Therese Raquin - Emile Zola [24]
Thérèse played with an unconcern that irritated Camille. She used to pick up François, the big tabby cat that Mme Raquin had brought with her from Vernon, and stroke him with one hand while putting down her dominoes with the other. Thursday evenings were torture for her and she often complained of not feeling well, of having a bad headache, in order to avoid playing, so that she could sit by idly and half asleep. With one elbow on the table and her cheek resting on the palm of her hand, she would watch her aunt’s and her husband’s guests, seeing them through a kind of smoky yellow mist that came out of the lamp. All these faces drove her crazy. She looked from one to the other with feelings of profound disgust and dull irritation. Old Michaud had a pallid complexion with red blotches: the dead face of an old man in his second childhood. Grivet had the narrow mask, round eyes and thin lips of a halfwit. Olivier, whose cheekbones protruded, gravely bore a stiff, insignificant head on his ridiculous body. As for Suzanne, Olivier’s wife, she was quite pale, with dull eyes, white lips and a soft face. And Thérèse could not see a single human, not a living creature, among these grotesque and sinister beings with whom she was shut up. At times she would suffer hallucinations, thinking that she was buried in a vault together with mechanical bodies whose heads moved and whose arms and legs waved when their strings were pulled. The heavy atmosphere of the dining room stifled her, and the eerie silence and yellowish glow of the lamp filled her with a vague sense of terror, an inexpressible feeling of anxiety.
Downstairs, on the front door, they had put a bell which gave a high-pitched tinkle as customers came in. Thérèse kept her ears open and when the bell rang she would hurry down, relieved and happy to get out of the dining room. She took her time serving the customer. When she was alone again, she would sit behind the counter and stay there for as long as possible, apprehensive of going back upstairs and feeling real joy at not having Grivet and Olivier in front of her. The damp air of the shop calmed the fever that burned her hands, and she slipped back into the solemn reverie that was her habitual state of being.
But she could not stay like this for long. Camille would be annoyed by her absence. He could not understand how anyone might prefer the shop to the dining room on a Thursday evening, so he would lean over the banisters and look around for his wife.
‘Hey, there!’ he would shout. ‘What are you doing? Why don’t you come back up? Grivet is having the devil’s own luck. He’s just won again.’
The young woman would get up painfully and return to her place opposite Old Michaud, whose drooping lips would form into a repulsive smile. And from then until eleven o’clock, she used to stay slumped in her chair, looking at Francois as he lay in her arms, so as not to see these paper dolls grimacing around her.
V
One Thursday, when he got home from the office, Camille brought with him a tall, square-shouldered young fellow, whom he pushed into the shop with a familiar pat on the back.
‘Mother,’ he asked Mme Raquin, showing the lad to her, ‘do you recognize this gentleman?’
The old shopkeeper looked at the tall fellow and rummaged around in her memory, but found nothing. Thérèse observed the scene placidly.
‘What!’ Camille continued. ‘You don’t recognize Laurent, little Laurent, the son of Old Laurent, who has those fine fields of wheat over near Jeufosse?1 Don’t you remember? I used to go to school with him. He’d come to fetch me in the morning, as he left the