Chocolat

34

Wednesday March 26

STILL NO SIGN OF MUSCAT. JOSEPHINE STAYED AT La Praline for most of Monday, but yesterday morning decided to return to the café. Roux went with her this time, but all they found was the mess. It seems the rumours are right. Muscat has gone. Roux, who has finished Anouk's new bedroom in the attic, has already begun work on the café. New locks on the door, the old linoleum pulled up and the grimy curtains stripped from the windows. He thinks that with a little effort – a coat of whitewash on the rough walls, a lick of paint on the battered old furniture, a lot of soap and water – the bar could be made into a bright and welcoming place. He offered to do the work for free, but Josephine will not hear of it. Muscat has of course cleaned out their joint account, but she has a little money of her own, and she is sure the new café will be a success. The faded sign which has read Café de la Republique for the last thirty-five years has at last been pulled down. In its place, a bright red-and-white awning – the twin of my own – and a hand-painted sign from Clairmont's yard which reads Café des Marauds. Narcisse has planted geraniums in the wrought-iron window boxes and they trail down the walls, their scarlet buds opening in the sudden warmth. Armande watches with approval from her garden just down the hill.

`She's a good girl,' she tells me in her brusque way. `She'll manage now she's got rid of the sot she married.’

Roux is living temporarily in one of the cafe's spare rooms, and Luc has taken his place with Armande, much to the annoyance of his mother.

`It's not a fit place for you to stay,' she snaps shrilly. I am standing in the square as they come out of the church, he in his Sunday suit, she in another of her innumerable pastel outfits, a silk scarf knotted over her hair.

His reply is polite, immovable. `Just until the p-party,' he says. `There's no-one there to look after her. Sh-she might hhave another f-fit.’

`Rubbish!' Her tone is dismissive. `I'll tell you what she's doing. She's trying to drive a wedge between us. I forbid you, I absolutely forbid you to stay with her this week. And as for that ridiculous party-'

`I don't think you should f-forbid me, M-maman.’

`And why not? You're my son, damn it, you can't just stand there and tell me you'd rather obey that crazy old woman than me!' Her eyes fill with angry tears. Her voice wavers.

`It's all right, Maman.’

He is unmoved by the display, but puts an arm around her shoulder. `It won't be for long. Just until the party. I p-promise. You're invited too, you know. It would make her happy if you c-came.’

'I don't want to go!' Her voice is spiteful and teary, like a tired child's.

He shrugs. `Don't go, then. But d-don't expect her to listen to what you want, afterwards.’

She looks at him. `What do you mean?’

`I mean, I could t-talk to her. P-persuade her.’

He knows his mother, this clever boy. Understands her better than she knows. `I c-could bring her round,' he says. `But if you don't want to t-try-' 'I didn't say that.’

On a sudden impulse she puts her arms around him. `You're my clever boy,' she says, her poise regained. `You could do it, couldn't you?’

She plants a ringing kiss on his cheek and he submits patiently. `My good, clever boy,' she repeats caressingly, and they walk off together, arm-in-arm, the boy already taller than his mother and looking across at her with the attentive look of a tolerant parent to a volatile infant.

Oh, he knows.

With Josephine busy with her own affairs I have had little help with my Easter preparations; fortunately most of the work is done now, with only a few dozen remaining boxes to' make. I work in the evenings to make the cakes and truffles, the gingerbread bells and the gilded pains d'epices. I miss Josephine's light touch with the wrapping and the decoration, but Anouk helps me as best she can, fluffing out frills of Cellophane and pinning silk roses onto innumerable sachets.

I have hidden the front window as I work on Sunday's display, and the face of the shop looks much as it did when we arrived, with a screen of silver paper covering the glass. Anouk has decorated the screen with cut-outs of eggs and animals in coloured paper, and there is a large poster in the centre announcing:

GRAND FESTIVAL DU CHOCOLAT Sunday, Place St Jerome

Now that the school holidays have begun the square is abuzz, with children, pressing their noses to the glass in the hope of catching a glimpse of the preparations. I have already taken more than eight thousand francs in orders some from as far as Montauban and even Agen – and still they come, so that the shop is rarely empty. Caro's leaflet campaign seems to have ground to a halt. Guillaume tells me that Reynaud has assured his congregation that the chocolate festival has his absolute support, despite rumours spread by malicious gossips. Even so I sometimes see him watching me from his small window, and his eyes are hungry and hateful. I know he means me harm, but somehow his poison has been drawn. I try to ask Armande, who knows far more than she is telling, but she simply shakes her head.

`All that was a long time ago,' she tells me, deliberately vague. `My memory isn't what it was.’

Instead she wants to know every detail of the menu I have planned for her party, relishing everything in advance. She is brimming with suggestions. Brandade truffle, vol-aux-vents aux trois champignons, cooked in wine and cream with wild chantrelles as a garnish, grilled langoustines with rocket salad, five different types of chocolate cake, all her favourites, homemade chocolate ice-cream… Her eyes are bright with delight and mischief.

`Never had parties when I was a girl,' she explains. `Not a single one. Went to a dance once, over in Montauban, with a boy from the coast. Whee!' She made an expressive, lewd gesture. `Dark as treacle, he was, and as sweet. We had champagne and strawberry sorbet, and we danced…’

She sighed. `You should have seen me then, Vianne. You wouldn't believe it now. He said I looked like Greta Garbo, the flatterer, and we both pretended he meant it.’

She gave a low chuckle. `Course, he wasn't the marrying kind,' she, said philosophically. `They never are.’

I lie awake almost every night now, sugarplums dancing before my eyes. Anouk sleeps in her new attic bedroom and I dream, awake, doze, wake, dream, doze until my eyelids glitter with sleeplessness and the room pitches around me like a rolling ship. One more day, I tell myself. One more day.

Last night I got up and took my cards from the box where I promised they would stay. They felt cool between my fingers, cool and smooth as ivory, the colours fanning across my palms – blue-purple-green-black – the familiar pictures sliding in and out of my line of vision like flowers pressed between black sheets of glass. The Tower. Death. The Lovers. Death. The Six of Swords. Death. The Hermit. Death. I tell myself it doesn't mean anything. Mother believed it, but where did that get her? Running, running. The weathervane above St Jerome 's is silent now, eerily calm. The wind has stopped. The lull disturbs me more than the screeching of the old iron. The air is warm and sweet with the new scents of approaching summer. Summer comes quickly to Lansquenet in the wake of the March winds, and it smells of the circus; of sawdust and frying batter and cut green wood and animal shit. My mother inside me whispers: Time for a change. Armande's house is lit; I can see the small yellow square in the window from here, throwing out chequered light across the Tannes. I wonder what she is doing. She has not spoken to me directly about her plan since that one time. Instead she talks about recipes, the best way to lighten a sponge cake, the sugar-to-spirit ratio for the best cherries in brandy. I looked up her condition in my medical dictionary. The jargon is another kind of escape, obscure and hypothetical as the images on the cards. Inconceivable that these words could apply to real flesh. Her sight is diminishing, islands of darkness floating across her vision so that what she sees is pied, dappled, finally all but obscured. Then the dark.

I understand her situation. Why should she struggle to preserve for any longer a condition doomed to this inevitability? The thought of waste – my mother's thought, born from years of saving and uncertainty – is surely inappropriate here, I tell myself. Better the extravagant gesture, the blowout, bright lights and sudden darkness after. And yet something in me childishly wails unfair! Still hoping perhaps for the miracle. Again, my mother's thought. Armande knows better.

In the last weeks – the morphine was beginning to take over every moment and her eyes were a perpetual glaze she would lose touch with reality for hours, drifting between fantasies like a butterfly between flowers. Some were sweet, dreams of floating, of lights, out-of-the-body meetings with dead movie stars and beings from ethereal planes. Some were back-shot with paranoia. The Black Man was never far in these, lurking at street corners, sitting at the window of a diner, behind the counter of a notion's store. Sometimes he was a cab driver, his cab a black hearse like the ones you find in London, a baseball cap drawn down over his eyes. The word DODGERS was written on his cap, she said, and that was because he was on the lookout for her, for us, for all the ones who had dodged him in the past, but not for ever, she said, shaking her head wisely, never for ever. During one of these black spells she brought out a yellow plastic wallet and showed it to me. It was stuffed with newspaper-cuttings, mostly dated from the late sixties and early seventies. Most were in French, but some were in Italian, German, Greek. All dealt with kidnappings, disappearances, attacks on children.

`So easily done,' she told me, her eyes huge and vague. `Big places. So easy to lose a child. So easy to lose a child like you.’

She winked at me blearily. I patted her hand in reassurance.

`It's OK, Maman,' I said. `You were always careful. You looked out for me. I never did get lost.’

She winked again. `Oh, you were lost,' she said, grinning. `You were lo-ost.’

She stared into space for a while after that, smiling-grimacing, her hand like a bunch of dry twigs in mine. 'Looo-ssstt,' she repeated forlornly, and began to cry. I comforted her as best I could, stuffing the clippings back into the file. As I did I noticed that several dealt with the same case, the disappearance of eighteenmonth-old Sylviane Caillou in Paris. Her mother left her strapped in her car-seat for two minutes while she stopped at a chemist's, and when she returned the baby had gone.

Gone too were the changing-bag and the child's toys, a red plush elephant and a brown teddy bear.

My mother saw me looking at the article and smiled again. `I think you were two then,' she said in a sly voice. `Or nearly two. And she was much fairer than you were. Couldn't have been you, could it? And anyway, I was a better mother than she was.’

`Of course not,' I said. `You were a good mother, a wonderful mother. Don't worry. You wouldn't have done anything to put me at risk.’

Mother just rocked and smiled. `Careless,' she crooned. `Just careless. Didn't deserve a nice little girl like that, did she?’

I shook my head, feeling suddenly cold.

Childishly: `I wasn't bad, was I, Vianne?’

I shivered. The pages felt scaly beneath my fingers. `No,' I assured her. `You weren't bad.’

'I looked after you all right, didn't I? Never gave you up. Not even when that priest said – said what he said. I never.’

'No, Maman. You never did.’

The cold was paralysing now, making thought difficult. All I could think of was the name, so similar to mine, the dates… And didn't I remember that bear, that elephant, its plush worn down to the red sailcloth, carried indefatigably from Paris to Rome, Rome to Vienna? Of course it might have been one of her delusions.

There were others, like the snake under the bedclothes and the woman in the mirrors. It could have been make believe. So much of my mother's life was just that. And besides… after so long, what did it matter? At three I got up. The bed was hot and lumpy; sleep a million miles away. I lit a candle and took it into Josephine's empty bedroom. The cards were back in their old place in Mother's box, shifting eagerly beneath my grasp. The Lovers. The Tower. The Hermit. Death. Sitting cross-legged on the bare floor I shuffled them with something more than mere idleness. The Tower with its falling people, its walls crumbling, I could understand. It is my constant fear of displacement, the fear of the road, of loss. The Hermit with his hood and lantern looks very like Reynaud, his sly pale face half-hidden in shadows. Death I know very well, and I forked my fingers at the card – avert! – with the old automatic gesture. But the Lovers? I thought of Roux and Josephine so alike without knowing it, and could not suppress a prick of envy. And yet behind it I felt a sudden conviction that the card had not yet given up all its secrets. A scent of lilac spilled across the room. Maybe one of Mother's bottles had a broken seal. I felt warm even in spite of the night chill, fingers of heat reaching into the pit of my stomach. Roux? Roux? I turned the card over, in haste, with trembling fingers.

One more day. Whatever it is can wait one more day. I shuffled the cards again, but I do not have my mother's deft touch and they slipped out of my hands onto the wood. The Hermit fell face-up. He looked more like Reynaud than ever in the flickering candlelight. His face seemed to grin viciously in the shadows. I'll find a way, he promised slyly. You think you've won, but I'll still find a way. I could feel his malevolence at my fingertips.

Mother would have called it a sign.

Suddenly, on an impulse I only half understood, I picked up the Hermit and held him up to the candle flame. For a moment the flame flirted with the stiff card, then the surface began to bubble. The pallid face grimaced and blackened.

`I'll show you,' I whispered. `Try to interfere and I'll-.'

A gout of flame flared alarmingly and I dropped the card onto the boards. The flame extinguished, spraying sparks and ash onto the wood.

I felt jubilant. Who rings the changes now, Mother? And yet tonight I cannot rid myself of the feeling that I have somehow been manipulated, pushed into revealing what would have been better left alone. I did nothing, I tell myself. I intended no malice.

Still, tonight, I can't get the idea out of my mind. I feel light, insubstantial as milkweed fluff. Ready for any wind to blow away.