4.

And so the weeks passed. I spoke to Luc again on several occasions, but met with nothing but his ironic civility. I could not shake the thought that he was familiar somehow, but could not place where I might have seen him before. I tried to find out his surname in the hope that it might give me a clue, but he paid cash at La Mauvaise Réputation and when I went there the café seemed full of the out-of-towners who haunted the Snack-Wagon. There were a few locals too: Mirielle Dupré and the two Lelac boys with Alain Lecoz, but mostly they were out-of-towners, pert-looking girls with their designer jeans and halters, young men in cycle leathers or Lycra shorts. I noticed that young Brassaud had added a jukebox and a pool table to his assortment of shabby slot machines-it seemed that not all trade had been bad in Les Laveuses.

Perhaps that was why support for my campaign was so halfhearted. Crêpe Framboise is at the far side of the village, on the Angers road. The farm was always isolated from the others, and there are no other houses for half a kilometer into the village. Only the church and the post office are within any kind of hearing distance, and you can guess that Luc kept his silence when there was a service. Even Lise, who knew what it was doing to our business, could make excuses for him. I complained to Louis Ramondin twice more, but I might as well have spoken to the cat, for all the use he was to me.

The man really wasn’t hurting anyone, he said firmly. If he broke the law, then perhaps something could be done. Otherwise, I was to let the man get on with running his business. Did I understand?

It was then the other affair began. Little things at first. One night it was fireworks going off somewhere in the street. Then motorcycles revving up outside my door at two in the morning. Litter tipped onto my doorstep during the night. A pane of my glass door broken. One night a motorcyclist rode about in my big field and made figure eights and skid marks and crazy loops all through my ripening wheat. Little things. Nuisances. Nothing you could tie down to him, or even to the out-of-towners he brought in his wake. Then someone opened the door of the henhouse and a fox got in and killed every one of those nice brown Polands of mine. Ten pullets, good layers all of them, all gone in a single night. I told Louis-he was supposed to deal with thieves and trespassers-but he practically accused me of forgetting the door myself.

“Don’t you think perhaps it might have just…swung open in the night?” He gave me his big friendly countryman’s smile, as if maybe he could smile my poor hens back to life. I gave him a sharp look.

“Locked doors don’t just swing open,” I told him tartly. “And it takes a clever fox to cut open a padlock. Someone mean did that on purpose, Louis Ramondin, and you’re paid to find out who.”

Louis looked shifty and muttered something under his breath.

“What did you say?” I asked sharply. “There’s nothing wrong with my ears, young Louis, and you’d better believe it. Why, I remember when-” I bit off the end of the sentence in a hurry. I’d been about to say that I remembered his old granddaddy snoring in church, drunk as a lord and with piss down his pants, hidden inside the confessional during the Easter service, but that was nothing la veuve Simon would ever have known about, and I felt cold to think that I might have given myself away with a piece of stupid gossip. You understand now why I didn’t have more to do with the Families than I could help.

Anyway, Louis finally agreed to have a look round the farm, but he didn’t find anything, and I just got on with things as best I could. The loss of the hens was a blow, though. I couldn’t afford to replace them-besides, who was to say it might not happen again?-so I had to buy eggs from the old Hourias farm, now owned by a couple named Pommeau who grew sweet corn and sunflowers, which they sold upriver to the processing plant.

I knew Luc was behind what was happening. I knew it but I couldn’t prove anything, and it was driving me half crazy. Worse, I didn’t know why he was doing it, and my rage grew until it was like a cider press squeezing my old head like an apple about ripe and ready to burst. The night after the fox in the henhouse I took to sitting up at my darkened window with my shotgun slung across my chest, and a strange sight it must have been to anyone who saw me in my nightdress and my autumn coat, keeping watch over my yard. I bought some new padlocks for the gates and the paddock, and I stood guard night after night waiting for someone to come calling, but no one came. The bastard must have known what I was doing, though how he could have guessed I don’t know. I was beginning to think he could see right into my mind.

5.

It didn’t take long for sleeplessness to take its toll on me. I began to lose concentration during the daytime. I forgot recipes. I couldn’t remember whether I’d already salted the omelette, and salted it twice or not at all. I cut myself seriously as I was chopping onions, only realizing I’d been asleep on my feet when I awoke with a handful of blood and one of my fingers gaping. I was abrupt with my remaining customers, and even though the loud music and the motorcycles seemed to have quieted down a little, word must have got around, because the regulars I had lost didn’t come back. Oh, I wasn’t entirely alone. I did have a few friends who took my part, but the deep reserve-the constant feeling of suspicion-that had made Mirabelle Dartigen such a stranger in the village must be in my blood too. I refused to be pitied. My anger alienated my friends and frightened my customers away. I existed on rage and adrenaline alone.

Oddly enough, it was Paul who finally put a stop to it. Some weekday lunchtimes he was my only customer, and he was regular as the church clock, staying for exactly an hour, his dog lying obediently under the chair, watching the road in silence as he ate. He might have been deaf, for all the notice he took of the Snack-Wagon, and he rarely said anything to me except hello and good-bye.

One day he came in but didn’t sit down at his usual table, and I knew something was wrong. It was a week after the fox in the henhouse, and I was dog-tired. My left hand was bound up in thick bandage after I’d cut myself, and I’d had to ask Lise to prepare the vegetables for the soup. I still insisted on making the pastry myself-imagine having to make pastry with a plastic bag mittened over one hand-and it was hard work. Standing half asleep on my feet at the kitchen door, I barely returned Paul’s greeting. He looked at me sideways, taking off his beret and stubbing out his small black cigarette on the doorstep.

“Bonjour, Madame Simon.”

I nodded and tried to smile. The fatigue was like a sparkling gray blanket over everything. His words were a yawning of vowels in a tunnel. His dog went to lie under their table at the window, but Paul stayed standing, his beret in one hand.

“You don’t look well,” he observed in his slow way.

“I’m all right,” I said shortly. “I didn’t sleep too well last night, that’s all.”

“Or any night this month, I’d say,” said Paul. “What is it, insomnia?”

I gave him a sharpish look. “Your dinner’s on the table,” I said. “Chicken fricassée and peas. I won’t be heating it up for you if it gets cold.”

He gave a sleepy smile. “You’re beginning to sound like a wife, Madame Simon. People will talk.”

I decided that this was one of his jokes and ignored it.

“Perhaps I can help,” insisted Paul. “It isn’t right for them to treat you this way. Somebody ought to do something about it.”

“Please don’t trouble yourself, monsieur.” After so many broken nights I could feel tears coming closer to the surface by the day, and even this simple, kind talk brought a stinging to my eyes. I made my voice dry and sarcastic to compensate, and looked pointedly in the opposite direction. “I can deal with it perfectly well by myself.”