‘Why not?’
‘And you could lend a hand round here?’
He went to stand in front of the yard full of farmyard fowls.
‘That’s unless you’re scared?’ he said, stretching.
‘Scared of what?’
‘You don’t know where I’m from.’
‘No man has ever scared me.’
‘But what if …?’
‘If what?’
‘If for instance I’ve just got out of prison.’
It was as though she had already guessed.
‘What of it?’
‘I might run off tonight with your savings.’
‘You’d never find them.’
‘What if I was to murder you?’
‘I’m stronger than you, my lad!’
‘If …’
‘If what?’
‘Nothing.’
His joking humour had fallen a little flat. He was observing her almost seriously.
‘You’re a strange woman. But look … The old man … He’s your father-in-law, you said?’
‘And you’re surprised I sleep with him, eh? In the first place, it’s not my fault if he’s an old goat. And anyway, do you think I’m going to let myself be thrown out of a house where I’ve been doing everything, just so’s other people will get all the benefit, bitches like that little Félicie you saw?’
‘Look, it’s reached thirty-nine now.’
‘You think it’s working? Well, if so, we need to take it into the wine store. Hang on, let me help you.’
‘It would be better to wait till tomorrow to put the eggs in.’
She agreed only reluctantly.
‘That’s a day lost.’
Then, as they were carrying the incubator into the cool wine store:
‘Do what you want. Like I said, I thought you were foreign, a Yugo or something like that. If you want bed and board and a bit of money now and then …’
Over the fence, he could see the girl sitting on the edge of the canal, holding the baby. She was nursing it. The bridge was raised. A barge was moving along almost imperceptibly, propelled by a pole. Further away, across the water, you could see a brickyard. Pigeons flew heavily through the calm air.
‘Of course, I’m not forcing you.’
He gazed at the birthmark like a patch of fur, the broad face, the deft hands, the solid, well-built body, the pink petticoat hanging lower than ever below the dress.
‘We could give it a try,’ he said. ‘As long as you’re not afraid.’
And as she took him, like her prey, towards the house, she said:
‘Don’t think you can scare me, my lad.’
She had started calling him the familiar ‘tu’ now. She had taken possession of him.
‘You know how to use a crusher? Right, you can crush a bag of oats and buckwheat for my fowls. And just watch Couderc’s face tonight!’
2
His bed, an iron frame rigged up in the middle of the attic, just under the skylight, smelled of hay with perhaps a hint of mildew, not unpleasant. What intrigued him all the time he was trying to get to sleep was the sound of drops falling one by one, at long intervals, right inside the attic, almost within reach. Yet there were no taps in the house. And it wasn’t raining, or he would have heard the patter of raindrops on the sloping glass of the skylight overhead.
Suddenly it was morning, and all he was aware of from the night was the smell, that smell of hay and mildew, which for him became the smell of the countryside. Daylight outlined the two rectangular panes above his head. In one corner of the attic was a dressmaker’s dummy, with its shapeless, inhuman outline: no breasts, a geometric waist and hips that stopped suddenly above a wooden stand.
