Chocolat

19

Sunday, March 2

MARCH HAS BROUGHT AN END TO THE RAIN. THE SKY IS raw now, a screeching blue between fast-moving clouds, and a sharpening wind has risen during the night, gusting in comers, rattling windows. The church bells ring wildly as if they too have caught a little of this sudden change. The weathervane turn-turns against the wheeling sky, its rusty voice rising shrilly. Anouk sings a wind-song to herself as she plays in her room:

March wind's an ill wind, my mother used to say. But in spite of that it feels good, smelling of sap and ozone and the salt of the distant sea. A good month, March, with February blowing out of the back door and spring waiting at the front. A good month for change..

For five minutes I stand alone in the square with my arms held out, feeling the wind in my hair. I have forgotten to bring a coat and my red skirt billows out around me. I am a kite, feeling the wind, rising in an instant above the church tower, rising above myself. For a moment I am disorientated, seeing the scarlet figure below in the square, at once here and there – falling back into myself, breathless, I see Reynaud's face staring out from a high window, his eyes dark with resentment. He looks pale, the bright sunlight barely grazing his skin with colour. His hands are clenched on the sill before him and his knuckles are the bleached whiteness of his. The wind has gone to my head. I send him a cheery wave as I turn to go back into the shop. He will see this defiance, I know, but this morning I do not care. The wind has blown my fears away. I wave to the Black Man in his tower, and the wind plucks gleefully at my skirts. I feel delirious, expectant.

Some of this new courage seems to have infused the people of Lansquenet. I watch them as they walk to church the children running into the wind with arms spread like kites, the dogs barking wildly at nothing, even the adults bright-faced, eyes streaming from the cold.

Caroline Clairmont in a new spring coat and hat, her son holding her by the arm. For a moment Luc glances at me, gives me a smile hidden by his hand. Josephine and Paul Marie Muscat, arms entwined like lovers, though her face is twisted and defiant beneath her brown beret. Her husband glares at me through the glass and quickens his step, his mouth working. I see Guillaume, without Charly today, though he still carries the bright plastic lead dangling from one wrist, a forlorn figure oddly bereft without his dog. Arnauld looks my way and nods. Narcisse stops to inspect a tub of geraniums by the door, rubs a leaf between his thick fingers, sniffs the green sap. He is sweet toothed in spite of his gruffness, and I know he will be in later for his mocha and chocolate truffles.

The bell slows to an insistent drone – domm! domm! as the people make their way through the open doors. I catch another glimpse of Reynaud – white-cassocked now, hands folded, solicitous – as he welcomes them in. I think he looks at me again, a brief flicker of the eyes across the square, a subtle stiffening of the spine beneath the robe but I cannot be sure.

I settle at the,counter, a cup of chocolate in my hand, to await the end of Mass.

The service was longer than usual. I suppose that as Easter approaches Reynaud's demands will become greater. It was over ninety minutes before the first people emerged furtively, heads bowed, the wind tugging impudently at headscarves and Sunday jackets, ballooning under skirts in sudden salaciousness, hurrying the flock across the square. Arnauld gave me a sheepish smile as he passed; no champagne truffles this morning. Narcisse came in as usual, but was even less communicative, pulling a paper out of his tweed coat and reading it in silence as he drank. Fifteen minutes later half the members of the congregation were still inside, and I guessed they must be awaiting confession. I poured more chocolate and drank. Sunday is a slow day. Better to be patient.

Suddenly I saw a familiar figure in a tartan coat slip through the half-open church door. Josephine glanced across the square, and, seeing it empty, ran across towards the shop. She noticed Narcisse and hesitated for a moment before deciding to come in. Her fists were clenched protectively in the pit of her stomach.

`I can't stay,' she said at once. `Paul's in confession. I've got two minutes.’

Her voice was sharp and urgent, the hurried words falling over themselves like dominoes in a line.

`You have to stay away from those people,' she blurted. `The travellers. You have to tell them to move on. Warn them.’

Her face worked with the effort of speaking. Her hands opened and closed.

I looked at her. `Please, Josephine. Sit down. Have a drink.’

`I can't!' She shook her head emphatically. Her wind, tangled hair blurred wildly around her face. `I told you I don't have time. Just do as I say. Please.’

She sounded strained and exhausted, looking towards the church door as if afraid of being seen with me.

`He's been preaching against them,' she told me in a fast, low tone. `And against you. Talking about you. Saying things.’

I shrugged indifferently. `So? What do I care?’

Josephine put her fists to her temples in a gesture of frustration. `You have to warn them,' she repeated. `Tell them to go. Warn Armande too. Tell her he read her name out this morning. And yours. He'll read mine out as well if he sees me here, and Paul-'

`I don't understand, Josephine. What can he do? And why should I care, anyway?’

`Just tell them, all right?’

Her eyes flicked warily to the church again, from which a few people were drifting. `I can't stay,' she said. `I have to go.’

She turned towards the door.

`Wait, Josephine-'

Her face as she turned back was a blur of misery. I could see that she was close to tears. `This always happens,' she said in a harsh, unhappy voice. `Whenever I find a friend he manages to ruin it for me. It'll happen the way it always does. You'll be well out of it by then, but me-' I took a step forward, meaning to steady her. Josephine pulled back with a clumsy gesture of warding.

`No! I can't! I know you mean well, but I just – can't!' She recovered with an effort. `You have to understand. I live here. I have to live here. You're free, you can go where you like, you-' `So can you,' I replied gently.

She looked at me then, touching my shoulder very briefly with the tips of her fingers.

`You don't understand,' she said without resentment. `You're different. For a while I thought maybe I could learn to be different too.’

She turned, her agitation leaving her, to be replaced by a look of distant, almost sweet, abstraction. She dug her hands into her pockets once mote.

`I'm sorry, Vianne,' she said. `I really tried. I know it isn't your fault.’

For a moment I saw a brief return of animation to her features. `Tell the river people,' she urged. `Tell them they have to go. It isn't their fault either – I just don't want anyone to be hurt,' finished Josephine softly. `All right?’

I shrugged. `No-one is going to be hurt,' I told her.

`Good.’

She gave a smile painful in its transparency. `And don't worry about me. I'm fine. I really am.’

Again that stretched, painful smile. As she edged past me through the door I caught a glimpse of something shiny in her hand, and saw that her coat pockets were stuffed with costume jewellery. Lipsticks, compacts, necklaces and rings spilled from between her fingers.

`Here. This is for you,' she said brightly, pushing a handful of looted treasure at me. `It's OK. I've got lots more.’

Then with a smile of dazzling sweetness she was off, leaving me with chains and earrings and pieces of bright plastic set in gilt weeping from my fingers onto the floor.

Later in the afternoon I took Anouk for a walk into Les Marauds. The travellers' camp looked cheery in the new sunlight, with washing flapping on lines drawn between the boats, and all the glass and paint gleaming. Armande was sitting in a rocking-chair in her sheltered front garden, watching the river. Roux and Mahmed were perched on the roof's steep incline, resetting the loose slates. I noticed that the rotten facia and the gable-ends had been replaced and repainted a bright yellow. I waved at the two men and sat on the garden wall next to Armande while Anouk raced off to the river bank to find her friends of last night.

The old lady looked tired and puffy-faced beneath the brim of a wide straw hat. The piece of tapestry in her lap looked listless, untouched. She nodded to me briefly, but did not speak. Her chair rocked almost imperceptibly, tick-tick-ticktick, on the path. Her cat slept curled beneath it.

'Caro came over this morning,' she said at last. `I suppose I should feel honoured.’

A movement of irritation.

Rocking; tick-tick-tick-tick.

`Who does she think she is?’ snapped Armande abruptly. `Marie Bloody Antoinette?’

She brooded fiercely for a moment, her rocking gaining momentum. `Trying to tell me what I can and can't do. Bringing her doctor-' She broke off to fix me with her piercing, birdlike gaze. `Interfering little busybody. She always was, you know. Always telling tales to her father.’

She gave a short bark of laughter. `She doesn't get these airs from me, in any case. Not on your life. I never needed any doctor – or any priest – to tell me what to think.’

Armande pushed out her chin defiantly and rocked even harder.

`Was Luc there?’ I asked.

`No.’

She shook her head. `Gone to Agen for a chess tournament.’

Her fixed expression softened. `She doesn't know he came over the other day,' she declared with satisfaction. `And she won't get to know, either.’

She smiled. `He's a good lad, my grandson. Knows how to hold his tongue.’

`I hear we were both mentioned in church this morning,' I told her. `Consorting with undesirables, so I'm told.’

Armande snorted. `What I do in my own house is my own business,' she said shortly. `I've told Reynaud, and I told Pere Antoine before him. They never learn, though. Always peddling the same old rubbish. Community spirit. Traditional values. Always the same tired old morality play.’

`So it's happened before?’ I was curious.

`Oh yes.’

She nodded emphatically. `Years ago. Reynaud must have been Luc's age in those days. Course, we've had travellers since then, but they never stayed. Not till now.’

She glanced upwards at her half-painted house. `It's going to look good, isn't it?’ she said with satisfaction. `Roux says he'll have it finished by tonight.’

She gave a sudden frown. 'I can have him work for me all I choose,', she declared irritably. `He's an honest man and a good worker. Georges has no right to tell me otherwise. No right at all.’

She picked up her unfinished tapestry, but put it down again without setting a stitch. `I can't concentrate,' she said crossly. `It's bad enough being woken up by those bells at the crack of dawn without having to look at Caro's simpering face first thing in the morning. "We pray for you every day, Mother,"' she mimicked. ` "We want you to understand why we worry so much about you.”

‘Worry about their own standing with the neighbours, more like. It's just too embarrassing to have a mother like me, reminding you all the time of how you began.’

She gave a small, hard smile of satisfaction. `While I'm alive they know there's someone who remembers everything,' she declared. `The trouble she got into with that boy. Who paid for that, eh? And him – Reynaud, Mr Whiter-than-White.’

Her eyes were bright and malicious. `I bet I'm the only one still alive who remembers that old business. Not many knew in any case. Could have been the biggest scandal in the county if I'd not known how to hold my tongue.’

She shot me a look of pure mischief. `And don't go looking at me like that, girl. I can still keep a secret. Why d'you think he leaves me alone? Plenty of things he could do, if he put his mind to it. Caro knows. She tried already.’

Armande chuckled gleefully – heh-hehheh.

`I'd rather understood Reynaud wasn't a local,' I said curiously.

Armande shook her head. `Not many people remember,' she said. `Left Lansquenet when he was a boy. Easier for everyone that way.’

For a moment she paused, reminiscing. 'But he'd better not try anything this tile. Not against Roux or any of his friends.’

The humour had gone from her face and she sounded older, querulous, ill. `I like them being here. They make me feel young.’

The small crabby hands plucked meaninglessly at the tapestry in her lap. The cat, sensing the movement, uncurled from beneath the rocking-chair and jumped onto her knees, purring. Armande scratched its head and it buzzed and butted at her chin with small playful gestures.

'Lariflete,' said Armande. After a moment I realized that was the cat's name. `I've had her nineteen years. That makes her nearly my age, in cat time.’

She made a small clucking sound at the cat, which purred louder. `I'm supposed to be allergic,' said Armande. `Asthma or something. I told them that I'd rather choke than get rid of my cats. Though there are some humans I could give up without a second thought.’

Lariflete whisker-twitched lazily. I looked across at the water and saw Anouk playing under the jetty with two black-haired river children. From what I could hear Anouk, the youngest of the three, seemed to be directing operations.

`Stay and have some coffee,' suggested Armande. `I was going to make some when you came along, anyway. I've got some lemonade for Anouk, too.’

I made the coffee myself in Armande's curious, small kitchen with its cast-iron range and low ceiling. Everything is clean there, but the one tiny window looks onto the river, giving the light a greenish underwater look. Hanging from the dark unpainted beams are bunches of dry herbs in their muslin sachets. On the whitewashed walls copper pans hang from hooks. The door like all the doors in the house – has a hole cut into the base to allow free passage to her cats. Another cat watched me curiously from a high ledge as I made the coffee in an enamelled tin pot. The lemonade, I noticed, was sugar free, and the sweetener in the basin was some kind of sugar substitute. In spite of her bravado, it seems as if she does take some precautions after all.

`Foul stuff,' she commented without rancour, sipping the drink from one of her hand-painted cups. `They say you can't taste the difference. But you can.’

She made a wry face.. 'Caro brings it when she comes. Goes through my cupboards. I suppose she means well. Can't help being a ninny.’

I told her she ought to take more care.

Armande snorted. `When you get to my age,' she told me, `things start to break down. If it isn't one thing, then it's another. It's a fact of life.’

She took another sip of the bitter coffee. `When he was sixteen Rimbaud said he wanted to experience as much as possible with the greatest possible intensity. Well, I'm going on eighty now, and I'm beginning to think he was right.’

She grinned, and I was again struck by the youthfulness of her face, a quality that has less to do with colouring or bone structure than with a kind of inner brightness and anticipation, the look of someone who has hardly begun to discover what life has to offer.

`I think you're probably too old to join the Foreign Legion,' I told her with a smile. `And didn't Rimbaud's experiences run rather to excess at times?’

Armande shot me an impish look. `That's right,' she replied. `I could do with a bit more excess. From now on I'm going to be immoderate – and volatile – I shall enjoy loud music and lurid poetry. I shall be rampant,' she declared with satisfaction.

I laughed. `You are quite absurd,' I said with mock severity. `No wonder your family despairs of you.’

But even though she laughed with me, rocking with merriment in her chair, what I recall now is not her laughter but what I glimpsed behind the laughter; that look of giddy abandon, desperate glee.

And it was only later, late into the night when I awoke sweating from some dark half-forgotten nightmare, that I remembered where I had seen that look before.

How about Florida, sweetheart? The Everglades? The Keys? How about Disneyland, cherie, or New York, Chicago, the Grand Canyon, Chinatown, New Mexico, the Rocky Mountains? But with Armande there was none of my mother's fear, none of her delicate parrying and wrangling with death, none of her mad hit-and-run flights of fantasy into the unknown. With Armande there was only the hunger, the desire, the terrible awareness of time.

I wonder what the doctor said to her this morning, and how much she really understands. I lay awake for a long time wondering, and when I finally slept, I dreamed of myself and Armande walking through Disneyland with Reynaud and Caro hand-in-hand as the Red Queen and the White Rabbit from Alice 's Adventures in Wonderland, with big, white, cartoon gloves on their hands. Caro had a red crown on her giant head, and Armande had a stick of candyfloss in each fist.

Somewhere in the distance I could hear the sounds of New York traffic, the blaring of horns getting closer.

`Oh my, oh don't eat that, it's poison,' squeaked Reynaud shrilly, but Armande went on gobbling candyfloss with both hands, her face glossy and self-possessed.- I tried to warn her about the cab, but she looked at me and said in my mother's voice, `Life's a carnival, cherie, more people die every year crossing the road, it's a statistical fact,' and went on eating in that terrible voracious way, and Reynaud turned towards me and squeaked, in a voice made all the more menacing for its lack of resonance, `This is all your fault, you and your chocolate festival, everything was ail right until you came along and now everyone's dying DYING DYING DYING-'

I held my hands out protectively. `It isn't me,' I whispered. `It's you, it's supposed to be you, you're the Black Man, you're-' Then I was falling backwards through the looking glass with cards spraying out in all directions around me nine of Swords, DEATH. Three of Swords, DEATH. The Tower, DEATH. The Chariot, DEATH.

I awoke screaming, with Anouk standing above me, her dark face blurry with sleep and anxiety. `Maman, what is it?’ Her arms are warm around my neck. She smells of chocolate and vanilla and peaceful untroubled sleep. `Nothing. A dream. Nothing.’

She croons to me in her small soft voice, and I have an unnerving impression of the world reversed, of myself melting into her like a nautilus into its spiral, round-around-around, of her hand cool on my forehead, her mouth against my hair.

`Out-out-out,' she murmurs automatically. `Evil spirits, get thee hence. It's OK now, Maman. All gone.’

I don't know where she picks these things up from. My mother used to say that, but I don't remember ever teaching Anouk. And yet she uses it like an old familiar formula. I cling to her for a moment, paralysed by love.

`It's going to be OK, isn't it, Anouk?’

`Of course.’

Her voice is clear and adult and self-assured. `Of course it is.’

She puts her head on my shoulder and curls sleepily into the circle of my arms. `I love you too, Maman.’

Outside the dawn is a moon shimmer away on the greying horizon. I hold my daughter tightly as she drifts back again into sleep, her curls tickling my face. Is this what my mother feared? I wonder as I listen to the birds- a single craw craw at first then a full congregation of them – was this what she fled? Not her own death, but the thousands of tiny intersections of her life with other, the broken connections, the links in spite of themselves, the responsibilities? Did we spend all those years running from our loves, our friendships, the casual words uttered in passing that can alter the course of a lifetime? I try to recall my dream, the face of Reynaud – his lost expression of dismay, I'm laze, I'm late – he, too, running from or into some unimaginable fate of which I am an unwitting part. But the dream has fragmented, its pieces scattered like cards in a high wind. Difficult to remember whether the Black Man pursues or is pursued. Difficult now to be sure whether he is the Black Man. Instead the face of the White Rabbit returns, like that of a frightened child on a carnivalwheel, desperate to get off.

`Who rings the changes?’

In my confusion I take the voice for someone else's; a second later I understand I have spoken aloud. But as I sink back towards sleep I am almost sure I hear another voice reply, a voice which sounds something like Armande's, something like my mother's.

You do, Vianne, it tells me softly. You do.