For an instant she had the desire to call out to her brother, but George held her back.
CHAPTER 9
AS THEY HAD IN THE PAST, THE TANERANS SPENT THEIR SUNDAYS at the place of an old friend, Mr. Briol, a retired teacher who lived in The Pardal. That morning, for the fourth time since their arrival, they crossed their large property.
In the Sunday calm, one could barely hear the Riotor babbling below the plateau, reduced as it was to a tiny stream in the wake of the big drought that had followed the week of the storm. The Tanerans set out through the old prune orchards, and the vines, caught up in a sort of vegetal madness, sent out long shoots on every side.
Before crossing the oak woods that stretched out at the end of their property on the south, they went alongside the estate’s tenant farmhouse. The Dedde girl was standing in the doorway, ready to leave for mass. She fidgeted and smiled at Henry in a way that expressed so vulgarly a recent involvement that the youngest of the Tanerans turned his head away.
When they were on the road, he used the pretext of a flock of birds flying high in the sunlit sky to hide his embarrassment. “Look, Maud!” In the dark, slanted eyes of her young brother, Maud saw the shadow of the wood pigeons reflected. His head back, he followed their flight until the moment when it blended into the azure sky.
When they got to the rocky road that wound through the vineyards, Mrs. Taneran had difficulty going forward. She had gained some weight during her leisurely holidays, and, despite the morning freshness, she felt tired and out of breath. “I’m not used to doing anything anymore. I’m getting heavy,” she moaned, wiping her forehead.
Her plaintive tone garnered no sympathy from any of her children. Her sons walked in front of her. Henry sauntered from one side of the path to the other, like a young boy. Jacques, already tired of the pleasures of the country, stopped now and then to get his mother going again with the impatient call, “Well, are you coming?”
The moment he felt an insult bubbling up in him, it came out of his mouth. That was his way of being honest. And if he detested Maud’s approach to things, it was precisely because she never expressed her feelings as spontaneously as he did. He never knew what effect his insults or attitude had on his sister, for his reproaches disappeared inside her in a mysterious murkiness, like a lake without currents. His mother always said of her son that as long as he was candid, he wasn’t as bad as people claimed him to be. No doubt it was true, to the degree to which Jacques was not any harder than he appeared.
He had just received a long letter from the Tavares Bank, which he had refused to show to his mother. He said he was very worried and spoke about going back home. Could one read into that a pretext for leaving Uderan, where he had been more or less cast aside for the last while?
Since the waitress’s suicide, Maud saw Jacques only at meals. He never spoke to her anymore. He was probably not unaware of the fact that George spent his evenings with his sister. At Barque’s, he missed this friend who had slipped away from him and was secretly humiliated by it. Maud guessed that Jacques didn’t have much fun anymore at Semoic and that a shameful feeling of distress had been torturing him since this affair. She knew through the Deddes’ daughter that fewer people than before came to the inn.
Without admitting it to himself, Jacques feared his sister because he suspected her to be his most indomitable enemy. He wasn’t sure that she would refrain from revealing anything to their mother if he dared to reproach her for monopolizing George Durieux, and all the more so because Jacques wasn’t sure if his sister was George’s mistress.
In the soft Sunday morning light, his mother considered her son with a sad tenderness, and one could guess by her look that she asked herself endless, tormenting questions about him. For the first time she doubted that he still wanted to settle down at Uderan, and she admitted it to him. She could be incredibly tactless at times, as she knew, but she could not hold her tongue, believing that it was her motherly duty to question him.
“In the beginning, we’ll help you,” she told him gently. “I’m sure that Taneran will help you. I can guarantee that this old estate is worth something these days…” Encouraged by his silence, she continued. “You’ll come to see that I did well not to have sold it. I would like you to reassure me, Jacques. I have already incurred tremendous expense to set you up here.”
Scornfully, he yelled at her to “keep Uderan” if she wanted to die there, but in that case, he would look for something else. An ugly discussion sprang up but soon ended, for both of them judged it useless to go any deeper. By her senseless devotion, Mrs. Taneran destroyed any desire her son might have had to escape. Her constant fervor irritated Jacques. One would have said, at times, that he reproached his mother for her very tenderness, realizing that her accommodating ways were making him grow softer. Nevertheless, he did not leave his family, because the blowups, as scandalous as they may have been, between Mrs. Taneran and her son, did not indicate anything more than the state of their nerves.
Mrs. Taneran and her children took a shortcut through the Pellegrains’ property. Mrs. Pellegrain, who was watching out for them, came and joined them. She was Mrs. Pecresse’s first cousin. Her Sunday “transformation” was to wear a bright-colored bonnet whose color contrasted with her scarlet complexion and wrinkled features, giving her a questionable look of extended youth and making this farm woman look like a lady of the night. They exchanged a few words.
“And your brother? Still doing well?” Mrs. Taneran inquired. Mrs. Pellegrain’s brother was a deaf-mute she had agreed to take in, despite the natural aversion she had for this unfortunate man. He was reputed, though, to be the best worker in the region. He was known to be capable of doing the work of two men, which is why his brother-in-law never failed to hire him. Even if Mrs. Pellegrain did her best to show her affection for her brother, everyone in the village was aware that he never ate at the family table and slept in a closet under the stairs.
Maud tried to move away from her mother chatting with the farm woman, but the latter addressed Maud in a strong southern accent. “So, miss, it’s nice to sleep at Uderan?” Maud felt herself reddening as if under the lash of a whip but responded boldly that, indeed, she enjoyed staying at the domain. She noticed that Jacques had stopped and was watching her in a half-mocking, disdainful way.
The deaf man came up to them, dressed in the clean, collarless shirt his sister made him wear on Sundays. When he saw the Tanerans, a big smile covered his face and curled his lips up over his enormous teeth. A sad, smothered sound came from his throat, expressing, no doubt, his contentment. But he didn’t stop and quickly walked away with his mouth open.
They passed by the Big Oak Farm and then arrived at The Pardal. Although the village was much farther away from Uderan than Semoic, the Tanerans had the habit of going to mass at The Pardal because of the parish priest, whom they knew. During the service, Maud noticed that her brothers were as furious as they were embarrassed to have been led to such a place. Sunday invariably ended in dispute; Jacques and Henry saw that by attending mass they always fell into the trap their mother succeeded in laying for them. Already, young Henry used the same arguments as his older brother in accusing his mother of tricking them into another dreadfully boring Sunday. This insignificant detail perfectly illustrated one of the family’s character traits: an incredible ability to forget! Indeed, what were they expecting and why did they have any illusions as to the day’s unchanging flow? They betrayed in that way their incurable weakness. They had barely started out for The Pardal when they suddenly seemed to recall the boredom they would encounter. Yet they never turned around and, out of spite, contrived to make the day as infernal as possible. Still, they knew how to preserve a certain dignity, for they were as cowardly in regard to scandal as they were daring in front of their subdued mother. Thus, during the service, they sat in the first row of the chancel with a slightly humble and contented look, in order to honor the confidence of the Pardalians, who gave them the best place in the church. The village folk moved back even farther behind them, it seemed, to acknowledge the Tanerans’ social standing.