Joanne Harris - Five Quarters of the Orange

But this year there was little of that. The sourness after La Mauvaise Réputation had begun our descent, and with it the letters, the rumors, graffiti on the walls, whispering behind our backs and polite silences to our faces. It was assumed that there could be no smoke without fire. The accusations (NAZI WHOAR on the side of the henhouse, the words reappearing larger and redder every time we painted them over), coupled with Mother’s refusal to acknowledge or deny the gossip, along with reports of her visits to La Rép exaggerated and passed hungrily from mouth to mouth, were enough to whet suspicions even more keenly. Harvesttime was a sour affair for the Dartigen family that year.

The others built their bonfires and sheaved their wheat. Children picked over the rows to make sure none of the grain was lost. We gathered the last of the apples-what wasn’t rotten through with wasps, that is-and stored them away in the cellar on trays, each one separate so that rot couldn’t spread. We stored our vegetables in the root cellar in bins and under loose coverings of dry earth. Mother even baked some of her special bread, though there was little market for her baking in Les Laveuses, and sold it impassively in Angers. I remember how we took a cartload of loaves and cakes to market one day, how the sun shone on the burnished crusts-acorns, hedgehogs, little grimacing masks-like on polished oak. A few of the village children refused to speak to us. On the way to school one day someone threw clods of earth at Reinette and Cassis from a stand of tamarisks by the riverside. As the day approached, girls began to appraise one another, brushing their hair with especial care and washing their faces with oatmeal, for on festival day one of them would be chosen as the harvest queen and wear a barley crown and carry a pitcher of wine. I was totally uninterested in this. With my short straight hair and froggy face I was never going to be harvest queen. Besides, without Tomas nothing mattered very much. I wondered if I would ever see him again. I sat by the Loire with my traps and my fishing rod and watched. I couldn’t stop myself from believing that somehow, if I caught the pike, Tomas would return.

Harvest festival morning was cold and bright, with the dying-ember glow peculiar to October. Mother had stayed up the night before-out of a kind of stubbornness rather than a love of tradition-making gingerbread and black buckwheat pancakes and blackberry jam, which she placed in baskets and gave to us to take to the fair. I wasn’t planning on going. Instead, I milked the goat and finished my few Sunday chores, then began to make my way toward the river. I had just placed a particularly ingenious trap there, two crates and an oil drum tied together with chicken wire and baited with fish scraps right at the edge of the riverbank, and I was eager to test it out. I could smell cut-grass on the wind with the first of the autumn bonfires, and the scent was poignant, centuries old, a reminder of happier times. I felt old too, trudging through the cornfields to the Loire. I felt as if I’d already lived a long, long time.

Paul was waiting at the Standing Stones. He looked unsurprised to see me, glancing briefly at me from his fishing before returning to the cork floater on the water.

“Aren’t you going to the f-fair?” he asked.

I shook my head. I realized I hadn’t seen him once since Mother chased him from the house, and I felt a sudden pang of guilt at having so completely forgotten my old friend. Maybe that’s why I sat down next to him. Certainly it was not for the sake of companionship-my need for solitude was stifling me.

“Me n-neither.” He looked almost morose, almost sour-faced that morning, his eyes drawn together in a frown of concentration that was unsettlingly adult. “All those idiots getting d-drunk and d-dancing about. Who needs it?”

“Not me.” At my feet the brown eddies of the river were hypnotic. “I’m going to check all my traps, then I thought I’d try the big sandbank. Cassis says there are pike there sometimes.”

Paul gave me a cynical look. “Never g-get her,” he told me tersely.

“Why not?”

He shrugged. “You j-just won’t, that’s all.”

We fished side by side for a time, as the sun warmed our backs slowly and the leaves fell yellow-red-black, one by one into the silky water. We heard the church bells ringing sweet and distant across the fields, signaling the end of Mass. The festival would begin within ten minutes.

“Are the others going?” Paul shifted a bloodworm from its warming place in his left cheek and speared it expertly onto the hook.

I shrugged. “Don’t care,” I said.

In the silence that followed I heard Paul’s stomach rumble loudly.

“Hungry?”

“Nah.”

It was then that I heard it. Clear as memory on the Angers road, almost imperceptible at first, growing louder like the drone of a sleepy wasp, louder like the buzz of blood in the temples after a breathless run across the fields. The sound of a single motorbike.

A sudden burst of panic. Paul must not see him. If it was Tomas I must be alone-and my heart’s sick lurch of joy told me, told me with a clear rapturous certainty, it was Tomas.

Tomas.

“Perhaps we could just have a look in,” I said with fake indifference.

Paul made a noncommittal sound.

“There’ll be gingerbread,” I told him slyly. “And baked potatoes and roasted sweet corn…and pies…and sausage in the coals of the bonfire.”

I heard his stomach rumble a little louder.

“We could sneak in and help ourselves,” I suggested.

Silence.

“Cassis and Reine will be there.”

At least I hoped they would. I was counting on their presence to enable me to make a quick getaway and back to Tomas. The thought of his closeness-the unbearable, hot joy that filled me at the thought of seeing him-was like baking stones under my feet.

“W-will she be there?” His voice was low with a hate that might in other circumstances have surprised me. I never imagined Paul to be the kind who bears grudges. “I mean your m-m-m-” He grimaced with the effort. “Your m-m-m-Your m-m-m-”

I shook my head. “Shouldn’t think so,” I interrupted, more sharply than I intended. “God, Paul, it drives me crazy when you do that.”

Paul shrugged indifferently. I could hear the sound of the motorbike clearly now, maybe a mile or two up the road. I clenched my fists so hard that my fingernails scarred my palms.

“I mean,” I said in a gentler tone. “I mean it doesn’t matter really. She just doesn’t understand, that’s all.”

“Will she b-be there?” insisted Paul.

I shook my head. “No,” I lied. “She said she’d be clearing out the goat shed this morning.”

Paul nodded. “All right,” he said mildly.

Tomas might wait at the Lookout Post for an hour or so. The weather was warm; he would hide his motorbike in the bushes and smoke a cigarette. If there was nobody around he might risk a dip in the river. If after that time no one had appeared, he would scribble a message for us and leave it (perhaps with a parcel of magazines or sweets carefully packed in newspaper) at the top of the Lookout Post, in the fork under the platform. I knew this; he’d done it before. In that time I could easily get into the village with Paul, then double back as soon as no one was watching. I would not tell Reinette or Cassis that Tomas was here. A burst of greedy joy at the thought. Imagining his face lit up by a smile of welcome, a smile that would be mine alone. With that thought I almost rushed Paul toward the village, my hot hand tight around his cool one.

The square around the fountain was already half filled with people. More people were filing out of the church, children holding candles, young girls with crowns of autumn leaves, a handful of young men fresh from confession-Guilherm Ramondin among them-ogling the girls prior to reaping a new crop of sinful thoughts. More, if they could get it; harvest was the time for it, after all, and there was precious little else to look forward to… I saw Cassis and Reinette standing a little way away from the main body of the crowd. Reine was wearing a red flannel dress and a necklace of berries, and Cassis was eating a sugared pastry. No one seemed to be talking to them, and I could sense the little circle of isolation around them. Reinette was laughing, a high, brittle sound like the scream of a seabird. A little distance away from them my mother stood watching, a basket of pastries and fruit in one hand. She looked very drab among the festival crowd, her black dress and head scarf jarring against the flowers and bunting. At my side I felt Paul stiffen.