Chocolat (21 page)

THIRTY

   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.

THIRTY-ONE

       Wednesday, March 19

       THERE SEEMS TO BE LESS ACTIVITY AT THE ROCHER woman’s shop these days. Armande Voizin has stopped visiting, though I have seen her a few times since her recovery, walking with a determined stride and with only a little help from her stick. Guillaume Duplessis is often with her, trailing that skinny puppy of his, and Luc Clairmont goes down to Les Marauds every day. On learning that her son has been seeing Armande in secret, Caroline Clairmont gives a smirk of chagrin.

       “I can’t do a thing with him these days, pere,” she complains. “Such a good boy, such an obedient boy one moment, and the next?” She raised her manicured hands to her bosom in a theatrical gesture.

       “I only told him — in the mildest possible way — that perhaps he should have told me he was going to visit his grandmother.” She sighed. “As if he thought I would disapprove, silly boy. Of course I don’t, I told him. It’s wonderful that you get on with her as well as you do — after all, you’re going to inherit everything one day — and suddenly he’s shouting at me and saying he doesn’t care about the money, that the reason he didn’t want me to know was that he knew I’d spoil everything, that I was an interfering bible groupie — her words, pere, I’d stake my life on that.” She brushed her eyes with the back of her hand, taking care not to smudge her impeccable make-up.

       “What have I done, pere?” she pleaded. “I’ve done everything for that boy, given him everything. And to see him turn away from me, to throw it all in my face because of that woman…” Her voice was hard beneath the tears: “Sharper than a serpent’s tooth,” she moaned. “You can’t imagine what it’s like for a mother, pere.”

       “Oh, you’re not the only person to have suffered from Madame Rocher’s well-intentioned meddling,” I told her. “Look around you at the changes she’s made in just a few weeks.”

       Caroline sniffed. “Well-intentioned! You’re too kind, pere,” she sneered. “She’s malicious, that’s what she is. She nearly killed my mother, turned my son against me…”

       I nodded encouragingly.

       “Not to mention what she’s done to the Muscats’ marriage,” continued Caroline. “It amazes me that you’ve had so much patience, pere. It really does.” Her eyes glittered with spite. “I’m surprised you haven’t used your influence, pere,” she said.

       I shrugged. “Oh, I’m just a country priest,” I said. “I don’t have any influence as such. I can disapprove, but?.”

       “You can do a sight more than disapprove,” snapped Caroline tautly. “We should have listened to you in the first place, pere. We should never have tolerated her here.”

       I shrugged. “Anyone can say that with hindsight,” I reminded her. “Even you patronized her shop, if I remember.”

       She flushed. “Well, we could help you now,” she said. “Paul Muscat, Georges, the Arnaulds, the Drous, the Prudhommes…We could pull together. Spread the word. We could turn the tide against her, even now.”

       “For what reason? The woman hasn’t broken the law. They’d call it malicious gossip, and you’d be no better off than before.”

       Caroline gave a narrow smile. “We could wreck her precious festival, that’s for sure,” she said.

       “Oh?”

       “Of course.” Intensity of feeling makes her ugly. “Georges sees a lot of people. He’s a wealthy man. Muscat, too, has influence. He sees people. He’s persuasive; the Residents’ Committee…”

       Of course he is. I remember his father, the summer of the river-gypsies.

       “If she makes a loss on the festival — and I hear she’s put quite a sum into preparing it already — then she might be pressured ?”

       “She might,” I replied mildly. “Of course I couldn’t be seen to have any part of it. It might look — uncharitable.”

       I could tell from her expression that she understood perfectly.

       “Of course, mon pere.” Her voice is eager and spiteful. For a second I feel utter contempt for her, panting and fawning like a bitch in heat, but it is with such contemptible tools, pere, that our work is often done.

       After all, pere, you should know.

THIRTY-TWO

      Friday, March 21

       THE LOFT IS ALMOST FINISHED, the plaster still wet in patches but the new window, round and brass-bound like a ship’s porthole, complete. Tomorrow Roux will lay the floorboards, and when they are finally polished and varnished, we will move Anouk’s bed into her new room. There is no door. A trapdoor is the only entrance, with a dozen steps leading upwards. Already Anouk is very excited. She spends much of her time with her head through the trapdoor, watching and giving precise instructions on what needs to be done. The rest she spends with me in the kitchen, watching the preparations for Easter. Jeannot is often with her. They sit together by the kitchen door, both talking at once. I have to bribe them to go away. Roux seems more like his old self since Armande’s illness, whistling as he puts the final touches to Anouk’s walls. He has done an excellent job, though he regrets the loss of his tools. The ones he is using, hired from Clairmont’s yard, are inferior, he says. As soon as he can, he will buy more.

       “There’s a place in Agen selling old river-boats,” he told me today over chocolate and eclairs. “I could get an old hulk and fix it up over the winter. I could make it nice and comfortable.”

       “How much money would you need?”

       He shrugged. “Maybe five thousand francs to begin with, maybe four. It depends.”

       “Armande would lend it to you.”

       “No.” He is immovable on this issue. “She’s done enough already.” He traced a circle around the rim of his cup with his forefinger. “Besides, Narcisse has offered me a job,” he told me. “At the nursery, then helping with the vendanges in the grape season, then there’s the potatoes, beans, cucumbers, aubergines…Enough work to keep me busy till November.”

       “That’s good.” A sudden wave of warmth for his enthusiasm, for the return of his good spirits. He looks better too, more relaxed and without that dreadful look of hostility and suspicion which shuttered his face like a haunted house. He has spent the last few nights at Armande’s house, at her request.

       “In case I have another one of my turns,” she says seriously, with a comic look at me behind his back. Deception or not, I am glad of his presence there.

       Not so Caro Clairmont: she came into La Praline on Wednesday morning with Joline Drou, ostensibly to discuss Anouk. Roux was sitting at the counter, drinking mocha. Josephine who still seems afraid of Roux, was in the kitchen, packaging chocolates. Anouk was still finishing her breakfast, her yellow bowl of chocolat au fait and half a croissant on the counter in front of her. The two women gave sugary smiles to Anouk, and looked at Roux with wary disdain. Roux gave them one of his insolent stares.

       “I hope I’m not coming at an inconvenient moment?” Joline has a smooth, practised voice, all concern and sympathy. Beneath it, however, nothing but indifference.

       “Not at all. We were just having breakfast. Can I offer you a drink?”

       “No’ no. I never have breakfast.”

       A coy glance at Anouk, which she, head in her breakfast-bowl, failed to notice.

       “I wonder if I might talk to you,” said Joline sweetly. “In private.”

       “Well, you could,” I told her. “But I’m sure you don’t need to. Can’t you say whatever it is here? I’m sure Roux won’t mind.” Roux grinned, and Joline looked sour. “Well, it’s a little delicate,” she said.

       “Then are you sure I’m the person you should be talking to? I would have thought Cure Reynaud far more appropriate?”

       “No, I definitely wish to speak to you,” said Joline, between compressed lips.

       “Oh.” Politely: “What about?”

       “It concerns your daughter.” She gave me a brittle smile. “As you know, I am in charge of her class at school.”

       “I do know.” I poured another mocha for Roux. “What’s wrong? Is she backward? Is she having problems?”

       I know perfectly well that Anouk has no problems. She has read voraciously since she was four and a half. She speaks English almost as well as French, a legacy from our New York days.

       “No, no,” Joline assures me. “She’s a very bright little girl.” A quick glance flutters in Anouk’s direction, but my daughter seems too much absorbed in finishing her croissant. Slyly, because she thinks I am not watching, she sneaks a chocolate mouse from the display and pushes it into the middle of the pastry to approximate a pain au chocolat.

       “Her behaviour, then?” I ask with exaggerated concern. “Is she disruptive? Disobedient? Impolite?”

       “No, no. Of coursenot. Nothing like that.”

       “What then?”

       Caro looks at me with a vinegary expression. “Curb Reynaud has visited the school several times this week,” she informs me. “To talk to the children about Easter, and the meaning of the Church’s festival, and so on.”

       I nodded encouragingly. Joline gave me another of her compassionate smiles.

       “Well, Anouk seems to be”— a coy glance in Anouk’s direction — “well, not exactly disruptive, but she’s been asking him some very strange questions.” Her smile narrowed between twin brackets of disapproval.

       “Very strange questions,” she repeated.

       “Oh well,” I said lightly. “She’s always been curious. I’m sure you wouldn’t like to discourage the spirit of enquiry in any of your pupils. And besides,” I added mischievously, “don’t tell me there’s any subject that Monsieur Reynaud isn’t equipped to answer questions on.”

       Joline simpered, protesting. “It upsets the other children, Madame,” she said tightly.

       “Oh?”

       “It seems Anouk has been telling them that Easter isn’t really a Christian festival at all, and that Our Lord is”— she paused, embarrassed — “that Our Lord’s resurrection is a kind of throwbackto some corn god or other. Some fertility deity from pagan times.” She gave a forced laugh, but her voice was chilly.

       “Yes.” I touched Anouk’s curls briefly. “She’s a well-read little thing, aren’t you, Nanou?”

       “I was only asking about Eostre,” said Anouk stoutly. “Cure Reynaud says nobody celebrates it any more, and I told him we did.”

       I hid my smile behind my hand. “I don’t suppose he understands, sweetheart,” I told her. “Perhaps you shouldn’t ask so many questions, if it upsets him.”

       “It upsets the children, Madame,” said Joline.

       “No, it doesn’t,” retorted Anouk. “Jeannot says we should have a bonfire when it comes, and have red and white candles, and everything. Jeannot says?”

       Caroline interrupted her. “Jeannot seems to have said a great deal,” she observed.

       “He must take after his mother,” I said. Joline looked affronted. “You don’t seem to be taking this very seriously,” she said, the smile slipping a little.

       I shrugged. “I don’t see a problem,” I told her mildly. “My daughter participates in class discussion. Isn’t that what you’re telling me?”

       “Some subjects shouldn’t be open to discussion,” snapped Caro, and for a moment, beneath that pastel-sweetness I saw her mother in her, imperious and overbearing. I liked her better for showing a little spirit. “Some things should be accepted on faith, and if the child had any proper moral grounding?” She bit off the sentence in confusion. “Far be it from me to tell you how to raise your child,” she finished in a flat voice.

       “Good,” I said with a smile. “I should have hated to quarrel with you.” Both women looked at me with the same expression of baffled dislike.

       “Are you sure you won’t have a drink of chocolate?”

       Caro’s eyes slid longingly over the display, the pralines, truffles, amandines and nougats, the Eclairs, florentines, liqueur cherries, frosted almonds.

       “I’m surprised the child’s teeth aren’t rotten,” she said tautly.

       Anouk grinned, displaying the offending teeth. Their whiteness seemed to add to Caro’s displeasure. “We’re wasting our time here,” she remarked coolly to Joline.

       I said nothing, and Roux sniggered. In the kitchen I could hear Josephine’s little radio playing. For a few seconds there was no sound but the tinny squeak of the speaker against the tiles.

       “Come on,” said Caro to her friend. Joline looked uncertain, hesitant.

       “I said come on!” With a gesture of irritation she swept out of the shop with Joline in her wake. “Don’t think I don’t know what you’re playing at,” she spat in lieu of goodbye, then they were both gone, their high heels clacking against the stones as they crossed the square to St Jerome’s.

       The next day we found the first of the leaflets. Scrunched up into a ball and tossed into the street, Josephine picked it up as she was sweeping the pavement and brought it into the shop. A single page of typescript, photocopied onto pink paper then folded into two. It was unsigned, but something about the style suggested its possible author.

       The title: ‘Easter and the Return to Faith’. I scanned the sheet quickly. Much of the text was predictable. Rejoicing and self-purification, sin and the joys of absolution and prayer. But halfway down the page; in bolder text than the rest, was a sub-heading which caught my eye.

       The New Revivalists: Corrupting the Spirit of Easter. There will always be a small minority of people who attempt to use our Holy traditions for personal gain. The greetings card industry. The supermarket chains. Even more sinister are those people who claim to revive ancient traditions, involving our children in pagan practices in the guise of amusement. Too many of us see these. as harmless, and view them with tolerance. Why else should our community have allowed a so-called Chocolate Festival to take place outside our church on the very morning of Easter Sunday? This makes a mockery of everything Easter stands for. We urge you to boycott this so-called Festival and all similar events, for the sake of your innocent children.

       CHURCH, not CHOCOLATE, is the TRUE MESSAGE of EASTER!

       “Church, not chocolate.” I laughed. “Actually, that’s a pretty good slogan. Don’t you think?”

       Josephine was looking anxious. “I don’t understand you,” she said. “You don’t seem worried at all.”

       “Why should I worry?” I shrugged. “It’s only a leaflet. And I’m certain I know who produced it.”

       She nodded. “Caro.” Her tone was emphatic. “Caro and Joline. It’s exactly their style. All that stuff about their innocent children.” She gave a snort of derision. “But people listen to them, Vianne. It might make people think twice about coming. Joline’s our schoolteacher. And Caro’s a member of the Residents’ Committee.”

       “Oh?” I didn’t know there even was a Residents’ Committee. Self-important bigots with a taste for gossip. “So what can they do? Arrest everybody?”

       Josephine shook her head. “Paul’s on that committee, too,” she said in a low voice.

       “So?”

       “So you know what he can do,” said Josephine desperately. I have noticed that in times of stress she reverts to her old mannerisms, digging her thumbs into her breastbone. “He’s crazy, you know he is: He’s just?”

       She broke off miserably, fists clenched. Again I had the impression that she wanted to tell me something, that she knew something. I touched her hand, reaching gently for her thoughts, but saw nothing more than before: smoke, grey and greasy, against a purple sky.

       Smoke! My hand tightened around hers. Smoke! Now that I knew what I was seeing I could make out details: his face a pale blur in the dark, his slicing, triumphant grin. She looked at me in silence, her eyes dark with knowledge.

       “Why didn’t you tell me?” I said at last.

       “You can’t prove it,” said Josephine. “I didn’t tell you anything.”

       “You didn’t need to. Is that why you’re afraid of Roux? Because of what Paul did?”

       She put up her chin stubbornly. “I’m not afraid of him.”

       “But you won’t talk to him. You won’t even stay in the same room with him. You can’t look him in the eye.”

       Josephine folded her arms with the look of a woman who has nothing more to say.

       Josephine I turned her face towards mine, forced her to look at me. “Josephine?”

       “All right.” Her voice was harsh and sullen. “I knew, all right? I knew what Paul was going to do. I told him I’d tell if he tried anything, I’d warn them. That was when he hit me.” She gave me a venomous look, her mouth halfbroken with unshed tears. “So I’m a coward,” she said in a loud, shapeless voice. “Now you know what I am; I’m not brave like you, I’m a liar and a coward. I let him do it, someone could have been killed, Roux could have been killed or Zezette or her baby and it would all have been my fault!” She took a long grating breath.

       “Don’t tell him,” she said. “I couldn’t stand it.”

       “I won’t tell Roux,” I told her gently. “You’re going to do that.”

       She shook her head wildly. “I’m not. I’m not. I couldn’t.”

       “It’s all right, Josephine” I coaxed. “It wasn’t your fault. And no-one was killed, were they?”

       Stubbornly: “I couldn’t. I can’t.”

       “Roux isn’t like Paul,” I said. “He’s more like you than you imagine.”

       “I wouldn’t know what to say.” Her hands twisted. “I wish he’d just leave,” she said fiercely. “I wish he could just take his money and go somewhere else.”

       “No you don’t,” I told her. “Besides, he isn’t going to.” I told her what he had said to me about his job with Narcisse, and about the boat in Agen. “He deserves at least to know who’s responsible,” I insisted. “That way he’ll understand that only Muscat is to blame for what happened, and that no-one else hates him here. You should understand that, Josephine. You know what it’s like to feel the way he feels.” Josephine sighed.

       “Not today,” she said. “I’ll tell him, but some other time. OK?”

       “It won’t ever be any easier than it is today,” I warned. “Do you want me to come with you?”

       She stared at me. “Well, he’ll be due a break soon,” I explained. “You could take him a cup of chocolate.”