The Beast Within (49 page)

One evening Jacques found Séverine in tears. When she saw him at the door she wept more bitterly and put her head on his shoulder. She had sometimes cried like this before, but he had always managed to take her in his arms and comfort her. Now, however, the closer he held her to him, the more he felt her succumb to a mounting despair. He was distraught. After a while he took her head in his hands, put his face close to hers and, looking into her tear-filled eyes, he pledged himself to do her will. He knew that the reason for her despair was that she was a woman whose sweet, gentle nature prevented her from doing the deed herself.

‘Forgive me,’ he said. ‘Wait a little longer. I swear that I will do it. Soon. As soon as I can.’

She fastened her lips on his as if to seal his oath. They came together in a profound kiss, uniting their two bodies as one.

Aunt Phasie had suffered a final seizure and had died at nine o‘clock on the Thursday evening. Misard had been waiting at her bedside and had tried to close her eyes, but they remained obstinately open. Her neck had stiffened, with her head tilted slightly over one shoulder as if she were looking round the room, and her lips were drawn back in what appeared to be a sardonic grin. On the corner of a table near her bed there burned a single candle. The trains that had been rushing past the house since nine o’clock, totally unaware of the dead woman who was lying there not yet even cold, made the body momentarily shake in the flickering light of the candle as they went by.

In order to get Flore out of the way, Misard had immediately sent her to Doinville to report the death. She wouldn’t be back before eleven; he had two hours in front of him. First of all, he calmly cut himself a piece of bread; his stomach felt empty because he hadn’t eaten, Aunt Phasie having taken an unconscionably long time to die. He ate standing up, walking backwards and forwards, putting things in their place. Now and then he would be seized by a fit of coughing that bent him double. He was half-dead himself, as thin as a bone, with no strength left in him and the colour gone from his hair. It looked as though his final victory would be very short-lived. But it didn’t worry him. He had destroyed her. She had been a fine, handsome, healthy woman, and he’d eaten her life away, as woodworm eats away oak! There she lay — on her back, finished, reduced to nothing! And he was still alive! A thought suddenly occurred to him; he knelt down and took a pan from under the bed containing some bran-water that had been prepared as an enema. Ever since she had begun to suspect he was trying to kill her, Misard had been putting the rat poison into her enemas rather than mixing it with the salt.
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This was something that had never occurred to her; she should have had more sense. She had taken the poison without knowing it, and this time it had finished her off. Having emptied the pan outside, he came back and mopped down the bedroom floor to remove the stains. Why had she been so stubborn? She had thought she could outwit him! Well, serve her right! When husband and wife are secretly trying to see each other into the grave, you need to keep your eyes open. He chuckled to himself. It amused him to think of her unknowingly imbibing poison through her bottom while being so careful to watch what went into her mouth. Just then an express went by, shaking the house like a rushing wind. Although this was a regular occurrence, Misard jumped and turned towards the window. Ah, yes, he thought, the never-ending stream! All those people! They came from far and wide, all in such a hurry to get wherever it was they were going, and all of them either oblivious or indifferent to anything they trampled underfoot on their way. In the deep silence that settled on the house after the train had gone by, Misard caught sight of the dead woman’s eyes, staring at him, wide open. Their fixed gaze seemed to be watching his every movement, and the corners of her mouth were turned up in a mocking sneer.

Misard, who normally never let things bother him, suddenly found himself feeling annoyed. He could hear her saying to him, ‘Go on, start looking!’ One thing was certain; she hadn’t taken her money with her, and now that she was dead, he would eventually find it. She should have given it to him and not made such a fuss about it; it would have saved him a lot of trouble. The eyes followed him everywhere. ‘Go on,’ she was saying, ‘start looking!’ He had never dared search the bedroom while she had been alive. He glanced round it. He would try the cupboard first. He took the keys from under her pillow, rummaged through the shelves of linen, emptied the two drawers and even took them out to see if there was a hiding place behind them. There was nothing! Next he turned his attention to the bedside table. He removed the marble top and turned it over. Again, nothing! He looked behind the mirror above the mantelpiece, a little mirror bought at a fair and fixed to the wall by two nails. He poked behind it with a flat ruler, but only succeeded in dislodging an accumulation of black fluff. ‘Go on, keep looking!’ In order to avoid the staring eyes that he felt were watching him, he got down on his hands and knees and went round the room tapping the floor with his knuckles, listening for a hollow sound that might indicate a space beneath. Several tiles were loose, and he pulled them up. Nothing! Still nothing! When he got back to his feet, the eyes were still staring at him; he turned round and tried to stare back into the unblinking gaze of the corpse. The corners of her lips had now retracted further, emphasizing her horrible grin. He felt sure she was mocking him. ‘Go on,’ she was saying, ‘keep looking!’ By now he had worked himself up into a frenzy. He went up to her; a vague suspicion had entered his mind. What he was contemplating was nothing short of sacrilege and made him turn even paler than he already was. How could he be sure she had not taken her money with her? Perhaps she had! Shamelessly, he drew back the sheets, undressed her and inspected the bends of her arms and legs. She had told him to keep looking, so he looked. He felt underneath her, behind her neck and the small of her back. He pulled off the bedclothes and thrust his arm full length inside the straw mattress. He found nothing. ‘Keep looking! Keep looking!’ The head had fallen back on to the pillow, which lay where he had left it, and continued to stare at him derisively.

Misard was shaking with anger. As he was trying to rearrange the bed, in walked Flore, having completed her errand in Doinville.

‘It’s arranged for the day after tomorrow,’ she said. ‘Saturday, at eleven.’

She was referring to the funeral. A single glance was enough to tell her what Misard had been spending his energy on while she’d been away. She raised her hands in a gesture of indifference and contempt.

‘Why don’t you just give up?’ she said. ‘You’ll never find it.’

Misard imagined that she too was defying him. He went up to her.

‘She’s given it to you, hasn’t she?’ he muttered between clenched teeth. ‘You know where it is, don’t you?’

Flore merely shrugged her shoulders. The idea that her mother could have given her thousand francs to someone else, even to her, her own daughter, was laughable.

‘Given it to me!’ she said. ‘You must be joking! She’s got rid of it, that’s for sure. It’s out there somewhere, buried in the ground. You’ll just have to keep looking for it.’

With a broad sweep of her hand she indicated the house, the garden with its well, the railway line and the open countryside beyond. The money was out there, buried in a hole, somewhere where no one would ever find it. Misard was beside himself. Once again he began frantically moving furniture about and tapping on the walls, not in the least bothered that Flore was still in the room. She went over to the window.

‘How lovely it is outside!’ she whispered. ‘Such a beautiful night! I walked fast. With all those stars shining, it’s as light as day! What a fine day it will be tomorrow when the sun comes up!’

For a moment she remained standing at the window, looking out at the tranquil countryside, softened by the first warm days of April. Her walk had reopened the wound in her heart and had left her feeling pensive and sad. But when she heard Misard walk out of the room and start moving furniture about in other parts of the house, she went over to the bed and sat looking at her mother. The candle was still burning on the bedside table with a long, steady flame. A train went by, shaking the house.

Flore had decided she would stay beside her mother through the night. She began to ponder. The sight of the dead woman took her mind off an idea that had haunted her for some time, an idea she had been turning over and over in her head beneath the starry skies, in the stillness of the night, all the way back from Doinville. There was something that puzzled her, and for a while it stopped her thinking about her own troubles: why hadn’t she felt more upset at the death of her mother? Why, even now, wasn’t she weeping? It was true that she had never spoken much to her; she was a law unto herself, and preferred to be out on her own, roaming the countryside the minute she was off duty. Even so she had been genuinely fond of her. During her final illness she had come and sat beside her a score of times, begging her to call a doctor. She was sure that Misard was up to no good and hoped that a doctor might frighten him off. But all she ever got from her sick mother was an angry ‘no’, as if she prided herself on accepting help from no one in her battle against her husband, a battle she was certain of winning whatever the outcome, since she was going to take her money with her. And so Flore had not insisted; she was too absorbed in her own troubles. She spent most of her time pacing furiously about the countryside in an attempt to forget her sorrows. It must have been this that stopped her weeping for her mother; when the heart is already heavy-laden, it has no room for further grief. Her mother had gone. She looked at her as she lay on the bed, pale and lifeless. Try as she might, she could not make herself feel any sadder. What was the point of calling the police and accusing Misard, since her world was about to collapse? Her eyes remained fixed on the body, but she no longer saw it. Slowly, inescapably, she was drawn back into the private realm of her own thoughts, and the idea which had planted itself in her brain took hold of her once again. All she felt was the violent rattle of the trains, marking the hours as they hurtled past.

In the distance she heard the rumble of an approaching stopping train from Paris. When the engine’s headlamp eventually passed in front of the window, the room was lit up as if by a flash of lightning or a sudden burst of flame.

‘Eighteen minutes past one,’ she thought. ‘Another seven hours! They will pass here at sixteen minutes past eight, tomorrow morning.’

For the past few months, waiting for this particular train once a week had become an obsession. She knew that the Friday-morning express was always driven by Jacques and that it would also be carrying Séverine, on her weekly trip to Paris. She was consumed with jealousy; all week long she waited for the moment the train went by, when she could look out for them and see them, and picture them in Paris, happy in each other’s arms. How she hated seeing the train fly past, wishing she could cling on to the last carriage and be carried away to Paris herself! It seemed to her as if the wheels of the train were cutting her heart to pieces. She felt so hurt that one night she had hidden herself in her room to write to the police. If she could get this woman arrested, her troubles would be at an end. She had once seen Séverine at La Croix-de-Maufras and knew that she had been one of Grandmorin’s mistresses. All she had to do was inform the authorities, and Séverine would be brought to trial. When she attempted to put pen to paper, however, the words wouldn’t come. She wondered whether the police would even listen to her. These high-up people were all in it together. She might well end up being put in prison herself, as had happened to Cabuche. No! If she sought revenge, she would do it on her own; she needed help from no one. Flore thought of revenge not as it was usually understood - hurting someone in order to remedy the hurt done to oneself - but as a final solution, a cataclysm, in which all was destroyed as if by lightning. She was a proud girl, physically stronger and more handsome than her rival, and was convinced that she had as much right to be loved as her. On her solitary excursions into the wild countryside near by, her long blonde hair flying freely in the wind, she wished she could take hold of her and settle the dispute like two maiden warriors, face to face in the depths of a forest. She had never been taken by a man. She was a match for any of them. She was indomitable. Victory would always be hers.

The idea had suddenly occurred to her the week before; it had struck her like a bolt from the blue. In order to stop them going past her house every week, in order to stop them going to Paris together, she must kill them. It was not something she had thought out; it was simply a crude, instinctive urge to get rid of them. When she had a thorn stuck in her finger she pulled it out; she would have cut her finger off if she’d had to. She must kill them. She must kill them the next time they went past. She must wreck the train, drag a beam of wood across the track, lift one of the rails, smash everything to pieces, destroy it. Jacques would be driving the locomotive; he couldn’t get off it. He would be crushed. His mistress always travelled in the leading carriage in order to be close to him; so she wouldn’t escape either. As for everyone else, the never-ending stream of passengers, she didn’t even give them a thought. They meant nothing to her; she didn’t know them. This train crash, and the sacrifice of so many lives, had become a waking obsession. Only a catastrophe on this scale, involving so much loss of life and human suffering, could possibly ease the enormous ache in her heart and assuage the tears she had shed.

On the Friday morning, however, her resolve had weakened; she was unable to decide where and how she was going to lift a rail. That evening, after she had finished duty for the day, another idea occurred to her. She walked through the tunnel and out to the Dieppe junction. She often came this way. The tunnel was a good half-league long, a vaulted passageway, completely straight. It excited her to see the trains coming towards her with their blinding headlamps; she was nearly run over every time. It must have been the sense of danger that attracted her, a need to do something reckless. This evening, however, having managed to avoid being seen by the night watchman, she had walked half-way through the tunnel, keeping to the left so that she could be sure that any train coming towards her would pass on her right, when she foolishly turned round to watch the tail-lights of a train for Le Havre. As she set off again, she had tripped, which forced her to turn round on herself a second time, with the result that she could no longer tell in which direction the red lights had been travelling. Her head was still spinning from the noise of the wheels. Bold as she was, she dared not move; she was so frightened that her hands went cold and her hair stood on end. She realized that, when another train went past, she wouldn’t know whether it was an up train or a down train; she might throw herself to the right or to the left and could be cut to pieces. She tried desperately to hold on to her reason, to remember, to think it through. But she was suddenly overcome with panic and ran forward blindly, frantically, into the darkness before her. She must not allow herself to be killed until she had killed the two she most hated. Her feet stumbled over the rails; she kept slipping and falling to the ground as she tried to run faster and faster. She felt as if she were going mad; the tunnel walls seemed to be closing in around her, the vaulted roof re-echoed with imaginary noises, fearful cries and horrible groans. She kept looking behind her, thinking she could feel the hot steam from a locomotive on her neck. Twice she was convinced she had made a mistake; she was running in the wrong direction and would be killed. She turned and ran the other way. She ran on and on. In front of her in the distance appeared a star, a shining eye, which was growing bigger and bigger. She steeled herself against the temptation to turn yet again and run the other way. The eye had grown to an incandescent ball, a savage mouth of flame. Without knowing what she was doing, she had leaped blindly to her left. The train thundered past, and a great gust of wind blew around her. Five minutes later she walked out of the Malaunay end of the tunnel, safe and sound.
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