The Widow (18 page)

It was odd: the day when Jean was depressed, she too was sad, and it would not have taken much to make her cry.

“I've got money put by. It's hidden in the house. There's more than you might think. Twenty-two thousand francs.”

Her eyes were fastened on him, watching for some reaction, but he was listening to her words without paying attention to them, without taking their meaning.

“Twenty-two thousand francs that I've saved sou by sou, ever since the first day I walked into this house. I robbed them all, the whole lot of them! I cheated, I pinched a franc here and a franc there. Well, not long before what happened to him, René … Are you listening, Jean?”

He shook himself, saw old Couderc prowling around the cows.

“I don't know why I'm telling you all this. Perhaps because I've never been able to talk to anybody about it. René was drunk. He came in very late, past midnight. He wanted to go off to South America. His friends must have put that idea in his head.

“‘Hand over your money!' he said to me. ‘It's no use to you, but I … '

“I refused. I tried to calm him down.

“‘Drink a cup of coffee, Rané. You're not yourself.'

“‘You think I'm drunk? I'm telling you, I want the money and then I'm off, this very night.'

“He started searching the house. He kept talking to himself. Swearing. I didn't dare leave my bedroom, and he came in again.

“‘Now you're going to tell me where you hid the stuff.'

“Believe it or not, Jean, he hit me. That night, I feared the worst. I wondered whether he wasn't capable of murder….

“It was a near thing, but I managed to push him out of my room and lock the door. Going downstairs, he fell, and the next day there was a lump on his forehead.”

Jean knew quite well that Tati did not tell him all this without good reason. She was looking at him far too attentively, as she did when she had an idea at the back of her head.

“He's always being punished, and I wonder whether he'll ever come back.”

He guessed vaguely. All this meant, confusedly: “ … While you, my dear, you're here and you won't go away.”

She sighed, asked for a glass of water which he went to get from the well so that it should be cooler.

“Stay with me a little longer. Nothing needs doing in a hurry this morning. Since I've been in bed, I've spent my time thinking. I had to reach forty-five to spend whole days in bed. Before that, sick or not, I kept on going like an animal. What are you thinking about?”

“Nothing.”

“No regrets?”

“What?”

“You know what I mean. Now about those twenty-two thousand francs, guess where they are.”

He shuddered. He would have liked not to hear the rest. He had the uncomfortable feeling that she was trying to tempt him.

“You go to bed right close to it every night. You've only got to stretch out your hand as you sleep. The dummy. You know? When you unscrew the foot, you find a hollow space inside. That's where it is.”

Well, had he been mistaken when he woke up in the night, before the end of such a lovely dream? It was starting! It was starting all over again!

“I'll tell you what I've been thinking. It's about the house. If you don't agree, I won't mind, see?”

A glance toward the brickyard.

“Sit down! When I'm lying in bed, I can't bear to see someone standing. You seem too tall. Take the armchair. Go on. Come closer. What's the matter with you this morning? You seem upset. Is it because I look horrible? I'll soon be better! Don't you worry. They're not going to get me yet.

“How much do you think a house like this would go for at an auction?”

“I don't know.”

“What with the land and the costs, it would bring around a hundred and twenty thousand. You mustn't forget that I come in for a third share, at least I do when Couderc's dead, seeing I'm his daughter-in-law and was married under community-property law. So it's as if I had forty thousand francs of my own. Do you follow me?”

“Yes.”

“Forty thousand and twenty-two thousand, that makes sixty-two thousand. More than half the sale price of the house. Now suppose I get a bank loan, or a mortgage for the balance. I know it's difficult…. ”

Now she was going about it more cautiously, with quick, anxious, piercing glances.

“Suppose someone backed me with a guarantee.”

He still did not understand.

“You told me you'd never claimed your mother's legacy. It's none of my business. The law is with you…. If you're angry, say so at once and I won't go on…. ”

“I'm not angry.”

“You'd keep the papers until I'd paid everything back. So you run no risk. Now listen to what comes next. I've given it plenty of thought, you see, and I'm no more of a fool than the next woman. At the market, they all laughed when I bought an incubator. Just let them wait and see. Here, we're short of land….

“But suppose, while we're buying the house, we bought the brickyard too…. ”

He quivered and looked automatically at the pink-roofed cottage.

“To begin with, that rids us of Françoise and her brood. They'd be forced to go away because they would never earn their living around here; they're too well known. The brickyard would go for a song. Hand me the magazine lying on the chest of drawers.”

It was an agricultural monthly. She showed him whole pages of advertisements about purebred poultry.

“We buy a big incubator that'll take a thousand eggs at a time. Instead of selling the chickens at market we send them all over France, in little cardboard boxes. Look, here are the boxes.”

“Yes.”

“I'm not asking you to answer at once. You've plenty of time to think it over. You're really not annoyed at me for talking about this? I said to myself that, if your father should come sometime soon…. For the time being,
they
won't dare to do anything. As long as I'm in bed and bear marks, they'll be too frightened I might take them to court. Look! There she comes again to snap her fingers at me under my own windows…. ”

He leaned out and saw Félicie strolling jauntily along the towpath, her baby under her arm. She looked like a little girl playing dolls, an impudent little girl who takes a delight in exasperating the grown-ups.

Her nose in the air, she was looking at her aunt with a smug smile and when Jean appeared she blinked two or three times by way of bidding him good morning.

“Don't look at her,” said Tati. “She'll be thinking you're in love with her! She runs to a man like a heifer to the bull and—What's the matter?”

“Nothing!”

“Is it because of what I said about her?”

“No.”

“Because of my plans for the house?”

“No, I'm tired.”

Tired, nervous, anxious, sick, as he waited for what could not fail to happen. Tati could never understand. And yet she, too, seemed to have a sixth sense.

“Are you interested in her?”

“Who?”

“Félicie, as you know very well.”

“Haven't I already told you, no?”

What possessed her to keep harping about Félicie? Wasn't it she who in the end prevented him from thinking of anything else?

He went downstairs to split wood, angrily. He almost wanted to cut his hand, just to see what would happen. The doctor would have to be called in; perhaps he would have to be taken to the hospital.

Who would answer his call for help, with Tati in bed?

He went to shift the cows. Deliberately, Félicie came wandering near him and he thought she was going to speak to him, even though Tati never lost sight of them.

He almost hoped she would not come that evening. At the same time, he wanted her to be there. He tormented himself, as though wantonly.

“Jean!”

“Yes. Here I am.”

“Remember that you're to go down to Clémence's after the baskets and the money.”

He went. He did everything that was required. He cut grass for the rabbits, cleaned out the pigeons' cages, and spread manure among the strawberry plants.

Tati was quite capable of calling him precisely at eight o'clock. Would he go up? She didn't call and he was half disappointed.

It was already five minutes past eight when he made his way toward the garden, and he found Félicie sitting calmly on a shaft of the cart.

“She runs to a man like…. ” Tati had said.

He wanted to talk to her, to sit down beside her, to put his arm around her waist. Best of all would have been for the two of them to stroll along the canal, arm in arm, listening to the frogs and breathing in the peace of evening. He said, without thinking, “You came.”

And he had scarcely brushed against her when she let herself go in his arms, her warm mouth glued to his mouth.

He was embarrassed. She was limp, as though unconscious. Waiting. They were at the very same spot as the evening before. He thought that her father might have followed her, that Tati was capable of coming downstairs….

She had shut her eyes. On his lips was the taste of her mouth and in his nostrils the smell that went with her red hair.

She gave a little sigh, like the sigh of a child. She stiffened in anticipation. She clenched her fingers around his wrist, trying to dig her nails into his skin.

“You're hurting me!” she said softly….

The evening before, it had all gone with such marvelous ease! Now he was clumsy, without desire. He was annoyed with the rabbits for stirring close to their heads. He was annoyed with the straw for rustling, with the voices that came from a barge moored at the lock where the bargee's family were taking the air.

Afterwards, there was a silence, and then Félicie asked, “My aunt hasn't said anything?”

“No.”

“She must suspect something. The way her eyes followed me all day long…. ”

She got up, satisfied, though perhaps not fully.

“Do you mean to stay with her?”

“I don't know.”

“I must go home. My father might …”

She turned back to give him a little kiss at random on his face. Then he heard the squeaking of the gate hinges. He looked up and was surprised to see that the sky was all stars.

He was so weary that he sat down on the shaft of the cart while Tati, worried, got out of bed and dragged herself along on her huge legs, calling continually, “Jean! … Where are you?”

A candlestick in her hand, she started downstairs. He was surprised to see a strip of light under the kitchen door, but did not wonder why. He was away, far away, in an almost astral world…. Invisible currents bore him along, tossing him about…. He'd go forward…. Slip back…. And the waves reunited him with Félicie for an instant…. He clutched at her…. He clung….

Already he seemed to feel contrary currents.

“What are you doing, Jean?”

Tati sighed with relief at finding him alone.

“I was wondering whether you'd gone. Why, the very thought of it … I think it would be even more dreadful than if René …”

She left unfinished what seemed to her like a blasphemy.

“Aren't you coming in?”

“Yes.”

“Help me. I thought myself stronger than I am.”

In the darkness, she gave off a smell of bed, of ailing flesh, of medicine.

It had been so wonderful when he got out of the bus, there in the sunshine! And when he had discovered the house, with all the little cares that it demanded and that took up the whole day!

“It's silly of me. I thought you weren't alone. I don't know what I should have done. I …”

The wave, now, carried him back to the kitchen, then to the narrow staircase up which he had to push Tati, and into her bedroom, where he closed the shutters.

And then, there was nothing but to go back to his loft, though he knew that he would not sleep, that he would be assailed by his terrors while Félicie, quiet and sated …

She probably let an arm hang down as she slept, with her bosom clear of the bedclothes, and he was sure that a smile sometimes crossed her face like a breath of wind over water, that her lips moved without uttering a sound.

T
ATI SWORE
that the summer was spoiled. Every two days, every three days at most, a storm rumbled in the distance, without even bringing a cooling shower. It could be felt far off in the air, somewhere in the direction of Morvan. The atmosphere was heavy. The rays of the sun, suddenly, seemed painted in oils. The thunder would crash at the four points of the horizon, wrinkling the water of the canal, and the chestnut leaves trembled, the skirts of cycling girls billowed, a few drops fell, almost reluctantly, and then came hours of gray gloom, of gusty wind, of mist.

It had happened for the first time on a Sunday, and that time Jean had laughed, almost wholeheartedly.

The morning had still been sunny, though a trifle hot, and except for the time he'd spent tending the animals, he had spent it in Tati's bedroom. Quite recent events already wore the charm of memory as though he knew that they would never come again. For instance, that first Sunday when, after the midday meal, they had sat outside the door, by the road. Tati in a wicker armchair, knitting, himself astride a straw-bottomed chair. He'd been smoking that pipe of old Couderc's, which he had cleaned out with brandy.

“That makes a week today I've been in bed!” she observed, looking at the dark hole formed by the doorway in Françoise's white house.

He looked too. He noted that houses, in the country, always have their doors open.

“Otherwise,” he thought, “there wouldn't be enough light…. The windows are too small.”

At that hour, Félicie would be dressing for church. Jean was sure she washed in the kitchen, where she would set the bowl of soapy water on the floor to soak her feet. The baby too would be on the floor, dirty as always. Eugène, on Sunday and on Sundays only, as though too hard-worked during the week, was in his bit of garden. As for the grandfather, he was waiting his turn to be washed and to be dressed in black, with his white tie and his elastic-sided shoes.