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, lucid, 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.
29
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.
`I miss reading,' she said. `It's getting too hard to see print nowadays, but Luc reads to me sometimes. Remember how I got him to read Rimbaud to me at that first meeting?’
I nodded. `You make it sound as if it was years ago,' I told her.
`It was.’
Her voice was light, almost uninflected. `I've had what I thought I'd never be able to have, Vianne. My grandson visits me every day. We talk like adults. He's a good lad, kind enough to grieve for me a little-‘
'He loves you, Armande,' I interrupted. `We all do.’
She chuckled. `Maybe not all,' she said. `Still, that doesn't matter. I have everything I've ever wanted right here and now. My house, my friends, Luc…’
She gave me a stubborn look. `I'm not going to have any of that taken away from me,' she declared mutinously.
`I don't understand. No-one can force you to-'
`I'm not talking about any one,' she interrupted sharply. `Cussonnet can talk as much as he likes about his retinal implants and his scans and laser therapies and what he likes' – her contempt for such things was apparent – `but that doesn't change the plain facts. The truth is I'm going blind, and there's not a lot anyone can do to stop it.’
She folded her arms with a gesture of finality.
`I should have gone to him sooner,' she said without bitterness. `Now it's irreversible, and worsening. Six months of partial sight is the most he can give me, then Le Mortoir, like it or not, till the day I die.’
She paused. `I could live another ten years,' she said reflectively, echoing my words to Reynaud.
I opened my mouth to argue, to tell her it might not be all that bad, then closed it again.
`Don't look like that, girl.’
Armande gave me a rallying nudge. `After a five-course banquet you'd want coffee and liqueurs, wouldn't you? You wouldn't suddenly decide to round it all off with a bowl of pap, would you? Just so you could have an extra course?’
`Armande-'
`Don't interrupt.’ Her eyes were bright. `I'm saying you need to know when to stop, Vianne. You need to know when to push away your plate and call for those liqueurs. I'll be eighty-one in a fortnight-'
`That's not so old,' I wailed in spite of myself. `I can't believe you're giving up like this!' She looked at me. `And yet you were the one, weren't you, who told Guillaume to leave Charly some dignity.’
`You're not a dog!' I retorted, angry now.
`No,' replied Armande softly, `and I have a choice.’
A bitter place, New York, with its gaudy mysteries; cold in winter and flashing with heat in summer. After three months even the noise becomes familiar, unremarkable, the sounds of cars-voices-cabs melting into a single sheet of sound which covers the place like rain. Crossing the road from the deli with our lunch in a brown sack between her folded arms, I meeting her halfway, catching her eye across a busy street, a billboard advertising Marlboro cigarettes at her back; a man standing against a vista of red mountains. I saw it coming. Opened my mouth to shout, to warn her… Froze. For a second, that was all, a single second. Was it fear which stapled my tongue to the roof of my mouth? Was it simply the slowness of the body's reaction when faced with the imminence of danger, the thought reaching the brain an aching eternity from the dull flesh's response? Or was it hope, the kind of hope which comes when all dreams have been stripped away and what remains is the long slow agony of pretence? Of course, Maman, of course we'll make it to Florida… Of course we will.