‘I’m sure there’s nothing wrong – it’s me who’s changed, not him – he does the shopping as usual, goes to union meetings, takes the coffee over to Mother – it’s me, it’s my condition.’
Elisa was on the fourth concrete step. She scraped the snow off this one just as she had the others, throwing it into a little heap on the left, and swept until the concrete was clear. Then she knelt down on the clean step ready to attack the fifth. ‘There, just a tiny bit higher …’
Straining hard she plunged her left hand into the snow and saw the imprint of Gilles’ studded shoe. The muscles of her face tensed, as if she were short of breath. ‘Dear little heart …’ She had not pronounced the words, but her lips quivered to their rhythm.
Up one more step, and there, the most satisfying task of all – a great slab of snow to push off all in one go. She brushed the step clear, moved on to another heap: ‘All these little heaps … I’ll ask Gilles to shovel them up with the spade. The trouble is, as soon as I ask him to do it I know he’ll get that new expression on his face …’
She turned round, sat down on a step still covered in snow, and stayed there for a moment, brush in hand. She could picture Gilles so clearly, sitting in front of the fire, legs stretched out, feet resting on the door of the open stove, with that new look of drowsy satiation. His head would move forward and backward in little jerky movements as if drawn by a will that was only semi-conscious; then he’d pull himself up abruptly, sharply, as though he’d been snorting, his attractive face looking somehow crumpled, the veins on his forehead standing out. If she said to him, ‘Would you mind clearing up the snow with the spade?’ he’d answer, ‘I don’t give a damn about those heaps of snow,’ and that new look would come over him. He’d sit down and make himself comfortable, sniffing, spitting noisily into his handkerchief, smiling greedily, fixedly, into the stove. Those heaps of snow, what a lot of fuss about nothing.
‘No, it’s me,’ she said to herself, ‘Everything seems funny to me at the moment, it’s my condition. Was I like this with the twins? Ouch! Another little kick, right in the middle of his mother’s belly: he’s going to be a strong one, all right. Oh yes, it must be me, surely. I ought to just get on with it.’
She attacked the next-to-last step.
Then she descended gingerly, keeping close to the wall, so as not to slip, in her over-large clogs. When she came to the door of the house she took them off and, holding them in her hands, walked silently in on her wet-stockinged feet, her eyes fixed on her swollen belly. Proudly she carried forward the new weight which had come to her from Gilles’ body.
Today he was a little late coming in, and he had Victorine with him.
‘I’ve brought the kid with me,’ he said. ‘She seemed bored at home, and since you go out so rarely now, I thought I might take her for a walk later.’
‘Good idea,’ Elisa said.
She looked proudly at her little sister, so pretty and so fresh; thinking of her own increasingly heavy and misshapen body, she said to herself, ‘I’m glad he’s going to take her out, it’ll make a change for him.’
She was ashamed to have felt that vague sense of une
