The Man Who Watched the Trains Go By by Georges Simenon

Author:Georges Simenon [Simenon, Georges]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2017-10-17T04:00:00+00:00

7.

How Kees Popinga created his home on the move, and how he deemed it his duty to lend a hand to the French police investigation

You start with a little detail, sometimes very trivial, and you end, without meaning to, by discovering some general principles.

And that morning, as he looked in the mirror – something he had always done with great seriousness – Popinga realized he had not shaved since he had left Holland, with the result that, although his beard was neither heavy nor fast-growing, his appearance was unprepossessing.

He turned to the bed, where a woman whom he did not know was putting on her stockings.

‘When you’re ready, you can go out and buy me a safety razor, some shaving soap, a shaving brush and a toothbrush.’

Since he had already given her the money in advance, she might well not have come back, but she was an honest woman, and on her return insisted on giving him an exact account of what she had spent. Then, not knowing whether she should stay or go, and not daring to ask, she sat back down on the bed and watched Popinga shaving.

It was one of those streets looking on to Faubourg Montmartre, a hotel of much lower standing than the one in Rue Victor-Massé. In fact, it stood in exactly the same relation to the other hotel as the woman sitting on the bed did compared to Jeanne Rozier, that is three or four categories lower.

On the other hand, this woman, whose name Kees did not even know, was genuinely trying to please him, working hard to find out what he preferred, as she proved by saying with a sigh:

‘You’re the sad type, aren’t you? An unhappy affair of the heart, that’s what I’d say.’

She said this with the firm yet tentative voice of someone reading it in the cards.

‘Why do you say that?’ he asked, soaping one cheek.

‘Because I’m beginning to know what men are like. How old do you think I am? Well, as you see me now, I’m thirty-eight, my dear! I know I don’t look it. I’ve seen them come and go, men like you, they take me to a hotel and then don’t do anything. And most of them, you know, sooner or later they start to talk, and talk, they tell me their whole life stories. We’re useful for that, aren’t we? We listen to it all, and it doesn’t go any further.’

It was almost a domestic scene with Kees, the paterfamilias, bare-chested, his braces hanging down to his calves: the woman chatting amiably to him while she waited for him to get ready. The funniest thing was that while he did gather that she thought he looked ‘the sad type’ – another new personality which was being foisted on to him, and which he mustn’t forget to note down – in the end he had stopped listening to her.

The razor had sent his thoughts in a different direction. For a moment, he wondered whether he shouldn’t buy an attaché case to carry a few belongings in.

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