He lay down again, couldn’t get back to sleep, and walked in his bare feet round the attic several times, wondering whether Tati was asleep down below.
He felt terribly tired. Not only because of the past or the present, but because of all the complications he could already see ahead: already, he was remembering with nostalgia the days he had just lived through. He was quite lucid. Twice, and twice only in his life, had he known that innocent feeling of calm: the time when he was ill and had stopped thinking of school as a reality any more; and then here, that morning when he had been striding off towards the village and waiting with all the local women behind the butcher’s van.
‘Jean! Jean!’
He realized someone was calling him. He didn’t know where he was, or that he should be getting up, and he plunged more deeply into the sunlit sleep of morning. And suddenly the door opened.
‘Monsieur Jean?’
An unfamiliar voice. A woman he had only glimpsed previously, the one who lived in the little house with the blue fence by the main road. She was young but had two front teeth missing, which disfigured her.
‘It’s about the eggs and butter, can you fetch them for me?’
She watched him get out of bed in a ray of sunlight. It was late. This was the first time he had woken so late, because he had been unable to sleep until almost morning.
He went past Tati’s door.
‘Didn’t you hear me call?’
‘I’m really sorry. I overslept.’
‘Quick, fetch the eggs and butter for her, and go with her to the bus.’
He felt heavy and sleepy. Still a vague feeling of anxiety, almost of anguish. He looked around, as if wondering from which direction the blow would come.
‘Is it bad, this illness of Tati’s?’
‘Yes … well, I don’t know.’
The path through the hazel bushes smelled of damp forest. Sometimes he tried to remember scraps of his dream. Félicie must be surprised not to have seen him up and about yet. He would have to hurry to milk the cows and tether them outside. He hadn’t the strength to make coffee. He would just have some white wine to swill round his mouth.
He helped the woman to load the baskets on to the red bus and, still in a daze, watched it disappear.
When he drove the cows out to the meadow, Félicie was at her door, the baby in her arms, and it seemed to him as if she was making a little sign to him. He looked up at the window. Tati was there, her greying hair hanging loose over her nightdress.
It would be so easy to live the way he remembered in his dream. All it would take …
‘Are you coming up Jean?’
He didn’t know that the postman, who did his rounds earlier than usual on Saturdays, had already been: he had called out on arriving, then gone upstairs.
And now Tati had a letter in her hand.
‘Come in! I’ve heard from René … Can you read it out?’
She was anxious too. He didn’t want to read the letter. He picked up the sheet of paper out of politeness.
My dear mother,
The bastard of a CO has landed me in it again, and it’ll be like this till my dyeing day.
The handwriting was that of a schoolboy, and full of spelling mistakes.
Everyone else here’s got a girl in Paris or some place and they get a thousand francs a month so they can go and get drunk with the serjeants.
‘It’s always about money,’ Tati sighed. ‘Every time he writes, he asks me for some, and it doesn’t get him anywhere. Why don’t you sit down? You seem distracted. You haven’t had a letter too, have you?’
She returned to her subject.
‘It’s for him I’ve done it all, slaved away, gone without … Just so’s he won’t be left without anything in this life. And sometimes I wonder …’
It was odd. The very same day when Jean was feeling low, she was sad too, and on the point of tears.
‘I’ve been putting money by. Hidden in the house. More than you might think: twenty-two thousand francs.’
She looked pointedly at him, watching for a reaction, but he was listening to her words without taking them in.
‘Twenty-two thousand francs I’ve saved up, sou by sou, since the day I came here. Yes, I stole from them, the lot. I cheated, I put away a franc here, a franc there. And then, just before the thing happened to René – are you listening, Jean?’
He seemed to wake up, as he saw old Couderc wandering about near the cows.
‘I don’t know why I’m telling you this. Perhaps it’s because I’ve never been able to talk to anyone about it. René was drunk. He came in one night after twelve. Said he wanted to go to South America. Must have been his friends put him up to that.
‘“Give me your money!” he shouted. “It’s doing nothing for you, but I could …”
‘And I didn’t want to. I tried to make him calm down. I said:
‘“Have some coffee, René, you’re not making sense.”
