The Beast Within (15 page)

She had broken out into a sweat and was shaking from head to toe.

‘See, it’s happening again! He’s drugged my food. I’ve got a bitter taste in my mouth as if I’d swallowed a lot of old pennies. But I swear I haven’t taken anything from him. It’s enough to make you throw yourself in the river! I can’t take any more tonight. I’d better get to bed. I’ll say goodbye to you now. If you’re leaving at seven twenty-six it’ll be too early for me. Come and see me again, won’t you. Let’s hope I’m still here.’

Jacques had to help her into the bedroom, where she lay down and went to sleep, exhausted. Left alone, he wondered whether he too shouldn’t go up to the attic and get some sleep. But it was still only ten to eight. Sleep could come later; he decided he would take a walk outside. The little paraffin lamp was left burning on the table, and the empty house slept quietly, shaken from time to time by the thunder of a passing train.

Once outside, Jacques was surprised to discover how soft the night air felt. Perhaps there was more rain on the way. A milky white cloud had spread itself across the entire sky, and the full moon, hidden behind it out of sight, filled the heavens with a reddish glow. He could see the countryside clearly; the nearby fields, the hills and the trees stood out black in the uniformly pale light of the moon, no brighter than a night-light. He wandered round the little vegetable garden and then thought he would go for a walk towards Doinville, as the road was less steep in that direction. He was about to set off when he caught sight of the house standing on its own on the other side of the railway track. He opened the wicket gate beside the level-crossing, the main gate being already shut for the night, and crossed the railway line. The house was one he recognized; he had looked at it from the lurching footplate of his locomotive every time he drove the train past. For some reason it haunted him; he had a vague notion that it was somehow connected with his own life. He had the same feelings each time — initially a kind of fear that it might no longer be there, and then a strange uneasiness when he discovered that it still was. Never had he seen either the doors or the windows open. The only thing he had managed to find out about it was that it belonged to President Grandmorin. He was seized by an irresistible desire to take a closer look, to see what he might discover.

For some time he stood in the road, facing the railings. He then took a few paces back and stood on tiptoe to try to get a better view. Where the railway cut through the garden, it had left only a narrow strip of ground with a wall round it in front of the steps to the main door. At the back of the house, however, there was a larger piece of ground, surrounded by a simple hedge. The whole place had a dismal, forsaken appearance, standing there abandoned, in the misty red glow from the night sky. He felt a shiver run through him and he was about to turn away when he noticed a gap in the hedge. Telling himself that he had nothing to fear, he stepped through. He felt his heart beating. Suddenly, as he came round a small, tumbledown greenhouse, he saw a shadowy figure crouching by the door. He stopped quickly.

‘What are you doing here?’ he exclaimed with astonishment.

It was Flore.

‘You can see what I’m doing,’ she said, trying to make her voice sound calm, for his appearance had taken her by surprise.

‘I’m helping myself to this twine. It’s all been left here to rot; it’s no use to anyone. I use it in the garden, so I come and take what I want.’

She had a big pair of scissors in her hand and was sitting on the ground, untangling lengths of twine and cutting it when it got caught in a knot.

‘Doesn’t the owner come here any more?’ asked Jacques.

She laughed.

‘The President’s hardly likely to show his face round here,’ she said, ‘after what happened to Louisette! So I’m taking his twine.’

Jacques was silent for a while, recalling the sad tale of Louisette’s death. He frowned.

‘Do you believe what Louisette said?’ he asked. ‘That Grandmorin tried to rape her, and she got hurt when it turned nasty?’

Flore suddenly became angry.

‘Louisette never lied,’ she protested. ‘Nor Cabuche either! Cabuche is my friend.’

‘I bet he’s your lover, too,’ said Jacques.

‘You’d be scraping the barrel if you had him as a lover,’ she said. ‘He’s my friend. I haven’t got any lovers and I don’t want any.’

She raised her head defiantly. Her thick blonde hair fell down over her face. Her lithe, muscular body exuded a sense of wild, wilful independence. She had acquired something of a reputation locally. There were stories of her pulling a farm wagon single-handed from the path of an oncoming train and stopping a runaway goods wagon as it careered out of control down the Barentin incline towards an approaching express. These astonishing feats of strength made her much sought after by the young men in the neighbourhood, all the more so because they thought at first she would be an easy catch, always wandering off into the fields as soon as she had finished work and finding some hidden spot where she could just lie on the ground gazing quietly into the sky undisturbed. But the first who were rash enough to approach her never wished to repeat the experience. She used to spend hours bathing in a nearby stream, naked. A group of lads, the same age as her, got together to go to watch her. Without even bothering to get dressed, she had grabbed hold of one of them and knocked him nearly senseless. No one tried to spy on her again. There was an even stranger story about her treatment of a signalman at the junction for Dieppe at the other end of the tunnel, a man called Ozil, a perfectly ordinary sort of chap, about thirty years old, whom she seemed to fancy, or so it was said. One night, thinking she wanted to make love, he had put his hands on her, and she had nearly beaten him to death with a stick. She held men in utter contempt, like an Amazon. Most people took this as proof that she was a bit wrong in the head.

Jacques listened with amusement to her protestations that she had no time for lovers.

‘What about Ozil?’ he asked. ‘Is the wedding off? I heard you used to run through the tunnel every day to see him.’

She shrugged her shoulders.

‘Wedding, my foot!’ she said. ‘I run through the tunnel because I like it! Two and a half kilometres in the dark! If you didn’t watch out you’d get cut to pieces by a train! You should hear the noise they make inside! Ozil was starting to get on my nerves. He’s not the man for me.’

‘Are you looking for somebody else, then?’ Jacques ventured.

She hesitated.

‘No,’ she said. ‘Certainly not.’

She started to laugh. She had become suddenly embarrassed and started untying a particularly awkward knot.

‘What about you?’ she asked without looking up, as if absorbed in her task, ‘Have you got a girlfriend?’

Jacques became more serious. He looked away, staring unsteadily into the night.

‘No,’ he said tersely.

‘So it’s true what they say, then,’ she continued. ‘That you can’t stand women. Come on, Jacques, I’ve known you long enough; you haven’t got a kind word to say for us. What have we done to upset you?’

He made no answer. She pondered a moment, put down the knot that she was trying to untie and looked at him.

‘Is it true that the only thing you’re in love with is your locomotive?’ she asked him. ‘Everybody makes jokes about it. They say you’re always polishing it and making it look shiny. They say it’s the only thing you really care about. I’m only telling you, Jacques, because I’m your friend.’

He looked at her as she sat in front of him, in the pale, misty light from the moon. He remembered when she was a little girl, boisterous and headstrong even then, flinging her arms round his neck the minute he came home and clinging to him in childish glee. Later they had gone their separate ways. Each time he met her again he noticed how much she had grown. Yet she would still fling her arms round him as before and gaze at him lovingly with her big bright eyes. Jacques found it more and more embarrassing. And now, she was a fully grown woman, handsome, desirable. She had loved him, he imagined, from the earliest days of her childhood. His heart began to beat quickly. He suddenly felt that he was the one she had been waiting for. The blood rushed to his head; he felt that it would burst. In the confusion that came over him, his first impulse was to flee. Desire had always driven him mad. He saw red.

‘Sit beside me, Jacques,’ she said.

He remained standing where he was, not knowing what to do. Suddenly his legs felt very tired. Then, yielding to the insistent call of his desire, he dropped to the ground beside her on the pile of twine. He could not speak; his throat was dry. Flore, normally so distant, so taciturn, chatted away ten to the dozen, till her head was in a whirl.

‘Mother made a mistake marrying Misard,’ she said. ‘It’ll do her no good ... I couldn’t care less ... I’ve got enough on my plate. Whenever I try to help she tells me to mind my own business ... So she can sort it out herself. I keep out of the house. I think about all the things I’m going to do. I saw you go past on your train this morning. I was sitting over there in those bushes, but you never look. I’ll tell you what I’m going to do. Not now. Another day perhaps ... when we’re best friends.’

She had dropped her scissors. Still without speaking, Jacques took her two hands in his. She thrilled to his touch. But the minute he raised her hands to his burning lips, she recoiled from him in horror, like an untouched virgin. In an instant she was again the Amazon, the despiser of men, defiant, hostile, spurning his advance.

‘Leave me alone,’ she said. ‘I don’t want to. Let’s just sit quietly ... That’s all you men ever think of! You wouldn’t believe what Louisette told me the day she died at Cabuche’s! Not that it was anything I didn’t know already. I’ve seen the President up to his dirty tricks with girls. He used to bring them here. There’s one that nobody knows about. He married her off.’

Jacques was no longer listening to her; her words fell on deaf ears. He seized her in a violent embrace and fastened his lips to hers. She gave a small cry, a moan, so deep, so tender, so clearly betraying the long-concealed love she bore him. Yet still she fought against him, blindly, instinctively refusing to yield. She desired him, yet she resisted him. She needed him to conquer her. They did not speak. They remained locked together, breast to breast, each trying desperately to overpower the other. It appeared briefly that she might be the stronger. He was beginning to weaken, and she had almost managed to pin him down beneath her when he grabbed her by the throat. He tore open her bodice, exposing her breasts, hard and swollen from the struggle, milky white in the pale light of the moon. She fell to the ground on her back and surrendered herself to him, defeated.

But he did not take her. He drew back, gasping for breath, looking at her. He seemed to be possessed; some wild impulse made him look around him for a weapon, a stone, anything that he might use to kill her. His eyes fell upon the scissors glinting in the moonlight among the pieces of twine that she had been cutting. He grabbed them and was on the point of plunging them into her body between the two rose-tipped white breasts when a chill ran through him and his mind suddenly became clear. He threw the scissors to the ground and fled from her, horrified. Flore lay with her eyes closed, thinking that he had rejected her because she had resisted him.

Jacques ran off into the night. He followed a path which led up a hill and then back down into a narrow dell, running as fast as he could. His feet sent stones clattering noisily down the path in front of him. He swerved off to the left into the bushes and then went right again, coming out on to a bare hilltop. He rushed down the slope and collided with the railway fence at the bottom. A train was approaching, snorting and belching out sparks; at first he didn’t realize what it was and he was terrified. Then he remembered. Ah, yes, he thought, all those people, the never-ending stream; and here was he, alone, in torment! He got to his feet and started running again, up a hill and down the other side. Whichever way he went, he found himself back at the railway line, sometimes deep in a cutting that opened up before him like a bottomless chasm, sometimes high on an embankment that shut out the horizon like an enormous barricade. The deserted countryside with its endless succession of hills was like a maze with no way out; he was lost in a dreary wasteland of barren fields, from which his distracted mind could find no escape. He had been walking for what seemed like ages over one hill after another when he noticed in front of him a round opening: the black mouth of the tunnel. A train was disappearing into it with a great roaring and hissing of steam, making the ground shake behind it as it vanished into the bowels of the earth.

His legs would carry him no further. He collapsed beside the railway line and wept convulsively, sprawled on his stomach, his face buried in the grass. He could not believe it. The terrible affliction, which he had thought was cured, had returned. He had wanted to kill her. He had wanted to kill this girl. Kill a woman! Kill a woman! The words had sounded in his ears since his early adolescence with the maddening, feverish insistence of unsated desire. Whereas other boys coming to puberty dreamed of possessing a woman, the only thing that had excited him was the thought of killing one. It was pointless trying to deceive himself. As soon as he had seen her naked, he had taken the scissors to plant them into her flesh, into the warm, white flesh of her breast, not simply because she had resisted him, but because he had wanted to do it. Indeed, he had wanted to do it so badly that, had he not clung with both hands to the tufts of grass beneath him, he might even then have run back and slit her throat. Good God! To think that it was Flore! The little girl he had watched growing up! That wild, unruly little girl! To think it was only now that he had discovered how much she loved him! He clenched his fists and dug his fingers into the earth, sobbing uncontrollably, choking with despair.