Jean would have liked to see a photo of Tati when she was young. Did she already have the same air of authority and that way of sizing up people to judge how far one could go with them?
She always looked like that at him, just as on the first morning in the bus. She was used to him now. She had held him in her arms naked and caressed his white skin. Early in the morning, she sometimes went up to the attic and watched him sleeping for a moment before waking him.
All the same, she kept an eye on him. He was always on the end of a string.
‘I was seventeen when the son, who wasn’t much better than the sisters, got me in the family way. I can still remember how it happened. He was in bed with a bad chest and I took him up some soup.
‘I said to him, “You’re running a fever.”
‘And the boy must have been thinking about it for hours to get his courage up:
‘“Take a look,” he said. “This is why I’m running a fever!”
‘Well, Couderc was furious, and he ended up making us get married. The girls got married too, Françoise to the watchman at the brickyard and the other, Amélie, she married an office clerk in Saint-Amand.
‘Is there any coffee left?’
She glanced at the clock, The pendulum swung her reflection back and forth, under the glass clock face.
She was going to allow herself a few more minutes.
‘One of these days, you’ll have to tell me what it was you did.’
She examined him more keenly.
‘Was it over a woman you killed someone? No, I won’t ask, I can see you don’t like it.’
Right! It was time to stand up and shake off the warm inertia that had invaded their limbs. She checked that not a drop of coffee was left in the blue pot, fetched the kettle from the stove, poured hot water into the sink and threw in a handful of soda crystals.
‘Now, this afternoon you’d better get on with hoeing the potatoes. I’m sure the old man will be coming inside soon. He’s been itching away for two or three days now, and if I don’t let him …’
So that was how he came to know the history of the Couderc family. He picked it up in fragments that he pieced together. The only one he couldn’t imagine was Tati’s husband, and he had not been shown any image of him. Perhaps there was none in the house. A sickly man, one might imagine. He had died of pneumonia. Even when he was alive, old Couderc had been in the practice of chasing after his daughter-in-law in the dark outbuildings.
‘You know what?’ Tati said, another time during their after-lunch siesta. ‘It’s not Françoise that scares me. She’s too stupid. Already, when she was little, everyone used to tease her because she couldn’t make sense of anything. A boy told her babies were made through your nose, and she went off in floods of tears. And Amélie, well, I can handle her. The worst of them’s that poisonous little tart Félicie, always hanging around her grandfather and showing him her baby … She’s from somewhere else, that girl, I really wonder who her father is. Not Françoise’s husband, that’s for sure. You’ve only got to look at her.’
Jean often saw Félicie from a distance. Perhaps it was the distance that impressed him.
Of the house by the brickyard, because of the raised bank of the canal, you could only see the pink tiled roof and the upper part of the white wall. Félicie was in the habit, in the early evening as the sun set behind her, of sitting by the lock, with the baby in her arms.
She was a slim girl. She seemed to bend under her son’s weight, like the stem under a heavy flower. You might mistake her for a child herself, if it weren’t that as she adjusted her hold on the baby, she jutted out her stomach, which gave her a more womanly profile.
From a distance, it was mainly the blue of her smock and the crown of auburn hair that could be seen.
Jean would walk nonchalantly along the towpath and approach her. He knew she watched him come. He knew as well that under her green eyes were golden freckles, and that his attention made her pinch her fine nostrils.
To reassure her, he would exaggerate his casual air, stopping to watch a angler’s float or to pick a yellow flower from the bank.
The lock-keeper with the wooden leg turned his handles. His children were sitting in the doorway and a doll without arms lay on the gravel.
If Jean drew a few metres nearer, invariably Félicie would suddenly turn away, hurry back to the house and shut the door.
He was the enemy, there was no doubt about that. Once, when he went even closer, the door opened, but it was not Félicie who came out. It was her mother, Françoise, nonplussed and angry, who stood on the threshold to protect her family.
‘Everything all right?’ he said automatically to the lock-keeper.
And he too looked at him suspiciously, turning his back.
Jean was not affected. His gaze always had the same casual air. Was he thinking of anything? Did he even need to think?
He was living hours out of time, hours he had not counted on, and his head was full of light, his nostrils alive to the smells around him, his limbs heavy with relaxation.
‘Jean! Jean!’ It was Tati’s shrill voice.
She stood in front of him, hands on hips, short, stocky, powerfully fleshed.
‘Are you sniffing round Félicie again? Hurry up and clean out the hutches. That’s three days I’ve been telling you to get on with it! If I have to do everything myself, what’s the point …?’
Two or three times a day, they both leaned over the incubator, which was a truly magical box for Tati. She hardly dared believe yet that her sixty chicks would all hatch at once.
‘Read what it says again. I haven’t got my glasses. Are you sure we don’t need to put more water in? At night I’m always scared the lamp will go out, and I don’t know what stops me coming down to check. Tomorrow you’ll have to make the milk churn work. On Saturday, I’ll fetch you a razor and the other things you need. By then, I hope I’ll have a letter from René.’
But first, she received a visit. It was the Thursday. Their after-lunch pause was over and she was washing the dishes.
‘You can go and cut down the weeds by the side of the house,’ she’d told Jean.
All the way along the whitewashed wall, nettles had sprung up. He went to fetch a hoe from the shed. Hatless, his shirt open-necked, cigarette in mouth, he was starting to scrape at the earth when he heard someone coming along the path through the trees.
A hundred metres away, in the shade of the hazel bushes which let only occasional patches of sunlight through, a family was advancing towards him, a dark-suited man with a goatee beard and a Panama hat, a rather bulky woman perspiring from her walk, and a little boy in a sailor suit whom she was dragging along and who had cut himself a switch to whip in the air.
