‘Right,’ said Pecqueux, ‘I’m off. I’ll leave you to your own devices.’
‘It’s still raining,’ said Jacques, ‘I’ll go and stretch out on the camp bed.’
Next door to the engine shed there was a room with some mattresses and loose covers over them, where the men could take a rest without undressing if they were only in Le Havre for a few hours. He watched Pecqueux disappear into the rain in the direction of the Sauvagnats’ house. As soon as he had gone, Jacques ventured out himself and ran across to the rest room. But he didn’t go in. He stood at the entrance with the door wide open, overcome by the stifling heat inside. At the back of the room an engine driver lay on his back, snoring, his mouth wide open.
He waited for a few more minutes. He could not put the meeting with Séverine out of his mind. His frustration at this infuriating storm was gradually giving way to a crazy desire to go to their rendezvous come what may. Even if he no longer expected to find Séverine waiting for him, he would still have the pleasure of being there himself. He felt as if his whole person were being drawn there. He went out into the storm, came to their usual meeting place and followed the dark alleyway between the coal stacks. He could not see in front of him because of the driving rain that cut into his face. He walked down the alleyway as far as the tool-shed, where once before he and Séverine had taken shelter. He thought he would feel less on his own in there.
Inside the shed it was pitch black. As he walked through the door, two arms lightly enfolded him, and he felt two lips being pressed warmly against his. It was Séverine.
‘Good heavens!’ said Jacques. ‘You’re here!’
‘Yes,’ she answered, ‘I saw the storm coming. I ran here before it started to rain. Jacques, you’ve been so long.’
Her voice faded to a sigh. Never before had she abandoned herself to him like this. She lowered herself on to the empty sacks that lay heaped in the corner like a bed. Jacques fell to the ground beside her, held in her embrace. He felt his legs resting across hers. They could not see each other, but their breaths mingled. As if in a trance, they became lost to all sense of time and place. They kissed each other passionately, and their hearts seemed to beat as one.
‘Darling,’ he said, ‘you waited for me ...’
‘Yes,’ she answered, ‘I waited for you. I waited and waited ...’
Immediately, impulsively, Séverine held him tight. She drew him towards her and without a word compelled him to take her. How it happened she did not know. By the time he arrived she had resigned herself to not seeing him. Without stopping to consider or to think what she was doing, she had been carried away by the sheer, unexpected joy of holding him in her arms, by the sudden, irresistible need to be his. It had happened because it had to. The rain fell even more insistently on the shed roof. The ground shook, as the last train from Paris went whistling and clattering into the station.
When Jacques raised himself from her, he was puzzled to hear the sound of falling rain. Where was he? His hand brushed against the handle of a hammer, which he had felt on the floor near him as he lay down beside her. A surge of joy ran through him. Could it be true? He had possessed Séverine and had not taken the hammer to smash her skull. She was his, and there had been no bitter struggle, no instinctive desire to fling her across his back, dead, like some trophy won in battle. No longer did he feel the need to avenge those ancient wrongs done from time immemorial, or sense the accumulated bitterness passed down from man to man since the first infidelity in the dark recesses of some primeval cave. Possessing Séverine was like a magic spell. She had cured him. He saw her as someone different, someone who for all her weakness was capable of violence, someone whose hands were steeped in blood. It was this that had protected her, like a fearsome coat of armour. She had overcome him. He had not dared lay hands on her. When he once more took her in his arms, it was with a feeling of deep indebtedness, and a desire to surrender himself to her totally.
Séverine likewise abandoned herself to him, happy to be released from the doubts which had beset her and which now seemed so pointless. Why had she denied him for so long? She should have yielded to him as she had promised herself she would; it could bring her only pleasure and delight. She knew now that this was what she had always wanted, even when it had seemed so good to wait. She needed to be loved body and soul, with a love that was steadfast and true. What she had endured, the horrors she had been drawn into, were too terrible for words. Life had treated her cruelly, viciously, dragging her through the mud and drawing her into crime. Her beautiful blue eyes, so innocent and appealing beneath her tragic crown of black hair, had a permanently frightened look about them. In spite of everything, she had remained virgin.
3
And now she had given herself for the first time, to a man she adored. She wanted to lose herself in him. She wanted to be his slave. She was his. He could make use of her as he wished.
‘Take me, my darling,’ she begged him. ‘I am yours for ever. I want only what you want.’
‘No, my dearest,’ he answered. ‘It is for you to command. I am here but to love and obey you.’
Hours went by. The rain had stopped falling long since. A great silence hung over the station. All that could be heard was the distant murmur of the sea. They were still in each other’s arms when a shot rang out. They sprang to their feet in alarm. Day was just beginning to break; a patch of pale light whitened the sky above the mouth of the Seine. What was that shot? They should not have stayed so long. It was madness. They had a sudden vision of Roubaud chasing after them with a revolver.
‘Stay where you are,’ said Jacques. ‘I’ll go and see what’s happening.’
He cautiously advanced towards the door. Outside it was still dark. He could hear the sound of men running towards them. He recognized Roubaud’s voice shouting to the night watchmen, telling them that there were three intruders and that he’d seen them stealing coal. For the past few weeks hardly a night had gone by without him having hallucinations about imaginary thieves. On this occasion something had suddenly alarmed him, and he had fired at random in the dark.
‘Quick! We can’t stay here,’ whispered Jacques. ‘They’ll search the shed. You must go home.’
They flung themselves into each other’s arms in a passionate embrace. Then Séverine ran quickly along the side of the engine shed, hidden by the high wall, while Jacques crept out quietly and hid himself amongst the coal stacks. They were only just in time, for, as Jacques had predicted, Roubaud did want to search the tool-shed. He was sure that that was where the intruders were. The watchmen’s lamps swung to and fro. There were some angry exchanges, and then they all went back towards the station, annoyed at having wasted their time.
Jacques decided that the coast was clear and was just setting off back to his room in the Rue François-Mazeline when he almost collided with Pecqueux, who was hastily doing up his clothes and swearing furiously under his breath.
‘What’s up with you?’ asked Jacques.
‘Don’t ask,’ replied Pecqueux. ‘Those bloody fools woke Sauvagnat up, and he heard me in bed with his sister. He came down in his nightshirt, and I had to get out through the window, quick. Listen! You can hear them.’
A woman was screaming and wailing. She was being beaten. A man’s voice was yelling abuse at her.
‘Did you hear that? He’s giving her a real hiding! She’s thirty-two years old, but if he catches her at it he thrashes her like a little girl! Ah well, too bad! I’m keeping out of it. He’s her brother after all!’
‘But I thought he didn’t mind you going to see her,’ said Jacques. ‘I thought it was only when she was with other men that he got angry with her.’
‘Who knows?’ said Pecqueux. ‘Sometimes he pretends not to see me. Other times, he beats her up. Listen to him now! The funny thing is that he still loves her. He’d give up everything rather than be parted from her. But he expects good behaviour. Heavens above! She’s getting the full treatment tonight!’
The screams subsided and were replaced by a series of long, pathetic moans. The two men walked away. Ten minutes later they were fast asleep side by side in their little bedroom with its yellow painted walls, its four chairs, a table and a metal wash-basin, which they shared.
During the following weeks, the nights when Jacques and Séverine met were nights of untold bliss. They did not always have a storm to protect them. On starry nights or when the moon was full, they felt uneasy and would look for pockets of shadow and little dark corners where they could happily hold each other close. All through August and September there were some wonderful nights, so mild that they would have lain asleep in each other’s arms till daybreak, had they not been woken by sounds from the station as it began to stir and by locomotives letting off steam in the distance. Even in October, when it began to turn chilly, it did not bother them. Séverine came more warmly dressed, wrapped in a big coat, almost big enough for Jacques to squeeze into too. They would barricade themselves in the tool-shed, which they had found a way of locking from the inside with the help of an iron bar, and there they felt safe and snug. The fierce November gales might be blowing slates from the rooftops, but they felt not the slightest draught. Jacques, however, ever since the night he had first made love to her, had wanted to possess her in her own home, in her poky little apartment, where she seemed different, more desirable, a respectable married woman quietly going about her daily business. She had always refused, not so much because of her prying neighbours as from a lingering sense of propriety. She could not bring herself to sleep with him in her own marriage bed. One Monday, however, in broad daylight, when Jacques had come for lunch and Roubaud was late back, having had to see the stationmaster, he picked her up and carried her across to the bed for a joke. It was such a mad, foolhardy thing to do, and they were both beside themselves laughing. Needless to say, they very soon became carried away. After that she offered no further resistance and Jacques came to meet her in her apartment after midnight on Thursdays and Saturdays. It was terribly risky, and they hardly dared move in case the neighbours heard them, but this only redoubled their passion and added to their pleasure. Often they felt a desire to walk abroad in the dark, to escape like caged animals, into the icy stillness of a winter’s night. Once they made love beneath the stars in the middle of a bitter December frost.
They had been living like this for four months, their love for each other growing stronger and stronger. To both of them love was something new. At heart they were still children, young innocents, amazed at falling in love for the first time, happy simply to be in each other’s arms, each submitting to the other’s will in a perpetual contest of self-sacrifice and surrender. Jacques was in no doubt that Séverine had cured him of the terrible malady he had inherited as a child; since he had possessed her the thought of murder no longer troubled him. Did physical possession satisfy the craving to kill? Was possession tantamount to killing? Who could fathom the shadowy mind of the beast within? He tried not to think about it. It was beyond him. The doorway to such horrors was best left unopened. Sometimes as he lay in her arms the thought of what she had done would suddenly come back to him. She had murdered; he had read it in her eyes as they sat together on the park bench in the Square des Batignolles. But he wanted to know no more. Séverine, on the other hand, seemed more and more anxious to tell him all that had happened. Sometimes, when she held him tight, he felt that she was bursting and gasping to tell him her secret, that her only reason for wanting to give herself was to find relief from the thing that was choking her. A violent tremor would run through her body and cause her breast to heave; confused sighs broke from her lips, and her voice faded away as she reached her ecstasy. Was she trying to speak to him? Seized with panic, he would quickly press his lips to hers and silence her confession with a kiss. Why let this thing come between them? Who could tell how it might change their love for each other? He sensed danger; the thought of her recounting the gruesome details of her crime to him made him shudder. She no doubt guessed what he was thinking because she would lie beside him and run her hands over him gently, lovingly, wanting only to love him and to be loved in return. And then they would make love, madly, passionately, and lie fainting in each other’s arms.
Since the summer, Roubaud had put on a lot of weight. Whereas Séverine seemed to be regaining the vivacity and freshness of the twenty-year-old girl she was, he seemed to be growing older and more sullen. As Séverine said, he had changed a lot in four months. He was still on good terms with Jacques, shaking his hand, inviting him back to the flat and never happier than when he joined them for a meal. But Jacques’s company was no longer enough to satisfy him. He would often go out as soon as he had finished eating, sometimes leaving Jacques alone with his wife, on the pretext that it was stuffy indoors and that he needed to get some fresh air. The truth was that he was now in the habit of visiting a little café on the Cours Napoléon, where he used to meet Monsieur Cauche, the safety officer. He didn’t drink much, bar the occasional tot of rum, but he had developed a liking for cards. It was becoming something of an obsession. It was only when he had the cards in his hand and was absorbed in endless rounds of piquet that he forgot his troubles and became more cheerful. Monsieur Cauche, who was an inveterate gambler, had insisted they play for money, and the stakes had now risen to a hundred sous
4
a game. This was a side of himself that Roubaud had never been aware of. He became completely carried away by the idea of winning a fortune, by the mania for making money, which can so take hold of a man that he will stake his job and his livelihood on a throw of the dice. So far his work had not suffered. He would go off to the cafe as soon as he was free, and if he wasn’t on duty he wouldn’t get back home until two or three in the morning. His wife didn’t complain, although she objected to him always coming back in a worse mood than when he’d left, for he was extraordinarily unlucky and ended up running into debt.