‘Don’t mind. Where are you going?’
‘Montluçon.’
‘That’ll do.’
‘All the way to Montluçon? Eight francs.’
The bus moved off again. Standing, the man searched his pockets, pulled out a five-franc coin, a two-franc piece, then, without apparently worrying, felt in all his other pockets until he found fifty centimes.
‘Here you are, seven fifty, and I’ll get off a bit before Montluçon.’
The women returning from market stared at him. The widow looked at him differently from the others. The girl alongside the driver did too, since she had not come across anyone like this before.
The bus strained going up the hill. Draughts of cool air came in through the open vents. The widow had a lock of hair falling over her forehead, her chignon was coming undone, and her pink petticoat, an odd bluish pink, hung down below the hem of her dress.
They could hear the sound of bells, though there was no church in sight. It must be midday. At a house by the roadside, one woman got off the bus, in front of a doorstep where two children were sitting.
Wasn’t it rather odd that, out of forty people, only the widow was looking at the man differently from the way anyone might look at a person? The other women were as placid and quiet as cows in a field watching a wolf prowl round them, without any alarm.
And yet this was a man such as they had never seen before on the bus that took them every Saturday to market. The widow had cottoned on the moment she set eyes on him. She had seen him try the car before hailing the bus. She had noticed that he was empty-handed. And you don’t walk empty-handed along a country highway with no idea where you are going.
She did not forget to listen out for the parcels jolting on the roof, but neither did she take her eyes off him, noting everything: the imperfectly shaved cheeks, the clear eyes staring into space, the grey suit that was shabby yet had an air about it, and the expensive shoes. A man capable of walking soundlessly and leaping like a cat. And who, after giving the bus driver seven francs fifty for his blue ticket, probably had no more money on him.
He was observing her too, screwing up his eyes to see her better, and his lips curled as if he was inwardly smiling. Was it the mole on her left cheek that amused him? A birthmark about the size of a five-franc coin, covered in silky brown hairs, as if someone had grafted there the skin of an animal, a polecat for instance.
The bus had already started downhill, over the rise. Behind the trees you could glimpse the river, the Cher, its waters foaming as it tumbled over the stones.
The widow too was trying to hide a smile. The man blinked his eyes. It was as if, among all these housewives, their heads nodding in unison, they had recognized each other.
As a result, she almost missed her stop. She suddenly realized that they were at the bottom of the hill. She leaned over and tapped the shoulder of the driver, who braked.
‘You’ll have to give me a hand with my incubator,’ she said.
She was short and broad, rather well-covered. It was quite a business to alight from the bus with all her baskets, because she began by trying to step off first, then she preferred to lower her baskets to the road instead.
The driver jumped down. The thirty or forty women in the bus watched, without a word. A little house could be seen not far off, a tiny two-roomed house with a blue painted fence round it.
‘Mind you don’t break anything. They’re fragile, these contraptions.’
The driver had climbed the iron ladder attached to the rear of the bus in order to reach the roof and was handing her down a bulky box with four feet, which she caught and laid carefully on the ground.
She felt for a two-franc coin in a purse full of change and held it out.
‘Here you are, son.’
But it was the man from the road that she was looking at, with a shade of regret.
The bus moved off. Through the rear window, the man could see the widow standing at the roadside next to her enormous box and her baskets.
‘Just like her niece,’ said the plump girl sitting next to the driver. ‘You know her, Félicie?’
The man could have sat down, now that there was a free seat. He remained standing. They went round a bend. The widow and the little house vanished. Then he leaned forward and, in turn, tapped the driver’s shoulder.
‘Can you drop me off here?’
Every head turned, when the bus set off again, to watch the man walk back in the other direction, and the girl gave the driver her reaction.
‘Odd chap, eh?’
It was further to walk than he had realized. It took him several minutes before he came once more within sight of the little house, the parcels at the roadside and the widow, who had opened the gate and was knocking at the door.
She watched him arrive without surprise. As he stopped, she came over to the fence.
‘I thought she’d be home, Madame Bichat, so she could lend me her wheelbarrow!’ she said. ‘But will you look at that, everything’s shut up!’
Nevertheless, she called out in a shrill voice, peering in all directions:
‘Clémence! Clémence!’
Then:
‘Where can she have got to, she never goes out? Maybe she’s had bad news about her sister.’
She went right round the house but found another locked door.
‘Now if I could just find the wheelbarrow.’
But there was only a vegetable plot and some flowers. No wheelbarrow. A turtle dove in a cage.
