The Drinking Den Page 26

  While this was happening, Old Bru had followed Gervaise into the room. Between the two of them they tried to reason with the locksmith and push him towards the door. But he turned round, saying nothing, foaming at the mouth; and, in his pale eyes, the alcohol blazed up, lighting a murderous fire. Gervaise’s wrist was scratched and bruised, and the old workman fell against the table. On the ground, Mme Bijard was panting harder than ever, her mouth wide open, her eyes closed.

  Now Bijard kept missing her. He came back, persisted, but struck to one side or other, furious, blind with rage, even hitting himself with blows that he lashed out into the air. And, in the midst of this massacre, Gervaise saw little four-year-old Lalie, in a corner of the room, watching her father beating her mother. In her arms, as though to protect her, the child was clasping her baby sister Henriette, only just weaned. She was standing, her head wrapped in an Indian shawl, very pale and solemn-looking. Her large black eyes were staring intently, without a tear.

  When Bijard finally stumbled against a chair and fell flat on the floor, where they left him snoring, Old Bru helped Gervaise to pick Mme Bijard up. Now the woman was racked by great sobs and Lalie, who had come across to them, watched her weep, accustomed to such events, and already resigned. As the laundress went back down the stairs, now that calm had returned to the house, she could still see the eyes of the four-year-old child, serious and brave as those of a grown-up woman.

  ‘Monsieur Coupeau is on the pavement opposite,’ Clémence shouted to her, as soon as she appeared. ‘He’s properly plastered!’

  Coupeau was just crossing the street. He almost knocked out a window-pane with his shoulder, missing the door. The drink had made him sullen, his teeth clenched, his nose pinched. At once, Gervaise recognized the hard stuff from the drinking den in the poisoned blood that had blotted his skin. She tried to humour him, to put him to bed as she did on those days when he was merry on wine. But he pushed her aside, still clenching his teeth and, as he went past, getting into bed by himself, he brandished his fist at her. He was like the other one, the drunkard snoring away upstairs, tired from the beating he had dealt out. At this, Gervaise felt a chill all over her: she thought about men, about her husband, about Goujet, about Lantier, and her heart broke as she despaired of ever knowing happiness.

  CHAPTER 7

  Gervaise’s Saint’s-day fell on the 19th of June. On feast-days in the Coupeau household they had a slap-up meal, a huge banquet from which they came away stuffed to bursting, their bellies full for a week afterwards. There was a general clear-out of small change. As soon as the couple had four sous, they gobbled them up, they invented saints on the calendar, to have an excuse for a treat. Virginie entirely approved of Gervaise’s liking for titbits. When you have a man who drinks everything, isn’t it just common sense not to let him pour away all the housekeeping, but to make sure that one’s stomach is lined first? Since the money would vanish anyway, one might as well be paying the butcher as the wine merchant. And Gervaise, with her love of food, readily gave in to this argument. Too bad! It was Coupeau’s fault if they were not saving a copper penny. Meanwhile, she had put on weight and limped more, because her leg, puffed up with fat, seemed to have shortened accordingly.

  That year,1 they started talking about the celebrations a month in advance. They tried to decide what to eat and licked their lips over it. The whole establishment had a tremendous desire for a party. They needed a real killer of a blow-out, something out of the ordinary and truly memorable: for heaven’s sake, it wasn’t every day that they had a good time! The laundress’s main preoccupation was deciding who she would invite. She wanted them to be twelve at table, no more, no less. Gervaise herself, her husband, Mother Coupeau and Mme Lerat already made four people from the family. She would also have the Goujets and the Poissons. At first, she had told herself that she wouldn’t invite her girls, Mme Putois and Clémence, for fear that it might put them on too familiar terms, but since there was constantly talk of the party in front of them and their ears were pricked in expectation, she did eventually tell them to come. Four and four, eight, plus two, ten. So, quite determined to complete the full number, she made things up with the Lorilleux, who had been hovering around her for some time; at least, it was agreed that the Lorilleux would come down and have dinner, and that they would patch up their quarrel over a raised glass. Naturally, people from the same family could not stay on bad terms for ever; and, moreover, everyone softened at the idea of a party. The opportunity was too good to refuse. The only trouble was that, when the Boches learned about this proposed reconciliation, they immediately started making up to Gervaise, with ingratiating smiles and friendly greetings, and the result was that they had to be invited as well. There you are! There would be fourteen of them, not counting the children. Gervaise had never given such a splendid dinner, and she was all flustered, but flushed with pride.

  The feast-day happened to be a Monday. This was a stroke of luck, because Gervaise could use Sunday afternoon to start the cooking. On the Saturday, while the girls were hurrying through their ironing, there was a long debate in the shop about what they would eat, finally. One dish had been agreed on for weeks: a large roast. Their eyes took on a hungry look when they spoke about it. The goose had even been bought. Mother Coupeau went to fetch it, so that Clémence and Mme Putois could see how much it weighed; and there were exclamations of astonishment, the brute seemed so huge, its rough skin distended with yellow fat.

  ‘Before that, stewed meat, don’t you think?’ Gervaise said. ‘A bit of broth and a small piece of boiled beef always goes down well. Then we need a dish with some sauce or other.’

  Tall Clémence suggested rabbit, but that was what they ate every day and they had all had rabbit up to their ears. Gervaise had a mind to do something more distinguished; when Mme Putois mentioned a blanquette de veau, they looked round at one another and started to smile. Nothing would go down as well as veal and a white sauce.

  ‘After that,’ Gervaise went on, ‘we need another dish with a sauce.’

  Mother Coupeau suggested fish, but the others turned up their noses and banged their irons harder. No one liked fish: it was hard to digest and full of bones. Boss-eyed Augustine dared to say that she liked ray, but Clémence shut her mouth with a dig in the ribs. Finally, just when Gervaise had thought of a pork stew with potatoes, and every face was smiling again, Virginie swept in like a gust of wind, very pleased with herself.

  ‘Just in time!’ Gervaise said. ‘Mother Coupeau, show her the beast.’

  Mother Coupeau went back to fetch the fat goose for a second time and Virginie had to hold it. She gasped: good Lord, what a weight it was! But she immediately put it back on the edge of the workbench, between a petticoat and a packet of shirts. She had something else on her mind; she took Gervaise into the back room.

  ‘I say, dear,’ she whispered quickly, ‘I have to warn you… You’ll never guess who I met at the bottom of the street: Lantier, that’s who! He’s out there, watching and roaming around. So I came here straight away. I was worried, for your sake, don’t you see?’

  The laundress had gone quite pale. What did the wretch want with her? He would have to come right in the middle of the preparations for the party. She had never had any luck; she couldn’t be allowed to enjoy something in peace. But Virginie said she was being too hard on herself, getting worked up like that. Goodness me, if Lantier took it into his head to follow her around, she would call for a constable and have him thrown in jail. In the month since her husband had got his appointment in the constabulary, the tall brunette had become quite overbearing with her talk of arresting everybody. Since she had raised her voice, saying that she would like to see him interfere with her in the street, so that she could take the rotter down to the police station herself and hand him over to Poisson, Gervaise gestured at her, begging her to keep quiet, because the girls were listening. She was the first to go back into the shop, pretending to be entirely at ease:

  ‘Now, do we
need a vegetable?’

  ‘Yes, yes, peas with bacon!’ all the others agreed, while Augustine, in her enthusiasm, was raking the stove with great stabs of the poker.

  The next day, Sunday, by three o’clock, Mother Coupeau had lit the two cooking stoves in the house, plus a third earthenware one borrowed from the Boches. At half-past three, the stew was boiling in a big pan, lent by the restaurant next door, because the family’s saucepan had seemed too small. They had decided to prepare the blanquette de veau and the pork stew the day before, because those are dishes that are better if reheated; however, the sauce for the blanquette would only be made at the moment when they were sitting down to eat. There was still quite enough left to do on Monday: the soup, the peas and the goose. The back room was completely lit up by the three fires, the roux for the sauces were simmering in the pans with a strong smell of burned flour, while the big pan threw out puffs of steam like a boiler, its sides shaken by deep, solemn glugging noises. Mother Coupeau and Gervaise, each with a white apron tied around her front, filled the room in their haste to strip parsley, hunt down the salt and pepper and turn the meat with a wooden spoon. They had sent Coupeau out to clear the decks, but in spite of that they were to have people getting in their way all afternoon. The cooking smelled so good, throughout the whole house, that the neighbours came in one after another, looking for excuses to visit, just to find out what was cooking; and they would stand there waiting, until the laundress was forced to lift up the lids of the pans. Then, at around five o’clock, Virginie appeared. She had seen Lantier again: honestly, you couldn’t set foot in the street without bumping into him. Mme Boche, too, had just spotted him on a corner of the pavement, poking his head out in a surreptitious way. So Gervaise, who was on the point of slipping out to buy a sou’s-worth of fried onions for the stew, was seized with terror and no longer dared to emerge – all the more since the concierge and the dressmaker had frightened her considerably by telling dreadful stories about men waiting for women with knives and pistols hidden under their coats. Honestly, it was true! You could read it every day in the papers; when one of those scoundrels got in a fury on finding a former mistress living happily, he was capable of anything. Virginie obligingly offered to go and fetch the onions. Women should help one another, they couldn’t let the poor girl be murdered. When she came back, she said that Lantier had gone; he must have slipped off, knowing that he had been seen. Despite that, the conversation, beside the stoves, revolved around him until evening. Mme Boche advised telling Coupeau, but Gervaise became very agitated and begged her never to let out a word of all this. Oh, no! That would be all they needed! Already, her husband must have suspected something was going on, because the last few days, when he went to bed, he had sworn and hit out at the wall with his fists. She would come over weak at the idea of two men beating each other up over her: she knew Coupeau, he was so jealous he might even attack Lantier with his cutters. And while the four of them sank deeper and deeper into this drama, the sauces were gently simmering away on the stoves, which were damped down with ash. The veal and the pork, when Mother Coupeau took the lids off them, gave out a little sound, a discreet rustling; and the stew continued with its own noise, like the snoring of a plump Friar Tuck asleep in the sun. In the end, each of them took a bit in a cup, to taste the broth.

  Finally, Monday arrived. Now that Gervaise was to have fourteen to dinner, she was afraid that she might not be able to find room for all of them. She decided to lay the table in the shop; and even then she was there measuring with a tape-measure from early morning, to decide which way to put the table. Then they had to take out the washing and take down the workbench; it was this bench, set upon different trestles, that would serve as a table. But, in the middle of all this commotion, a customer arrived and made a scene because she had been waiting for her laundry since Friday; they couldn’t give a damn about her, naturally, but she wanted her laundry at once. So Gervaise apologized and lied without a blush: it was not her fault, she was spring-cleaning the shop and the girls would not be back until the next day; and she sent the customer off in a better mood, promising to look after her at the earliest possible moment. Then, when the woman had gone, she launched into a tirade against her. Honestly, if you listened to the clients, you wouldn’t even take time off to eat; you’d be slaving away your whole life long for the sake of their pretty eyes. She wasn’t a dog on a leash, was she? Oh, no: even if the Grand Turk himself were to come along with his shirt-collars and offer her a hundred thousand francs, she wouldn’t pick up an iron that Monday, because at last it was her turn to have a bit of fun.

  The whole morning was spent completing the shopping. Three times Gervaise went out and came back laden like a mule. But just as she was going out again to fetch the wine, she noticed that she did not have enough money. She would willingly have taken the wine on credit, but the family couldn’t be left with no money because of those myriad little expenses that one doesn’t anticipate. And, in the back room, she and Mother Coupeau were in despair, working out that they needed at least twenty francs. Where were they to find those four 100-sou pieces? Mother Coupeau, who had once done the housework for a minor actress at the Théâtre des Batignolles, was the first to mention the pawnbroker’s. Gervaise was so relieved she laughed. How silly she was! She hadn’t thought of that. She quickly folded up her black silk dress into a towel and pinned it together. Then she herself hid the parcel under Mother Coupeau’s apron, telling her to keep it flat against her belly, because of the neighbours, who didn’t need to know anything about it. And she came to the door, to see that no one was following the old woman. But she was not even outside the coal merchant’s before Gervaise called her back:

  ‘Mother, mother!’

  She led her back into the shop, took her wedding ring off and said: ‘Here, put that with it. We’ll get more.’

  And when Mother Coupeau brought back twenty-five francs, she danced for joy. She would order an additional six bottles of good wine to drink with the roast. That way, the Lorilleux would be crushed.

  For a fortnight, this had been the Coupeaus’ dream: to crush the Lorilleux. The sly devils: what a lovely pair they were, the both of them, husband and wife: didn’t they shut themselves in whenever they had something good to eat, as though they had stolen it? Sure: they would block the window with a blanket to hide the light and pretend to be sleeping. Of course, no one would go up then, so they stuffed themselves all on their own and hurried to get it down them, without speaking a single word that might be heard. Even the next day, they would be careful not to throw the bones out with the garbage, because then people would know what they had been eating; so Mme Lorilleux went to the end of the street, to put them down a drain. One morning, Gervaise had caught her there, emptying a basket full of oyster shells. Oh, no! Those skinflints were certainly not open-handed and all these manoeuvres came from their eagerness to appear poor. Well, she’d give them a lesson and prove that she was not stingy. If she could, Gervaise would have set up her table across the street and invited everyone to join her. Money wasn’t invented so that it could gather dust, was it? It looks so pretty when it’s brand new, shining in the sun. She was so unlike them now that, on the days when she had twenty sous, she would make out that she had forty.

  Mother Coupeau and Gervaise talked about the Lorilleux, as they were laying the table, at three o’clock. They had hung some large curtains in the shop window but, as it was warm, the door stayed open and the whole street walked by in front of the table. The two women did not put down a carafe, bottle or a salt-cellar without trying to slip in a vexatious imprecation directed against the Lorilleux. They had placed them so that they could see the splendid layout of the table and they were keeping the best plates for them, knowing that the real china plates would be a bit of a shock.

  ‘No, no, Mother, don’t give them those napkins,’ Gervaise called out. ‘I’ve got two that are in damask.’

  ‘Well, there!’ the old woman said. ‘That will kill them f
or sure.’

  And they smiled, standing on either side of this great white table with its fourteen neatly rowed place-settings, and swelled with pride. It was like a shrine in the midst of the shop.

  ‘And why are they so lousy, anyway?’ Gervaise continued. ‘You know, last month, they were lying when that woman went around saying that she had lost a piece of gold chain while she was taking the work back. Honestly! As if that one ever lost anything! It was just a way of pleading poverty and not giving you your hundred sous.’

  ‘I’ve only seen them twice, those hundred sous of mine,’ Mother Coupeau said.

  ‘And I bet that, next month, they’ll have thought up another story! That explains why they cover up their window when they’re eating a rabbit, doesn’t it? We should be quite entitled to say to them: “Since you’ve got rabbit to eat, you could easily give a hundred sous to your mother.” Oh, they’re such rotters! What would have become of you, if I hadn’t taken you in with us?’

  Mother Coupeau nodded. That day, she was entirely against the Lorilleux, because of the great feast that the Coupeaus were giving. She loved cooking, the gossip over the saucepans and the whole house turned upside-down by the celebration. In any case, she usually got on well with Gervaise. At other times, on the days when they got on one another’s nerves – something that happens in every family – the old woman grumbled at the dreadful misfortune of finding herself at the mercy of her daughter-in-law. Underneath, she must have had some affection for Mme Lorilleux – who was her own daughter, after all.

  ‘True, isn’t it?’ Gervaise went on. ‘You wouldn’t be so well fed with them. No coffee, no tobacco, no treats! Tell me, would they have put two mattresses on your bed?’

  ‘No, of course not,’ Mother Coupeau answered. ‘When they come in, I’m going to stand opposite the door, just to see the look on their faces.’