Did he still love her? She kept herself at the surface of her sleep, light and annoying, like an irritating fly. He sensed that she was there, at his side, for he grunted and murmured something incomprehensible and sank into sleep once again. What brought her suffering, she would have to endure alone.
It was now almost day. She arose and got dressed. Once she had made this first effort, she was in a hurry to get it over with. She had no trouble letting herself out, for everything had been left open in the rush of the night before. The road seemed long, she was shivering, and a stabbing pain in her lower body prevented her from running.
As she left the cypress lane, she looked back and considered George’s home, drab in the early morning. Was she dreaming? She thought she saw a human form briskly leave the road. She pushed aside the suspicion that came to her, as she would have done a bad omen one conjures up without thinking about it again. When she caught sight of Uderan, she could not repress a strange smile.
In the mirror she noticed her pale coloring and haggard eyes. Once undressed, her naked body took on a beauty of which she had just become conscious and that left her both sad and proud. George had said so much about it to her, and his sentences came back to her in fragments. She tried in vain to bring them back in their warmth and spontaneity.
She had a hard time putting her ideas together. Soon she wasn’t thinking of anything, except her mother, who might come to Uderan at any moment. She remained, however, unperturbed. “Bah! It’s just foolishness, all that, just foolishness…”
A pain rose from her lower parts, warmly emanating like the memory of her pleasure. She buried herself in the freezing-cold sheets and quickly succumbed to a vertiginous sleep that left her without dreams.
CHAPTER 11
MAUD DID NOT GO BACK TO THE PECRESSE HOME UNTIL EVENING, after roaming all day down by the Riotor. As soon as she entered, she realized that no one in the room was speaking. It seemed that nobody noticed her presence and that they were all preoccupied by the same concern. Even Mr. Pecresse, after pulling up a chair for her, returned to his motionless position by the fireplace, between his dogs.
Mrs. Taneran wasn’t there. Maud was struck by the absence of her mother, for the usual time for dinner had gone by without anyone paying any heed. A kind of suppressed fear rose in Maud. What did she come looking for at the Pecresses? Shouldn’t she have stayed at George Durieux’s place instead of fleeing in the morning? She sat down, seemingly calm.
From time to time the two griffons lying near the fireplace vigorously scratched their sides; Maud remembered that the odor of racing dogs sickened her mother, who invariably asked, every evening, that they open the windows a little. (This evening the windows were closed, in the absence of their mother.)
Through the windows one could see the Dior in the distance, smoking like a brush fire and spreading a refreshing humidity, as if it had exhaled, with the coming of evening, a vapor carefully contained during the day. Sitting beside the window, the Pecresse son was looking at the view without really seeing it, while continuously redirecting his gaze toward Maud, to show her that her indifference tortured him.
Jacques and Henry, sitting close enough to touch each other, remained idle. After a moment, Maud went up to her younger brother: “What’s going on? Can you tell me where Mother is?”
Henry gave her an angry look, stiffened his mouth in an expression of forced indignation, while Jacques appeared to be waiting for his sister to come to him. In Jacques’s hollow cheeks his muscles played, round and hard like marbles. His lips were pale from being stretched over his teeth, and a blank stare, characteristic of his bad times, filtered through his half-closed eyes.
The Pecresse woman was exultant. By her look, by her sinuous walk through the room, one could make out an expression of satisfaction that she could barely keep inside. She, at least, found herself at home in this room where a dismal silence persisted. With a light step she went from one to the other, engaging them. Her southern accent, usually so unpleasant, softened and gave her voice an unexpected sweetness.
She flattered them with her gestures, her looks. One minute she spoke to her son: “John, dear, if you would like to smile a bit you would make your mother happy.” The next moment she spoke to Henry Taneran: “Pick up the newspaper and let us know what’s going on. My poor son, John, won’t be the one to do that right now. Ah! John. Ah! John…” No one deigned to reply because, in spite of it all, her pretense did not escape them, and it revolted them.
Maud scrutinized them all insistently and asked once again where her mother was. Time was passing and Mrs. Taneran had not yet appeared, although usually she came back early from the tenant farm.
But an obstinate silence met the young woman’s words. They were clearly refraining from speaking to her, and their attitude soon became so evident that she was frightened. She suddenly thought she grasped the reason for their anger and felt invaded by a sense of shame that totally crushed her. Her obsession with seeing her fears come to fruition made her recoil as if she were in the path of an object coming toward her at a dizzying speed. But just at the moment when she thought she understood, she fell back into doubt. She would have liked to have asked them a question that would have enlightened her, but nothing came to mind. They had been dwelling on their anger for too long to be able to listen to her. She realized that and decided it was more prudent to remain silent.
Nevertheless, Mrs. Pecresse could no longer contain her impatience. She leaned over Maud and hissed right in her face, “Where is your mother? She’s looking for you, the poor woman! She must be very worn-out. She was already dragging herself around before that. It’s because you haven’t shown up the entire day, Miss Grant…”
Mrs. Pecresse added, cleverly calculating the effects in order to stir up shame and remorse in Maud, “In fact, she’s been gone since noon hour…”
Maud backed away from Mrs. Pecresse, her arms stiffened in a gesture of defense, but the woman stared her down and it was the young woman who closed her eyes… Suddenly she saw the shadow that had crossed the cypress lane just as she was leaving George’s place. Hadn’t it been round and gray like the Pecresse woman herself…? Was it possible that was related to what she was currently experiencing? Maud reviewed her day spent wandering near the Riotor. How had she not foreseen that during that time her brothers would remain with the Pecresses and that their desire to catch her red-handed would grow? No doubt her mother wasn’t aware of anything. But they knew what they were doing. With that, there was Jacques’s need to distract himself and to make her pay for the audacity she had had at Barque’s the other evening.
That the Pecresse woman would collaborate with Jacques to find her guilty was unexpected, to say the least! What impudence Jacques had! He wasn’t reluctant to associate with the Pecresse woman, even though he had deceived her twice, in not accepting his share of responsibility for the suicide of the young woman and in pushing his mother to leave Uderan definitively. He had clearly latched onto the first excuse to strike back at Maud, happy that she had provided him with such an ideal pretext. Up until now, he had hesitated to use sensitive arguments against her that would have also compromised himself. Since the event at Barque’s, he had hung around, not finding himself at home anywhere. He felt alone and needed someone else to do something wrong in order to distract him from his own obsessive guilt…
Her brother knew. Maud felt lost and wanted to flee.
At that very moment, something unexpected occurred to forcefully sweep away their anger. From the heights of Uderan came a weak, strangled voice that seemed to fear being heard, and that immediately produced silence: “Mrs. Pe-cre-sse!”