‘There are potatoes on the stove.’
‘You can just cut yourself a slice of ham. I’ll get up presently. Could you put the blind down? The light hurts my eyes.’
As he moved past, she furtively kissed the back of his hand.
He went downstairs and took a plate from the cupboard.
After eating, he stood in the doorway, a cigarette in his mouth, hands in his pockets.
The Sunday afternoon strollers were beginning to appear on the towpath, where the trees cast deep purple shadows.
Perhaps I should take her a cup of coffee, he wondered.
He had forgotten his night terrors. He was content.
7
A warm, soft rain fell from morning to night, and everything was so quiet, so silent, under the cloudy blanket of the sky, that it was possible to imagine you heard the grass growing.
Sounds, nearby or distant, instead of merging as they did in sunlight, came to the ears in isolation, standing out against the silence, like solos, personal messages: a cock crowing, the lock-keeper letting the handle drop on the stone slab after use, or the tinny bugle of a barge.
Jean had woken earlier than usual and, seeing the grey world through his skylight, almost thought it was still night-time. A cow lowing in the shed reminded him that Couderc was not there now, and he would have to torture the poor beasts once again.
But the silence was broken by a sharp and unexpected scream from inside the house.
‘Jean!’
The call was dramatic and anguished. It made you think of the tram accident that in a second turns a busy sunlit street into a scene of medical emergency, or of people running out of a house in panic and terror, shouting ‘Fire!’
Jean felt close to fear himself. Not of anything definite. Fear of some drama. He went upstairs. Tati’s door opened suddenly.
‘Jean! Look!’
He couldn’t see at once, since she was against the light.
‘I’m going to die, Jean!’
But he was quite seriously alarmed when he saw at last Tati’s face, completely misshapen, her eyes almost closed by swelling, and her lip distorted. It was as if her head had swollen to twice its size. Staring at herself in the mirror, she stammered in fright:
‘My head’s full of water … I knew someone once, their blood turned to water, but in their legs. What do you think, Jean? Am I going to die?’
The curious thing was that, on leaving her room, he felt neither sad nor distressed. He remembered to open the hen-house door as he went past and threw a handful of grain to the chickens; then, as he crossed the kitchen, he regretted that there was no cold coffee left over from the night before.
Bareheaded, he went along the canal, where the water was as smooth and thick as black velvet. Someone was up and about in the small house by the brickyard. They were probably sitting drinking their morning coffee. Only Françoise appeared in the doorway, unwashed and with uncombed hair, to watch him go past.
He muttered a greeting to the lock-keeper with the peg leg as he almost touched him, but received no reply.
He was walking as casually as if he were out for a stroll. He overtook two children on their way to school. As he entered the grocery-cum-tobacconist’s, which had a public telephone box, he set off its bell. A little old woman in bedroom slippers came in silently by a different door and he was taken aback to find her suddenly in front of him in the shadows, on the other side of the counter.
She did not ask him anything. Perhaps she was frightened of him?
‘Can I use the phone?’
He smiled, thinking that she knew he was a murderer. He went into the telephone cabin.
‘Hello … Doctor Fisol’s surgery? … Doctor Fisol? … Can I …? Yes, Madame Couderc … Madame Couderc the widow, at the Gué de Saulnois Farm … Hello … You know where that is? … Yes, I think it’s pretty urgent.’
He bought some cigarettes while he was there, and as he went out met again the schoolchildren whom he had passed on the towpath.
He was counting on seeing Félicie on the way back, but saw only old Couderc, sitting on a chair to the left of the door, a cap on his head, indifferent to the fine rain falling. His attitude made you think of a dog tied up in a doorway that its owner comes to see now and again to check it hasn’t got loose.
‘He’s going to come, Jean? You explained how to get here …? You need to go and milk the cows, the poor creatures haven’t stopped mooing.’
‘Yes, yes. Don’t worry.’
‘Keep your ears open in case I call. It’ll mean I feel worse.’
He began by lighting the fire to make coffee, and now he thought he could feel for the hundreds of thousands of women who rise early, before the rest of the household wake up, then come and go in their kitchen, raking out the stove, or throwing paraffin on it to make the coal catch more quickly.
Which he then did himself, and a not disagreeable smell filled the room as blue flames shot up. He ground the coffee beans and his mind felt as vacant as the empty room around him, and almost as sweet.
Sometimes he could hear Tati shifting in bed upstairs. He took her a cup of coffee with sugar.
‘Do you think I ought to drink it? Look at me. Is it still swelling? Get a move on to milk the cows, Jean.’
He seated himself on the old man’s three-legged stool. The cow’s tail made it hard for him and he would have liked to tie it but couldn’t find any string A heap of warm dung lay at his feet, and the cows turned their heads to look at him in surprise.
What would he do with them once they had been milked? They must be hungry.
