She nodded her head and tears rolled down her cheeks, creating two channels in her make-up. When he had finished eating, she disappeared for a moment into the kitchen, to return wearing an irresistible three-cornered hat and carrying a small handbag in green needlepoint. She smiled and pointed at the door. Jean was alarmed. Was she going to leave him alone amidst the flowery cretonne, watched over by a soldier who had met death on the battlefield?
‘I come!’ he said.
The handbag twirled with pleasure on the old lady’s arm. She knew exactly where she was going, and forged ahead between indifferent passers-by along pavements lined with identical houses of red brick. The weather was exceptionally mild, and men in shirtsleeves were trimming their box hedges in their minuscule gardens and mowing their meagre lawns. Jean was finding it hard to keep up, and wondered where she was leading him with such lightness of mood and a mysterious smile at the lipstick-smudged corners of her mouth. No one at home having apprised him of the bizarre customs of this exotic people, he felt no anxiety and concluded that his landlady’s athletic strides must be her preferred form of exercise before going to bed. Night was falling and everything looked darker. A succession of enormous protuberant eyes peered out at the edge of the street, the bow windows whose yellowish glow was reflected on the road surface, and he felt as if he was walking between the tentacles of an enormous slumbering octopus in a town that was being crushed in the darkness. After more than ten minutes of this brisk walk, the old lady turned into a street that was better lit, with illuminated signs and shop windows. Jean just managed to dash in behind her as she entered a smoke-filled pub, in which all he could initially make out was the men squeezed together around the bar, each holding out a hand full of change. Behind the counter a barman in a striped waistcoat, bald but with a face embellished by a fine waxed moustache, lowered and raised steel levers, handed out large glasses of beer, and took the money immediately, without a smile or a word. The old lady did not seem in the least frightened by the bustle and unselfconsciously elbowed her way through to the holy of holies, from which she returned with a glass of cider for Jean and a whisky for herself. They drank standing up, resting against a pillar and exchanging smiles. When he refused the third glass of cider she seemed to think he needed a ‘just so you know’, because she led him towards a swing door marked ‘Gents’. A constant flow of men was emerging, buttoning their flies as they did so. Out of politeness Jean followed suit. The old lady meanwhile had moved on to drinking beer and brandy alternately, a swig of one followed by a swig of the other. Everyone seemed to know her. They greeted her good-humouredly, without the slightest mockery. Jean learned her name: ‘Eliza’ or sometimes ‘Mrs Pickett’. At the rate she was going, it was evident that she would soon be completely drunk, but she bore up very well, if a little red-faced beneath her make-up, which was beginning to crack in the heat of the room. An unintentional elbow nudged her hat. Thinking she was putting it straight, she replaced it completely askew without losing any of her dignity. At about eleven o’clock the barman stopped serving drinks, and Mrs Pickett gestured to Jean that it was time they went back. She had spoken to him several times without his being able to say anything in response apart from ‘yes’, which was about the only word in English he felt more or less sure of. He told himself that in any case she wasn’t listening. When she left the support of the pillar, which had held her up since the beginning of the evening after each of her sorties to the bar, the pub spun in front of her and she had to grip onto Jean’s arm. They set out down the street, but she could hardly place one foot in front of the other. Repeatedly tripping over herself, she finally stopped, pulled off her buckled pumps, handed them to her companion and walked a little more steadily in her cotton stockings. Jean saw her swaying more and more and offered her his arm. For the last five hundred metres he had to half-carry her. She weighed nothing, a little package of mummified skin and bones. Thanks to Jean the key was turned in the lock. Mrs Pickett tossed her three-cornered hat onto a coat hook, did a little dance, and sat down heavily on the ground, where she began to laugh madly. Jean picked her up, without force, and laid her, still cackling, on the living-room sofa and piled some cushions on top of her. Eliza Pickett shut her eyes immediately, but as he was about to turn out the light and go to his room, she sat up and said in French, ‘Would you give me a glass of water, my dear?’