Chocolat

30

Tuesday March 18

JOSEPHINE COMMENTED ON MY SILENCE AS WE WORKED together. We have made three hundred of the Easter boxes since we began, stacked neatly in the cellar and tied with ribbons, but I plan for twice that many. If I can sell them all we will make a substantial profit, perhaps enough to settle here for good. If not – I do not think of that possibility, though the weathervane creaks laughter at me from its perch. Roux has already started work on Anouk's room in the loft. The festival is a risk, but our lives have always been determined by such things. And we have made every effort to make the festival a success. Posters have been sent as far as Agen and the neighbouring towns. Local radio will mention it every day of Easter week. There will be music – a few of Narcisse's old friends have formed a band – flowers, games. I spoke to some of the Thursday traders and there will be stalls in the square selling trinkets and souvenirs. An Easter-egg hunt for the children, led by Anouk and her friends, carnets-surprise for every entrant. And in La Celeste Praline, a giant chocolate statue of Eostre with a corn sheaf in one hand and a basket of eggs in the other, to be shared between the celebrants. Less than two weeks left. We make the delicate liqueur chocolates, the rose-petal clusters, the goldwrapped coins, the violet creams, the chocolate cherries and almond rolls in batches of fifty at a time, laying them out onto greased tins to cool. Hollow eggs and animal figures are carefully split open and filled with these. Nests of spun caramel with hard-shelled sugar eggs, each topped with a triumphantly plump chocolate hen; piebald rabbits heavy with gilded almonds stand in rows, ready to be wrapped and boxed; marzipan creatures march across the shelves. The smells of vanilla essence and cognac and caramelized apple and bitter chocolate fill the house.

And now there is Armande's party to prepare, too. I have a list of what she wants on order from Agen – foie gras, champagne, truffles and fresh chantrelles from Bordeaux, plateaux de fruits de mer from the traiteur in Agen. I will bring the cakes and chocolates myself.

`It sounds fun,' calls Josephine brightly from the kitchen, as I tell her about the party. I have to remind myself of my promise to Armande.

`You're invited,' I told her. `She said so.’

Josephine flushes with pleasure at the thought. `That's kind,' she says. `Everyone's been so kind.’

She is remarkably unembittered, I tell myself, ready to see kindness in everyone. Even Paul-Marie has not destroyed this optimism in her. His behaviour, she says, is partly her own fault. He is essentially weak; she should have stood up to him long ago. Caro Clairmont and her cronies she dismisses with a smile. `They're just foolish,' she tells me wisely.

Such a simple soul. She is serene now, at peace with the world. I find myself becoming less and less so, in a perverse spirit of contradiction. And yet I envy her. It has taken so little to bring her to this state. A little warmth, a few borrowed- clothes and the security of a spare room… Like a flower she grows towards the light, without thinking or examining the process which moves her to do so. I wish I could do the same.

I find myself returning to Sunday's conversation with Reynaud. What moves him is still as much of a mystery to me as it ever was. There is a look of desperation about him nowadays as he works in his churchyard, digging and hoeing furiously – sometimes bringing out great clumps of shrubs and flowers along with the weeds – the sweat running down his back and making a dark triangle against his soutane. He does not enjoy the exercise. I see his face as he works, features crunching with the effort. He seems to hate the soil he digs, to hate the plants with which he struggles. He looks like a miser forced to shovel banknotes into a furnace: hunger, disgust and reluctant fascination. And yet he never gives up. Watching him I feel a familiar pang of fear, though for what I am not sure. He is like a machine, this man, my enemy. Looking at him I feel strangely exposed by his scrutiny. It takes all my courage to meet his eyes, to smile, to pretend nonchalance.. inside me something screams and struggles frantically to escape. It is not simply the issue of the chocolate festival which enrages him. I know this as keenly as if I had picked it out of his bleak thoughts. It is my very existence which does so. To him I am a living outrage. He is watching me now, covertly from his unfinished garden, his eyes sliding sideways to my window then back to his work in sly satisfaction. We have not spoken since Sunday, and he thinks he has scored a point against me. Armande has not returned to La Praline, and I can see in his eyes that he believes himself to have been the cause of this. Let him think it if it makes him happy.

Anouk tells me he went to the school yesterday. He spoke about the meaning of Easter – harmless stuff, though it chills me somehow to think of my daughter in his care – read a story, promised to come again. I asked Anouk if he had spoken to her. `Oh yes,' she said blithely. `He's nice. He said I could come and see his church if I wanted. See St Francis and all the little animals.’

'And do you want to?’

Anouk shrugged. `Maybe,' she said.

I tell myself – in the small hours when everything seems possible and my nerves shriek like the unoiled hinges of the weathervane – that my fear is irrational. What could he do to us? How could he hurt us, even if that is his intention? He knows nothing. He can know nothing about us. He has no power.

Of course he has, says my mother's voice in me. He's the Black Man.

Anouk turns over restlessly in her sleep. Sensitive to my moods, she knows when I am awake and struggles towards wakefulness herself through a morass of dreams. I breathe deeply until she is under again.

The Black Man is a fiction, I tell myself firmly. An embodiment of fears underneath a carnival head. A tale for dark nights. Shadows in a strange room.

In lieu of an answer I see that picture again, bright as a transparency: Reynaud at an old man's bedside, waiting, his lips moving as if in prayer, fire at his back like sunlight through stained glass. It is not a comforting picture. There is something predatory in the priest's stance, a likeness between the two reddened faces, the glow of flame between them darkly menacing. I try to apply my studies in psychology. It is an image of the Black Man as Death, an archetype which reflects my fear of the unknown. The thought is unconvincing. The part of me that still belongs to my mother speaks with more eloquence.

You're my daughter, Vianne, she tells me inexorably. You know what that means.

It means moving on when the wind changes, seeing futures in the turn of a card, our lives a permanent fugue.

`I'm nothing special.’ I am barely aware that I have spoken aloud.

`Maman?’ Anouk's voice, doughy with sleep.

'Shh,' I tell her. 'It isn't morning yet. Sleep some more.’

`Sing me a song, Maman,' she murmurs, reaching out her hand to me in the darkness. `Sing me the song about the wind again.’

And so I sing, listening to my own voice against the small sounds of the weathervane:

V’la l'bon vent, V'la l'joli vent

V'la l'bon vent, ma vie m'appelle

V'la l'bon vent, V'la l'joli vent

V'la l'bon vent, ma mie m'attend.

After a while I begin to hear Anouk's breathing steady again, and I know she is sleeping. Her hand still rests in mine, soft with sleep. When Roux has finished the work on the house she will have a room of her own again and we will both sleep more easily. Tonight feels too close to those hotel rooms which we shared, my mother and 1, bathed in the moisture of our own breathing, with condensation running down the windows and the sounds of the traffic, interminable, outside.

V’la l'bon vent, V'la l'joli vent…

Not this time, I promise myself silently. This time we stay. Whatever happens. But even as I slide back into sleep I find myself considering the thought, not only with longing, but with disbelief.