All Our Worldly Goods by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781407065366
Publisher: Random House

18

Pierre was in Paris, trying to get some money.

For three years, now, the machines of Saint-Elme, like those in all the industrial centres of the region, produced expensive merchandise that no one bought. When a supplier finally managed to get some orders, three times out of four the goods were delivered but never paid for: the oldest, most dependable firms were going bankrupt.

‘Ours is only still in business thanks to Simone’s money. But as for me,’ thought Pierre, ‘I have none left.’

A third of Julien Hardelot’s fortune had disappeared when the Digoin Bank collapsed. It had seemed indestructible, that bank, which for two generations had managed Saint-Elme’s money. But it too had died: may it rest in peace. All Pierre’s remaining cash had been spent on the factory three years before, but it constantly demanded more investment, a new pot of gold. Every time the money ran out they had to start all over again with new calculations, new loans, new economies, anguishing over how to hold on to their business. Soon Pierre would be forced to hand over his share of the stock to Burgères – he already owed him a large sum – and then it would be goodbye to the factory. He knew that Simone wanted to get rid of him. ‘It’s because she was in love with you,’ Agnès said. ‘She’s bossy by nature and wants to control you with her money, since she couldn’t manage it in other ways when we were young.’

‘Just what a woman would think,’ he’d reply, but there was some truth in it.

He’d always got along with Roland Burgères. Roland was curiously friendly and respectful towards him; if things had been left to the two of them, it would all have worked out. But Simone! She was fat now, a heavy old woman with hard eyes. She dressed constantly in black, in mourning for her innumerable cousins from the north and the Pas-de-Calais, each of whom died childless and made her their heir. ‘Money attracts money,’ the Hardelot-Arques and the Hardelot-Demestres said bitterly: they could sense that their reign was at an end, that the sceptre was being handed over. In the sitting rooms of Saint-Elme, the Hardelots were now a diminished lot, a small, frail group of family members, while the ungrateful masses trotted along behind the enormous Madame Burgères (just as they used to follow Julien Hardelot); she walked slowly and, with her ample bosom and vast hips, she seemed to break through the crowd as a frigate breaks through the sea; and behind, in her wake, came her only child, Rose.

‘Yes, there might be some truth in it,’ thought Pierre when he caught Simone looking a certain way, not at him, never at him, but at Agnès.

He felt the victim of a rivalry between women. ‘But if it were only me,’ he thought, ‘if I were the only one concerned …’

What worried him was Guy’s future. He could just picture Guy having to beg for work in the factory that had once belonged to his grandfather.

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