‘Stay where you are,’ said Jacques. ‘I’ll go and see what’s happening.’
He cautiously advanced towards the door. Outside it was still dark. He could hear the sound of men running towards them. He recognized Roubaud’s voice shouting to the night watchmen, telling them that there were three intruders and that he’d seen them stealing coal. For the past few weeks hardly a night had gone by without him having hallucinations about imaginary thieves. On this occasion something had suddenly alarmed him, and he had fired at random in the dark.
‘Quick! We can’t stay here,’ whispered Jacques. ‘They’ll search the shed. You must go home.’
They flung themselves into each other’s arms in a passionate embrace. Then Séverine ran quickly along the side of the engine shed, hidden by the high wall, while Jacques crept out quietly and hid himself amongst the coal stacks. They were only just in time, for, as Jacques had predicted, Roubaud did want to search the tool-shed. He was sure that that was where the intruders were. The watchmen’s lamps swung to and fro. There were some angry exchanges, and then they all went back towards the station, annoyed at having wasted their time.
Jacques decided that the coast was clear and was just setting off back to his room in the Rue François-Mazeline when he almost collided with Pecqueux, who was hastily doing up his clothes and swearing furiously under his breath.
‘What’s up with you?’ asked Jacques.
‘Don’t ask,’ replied Pecqueux. ‘Those bloody fools woke Sauvagnat up, and he heard me in bed with his sister. He came down in his nightshirt, and I had to get out through the window, quick. Listen! You can hear them.’
A woman was screaming and wailing. She was being beaten. A man’s voice was yelling abuse at her.
‘Did you hear that? He’s giving her a real hiding! She’s thirty-two years old, but if he catches her at it he thrashes her like a little girl! Ah well, too bad! I’m keeping out of it. He’s her brother after all!’
‘But I thought he didn’t mind you going to see her,’ said Jacques. ‘I thought it was only when she was with other men that he got angry with her.’
‘Who knows?’ said Pecqueux. ‘Sometimes he pretends not to see me. Other times, he beats her up. Listen to him now! The funny thing is that he still loves her. He’d give up everything rather than be parted from her. But he expects good behaviour. Heavens above! She’s getting the full treatment tonight!’
The screams subsided and were replaced by a series of long, pathetic moans. The two men walked away. Ten minutes later they were fast asleep side by side in their little bedroom with its yellow painted walls, its four chairs, a table and a metal wash-basin, which they shared.
During the following weeks, the nights when Jacques and Séverine met were nights of untold bliss. They did not always have a storm to protect them. On starry nights or when the moon was full, they felt uneasy and would look for pockets of shadow and little dark corners where they could happily hold each other close. All through August and September there were some wonderful nights, so mild that they would have lain asleep in each other’s arms till daybreak, had they not been woken by sounds from the station as it began to stir and by locomotives letting off steam in the distance. Even in October, when it began to turn chilly, it did not bother them. Séverine came more warmly dressed, wrapped in a big coat, almost big enough for Jacques to squeeze into too. They would barricade themselves in the tool-shed, which they had found a way of locking from the inside with the help of an iron bar, and there they felt safe and snug. The fierce November gales might be blowing slates from the rooftops, but they felt not the slightest draught. Jacques, however, ever since the night he had first made love to her, had wanted to possess her in her own home, in her poky little apartment, where she seemed different, more desirable, a respectable married woman quietly going about her daily business. She had always refused, not so much because of her prying neighbours as from a lingering sense of propriety. She could not bring herself to sleep with him in her own marriage bed. One Monday, however, in broad daylight, when Jacques had come for lunch and Roubaud was late back, having had to see the stationmaster, he picked her up and carried her across to the bed for a joke. It was such a mad, foolhardy thing to do, and they were both beside themselves laughing. Needless to say, they very soon became carried away. After that she offered no further resistance and Jacques came to meet her in her apartment after midnight on Thursdays and Saturdays. It was terribly risky, and they hardly dared move in case the neighbours heard them, but this only redoubled their passion and added to their pleasure. Often they felt a desire to walk abroad in the dark, to escape like caged animals, into the icy stillness of a winter’s night. Once they made love beneath the stars in the middle of a bitter December frost.
They had been living like this for four months, their love for each other growing stronger and stronger. To both of them love was something new. At heart they were still children, young innocents, amazed at falling in love for the first time, happy simply to be in each other’s arms, each submitting to the other’s will in a perpetual contest of self-sacrifice and surrender. Jacques was in no doubt that Séverine had cured him of the terrible malady he had inherited as a child; since he had possessed her the thought of murder no longer troubled him. Did physical possession satisfy the craving to kill? Was possession tantamount to killing? Who could fathom the shadowy mind of the beast within? He tried not to think about it. It was beyond him. The doorway to such horrors was best left unopened. Sometimes as he lay in her arms the thought of what she had done would suddenly come back to him. She had murdered; he had read it in her eyes as they sat together on the park bench in the Square des Batignolles. But he wanted to know no more. Séverine, on the other hand, seemed more and more anxious to tell him all that had happened. Sometimes, when she held him tight, he felt that she was bursting and gasping to tell him her secret, that her only reason for wanting to give herself was to find relief from the thing that was choking her. A violent tremor would run through her body and cause her breast to heave; confused sighs broke from her lips, and her voice faded away as she reached her ecstasy. Was she trying to speak to him? Seized with panic, he would quickly press his lips to hers and silence her confession with a kiss. Why let this thing come between them? Who could tell how it might change their love for each other? He sensed danger; the thought of her recounting the gruesome details of her crime to him made him shudder. She no doubt guessed what he was thinking because she would lie beside him and run her hands over him gently, lovingly, wanting only to love him and to be loved in return. And then they would make love, madly, passionately, and lie fainting in each other’s arms.
Since the summer, Roubaud had put on a lot of weight. Whereas Séverine seemed to be regaining the vivacity and freshness of the twenty-year-old girl she was, he seemed to be growing older and more sullen. As Séverine said, he had changed a lot in four months. He was still on good terms with Jacques, shaking his hand, inviting him back to the flat and never happier than when he joined them for a meal. But Jacques’s company was no longer enough to satisfy him. He would often go out as soon as he had finished eating, sometimes leaving Jacques alone with his wife, on the pretext that it was stuffy indoors and that he needed to get some fresh air. The truth was that he was now in the habit of visiting a little café on the Cours Napoléon, where he used to meet Monsieur Cauche, the safety officer. He didn’t drink much, bar the occasional tot of rum, but he had developed a liking for cards. It was becoming something of an obsession. It was only when he had the cards in his hand and was absorbed in endless rounds of piquet that he forgot his troubles and became more cheerful. Monsieur Cauche, who was an inveterate gambler, had insisted they play for money, and the stakes had now risen to a hundred sous4 a game. This was a side of himself that Roubaud had never been aware of. He became completely carried away by the idea of winning a fortune, by the mania for making money, which can so take hold of a man that he will stake his job and his livelihood on a throw of the d
ice. So far his work had not suffered. He would go off to the cafe as soon as he was free, and if he wasn’t on duty he wouldn’t get back home until two or three in the morning. His wife didn’t complain, although she objected to him always coming back in a worse mood than when he’d left, for he was extraordinarily unlucky and ended up running into debt.
Then came the first quarrel. Although she had not yet come to hate him, Séverine was finding Roubaud more and more difficult to put up with. She felt as if he were a weight bearing down on her whole life; but for the constant burden of his presence, she would have been free and happy. She had no regrets about deceiving him. After all, it was his fault; hadn’t he more or less forced her into it? As they gradually drifted apart, they each tried to overcome the disruption in their lives, seeking consolation or distraction in their own different ways. If he had his cards, she was entitled to have a lover. But what really annoyed her, what she simply could not come to terms with, was finding herself short of money as a result of his continual losses. Her housekeeping money was now being squandered at the café on the Cours Napoléon, and she sometimes couldn’t see her way clear to paying the laundry bill. She had to do without all sorts of little comforts and items of clothing. That evening, they had quarrelled over a pair of shoes she needed to buy. Roubaud was about to leave and couldn’t find a knife to cut himself a slice of bread. So he had taken a knife from the sideboard drawer. It was the murder weapon. She looked him straight in the eyes as he refused to give her the fifteen francs she wanted for the shoes. He didn’t have the money and he had no idea where he could find it. But she was insistent and asked him again. He refused a second time, becoming more and more exasperated. Suddenly, she pointed to the place under the floor, where the ghostly spoils still lay hidden. There was some money there, she said, and she wanted some of it. Roubaud turned pale; the knife fell with a clatter into the drawer. For a moment she thought he was going to hit her. He came towards her, muttering that the money down there could rot, that he’d sooner cut his hand off than take any of it. He clenched his fists and threatened to beat her if she tried to take the floorboard up or steal a single centime while he was out. He would never touch it! Never! It was dead and buried! Séverine, too, had turned pale. The thought of groping around under the floorboards made her feel faint. They might end up poor, they might be starving, but the money would stay where it was. They never mentioned it again, even when they were really hard up. But every time they chanced to walk on that part of the floor, the burning sensation in their foot got worse. They ended up always walking round it.
Other arguments followed, about La Croix-de-Maufras. Why hadn’t the house been sold? Each accused the other of doing nothing to get things moving. Roubaud still refused to have anything to do with it, whilst Séverine, on the odd occasions she wrote to the Misards, received only vague information in reply; no one had shown any interest in it, the fruit trees had failed and the vegetables wouldn’t grow because there was nobody to water them. In the weeks following the crisis, the Roubauds had lived blissfully free from care. But things were changing; it seemed that all their troubles were about to begin again. The seeds of discontent - the hidden money, the secret lover - had begun to sprout, forcing them apart and setting them against each other. They grew to dislike each other more and more. Their life together was becoming a torment.
What was more, by a singular stroke of ill fortune, they began to have further trouble with their neighbours. A new spate of gossip and argument had broken out. Philomène had recently had a slanging match with Madame Lebleu, who accused her of selling her a chicken that had died of fowl pest. The real reason for their disagreement, however, was that Philomène had now developed a friendship with Séverine. One night, Pecqueux had seen Séverine in Jacques’s arms. Because Pecqueux was Jacques’s fireman, Philomène had overcome her earlier dislike of Séverine, having discovered that she was Jacques’s mistress, and was doing her utmost to be pleasant towards her. She prided herself on being a friend of the most attractive and incontestably the most refined lady at the station and had turned against the cashier’s wife, that old bag as she called her, whose sole aim in life was to make trouble. She blamed her for everything and went around telling everyone that the apartment overlooking the street belonged by rights to the Roubauds and that it was outrageous that it had not been returned to them. So things were not going well for Madame Lebleu. She also risked getting into serious trouble because of her constant spying on Mademoiselle Guichon in the hope of catching her with the stationmaster. She still hadn’t succeeded but she had been foolish enough to get herself caught with her ear glued to their doors. Monsieur Dabadie, furious at this eavesdropping, had told Moulin, the other assistant stationmaster, that if Roubaud wished to reapply for the apartment, he would be happy to endorse his application. Moulin, who was normally not one for gossip, had repeated this to everyone on the corridor. Feelings had run very high, and at one point things had nearly come to blows.
Amidst all this growing unpleasantness, there was only one day that Séverine looked forward to - Friday. In her quietly determined way, she had invented an excuse for getting away. It was the first thing that came into her head; she had a pain in her knee and needed to see a specialist. So every Friday since October, she had been taking the 6.40 express in the morning, which was always driven by Jacques, and had spent the day with him in Paris, coming back in the evening on the 6.30. Initially she felt obliged to inform her husband how her knee was progressing; some days it felt better and some days it felt worse. But after a while, realizing that he wasn’t even listening, she had simply given up mentioning it. Sometimes she looked at him and wondered whether he knew. How was it possible that someone so fiercely jealous, someone who had demanded bloody retribution and killed in a blind rage, could accept that she had taken a lover? She couldn’t understand it. She thought he must be turning stupid.
It was a bitterly cold December night. Séverine had waited up very late for her husband to come home. The next day was Friday, and she had to be up before dawn to catch the train to Paris. She had got into the habit of getting everything ready beforehand, setting out her clothes so that she could dress the minute she got up. Eventually she went to bed, falling asleep at about one o’clock. Roubaud had still not returned. Already twice before, he had not arrived back until the small hours. He had become totally addicted to his passion for cards and seemed unable to drag himself away from the café, where a little back room had been set aside especially. It had become a veritable gambling den and large sums of money were being wagered at écarté.5 Séverine was quite happy to have the bed to herself; with the bed covers tucked warmly around her, she fell into a deep sleep, dreaming about the delights of the day to come.
It was almost three in the morning when she was woken by a strange noise. She had no idea what it could have been, thought she must have been dreaming and went back to sleep. But then she heard heavy thuds and the sound of wood creaking, as if someone were trying to force open a door. Suddenly there was a loud thump and the sound of something snapping, which made her sit bolt upright in her bed. She was terrified and convinced that someone was trying to break in from the corridor outside. For a whole minute she sat not daring to move, straining her ears to listen. Eventually plucking up her courage, she got out of bed to investigate. She walked noiselessly across the room on her bare feet and quietly inched open the bedroom door. She was wearing only her nightdress; she was so cold that she had turned white and was shivering. The sight which now greeted her eyes in the dining room made her stand rooted to the ground in terror and amazement.
Roubaud was on the floor, lying on his stomach and leaning on his elbows. He had prised open the edge of the parquet floor with a chisel. He had placed a candle beside him, and its light cast a huge shadow on the ceiling. He was leaning over the hole, which ran like a black slit across the parquet floor, peering inside it. His eyes seemed to start from his head. The blood had run to his cheeks and turned them purple; h
is face was the face of a murderer. Wildly, he thrust his hand under the floorboard, but found nothing. He was shaking with fear and had to bring the candle nearer. There, down in the hole, he saw the purse, the banknotes and the watch.
Séverine let out a cry. Roubaud turned round, terrified. For a moment he didn’t recognize her. He must have thought she was a ghost, standing there in her white nightdress with big frightened eyes.
‘What are you doing?’ she asked.
He realized that it was Séverine but made no answer, merely grunting in reply. He looked at her. Her presence annoyed him; he wished she would go back to bed. What could he say? Seeing her standing in front of him, shivering, with nothing on, all he wanted to do was to hit her.
‘So that’s your game!’ she continued. ‘You refuse to buy me shoes and then you help yourself to his money, because you’ve lost at cards!’
Roubaud lost his temper. Was she still going to carry on ruining his life and stand in the way of his pleasures? He no longer desired her, and making love had become a torment. He was getting his enjoyment elsewhere and didn’t need her any more. He reached down into the hole again and took out the purse containing the three gold hundred-franc coins. Having put the floorboard back in place with his heel, he came towards her.
‘You’re making my life a misery,’ he hissed. ‘I’ll do what I like. Do I ask you what you get up to in Paris?’
With a furious shrug of the shoulders he went back to the café, leaving the candle burning on the floor.
Séverine picked it up and went back to bed, frozen to the marrow. She left the candle burning, unable to get back to sleep, her eyes wide open, counting the minutes until it was time to catch her train.
It was now perfectly clear to her that Roubaud had steadily deteriorated, as if the crime had seeped into him, eating him away and dissolving all links between them, and that he knew.