Joanne Harris - Five Quarters of the Orange

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.”

Paul remained unquelled. “You can trust me, you know,” he said quietly. “You should know that by now. All this time…” I looked at him then, and suddenly I knew.

“Please, Boise…”

I stiffened.

“It’s all right. I haven’t told anyone, have I?”

Silence. The truth stretched between us like a string of chewing gum.

“Have I?”

I shook my head. “No. You haven’t.”

“Well, then.” He took a step toward me. “You never would take help when you needed it, not even in the old days.” Pause. “You haven’t changed that much, Framboise.”

Funny. I thought I had. “When did you guess?” I asked at last.

He shrugged. “Didn’t take long,” he said laconically. “Probably the first time I tasted that kouign amann of your mother’s. Or maybe it was the pike. Never could forget a good recipe, could I?” And he smiled again beneath his drooping mustache, an expression that was both sweet and kind and unutterably sad at the same time.

“It must have been hard,” he commented.

The stinging at my eyes was almost unbearable now. “I don’t want to talk about it,” I said.

He nodded. “I’m not a talker,” he said simply.

He sat down then to eat his fricassée , stopping occasionally to look at me and smile, and after a while I sat down next to him-after all, we were alone in the place-and poured myself a glass of Gros-Plant. We sat in silence for a time. After a few minutes I laid my head down on the tabletop and wept quietly. The only sounds were my weeping and those of Paul’s cutlery as he ate reflectively, not looking at me, not reacting. But I knew his silence was kind.

When I had finished I wiped my face carefully on my apron. “I think I’d like to talk now,” I said.

Paul is a good listener. I told him things I never meant to tell a living soul, and he listened in silence, nodding occasionally. I told him about Yannick and Laure, about Pistache and how I had let her go without a word, about the hens, the sleepless nights, and how the sound of the generator made me feel as if ants were crawling inside my skull. I told him of my fears for the business, for myself, my nice home and the niche I had made for myself among these people. I told him of my fear of growing old, of how the young today seemed so much stranger and harder than we had ever been, even with what we had seen during the war. I told him of my dreams, of Old Mother with a mouthful of orange and of Jeannette Gaudin and the snakes, and little by little I began to feel the poison inside me drain away.

When at last I finished, there was silence.

“You can’t stand guard every night,” said Paul at last. “You’ll kill yourself.”

“I have no choice,” I told him. “Those people, they could come back any time.”

“We’ll share watches,” said Paul simply, and that was that.

Ilet him have the guest room now that Pistache and the children were gone. He was no trouble, keeping to himself, making his own bed and keeping things tidy. A lot of the time you’d hardly have noticed him, and yet he was there, calm and unobtrusive. I felt guilty that I had ever thought him slow. In fact he was quicker than I was in some ways; certainly it was he who finally made the connection between the Snack-Wagon and Cassis’s son.

We spent two nights watching for trespassers-Paul from ten till two, and I from two till six-and already I was beginning to feel more rested and more able to cope. Just sharing the problem was enough for me just then; just knowing there was someone else… Of course, the neighbors began to talk almost at once. You can’t really keep a secret in a place like Les Laveuses, and too many people knew that old Paul Hourias had left his shack by the river to move in with the widow. People fell silent as I came into shops. The postman winked at me as he delivered letters. Some disapproving glances came my way, mostly from the curé and his Sunday-school cronies, but for the most part there was little but quiet, indulgent laughter. Louis Ramondin was heard to say that the widow had been behaving strangely in recent weeks, and now he knew why. Ironically, many of my customers came back for a while, if only to see for themselves whether the rumors were true.

I ignored them.

Of course, the Snack-Wagon hadn’t moved, and the noise and nuisance from the daily crowds did not abate. I’d given up trying to reason with the man, the authorities, such as they were, seemed uninterested, which left us-Paul and I-with only one remaining alternative.

We investigated.

Every day Paul took to drinking his lunchtime demi at La Mauvaise Réputation, where the motorcyclists and the town girls came. He questioned the postman. Lise, also helped us, even though I’d had to lay her off for the winter, and she set her little brother, Viannet, onto the case too, which must have made Luc the most watched man in Les Laveuses. We found out a few things.

He was from Paris. He’d moved to Angers six months ago. He had money and plenty of it, spending freely. No one seemed to know his last name, though he wore a signet ring with the initials L. D. He had an eye or two for the girls. He drove a white Porsche, which he kept at the back of La Mauvaise Réputation. He was generally reckoned to be all right, which probably meant he bought a lot of rounds.