She groped her way downstairs and stopped behind the kitchen door. In order to find the courage to open it, she repeated to herself, “None of this is important… in a little while no one will be talking about it…”
Then she was into the room. The immediate silence swept down on her and left her disconcerted. The light was so bright that she instinctively shaded her eyes with her hand.
As everyone was sitting somewhat back from the table, they must have finished dinner. Without looking at him, she picked out Jacques, who was rolling pieces of bread between his fingers and throwing them into the fire. Near him, Mrs. Taneran probably wore the “ashen face” that her children well knew. The Pecresse woman was the first to speak. “You’re going to eat something, Miss Grant…” The little servant girl went to get a plate, which she put on the edge of the table, and then she put some wood in the stove.
Maud wended her way toward the fireplace and leaned on it, facing the hearth, so she would no longer have to look at them. Everyone was observing a silence that became intolerable the longer it lasted, and that rose and rose, like water rising in a sinking boat. A single word would have been enough to ignite their fury, causing this deadly inertia to explode. Maud would have liked to disappear in the puddle of her shadow, dwindling until she became, like the shadow itself, nothing.
Mindlessly she tried to pet the griffon closest to her, but the dog growled, and her nervousness became such that she blushed and lost her bearings, as if this failure with the dog discredited her even more in their eyes. “Come, it’s ready,” said Mrs. Pecresse, “Come along, Miss Grant…”
Maud remained motionless, contemplating the white oval table, which sparkled in the brightness of the ceiling light, then the empty chair, and on the table, the steaming plate. Nearby, two closed, trembling hands tapped on the table: two hands with the same bone structure, palm width, and, more than anything, the distinctively inverted thumb, a sign of violence, that she bore as well. The faces in the room, plunged in the shadow of the lampshade, escaped her. The Pecresse woman pushed her toward the table, and she found herself in front of the plate.
They devoured her pitilessly with their gaze, with the curiosity inspired by every scandalous act. They followed her gestures, awaited her mistakes. The simple movement she had to make in order to eat required such an effort that, at times, she was no longer in control of her arm, which literally became paralyzed.
She would have given her life to hear them speak, at last, and say a single word that would have revealed the meaning of their anger. She knew so well the dark roads they enjoyed taking, where they got lost…
In the barn, which was near the kitchen, they could hear the animals crushing their bedding and rummaging around their empty feeding troughs. This familiar sound surprised Maud a little, in that it was peaceful and habitual.
Suddenly, John Pecresse got up and left. His mother, with feigned discretion, imitated him and acted as if she were following him without actually making up her mind. “You can stay, Mrs. Pecresse, you know…” It was the voice of Mrs. Taneran. It had a somewhat contemptuous sound to it, and more than weariness came through; it revealed such a deep discouragement that everything sank into it and disappeared like a wisp of straw.
Maud, for her part, could only fixate on her plate rather stupidly.
“What the hell do you think you’re doing? Do you think we have nothing else to do but watch and wait for you?” This voice, with its skillful inflections, was that of Jacques. Maud didn’t bat an eyelid.
The servant had gone to bed and Mrs. Pecresse made a move to get up and clear the table, thus feigning a noble disinterest in the whole affair. The Tanerans’ disagreement was blowing up so violently that this miserable woman was very pleased and could move away from it without any effort, now that she had caused it.
“Please stay seated, Mrs. Pecresse. Maud, could you clear the table?” A feeling of hope filled the young woman, who recognized this tone of tender scolding her mother sometimes used with her.
Without a word, Maud went toward the sink. Jacques followed her closely; she heard his breathing, right there, at her back. What excuse would he come up with? The lowest, the most banal, the most ridiculous, the most shameful…
“So you’re going to wash your plate? I’ll teach you to sneak off. You don’t care about anything and you’ve figured out how to run around… I won’t allow it much longer…”
Maud kept herself from speaking or moving. The plate she held in her two hands suddenly changed its appearance, so that she no longer saw it as it was, but broken and bloody with a face coming through it, like the face of a clown bursting through a sheet of paper.
“Jacques, leave her alone; that’s what she deserves,” Henry chimed in.
But Jacques was in full form and impossible to stop. “We’ve left her alone too long! When I think of how we all indulged her, of how we trusted her… Do you want to know something, something I hid from you, because I had pity on her?” He stretched out his arms toward his mother in a solemn gesture. “It disgusts me that it’s come to this, I must say. Do you remember? The money, when Muriel died?”
He interrupted himself, finally delivered from this very minimal obligation toward his sister. Mrs. Taneran seemed petrified. In a quick calculation, Maud measured the distance that separated her from the door. She would slip along the wall, lift the latch… Before rushing over, though, she summoned whatever reason she had left.
“Don’t believe him; I borrowed three hundred and fifty francs in exchange for my chain bracelet—you see, I don’t have it anymore…” She showed her bare arm and cunningly slid toward the door.
Jacques yelled like someone possessed, “It’s not true, liar!”
But Maud was already outside. She hurtled down the road at such speed that the stones flew out from under her feet. When she got to the valley, near the Dior, she stopped. Insults were still being hurled at her from above. The open door shed a big square of light on the countryside. Several voices mixed together with Jacques’s—that of the Pecresse woman, who yelled her name with the loud, drawling accent she had when she called her dogs in the evening. And then Henry’s.
“Hey! Maud! Come back! Come stay here! If you don’t, Mother won’t sleep a wink. You know that, don’t you…” Stiff, biting her lips to keep from answering, she silently shook her head—no. The first tears finally flowed from her eyes. She was soon able to see that the square of light disappeared from above.
She lay down on the riverbank. One of her hands held her head and the other hung down in the water current, making a frail and bubbly melody.
CHAPTER 13
THE WATER WAS SO COLD THAT AFTER A MOMENT MAUD could no longer feel her fingers. She withdrew her hand and put it on the thick grass, which felt warm by comparison. In the silence that reigned near the river, she heard the sound of her own sobbing. An instant later she wanted to draw up her legs, but it hurt too much; she felt the same thing when she tried to get up. Very carefully she brought her limbs in close, into the hollow of her curled-up body, discovering a gentleness in her actions that made her feel as if she had compassion for herself.
Although it was June, it was still very difficult for Maud to warm herself in this flowing rift of the Dior, where the earth softened at night like a humid sponge. Her dress and clothing stuck to her body, but it was only when she was no longer immobile that the cold penetrated her all of a sudden and made her shiver. She wasn’t sad, but weary, with a weariness made painful by the cold.