She was getting dressed, in the old pink flannel undergarment and her everyday clothes.
‘But work is work. What are you doing?’
He had lifted the blind and was looking out of the window at the towpath, the promenade for local people.
‘You’d do better to find some trousers that fit. As for Couderc, tonight, too bad for him. Aren’t you ready yet?’
A boy was fishing, and now and then pulled a tiny fish out of the water. A young man and a girl went past, side by side, heads down but not touching each other. Perhaps they had quarrelled? Or maybe they were on the point of saying something but hesitating. They might have been making the decision of their lives in the setting sun, while the shadows of the trees lengthened before them. The girl was holding a yellow flower in her hand and waved it in the air like a whip. The boy didn’t know what to do with his long arms.
A toddler almost ran into them, and its mother, sitting on the raised bank with her husband, called out:
‘Henri! Henri, come back here!’
The two gendarmes cycled past slowly and ponderously for the third time that day, on bikes as clumsy as themselves.
‘Time to get the hens in,’ said Tati, opening the door.
Then, suspiciously:
‘You didn’t enjoy it, then?’
He smiled, kindly and politely.
‘Of course I did.’
‘Well, get a move on. I’m going to make the soup.’
Was she pleased with him? Displeased? She wasn’t sure. As she went out, she glanced back at the bedroom and the wardrobe, in front of which he was trying on a pair of her late husband’s trousers.
3
Tati, who was on the move all day and who seemed, as she came and went, to carry the whole household on her sturdy shoulders, had her hour of weakness.
This was after the midday meal, which they called dinner. As the summer advanced, the greater was the contrast between the outside, dazzling in the sun, and the cool shade of the kitchen. Best of all, in one deep corner, where an old cupboard, now without its doors, made a kind of niche, two buckets full of water from the well always stood with a jug alongside; never had Jean, even at a freshwater spring in the woods, had such a sense of limpidity, such a desire to feel cold water run down his throat.
They kept the door to the yard closed because of the flies, and also to stop the hens running into the kitchen. But under the lower panel there was a large gap, a band of molten gold through which they could see the feet of the farmyard fowls.
Couderc, once he had swallowed his last mouthful, would wipe his knife on the wooden table, which was scarred with cuts at his place, then, like a draught animal returning between its shafts, pull his long body up and walk heavily off to some corner of the yard, where he was soon heard moving boxes and barrels about. He was fixing things, mending gates, cutting stakes for fencing, chopping wood for the fire, or setting sticks for the peas or poles for the tomatoes, with a vacant expression and a drop always hanging from the end of his nose, summer and winter.
At the same moment, Tati, pressing her stomach against the table without clearing the dishes, would push back her chair, making its seat creak. A sigh came from her ample bosom, and at that time of day her breasts seemed to settle comfortably on her round belly, her skin glistened and her eyes were moist.
Jean had already formed the habit of fetching the coffee from the stove, and the blue coffee pot had its regular place under a ray of sunlight falling from the window.
Tati would gaze at her glass, for she always drank coffee from a glass. Her two lumps of sugar melted. She watched them fondly and drank some of the clear brown liquid.
It was as if, for miles around, life was at a standstill. On the canal, the barges had stopped for a siesta, and their mules or donkeys rested in a patch of shade. There was no sound but the cooing of pigeons, with an occasional cock crowing, or the old man’s hammering.
‘To think when I first came to this house it was as a servant girl, just fourteen.’
Tati’s gaze lingered over the walls, unchanged apart from being whitewashed once a year. The calendar, with its coloured print of harvesters, and a rack for newspapers, must have been the same one as in the past. On either side of the old kneading trough, now used as a repository for all kinds of objects, the two portraits in oval frames had not changed either.
‘That’s what Couderc looked like, back then.’
The same long face, thick hair standing on end. A pointed moustache draped across his face. The uncompromising expression of someone sure of his own importance.
‘He was thirty-five then! He owned the brickyard, he’d inherited it from his father. He was born in this house. Their land reached as far as the village and there were ten cows in the shed.’
She stirred her coffee and sipped it again, daintily, with cat-like pleasure.
‘His wife had just died and he was on his own with three kids. When I got here, they’d just buried her and the house was full of the smell of candles and chrysanthemums.’
The other portrait, opposite Couderc’s, was even more faded, as if it knew it was now only the shade of a woman departed. Her features were faint, vanishing away. A melancholy smile, a high-piled chignon. And a cameo brooch, the same one Tati now wore on Sundays.
‘I don’t remember how, but my mother heard they wanted someone to look after the children. We lived a long way off, nearer Bourges. A neighbour drove me over in his cart. My mother was afraid they’d think I was too young, so she pinned my hair up and made me wear a long dress.’
Sometimes there were harsh notes like pebbles in her voice.
‘The boy was eleven, and nearly as tall as me. The two girls were called Françoise and Amélie. They were stupid and dirty, especially Françoise. You’ve seen her, Félicie’s mother. She married that man Tordeux, good for nothing but nightwatchman at the brickyard.’
Jean was relaxing too, sitting astride his chair, elbows leaning on the back and a thin column of smoke coming from his cigarette.
And Tati sighed.
‘That’s the story.’
She knew what she meant. For her, the walls and the objects came to life. She could see them at different times, for instance, in those days when she was only fourteen and would be the first up in the morning, coming down in winter to light the fire in the cold kitchen before breaking the ice outside in the horse trough.
‘Couderc was a local councillor. He could have been mayor. He was serious in those days, didn’t chase women. I never found out how he started to lose money. But he joined forces with some businessman who went bankrupt, and he had to sell the brickyard.’
