Sunday by Georges Simenon

for a long time.
    What was he afraid of? For he was afraid, with an undefined fear similar to that which seizes animals during storms and great cataclysms. He felt the need to go into the kitchen, to pour himself out a glass of wine, to be near somebody, even Madame Lavaud, whom he did not dare to look at straight away, but asked:
    'My wife isn't back yet?'
    He knew the answer. He would have heard the car.
    'No, Monsieur Emile.'
    She was speaking in her normal voice. She didn't appear to know. And even if she had known? She was on his side. She used to glare balefully at Berthe when the latter had her back turned, Berthe who never lost an opportunity to humiliate her, as she humiliated everybody who came near her.
    It was as if, in his panic, he was seeking a reassuring, plausible reason, and this went on for several days, during which he did not feel himself.
    It was as if he carried around inside him the germ of something still unknown. People who are succumbing to an illness experience the same sort of discomfort and complain of feeling off colour.
    His brief adventure with Nancy had had no consequences of this sort. On leaving the Flat Stone he had felt like singing, pleased with himself and with her. He felt he had won a victory, even if it had no future. He had shown his partner that he was not a child but a man, and that he was not afraid of a woman. Her body had satisfied him. It was a pleasant memory, warm and voluptuous.
    And later, when he had not found the English-woman at their meeting-place, when he had learned that Berthe had ordered her out of the house, he had clenched his fists in rage, knowing that he would never forgive his wife for it.
    Nevertheless, he had not been disturbed in his innermost being.
    This time, Berthe came back from town without looking at him with a questioning, let alone a suspicious glance. Ada had gone back to her work, so like the Ada of other days that he might well have wondered whether anything had really happened.
    For one instant this had been one of his fears. He did not really know her. He was well aware, he had heard people saying often, that she was not like other girls.
    Might she not have suddenly behaved differently, begun to look at him with love in her eyes, or with reproach, or even run off to her father's to tell him, weeping, what had happened ?
    Then as the hours, the days slipped by, he became more and more convinced that what he had done was necessary, and that what he would do from then on flowed naturally from it, as well as from a kind of fatality.
    There had been several strange, tortured days, which he would not have wished not to live through, which were probably the most important days in his existence, but which left a chaotic and almost a shameful memory.
    This, too, vaguely reminded him of his scripture lessons, of St. Peter betraying three times and the cock crowing.
    In his bed the first evening, for example, beside Berthe asleep, whose warmth he could feel, he was annoyed with himself for having con-promised, by an unpremeditated act, an equilibrium which suddenly seemed to have been satisfactory to him, a routine to which he had become so well adapted that he was frightened at the idea that it could be shattered.
    It was almost certain that he would go on, either of his own accord, or because Ada would demand it.
    Berthe would find out, sooner or later, Berthe, who knew everything that happened, not only in the house, but in the village.
    He was even more afraid of Pascali, who was not like other men, whose reactions were incalculable.
    He pictured him arriving at La Bastide, not, this time, to sit in the kitchen and drink his glass of wine in silence, but to demand satisfaction.
    Finally, he had taken no precautions and Ada was too ignorant to have taken any herself.
    Supposing she were to have a child?
    It was he who began to do the spying, puzzled at finding her as impassive as usual, with, at the very most, the reflection of an interior joy in her