‘There were four or five of them, they’d been drinking. In Saint-Amand. The tobacconist’s didn’t have shutters and at night you could see everything on show – so they smashed the window. When he came home, I didn’t suspect a thing. But I noticed he’d been sick. Next morning, he went off to work as usual. He was apprenticed to a joiner in Saint-Amand. The police and gendarmes investigated for ten weeks and it was that idiot, Chagot … A boy who’s not right in the head and vicious with it. Well, he started to talk in his sleep. His father’s a clerk in the ironmonger’s. They think they’re a cut above everyone else. So then that idiot – I mean the father now, Chagot, off he went to the police, stiff as a walking stick, tears in his eyes and hands all of a tremble. “I’m doing my duty as a citizen and a father,” he tells them.
‘And that was it. They hauled his kid in. Didn’t need to question him for long, he still had a lighter in his pocket. And then he goes:
‘“It was Couderc put us up to it.”
‘Which was a blatant lie, because my son would never have thought of doing something like that.
‘And now he’s in Africa. I send him money every week. He writes me long letters. One day I’ll read them to you.’
Why was her tone more formal again? Jean smoked cigarette after cigarette, leaning his arms on the back of the chair, with an absent air. A family had encamped on the grass not far away from them, and the mother was cutting up a tart which she had taken from its newspaper wrapping.
‘That’s a long time, five years, eh?’
The sun had reached them now. Their skin was beginning to have the scent of summer.
‘And all that time, no woman?’
He shrugged.
‘And since then?’
He smiled and shook his head. She sighed.
‘Time to go and put the eggs in the incubator, maybe. In the countryside, it’s never Sunday all day long.’
They put the eggs in rows, one by one, after candling them. The lamp was refilled with paraffin, the wick cleaned and water poured into the tank that maintained the humidity in the contraption. The whole time they were doing it, it was obvious that Tati was thinking of nothing else.
‘There’s this woman somewhere near Orléans, she sends off three-day-old chicks in special boxes, cardboard ones, and gets five francs each for them. Sixty times five francs a month, allowing for eggs that break …’
And the next moment:
‘You’d better put your jacket on, it’s going to cool down. Next week, I’ll buy you some clothes. What you’ve got is no good for working in the country … And by the way …’
‘What?’
‘Why did you spin me a yarn just now, when I mentioned the distillery? Why did you say that man was your father? Playing tricks on me or what?’
‘I don’t know …’
‘You’re as bad as René. Here, fill this pail up with oats. Every evening, round this time, you’ll have to chuck some oats down for the chickens. Then go and fetch some grass for the rabbits for tomorrow. That way you’ve got time to do something else in the morning.’
The day had slipped by like water and it was a surprise to see the sun’s rays turn red and the sky become violet.
‘Was that true what you said, back then? That since you got out, you haven’t …?’
The fire in the kitchen had gone out. A few logs would be kindled again to make soup in the evening.
‘As it’s your first Sunday, we can treat ourselves to a little glass. Couderc’s in the café, playing cards. A wonder anyone’ll play with him, since he can’t hear a thing. And believe it or not, till he was fifty, he was a man like any other. It started up with me when Marcel was still alive. Marcel, that’s my husband as was. He had bad health. The old man was always after me … Drink up, this is five years old, this stuff, we distil it here with wine from our own vines, back of the house.’
Sunbeams as powerful as the light from a film projector came in through the small panes of the window. Tati held her glass in her hand and didn’t know where to look.
‘Perhaps there’d be a suit upstairs would fit you. I need to get out of my best dress.’
She wondered whether to pour him another drink and decided it wasn’t necessary.
‘Come and see.’
Her bedroom was clean, with whitewashed walls, a large walnut bedstead and an old wardrobe. She opened it, releasing the smell of mothballs.
‘Look here, you can try these trousers, they were Marcel’s. I’m just going to change.’
The blind was down, letting in only a golden glow. The eiderdown on the bed was blood red.
‘Are you embarrassed? Your skin’s white, like a girl.’
Then she laughed in a strained way, glancing at a particular part of his body.
‘You’ll be out of practice, won’t you?’
What happened afterwards reminded Jean of long-ago memories, of one night when he was sixteen; with a schoolfriend, the son of a builder, they had saved up and secretly gone into a certain well-known house in Montluçon.
The same crude words, the same precise gestures. And the same domination by a woman who left him no initiative, for whom he was just a thing. The same candid obscenity.
‘All right for you, was it?’
He would have surprised her greatly by confessing that the whole time he had been looking only at the velvety mole on her cheek and had thought only of that patch of animal skin decorating her face.
‘Still, let me give you a warning. Don’t try to take advantage. Know what I mean? Just a bit of fun now and then.’
