He had the impression he was descending into life. He was making gestures he had forgotten – or that he perhaps still made, but without realizing it – such as raising the collar of his overcoat to keep warm and plunging his hands in his pockets as he savoured the cold and the rain, the mystery of the streets glittering with reflections.
At this hour, there were still people moving around the town, and it occurred to him to wonder where they were going. When was the last time he’d gone out in the evening? In Rue d’Allier, there were new lights, and the cinema wasn’t in the same place as the old one, which had announced its shows with a continuous bell.
Loursat walked quickly. The glances he cast at people and things were still only furtive, as if ashamed. He wasn’t going to give in straight away. He was grunting as he walked, and by the time he rang at the Dossins’ glass and wrought-iron door, his hostility had returned. When the butler, who wore a white jacket like a barman, tried to take his coat, he gave him a scornful look.
‘Where’s my sister?’
‘Madame is in the small boudoir. If Monsieur would be so kind as to follow me …’
What if he refused to wipe his feet, as a protest against this very white entrance hall, against all this newness, this modernity, this flashiness? He didn’t do so, although he did think of it. But he did light a cigarette and throw his match on the floor.
‘Come in, Hector … Shut the door, Joseph. If Monsieur Edmond comes back, ask him to come and see me immediately.’
He was already bristling like a porcupine. He didn’t like his sister, even though she had never done anything to him. He resented her for her constant mournfulness, the pale colours she dressed in, her flabby, half-hearted elegance, and perhaps also for being married to Dossin, living in this townhouse and having well-trained servants.
It wasn’t jealousy. He was probably as rich as she was.
‘Sit down, Hector. It’s kind of you to come. Have you dropped by the courthouse? What do you know exactly? What has Nicole told you? You did get her to talk, didn’t you?’
‘I don’t know anything at all, except that they killed a man in my house.’
He wondered why he resented them so much, and couldn’t find a satisfactory answer. True, he despised them for their vanity, for this townhouse they had built that had become their reason for being. As far as he was concerned, Dossin, with his moustache that always smelt of liqueurs or young women, was the epitome of the happy idiot.
‘You don’t mean, Hector, that it’s the children who …’
‘It certainly looks like it.’
She stood up despite her illness – she’d had stomach problems ever since Edmond was born.
‘Are you mad? Or else, if this is a joke, you’re being horrible. I’m so jittery, you know. I phoned you because I couldn’t bear all this anxiety on my own. You come running, which should have surprised me, only to tell me cynically that our children—’
‘You asked me for the truth, didn’t you?’
Basically, if nothing had happened in the past, his wife – because he would have a wife – would be about the same age now as Marthe. Would they have followed the trend that had led a number of important Moulins families to build new houses in the past few years?
It was hard to say. There were so many things he was thinking about, all at the same time, as he looked at his sister. Above all, it struck him how impossible it was to imagine the way he would be now if he were married, perhaps with other children, or what he would have done in all those years.
‘Listen, Hector, I know you aren’t always in a normal frame of mind. I have no idea if you’ve been drinking today. But you must realize that now’s not the time to shut yourself up in that filthy study of yours! What’s happening is partly your fault. If you’d brought up your daughter properly—’
‘Tell me, Marthe, did you send for me just to tell me off?’
‘Yes, if it’s necessary to make you realize where your duty lies. These children are irresponsible. In a normal household, they wouldn’t have been able to get in at night and indulge their every whim. Do you know what I wonder? If it’s true that you didn’t know what was going on! Look at you, you’re not even reacting. You’re a lawyer. At the courthouse they feel sorry for you, but they respect you all the same.’
She had said ‘all the same’! And that they felt sorry for him!
‘I don’t know if Nicole takes after her mother, but—’
‘Marthe!’
‘What?’
‘Come here.’
‘Why?’
To slap her! Which he now did, as surprised by his gesture as she was.
‘Get my meaning?’
He had never before been rough with her, except when they were very little.
‘I don’t care about your husband, or …’
He stopped dead, just in time. Was it possible, despising them as he did, every single one of them, and having had the strength to live alone in his corner, in his hole, for eighteen years, that he should now stoop to such arguments? To yell in his sister’s face that her husband, who was constantly travelling, was also constantly cheating on her, that the whole town knew it, that she herself knew it and that people attributed her bad health and that of her son to a particular chronic disease?
He looked in vain for his hat, which the butler had taken from him. Marthe was crying. It was hard to think that they were both over forty, and consequently that they were what are known as reasonable people.
‘Are you leaving?’
‘Yes.’
‘Aren’t you going to wait for Edmond?’
‘He just has to come and see me tomorrow morning if there’s any news.’
‘You’ve been drinking, haven’t you?’
‘No!’
But he was irritated, and what irritated him, if you went deep into things, was this question he was asking himself for the first time:
‘Why have I lived like a bear for eighteen years?’
He had even got to the point of wondering if it was really because of Geneviève, because she had run off with another man and hurt him badly.
Hadn’t his student room in Paris been just as untidy, with the same unhealthy intimacy, as his study today? Even back then, he had spent hours on end browsing through books, feeding on poetry and philosophy, breathing his own smell with a kind of shameful pleasure.
In the entrance hall, he snatched his hat from the hands of the butler, then turned and looked him up and down.
‘What’s he thinking?’ he wondered.
The truth was, he had never tried to live. He had realized this when he had descended into the town earlier, and the most alarming thing was that he was going back there, that he had no desire to go home.
Just as he had looked at the butler, now he turned to look at shadowy, furtive figures of the night, made all the more mysterious by the damp air.
What did his sister imagine? Not the truth, for sure! People felt sorry for him, she’d said! They thought of him as an eccentric, a poor devil, why not as a failure?
He hated them all, he despised them! The Ducups, the Dossins, the Rogissarts and all the others who thought they were alive because …
His overcoat smelt of soaked wool, and beads of water trembled in the hairs of his beard. As he walked down Rue d’Allier, keeping close to the buildings, it struck him, for some reason, that he was like a middle-aged gentleman slinking towards a house of ill repute.
He passed a brasserie. The windows were steamed up, but through the smoke, men could still be seen playing billiards, others playing cards, and it occurred to Loursat that he had never been able to join in other people’s peaceful, everyday lives. He envied these men. He envied everything that was alive around him, these strangers walking, going somewhere.
And Émile Manu! Vibrating like a cable that’s too taut, so tense and excitable that it was wearying to keep up with the successive transformations of his face as he talked about his love and about death, as he defied Loursat, one minute imploring, the next watchful, the next once again threatening!
Manu and his companions had walked down these streets at times like these, Nicole with them! Day by day, hour by hour, they had created their own adventure.
During that time, their parents had pretended to be alive, decorating their houses, fussing over their servants’ uniforms, the quality of their cocktails, the success of a dinner or a bridge party …
Marthe had talked about her son, but did that mean she knew him? Not in the slightest! Any more than the previous day Loursat had known Nicole!
Coming to the Boxing Bar, he didn’t hesitate. He opened the door and shook his wet overcoat.
The small, dimly lit room was almost empty. A cat lay asleep on a table. The owner was playing cards with two women near the counter, two women who clearly belonged to the underground breed you meet at night in the streets.
He had never been aware that such things existed in Moulins. He took a seat and crossed his legs. Jo put down his cigarette and his cards, stood up and came towards him.
‘What can I get you?’
He ordered a toddy. Jo put the water to boil on a hot plate, all the while observing his customer surreptitiously. The two women were also looking at him, smoking their cigarettes. It seemed as if one of them might be about to try to seduce him, but Jo signalled to her that there was no point.
The cat was purring. Everything was very calm. Outside, nobody passed.
‘Maybe you’d like to have a little chat, Monsieur Loursat?’ Jo said, at last putting the toddy down on the table.
‘Do you know me?’
‘I thought it was you when you came in this afternoon. I’ve heard talk, know what I mean?’
Instinctively, he looked over to a corner table, probably the one where the young people usually sat.
‘Do you mind?’
He sat down. The two women were waiting, resigned.
‘I’m surprised the police haven’t come to question me yet. Not that I have anything to do with any of this! On the contrary, if anyone could calm them down, it was me! But you know how it is at that age …’
He was at his ease, capable of the same casualness in front of the examining magistrate or in court.
‘Not to mention that most of it was just talk! Want to know what I think? It was watching gangster films that turned their heads. That’s why they acted all free and easy, like they were hardened criminals. But if you’re thinking I had anything to do with any of it, you’re barking up the wrong tree. Isn’t that so?’
He had raised his voice to address the two women.
‘What did I tell the two of you? Didn’t I say they’d get me in trouble one of these days? … Mind you, once they’d drunk their fill, I always refused to keep serving them. The other evening, when the young one came, the new one, Émile, and tried his damnedest to borrow money from me in exchange for a watch, I gave him twenty francs but told him I didn’t want the watch. At my age, if you know what I mean …’
He was intrigued by Loursat, who probably wasn’t quite the way he’d imagined. What had the kids said about him? They’d probably said he was someone befuddled with drink.
Jo smiled, already more familiar.
‘The thing that always amazed me was that you didn’t hear anything. Some nights it went on until five in the morning. I even wondered …’
‘What will you have?’ Loursat asked.
Jo gave him a slight wink. It wouldn’t have taken much for him to nudge Loursat with his elbow, and the latter wouldn’t have been annoyed. On the contrary!
‘I’ll have a little crème de menthe. A refill for you?’
Passing the girls, he winked at them too. One of them stood up, tugged at her dress and, through the dress, at her knickers, which were too tight around her buttocks.
‘I’m going for a walk,’ she announced.
Soon afterwards, Loursat and Jo were alone in the syrupy calm of the bar.
‘You want my opinion? I guess I’m more likely to know than anyone else. Not that they confided in me, I wouldn’t have liked that. But they came almost every evening and I’d hear them talking, without letting on. For instance, that girl of yours. I’d lay bets there was nothing between her and Monsieur Edmond. I’ll go further. I’m pretty sure Monsieur Edmond isn’t interested in women. I’ve known people like that. He’s not strong. I’d swear he’s shy. And shy people brag. As for the young one …’
The young one was Émile Manu, and Loursat quite liked hearing him being talked about in a sympathetic tone.
‘That first evening, I’d have been happy to tell him to leave while he could. Like the other one, Luska, they call him, the one who works all day out on the street outside Prisunic. What I’m trying to say is this: Monsieur Edmond, and another one who came from time to time, whose name I forget, the son of a businessman, they could get up at any time of the morning. Plus, if there’s any trouble, their parents are always there. But when I see kids who don’t get enough to eat, who probably come from homes where they count every penny … They want to do as much as the others, or more. I doubt that one had ever had a hard drink, you could see it from his face … They didn’t come the next day, but two days later Monsieur Edmond told me they’d knocked a man down and were looking after him in your house. “Take my advice,” I told them, “go to the police and …”’
Occasionally Loursat had to make an effort to convince himself that it was he himself who was here, listening, wanting to hear more, even to ask questions.
‘Did you know Big Louis?’
‘No, but I heard about him, and I knew right away what he was like. A shifty kind of character, like most of these country thugs. The kind of vagrant who’d happily strangle a little girl if he found her alone in the woods, or attack an old couple for their savings. I guess you know all that better than me, you’re a lawyer … The mistake they made was to panic and not leave him by the side of the road. Obviously, when he found himself in a townhouse, with these kids scared out of their wits and your daughter looking after him like a nurse, he decided to take advantage. He’d hit the motherlode! Now, as for what he made them do …’
He humbly offered Loursat a cigarette and lit it for him.
‘All I can tell you is that the others weren’t happy about it at all. They weren’t enjoying themselves like before. Sometimes I’d hear them whispering, but they shut up as soon as I got too close. I mean, it was none of my business, was it? As for knowing how they planned to get rid of him … After all, they couldn’t leave the body in your house. They at least had to transport it to the river … Look, I might as well tell you this. Just today, at midday, Monsieur Edmond came in here after his class. He was even whiter than usual, with rings under his eyes like a woman that’s just had a baby. I wasn’t sure I should serve him. “One of us did something stupid!” he said. “Those idiots take everything seriously.” I looked at him, hoping he’d continue. But he seemed to be in a hurry. “We’re in it up to our necks now!” he said as he was leaving. “My mother isn’t going to like this.”’
The Dwarf, speaking about Manu, called him ‘Monsieur Émile’ in an affectionate tone. Jo the Boxer, speaking about Dossin, called him ‘Monsieur Edmond’, perhaps because he was the son of a rich manufacturer of agricultural machinery, perhaps also because he seemed to be the leader and because he was the one who most often paid the bill.
It was as if Loursat had opened a book, and was now browsing through it, snatching greedily at the slightest morsel of truth.
Jo had got so used to him, to that big head, dishevelled hair and watery eyes, that he stood up and announced:
‘The next round’s on me!’
He refilled Loursat’s glass without asking, and sat down again, completely unembarrassed.
‘When you came in this afternoon, I assumed you were going to question me. Then I thought about it and realized that with the kind of kids involved, the whole thing would be sorted out. But now it seems they’ve summoned Monsieur Edmond to the courthouse.’
‘Who told you that?’
‘The one who works in a bank. What’s his name again? Destrivaux, I think. I never understood what he was doing with that lot. Do you know him?’
‘No.’
‘A tall, thin kid. Obviously, at that age, they’re all pretty thin, except for the pork butcher. But a particular kind of thin kid, with glasses, parted hair, comes across so respectable and so shy, he always got on my nerves. Apparently, his father’s been a cashier in the same bank for thirty years. I leave you to think of the rows that’s going to cause! He’s in a terrible state.’
‘The father?’
‘No, the son! He came here on his bike, after the bank closed. I think he’d been sent a note.’
A note from Nicole, damn it! She hadn’t left anyone out, and the Dwarf had dashed all over town!
‘He didn’t dare go home. He asked me, as if it didn’t concern him, if the police could easily track someone down in Paris. I told him not to do it, because it’d only take them a few months.’
Was it that he suddenly felt worried, faced with Loursat’s excessive calm?
‘You’re going to take care of it, aren’t you? They say, when you defend a case, you’re quite something, but it doesn’t happen often. Anyway, if you need me to testify … I’ve had my troubles in my time, like anyone else, but since the last amnesty, my criminal record has been clean. They aren’t even allowed to talk about it any more!’
Loursat couldn’t make up his mind to leave. He was angry at himself for being here, listening, and yet he was as overexcited as a child being told a story and hoping it will never end.
‘What is this Auberge aux Noyés of theirs?’ he asked, resisting the desire to order a fourth drink.
His eyes were already smarting. He felt hot. He mustn’t overdo it this evening.
‘To be honest, it’s nothing much. They always imagined things. For instance, if they happened to see a pal of mine in here, they’d immediately assume he was a dangerous ex-convict. Other times, they were convinced the police were watching them and I kept having to go out in the street to have a look. I think they’d all bought guns, but they wouldn’t have dared use them.’
‘One of them did!’ Loursat cut in.
In his home! In his house! And nobody in the town – he even less than everyone else – had suspected that a group of youngsters had been living a life on the fringes of other people’s lives.
Edmond was kind to his mother, as kind as a daughter, she loved to say, holding him up as an example. And in the evening …
‘How much do I owe you?’
‘Sixteen francs. I’m giving you a special rate, like them. Do you think whoever fired the shot will be able to claim extenuating circumstances?’
He spoke almost like a professional, avoiding certain words.
‘They’ve been quite harsh for some time now. In Rouen, they executed a kid who was only nineteen.’
At the corner of the street, Loursat passed one of the two women. She was holding an umbrella and was pacing up and down the pavement, perched on her high heels. She bade him a friendly goodnight.
He couldn’t resign himself to going home, back to his study where he had been entrenched for eighteen years. He’d almost reached Place d’Allier when an empty taxi passed, and he abruptly hailed it.
‘Do you know a country inn called the Auberge aux Noyés?’
‘Near the old post office?’
‘I think so.’
‘Do you want me to drive you there?’
The driver, a decent family man, gave his customer a critical glance and finally opened the door.
‘It’ll be sixty francs both ways.’
When was the last time he had taken a taxi, especially at night? He had almost forgotten the feel of the streets, or what the outskirts of town looked like, beyond the cemetery. It was here that they had built the new neighbourhood where Émile Manu and his mother lived.
‘There’s something burning!’ the driver said, turning his head.
It was a cigarette end that Loursat had dropped on the rug. He stubbed it out.
‘You know, it’s quite likely they’ll all be asleep.’
It was an old private car, with no separation between the driver and his passenger. The driver would have liked to chat. The windscreen wipers moved back and forth, making an irritating noise. From time to time, the lights of other cars passed.
‘Hold on, I think this is where we have to turn. Don’t often get the chance to come out here.’
At the end of a rutted path, two hundred metres from a farmhouse with whitewashed walls, they glimpsed reflections on the river, a low, muddy bank and a two-storey building with lighted windows.
‘Will you be long?’
‘I don’t think so.’
He had read everything, digested everything, he had reflected, day by day, year by year, on every human problem, and yet he didn’t know how to make certain gestures, how to walk into a country inn, how to sit down at a table.
He didn’t even know, to be honest, that such places existed, and he advanced diagonally, looking around in mistrust.
It was yet another banal little room, cleaner than they usually are in the country, its walls painted in oil, with advertising chromos and a pitch-pine counter.
For some reason, you didn’t have the impression you were entering a public place, in spite of the rows of tables and the bottles on a shelf. It was too calm, as intimate as a middle-class kitchen. The cream-coloured curtains at the windows were drawn.
At a table, a man was sitting, a middle-aged man whom Loursat took for a grain or poultry merchant. In fact, he thought he had glimpsed a van with its lights off parked in front of the door.
A young girl was at his table, and when the door had opened it had seemed to Loursat that the customer had abruptly withdrawn his hand from her lap.
Now, the two of them were looking at him and waiting, either curious or annoyed, probably both. Loursat sat down by himself and once again shook his heavy overcoat.
The girl came over to him. ‘What are you having?’ she asked.
‘A toddy.’
‘The fire’s out and we don’t have gas. You can have a glass of rum if you like.’
She opened a polished door and yelled up the stairs:
‘Mum! Eva!’
Then she returned to her companion, put her elbows on the table and smiled with as much kindness as was possible for someone who was asleep on her feet.
‘And what did you say to him?’ she asked, resuming the conversation where Loursat had interrupted it.
The inner door had remained open. Behind, in the darkness, he saw a woman come to look at him, a thin woman in her forties, who had already put in her curlers for the night.
Their eyes met, and she withdrew and disappeared, probably going upstairs, where the footsteps of two people could next be heard. Five minutes went by before Eva appeared. She was so similar to the other girl, it was immediately obvious that they were sisters. As she approached, Loursat was aware of a sickly smell, typical of a sleeping woman.
‘Did you order something?’
‘A rum!’ the other girl said.
‘A large one?’
He said yes. Everything interested him. He didn’t want to let anything pass him by. He was trying to imagine the group of young people and Nicole … Émile Manu, who had gone out that evening for the first time and was drunk …
They were watching him, trying to figure out why he was here. Eva served him his drink, but didn’t dare sit down at his table. She stood near him for a moment, then went and took up position behind the counter. The grain merchant took his wallet from his pocket.
‘What do I owe you?’
‘Leaving so soon?’
He glanced over at Loursat, as if to say:
‘Do you think this is fun for me?’
Growing affectionate, she walked him to the door. Behind it, she probably kissed his cheek furtively and allowed him to caress her.
By the time she came back in, she had lost her gusto, but tried to recover a little of it, saying to Loursat:
‘Filthy weather!’
Then:
‘You’re not from round here, are you? Are you a commercial traveller?’
Neither of the girls was ugly. In fact, they were quite pretty, but dull.
‘I’m thirsty, Eva! … Will you buy me a lemonade, monsieur?’
He had the impression that every now and again their mother came and looked through the gap in the door. He was embarrassed, as if he’d been caught in the act.
‘Cheers! Will you buy Eva a drink, too? Have something, Eva.’
And so he ended up with the two of them at his table, not knowing what to say, glowering at them. The two girls kept exchanging glances that were a conversation in themselves. Noticing this, Loursat grew ever more uncomfortable.
‘How much do I owe you?’
‘Nine fifty … Don’t you have change? Did you come by car?’
The driver was sitting where he had left him. He immediately set off.
‘No luck, eh? I did warn you, but you never know. A drink and a laugh, sure, maybe a bit of a grope, okay. But as for the rest …’
He suddenly became aware that his embarrassment was now mixed with a certain satisfaction at being taken for a man who would travel kilometres out of town in search of a house where he could touch up girls.
He couldn’t have said why he associated this new thought with his sister Marthe. He saw her again, standing there in her pale-green dress, receiving his slap. He’d have liked her to be here …
‘Do a lot of people go there?’ he asked, leaning forwards to hear the driver’s reply.
‘Regulars who imagine they’ll get lucky one day. Gangs of youngsters who want to raise a ruckus and don’t dare do it in any of the cafés in town.’
There wasn’t a single light on now in the new neighbourhood, with its unfinished streets, where Émile Manu lived. At the Boxing Bar, on the other hand, two silhouettes could be made out behind the curtain.
‘Where shall I drop you?’
‘Anywhere … At the corner of the street.’
Like someone who can’t resign himself to seeing a party end, he was prolonging this evening, stopping occasionally to listen to footsteps in the distance.
In his street, passing all the big houses that were similar to his, it struck him that he hated them, them and their occupants, just as he hated his sister, and Dossin, and Rogissart and his wife, and Ducup and the deputy prosecutor, all these people who hadn’t done him any harm but were on the other side of the barricade, which would have been his side if his wife hadn’t run off with a man named Bernard, if he hadn’t spent eighteen years shut up in his study and if he hadn’t just discovered a bustling life he’d never thought about, a life superimposed on the other life, the official life of the town, people he’d never suspected, people who were different: a Nicole who stood up to Ducup and sent off notes in all directions, Jo the Boxer who offered him a round, Émile Manu who was ready either to pick a fight or burst into sobs, and even that pallid Edmond Dossin who was going to make things difficult for his vain dandy of a father and his oh-so-distinguished mother, even that bank clerk, the son of a model cashier, whom he didn’t yet know and who was foolish enough to think he could hide in Paris, and that Luska who sold shoes in the street outside Prisunic …
What happened next was that he found he didn’t have his key. He rang, knowing perfectly well that the Dwarf would be too scared to come downstairs and that Nicole was probably fast asleep.
On the off-chance, he went to the side alley and found the tradesman’s entrance open, as it had been on those other days, and that was how he got home.
It gave him the illusion that in a small way he was part of the group!