I’d wondered how long it would take him to arrive.
He considered us for a time, smiling. A guarded smile, proprietary, benevolent; the lord of the manor welcomes inopportune guests. I could feel him very conscious of my wet and dirty overalls, my hair caught up in a red scarf, my bare feet in their dripping sandals.
“Good morning.” There was a rivulet of scummy water heading for his highly polished black shoe. I saw his eyes flick towards it and back towards me. “Francis Reynaud,” he said, discreetly sidestepping. “Cure of the parish.”
I laughed at that; I couldn’t help it.
“Oh, that’s it,” I said maliciously. “I thought you were with the carnival.”
Polite laughter; heh, heh, heh.
I held out a yellow plastic glove.
“Vianne Rocker. And the bombardier back there is my daughter Anouk.”
Sounds of soap explosions, and of Anouk fighting Pantoufle on the stairs. I could hear the priest waiting for details of Monsieur Rocker. So much easier to have everything on a piece of paper, everything official, avoid this uncomfortable, messy conversation.
“I suppose you are very busy this morning.”
I suddenly felt sorry for him, trying so hard, straining to make contact. Again the forced smile.
“Yes, we really need to get this place in order as soon as possible. It’s going to take time! But we wouldn’t have been at church this morning anyway, Monsieur le Curé. We don’t attend, you know.”
It was kindly meant, to show him where we stood, to reassure him; but he looked startled, almost insulted.
“I see.”
It was too direct. He would have liked us to dance a little, to circle each other like wary cats.
“But it’s very kind, of you to welcome us,” I continued brightly. “You might even be able to help us make a few friends here.”
He is a little like a cat himself, I notice; cold, light eyes which never hold the gaze, a restless watchfulness, studied, aloof.
“I’ll do anything I can.” He is indifferent now he knows we are not to be members of his flock. And yet his conscience pushes him to offer more than he is willing to give. “Have you anything in mind?”
“Well, we could do with some help here,” I suggested. “Not you, of course”– quickly, as he began to reply. “But perhaps you know someone who could do with the extra money? A plasterer, someone who might be able to help with the decorating?”
This was surely safe territory.
“I can’t think of anyone.” He is guarded, more so than anyone I have ever met. “But I’ll ask around.”
Perhaps he will. He knows his duty to the new arrival. But I know he will not find anyone. His is not, a nature which grants favours graciously. His eyes flicked warily to the pile of bread and salt by the door.
“For luck.” I smiled, but his face was stony. He skirted the little offering as if it offended him.
“Maman?” Anouk’s head appeared in the doorway, hair standing out in crazy spikes. “Pantoufle wants to play outside. Can we?”
I nodded.
“Stay in the garden.” I wiped a smudge of dirt from the bridge of her nose. “You look a complete urchin.” I saw her glance at the priest and caught her comical look just in time. “This is Monsieur Reynaud, Anouk. Why don’t you say hello?”
“Hello!” shouted Anouk on the way to the door. “Goodbye!”
A blur of yellow jumper and red overalls and she was gone, her feet skidding manically on the greasy tiles. Not for the first time, I was almost sure I saw Pantoufle disappearing in her wake, a darker smudge against the dark lintel.
“She’s only six,” I said by way of explanation.
Reynaud gave a tight, sour smile, as if his first glimpse of my daughter confirmed every one of his suspicions about me.
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3
Thursday, February 13
Thank God that’s over. Visits tire me to the bone. I don’t mean you, of course, mon pere; my weekly visit to you is a luxury, you might almost say my only one. I hope you like the flowers. They don’t look much, but they smell wonderful. I’ll put them here, beside your chair, where you can see them. It’s a good view from here across the fields, with the Tannes in the middle distance and the Garonne gleaming in the far. You might almost imagine we were alone. Oh, I’m not complaining. Not really. But you must know how heavy it is for one man to carry. Their petty concerns, their dissatisfactions, their foolishness, their thousand trivial problems…
On Tuesday it was the carnival. Anyone might have taken them for savages, dancing and screaming. Louis Perrin’s youngest, Claude, fired a water-pistol at me, and what would his father say but that he was a youngster and needed to play a little? All I want is to guide them, mon pere, to free them from their sin. But they fight me at every turn, like children refusing wholesome fare in order to continue eating what sickens them.
I know you understand. For fifty years you held all this on your shoulders in patience and strength. You earned their love. Have times changed so much? Here I am feared, respected… but loved, no. Their faces are sullen, resentful. Yesterday they left the service with ash on their foreheads and a look of guilty relief. Left to their secret indulgences, their solitary vices. Don’t they understand? The Lord sees everything. Isee everything. Paul-Marie Muscat beats his wife. He pays ten Avesweekly in the confessional and leaves to begin again in exactly the same way. His wife steals. Last week she went to the market and stole trumpery jewellery from a vendor’s stall. Guillaume Duplessis wants to know if animals have souls, and weeps when I tell him they don’t. Charlotte Edouard thinks her husband has a mistress – I know he has three, but the confessional keeps me silent.
What children they are! Their demands leave me bloodied and reeling. But I cannot afford to show weakness. Sheep are not the docile, pleasant creatures of the pastoral idyll. Any countryman will tell you that. They are sly, occasionally vicious, pathologically stupid. The lenient shepherd may find his flock unruly, defiant. I cannot afford to be lenient. That is why, once a week, I allow myself this one indulgence. Your mouth is as closely sealed, mon pere, as that of the confessional. Your ears are always open, your heart always kind. For an hour I can lay aside the burden. I can be fallible.
We have a new parishioner. A Vianne Rocher, a widow, I take it, with a young child. Do you remember old Blaireau’s bakery? Four years since he died, and the place has been going to ruin ever since. Well, she has taken the lease on it, and hopes to reopen by the end of the week. I don’t expect it to last. We already have Poitou’s bakery across the square, and, besides, she’ll never fit in. A pleasant enough woman, but she has nothing in common with us. Give her two months, and she’ll be back to the city where she belongs. Funny, I never did find out where she was from. Paris, I expect, or maybe even across the border. Her accent is pure, almost too pure for a Frenchwoman, with the clipped vowels of the North, though her eyes suggest Italian or Portuguese descent, and her skin…
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But I didn’t really see her. She worked in the bakery all yesterday and today. There is a sheet of orange plastic over the window, and occasionally she or her little wild daughter appears to tip a bucket of dirty water into the gutter, or to talk animatedly with some workman or other. She has an odd facility for acquiring helpers. Though I offered to assist her, I doubted whether she would find many of our villagers willing. And yet I saw Clairmont early this morning, carrying a load of wood, then Pourceau with his ladders. Poitou sent some furniture; I saw him carrying an armchair across the square with the furtive look of a man who does not wish to be seen. Even that ill-tempered backbiter Narcisse, who flatly refused to dig over the churchyard last November, went over there with his tools to tidy up her garden.