‘Isn’t your mother with you, Roger?’
‘No, Mademoiselle. Today Roger is mine for the whole day. Now let’s see what you can show me.’
He was in a holiday mood. He was the uncle who had arrived miraculously from Brussels and who was going to transform a boy’s life completely.
‘No blue, Mademoiselle. Find me something gayer.’
Valérie did not dare to approach. The assistant regretfully produced a red jersey suit which delighted Guillaume.
‘Put it on him, will you?’
The assistants made signs to each other from one counter to the next. They all knew that Roger was dedicated to the Virgin, and imagined Élise’s face when she saw her son come home in that gaudy red suit.
‘Perfect! Leave it on him. Put his dress on one side. His mother will come and pick it up one of these days. How much?’
He was Guillaume! And with Guillaume, everything was different. The boy followed him, dumbfounded, still a little frightened.
‘Now let’s see. What would you like to do now?’
Roger’s gaze alighted on an ice-cream vendor’s yellow cart.
‘An ice-cream!’
He would never have dared to say that to his mother. Guillaume leaned his elbows on the little cart and spoke familiarly to the vendor, as he spoke to everybody.
‘Give this little nipper an ice. A strawberry ice, Roger?’
‘Yes.’
Then he plunged into the town crowds with the child, who let himself be pulled along while he sucked his cornet crowned with pink cream. If only Élise had seen him!
This was all so different from the quiet visits to L’Innovation the other days, from the silent walk between the counters, the discreet exchange of signals, the long halts in front of a piece of madapollam or merino, the words which were whispered with an eye on Monsieur Wilhem’s silhouette or the Inspector’s frockcoat!
Guillaume went along streets where Roger had never been. In the Place Verte, they crossed a sea of sweet-smelling flowers where the flower sellers sat behind their bouquets like the women in the market behind their baskets of fruit or vegetables.
‘What if we went and had dinner at the Exhibition? Would you like to go and have dinner at the Exhibition?’
They took the tram. With Élise, they took the tram only when it was absolutely necessary. The ice was still lasting. There was a bit of it left when they got off the tram outside the Exhibition gates and Guillaume paid for them to go in; he did not even know that children did not pay and bought two tickets, afterwards making straight for the restaurant section.
Usually they avoided this section where, in brightly painted houses, you could see people eating huge Brussels waffles with the holes filled with whipped cream. They went straight across to the free stands, including those where samples were given, the chocolate stand for instance, with its machines, its huge shining wheel, the belt slipping along without a sound, and the negro dressed as if he had come out of the Arabian Nights who distributed the drops of chocolate which had fallen from the machine.
Guillaume did not know that Élise forbade her son to eat these samples.
‘It’s dirty!’ she would tell him, wiping the palms of his hands with her handkerchief.
He did not know that when the child was thirsty and stopped in front of the stalls on which rows of coloured bottles of soda-water were lined up, you had to pull him away and say:
‘You’ll have a drink when we get back home.’
Guillaume did not know either where you had to go to get the sumptuous prospectuses of which Roger already had quite a collection, the coloured pictures, the series of wild animals given by Remy starch, and above all the booklet advertising Swedish matches, with its thin, silky paper on which you could see matches of all colours, green ones, red ones, and even some with golden heads.
‘What does your mother give you to eat?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Tell me, waiter …’
For they were sitting under an arbour, with a waiter in a white apron beside them, like the people they walked past so quickly the other days before going to have a snack on a bench.
‘What are you going to give this little fellow?’
‘You could always start with a soup. Then something light, a fried sole for instance?’
‘A fried sole, then.’
He drank some wine. His eyes laughed like Désiré’s. They were the same dark brown, but they did not have the same gentleness, or rather there was in their gay flame a more vulgar note which was sometimes rather aggressive.
‘Are you happy? Are you enjoying yourself?’
‘Yes.’
A man went past with some paper windmills fastened to coloured sticks.
‘Do you want a windmill?’
‘Yes.’
The child was impressed. A grown-up’s napkin had been tied round his neck. Nobody had seen to it that he piddled, and he had done so in his red jersey trousers which were scratching him between the legs.
It was all too much for him. He could not stand it any longer. His cheeks were burning. He was hard put to it not to burst out sobbing.
‘Do you want to go on the water-slide?’
He pulled at the hand which was dragging him along.
‘No! …No! …’
He was frightened. For hours on end, the other days, they had watched people in boats coming down the slope of the water-slide, but the idea of going on it himself had never occurred to him.
‘You aren’t tired, are you?’
‘Yes …No …’
He would have liked it all to last a long time and yet he could feel a mounting anguish in his chest. When he looked at his Uncle Guillaume, he thought he would recognize his father, but it was such a different father that he was afraid of him and became sad.
‘What do you want us to do now?’
With his mouth full and his hands full, he did not reply. The jersey was chafing his thighs which were probably all red, especially with the piddle.
‘What if we went to say hullo to your papa, who’s still in his office?’
The child clutched at this straw, even though the word papa, which was never uttered in the Rue Pasteur, shocked him.
‘Yes.’
Was his father waiting outside, at the corner of the Pont du Commerce, to the left of the entrance, as on the other evenings when they came out of the Exhibition? For Désiré had not gone to the expense of buying a permanent ticket. When he left his office, he came to wait for Élise and the child, and, since Roger was always tired by that time, he carried him home on his shoulders.
‘Put him down, Désiré! He’s too big now.’
‘I don’t want to be put down.’
Today everything was different. Time had disappeared. The Exhibition was all topsy-turvy. Nothing was in its place. You could not be certain of anything any more. He felt lost in a world which no longer had any meaning and in which people bustled about in all directions.
‘Wait a moment. We’ll take a carriage.’
He did not understand. Carriages were for taking people to hospital. He clung to his uncle’s hand.
‘No. I don’t want to.’
But Guillaume had already signalled to an open cab.
‘You really don’t want to get in?’
‘No.’
‘Why not?’
‘I don’t want to. I want Mother.’
There was only the Pont du Commerce to cross, the square with the ducks where the flags fluttered in the sunshine. Then they were already in the Rue des Guillemins. They turned the corner of the Rue Sohet. A triumphant smile appeared on Guillaume’s lips as he pushed open the door of the insurance office.
The child, for his part, saw only a partition with windows in it which he could not reach.
‘Well, I never! Guillaume! What are you doing here in Liége?’
And Guillaume mischievously lifted Roger up in his arms and placed him on the sill of the little window.
The boy
discovered a world he did not know, a stove, some furniture, a piece of bread and butter on an unfolded napkin, a bowl full of coffee, and his father, in shirtsleeves, who looked quite at home here although they had surprised him in a strange setting.
It was funny: Désiré was almost embarrassed by his son’s inspection of this scene, but he smiled straight away and went to open the communicating door.
‘Come in, Guillaume. Come in, son. I suppose it’s you, Guillaume, who bought him that suit?’
What was the use of pressing the point? Élise would tell him herself!
‘Sit down, Roger. You see, this is your father’s office. And how’s your wife, Guillaume? Are you here for a few days? You’ve had your dinner, I suppose?’
He picked up his bread and butter, next to the typewriter, while the child stared hard, as if he were making a memorable discovery, at his father eating somewhere else than at home, in his shirtsleeves, just as he was in the evening in the Rue Pasteur flat.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
‘DO YOU think the colour will come out, Valérie?’
Élise took out of the hot, soapy bath a blood-red, shapeless mass which was Roger’s first suit. Were there any pink streaks in the bluey water? That was the vital question.
‘I assure you it won’t, Élise. You’ll see, they’ll take it back all right.’
Élise was in a state of nerves. She couldn’t find any other word for it. She felt just as she did when she had cried a lot and yet she had not cried at all today: her head and legs were empty, and there was a sort of hurried ticking going on all over her body, as if there were a machine driving her along, wanting to go faster than her.
Madame Smet was the same at nine o’clock in the evening as at ten o’clock in the morning, always the visitor, with her mittens on her freckled hands, wagging her head in approval of whatever was said to her, and sitting erect on her upright chair, for she had never agreed to sit in an armchair.
Valérie’s fingers were fluttering over a piece of crochet-work. It was the only kind of work she could do. Her fingers were so delicate, so diaphanous, her hands so frail, that she would sprain her wrist if she had to bring up a bucket of water.
Wasn’t it paradoxical that she should have become Élise’s best friend? Valérie had no bones, no nerves. When you looked at her hand in front of the lamp, you could not see any bones in it, or hardly any. And her feet were so tiny that she had to buy her shoes in the little girls’ department.
She did not weigh heavily on the earth. She was like a strange little princess who was neither pretty nor a princess, an unsubstantial creature with a plain face, a big head, and the hair of a Chinese doll, who, apart from her silks and laces, was unfit for everything, even for living, and there was no doubt at all that she and her mother would have allowed themselves to starve if they had not had Marie, the elder daughter, the dressmaker, to do their housework for them before going out to work.
Élise was fond of Valérie, but it made her suffer all the same to see a woman as young as that sitting impassively beside a tub full of dirty crockery. In her place, she would have stood up long ago and said:
‘Give me a dishcloth, Élise.’
This evening, Élise kept asking anxiously:
‘Do you really think they’ll take it back?’
The door was half-open. Roger was asleep. It was nine o’clock. As happened every Friday, Désiré had gone to play whist at the Veldens’.
He was happy over there. He was the most skilful person there, just as in the Rue Puits-en-Sock he was the most intelligent. He was also the gayest. He joked and smiled all round with a smile which was almost condescending.
Yet the Velden brothers, the coppersmiths, were one of the oldest families in Outremeuse and they had a score of workers whom the siren—you could hear it from the Rue Pasteur—called back to work at one o’clock. There was also Émile Grisard, who was a government architect and whose brother was a traveller for a big champagne firm. And there was Monsieur Reculé, a chief clerk on North Belgian Railways, who travelled first class free of charge.
They needed Désiré so badly, people like them, that if he was a quarter of an hour late, they came ringing the bell in the Rue Pasteur!
‘You’ll see, Élise, when it’s dry and ironed, it won’t show any more.’
They made up a tremendous fire. The suit started drying, the irons warmed up, red clinkers rained down into the ashtray inside the stove and all this sent Madame Smet to sleep. She dozed off, giving a start every time the whispering grew a little louder.
When he had come home at two o’clock, Désiré had not said anything. Élise could not forgive him for it. He had arrived delighted with his meeting with his brother, full of that good humour which she so detested in the Mamelins.
She had not noticed anything at first. He had teased Madame Smet, as usual, and had sat down to table with a merry appetite.
‘You haven’t seen Guillaume, have you?’
‘He dropped into the office just now with Roger.’
‘Where are they?’
‘We came back together on the No. 4 tram.’
She could see them, she could swear she could see them, on the platform of the tram which went right round the town; they had not gone inside so as to be able to smoke, and also because it was gayer outside; Roger had remained standing between their legs while they told their stories.
‘Where’s Roger?’
‘Guillaume left me and got off the tram in the Place du Congrès. He wanted to show our son to an aunt of his wife’s who lives in Bressoux or Jupille.’
Thoughtlessness! There was no other word for it!
‘What were you thinking of, Désiré?’
‘But Guillaume is perfectly capable of looking after a child.’
She had not cried, on account of Madame Smet. Perhaps it was because she had not cried once all day that she was in such a state of nerves.
Now it all came back to her, all that had been done to her, all that she had suffered, all that she sometimes brooded over for hours on end while looking after the child in the Place du Congrès, when Madame Pain was not there.
Désiré had had his dinner. He had drunk his coffee, had wiped his moustache with an air of satisfaction, had picked up his hat and stick. He had not told her everything. She had been a long way from suspecting that at that moment he had already seen the red suit and that, like a coward, so as to enjoy his dinner in peace, he had said nothing about it.
Worse still, she remembered murmuring:
‘I wonder what surprise he’s going to spring on us.’
And with a vague gesture he had replied:
‘With Guillaume, you’ve got to be ready for anything …’
He had known all the time! And he had gone off, as stiff as a ramrod, his conscience at peace. And Élise had been left alone with Madame Smet, with whom you always kept wondering what to say and whether she was listening.
Three o’clock … Four o’clock … Guillaume had promised to bring the child home at four o’clock and the hands of the alarm-clock on the mantelpiece already stood at twenty-past.
‘Listen, Madame Smet …’
She apologized, begged the old lady to forgive her. She did not know this relative of her sister-in-law’s, a person who was said to live at Bressoux, on the other side of the Dérivation, right out in the suburbs and even outside the town.
‘All I’m asking of you is a quarter of an hour. It’s because of Roger …’
She did not know where to go looking for him. For quite a while she stood hesitating in the middle of the Place du Congrès, looking at all the streets leading off the square and trembling at the approach of every tram.
Finally, without any valid excuse, she dashed off in the direction of the Rue Puits-en-Sock. Generally speaking, she did not go there without a hat, just wearing a shawl. She felt embarrassed. It always made her feel queasy to breathe in that smell of saltpetre, in the whitewashed passage in which a creaking gate had been
installed to stop the children from rushing out under the wheels of a tram.
She had never been able to breathe freely in that house. Everything in it shocked her, especially the stench in the yard, that smell of poverty, of slops, which you found only in certain lower-class districts. Even when she and her mother had been at their poorest, they would never have agreed to live in the midst of smells like that.
She knew that she had already been seen through the fake stained-glass windows. She knocked. She went in.
‘Good evening, Cécile.’
And once again it was a mute hostility which she encountered, which struck her as being aimed personally against her, that atmosphere in the kitchen which had remained the same for all that Madame Mamelin was dead and Cécile had taken her place. To think that Désiré had lived until the age of twenty-four in that house!
The lamp was not lit until the last possible moment. All the objects in the kitchen were in the same places, where they had always been, and the least among them had gradually acquired a physiognomy like a human being, the coffee-mill for instance, the wooden chicory-pot, the matchbox, the pendulum of the clock, everything, even the warmth of the room which was not the same as anywhere else.
And Cécile! It was ironing day. As far back as anybody could remember, Friday had always been ironing day in the Rue Puits-en-Sock, and Cécile was duly ironing, with her mother’s heavy laundry irons in which embers were burned; the brackets were in their usual place on the blanket on which the burnt patches served as guide marks.
You felt that you were in the way, that you were disturbing an eternal harmony. Cécile had been ironing all day and would go on ironing like that until the end of time without giving any sign of surprise or impatience if, by some miracle, Friday were to last forever.
Élise had not seen Old Papa when she had come in. It was too dark and she gave a start as she caught sight of that stone statue in its armchair.
‘It’s only me, Old Papa.’
‘I know, my girl.’
Through the windows, on the other side of the yard, Chrétien Mamelin could be seen in his workshop, slowly and solemnly steaming a hat, and that ill-lit picture too had a dreadfully eternal appearance.
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