He had not consciously expected anything, but as he entered the dining-room he saw his father with his back turned to him at the corner cupboard with his hand on the key, his head cocked, his shoulders up, very like George, and it was as though he had foreseen it. It was uncanny and his heart ached in a sort of dread.
His mother’s face was shining with a glowing excitement, and she looked away from him as she said:
“Your father wants us to let him stay for a little. There’s George’s room, you know, and I want him to.”
René felt helpless. The emergency was too strong for him.
“All right,” he said.
His father turned and smiled pleasantly.
“That’s good of you—very good of you. I’d be in the cart without. I’m—well—I’ve been—— But we’ll talk of that later.”
“Talk!” murmured René, aghast. “Who would talk? Who could find anything to say?” Miserably he laid out the plates round the big hospitable table, so big, so hospitable, that it was out of place and forbidding.
Mr. Fourmy had already helped himself to whisky. (George always kept a bottle in the house in case he and Elsie should drop in of an evening.) They drew up to the table and went through a mockery of eating. The bread was bitter in René’s mouth, and the dainties they had bought were tasteless. Mrs. Fourmy talked in a toneless twittering voice of the music-hall performance, while René stole glances at his father and avoided meeting his eyes. If he met his eyes he felt, in spite of himself, amused, charmed, tickled, somehow pleased, and with that pleasure was mixed a salt savor of pity, so that it was irresistible and led on wonderfully to a sure promise of adventure. René kept muttering to himself: “He’s a bad man. A bad Fourmy, and you can’t do worse than that.” This memory he flung with a look at his mother, only to realize as he looked that she had no thought for him, but, like him, was stealing glances at his father and avoiding meeting the little keen humorous eyes. And his father went on eating hungrily and heartily. Half a loaf of bread he ate, and two-thirds of the ham and all the liver sausage. Then he looked wistfully at the honey-cakes, but desisted, produced a packet of cigarettes, and began to smoke.
“That’s good,” he said. “My first square meal since this morning. That’s good, good.”