‘No, Madame.’
Then Élise had opened Roger’s door. There was nothing separating them, since the communicating door was open. They could distinctly hear her breathing. She had hesitated, obviously tempted to go in.
Finally she had gone downstairs, and after a long period of silent immobility Alice had given a hysterical laugh.
‘What’s she going to say? You don’t think she’ll throw us out, do you?’
‘No fear. She’s far too keen on her lodgers!’
He was ashamed of this uncalled-for piece of spite, but he had to say something. Marie started crying and finally got up, pulling her dress down.
‘I think I’d better leave you two by yourselves.’
‘There’s no need to now,’ the other girl replied. ‘We’ve finished. All you had to do was let him get on with it. Isn’t that so, Roger?’
‘Of course.’
All this set your nerves on edge. Roger was keyed up and he would have liked to have a fit of hysterics like his mother to ease the tension.
‘Where are you going?’
‘To bed.’
Marie was fool enough to light the oil-lamp and the three of them looked like ghosts. Downstairs, they could hear Élise’s monotonous voice and, now and then, Désiré’s bass trying to calm her down in a murmur.
Roger had not gone downstairs. He had slept badly. He had walked in his sleep twice, something which often happened to him now, just as it had when he was little. He must have called out, for his parents had got up. He remembered his father, in his night-shirt and barefoot, gently taking him back to bed. His night-light had been left burning on a corner of the mantelpiece.
In the morning, he had deliberately gone downstairs when everybody was already at table. Marie was as red as a tomato, incapable of swallowing a single mouthful. Alice, on the other hand, was chattering away, and Élise was answering her while trying to assume a friendly expression.
He had kissed his mother as he did every morning. She had not returned his kiss. All the same, she had given him his breakfast and a franc for his dinner. She had announced that she was going to spend the afternoon at Aunt Louisa’s and asked the lodgers to have a look at the fire when they came home.
He had scarcely seen his father. He had preferred not to see him. If he had been only a year older, he would have crossed the frontier to enlist, for youths had been accepted who were under seventeen. What was he going to do in two months’ time, when the results of the examinations were announced? He did not want to pass. It was a futile humiliation, if only with regard to Father Renchon who pretended to have forgotten that he existed.
Now he was playing billiards with Stievens whose ambition it was to look like a fashion-plate. He circled round the green cloth with a mechanical walk, envying the others in the room, all those placid men who were not forced to face problems like his.
They were notabilities of the town, solicitors, big business men. Nearly all of them were fifty or more, and they had not a single glance to spare for those two adolescents carefully copying their gestures and attitudes.
‘What are you doing tonight?’
‘I’m going to bed,’ replied Stievens, who was a great sleeper.
Gaston Van de Waele had gone off for a few days to Neeroeteren, where soon he would be saying grace, in all seriousness, at the head of the table.
Roger had rarely felt his solitude so keenly. It seemed to him that his fate was like no other and that consequently nobody in the whole world was capable of understanding him.
‘Shall we have another game?’
‘No. My mother has some guests this evening and I promised to be home early.’
Even Stievens was deserting him! They crossed the auditorium of the Palace just as the orchestra was playing its finale and a thousand people were all hurrying at once towards the door with the same sound of shuffling feet as at the end of a High Mass.
Outside, it was still light. The sun, although it was no longer visible, was still filling the streets with that uniform light which comes from nowhere. A red gable became as bright as a fire, and an attic window in the middle of a slate roof blazed with a thousand flames which hurt the eyes.
‘You’re coming my way?’ asked the surprised Stievens, who lived in the opposite direction from Roger.
‘I’ll walk with you part of the way.’
When he left his friend at his door, he was even more at a loss, not knowing what to do or where to go, and putting off the moment of pushing open the kitchen door in the Rue des Maraîchers.
He had not a single centime left. He had not dared to ask Stievens to pay for him and had just had a glass of beer. He was not really hungry, despite the fact that he had had nothing to eat since the morning. It was a heavy feeling, an uneasiness which he could not place.
Surprised to find himself back in the middle of the Passerelle, he gazed at the Meuse, which was taking on a metallic colour, and at the pink faces of the passers-by, flushed by the setting sun.
At home, everybody would be at table. It had been a mistake to dawdle. In front of the lodgers, Élise would probably not have dared to say anything and that would have given him time to eat. He quickened his step and ended up by almost running. There was no doubt about that, and later on he would be tempted to believe that it was a presentiment.
He opened the door with his key. Straight away, he felt there was something unusual about the house. He could not see anybody through the curtain hanging over the glazed kitchen door, and the table was not laid. As panic-stricken as a child, he shouted:
‘Mother!’
There was some movement up above, and he rushed upstairs. A door opened, the door of his parents’ room, but it was his cousin Anna who appeared, very upright, very stiff, one finger at her lips, and said:
‘Ssh, Roger.’
Some misfortune had occurred. The mere presence of Anna on the threshold of that room was a sign of misfortune. Roger’s first idea was that his mother had committed a desperate act. He pushed his cousin to one side and stood motionless, a prey to a terrible feeling at the sight of the bedroom filled with the pink light of evening.
Désiré was lying on the bed, his head supported by several pillows. On the bedside table there were some medicine bottles, and a strong hospital smell was floating in the air. Élise was standing by the bed, snivelling, and trying to smile so as not to cry.
‘Come in, Roger. Shut the door, Anna. Don’t make any noise. Come here very quietly and kiss your father.’
Désiré looked at him and there was such happiness in his brown eyes at the sight of his son that you could tell straight away that he had thought that he would never see him again.
Roger kissed him, close to the stiff moustache which still smelled of tobacco.
‘It’s nothing, son. Don’t cry.’
‘No, it’s nothing,’ Élise hurriedly declared. ‘An attack of intercostal neuralgia, that’s what the doctor told us, isn’t it, Anna? It’s frightening when it happens, but a week from now there won’t be any sign of it.’
She was talking as people talk to the sick, to reassure them. Roger could feel that his father did not believe her. He would have liked to stay alone with him. Désiré was in a feeble condition, and his voice sounded like Cécile’s.
‘Go and have your supper, son. They’ve given me something to make me sleep. Above all, you must have enough to eat.’
It was Anna who went down to the kitchen with him and served him on a corner of the table, while at the same time telling him what had happened.
‘Just imagine, your mother was at our house when they came from Sauveur’s to say that she was wanted on the telephone. We’d just sat down at table to have some coffee. Monique, who was there too, had a feeling straight away that something had happened and she wouldn’t let your mother go by herself. It was one of your lodgers, I don’t know which, who was telephoning from the doctor’s across the street from here.’
Roger ate his supper without be
ing aware of it. He ate, but he was not hungry, and he listened attentively to the words his cousin pronounced, words which were promptly translated into pictures.
The Quai de Coronmeuse was familiar enough. He could see Monsieur Sauveur’s house too. And Alice, panic-stricken, at the doctor’s across the way. For it was Alice. Marie would not have thought of telephoning. She would not have known how to set about it.
‘It was another stroke of luck that they were at home. They’d just come back when the doorbell rang. They looked out of the window and saw an ambulance outside. It was your father whom they were bringing home from the Rue Sohet. He’d had an attack at the office. They did what they could for him there, and then Doctor Fischer, a specialist Monsieur Monnoyeur had sent for, brought him here himself. Just when your mother wasn’t at home! We ran here as fast as our legs could carry us. I do believe we got here quicker than the tram. The doctor was still here when we arrived.’
‘What did he say?’
‘Eat up, Roger.’
‘I want to know exactly what he said.’
‘You understand, he can’t say anything definite yet, but he thinks it won’t be serious this time. The worst is over.’
‘Why do you say this time?’
‘Because there may be other attacks.’
‘Attacks of what?’
‘Your father’s got a weak heart. Doctor Fischer’s coming again tomorrow. He knew what it was beforehand, because Désiré had already consulted him several times. You’re a man now, Roger. You must be a man, because your mother has to be able to count on you, whatever happens. Your father needs to take it easy. He must have a quiet life, without any excitement.’
Élise’s voice, up above, called softly:
‘Can you come upstairs, Anna?’
His mother came down and slumped on to a chair as if her legs would no longer carry her. With her head in her hands, she started crying soundlessly. Roger went over to her and put an arm round her shoulders.
‘Don’t cry, Mother.’
He murmured anything that came into his head. The words did not matter. He stroked her hair. Then, kneeling in front of her like the little boy of old, he put his head in her lap.
‘We’ll take care of him and you’ll see, we’ll cure him all right. Don’t cry. I’ll be a man, I promise. I’ll work. You see …’
How could he express what he felt, when he did not even dare to think it? And yet there was within him so to speak the certainty that this had been bound to happen. Nobody had known this, but it was something which had been decided beforehand. It was a horrible thing to say. There were no words to express an idea like that. It was inconceivable that it should be true. And yet, just now, when he had gone into the bedroom, it had seemed to him that his father could have murmured to him:
‘You see, son, I’ve set you free …’
For Roger was saved now. He was sure of that. He squeezed his mother’s hands in his and gazed intently at her tear-stained face.
‘Anna says it isn’t a serious attack…’
‘There’ll be more of them. I know that. Doctor Fischer told me. He asked me if I was strong enough to bear the truth. He isn’t one of those doctors who go on lying to a family to the very end. Désiré has been suffering for a long time from angina pectoris, but he kept it from us so as not to frighten us. And I was so cruel to him!’
‘What are you saying, Mother?’
‘You can’t know. I’ll never forgive myself. When I think that I reproached him for not worrying what would become of me if something happened to him! Now I know, from Doctor Fischer, that he applied for a life-insurance policy a long time ago and that his application was turned down.’
She glanced automatically at the alarm-clock.
‘I must give my lodgers their supper all the same. It’s too late for Anna to go back home. You’ll let her have your bed and sleep on the chaise-longue in the dining-room. It seems he’ll be able to get up in two or three days. He may go on for years without another attack, but on the other hand he may be carried off from one minute to the next. It really is the most horrible disease there is. To think that from now on I’ve got to live with the idea that I may be called to the telephone at any time to be told …’
She laid the table, performed the usual everyday gestures, made up the fire, poured the boiling water on the coffee.
‘Where are you going, Roger?’
He did not know where he was going, possibly into the dining-room where nobody ever set foot and the shutters stayed closed from one year’s end to the other. He wanted to be alone. His head was spinning. He thought that he had detected a reproach in his mother’s voice and he stayed to reassure her.
‘You’ll see, I’ll help you. I’ll go and find a job tomorrow.’
But no, it wasn’t possible! Was it true that he felt a sort of relief at his father’s illness? He experienced a need to protest and the protest itself hurt him. He would do anything for his father to be well again and for the threat hanging over his life to disappear for ever.
Yet now, from one minute to the next, everything had been settled of what had previously been so heavy with potential misfortune. Nobody had said anything about the horrible scene the day before. Perhaps nobody would ever say anything about it again, at least for a long time to come. He was going to leave school. He would not have to sit for his examinations, or suffer the humiliation of the inevitable failure.
His mother called out automatically at the foot of the stairs:
‘Mademoiselle Alice! Mademoiselle Marie!’
They came and sat down at table, rather self-consciously. Élise tried to look on the cheerful side of things.
‘You’ll see, it won’t be anything serious. The doctor says that a week from now, it will be just a bad memory. You must have been frightened, Mesdemoiselles. It would have to happen when you were alone in the house! It’s a good thing that you knew where I was and that you thought of telephoning me.’
All that time, Roger had been playing billiards, over the Palace, circling with other dummies round tables lit by reflectors. Then he had accompanied Stievens to his house and had wandered interminably through the streets.
‘I’m going upstairs to relieve Anna,’ he announced. ‘Are there any drops to be given?’
‘Nothing more until eleven o’clock. What he needs now is absolute rest. He must sleep too.’
It was Roger’s night-light which was being used again. Walking on tiptoe, he motioned to Anna, who got up to give him her seat. The door-hinges creaked slightly, then there was nothing to be heard but a gentle murmur of voices and the sound of plates clattering in the kitchen. With his chin in his hands, Roger gazed intently at his father, who was sleeping and whose moustache quivered with every breath.
CHAPTER NINE
CONTRARY to what he would have imagined in the past, it was the passers-by who were in the aquarium and it was he who, through the bookshop window, watched them with a curiosity tinged with pity.
The most astonishing thing was the serious, not to say solemn expressions which people’s faces assumed, just as they were indulging in their most ridiculous gestures.
The frame—the aquarium—was bigger or smaller depending on whether Roger was standing near the window or at the back of the bookshop. When he was in the back-room, which was known as the office, this field of vision, framed in the communicating hatch lined with books, was reduced to the proportions of a cinema screen.
Well, in spite of what you imagined when you were in the street yourself, the passers-by had exactly the same jerky walk as the characters on the screen, particularly the comic characters, those who gesticulated more wildly than the rest.
Whether they came in from the left or the right, they looked as if they had been hurled by a catapult into this piece of world which was barely sixty feet long, and as if they were racing each other across it, their eyes set, their jaws jutting fiercely, to disappear again into nothingness.
All day long, Roger
could read on the window, the wrong way round, the words: Germain’s Bookshop, and, in smaller enamel letters: Lending Library. All day long, on the other side of this frontier, people stopped short, as if a spring had broken inside them.
You could then see them from the front, in close-up. They did not move, but stayed there side by side, sometimes five or six in a row, not knowing one another, lost in the contemplation of the yellow-backed books in the window-display.
It was inconceivable that they should be thinking, in spite of their tense features and the often dramatic expression on their faces. They were simply waiting for the reverse switch to work, which would send them back into their jerky walk and carry them off the stage.
The yellow trams, which went past minute by minute making a tremendous din, were not to be taken any more seriously, with the driver rigid on the platform in front, the conductor on the one at the back, and two rows of wobbling heads inside; and it would be no surprise if, like a toy which was out of order, they went hurtling against a real wall.
The patterns of light and shade changed from hour to hour, almost from minute to minute. Over the way, there was a shoe-shop with two elegant windows and a door which was open all the time. The shop-girls, who wore white collars over black dresses, went to and fro in the half-light, and now and then one of them, showing a customer to the door, leant outside, on the point of crossing the frontier into the street. She was within an ace of being caught up in the mechanism, but she sensed the danger and plunged nimbly back into her world of white boxes piled up like bricks.
All that was tiny and unreal. The solid world began near the window of the bookshop with Mademoiselle Georgette sitting behind a high desk. Roger, perched on a bamboo ladder, coughed to attract her attention and said in a voice which he had not known he possessed before, a voice which he had acquired in this shop:
‘843.’
At her cash-desk, Mademoiselle Georgette, the bookseller’s niece, turned the pages of a register in search of the figure 843, which was the number of a customer’s subscription. When she stopped going through the book and lowered her pen on to one page, he knew that he could go on:
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