Joanne Harris - Five Quarters of the Orange

No more. Just like that. If it had been another woman I wouldn’t have believed it, but Mirabelle Dartigen was no ordinary woman. No more, she said. And that was her last word. To my knowledge she never took morphine again, though that too might have been because of what happened rather than from sheer force of will. Of course, by then there were to be no more oranges, ever again.

I think even I had lost my taste for them.

Itold you much of what she wrote was lies. Whole paragraphs of them, tangled into the truth like bindweed into a hedge, further obscured by the mad jargon she uses, lines crossed and recrossed, words folded and inverted so that each one is a struggle of my will against hers to extract meaning from the code.

Walking down by the river today. I saw a woman flying a kite made of plywood and oil drums. Wouldn’t have imagined such a thing could fly. Big as a tank but painted so many colors, and ribbons flying from the tail. I thought (at this point some words are obscured by an olive-oil stain, bleeding the ink a deep violet into the paper) but she leaped onto the crossbar and swung into the air. Didn’t recognize her at first, though I thought it might have been Minette, but (a larger stain here obscures most of the rest, though there are a few words still visible. Beautiful is one of them. Scrawled across the top of the paragraph she has written the word seesaw in ordinary script. Below, a scratchy diagram which might represent almost anything, but which seems to show a stick figure standing on a swastika shape.).

In any case, it doesn’t matter. There was no kite woman. Even the reference to Minette makes no sense-the only Minette we ever knew was an elderly distant cousin of my father, to whom people would kindly allude as “eccentric,” but who referred to her many cats as “my babies” and who could sometimes be seen suckling kittens at her breast in public places, her face tranquil above her sagging, scandalous flesh.

I’m only saying this so you’ll understand. There were all kinds of fanciful tales in Mother’s album, stories of meetings with long-dead people, dreams disguised as fact, prosaic impossibilities: rainy days converted to bright ones, an imaginary guard dog, conversations that never happened-some of them quite dull-a kiss from a friend long since vanished. Sometimes she mixed truth with lies so effectively that even I am no longer sure which is which. Besides, there is no apparent purpose. Perhaps it was her illness talking, or the delusions of her addiction. I don’t know if the album was meant for any eyes but hers. Nor does it act as a memoir. In places it is almost a diary, but not quite; the irregular sequence robs it of logic and of usefulness. Maybe this is why it took me so long to understand what was staring me in the face, to see the reason for her actions and the terrible repercussions of my own. Sometimes the phrases are doubly hidden, crammed between the lines of recipes in tiny scratching script. Maybe that’s how she wanted it to be. Between her and myself, at last, a labor of love.

Green-tomato jam. Cut green tomatoes into pieces, like apples, and weigh them. Place in a bowl with 1 kg. of sugar to the same weight of fruit. Awoke at three again this morning and went to find my pills. Forgot again that I’d none left. When the sugar is melted (to stop it burning add 2 glasses of water if required) stir with a wooden spoon. I keep thinking that if I go to Raphaël he might find me another supplier. I daren’t go to the Germans again, not after what happened. I’d rather die first. Then add the tomatoes and boil gently, stirring very frequently. Skim off the residue with a slotted spoon at intervals. Sometimes dying seems better than this. At least I wouldn’t have to worry about waking up, ha ha. I keep thinking about the children. I’m afraid Bele Yolande has honey fungus, have to dig away the infected roots or it will spread to them all. Allow to boil gently for about 2 hours, maybe a little less. When the jam sticks to a small plate it is ready. I feel so angry, with myself, with him, with them. With myself most of all. When that idiot Raphaël told me, I had to bite my lips till they bled so that I wouldn’t give myself away. I don’t think he noticed. I said I knew already, that girls were always getting into mischief, that nothing had come of it. He seemed relieved, and when he’d gone I took the big hatchet and chopped wood until I could hardly stand, wishing all the time it was his face.

You see, her narrative is unclear. Only in retrospect does it begin to make a little sense. And of course, she gave nothing away of her conversation with Raphaël. I can only imagine what took place, his anxiety, her stony impassive silence, his guilt. It was his café, after all. But Mother wouldn’t have given anything away. Pretending she knew was a defensive measure, throwing up a barrier against his unwanted concern. Reine could look after herself, she must have said. Besides, nothing really happened. Reine would be more careful in future. We could only be happy that nothing worse had occurred.

T. told me it wasn’t his fault, but Raphaël says he stood by and did nothing. The Germans were his friends, after all. Perhaps they paid for Reine the way they did for those town women T. brought with him.

What lulled our suspicions was that she never mentioned the incident to us. Maybe she simply didn’t know how-her distaste of anything that reminded her of bodily functions was acute-or maybe she thought it was something better left alone. But her album reveals her growing rage, her violence, her dreams of retribution. I wanted to chop at him until there was nothing left , she writes. When I read that for the first time, I was certain she was referring to Raphaël, but now I’m not so sure. The intensity of her hatred speaks of something deeper, darker. A betrayal, perhaps. Or a thwarted love.

Below a recipe for applesauce cake, she writes:

His hands were softer than I expected. He looks very young, and his eyes are the exact same color as the sea on a stormy day. I thought I would hate it, hate him, but there is something about his gentleness. Even in a German. I wonder whether I am insane to believe what he promises. I’m so much older than he is. And yet I’m not so old. Perhaps there’s time.

There is no more at this point, as if she is ashamed at her own boldness, but I find small references throughout the album, now that I know where to look. Single words, phrases broken by recipes and gardening reminders, coded even from herself. And the poem.

For years I assumed that it was fantasy too, like so many of the other things she mentions. My mother could never have had a lover. She lacked the capacity for tenderness. Her defenses were too good, her sensual impulses sublimated into her recipes, into creating the perfect lentilles cuisinées , the most ardent crème brûlée . It never occurred to me that there might be any truth in these, the most unlikely of her fantasies. Remembering her face, the sour turn of her mouth, the hard lines of her cheekbones, the hair scraped back into a knot at the back of her head, even the story of the kite woman seemed more likely.

And yet I came to believe it. Maybe it was Paul who started me thinking. Maybe the day when I caught myself looking at my reflection in the mirror with a red scarf round my head and my birthday earrings (a present from Pistache, never before worn) dangling coquettishly. I’m sixty-four years old, for pity’s sake. I ought to know better. And yet there’s something in the way he looks at me that sets my old heart lurching like a tractor engine. Not the lost, frantic feeling I had with Tomas. Not even the sense of temporary reprieve that was Hervé‘s gift to me. No, this is something different again. A feeling of peace. The feeling you get when a recipe turns out perfectly right, a perfectly risen soufflé, a flawless sauce hollandaise . It’s a feeling which tells me that any woman can be beautiful in the eyes of a man who loves her.