Peaches for Monsieur Le Curé, Page 2

  And now that wind was blowing again. Blowing from beyond the grave, prettily scented with peaches—

  Bring the children.

  Well, why not?

  Call it a holiday, I thought. A reason to leave the city behind; to give Rosette a place to play; to give Anouk the chance to revisit old friends. And yes, I do miss Lansquenet; the dun-coloured houses; the little streets that stagger down towards the Tannes; the narrow ribs of farmland that stretch across the blue hills. And Les Marauds, where Armande lived; the old deserted tanneries; the half-timbered derelict houses leaning like drunks into the path of the Tannes, where the river-gypsies moored their boats and lit their campfires along the river …

  Take a trip back to Lansquenet. Bring the children.

  What harm could it do?

  I never promised anything. I never meant to change the wind. But if you could travel back through Time, and find yourself as you used to be, wouldn’t you try, just once at least, to give her some kind of warning? Wouldn’t you want to make things right? To show her that she’s not alone?

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Saturday, 14th August

  A NOUK RECEIVED the news of our trip with vivid, touching enthusiasm. Her schoolfriends are mostly away for August, and with Jean-Loup still in hospital, she spends too much of her time alone and sleeps more than is good for her. She needs to get away for a while – as do we all, I realize. And Paris is dreadful in August; a ghost city, crushed in a fist of heat; shuttered shops, streets bare of everything but tourists, with their rucksacks and their baseball caps and the traders who follow like swarms of flies.

  I told her we were going south.

  ‘To Lansquenet?’ she said at once.

  I hadn’t expected that. Not yet. Perhaps she read my colours. But her face lit up at once, and her eyes – which are as expressive as the sky, with all its variations – losing the squally, ominous look that seems habitual nowadays and shining with excitement, just as they did when we first arrived in Lansquenet, eight years ago. Rosette, who mimics everything Anouk does, was watching closely, awaiting her cue.

  ‘If that’s all right,’ I said at last.

  ‘Cool,’ said Anouk.

  ‘Coo,’ said Rosette.

  A ricochet on the oily Seine signalled Bam’s approval.

  Only Roux said nothing. In fact, since Armande’s letter he has been unusually silent. It is not that he has any particular affection for Paris, which he tolerates for our sake, and because he regards the river, and not the city, as his home. But Lansquenet has not treated him well, and Roux has never forgotten it. He still bears a grudge for the loss of his boat, and for what happened afterwards. He has a few friends there – Joséphine is one of them – but on the whole he sees the place as a den of small-minded bigots who threatened him, burnt his home, even refused to sell him supplies. And as for the curé, Francis Reynaud—

  In spite of his simplicity, there is something sullen about Roux. Like a wild animal that can be tamed, but never forgets unkindness, he can be both fiercely loyal and fiercely unforgiving. I suspect that in the case of Reynaud he will never change his mind, and as for the village itself, he feels nothing but contempt for the tame little rabbits of Lansquenet, living so quietly by the bank of the Tannes, never daring to look beyond the nearest hill, flinching at every breath of change, at the arrival of every stranger—

  ‘Well?’ I said. ‘What do you think?’

  For a long time Roux stayed silent, looking into the river, his long hair hanging in his face. Then he shrugged.

  ‘Maybe not.’

  I was surprised. In all the excitement, I’d forgotten to ask what he felt. I’d assumed that he too would welcome the chance of a change of scenery.

  ‘What do you mean, maybe not?’

  ‘The letter was addressed to you, not me.’

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me before?’

  ‘I could see you wanted to go.’

  ‘And you’d rather stay here?’

  He shrugged again. Sometimes I think his silences are more articulate than speech. There’s something – or someone – in Lansquenet that Roux doesn’t want to revisit, and I knew that no amount of questioning would make him confess to anything.

  ‘It’s OK,’ he told me at last. ‘Do whatever you have to do. Visit the place. Put flowers on Armande’s grave. And then come home to me.’ He smiled and kissed my fingertips. ‘You still taste of chocolate.’

  ‘You won’t change your mind?’

  He shook his head. ‘You won’t be there long. And besides, someone has to look after the boat.’

  That was true, I told myself: but still, it makes me uneasy to think that Roux prefers to stay behind. I had assumed we would travel by boat; Roux knows all the waterways. His route would have taken us down the Seine and through a maze of canals to the Loire, and from there towards the Canal des Deux Mers, the Garonne, and at last into the Tannes, through locks and lifts, fast water and slow, past fields and castles and industrial estates, watching the water change as we go from broad to narrow and back again, from oily to green, fast-moving to slow, brown to black to yellow to clear.

  Each river has its own personality. The Seine is urban; industrious; a highway crammed with barges piled with timber; crates; shipping containers; metal girders; car parts. The Loire is sandy and treacherous, silver in the sunlight but rank below the surface, riddled with snakes and sandbars. The Garonne is bumpy; irregular; generous in certain parts, so shallow in others that a houseboat – even a small one like ours – would have to be hoisted by mechanical lift from one level to the next, taking time, precious time—

  But none of that happened. We took the train. A better option in so many ways; besides, to move a houseboat on the Seine is no straightforward task. There is paperwork to fill in; permissions to be granted; the mooring to be secured and countless pieces of administration to be seen to. But somehow it makes me uneasy to come back to Lansquenet like this; suitcase in hand, like a refugee, Anouk at my heels like a stray dog.

  Why should I feel this sense of unease? After all, I have nothing to prove. I am no longer the Vianne Rocher who blew into town eight years ago. I have a business now; a home. We are no longer river-rats, moving from village to village in search of mean pickings; itinerant work, digging, planting, harvesting. I am in charge of my destiny. I call the wind. It answers to me.

  Why then – why this urgency? Is it for Armande? For myself? And why is it that the wind, far from easing as we leave Paris, seems to have grown more persistent as we travel south, its voice acquiring a plaintive note – hurry, hurry, hurry?

  I keep Armande’s letter in the box that I carry with me wherever I go, along with my mother’s Tarot cards and the fragments of my other life. It isn’t much to show for a life; all those years we spent on the road. The places we lived; the people we met; the recipes I collected; all the friends we made and lost. The drawings Anouk made in school. Some photographs; not many. Passports, postcards, birth certificates, identity cards. All those moments, those memories. Everything we are, compressed into just two or three kilos of paper – the weight of a human heart, in fact – that sometimes seems unbearable.

  Hurry. Hurry. That voice again.

  Whose is it? My own? Armande’s? Or is it the voice of the changing wind, which blows so softly that sometimes I can almost believe it has stopped for good?

  Here, along the last stretch of our journey, the roadside is covered with dandelions, most of them now gone to seed, so that the air is filled with bright little particles.

  Hurry. Hurry. Reynaud used to say that if you let dandelions go to seed, the next year they get into everything – roadsides, verges, flowerbeds, vineyards, churchyards, gardens, even the cracks in the pavement – so that in a year’s time, or maybe two, there are nothing but dandelions left, marching across the countryside; hungry, indestructible—

  Francis Reynaud hated weeds. But I always liked the dandelions; their cheery faces, their tasty leaves. Even so, I’ve
never seen quite so many growing here. Rosette likes to pick them and blow the seeds into the air. Next year—

  Next year—

  How strange, to be thinking of next year. We are not used to planning ahead. We were always like those dandelion seeds; settle for a season, then blow away. Dandelion roots are strong. They need to be, to find sustenance. But the plant only flowers for a season – even assuming someone like Francis Reynaud hasn’t already uprooted it – and after it has gone to seed, it has to move on with the wind to survive.

  Is that why I find myself drawn so readily back to Lansquenet? Is this a response to some instinct so deep that I am barely conscious of the need to return to the place where once I sowed these stubborn seeds? I wonder what, if anything, has grown there in our absence. I wonder whether our passage has left a mark, however small, on this land. How do folk remember us? With affection? Indifference? Do they remember us at all, or has time erased us from their minds?

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Sunday, 15th August

  ANY EXCUSE FOR a carnival, père. At least, so it is in lansquenet, where folk work hard and anything new – even the opening of a shop – is seen as a break from the daily routine, a reason to stop and celebrate.

  Today, it is the Sainte-Marie, the festival of the Virgin. A national holiday, though, of course, most people try to get as far away from the church as they can, spending their time in front of the television, or going to the seaside – it’s only two hours’ drive to the coast – coming home in the early hours with sunburn on their shoulders and the furtive look of domestic cats that have stayed out all night up to no good.

  I know. I have to be tolerant. My role as a priest is changing. The moral compass of Lansquenet is held by others nowadays; by city folk and outsiders, by officials and the politically correct. Times are changing, so they say, and the old traditions and beliefs must now be made to comply with decisions made in Brussels by men (or even worse, by women) in suits who have never been out of the metropolis, except maybe for a summer in Cannes, or ski-ing in the Val d’Isère.

  Here in Lansquenet, of course, the poison has taken some time to reach the pulse points of the community. Narcisse still keeps bees as his father and grandfather did, the honey still unpasteurized in defiance of EU restrictions – though nowadays he gives it away, flamboyantly and with a gleam in his eye, absolutely free, he says, with the postcards he sells at 10 euros apiece, thereby circumventing the need to conform to the new restrictions, or break with a local tradition that has remained unchanged for centuries.

  Narcisse is not the only one to sometimes defy the authorities. There’s Joséphine Bonnet – Muscat, as was – who runs the Café des Marauds, and who has always done whatever she could to encourage the despised river-gypsies to stay – and the Englishman and his wife, Marise, who own the vineyard down the road, and who often hire them (off the books) to help bring in the harvest. And Guillaume Duplessis, long since retired from teaching, but who still gives private lessons to any child who asks for them, in spite of new laws calling for checks on anyone working with children.

  Of course, there are some who welcome innovation – as long as they are somehow involved. Caro Clairmont and her husband are now zealous disciples of Brussels and Paris, and have recently made it their mission to introduce Health and Safety into our community, checking pavements for evidence of neglect, campaigning against itinerants and undesirables, promoting modern values and generally making much of themselves. Traditionally Lansquenet has no mayor, but if it had one, then Caro would be the obvious choice. As it is, she runs the Neighbourhood Watch, the League of Christian Women, the village Book Club, the Riverside Cleaning Campaign and ParentWatch, a group designed to protect our children against paedophiles.

  And the church? Some would say she runs that, too.

  If you’d told me ten years ago that I would one day sympathize with rebels and refuseniks, I would probably have laughed in your face. But I myself have changed since then. I have come to value different things. When I was younger, Order reigned; the messy, disorderly lives of my flock were a constant irritation. Now I have come to understand them better – if not always to approve. I have come to feel – not affection, precisely, but something almost approaching it when dealing with their problems. It may not have made me a better man. But I have learnt over the years that it’s better to bend a little than be broken. Vianne Rocher taught me that, and although I was never happier to see anyone leave Lansquenet than when she and her daughter moved away, I know what I owe her. I know it well.

  Which is why, on the tail of this carnival, with change in the air like the scent of smoke, I can almost imagine Vianne Rocher coming back to Lansquenet. It would be so very like her, you see, to roll into town on the eve of a war. Because a war is coming, that is certain, and it smells like a storm about to break.

  I wonder, would she sense it, too? And is it wrong of me to hope that this time she would take my side, instead of joining the enemy?

  CHAPTER SIX

  Sunday, 15th August

  I DON’T OFTEN return to places I’ve left. I find it too uncomfortable to deal with all the things that have changed: cafés closed, paths overgrown, friends moved away, or settled rather too permanently in cemeteries and old folks’ homes—

  Some places change so completely that I can hardly believe I was there at all. In a way that’s for the best: I am spared the routine heartbreak of once-familiar places and times reduced to reflections of themselves in mirrors that we broke when we left. Some change only a little, which is sometimes harder to bear. But I have never returned to a place where nothing seemed to have changed at all—

  Not until today, at least.

  We came on the wind of the carnival. Eight and a half long years ago, on a wind that seemed to promise so much; a mad wind, full of confetti and scented with smoke and pancakes cooked by the side of the road. The pancake stall is still there, and the crowds that line the side of the street, and the flower-decked cart with its motley crew of fairies, wolves and witches. I bought a galette from that very stall. I bought one now, to remember. Still as good, just the right side of burnt, and the flavours – butter and salt and rye – help reawaken the memory.

  Anouk was standing beside me then, a plastic trumpet in her hand. Now she stood wide-eyed and alert, and Rosette was the one with the trumpet. Prraaaaaaa! This time it was red, not yellow, and there was no hint of frost in the air, but the sounds and voices and scents were the same; and the people in their summer clothes – overcoats and berets giving way to white shirts, straw hats; who’d wear black in this heat? – might almost be the same ones, especially the children who bounced along in the wake of the cart, collecting streamers and flowers and sweets—

  Prrraaaaaa! went the trumpet. Rosette laughed. Today, she is in her element. Today she can run like a mad thing, swing like a monkey, laugh like a clown, and no one will notice or criticize. Today she is normal – whatever that means – and she joined the procession behind the cart, hooting with exuberance.

  This must be the fifteenth of August, I thought. I’d almost forgotten what day it was. I don’t really follow the Church’s festivals, but I could see her, the Mother of Christ, in plaster with a gilded crown, being carried in state by four choirboys under a flowery canopy. The boys were wearing surplices, and slightly resentful expressions. Well, it must have been hot under those robes, and the others were having much more fun. For a moment I almost recognized the face of one of the choirboys – it looked like Jeannot Drou, Anouk’s little friend back in the days of La Céleste Praline – though of course it couldn’t have been. The boy must be seventeen by now. But the faces were familiar. A relative, a cousin, perhaps, maybe even a brother. And that girl on the cart with the fairy wings looked just like Caroline Clairmont. A woman in a blue summer frock could almost have been Joséphine Muscat, and that man with his dog, standing too far away for me to see the face under the hat, might easily have been my old friend Guillaume.

 
And that figure in the black robe, standing slightly apart from the rest of the crowd in silent disapproval—

  Could that be Francis Reynaud?

  Prraaaaaaaa! The trumpet was garish and off-key, like the bright red plastic of its manufacture. The black figure seemed almost to wince as Rosette scurried past, with Bam (quite clearly visible today) screaming and scampering in her wake.

  But it wasn’t Reynaud. I could see that now as the figure turned to look back at the procession. In fact it wasn’t a man at all. It was a woman in niqab – young, from her figure, and veiled in black even to her fingertips. In this brutal heat she wore gloves, and her eyes, the only part of her that could be seen above the veil, were long and dark and unreadable.

  Had I seen her before? I thought not. And yet she was strangely familiar, perhaps because of the colours that swam around her black, immobile shape; the colours of the carnival, the flowers, the streamers, the bunting, the flags.

  No one spoke to her. No one stared. In Paris, where folk are so jaded that hardly anything invites comment, people still notice the niqab, but here, where gossip is currency, the face-veil attracts no second glance.

  Out of tact? Maybe. Out of fear? The crowd parted around her on either side, allowing a space to contain her. She might have been a ghost – standing unseen in the slipstream with the scent of fried food and candyfloss distressing the air around her and the cries of children like fireworks hurled into the hot blue sky.

  Prraaaaaaaa! Oh, my. That trumpet again. I looked for Anouk, but she had disappeared, and for a moment my city senses prickled with anxiety—

  Then I saw her in the crowd, talking to someone – a boy of her age. Maybe a friend. I do hope so. Anouk finds it hard to make friends. Not that she is antisocial. Quite the opposite, in fact. But others sense her otherness, and tend to give her a wide berth. Except for Jean-Loup Rimbault, of course. Jean-Loup, who has already skirted death so many times in his short life. I sometimes despair of my little Anouk, who has already endured so much loss, choosing as her closest friend someone who may not live to see twenty.