The Train Read Free Page B

radio, of the street, of the town which was waking up much faster than usual.
    We ate in silence, in the kitchen, as usual, listening hard to the noises outside, without appearing to do so, on account of Sophie. Anyone would have thought that our daughter herself was hesitating to ask us any questions and she watched us in silence, one after the other.
    “Drink your milk.”
    “Will we have any milk there?”
    “What do you mean, there?”
    “Why, where we are going …”
    Tears started running down my wife’s cheeks. She turned her head away while I looked sadly at the familiar walls, at the furniture which we had chosen piece by piece five years earlier, before we got married.
    “Go and play now, Sophie.”
    And my wife, once she was alone with me, said:
    “Perhaps I’d better go and see my father.”
    “What for?”
    “To find out what they are doing.”
    She still had her father and mother, and three sisters, all married, two of whom lived at Fumay, one of them the wife of a confectioner in the Rue du Château.
    It was because of her father that I had set up in businesson my own, for he was ambitious for his daughters and would not have allowed any of them to marry a workman.
    It was he, too, who had made me buy the house on a twenty-year mortgage. I still had fifteen years of installments to pay, but in his eyes I was a property owner and that reassured him for the future.
    “You never know what might happen to you, Marcel. You’re cured, but people have been known to have relapses.”
    He had started in life as a miner in Delmotte’s slate-pits, and had become a foreman. He had his own house too, and his own garden.
    “You can arrange to buy a house in such a way that, if the husband happens to die, the wife doesn’t have to pay anything more.”
    Wasn’t it funny thinking about that on that particular morning, when nobody in the world could be sure of the future anymore?
    Jeanne dressed and put on her hat.
    “You’ll keep an eye on Sophie, won’t you?”
    She went off to see her father. The cars went by, more and more of them, all heading south, and two or three times I thought I heard some planes. They didn’t drop any bombs. Perhaps they were French or English: it was impossible to tell, for they were flying very high and the sun was dazzling.
    I opened the shop while Sophie was playing in the yard. It isn’t a real shop, for the house was not built for use as business premises. My customers have to go along a corridor and an ordinary window has to serve as a shop window. The same is true of the dairy shop, a little farther on. It is often like that in the suburbs, at least in the north. It means that we are forced to leave the front door open and I have fitted the shop door with a bell.
    A couple of bargees came in for their radios. They weren’t ready but they insisted on taking them all the same. One of them was going downstream toward Rethel, while the other, a Fleming, wanted to get home at all costs.
    I washed and shaved, watching my daughter through the window from which I could see all the gardens in the street full of flowers and grass, which was still a fresh green. People were talking to each other over the walls and I could hear a conversation between the Matrays, on the same floor as I was, for the windows were open.
    “How do you expect to take all that with you?”
    “We’ll need it.”
    “We may need it, but I don’t see how we’re going to carry those suitcases to the station.”
    “We’ll take a taxi.”
    “If we can find one! I wonder if there’ll still be any trains.”
    I was suddenly afraid. I pictured the crowds pouring down every street toward the little station just as the cars were streaming toward the south. It struck me that we ought to be leaving, that it was no longer a matter of hours but of minutes, and I reproached myself for having allowed my wife to go and see her father.
    What advice could he give her? What did he know that I didn’t?
    The fact of