Chocolat (16 page)

       She stopped abruptly and looked at her watch. “I’ve talked too much,” she said in surprise. “I won’t have time for any chocolate if I’m going to catch my bus.”

       I looked at her. “Have the chocolate instead of the bus,” I told her. “On the house. I only wish it could have been champagne.”

       “I have to go,” she said fractiously. Her fists dug repeatedly into her stomach. Her head dropped like a charging bull’s.

       “No.” I looked at her. “You have to stay here. You have to fight him face to face. Otherwise you may as well never have left him.”

       She returned my look for a moment, half-defiant. “I can’t.” There was a desperate note in her voice. “I won’t be able to. He’ll say things, he’ll twist everything…”

       “You have friends here,” I said gently. “And even if you don’t realize it yet, you’re strong.”

       Then Josephine sat down, very deliberately, on one of my red stools, put her face against the counter and cried silently.

       I let her. I didn’t say it would be OK. I made no effort to comfort her. Sometimes it’s better to leave things as they are, to let grief take its course. Instead I went into the kitchen and very slowly prepared the chocolat espresso. By the time I’d poured it, added cognac and chocolate chips, put the cups onto a yellow tray with a wrapped sugar lump in each saucer, she was calm again. It’s a small kind of magic, I know, but it sometimes works..

       “Why did you change your mind?” I asked when the cup was half-finished. “Last time we talked about this you seemed very sure you weren’t going to leave Paul.”

       She shrugged, deliberately avoiding meeting my eyes. “Was it because he hit you again?”

       This time she looked surprised. Her hand went to her forehead where the broken skin looked angry, inflamed. “No.”

       “Then why?”

       Her eyes slid from mine again. With her fingertips she touched the espresso cup, as if to test its reality. “Nothing. I don’t know. Nothing.”

       It is a lie, and a visible one. Automatically I reach for her thoughts, so open a moment ago. I need to know if I made her do it, if I forced her in spite of my good intentions. But for the moment her thoughts are formless, smoky. I can see nothing there but darkness.

       To press her would have been useless. There is a stubborn streak in Josephine which refuses to be hurried. She will tell me in time. If she wants to.

       It was evening before Muscat came looking for her. By then we had made up her bed in Anouk’s room — for the moment Anouk will sleep on the camp bed beside me. She takes Josephine’s arrival in her stride, as she accepts so many other things. I knew a momentary pang for my daughter, for the first room of her own she had ever had, but promised it would not be for long.

       “I have an idea,” I told her. “Perhaps we could have the attic space beneath the roof made into a room just for you, with a ladder to climb up, and a trapdoor above it, and little round windows cut into the roof. Would you like that?”

       It is a dangerous, beguiling notion. It suggests we are going to stay here a long time.

       “Could I see the stars from up there?” asked Anouk eagerly.

       “Of course.”

       “Good!” said Anouk, and bounced upstairs to tell Pantoufle.

       We sat down to table in the cramped kitchen. The table was left from the shop’s bakery days, a massive piece of rough-cut pine cross-hatched with knife scars into which veins of ancient dough, dried to the consistency of cement, have worked to produce a smooth marbly finish. The plates are mismatched: one green, one white, Anouk’s flowered. The glasses, too, are all different: one tall, one short, one which still bears the label Moutarde Amora. And yet this is the first time we have really owned such things. We used hotel crockery, plastic knives and forks. Even in Nice, where we lived for over a year, the furnishings were borrowed, leased with the shop. The novelty of possession is still an exotic thing to us, a precious thing, intoxicating. I envy the table its scars, the scorch marks caused by the hot bread tins. I envy its calm sense of time and I wish I could say: I did this five years ago. I made this mark, this ring caused by a wet coffee cup, this cigarette burn, this ladder of cuts against the wood’s coarse grain. This is where Anouk carved her initials, the year she was six years old, this secret place behind the table leg. I did this on a warm day seven summers ago with the carving knife. Do you remember? Do you remember the summer the river ran dry? Do you remember?

       I envy the table’s calm sense of place. It has been here a long time. It belongs.
* * * *

       Josephine helped me prepare dinner: a salad of green beans and tomatoes in spiced oil, red and black olives from the Thursday market stall, walnut bread, fresh basil from Narcisse, goat’s cheese, red wine from Bordeaux. We talked as we ate, but not about Paul-Marie Muscat. Instead I told her about us, Anouk and I, of the places we had seen, of the chocolaterie in Nice, of our time in New York just after Anouk was born and of the times before, of Paris, of Naples, of all the stopping-places Mother and I had made into temporary homes in our long flight across the world. Tonight I want to recall only the bright things, the funny, the good things. There are too many sad thoughts in the air already. I put a white candle on the table to clear bad influences, and its scent is nostalgic, comforting. I remembered for Josephine the little canal at Ourcq, the Pantheon, the Place des Artistes, the lovely avenue of Unter den Linden, the Jersey ferry, Viennese pastries eaten in their hot papers on the street, the seafront at Juan-les-Pins, dancing in the streets in San Pedro. I watched her face lose a little of its set expression. I remembered how Mother sold a donkey to a farmer in a village near Rivoli, and how the creature kept finding us again, time after time, almost as far as Milan. Then the story of the flower-sellers in Lisbon, and how we left that city in a refrigerated florist’s van which delivered us half frozen four hours later by the hot white docks at Porto. She began to smile, then to laugh. There were times when we had money, Mother and I, and Europe was sunny and full of promise. I remembered them tonight; the Arab gentleman in the white limousine who serenaded Mother that day in San Remo, how we laughed and how happy she was, and how long we lived afterwards on the money he gave us.

       “You’ve seen so much.” Her voice was envious and a little awed. “And you’re still so young.”

       “I’m nearly the same age as you.”

       She shook her head. “I’m a thousand years old.” She gave a smile which was both sweet and wistful. “I’d like to be an adventurer,” she said. “To follow the sun with nothing but a single suitcase, to have no idea at all of where I might be tomorrow.”

       “Believe me,” I told her gently, “you get tired. And after a while everywhere starts to look the same.”

       She looked doubtful.

       “Trust me,” I said. “I mean it.”

       It isn’t quite true. Places all have their own characters, and returning to a city where you have lived before is like coming home to an old friend. But the people begin to look the same; the same faces recurring in cities a thousand miles apart, the same expressions. The flat, hostile stare of the official. The curious look of the peasant. The dull unsurprised faces of the tourists. The same lovers, mothers, beggars, cripples, vendors, joggers, children, policemen, taxi-drivers, pimps. After a while one begins to feel slightly paranoid, as if these people were secretly following from one town to another, changing clothes and faces but remaining essentially unchanged, going about their dull business with half an eye slyly cocked at us, the intruders. At first one feels a kind of superiority. We are a race apart, we the travellers. We have seen, experienced, so much more than they. Content to run out their sad lives in an endless round of sleep-work-sleep, to tend their neat gardens, their identical suburban houses, their small dreams; we hold them in a little contempt. Then, after a while, comes envy. The first time it is almost funny; a sharp sudden sting which subsides nearly straight away. A woman in a park, bending over a child in a pushchair, both faces lit by something which is not the sun. Then comes the second time, the third; two young people on the seafront, arms intertwined; a group of office-girls on their lunchbreak, giggling over coffee and croissants…before long it is an almost constant ache. No, placesdo not lose their identity, however far one travels. It is the heart which begins to erode after a time. The face in the hotel mirror seems blurred some mornings, as if by too many casual looks. By ten the sheets will be laundered, the carpet swept. The names on the hotel registers change as we pass. We leave no trace as we pass on. Ghostlike, we cast no shadow.

       I was roused from my thoughts by the imperious knocking at the front door. Josephine half-stood, fear starting in her eyes, both fists clenched against her ribs. It was what we had been waiting for; the meal, the conversation, merely a pretence at normality. I stood up.

       “It’s OK,” I told her. “I won’t let him in.”

       Her eyes were glazed with fear. “I’m not talking to him,” she said in a low voice. “I can’t.”

       “You may have to,” I answered. “But it’s all right. He can’t walk through walls.”

       She gave a shaky smile. “I don’t even want to hear his voice,” she said. “You don’t know what he’s like. He’ll say…”

       I began to move towards the unlit shop area. “I know exactly what he’s like,” I said firmly. “And whatever you might think, he isn’t unique. The advantage of travel is that after a while you begin to realize that wherever you go most people aren’t really all that much different.”

       “I just hate scenes,” murmured Josephine quietly as I put on the shop lights. “And I hate shouting.”

       “Soon be over,” I said as the hammering began again. “Anouk can make you some chocolate.”

       The door is on a safety-chain. I put it on when we arrived, being used to city security, though there was never a need for it until now. In the slice of light from the shop, Muscat’s face is congested with rage.

       “Is my wife here?” His voice is thick and beery, his breath foul.

       “Yes.” There is no reason for subterfuge. Better have it out now and show him where he stands. “I’m afraid she has left you, Monsieur Muscat. I offered to let her sleep here for a few nights, until things are sorted out. It seemed the best thing to do.” I try to make my voice neutral, polite. I know his type. We met it a thousand times, Mother and I, in a thousand places. He gapes at me in stupefaction. Then the mean intelligence in his eyes takes over, his gaze narrows, his hands open to show that he is harmless, bewildered, ready to be amused. For a moment he seems almost charming. Then he takes a step closer towards the door. I can smell the rankness of his breath, like beer and smoke and sour anger.

       “Madame Rocher.” His voice is soft, almost appealing. “I want you to tell that fat cow of mine to get her arse out of there right now, or I’ll be in to get her. And if you get in my way, you bra-burning bitch…” He rattles at the door.

       “Take the chain off.” He is smiling, wheedling, his rage burning from him with a faint chemical stink. “I said take the fucking chain off before I kick it off!” His voice is womanish in anger. His squeal sounds like that of an angry pig.

       Very slowly I explain the situation to him. He swears and shrieks his frustration. He kicks at the door several times, making the hinges wince.

       “If you break into my house, Monsieur Muscat,” I tell him evenly, “I’ll assume you’re a dangerous intruder. I keep a can of Contre-Attaq’ in my kitchen drawer, which I used to carry when I lived in Paris. I’ve tried it once or twice. It’s very effective.”

       The threat calms him. I suspect he believes he alone has the right to make threats. “You don’t understand,” he whines. “She’s my wife. I care for her. I don’t know what she’s been telling you, but…”

       “What she’s been telling me doesn’t matter, Monsieur. The decision is hers. If I were you I’d stop making an exhibition of myself, and go home.”

       “Fuck that!” His mouth is so close to the door that his spittle peppers me with hot, foul shrapnel. “This is your fault, you bitch. You started filling her head with all this emancipation bullshit.” He mimics Josephine’s voice in a savage falsetto. “Oh, it was all Vianne says this, and Vianne thinks that. Let me talk to her for just one minute and we’ll see what she says for a change.”

       “I don’t think that’s…”

       “It’s all right.” Josephine has come up behind me, softly, a cup of chocolate held between her folded hands as if to warm them. “I’ll have to talk to him, or he’ll never go away.”

       I look at her. She is calmer, her eyes clear. I nod. “OK.”

       I step aside and Josephine goes to the door. Muscat begins to talk but she cuts him short, her voice surprisingly sharp and even. “Paul. Just listen to me.”

       Her tone slices through his blustering, silencing him mid-phrase. “Go away. I’ve nothing more to say to you. All right?”

       She is shaking, but her voice is calm and level. I feel a sudden rush of pride for her, and give her arm a reassuring squeeze. Muscat is silent for a moment. Then the wheedling tone returns to his voice, though I can still hear the rage behind it, like the buzz of interference on a distant radio signal.

       “Jose,” he says softly, “this is stupid. Just come out and we can talk about it properly. You’re my wife, Jose. Doesn’t that deserve at least, another try?”

       She shakes her head. “Too late, Paul,” she tells him in a tone of finality. “I’m sorry.”

       Then she shut the door very gently, very firmly, and though he hammered on it for several minutes longer, swearing and cajoling and threatening by turns, even weeping as he became maudlin and began to believe his own fiction, we did not answer it again.

       At midnight I heard him shouting outside, and a clod of earth hit the window with a dull thumping sound, leaving a smear of clay across the clear glass. I stood up to see what was happening and saw Muscat like a squat, malevolent goblin in the square below, his hands thrust deep into his pockets so that I could see the soft roll of his stomach above the waistband of his trousers. He looked drunk.