The Drinking Den (29 page)

‘Gracious, I won't say no. Just crossing the road is enough to chill you to the bone.'

Luckily, there was some coffee left. Mother Coupeau went to fetch a glass and Gervaise politely allowed Virginie to take her own sugar. The girls moved back to make a small place for her near the stove. She shivered for a moment, her nose red, clasping her glass in her stiffened hands to warm them up. She had just come from the grocer's where you could freeze just waiting for half a pound of gruyère cheese. And she exclaimed at the heat in the laundry: honestly, you'd think you were in an oven, it would revive the dead, the heat gave you such a pleasant tingling feeling on the skin. Then, warming up, she stretched out her long legs and the six women slowly sipped their coffee, surrounded by the unfinished washing, in the damp haze of steaming linen. Only Mother Coupeau and Virginie sat on chairs. The others, on their low benches, looked as though they were seated on the ground, and that squinting Augustine had even pulled a corner of the sheet under her petticoats, so that she could stretch out. For a while they said nothing, each with her nose in her glass, savouring the coffee.

‘It is good after all,' Clémence announced.

But she nearly choked, in a sudden fit of coughing. She leaned her head against the wall, so that she could cough harder still.

‘That's a nasty one,' said Virginie. ‘Where did you pick it up?'

‘Who knows?' Clémence answered, wiping her face on her sleeve. ‘It must have been the other evening. There were two people having a punch-up outside the Grand Balcon. I wanted to take a look, so I
stopped there, in the snow. Oh, boy! What a ruckus! I nearly died laughing. One of them had her nose torn and the blood was pouring on the ground. When the other one – a great beanpole, she was, like me – when she saw the blood, she took to her heels. Anyway, that night, I started to cough. And I have to say men are that stupid when they sleep with a woman: they take the bedclothes and leave you uncovered all night…'

‘Fine way to behave,' Mme Putois said. ‘You're killing yourself, my girl.'

‘So what, if I want to kill myself! As if life was that much fun… You slave all bloody day long to earn fifty-five
sous
, boiling yourself morning, noon and night in front of the stove; no, honestly, I've had it up to here! But, believe me, this cold won't do me the favour of carrying me off. It will go away just as it came.'

There was a silence. That good-for-nothing Clémence, who led the
chahut
⁸
in the dance-halls, screeching like a whore, always depressed people with her talk of death when she was at work. Gervaise knew what she was like and merely remarked:

‘You're not exactly jolly on these mornings after, are you?'

The truth was that Gervaise would have preferred to avoid any talk about fights between women. It bothered her when anyone talked about kicks on the shins or a bunch of fives in the chops in front of her and Virginie, because of the scrap in the wash-house. As a matter of fact, Virginie was looking at her with a smile.

‘Oh,' she murmured, ‘I saw a real hair-puller yesterday. They were going at one another like two cats…'

‘Who was?' asked Mme Putois.

‘The midwife from the end of the street and her maid, you know, that little blonde girl… She's a right little bitch, that one. She was yelling at the midwife: “Yes, yes, you got rid of that baby for the greengrocer's wife, and I'll be off to tell the police about it, if you don't pay me.” And you should have seen how she was blinding and cursing! At this, the midwife let fly a punch, bam! Right on the nose! At this the darned bitch went for her mistress's eyes and started to scratch her and tear out her hair. Oh, boy, yes, by the roots! The pork butcher had to separate them.'

The girls gave a complicit laugh. Then each of them took a little sip of coffee in a swaggering sort of way.

‘Do you really think she did that? Got rid of a baby?' said Clémence.

‘Hell, I don't know! There was a rumour going around,' Virginie replied. ‘But I wasn't there, of course. In any case, it goes with the job. They all do it.'

‘Ah, no,' said Mme Putois. ‘It's silly to go to them. What, and get yourself crippled! No thanks! Especially when there's one sovereign remedy. Every evening you drink a glass of holy water and make the sign of the cross three times over your belly with your thumb. It blows away then like an ill wind.'

Mother Coupeau, whom everyone thought was asleep, shook her head in protest. She knew another way, and this one really was infallible. You had to eat a hard-boiled egg every two hours and put spinach leaves on the small of the back. The four other women looked serious. But Augustine, the one with the squint, who would start to giggle all on her own, and no one ever knew why, emitted the chicken's cackle that was her own peculiar laugh. Everyone had forgotten about her. Gervaise lifted the petticoat and saw her on the cloth, rolling around like a piglet with her legs in the air. She pulled her out and put her back on her feet with a slap. What was she laughing about, the silly goose? Ought she to be listening, when grown-ups were talking? First of all she could take back the washing of a friend of Mme Lerat, in Batignolles. As she spoke, the boss was slipping the basket under her arm and pushing her towards the door. The boss-eyed girl, sobbing and grousing, went off, dragging her feet through the snow.

Meanwhile, Mother Coupeau, Mme Putois and Clémence were debating the effectiveness of hard-boiled eggs and spinach leaves. Then, Virginie, who had been lost in thought, holding her glass of coffee, said quietly:

‘Good heavens, people fight, people kiss, what does it matter, when the heart's in the right place…'

And, leaning over to Gervaise, with a smile, she added:

‘No, of course I don't hold it against you… Do you remember the business in the wash-house?'

The laundress was quite embarrassed. This is what she had been
fearing. Now, she guessed that they would start talking about Lantier and Adèle. The stove grumbled, and the heat radiated twice as fiercely as before from the red pipe. In their stupor, the girls, who were making their coffee last in order to delay their return to work as long as possible, looked out at the snow in the street, with expressions of languid voluptuousness on their faces. They had reached the stage of exchanging confidences; they said what they would have done if they had had an income of ten thousand francs: they would have done nothing at all, they would have spent whole afternoons warming themselves like this, showing their utter contempt for work and not going anywhere near it. Virginie had come close to Gervaise, so as not to be heard by the others. And Gervaise felt weak and faint-hearted, no doubt because of the excessive heat; so soft and so faint-hearted, in fact, that she could not find the strength to change the subject; she was actually waiting to hear what the big girl had to say, and enjoying the feeling that swept over her, though she would not have admitted it to herself.

‘I hope I'm not upsetting you?' the dressmaker went on. ‘I've had it on the tip of my tongue, twenty times. In any case, since we've raised the subject… I didn't mean anything by it, you understand? No, of course not, I don't hold it against you, what happened. On my honour! I haven't an ounce of ill will towards you.'

She stirred the dregs of her coffee in the glass, to take up all the sugar, then drank three drops, with a little whistling on her lips. Gervaise, with a lump in her throat, said nothing, but she did wonder if Virginie had really forgiven the beating as easily as that: she could see a yellow spark light behind the pupils of her black eyes. The she-devil must have put her rancour in her pocket and her handkerchief on top.

‘You had an excuse,' she went on. ‘Someone had just played a really foul trick on you. Oh, I'm fair-minded, now! In your place, I would have got out a knife.'

She took another three sips, whistling on the edge of the glass; then she abandoned her drawling tone and added quickly, without pausing:

‘Not that it brought them any luck; my God, no luck at all! They went to live in some hole near La Glacière, in a filthy street where there is always mud up to your knees. I went there one morning, two
days later, to have lunch with them. It was the devil's own job to get there on the bus, I tell you! Well, my dear, I found them already having a row. Honestly! When I came in they were hitting each other. Huh! Nice pair of love-birds they were! You know, Adèle is no better than she should be. I know she's my sister, but that doesn't stop me saying that she's a real slut under the skin. She played a whole lot of really mean tricks on me; it would take me too long to tell you all of them, and in any case all that's between me and her. As for Lantier, well, you know him well enough yourself, he's not much use either. A right little gentleman, isn't he? One who'll have the skin off your back as soon as look at you! And when he hits you, it's with a closed fist. So they gave one another a really good battering. You could hear them thumping away as you came up the stairs. That very same day, the police arrived. Lantier wanted a soup with oil, some muck they eat down South; and since Adèle thought it was disgusting, they chucked the bottle of olive oil at each other's faces, then the saucepan, the soup tureen and the whole works – in short, what ensued was a battle to stir up the entire neighbourhood.'

She talked about other fights, and went on and on about the two of them, describing things that would make your hair stand on end. Gervaise listened to all this in silence, her face pale, with a tic at the corner of her mouth, which looked like a little smile. It was almost seven years since she had had any news of Lantier; and she would never have thought that the name ‘Lantier', murmured in her ear in this way, would give her such a warm feeling in the pit of her stomach. No, she had not thought she would be so curious about the fate of that wretch, who had behaved so badly towards her. She could no longer feel jealous of Adèle now, but she did laugh to herself at the disputes between the couple and imagined the girl's body covered in bruises, which amused her and gave her a feeling of being avenged. She could have stayed there until the following morning, listening to Virginie's stories.

She didn't ask any questions, because she didn't want to appear that interested. It was as though, suddenly and unexpectedly, someone had filled in a hole for her: now her past led directly to her present.

Eventually, Virginie stuck her nose back in the glass; she was sucking
the sugar, with her eyes half closed. At this, realizing that she ought to say something, Gervaise adopted an expression of indifference and asked:

‘Are they still living at La Glacière, then?'

‘Heavens, no!' the other woman answered. ‘Didn't I tell you? They split up a week ago. One fine morning, Adèle went off with her things; and Lantier was in no hurry to go running after, I can tell you.'

The laundress let out a little cry and said quite loudly:

‘So they're not together any longer!'

‘Who's that?' Clémence asked, breaking off her conversation with Mother Coupeau and Mme Putois.

‘No one,' said Virginie. ‘People you don't know.'

But she looked at Gervaise and noticed that she was strangely agitated. She came closer and appeared to take a malign pleasure in going over her story again. Then, suddenly, she asked what Gervaise would do, if Lantier should come sniffing around her; because, after all, men are such odd creatures and Lantier might well decide to return to his first love. Gervaise drew herself up, in a very prim and haughty manner. She was married, she would quite simply throw Lantier out. There couldn't be anything between them now, not even a handshake. Honestly, she would have to be entirely lacking in feeling even to look that man in the face again.

‘Of course, I know,' she said, ‘Etienne is his; there's a tie there that I cannot break. If Lantier should want to get close to Etienne, I would send the boy to him, because no one can stop a father loving his child. But, where I'm concerned, Madame Poisson, I assure you, I should rather be chopped into pieces than allow him to lay a finger on me. And that's final.'

As she spoke these last words, she traced the outline of a cross in the air, as if to seal her vow for ever. Then, wishing to break off the conversation, she pretended to come to herself with a start, and shouted at the girls:

‘Hey, now, you lot! Do you think the washing will iron itself? What lazybones you are! Hop, hop! To work!'

The women were in no hurry, drowsy and heavy with a stupor of laziness, their arms hanging by their skirts, still holding their empty
glasses in one hand, with a few coffee grounds in the bottom of each one. And they went on talking.

‘It was little Célestine,' Clémence was saying. ‘I knew her. She had a phobia about cat's hair. You know, she saw cat's hair everywhere and was constantly turning her tongue round like this, because she thought her mouth was full of it.'

‘Now, once,' said Mme Putois, ‘I had a friend who had a tapeworm. Oh, they're so fussy those creatures! It would play havoc with her stomach when she didn't give it chicken. Imagine: the husband earned seven francs and it all went on titbits for the worm…'

‘I would have cured her at once,' Mother Coupeau said, breaking in. ‘Good Lord, yes: you just swallow a grilled mouse and that poisons the worm immediately.'

Gervaise herself had slipped back into a pleasant state of idleness. But she shook herself and stood up. Well, I never! An afternoon spent doing nothing! That was hardly the way to keep your purse full. She was the first to go back, to her curtains, but only to find that they had been dirtied by a spot of coffee, so before picking up the iron, she had to rub the stain with a damp cloth. The girls stretched in front of the stove and reluctantly hunted for their iron-holders.

As soon as Clémence moved, she had a fit of coughing, which racked her whole body. Then she finished her man's shirt, pinning up the sleeves and the collar. Mme Putois had gone back to her petticoat.