Pedigree by Georges Simenon Page B

who worked for a living was shut up indoors.
    Ã‰lise and Madame Smet watched him eat in silence. In spite of themselves, they looked at him rather as if he were a visitor from another world, and the joy he had breathed in while walking through the streets in the savoury air was foreign to them. It was like a cold draught which had disturbed the cosy calm of the flat.
    It was not until Désiré had been gone for quite a while that the circle closed again, Élise resumed her morose smile and Madame Smet her interior reverie, and the slightest sound became audible once more while the two women waited patiently for the cooker’s inevitable ‘boom’.
    He walked along. The sun was shining. But when it rained, the town looked just as delightful, and he had a way that was all his own of carrying his umbrella like a canopy. The three o’clock cigarette tasted good. Each cigarette had its special taste, the taste of a particular street, the taste of a particular time of day, of hunger or digestion, of the gay morning or the evening.
    The slow train had stopped at Huy. The Cologne-Paris express was due to arrive. Léopold pulled his companion over to the lavatory.
    â€˜Give me your smock.’
    Because nobody had ever seen a worker in a smock get on an express. It was Léopold, with his jet-black beard, who looked like a ferocious anarchist, and Marette like a frightened child.
    â€˜Hurry up.’
    Such a child, and so frightened, that he felt a sudden need to relieve himself and disappeared behind one of the doors with a grating just as the train was entering the station.
    â€˜Is that my train?’
    â€˜Hurry up.’
    Nobody, in this little station, was thinking about the anarchist of the Place Saint-Lambert. Léopold had bought a ticket for Paris and passed it to Marette.
    â€˜You’ve got your wallet?’
    They ran along the platform. They had no time either to shake hands or to say good-bye; the train moved off before Marette had finished buttoning his braces, and his thin, pale face disappeared into the tunnel at the first bend.
    There was a train for Liége, but Léopold was thirsty. He had a drink at the station buffet. Then he crossed the square and went into a café. In a little while he would lumber out, looking for another door to push open, another café in which to sit down, and at six o’clock, after losing his buckets, his paint-pots and his brushes all over the place, he would take off his smock with a sigh of relief and beckon to the waiter, for want of the strength or the courage to speak.
    â€˜The same again.’
    Little grey-green glasses with thick bottoms, glasses of pale gin which he emptied at one gulp, repeating the same gesture:
    â€˜Fill it up.’
    Désiré locked the safe and mixed up the combination. He could have taken the tram as far as the Place Saint-Lambert. He could have walked part of the way with Daigne or Laurent. Instead, he set off alone, and this was another happy moment in his day, with the streets turning purple, the passers-by seemingly gliding along in a silent mist, the gas-lamps every few yards, the shop windows no longer attracting anybody’s attention and forming rectangles of soft light, and finally, alongside the Boulevard d’Avroy, the deserted park and the ducks lingering on the glistening water.
    He decided to drop into Tonglet’s, in the Rue de la Cathédrale, opposite the church of Saint-Denis, to buy some liver pudding. Or some larded liver? He didn’t know yet. Some larded liver?
    â€˜Give me a quarter … no, a quarter and a half of …’
    Valérie was waiting for him to arrive before taking her mother home. She had not taken her coat off, had not even sat down.
    â€˜It isn’t worth it, Élise! Désiré will be here in a minute.’
    As if she were going to wear out one of the chairs; as if sitting down constituted a sort of invasion, of vulgarity, when she