Read She Who Was No More for Free Online Page A

it was! Ravinel had known him as a schoolboy in a black smock who had helped him with his sums. For a second they stared at each other, then Larmingeat held out his hand.
    ‘Fernand. Fancy meeting you again! It must be quite twenty-five years since we last saw each other.’
    Cadiou clapped his hands.
    ‘Three brandies.’
    There was a moment of embarrassment all the same. To think that this was Larmingeat! This tall fellow with a beaky nose and cold eyes!
    ‘What are you doing now?’ asked Ravinel.
    ‘I’m an architect. And you?’
    ‘Oh, just a salesman.’
    That was slightly embarrassing too. It established a certain distance between them. Larmingeat turned quickly to Cadiou.
    ‘Yes. We were at school together. In Brest. And if I remember rightly we graduated at the same time. But what a long time ago!’
    He warmed his brandy in the hollow of his hand.
    ‘What about your parents?’ he asked, turning back to Ravinel.
    ‘They are both dead.’
    Larmingeat sighed.
    ‘His father was a master at the Lycée,’ he explained to Cadiou. ‘I can see him still, with his briefcase and his umbrella. He rarely smiled.’
    That was quite true. He hardly ever smiled. For one thing, he had T.B. But there was no need for Larmingeat to know that. In fact Ravinel had much rather they talked of something else than his father, a dull stick of a man, always in black. It was really because of him that Ravinel had become fed up with his studies. Always saying: ‘When I’m no longer with you,’ and enjoining his son to work harder and harder. Sometimes at meals he would stop eating and contemplate him from under his enormous Ravinel eyebrows. Then a volley of questions would be fired at him. What was the date of the Treaty of Campo Formio, the formula for butane gas, the sequence of tenses in Latin. A precise, meticulous man, in whose brain all information was neatly classified. For him geography consisted of lists. Towns, mountains, rivers. History was a list of dates. Man himself was a list of bones, muscles, and organs.
    When Ravinel took his examinations—that was the worst of all. To think of it was enough to make him break out into a cold sweat. And even now strange words would suddenly jump up at him out of the past, menacing as in a nightmare. Words like cretaceous or monocotyledonous. It’s not with impunity that you’re the son of a schoolmaster—at any rate of one like that.
    What would Larmingeat say if Ravinel told him he had actually prayed for his father’s death? He had. And he had watched intently for every sign of the approaching end. He had known enough about the symptoms. He knew the meaning of a little froth at the corner of the mouth, or that peculiar hollow cough in the evenings. And all his life he had known what it meant to be the son of an invalid. Always thinking of one’s own health, conscious of one’s temperature and of the least change in the weather.
    ‘We don’t live long in our family.’
    That’s what his mother used to say. And she backed it up by dying a few months after her husband, just fading away, worn out by years of worry and scraping.
    He was an only child, Ravinel, and, though he was well in his teens when his parents died, it seemed to him ever after that he had always been an orphan. And he had remained rather like one. Something in him seemed to have been nipped in the bud. He always started if a door slammed or his name was called out and became nervous if a question was fired at him suddenly. Of course nobody asked him the date of the Treaty of Campo Formio nowadays. But that didn’t make any difference: he was afraid of being caught on the wrong foot. Another thing: he was apt to forget his own telephone number or the number of his car. One day, perhaps, he’d forget his own name! An awful thought! He’d no longer be a son or a husband or anything else. Just a man among millions of others…
    As a matter of fact, on second thoughts, it might be rather nice. Only, it