The Widow by Georges Simenon Page B

She’s Félicie’s mother. She married Tordeux, who’s barely fit to be watchman at a brickyard.”
    Jean was relaxing too, still astride a chair, his elbows on its back, a slender thread of smoke rising from his cigarette.
    And Tati sighed: “That’s the whole story!”
    She knew how she meant it. For her the walls, everything in the room, became alive. She could see them again at different periods—when, for instance, just fourteen years old, she was the first of the household to get up and, in the depth of winter, light the fire in the cold kitchen, before going to break the ice in the horse trough.
    â€œCouderc was on the town council. He could have got himself elected mayor. He was a serious sort of man then, who wouldn’t so much as look twice at a woman. I’ve never known how he came to start losing money. Some sort of partnership with a contractor who went bankrupt, and that made him sell the brickyard.”
    Jean would have liked to see a portrait of Tati as a young girl. Had she even then had that air of authority, that way of looking people over as though reckoning just how far you could go with them?
    She always looked at him in that fashion, as she had done on that first morning in the bus. She had grown used to him. She had held him naked in her arms, she had stroked his white skin. At dawn she would sometimes climb up to the loft and, before waking him, watch him for a moment as he slept.
    But for all that she still spied on him, still kept him on the end of a string.
    â€œI was seventeen when the boy, who wasn’t much cleverer than his sisters, got me in the family way. I can still remember exactly how it happened. He was in bed with a sore throat. I had taken some broth up to him.
    â€œ ‘You got a fever,’ I said. And he said to me—he must have been rehearsing it for hours to get his courage up: ‘Look! … This is why I’ve got a fever!’
    â€œCouderc was furious, but finally got us married. The daughters married too. Françoise married the watchman at the brickyard and the other one, Amélie, married a clerk from St. Amand.”
    â€œAny coffee left?”
    She looked at the time. The pendulum swung its shining disk from left to right and right to left behind the glass of the clock case.
    She allowed herself a few minutes more.
    â€œOne day you’ll have to tell me what you did.”
    She looked at him more intently.
    â€œDid you kill for a woman? All right! I’m not asking questions. I can see how it’d bother you.”
    Come! It was time to get up, to shake off the warm numbness penetrating their every limb. She made sure there was not a drop of coffee left in the blue coffeepot, brought the kettle from the stove, poured the hot water into the dishpan, dropped in a handful of flakes.
    â€œThis afternoon you’d better go and hoe the potatoes. Any moment now I guess the old man will turn up. He’s been hot and bothered for two or three days now, and if I don’t let him have his way…. ”
    And so he got to know the story of the Coudercs. He would learn a bit here and a bit there, and piece the bits together. Tati’s husband alone he could not picture, and he had not been shown a single portrait of him. Perhaps there wasn’t one in the house?
    A man in poor health. And sad, so far as he could judge. He had died of pneumonia. While he was still alive, old Couderc had already made a habit of pursuing his daughter-in-law in the darkness of the outbuildings.
    â€œYou see,” said Tati another time during her after-dinner hour, “it isn’t Françoise I’m afraid of. She’s too stupid. Even when she was a child they made fun of her because she never took anything in. A boy made her believe that children are made with the nose, and she cried and cried over it. As for Amélie, I can stand up to her. The real pest is that slut of a Félicie who’s always