Therese Raquin - Emile Zola [76]
Soon tiredness overcame them to such an extent that, one evening, they decided to lie down on the bed. They did not get undressed, but threw themselves fully clothed on the quilt, fearful that they might touch one another’s bare skin. It seemed to them that they would get a painful shock from the slightest contact. Then, when they had dozed off like that for two nights in a restless sleep, they risked taking off their clothes and slipping between the sheets. But they stayed far away from one another and were careful not to touch by mistake. Thérèse went to bed first and got into the far side, against the wall. Laurent waited until she was settled down, then carefully stretched himself out on the front of the bed, right on the edge. There was a wide gap between them. This was where the body of Camille lay.
When the two murderers were under the same sheet and shut their eyes, they would imagine they could feel the damp corpse of their victim spread out in the middle of the bed, sending a chill through their flesh. It was like some grotesque barrier between them. They were seized by feverish delirium and the barrier would become an actual one for them; they would touch the body, they would see it lying like a greenish, rotten lump of meat and they would breathe in the repulsive odour of this heap of human decay. All their senses shared in the hallucination, making their sensations unbearably acute. The presence of this foul bedfellow would keep them motionless, silent and rigid with fear. At times, Laurent would consider violently grasping Thérèse in his arms, but he dared not move, telling himself that if he were to reach out an arm he would surely grasp a handful of Camille’s soft flesh. At that, he would imagine that the drowned man had just lain down between them, to prevent them from touching one another. Eventually, he realized that Camille was jealous.
Occasionally, however, they would try to exchange a timid kiss to see what happened. The young man would tease his wife, demanding that she kiss him. But their lips were so cold that death appeared to have come between their mouths. They would feel nausea; Thérèse shuddered in horror and Laurent, who could hear her teeth chatter, would lose his temper with her.
‘Why are you trembling?’ he would shout. ‘Are you afraid of Camille, then? Come on, the poor fellow can’t feel his bones any longer.’
The pair of them avoided admitting the cause of their anxieties. When either of them imagined seeing the drowned man’s pallid face before them, they would shut their eyes and enclose themselves in terror, not daring to talk to the other about the vision, for fear of inducing a still more frightful attack. When Laurent, driven to the end of his tether, accused Thérèse in a desperate fury of being afraid of Camille, the name, spoken aloud, would make the horror more intense. The murderer would lose his head.
‘Yes, yes,’ he spluttered, speaking to her. ‘You’re afraid of Camille ... I can see that, for God’s sake! You’re crazy, you don’t have an ounce of courage. Huh! You can sleep easy. Do you think your first husband will come and pull your feet because I’m in bed with you?’
This idea, the suggestion that the drowned man might come and pull their feet, made Laurent’s hair stand on end. He went on, still more savagely, tearing into himself.
‘I’ll have to take you to the cemetery one night. We’ll open Camille’s coffin and you’ll see what a heap of rotten meat he is! Then perhaps you won’t be afraid of him any more ... Come on, he doesn’t know we pushed him in the water.’
Thérèse was moaning softly, with her head under the sheet.
‘We pushed him in the water because he was in our way,’ her husband went on. ‘And we’d do it again, wouldn’t we? Don’t be such a baby. Be strong. It’s silly to let this get in the way of our happiness. Don’t you see, dear, when we’re dead ourselves, we won’t be any more or less happy under the ground because we chucked an idiot into the Seine, and will have been free to enjoy our