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“They were both old, even if they weren’t aware of it in their day-to-day life. In a few years, they would be dead. Was the stray cat found one night in the street really the cause of…?

He mustn’t give in. Joseph wasn’t the only issue. It was him she had wanted to get at through the cat.”

Belgian writer Georges Simenon wrote Le Chat in French in 1967. It has been recently translated into English by Ros Schwartz as The Cat.

The plot, on the face of it, is quite sweet – an elderly man and woman, both widowed, marry to spend the rest of their lives together. It is not a marriage of a successful romance, but one of convenience. She would like to have a man around to fix things when they fall into disrepair; he, on the other hand, has never lived alone. A companion is welcome. What could have been a practical enough arrangement quickly dissolves into a domestic hell. We first meet Émile and Marguerite on an evening when they aren’t talking – the couple communicates by exchanging notes, sometimes no longer than a couple of words. We will soon find out that they do not speak to each other at all.

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