Chocolat

by Joanne Harris

  “Maman? Maman? Hold on, darling, it’s me! I’m coming! This way, Monsieur Cussonnet, this way into the — oh yes, you know your way around, don’t you? Oh dear, the times I’ve told her — positively knew something like this would happen —”

  Georges, feebly protesting: “Do you really think we ought to interfere, Caro darling? I mean, let the doctor get on with it, you know?”

  Joline in her cool, supercilious tone: “One does wonder what he was doing in her house in any case.”

  Reynaud, barely audible: “Should have come to me…”

  I felt Roux stiffen even before they came into the room, looking quickly round for a way out. Even as he did it was too late. First Caroline and Joline with their immaculate chignons, their twin-sets and Hermes scarves, closely followed by Clairmont — dark suit and tie, unusual for a day at the lumber yard, or did she make him change for the occasion? — the doctor, the priest, like a scene from melodrama, all frozen in the doorway, faces shocked, bland, guilty, aggrieved, furious. Roux staring them out with that look of insolence, one hand bandaged, damp hair in his eyes, myself by the door, orange skirt mudsplashed from my run down to Les Marauds, and Armande, white but composed, rocking cheerily in her old chair with her black eyes snapping with malice and one finger crooked, witchlike.

  “So the vultures are here.” She sounded affable, dangerous. “Didn’t take you long to get here, did it?” A sharp glance at Reynaud, standing at the rear of the group. “Thought you’d got your chance at last, did you?” she said acidly. “Thought you’d slip in a quick blessing or two while I wasn’t compos mentis?” She gave her vulgar chuckle. “Too bad, Francis. I’m not quite ready for last rites yet.”

  Reynaud looked sour. “So it would appear,” he said. A quick glance in my direction. “It was fortunate that Mademoiselle Rocher is so — competent — in the use of needles.” There was an implicit sneer in the words.

  Caroline was rigid, her face a smiling mask of chagrin. “Maman, cherie, you see what happens when we leave you on your own. Frightening everyone like this.”

  Armande looked bored.

  “Taking up all this time, putting people out?” Lariflete jumped up onto her knee as Caro was talking, and the old lady stroked the cat absently. “Now do you understand why we tell you —”

  “That I’d be better off in Le Mortoir?” finished Armande flatly. “Really, Caro. You don’t give up, do you? That’s your father all over, you know. Stupid, but persistent. It was one of his most endearing characteristics.”

  Caro looked petulant. “It isn’t Le Mortoir, it’s Les Mimosas, and if you’d only have a look round —”

  “Food through a tube, someone to take you to the toilet in case you fall over?”

  “Don’t be absurd.”

  Armande laughed. “My dear girl, at my age I can be anything I please. I can be absurd if I feel like it. I’m old enough to get away with anything.”

  “Now you’re behaving like a child.” Caro’s voice was sulky. “Les Mimosas is a very fine, very exclusive residential home, you’d be able to talk to people your own age, go on outings, have everything organized for you —”

  “It sounds quite wonderful.” Armande continued to rock lazily in her chair. Caro turned to the doctor, who had been standing awkwardly at her side. A thin, nervy man, he looked embarrassed to be there at all, like a shy man at an orgy. “Simon, tell her!”

  “Well, I’m not sure it’s really my place to —”

  “Simon agrees with me,” interrupted Caro doggedly. “In your condition and at your age, you simply can’t go on living here on your own. Why, at any time, you might —”

  “Yes, Madame Voizin.” Joline’s voice was warm and reasonable. “Perhaps you should consider what Caro — I mean, of course you don’t want to lose your independence, but for your own good…”

  Armande’s eyes are quick and bright and abrasive. She stared at Joline for a few moments in silence. Joline bridled, then looked away, blushing. “I want you out of here,” said Armande gently. “All of you.”

  “But, Maman?”

  “All of you,” repeated Armande flatly. “I’ll give the quack here two minutes in private — seems I need to remind you of your Hippocratic oath, Monsieur Cussonnet — and by the time I’ve finished with him I expect the rest of you buzzards to be gone.” She tried to stand, pushing herself up from her chair with difficulty: I took her arm to steady her, and she gave me a wry, mischievous smile.

  “Thanks, Vianne,” she said gently. “You, too.” This was to Roux, still standing at the far side of the room looking drab and indifferent. “I want to talk to you when I’ve seen the doctor. Don’t go away.”

  “Who, me?” Roux was uneasy. Caro glanced at him with undisguised contempt.

  “I think that at a time like this, Maman, your family should be the —”

  “If I need you, I know where to call,” said Armande tartly. “For the moment, I want to make arrangements.”

  Caro looked at Roux. “O-oh?” The syllable was silky with dislike. “Arrangements?” She flicked her eyes up and down him, and I saw him flinch slightly. It was the same reflex I had seen previously with Josephine; a stiffening, a slight hunching of the shoulders, a drilling of the hands into the pockets as if to present a smaller target. Beneath that knowing scrutiny every flaw is revealed. For a second he sees himself as she sees him: filthy, uncouth.

  Perversely he acts out the role she has handed him, snarling: “What the fuck d’you think you’re looking at?”

  She gives him a startled look and backs away.

  Armande grins. “I’ll see you later,” she tells me. “And thank you.”

  Caro followed me with visible chagrin. Caught between curiosity and her reluctance to talk to me, she is brisk and condescending. I gave her the facts with no elaboration. Reynaud listened, expressionless as one of his statues. Georges tried for diplomacy, smiling sheepishly, delivered platitudes. No-one offered me a lift back home.

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  Saturday, March 15

  I WENT TO SPEAK TO ARMANDE VOIZIN once again this morning. Once again she refused to see me. Her redhaired watchdog opened the door and growled at me in his uncouth patois, wedging his shoulders against the frame to prevent me from entering. Armande is quite well, he tells me. A little rest will bring about a complete recovery. Her grandson is with her, and her friends visit every day — this with a sarcasm which makes me bite my tongue. She is not to be disturbed. It galls me to plead with this man, pere, but I know my duty. Whatever low company she has fallen into, whatever taunts she flings at me, my duty remains clear. To comfort — even where comfort is refused — and to guide. But it is impossible to speak to this man about the soul — his eyes are blank and indifferent as an animal’s. I try to explain. Armande is old, I tell him. Old and stubborn. There is so little time for both of us. Doesn’t he see that? Will he allow her to kill herself with neglect and arrogance?

  He shrugs. “She’s fine,” he tells me, his face bland with dislike. “No-one’s neglecting her. She’ll be just fine now.”

  “That isn’t true.” My voice is deliberately harsh. “She’s playing Russian roulette with her medication. Refusing to listen to what the doctor tells her. Eating chocolates, for God’s sake! Have you only thought what that might do to her, in her condition?”

  His face closes, becomes hostile and aloof. Flatly: “She doesn’t want to see you.”

  “Don’t you care? Don’t you care that she’s killing herself with gluttony?”

  He shrugs. I can feel his rage through the thin pretence of indifference. Impossible to appeal to his better nature — he simply stands guard, as he has been instructed. Muscat tells me Armande has offered him money. Perhaps he has an interest in seeing her die. I know her perversity. To disinherit her family for the sake of this stranger would appeal to that part of her.

  “I’ll, wait,” I told him: “All day, if I have to.”

  I waited for two hours outside in the gar
den. After that time it began to rain. I had no umbrella, and my soutane was heavy with moisture. I began to feel dizzy and numb. After a while a window opened and I caught the maddening smell of coffee and hot bread from the kitchen. I saw the watchdog looking at me with that look of surly disdain and knew that I might fall unconscious to the ground without his making a move to help me. I felt his eyes on my back as I returned slowly up the hill towards St Jerome’s. Somewhere across the water I thought I heard a sound of laughter.

  I have failed too with Josephine Muscat. Though she refuses to go to church, I have spoken with her several times, but to no avail. There is a deep core of some stubborn metal in her now, a kind of defiance, though she remains respectful and soft-spoken throughout our conversation. She never ventures far from La Celeste Praline, and it was outside the shop that I saw her today. She was sweeping the cobbles by the doorway, her hair tied with a yellow scarf. As I made my way towards her I could hear her singing to herself.

  “Good morning, Madame Muscat.” I greeted her politely…I know that if she is to be won back it must be by gentleness and reason. She may be made to repent later, when our work is done.

  She gave me a narrow smile. She looks more confident now, back straight, head high, mannerisms she has copied from Vianne Rocher.

  “I’m Josephine Bonnet now, pere.”

  “Not under the law, Madame.”

  “Bof, the law.” She shrugged.

  “God’s law,” I told her with emphasis, fixing her with reproach. “I have prayed for you, ma fille. I have prayed for your deliverance.”

  She laughed at that, not unkindly. “Then your prayers have been answered, pere. I’ve never been so happy.”

  She seems impregnable. Barely a week of that woman’s influence and already I can hear that other’s voice through hers. Their laughter is unendurable. Their mockery, like Armande’s, a goad which makes me stupid and enraged. Already I feel something in me respond, pere, something weak to which I thought I was immune. Looking across the square at the chocolaterie, its bright window, the boxes of pink and red and orange geraniums at the balconies and at either side of the door, I feel the insidious creeping of doubt in my mind, and my mouth fills at the memory of its perfume, like cream and marshmallow and burnt sugar and the heady mingling of cognac and fresh-ground cocoa beans. It is the scent of a woman’s hair, just where the nape joins the skull’s tender hollow, the scent of ripe apricots in the sun, of warm brioche and cinnamon rolls, lemon tea and lily-of-the-valley. It is an incense diffused on the wind and unfurling softly like a banner of revolt, this devil’s spoor, not sulphurous as we were taught as children but this lightest, most evocative of perfumes, combined essence of a thousand spices, making the head ring and the spirit soar. I find myself standing outside St Jerome’s with my head lifted into the wind, straining to catch a trace of that perfume. It suffuses my dreams, and I awake sweating and famished. In my dreams I gorge on chocolates, I roll in chocolates, and their texture is not brittle but soft as flesh, like a thousand mouths on my body, devouring me in fluttering small bites. To die beneath their tender gluttony seems the culmination of every temptation I have ever known, and in such moments I can almost understand Armande Voizin, risking her life with every rapturous mouthful.

  I said almost.

  I know my duty. I sleep very little now, having extended my penance to include these stray moments of abandon. My joints ache, but I welcome the distraction. Physical pleasure is the crack into which the devil sends his roots. I avoid sweet scents. I eat a single meal a day, and then only the plainest and most flavourless of foods. When I am not going about my duties in the parish I work in the churchyard, digging the beds and weeding around the graves. There has been neglect there for the past two years, and I am conscious of a feeling of unease when I see what riot there is now in that hitherto orderly garden. Lavender, marjoram, goldenrod and purple sage have shot up in lavish abandon amongst the grasses and blue thistles. So many scents disturb me. I would like orderly rows of shrubs and flowers, perhaps with a box hedge around the whole. This profusion seems somehow wrong, irreverent, a savage thrusting of life, one plant choking another in a vain attempt at dominance. We were given mastery over these things, the Bible tells us. And yet I feel no mastery. What I feel is a kind of helplessness, for as I dig and prune and cut, the serried green armies simply fill the spaces at my back, pushing out long green tongues of derision at my efforts. Narcisse looks at me in amused contempt.

  “Better get some planting done, pere,” he tells me. “Fill those spaces with something worthwhile. Otherwise the weeds will always get in.”

  He is right, of course. I have ordered a hundred plants from his nursery, docile plants which I will put in by rows. I like the white begonias and the dwarf iris and the pale yellow dahlias and the Easter lilies, scentless but so lovely in their prim whorls of leaf. Lovely, but not invasive, promises Narcisse. Nature tamed by man.

  Vianne Rocher comes over to look at my work. I ignore her. She is wearing a turquoise pullover and jeans with small purple suede boots. Her hair is a pirate flag in the wind.

  “You’ve got a lovely garden,” she remarks. She lets one hand trail across a swathe of vegetation; she clenches her fist and brings it to her face full of scent.

  “So many herbs,” she says. “Lemon balm and eau-de-cologne mint and pineapple sage?”

  “I don’t know their names.” My voice is abrupt. “I’m no gardener. Besides, they’re just weeds.”

  “I like weeds.”

  She would. I felt my heart swell with anger — or was it the scent? I stood up hip-deep in rippling grasses and felt my lower vertebrae crackle under the sudden pressure. “Tell me something, Mademoiselle.”

  She looked at me obediently, smiling.

  “Tell me what you think to achieve by encouraging my parishioners to uproot their lives, to give up their security?”

  She gave me a blank look. “Uproot?” She glanced uncertainly at the heap of weeds on the path at my side.

  “I refer to Josephine Muscat,” I snapped.

  “Oh.” She tweaked at a stem of green lavender. “She was unhappy.” She seemed to think that explained everything.

  “And now, having broken her marriage vows, left everything she had, given up her old life, you think she will be happier?”

  “Of course.”

  “A fine philosophy,” I sneered, “if you’re the kind of person who doesn’t believe in sin.”

  She laughed. “But I don’t,” she said. “I don’t believe in it at all.”

  “Then I pity your poor child,” I said tartly. “Brought up without God and without morality.”

  She gave me a narrow unamused look. “Anouk knows what’s right and wrong,” she said, and I knew that at last I had reached her. One small point scored. “As for God?” She bit off the phrase. “I don’t think that white collar gives you sole right of access to the Divine,” she finished more gently. “I think there may be room somewhere for both of us, don’t you?”

  I did not deign to answer. I can see through her pretended tolerance. “If you really want to do good,” I told her with dignity, “you will persuade Madame Muscat to reconsider her rash decision. And you will make Armande Voizin see sense.”

  “Sense?” She pretended ignorance, but she knew what I meant.

  I repeated much of what I had told the watchdog. Armande was old, I told her. Self-willed and stubborn. But her generation is ill-equipped to understand medical matters. The importance of diet and medication — the stubborn refusal to listen to the facts.

  “But Armande is quite happy where she is.” Her voice is almost reasonable. “She doesn’t want to leave her house and go into a nursing-home. She wants to die where she is.”

  “She has no right!” I heard my voice crack whiplike across the square. “It isn’t her decision to make. She could live a long time, another ten years perhaps?”

  “She still may.” Her tone was reproachful. “She is still mobile, luci
d, independent?”

  “Independent!” I could barely conceal my disdain. “When she’ll be stone blind in six months? What is she going to do then?”

  For the first time she looked confused. “I don’t understand,” she said at last. “Armande’s eyes are all right, aren’t they? I mean, she doesn’t even wear glasses.”

  I looked at her sharply. She didn’t know. “You haven’t spoken to the doctor, have you?”

  “Why should I? Armande?”

  I cut her short. “Armande has a problem,” I told her. “One which she has systematically been denying. You see the extent of her stubbornness. She refuses to admit, even to herself, even to her family?.”

  “Tell me. Please.”Her eyes were hard as agates.

  I told her.

  TWENTY-NINE

  Sunday, March 16

  AT FIRST ARMANDE PRETENDED SHE DIDN’T KNOW WHAT I was talking about. Then switching to a high-handed tone, demanded to know who had blabbed, while at the same time declaring that I was an interfering busybody, and that I had no idea what I was talking about.

  “Armande,” I said as soon as she paused for breath. “Talk to me. Tell me what it means. Diabetic retinopathy?”

  She shrugged. “I might as well, if that damn doctor’s going to blab it all over the village.” She sounded petulant. “Treating me as if I wasn’t fit to make my own decisions any more.” She gave me a stern look. “And you’re no better, madam,” she said. “Clucking over me, fussing — I’m not a child, Vianne.”

  “I know you’re not.”

  “Well, then.” She reached for the teacup at her elbow. I saw the care with which she secured it between her fingers, testing its position before she picked it up. It is not she, but I, who have been blind. The red-ribboned walking-stick, the tentative gestures, the unfinished tapestry, the eyes shadowed beneath a succession of hats…

  “It isn’t as if you could do anything to help,” continued Armande in a gentler tone. “From what I understood it’s incurable, so it’s nobody’s business but my own.” She took a sip of the tea and grimaced. “Camomile,” she said without enthusiasm. “Supposed to eliminate toxins. Tastes like cat’s piss.” She put the cup down again with the same careful gesture.