Mr Hire's Engagement by Georges Simenon

his delicate hands. He was as pale and lean as a prophet, always grave and slow, capable of going on talking by himself for hours, in a low, inward voice, as he sat cross-legged on his work-table.
    Dishonest—that man? If people couldn't understand that, what could they understand?
    And Mr. Hire, who felt limp, drained of all spirit, automatically wrapped up forty-two parcels, labelled them, and filled in the registration forms for the post.
     
     
    When he got home, at ten-past seven, the concierge, who was in the passage, hurried back to her lodge without greeting him. A little boy who was going upstairs in front of Mr. Hire began to run and hammered with both fists on his parents' door.
    Mr. Hire lit his stove, wound up the alarm-clock, and went, item by item, through all his daily ritual. While the water was heating for the coffee he laid the table, swept up some crumbs that had fallen on the floor the previous evening, even took an old nail and raked out two pieces of fluff from between the floorboards.
    There were the same noises as on other days, plus the rain, which was running down a spout alongside the window. The baby upstairs must be ill, for the doctor called, there was whispering on the landing and even on the stairs, because the father took hold of the doctor's arm and accompanied him all the way down, to get at the truth.
    Mr. Hire washed up, and rubbed his two knives on an emery board. Ten times he went past his washstand. Ten times he stared at himself suspiciously in the glass, forcing himself to smile in order to discover what his smile looked like, then glaring sternly into space.
    At last he sat down, as tired as though he had been playing skittles all day. But he could not bear to go on sitting doing nothing, and he went over to his wardrobe, fetched a shoe-box, laid it on the table and tipped out the contents.
    There were old papers, old photographs, and, in a pocketbook with a red rubber band round it, some Government Bonds.
    There was a knock on the door. A woman's voice said at once:
    'It's me!'
    She had just finished tidying up her employer's flat, and her hands were still red and damp.
    'Can I come in and say good evening?'
    She had thrown a coat over her shoulders to cross the courtyard, and she let it slip off onto a chair.
    'Have they been bothering you again to-day?'
    Her manner was easy and unaffected. Coming nearer to the table she saw the photographs and picked up one of them, glanced up.
    'What's this?'
    'My class, at the council school.'
    'But which is you?'
    There were fifty boys in four rows, with potted plants at either end. They were all dressed in their Sunday best, and some held themselves very stiffly, with chins up, while others looked sullenly at the camera as if they were full of mistrust.
    'There,' said Mr. Hire, pointing.
    She laughed.
    'Is that really you?'
    With a nervous giggle, Alice could not help comparing the photograph with Mr. Hire.
    'How old were you?'
    'Eleven.'
    Eleven! And he didn't look like a kid! Nor like a man, either. One could pick him out from the rest in the photograph at a first glance.
    He was no taller than they, but he was so fat that he no longer looked in the least childish. His bare thighs were enormous, a little off the straight, his knees padded with fat. He had a double chin, and his eyes stared out fixedly and dejectedly from his pudding-face.
    He could never have played in the courtyard or on the playing-fields with the other kids, he could have had nothing to say to them, in fact, for he was already like a little old man, solemn and short-winded.
    'You know, you've got thinner.'
    It was true. As he grew older, Mr. Hire had dwindled to a normal girth, and all that remained of the photograph was his strange flabbiness, his unnaturally rounded figure, and the mouth, too clearly outlined in his indecisive face.
    'Was it an illness?'
    'No. I took after my mother.'
    He was not looking at the girl. He had stopped glancing at his own reflection.