Five Quarters of the Orange (13 page)

“So you can take your bribes,” I yelled hoarsely, “and you can stick them up your fancy ass with your Paris menus and your tangy apricot
coulis
and your
poor old Papas
—”

For a second our eyes met and I saw hers unveiled at last and filled with spite.

“I could talk to my lawyer—” she began.

I began to laugh. “That’s right!” I hooted. “Your lawyer! It always comes to that in the end, doesn’t it?” I yarked savage laughter. “Your lawyer!”

Yannick tried to calm her down, his eyes bright with alarm. “Now,
chérie
…you know how we—”

Laure turned on him savagely. “Get your fucking hands off me!”

I howled laughter, cramping my stomach. Points of darkness danced before my eyes. Laure’s eyes shot me with hate-shrapnel, then she recovered.

“I’m sorry.” Her voice was chilly. “You don’t know how important this is to me. My career…”

Yannick was trying to steer her toward the door, keeping a wary eye on me. “No one meant to upset you,
Mamie
,” he said hastily. “We’ll come back when you’re more
reasonable
—it’s not as if we were asking to
keep
the book…”

Words like spilled cards sliding. I laughed harder. The terror in me grew, but I could not control my laughter, and even when they had gone—the screech of their Mercedes’ tires oddly furtive in the night—I still felt the occasional spasm, souring into half-sobs as the adrenaline fell from me, leaving me feeling shaken and old.

So old.

Pistache was looking at me, her face unreadable. Prune’s face appeared round the bedroom door.

“
Mémée?
What’s wrong?”

“Go to bed, sweetheart.” said Pistache quickly. “It’s all right. It’s nothing.”

Prune looked doubtful. “Why was
Mémée
shouting?”

“Nothing.” Her voice was sharp now, anxious. “Go to bed!”

Prune turned reluctantly. Pistache closed the door.

We sat in silence.

I knew she’d talk when she was ready, and I knew better than to rush her. She looks sweet enough, but there’s a stubborn streak in her all the same. I know it well; I have it too. Instead I washed the dishes and the cups, dried them and put them away. After that I took out a book and pretended to read.

After a while Pistache spoke. “What did they mean about a legacy?”

I shrugged.

“Nothing. Cassis made out he was a rich man so that they’d look after him in his old age. They should have known better. That’s all.” I hoped she might leave it at that, but there was a stubborn line between her eyes that promised trouble.

“I never even knew I had an uncle,” she said tonelessly.

“We weren’t close.”

Silence. I could see her going over it in her mind and I wished I could stop the circle of her thoughts, but knew I couldn’t.

“Yannick’s very like him,” I told her, trying for lightness. “Handsome and feckless. And his wife leads him like a dancing bear.” I demonstrated mincingly, hoping for a smile, but if anything her thoughtful look deepened.

“They seemed to think you’d cheated him somehow,” she said. “Bought him out, when he was ill.”

I forced myself to pause. Anger at this stage would not help anyone.

“Pistache,” I said patiently. “Don’t believe everything those two tell you. Cassis wasn’t ill, at least, not in the way you think. He drank himself into bankruptcy, left his wife and son, sold off the farm to pay his debts…”

She watched me curiously, and I had to make an effort to keep my voice from rising. “Look, that was all a long time ago. It’s over. My brother’s dead.”

“Laure said there was a sister.”

I nodded. “Reine-Claude.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

I shrugged. “We weren’t—”

“Close. I gathered.” Her voice was small and flat-sounding.

Fear pricked at me again, and I said more sharply than I had intended: “So? You understand that, don’t you? After all, you and Noisette were never—” I bit the words short, but too late. I saw her flinch and cursed myself inwardly.

“No. But at least I tried. For you.”

Damn. I’d forgotten how sensitive she was. All those years I took her for the quiet one, watching my other daughter grow wilder and more willful day by day…. Yes, Noisette was always my favorite. But until now I thought I’d hidden it better. If she had been Prune I would have put my arms around her, but to see her now, this calm, close-faced woman with her small, hurt smile and sleepy cat’s eyes…I thought of Noisette, and how, out of pride and stubbornness, I had made her a stranger to me. I tried to explain.

“We were separated a long time ago,” I told her. “After…the war. My mother was…ill…and we went to live with different relatives. We didn’t keep in touch.” It was almost true, at least as close as I could bear to tell her. “Reine went to…work…in Paris. She…fell ill too. She’s in a private hospital near Paris. I visited her once, but…” How could I explain? The institution-stink of the place, boiled cabbage and laundry and sickness, televisions blaring in soft rooms full of lost people who wept when they didn’t like the stewed apples and who sometimes shouted at one another with unexpected viciousness, flailing their fists helplessly and pushing each other against the pale green walls. There had been a man in a wheelchair—a relatively young man with a face like a scarred fist and rolling, hopeless eyes—who had screamed
I don’t like it here! I don’t like it here!
during the whole of my visit, until his voice faded into a drone and even I found myself ignoring his distress. One woman stood in a corner with her face to the wall and wept, unheeded. And the woman on the bed—the huge bloated thing with the dyed hair, round white thighs and arms cool and soft as fresh dough, smiling serenely to herself and murmuring…Only the voice was the same, without which I would never have believed it, a little-girl’s voice chiming nonsense syllables, the eyes as blank and round as an owl’s. I made myself touch her.

“Reine. Reinette.”

Again that vapid smile, the little nod, as if in her dreams she were a queen and I her subject. She had forgotten her name, the nurse told
me quietly, but she was happy enough; she had her “good days” and she loved the television, especially the cartoons, and to have her hair brushed while the radio played….

“Of course we still have our bad spells,” said the nurse, and I froze at the words, feeling something shrivel in my stomach to a bright hard knot of terror. “We wake in the night”—strange, that pronoun, as if by taking on part of the woman’s identity she might be able to somehow share in the experience of being old and mad—“and sometimes we have our little tantrums, don’t we?” She smiled brightly at me, a young blonde of twenty or so, and I hated her so much in that moment for her youth and cheery ignorance that I almost smiled back.

I felt the same smile on my face as I looked at my daughter, and hated myself for it. I tried again for a lighter note.

“You know what it’s like,” I said apologetically. “Can’t bear old people…hospitals. I sent some money….”

It was the wrong thing to say. Sometimes everything you say is the wrong thing. My mother knew that.

“
Money
,” said Pistache contemptuously. “Is that all people care about?”

She went to bed soon after, and nothing was right again between us that summer. Near the end of the holidays she left a little earlier than usual, pleading fatigue and the approach of the school term, but I could see something was wrong. I tried to talk about it to her once or twice, but it was no good. She remained distant, her eyes wary. I noticed she was receiving a lot of mail, but I thought nothing of it until much later. My mind was on other things.

A
few days after the business with Yannick and Laure, the Snack-Wagon arrived. A large trailer-van brought it and parked its load on the grass verge just opposite Crêpe Framboise. A young man in a red-and-yellow paper hat got out. I was busy with customers at the time and paid little attention, so that when I looked out again later that afternoon I was surprised to see that the van had gone, leaving on the verge a small trailer upon which the words
Super-Snak
were painted in bright red capitals. I came out of the shop to take a closer look. The trailer seemed abandoned, though the shutters that secured it were heavily chained and padlocked. I knocked on the door. There was no answer.

The next day the Snack-Wagon opened. I noticed it at about eleven thirty, when my first customers usually begin to arrive. The shutters opened to reveal a counter above which a red-and-yellow awning gaped. Then a string of bunting, each colored flag bearing the name of a dish and a price—
steak-frites, 17F; saucisse-frites, 14F
—and finally a number of brightly colored posters advertising Super-Snaks or Big Value Burgers and a variety of soft drinks.

“Looks like you’ve got competition,” said Paul Hourias, exactly on time at twelve fifteen. I didn’t ask him what he wanted to order—he always orders the special and a
demi
—you could set your watch by him. He never says much, just sits in his usual place by the window and eats and watches the road. I decided he was making one of his rare jokes.

“Competition!” I repeated derisively. “Monsieur Hourias, the day Crêpe Framboise has to compete with a grease merchant in a trailer is the day I pack up my pots and pans for good.”

Paul chuckled. The day’s special was grilled sardines, one of his favorites, with a basket of my walnut bread, and he ate reflectively,
watching the road, as usual, as he did. The presence of the Snack-Wagon did not seem to affect the number of clients in the
crêperie
, and for the next two hours I was busy overseeing the kitchen while my waitress, Lise, took the orders. When I looked out again there were a couple of people at the Snack-Wagon, but they were youngsters, not regulars of mine, a girl and a boy, with cones of chips in their hands. I shrugged. I could live with that.

The next day there were a dozen of them, all youngsters, and a radio playing raucous music at maximum volume. In spite of the day’s heat I closed the
crêperie
door, but even so the tinny ghosts of guitars and drums marched through the glass, and Marie Fenouil and Charlotte Dupré, both regulars, complained about the heat and the noise.

The day after that the crowd was larger, the music louder, and I complained. Marching up to the Snack-Wagon at eleven forty, I was immediately enswarmed in adolescents, some of whom I recognized, but many out-of-towners too, girls in halter tops and summer skirts or jeans, young men with turned-up collars and motorcycle boots with jingling buckles. I could see several motorbikes already propped up against the sides of the Snack-Wagon, and there was a smell of gas mingled in among those of frying and beer. A young girl with cropped hair and a pierced nose looked at me insolently as I marched up to the counter, then thrust her elbow in front of me, just missing my face.

“Waitcher turn,
hé, mémère
,” she said smartly, through a mouthful of gum. “Can’tcher see there’s people waiting?”

“Oh, is
that
what you’re doing, sweetheart?” I snapped. “I thought you were just looking for business.”

The girl gaped at me, and I elbowed past her without a second glance. Mirabelle Dartigen, whatever else she might have done, never raised her children to mince their words.

The counter was high, and I found myself looking up at a young man of about twenty-five, good-looking in a dirty-blond sharpish kind of way, hair past his collar and a single gold earring—a cross, I
think—dangling. Eyes that might have done something for me forty years ago, but nowadays I’m too old and too particular. I think that old clock stopped ticking just about the same time men stopped wearing hats. Come to think of it, he looked a little familiar, but I wasn’t thinking about that then.

Of course, he already knew me.

“Good morning, Madame Simon,” he said in a polite, ironic voice. “What can I do for you? I’ve got a lovely
burger américain
if you’d care to try it.”

I was angry, but I tried not to show it. His smile showed that he was expecting trouble, and that he felt confident to withstand it. I gave him one of my sweetest.

“Not today, thank you,” I told him. “But I would be grateful if you’d consider turning your radio down. My customers—”

“But of course.” His voice was smooth and cultured, his eyes gleaming porcelain blue. “I had no idea I was disturbing anyone.”

Beside me, the girl with the pierced nose made an incredulous sound. I heard her say to a companion, another girl in a halter and shorts so small that fleshy half-moons showed beneath the hem, “Did you hear what she said to me? Did you hear?”

The young blond man smiled, and reluctantly I saw charm there, and intelligence, and something oh-so-familiar that needled and nibbled. Leaning over to turn the music down. Gold chain around the neck. Sweat stains on a gray T-shirt. Hands too smooth for a cook, oh there was something wrong about him, about the whole thing, and for the first time I felt not anger but a kind of fear….

Solicitous: “Is that all right for you, Madame Simon?”

I nodded.

“I’d hate to be thought an intrusive neighbor.”

The words were all right, but I still couldn’t shake the thought that there was something wrong, some mockery in that cool, courteous tone that I’d missed somehow, and though I’d got what I wanted, I fled the place, almost turning my ankle on the gravel of the verge,
with the press of young bodies against me—there must have been forty of them now, maybe more—and the sound of their voices drowning me. I got out quickly—I never liked to be touched—and as I went back into Crêpe Framboise I heard the sound of raucous laughter, as if he had waited for me to leave to make some comment. I looked back sharply, but he had his back to me by then and was flipping a row of burgers with practiced ease.

But still that feeling of wrongness remained. I found myself watching out of the window more than usual, and when Marie Fenouil and Charlotte Dupré, the customers who had complained about noise the previous day, did not arrive at their usual time, I began to feel edgy. It might be nothing, I told myself. There was only a single empty table, after all. The majority of my customers was here as usual. And yet I found myself watching the Snack-Wagon with a reluctant fascination, watching
him
as he worked, watching the crowd that remained by the roadside, young people eating from paper cones and polystyrene boxes while he held court…. He seemed on friendly terms with everyone. Half a dozen girls—the one with the pierced nose among them—propped up the counter, some with cans of soda in their hands. Others lolled in languid attitudes nearby, and there was much studied perking-out of bosoms and flicking of hips. Those eyes, it seemed, had touched softer hearts than mine.

At twelve thirty I heard the sound of motorcycles from the kitchen. A terrible sound, like pneumatic drills in unison, and I dropped the skillet with which I was turning a row of
bolets farcis
to run out into the road. The sound was unbearable. I clapped my hands over my ears and even then felt sharp pain lancing my eardrums, made sensitive from so many years of diving in the old Loire. Five motorcycles, which I had last seen propped against the sides of the Snack-Wagon, were now parked on the road just opposite, and their owners—three with girls perched delicately behind them—were revving up to leave, each trying to outdo the rest in volume and atti
tude. I shouted at them, but could hear nothing but the tortured screech of the machines. Some of the young customers at the Snack-Wagon laughed and clapped. I waved my arms furiously, unable to make myself heard against the din, and the riders saluted me mockingly, one rising onto his back wheels like a prancing horse in a redoubled gale of sound.

The whole performance lasted five minutes, by which time my
bolets
were burnt and my ears ringing painfully, and my temper risen to the melting point. There was no time to complain again to the owner of the Snack-Wagon, though I promised myself that I would as soon as my customers left. By then, however, the wagon had closed, and though I thumped furiously against the shutters, no one answered.

The next day the music was playing again.

I ignored it for as long as I could, then stamped off to complain. There were even more people than before, and a number of them, recognizing me, made insolent comments as I pushed my way through the little crowd. Too angry to be polite today, I glared up at the Snack-Wagon’s owner and spat:

“I thought we had an agreement!”

He gave me a smile as wide and as gleaming as a barn door. Inquiringly:
“Madame?”

But I was in no mood to be cajoled. “Don’t go trying to pretend you don’t know what I’m talking about. I want the music off, right now!”

Polite as always, and now looking slightly hurt at my ferocious attack, he switched the music off.

“But of course,
madame
. I didn’t mean to offend you. If we’re to be such close neighbors we should try to accommodate each other.”

For a few seconds I was too angry even to hear the warning bell.

“What do you mean, ‘close neighbors’?” I managed at last. “How long do you imagine you’re going to be staying here?”

He shrugged. “Who knows?” His voice was silky. “You know the catering business,
madame
. Such an unpredictable thing. Crowds one day—the next, half empty. Who knows what may happen?”

The warning bells had grown to a jangle now, and I was beginning to feel cold. “Your trailer’s on a public road,” I said dryly. “I imagine the police will move you on as soon as they spot you.”

He shook his head. “I’ve got permission to be here, on the verge,” he told me gently. “All my papers bear scrutiny.” Then he looked at me with that insolent politeness of his. “Do yours,
madame
, I wonder?”

I kept my face stony, while my heart flipped over like a dying fish. He knew something. The thought spun dizzily in my head. Oh God. He knew something. I ignored his question.

“Another thing.” I was pleased with my voice, with its low, sharp quality. The voice of a woman who is not afraid. Beneath my ribs my heart beat faster. “Yesterday there was a commotion with motorcycles. If you allow your friends to disturb my customers again, then I shall report you for creating a public nuisance. I’m sure the police—”

“I’m sure the police will tell you that the cyclists themselves are responsible, not I.” He sounded amused. “Really,
madame
, I’m trying to be reasonable, but threats and accusations aren’t going to solve the problem….”

I left feeling strangely culpable, as if I, and not he, had made the threats. That night I slept fitfully, and in the morning snapped at Prune for spilling her milk, and at Ricot for playing soccer too close to the kitchen garden. Pistache looked at me oddly—we had barely spoken since the night of Yannick’s visit—and asked if I felt all right.

“It’s nothing,” I said shortly, and returned to the kitchen in silence.