The Little Man From Archangel by Georges Simenon Read Free Book Online Page A

relieved itself before returning to the Town Hall, and in the evening the performance was repeated.
    Why, while Jonas was eating, did The Widower watch him today more closely than before? It wasn't possible that he already knew. Yet anyone would have sworn that he was thinking to himself, restraining a snigger:
    'Ah! So, you're back again!'
    Rather as if the two of them had been members of the same club, as if Jonas had left it for a time and finally come back, repentant, to the fold.
    All this existed only in his imagination, but what was not imagination was his terror at the idea of once again sitting opposite the chief clerk every day.
    'What will you have for dessert, Monsieur Jonas? There's Eclairs and apple tart.'
    He had always liked pudding, particularly apple tart, which he chose, and he felt guilty at yielding to his greed at such a moment.
    'What's your news, Monsieur Jonas?'
    Pepito was tall like Palestri, dry and lean, but unlike his compatriot, he was always smiling and affable. Anyone would have thought running a restaurant was all a game for him, he did it with such good humour. Maria, his wife, had become enormous as a result of living in a kitchen six yards square, but that did not prevent her remaining young and alluring. She, too, was jolly and would burst into laughter over nothing.
    As they had no children, they had adopted a nephew whom they had sent over from their country and who could be seen doing his homework in the evening at one of the restaurant tables.
    'How's Gina?'
    'She's all right.'
    'The other day my wife met her in the market and, I don't know why, she got the impression that she was expecting a baby. Is that true?'
    He said no, almost ashamed, for he was sure it was his fault if Gina was not pregnant.
    What had misled Maria was that recently Gina had taken to eating more than usual, with a sort of frenzy, and from being plump as she was before, had become fat to the extent of needing to alter her clothes.
    At first he had rejoiced at her appetite, for in the early days of their marriage, she hardly ate at all. He used to encourage her, seeing it as a sign of contentment, thinking that she was acclimatizing herself to their life, and that she might end by actually feeling happy.
    He had said so to her and she had replied with a vague, rather protective smile, which she turned on him increasingly often now. She had not her mother's authoritative personality, quite the opposite. She did not concern herself with business, or money, or the decisions that had to be taken in household matters.
    Yet, despite the difference in age, it was she who adopted an indulgent manner now and then towards Jonas.
    He was her husband and she treated him as such. But in her eyes, perhaps, he was not quite a man, a real male, and she seemed to look on him as a backward child.
    Had he been wrong not to have been more severe with her? Ought he to have taken her in hand? Would that have changed matters?
    He had no desire to think about it. The Widower, opposite, was hypnotizing him and he finished up his apple tart faster than he would have wished, in order to escape his gaze.
    'So soon?' exclaimed Pepito when he asked for the bill. 'Aren't you going to have your coffee?'
    He would take it at Le Bouc's, with the possibility in the back of his mind of hearing some news there. In the old days he used to eat as slowly as Monsieur Métras, and the majority of single men who lunched in the restaurant and who, for the most part, chatted with the patron afterwards.
    'Julia! Monsieur Jonas' bill.'
    And, addressing him:
    'Shall we be seeing you this evening?'
    'Perhaps.'
    'She hasn't gone for long?'
    'I don't know yet.'
    It was starting all over again. He was floundering, no longer knowing what to reply to the questions that were being put to him, realizing that it would be worse tomorrow and worse still in the days to follow.
    What would happen, for example, if La Loute came to see her family and disclosed that Gina had