail flower whose stem bent in the slightest breath of air. Everything about her was as delicate and misty as a pastel drawing.
Aunt Louisa broke in:
‘It’s no use me telling her that everything will work out all right, that God can’t want Évariste to be unhappy, she just goes on tormenting herself. This morning, some neighbours told her that he’d written again to that woman.’
Not long ago, they would never have broached this subject in front of Roger. Probably they considered that he was big enough now to understand.
‘Who knows what lies she may be telling him? But I’ve written a long letter too, a letter I sent off yesterday with a bargee. When Évariste gets it, he’ll realize on which side the truth lies.’
Why was it that on a morning like this, when he was feeling quite relaxed and wanted nothing more than to feel even more relaxed, he had to be bothered with this disgusting family matter?
Monique was a cousin, not of his, although he called her that, but of Évariste who was at the front and had given such an unpleasant reception to poor Jacques Schroefs.
She had two younger sisters, the girls who had gone to get some bread and were going to accompany them to Lanaeken. They lived in the same district, in the Rue Sainte-Foi, just behind the Quai de Coronmeuse. Their father was a doctor, but he had scarcely any patients. He was rarely to be seen and people talked about him as little as possible, for he was a strange man who had a vice: he was addicted to ether. Roger had caught sight of him twice: a bearded man with grey hair and a grey complexion, always dirty and shabbily dressed, with dandruff on the collar of his jacket and eyes as dull as those of the Rue de la Loi neighbour who had died of the sleeping-sickness.
How could a man like that be the father of the poetic Monique whose feet scarcely touched the ground?
Évariste and Monique had been engaged. There had not been an official engagement, but it had always been understood that they would get married one day and that they would make a handsome couple. Évariste was tall and thin, with a rather grim face, for he was a conscientious young man who took life seriously. He had had only a year left to complete his studies for the Bar when the war had broken out.
Another catastrophe, for him, had occurred before the war. A local girl had had a child by him, a working-class girl, whose father, a sturdy little man, was night-watchman in a factory. This man, a stubborn, obstinate fellow, had come to see Louisa, and to all her objections had simply replied:
‘Only marriage will do.’
Louisa had tried everything. She had offered money. She had consulted a famous lawyer. She had even tried to find proof that the Prunier girl had had relations with other men, to show that Évariste was not necessarily the child’s father.
It had all been in vain. A dozen times a day, Prunier had returned to the attack, truculent and abusive, shouting and gesticulating in the shop and even outside on the pavement where he threatened to stir up the passers-by, and constantly returning to his perpetual refrain:
‘Only marriage will do.’
They had been married two months before the war, when Thérèse Prunier was four months pregnant. She was a nondescript little thing, puny and pretty like so many others, a girl of the people who worked in a dressmaker’s workshop.
Désiré had been the first to know, for it had been to him that Évariste, right from the start, had confided his troubles. Désiré had told nobody, not even Élise. She had wondered why Évariste, whom they never used to see before, came nearly every evening to the Rue de la Loi.
He was given to seeing life in a tragic light. It was in his nature. He liked taking up attitudes and watched himself living. On his wedding-day, in the Quai de Coronmeuse kitchen, pale and red-eyed, he had declared to his mother, who repeated his words as if they were a sacred text:
‘I am going to my wedding as I would to the funeral of my youthful hopes.’
The couple had not lived together. It had been decided that Thérèse should go on living at her parents’ home and Évariste with his family until he had completed his studies.
The war had broken out, and Évariste had gone away before the birth of his son, who was a puny, highly strung child. He had had convulsions, and his mother had nearly died in childbirth. Who could say whether Louisa did not pray for things to work out that way?
Since then, Monique Duchêne had got into the habit of coming every day to the Quai de Coronmeuse, where she was treated as a daughter-in-law.
‘You haven’t any news, have you, Aunt?’
She did not say mother yet, but the word was implied, and the two women behaved to one another as daughter-in-law and mother-in-law; they did not doubt for a moment that the matter would end like that, because it could not be otherwise, God would not allow it. They went to Mass together and could be seen together at Vespers and Benediction, praying, as Désiré put it, ‘to God at the foot of the Cross’. They burnt candles. Monique took part in all the charitable activities of the parish. She wrote to Évariste nearly every day, even though the opportunities of sending post by way of Holland were somewhat rare.
To begin with, the Pruniers had refused to allow the child to go to spend a day now and then at his paternal grandmother’s home.
‘If the mother isn’t good enough for them, they don’t need the son either.’
The lawyers had been called in once more. The case had been taken to court. Louisa had won. Once a week, Thérèse’s mother, who put a hat on only on this occasion, brought the child to the door of the shop, then went away, without a greeting, without a word. And in the evening it was Anna who took the child back to the little working-class house, ringing the bell, but hurrying away before anybody opened the door.
The whole family felt sorry for Monique and admired her heroism.
‘If you saw her with the child, Désiré, it would bring tears to your eyes. Though she’s every reason to hate it, she loves it like a real mother because, as she says, it’s Évariste’s child. The day the little boy comes to Louisa’s, she spends the whole day there. It’s her that takes him out for a walk. She dressed him up from head to foot and do you know what those people did? They sent all the clothes back in a parcel that they left on the doorstep like thieves.’
Thérèse went on writing to Évariste. As if she could possibly love him!
‘You see, Élise, they’ve got only one thing in their heads: the idea that we’ve got money. The fact that Évariste is at the front doesn’t stop that girl from running after men. I heard that she’d been seen with some Germans. I wrote to Évariste and told him so. I saw the lawyer again, and he told me that if Évariste wrote a letter that he drafted for me, I’d be given custody of the child. Monique would be so happy!’
And the latter sighed:
‘Évariste won’t do it.’
‘Why not, seeing that he doesn’t love that woman?’
‘He’s too scrupulous. He wants to do his duty in spite of everything, to drain the cup to its dregs. I know that Thérèse has written to him telling the most awful lies about us. He must be so unhappy over there, all alone, and pulled this way and that!’
Anna had come downstairs, solidly built like her mother, with a mannish face. She put on her gloves and started looking for her parasol.
‘Haven’t your sisters arrived yet, Monique? And I
thought I was late. Good morning, Aunt. Isn’t Roger with you?’
Roger had preferred to slip into the workshop which looked out on to the sunny yard, where his uncle, in the blue shadows, was plaiting scented wands in the company of the hunchbacked workman. It felt like another world. You could hear the hammers at Sauveur’s, the trams going along the embankment and the Rue Sainte-Foi, the sirens of the tugs, and the buzzing of flies. Roger would have liked to be back in the far-away days when he used to come to choose a willow-wand which he would patiently peel afterwards, or the still more distant time when, a little short-legged fellow, he circled round his uncle, whom he did not know, finally asking anxiously:
‘Tell me, workman, don’t people eat in this house?’
The yard had been bigger, the wall higher, the solitary tree enormous—that tree which sprang from between the uneven paving-stones and whose velvet leaves he stroked today, scarcely needing to stand on tip-toe to do so.
‘Roger! Where are you, Roger? We’re going!’
He was full of goodwill this morning, as he gave his arm to his mother and tried to imagine her as a young girl lost in the immensity of L’Innovation. He was looking forward to going to Lanaeken with his cousins.
One of them, Colette, who was only a little older than he, was a pretty girl with bold eyes. Her fair hair hung down her back in two heavy plaits. She wore shorter skirts than other girls of her age and she had the gestures of a boy; several times they had pretended to fight so as to have an excuse for rolling about in the grass or the cornfields together.
The year before, when they had got into the habit of going picnicking all together on Moncin Island, two miles from Coronmeuse, he had been in love with Colette, in the right way, without any unhealthy curiosity or any thoughts which could make him blush.
He had admired her sister Monique who had walked nonchalantly behind them with the grown-ups, holding a parasol tilted to one side. Monique had reminded him of the mother of his little friend Jacques at Embourg, under the firs, and the pretty villa among the roses in the park.
Pedigree Page 56
