Therese Raquin - Emile Zola [98]
Both of them had had the idea of separating. Each in turn had dreamed of running away to enjoy some rest far from this Passage du Pont-Neuf where the damp and dirt seemed to have been designed especially for their desolate existence. But they did not dare, they could not escape. The thought of not rending each other apart, of not staying there to suffer and inflict suffering, seemed impossible to them. They were obstinate in their hatred and cruelty. A sort of attraction and repulsion drove them asunder and kept them together at the same time. They felt that peculiar sensation of two people who, after an argument, want to separate, yet keep on coming back to shout fresh insults at one another. Then there were material obstacles to flight: they did not know what to do with the cripple, or what to say to their Thursday guests. If they fled, people might suspect something: they imagined being hunted down and guillotined. So they stayed, out of cowardice; they stayed and grovelled in the horror of their existence.
When Laurent was not there, during the mornings and afternoons, Thérèse would go from the dining room to the shop, gnawed by anxiety, not knowing how to fill the void that every day sank deeper in her. She was at a loose end when not weeping at Mme Raquin’s feet or being beaten and insulted by her husband. As soon as she was alone in the shop, a sense of despondency overcame her: she would look out numbly at the people going up and down the dirty, black arcade, and become mortally depressed in the depths of this dark tomb stinking of the graveyard. Eventually, she asked Suzanne to come and spend whole days with her, hoping that the presence of this sad creature, all soft and pale, would calm her nerves.
Suzanne gleefully accepted the offer. She still felt a kind of respectful friendship towards Thérèse, and had long wanted to come and work with her while Olivier was in his office. She brought along her embroidery and took up Mme Raquin’s empty place behind the counter.
From that day on, Thérèse left her aunt more alone. She went up less often to weep on her knees and kiss her dead cheeks. She had something else to occupy her. She made an effort to listen to Suzanne’s slow chattering on about her family and the trivialities of her monotonous life. It took Thérèse out of herself. She was sometimes surprised to find herself getting interested in some nonsense and would later smile bitterly to herself over it.
Little by little, she lost all the customers who used to come to the shop. Since her aunt had become immobilized upstairs in her chair, she let the shop go to the dogs, abandoning the goods to dust and damp. There was a smell of mould about the place, cobwebs hung from the ceiling and the floor was hardly ever brushed. Apart from that, what drove the customers away was the strange manner in which Thérèse would sometimes greet them. When she was upstairs, being beaten by Laurent or seized by a fit of terror, and the bell on the shop door tinkled imperiously, she would have to go down, almost without taking the time to tie up her hair and wipe away her tears. On such occasions she would serve the waiting customer brusquely and often not even take the trouble to serve her, shouting down from the top of the wooden staircase that she no longer had whatever the customer wanted. This offhand treatment was not calculated to retain the clientele. The little girls who worked in the district were used to the gentle manners of Mme Raquin