The Wretches Page 11

  I didn’t know what to do with myself. I was in a terrible state. I’d chopped down a tree only to have it fall on top of me.

  Maybe I’d find a bit of peace and quiet upstairs? The darkened bedrooms behind their closed shutters seemed much less threatening than the ground floor.

  I went back to Jess’s bedroom. On the bedside table, the Bible’s golden lettering glistened like the wings of a bee in the sun. Fearfully, I took the fat black book in my hands. The rough leather of the cover unsettled me, as if it were a living skin.

  HOLY BIBLE.

  Did Jess really believe all the barbaric things written in there? On the first page there was a cross, with an English sentence written above it. Did that mean our God was an American too? And people prayed to him in these words, which I didn’t even understand? I’d sworn a lie on these flimsy pages, decorated with their Gothic capital letters.

  Was that as bad as if I’d sworn a false oath on a French Bible? What did “Holy Bible” mean exactly? Maybe it wasn’t the same Bible as ours? One thing was the same: that cross, shaded so that it seemed to stand out from the page. The telephone rang. The sound seemed to come from very far away. It had to be Jess calling me back. Would I have to make my confession over the telephone?

  What was it he’d called the black book? “My wedding Bible”? So they had a special Bible for getting married in America?

  The telephone’s nagging ring was still there, screaming in the silence of the house. With every trill of the bell I shook my head, murmuring: “No, Jess! I don’t dare. No, Jess!”

  It was worse than if he’d been there in front of me, with his tanned skin and that expectant look on his face.

  I tried to hold out, but the ringing wouldn’t stop. Finally, I went downstairs, the Bible clutched against my chest.

  I don’t know if you’ve ever had occasion to stare at a telephone while it rings and rings, crying at you to answer it. Well I have, and take it from me, it feels horrible. It’s as if your whole destiny is crammed into that little plastic box, calling out to you for help. I was hoping that the ringing would stop. Once it was silent again, I’d have the time to conquer my fear before calling back.

  “Hello!”

  I snatched up the handset and held it to my ear. The secretary’s cold, impatient voice drilled into my skull.

  “Is this Mister Rooland’s maid speaking?”

  “His maid, yes.”

  “Mister Rooland is back in the office now. He’d like to know what you wanted to talk to him about.”

  I didn’t understand. Why didn’t Jess want to speak to me himself? Was it really over, then? The sound of my voice was repulsive to him now, even on the telephone…

  “Could you please just put him on?” I begged.

  “Mister Rooland is busy. He said you should speak to me.”

  “Let me speak to him! It’s very important!”

  “One moment, please.”

  He must have been standing in front of her. She explained my insistence to him in their language. I couldn’t hear a reply, but he must have shaken his head.

  “Mister Rooland can’t speak to you. Would you like to tell me the reason for your call or not?”

  She was a stubborn mule all right, this girl. As upset as I was, I found myself conjuring up her image: flat-chested, buck-toothed, and I’d give you ten to one she had an awful name too.

  “Would you please tell Monsieur Rooland that the police came to the house? He should go to the Léopoldville commissioner’s office as soon as possible.”

  Why did I get the feeling that Jess had picked up a second receiver? All of a sudden I could sense his presence on the line.

  “Are you listening, Monsieur Rooland?” I cried. “No! Don’t hang up, I beg you, go to the commissioner’s office before you come home. They’ll explain everything to you, I don’t think I could bear it…”

  Just then, the Bible slipped from my grasp. I tried to catch it, but clumsily pressed the hook on the telephone in doing so. When I put the receiver to my ear again, all I could hear was the maddening hiss that made me think of the great empty skies above.

  The aspirin was doing its job. I was feeling a bit better. Not completely better, but at least well enough to get on with my daily chores.

  I had to get back to work: vacuum the living room, then the bedrooms. I only had a few hours in which to become a good little maid again. If I could somehow curl up into my shell, maybe it would make the dreaded confrontation with Monsieur Rooland a little easier to bear.

  It would be easier for both of us if all he had to do was get rid of an employee, rather than a lover. Mum always says, the bigger they are the harder they fall. It may be just a stale old saying, but there’s some truth in it. Take it from me.

  TWENTY

  Rather than making me drowsy and sluggish, the fever seemed to give me a boost. I don’t remember ever working as hard as I did that afternoon. I think I must have taken all the despair I felt and put it into waxing the floors and polishing the silver.

  I got more work done in four hours than a normal maid would have managed in eight. The beds! The bathroom! The lot! I even scrubbed the front steps, would you believe? It was as if I thought I could earn my pardon that way…

  It was a gloomy day outside. The lightest clouds in the louring sky were grey, and the muggy air was almost unbreathable.

  The exhaustion hit me suddenly. I was scrubbing the last of the front steps when all at once I felt so knackered I sat down right there and then, on the wet step, panting as if I’d just run a cross-country race.

  The blue-cushioned swing groaned on its hooks. The canopy’s scalloped edges flapped lazily in the air.

  You couldn’t feel a breath of wind, though. Apart from that seat, everything was stagnant and silent. The litter in the street was motionless on the ground. I sat there, hypnotized by the sight of the strangely swaying swing.

  Maybe it was Thelma’s spirit that… Oh! I can see you smiling. Another crazy idea, right? And yet…

  When I’d noticed Jess and his wife for the first time, the swing had been making the same rusty squeak, and I think it was that noise that had attracted my attention. A noise like a bird’s call.

  A little Renault van came crawling down the road, as if the driver were looking at the house numbers as he drove.

  Instinct’s a funny thing: as soon as I saw that little van I knew it was going to stop at our gate. And it did, pulling up next to the kerb right outside. Two men got out: two policemen. One of them had more stripes on his arm than the other. He was older too. Tubby and red-faced, he looked like a ball balanced on two leather boots. His subordinate was taller, dark-haired and olive-skinned.

  I stood up to go and meet them.

  “Are you Madame Rooland?” asked the officer.

  Oh! You’ll never know how confused I was there for a few seconds. Me: Madame Rooland? Someone had believed that I could be Madame Rooland? So my dream hadn’t been as mad as all that!

  “Madame Rooland is dead. I’m just the maid.”

  There had been a sort of nervous concern in the policemen’s manner up to that point. Now they quickly became sullen.

  “Ah, I see. Does Mr Rooland have a mother?”

  “No.”

  “Or a father?”

  “Not as far as I know. What did you want to talk to them about?”

  “Your employer has had an accident on the Quarante-Sous road.”

  “An accident?”

  “He went into the back of a lorry. It was stopped at a junction.”

  A calm came over me, just as it had the night Jess told me I’d have to go back to Arthur’s.

  “Is it serious?”

  “He’s dead. Hardly surprising: he was doing a hundred and forty.”

  The swing cackled in the garden behind me. Jess had joined Thelma there now. The pair of them must have been having a merry old time watching me standing there, swaying with shock between those policemen.

  “Would
you mind coming with us for the identification? We have to make sure someone hadn’t just stolen his car, you see… It does happen.”

  “No need to change your clothes,” the tubby officer assured me. “We’ll bring you right back.”

  We left straight away.

  “Aren’t you going to close the door?” the dark-haired one asked.

  “What’s the point?”

  They didn’t insist.

  I was on the back seat. The officer sat up front next to the driver and fired questions without looking at me, without even turning his head in my direction.

  “Did he have reddish-brown hair, your boss?”

  “Yes.”

  “And freckles?”

  “Yes.”

  “Wearing a blue-and-pink-striped suit?”

  “Yes.”

  “And a striped shirt too?”

  “Yes.”

  “It must be him, then. Was it long ago his wife died?”

  “This winter.”

  “Was he grieving?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Why was he asking me that? What did it matter to some fat old policeman whether Jess had mourned Thelma or not?

  “So was he an idiot, then, or what?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “There were no skid marks on the road. He didn’t brake. Visibility was excellent. A driver who was following behind him said it looked like he drove into that lorry deliberately…”

  “Oh!”

  “Your boss’s death doesn’t seem to have upset you all that much, eh?”

  I didn’t answer.

  “He was American!” said the driver, with a knowing air, as if that would somehow justify my indifference.

  I thought back to my conversation on the telephone with the secretary. I should have told her why the police commissioner wanted to see Jess. He must have thought they were going to arrest him. His wife had thought him guilty, just like me, and now the cops had come to the same conclusion.

  Jess hadn’t wanted to struggle any more. I’d made him feel like a murderer, and he’d just wanted it all to end.

  “Was he a good boss?”

  “I’m sorry?”

  This time the policeman saw fit to turn his red face towards me.

  “I asked you whether he was good boss.”

  “Oh, yes, of course…”

  The car drove through the town-hall gates. We’d arrived. They’d left Jess in a little outbuilding round the back. The first thing I noticed was his feet, sticking out from under the tatty grey tarpaulin they’d covered him with. Jess’s feet! The only man’s feet that didn’t give me the creeps.

  I thought about how I’d shone those two-tone shoes a thousand times, using two different polishes.

  “There’s no need,” I stammered.

  But they didn’t understand. They lifted the sheet anyway.

  That night, when I’d gently stroked his mouth to feel the shape of his smile, the image of it had been imprinted on my fingers somehow. Now here it was again, still hovering on his dead face. I recognized it. A dried-up rivulet of blood ran from his ear. He had one eye shut and the other half-open, as if to take one last peek at my reaction.

  “It’s him, isn’t it?”

  By way of answer, I knelt down next to the body. The policemen didn’t dare try to stop me, and I whispered into Jess’s bloody ear:

  “Oh, Monsieur Rooland. I didn’t know you loved her this much!”

  They made me get up then. They seemed awfully embarrassed about it all. Still, true to their word, they took me back to the house.

  Their car turned the corner out of the road. I looked up at the empty home from the pavement outside. One of the upstairs windows had been blown open by a gust of wind through the front door. A curtain hung out of it, fluttering in the breeze like a handkerchief waving goodbye.

  So, instead of pushing the gate, I continued on my way.

  EPILOGUE

  Two months went by. I never would have told you all this if I hadn’t gone to see the doctor this afternoon, to do with some problems I’ve been having. He’s one of the nice ones, you know: kind and understanding and all that. Plus he’s known me since I was so high.

  “My poor dear, I don’t know what to tell you,” he said. “You’re pregnant.”

  He was expecting the usual bursting-into-tears act, but I didn’t bat an eyelid. Just when you think something’s finished and done with, back it comes to remind you it’s not over yet! Still, it’s a consolation of sorts to think that I’m the one who’ll be able to give Jess the child he wanted so much, don’t you think?

  Oh, there’ll be some drama back at Arthur’s place, all right. Mum’s hair will go grey overnight. She’ll probably think there’s some sort of curse on the women in our family. I don’t care. It’s too late now: she should’ve stepped in earlier.

  It all would have happened differently then.

  But that’s just it: can things happen any differently from the way they do?

  When you get right down to it that’s life’s great mystery, isn’t it?

  Anyway, it’s better to tell yourself that it was all written in the stars. One evening, coming back from Ridel’s, I had to walk past their place and see them sitting out on that blue swing, with their whiskies and the turntable playing “Loving You”.

  Is it my fault if my imagination ran away with me and I lost my head?

  No, because it’s all planned out in advance.

  You’ll never convince me otherwise, and I’ll repeat it to myself every day, when I can feel the grief and the guilt coming near. Yes, every day, like a lesson you’ve got to learn by heart, or like a prayer: every day, until I’ve forgiven myself for finishing off Madame Rooland in the ambulance, because I thought she was going to rat on Jess.

  Did you know?

  One of France’s most prolific and popular post-war writers, Frédéric Dard wrote no fewer than 284 thrillers over his career, selling more than 200 million copies in France alone. The actual number of titles he authored is under dispute, as he wrote under at least 17 different aliases (including the wonderful Cornel Milk and l’Ange Noir).

  Dard’s most famous creation was San-Antonio, a James Bondesque French secret agent, whose enormously popular adventures appeared under the San-Antonio pen name between 1949 and 2001. The thriller in your hands, however, is one of Dard’s “novels of the night” – a run of stand-alone, dark psychological thrillers written by Dard in his prime, and considered by many to be his best work.

  Dard was greatly influenced by the renowned Georges Simenon. A mutual respect developed between the two, and eventually Simenon agreed to let Dard adapt one of his books for the stage in 1950. Dard was also a famous inventor of words – in fact, he dreamt up so many words and phrases in his lifetime that a special dictionary was recently published to list them all.

  Dard’s life was punctuated by drama; he attempted to hang himself when his first marriage ended, and in 1983 his daughter was kidnapped and held prisoner for 55 hours before being ransomed back to him for 2 million francs. He admitted afterwards that the experience traumatised him for ever, but he nonetheless used it as material for one of his later novels. This was typical of Dard, who drew heavily on his own life to fuel his extraordinary output of three to five novels every year. In fact, when contemplating his own death, Dard said his one regret was that he would not be able to write about it.

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  Copyright

  Pushkin Vertigo

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  London, WC2H 9JQ

  Original text © 1959 Fleuve Editions,

  département d’Univers Poche, Paris

  First published in French as Les Scélérats in 1959