`You can't just run away from it all,' I said. `I know. I've tried it.’
'Well, I can't stay in Lansquenet,' she snapped, and I could see she was close to tears. `Not with him. Not now.’
`I remember when we lived like that. Always moving. Always running away.’
She has her own Black Man. I can see him in her eyes.
He has the unanswerable voice of authority, a specious logic which keeps you frozen, obedient, fearful. To break free from that fear, to run in hope and despair, to run and to find that all the time you were carrying him inside yourself like a malignant child. At the end, Mother knew it. Saw him at every street corner, in the dregs of every cup. Smiling from a billboard, watching from behind the wheel of a fast car. Getting closer with every beat of the heart.
`Start running away and you'll be on the run for ever,' I told her fiercely. `Stay with me instead. Stay and fight with me.’
Josephine looked at me. `With you?’
Her astonishment was almost comic.
`Why not? I have a spare room, a camp bed' She was already shaking her head and I subdued an urge to clutch at her, to force her to stay. I knew I could do it. `Just for a while, till you find somewhere else, till you find a job-' She laughed in a voice tight with hysteria. `A job? What can I do? Apart from clean – and cook – and wipe ashtrays and – pull pints and dig the garden and screw my h-husband every Fri-Friday night-' She was laughing harder now, grabbing at her stomach.
I tried to take her arm. `Josephine. I'm serious. You'll find something. You don't have to-'
`You should see him sometimes.’
She was still laughing, each word a bitter bullet, her voice metallic with self-loathing. `The pig in heat. The fat, hairy porker.’
Then she was crying with the same hard rattling sounds as her laughter, eyes squeezed shut and hands pressing against her cheeks as if to prevent some inner explosion. I waited.
`And when it was over he'd turn away, and I'd hear him snoring. And in the morning I'd try' – her face contorted, her mouth twisting to form the words – `I'd try – to shake – his stink – out of the sheets, and all the time I'd be thinking: what happened to me? To Josephine Bonnet, who was so bright at s-school and who used to dream of being a ddancer-' She turned to me abruptly, her hot face flaring, but calm. `It sounds stupid, but I used to think that there must have been a mistake somewhere, that one day someone was going to come and tell me that it wasn't happening, that this was all some other woman's dream and that none of it could ever have happened to me-' I took her hand. It was cold and trembling. One of her nails was torn down to the quick, and there was blood grimed into the palm.
`The funny thing is, I try to remember what it must have been like loving him, but there's nothing there. It's all a blank. Nothing there at all. I remember everything else – the first time he hit me, oh I remember that – but you'd think that even with Paul-Marie there'd be something to remember. Something to excuse it all. All that wasted time.’
She stopped abruptly. and looked at her watch. `I've talked too much,' she said in surprise. `I won't have time for any chocolate if I'm going to catch my bus.’
I looked at her. `Have the chocolate instead of the bus,' I told her. `On the house. I only wish it could have been champagne.’
`I have to go,' she said fractiously. Her fists dug repeatedly into her stomach. Her head dropped like a charging bull's.
`No.’ I looked at her. `You have to stay here. You have to fight him face to face. Otherwise you may as well never have left him.’
She returned my look for a moment, half-defiant. `I can't.’
There was a desperate note in her voice. `I won't be able to. He'll say things, he'll twist everything' `You have friends here,' I said gently. `And even if you don't realize it yet, you're strong.’
Then Josephine sat down, very deliberately, on one of my red stools, put her face against the counter and cried silently.
I let her. I didn't say it would be OK. I made no effort to comfort her. Sometimes it's better to leave things as they are, to let grief take its course. Instead I went into the kitchen and very slowly prepared the chocolat espresso. By the time I'd poured it,' added cognac and chocolate chips, put the cups onto a yellow tray with a wrapped sugar lump in each saucer, she was calm again. It's a small kind of magic, I know, but it sometimes works..
`Why did you change your mind?’ I asked when the cup was half-finished. `Last time we talked about this you seemed very sure you weren't going to leave Paul.’
She shrugged, deliberately avoiding meeting my eyes. `Was it because he hit you again?’
This time she looked surprised. Her hand went to her forehead where the broken skin looked angry, inflamed. 'No.’
`Then why?’
Her eyes slid from mine again. With her fingertips she touched the espresso cup, as if to test its reality. `Nothing. I don't know. Nothing.’
It is a lie, and a visible one. Automatically I reach for her thoughts, so open a moment ago. I need to know if I made her do it, if I forced her in spite of my good intentions. But for the moment her thoughts are formless, smoky. I can see nothing there but darkness.
To press her would have been useless. There is a stubborn streak in Josephine which refuses to be hurried. She will tell me in time. If she wants to.
It was evening before Muscat came looking for her. By then we had made up her bed in Anouk's room – for the moment Anouk will sleep on the camp bed beside me. She takes Josephine's arrival in her stride, as she accepts so many other things. I knew a momentary pang for my daughter, for the first room of her own she had ever had, but promised it would not be for long.
`I have an idea,' I told her. `Perhaps we could have the attic space beneath the roof made into a room just for you, with a ladder to climb up, and a trapdoor above it, and little round windows cut into the roof. Would you like that?’
It is a dangerous, beguiling notion. It suggests we are going to stay here a long time.
`Could I see the stars from up there?’ asked Anouk eagerly.
`Of course.’
`Good!' said Anouk, and bounced upstairs to tell Pantoufle.
We sat down to table in the cramped kitchen. The table, was left from the shop's bakery days, a massive piece of rough-cut pine cross-hatched with knife scars into which veins of ancient dough, dried to the consistency of cement, have worked to produce a smooth marbly finish. The plates are mismatched: one green, one white, Anouk's flowered. The glasses, too, are all different: one tall, one short, one which still bears the label Moutarde Amora. And yet this is the first time we have really owned such things. We used hotel crockery, plastic knives and forks. Even in Nice, where we lived for over a year, the furnishings were borrowed, leased with the shop. The novelty of possession is still an exotic thing to us, a precious thing, intoxicating. I envy the table its scars, the scorch marks caused by the hot bread tins. I envy its calm sense of time and I wish I could say: I did this five years ago. I made this mark, this ring caused by a wet coffee cup, this cigarette bum, this ladder of cuts against the wood's coarse grain. This is where Anouk carved her initials, the year she was six years old, this secret place behind the table leg. I did this on a warm day seven summers ago with the carving knife. Do you remember? Do you remember the summer the river ran dry? Do you remember? I envy the table's calm sense of place. It has been here a long time. It belongs.
Josephine helped me prepare dinner: a salad of green beans and tomatoes in spiced oil, red and black olives from the Thursday market stall, walnut bread, fresh basil from Narcisse, goat's cheese, red wine from Bordeaux. We talked as we ate, but not about Paul-Marie Muscat. Instead I told her about us, Anouk and I, of the places we had seen, of the chocolaterie in Nice, of our time in New York just after Anouk was born and of the times before, of Paris, of Naples, of all the stopping-places Mother and I had made into temporary homes in our long flight across the world. Tonight I want to recall only the bright things, the funny, the good things. There are too many sad thoughts in the air already. I put a white candle on the table to clear bad influences, and its scent is nostalgic, comforting. I remembered for Josephine the little canal at Ourcq, the Pantheon, the Place des Artistes, the lovely avenue of Unter den Linden, the Jersey ferry, Viennese pastries eaten in their hot papers on the street, the seafront at Juan-les Pins, dancing in the streets in San Pedro. I watched her face lose a little of its set expression. I remembered how Mother sold a donkey to a farmer in a village near Rivoli, and how the creature kept finding us again, time after time, almost as far as Milan. Then the story of the flower-sellers in Lisbon, and how we left that city in a refrigerated florist's van which delivered us half frozen four hours later by the hot white docks at Porto. She began to smile, then to laugh. There were times when we had money, Mother and I, and Europe was sunny and full of promise. I remembered them tonight; the Arab gentleman in the white limousine who serenaded Mother that day in San Remo, how we laughed and how happy she was, and how long we lived afterwards on the money he gave us.