This time, it had come in connection with cheeses, the little Herve cheeses which they had brought back from Éléonore Dafnet’s and put in the cellar, where, so it was said, they could be kept for months. One afternoon when he had been alone in the house, Roger had eaten two of these cheeses, and he had said nothing about it, convinced that nobody would notice that two were missing out of so many.
This cheese incident was something else that Élise had kept to herself for two or three days.
‘Where are you going, Roger?’
‘Out.’
‘You’d do better to do your homework.’
‘I’ve done it already.’
‘Who are you going to meet?’
‘Nobody. Friends of mine.’
‘Don’t you think it would be nicer of you to offer to go to the food-centre for me?’
He said nothing, determined not to do anything of the sort, for he had a rendezvous with Gaston Van de Waele.
‘But no! I know you! You prefer to wait until I’m spending the afternoon queueing in the sun to steal cheese from the cellar. No, don’t go. I haven’t finished yet. It’s disgraceful, when a big strong man like your father has the same ration as us …’
‘Listen, Mother …’
‘No, Roger. You see, you’ve upset me too much and I’ve got to talk to you once for all. Your father’s too good to you. It’s stupid, the way he treats you. If I talk to him about you, he always takes your side.’
‘Please, Mother. Once we start, you know very well how it’ll finish.’
‘I was telling my sister Louisa about it yesterday …’
It was a bad sign that, for some time now, she had kept rushing off to Coronmeuse. But he did not realize as yet how serious it was. Élise herself did not know how to get to the point.
‘Let’s leave Aunt Louisa out of it,’ he suggested. ‘I’d rather go to the food-centre and have done with it. Give me the cards and the shopping-bag.’
‘Aren’t you ashamed of yourself, Roger?’
‘I did wrong eating the cheeses, I admit that. There now. Are you satisfied?’
‘I’m not talking about the cheeses. I’m talking about you. And all the prayers I’ve said for you to grow up a decent man.’
He went pale, and his heart missed a beat. He suddenly felt sure that his thefts from the till at Gruyelle-Marquant’s had been discovered, that his grandfather had seen him and talked. He stood there, rigid, like a condemned man.
‘Cécile told me everything before she died. Poor thing! On her death-bed, she was still worrying about you and she begged me to keep an eye on your behaviour.’
‘What was she interfering about?’
‘Don’t play the innocent, Roger. You know very well what it was. And to think that I pinched and scraped so that, in spite of the war, you should enjoy the country air at Embourg! Your poor cousin went to see you, without ever suspecting what you were doing with one of her pupils. When I heard about that, I thought I was going to go mad. I didn’t want to believe it. And you boasted about it to Cécile while I was praying that my son …’
‘… should remain pure until he married, I know.’
‘You’ve still got the heart to laugh at me?’
‘No, Mother, I’m not laughing. Let’s just try not to be ridiculous. I tell you there’s still time for us to stop. But soon you’ll be rolling on the floor and saying things you’ll regret afterwards.’
That had happened, of course. He in his turn had lost his temper. Why had he brought up Aunt Louisa, Évariste, Monique? He felt so bitter about the act of treachery committed by Cécile, who was dead, that he had rapidly become hateful. He preferred not to remember what he had said. Things had gone so far that a frantic Élise had ended up by screaming:
‘I curse you, Roger, do you hear?’
She had thrown something at him, one of Désiré’s shoes which she had just brought back from the cobbler’s. He had rushed out of the house. It was just five o’clock. He had gone to meet his father, who had understood as soon as he had seen his face.
‘What is it now, son?’
‘A scene with Mother.’
‘Why do you always rub her up the wrong way? You know how nervy she is, and yet you insist on answering her back.’
‘This time it’s worse than that. Aunt Cécile told her things I had told her in confidence as I would a friend. About girls. She was always asking me questions.’
He found it more embarrassing to broach this subject with his father than with his mother.
‘You’ve got a sweetheart? Is that it?’
‘Not exactly. You know those novenas Mother and Aunt Louisa insist on offering up for me. Well, when Mother found out that they’d been useless …’
Désiré had not asked any more questions.
‘Come along. Above all, if your mother talks about it again, don’t answer her whatever you do, don’t try to prove that you’re right.’
‘She’s in a dreadful state. You’ll see.’
But nothing had happened that evening, thanks to the two lodgers sent by Éléonore Dafnet who had arrived providentially. They were two girls who were as different from one another as the blonde and the brunette on the calendar at Aunt Louisa’s. Élise made an effort to smile, in spite of her red eyes and the furious glances she shot at her son as soon as the others had their backs turned.
‘Excuse me, Mesdemoiselles. I wasn’t expecting you today and the house is at sixes and sevens. We’ve just lost one of my husband’s sisters who has left three little children …’
Since then, they had been living in a tense, incoherent atmosphere. Why hadn’t Roger had the courage to follow the advice which his father had given him?
‘Don’t go out for a few days. Do your best to help your mother. She appreciates little kindnesses so much. If you tackle her the right way, she’ll have forgotten everything in a week.’
He did exactly the opposite, almost in spite of himself.
Then Désiré spoke severely to him.
‘Your mother’s right, Roger. At your age, you haven’t any right to come home at midnight, or even two o’clock in the morning. You’ve dropped your studies. You’re never to be seen with a book in your hand. You’re out all the time, with unsuitable friends …’
But didn’t Désiré seem to be telling him with a wink:
‘I’m saying all this to have a little peace. I understand you. Isn’t it enough for her that I stay at home every evening? I’ve stayed at home ever since I got married. But you are young. You have the whole of your life in front of you …’
Élise felt this and watched them like a hawk, trying to find some proof of their complicity.
‘Ask him where he went yesterday. He must have been drinking and he brought up all his dinner. He can’t deny it, because I found his suit covered with bits of vomit and I’ve had all the trouble in the world cleaning it.’
‘Answer, Roger. Where were you?’
‘With Gaston. It was the students’ day.’
Gaston Van de Waele, who had enrolled at a commercial school where he rarely set foot, none the less regarded himself as a student, and every Friday evening he put on a green velvet cap with a long peak such as the university students wore. There were hundreds of them who met at the Pavillon de Flore where the performance was reserved for them.
Roger went with them. They made a rumpus. After the show, they formed up in crocodiles and went through the streets singing, climbing gas-lamps, ringing doorbells, and storming noisily into cafés and night-clubs. The evening nearly always finished in some place of ill-repute, with a riotous drinking session accompanied by animal noises and obscene army songs.
‘Then ask him where he gets the money to go out like that.’
Roger blushed and replied rather too quickly:
‘It’s Gaston who pays.’
‘And you aren’t ashamed to go on accepting your cousin’s invitations? You aren’t as proud as I thought you were. In any case, I’ll have
a word with Gaston. I’ll forbid him to take you out.’
He avoided staying at home. He avoided his mother. He was afraid of the sad, anxious gaze of his father, who sometimes looked as if he were silently appealing to him. Did Désiré understand that if he thwarted his son, the result would be quicker and more disastrous than ever?
Meanwhile, it was on him that Élise’s anger fell, and Roger knew it. The only respite his father had was when the two lodgers were in the kitchen, but they did not stay there long after their meals. They went up to their room or out to the cinema, never suspecting that their departure marked the end of Désiré’s tranquillity.
Roger was as ashamed of this as if he had committed an act of treachery. The only thing which restrained him was the thought of his father alone with Élise in the kitchen, but a devil impelled him in spite of everything to do what he should have avoided.
‘I hope that you will at least respect my lodgers?’
They were not exactly alluring. They were homespun country girls, and Roger would not have turned round to look at them in the street. One of them, Marie, who had a moon-shaped face and big vacant eyes, was in love with Roger, stupidly, hopelessly in love. The other, a skinny girl with red hair and her face plastered with make-up, played the coquette with disarming naïvety.
Out of defiance, he had made a rendezvous with them outside. He had waited for them on the corner of the street, a stone’s-throw from the house. They had gone out together and had spent the whole evening poking fun at Élise and her novenas. Now, at dinner, they darted conspiratorial glances at one another and were hard put to it not to burst out laughing as they kicked each other under the table.
The catastrophe was inevitable. Roger had got to the point of hoping for it. He was constantly short of money. The last time he had gone out with the two lodgers, the redhead had slipped a note into his hand to pay for the cinema seats. He had paid her back the next day, but to do that he had had to borrow some money from Gaston, who had no more liqueurs to sell.
He had already sold half his school books to a bookseller in the Rue Saint-Paul. He had also sold the silver watch which his father had given him when he had started going to college.
Anything was preferable to the atmosphere at home, even the billiard saloon where, looking at himself in the mirrors, he gave himself the illusion of being a man. Hadn’t he come to envy Stievens, who could not be said to be afraid of his mother’s reproaches and who, one day when they were quarrelling, had calmly called her a whore?
It was the height of summer, and yet it seemed to him that everything around him was dark and menacing. He avoided the sunshine in the streets, and like Gaston Van de Waele sought the ambiguous chiaroscuro of certain disreputable cafés.
It often happened that he had no dinner. An economical restaurant had been set up for the undernourished population, where for one franc you were entitled to a substantial meal. It was a huge room in the old Palais de Glace, on the Boulevard de la Sauvenière, lit by the crude light coming through a glass ceiling. You queued in front of a succession of counters, receiving a plate here, a set of table utensils there, and passing cooking-pots from which girls ladled out soup, vegetables, meat and bread. After that, all that remained for you to do was to find a place in which to sit down at one of the deal tables.
Everything had the same insipid taste and, whatever the dish for the day might be, the same smell of rancid bacon and dish-water; but it was food all the same and there was plenty of fat in it.
Often Roger kept the franc and wandered through the streets with an empty stomach, in the midday sun, until it was time to go back to school.
Élise went to Le Bouhay every evening. She told her troubles to a confessor before whom she probably cried her eyes out and who must have formed a wonderful idea of Roger. As soon as she had a moment free, she rushed over to Coronmeuse, coming back with her unpleasant expression.
The lodgers lived in the same room, the handsome corner room which had been Mademoiselle Rinquet’s. Roger had the room on the right, looking out on the boulevard, and his parents the one on the left, on the Rue des Maraîchers side.
The communicating doors between the three rooms were all bolted. What is more, in the girls’ room, a wardrobe blocked Roger’s door.
The latter had not been able to go out the day before, for want of money. He had not wanted to stay in the kitchen and had gone upstairs straight after supper, a prey to angry thoughts. He had stayed for a long time stretched out on his bed in the dark, his eyes open, his gaze fixed on the lace curtains whose complicated pattern stood out sharply in the moonlight.
Then he had heard Marie and Alice coming upstairs and whispering in their room. One of them had started tapping on the wall while they had tried to bottle up their laughter.
‘Are you asleep?’
At first he had maintained a sulky silence, but he had ended up by replying:
‘No.’
‘What are you doing?’
‘Nothing.’
They were in high spirits. He could still hear their voices and their laughter. Then he had heard a dull rumble and realized that they were trying to move the wardrobe.
He had been frightened, really frightened, sensing that nothing would stop them and that, for his part, he was ready to take any risks.
‘Are you there, Roger? Can you hear me?’
‘Yes.’
‘Would you like to come and eat some chocolates with us?’
They nudged each other, on the point of bursting out laughing, as girls always were. The bolt was pulled back and the door opened; he could only just make out the two figures in the dark room, which had a different smell from his own room, and he had the impression that the girls were as frightened as he was.
It was a gesture of defiance. Downstairs, just below them, Élise and Désiré were sitting in the sluggish atmosphere of the kitchen, and the house was so quiet that now and then you could hear the ‘poof’ of the stove and you had the impression of hearing Désiré turning the pages of his newspaper.
Was it conceivable that Élise was not cocking her ears at the furtive movements of Roger and the two girls?
‘Where are the chocolates?’ he asked, with a lump in his throat.
‘There aren’t any. It was a trick to make you come.’
Why were they laughing like that? They were mad. Anybody would have thought that they had been drinking or that they had an idea up their sleeves.
‘Well, Marie, are you happy now?’ asked Alice. ‘Don’t take any notice of me, you two. I’m going to sleep.’
And the redhead lay down on the bed while fat Marie protested, probably going red in the face.
‘What are you talking about, Alice? You mustn’t believe her, Roger. I didn’t say anything.’
‘Are you pretending that you didn’t tell me that you’d give a lot to have him kiss you?’
‘Shut up!’
‘What are you waiting for, Roger? I swear it’s true. She’s mad about you. She talks about you from morning till night. The other day, she tried to pinch your picture from your mother’s album.’
There was still time. Roger had only to go away, but he did not dare to, restrained by self-respect and perhaps also a more complicated feeling. Not for anything in the world did he want to show that he was afraid of his mother, and yet, just now, he really was afraid of her. She was busy peeling carrots, he knew that; he had the impression that he could see her using the paring-knife, and his father sitting in the wickerwork armchair, holding his newspaper in front of him.
‘Wait a minute, Roger. If she’s going to pretend she doesn’t want to, I’ll hold her for you.’
And Alice sprang to her feet and ran after her, the two girls rushing from one corner of the room to another on tip-toe, hushing each other and finally rolling on to the bed.
‘You can come now. I’m holding her. Don’t scratch me, you big silly! Seeing that you want to! You know, Roger, I do believe that she’s never been kissed by
a boy, and I’ve known her a long time.’
Roger had found himself lying between them in the dark. His lips had pressed against the lips of the amorous Marie while his hands were searching for the other girl’s hands, and their fingers had intertwined as if to say:
‘It’s all a joke. We’re making fun of the poor girl. She’s such a ninny!’
‘Are you happy, Marie? Is it good?’
And Roger’s hands let go of hers to slip into her bodice. He bore down on them with his full weight. The laughing stopped. Perhaps all three of them felt rather ashamed, but their faces were invisible and they did not know how to extricate themselves from the situation they had got into. Now and then the springs creaked and then Roger cocked his ears, holding his breath, convinced that he was going to hear the kitchen door open at any moment.
Alice’s hands were as bold as his. He stayed face to face with Marie, but it was on to her friend that he gradually slipped his body.
Earlier on, when he had come into the room, he had not meant to do anything whatever. Even now there was no desire in him. Why then did he insist on undressing the fat girl, whom he ended up by stripping to the waist and who, as her only defence, kept her hand desperately over her sex?
‘Go on!’ Alice whispered to him. ‘Do her up!’
Then, impelled by heaven knows what complicated desire of vengeance, it was on Alice that he did a mime of love. He did not make love to her. The idea did not occur to him. But he exaggerated the pretence, and Marie lay there beside them, her belly bare, not understanding and suffering while the other girl, to complete the illusion, started heaving sighs.
The kitchen door had opened. There had been a silence. They could imagine Élise standing in the hall, her face turned towards the staircase well, listening. All three held their breaths while she finally came upstairs and put her ear to the door.
‘Did you call me, Mesdemoiselles?’
It was Alice who managed to reply in a toneless voice:
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