Five Quarters of the Orange / Пять четвертинок апельсина - Харрис Джоанн

Some of my customers complained. Some simply stayed away. By the end of the week, seven of my regulars had seemingly stopped coming altogether and the place was half empty on weekdays. On Saturday a group of nine came from Angers, but the noise was especially bad that evening, and they looked nervously at the crowd at the roadside where their cars were parked, finally leaving without dessert or coffee and with the conspicuous absence of a tip.

This couldn’t go on.

Les Laveuses has no police station, but there is one gendarme, Louis Ramondin-François’s grandson-though I never had much to do with him, he being from one of the Families. A man in his late thirties, lately divorced following a too-early marriage to a local girl, with the look of his uncle Guilherm, the one with the wooden leg. I didn’t want to talk to him now, but I could feel everything slipping away from me, pulling me apart in every direction, and I needed help.

I explained the situation with the Snack-Wagon. I told him about the noise, the litter, my customers, the motorcycles. He listened with the look of an indulgent young man talking to a fussy grandmother, nodding and smiling so that I longed to knock heads with him. Then he told me-in the cheery, patient tone the young reserve for the deaf and the elderly-that no law was as yet being infringed. Crêpe Framboise was on a main road, he explained. Things had changed since I first moved to the village. He might be able to talk to Luc, but I must try to understand…

Oh, I understood. I saw him later by the Snack-Wagon, out of uniform, chatting with a pretty girl in a white T-shirt and jeans. He had a can of Stella in one hand and a sugared waffle in the other. Luc gave me one of his satirical smiles as I went by with my shopping basket, and I ignored them both. I understood.

In the days that followed, business at Crêpe Framboise slumped even more. The place was only half full now, even on Saturday nights, and weekday lunchtimes were even poorer. Paul stayed, though, loyal Paul with his special every day and his demi, and out of simple gratitude I began to give him a beer on the house, though he never asked for more than the single glass.

Lise told me that Luc-our Snack-Wagon owner-was staying over at the Café de La Mauvaise Réputation, where they still rent a few rooms.

“I don’t know where he’s from,” she told me. “Angers, I think. He’s paid his rent three months in advance, so it looks as if he’s planning to stay.”

Three months. That would take us almost to December. I wondered whether his clientele would be as keen when the first frost came. It was always a low season for me, with only a few regulars to keep things going, and I knew that with things as they were I might not even be able to count on those. Summer was my high time, and in those holiday months I usually managed to set aside enough money to make me comfortable until the spring. But this summer… As things were at present, I told myself coolly, I might make a loss. It was all right; I had money put away, but there was Lise’s wage, plus the money I sent for Reine, feed for the animals, stores, fuel, machine rental… And with autumn coming soon there would be the laborers to pay, the apple pickers and Michel Hourias with his combine, though I could sell the grain and the cider in Angers to tide myself over.

Still, it might be hard. For some time I fretted uselessly over figures and estimates. I forgot to play with my grandchildren, and for the first time wished that Pistache had not come for the summer. She stayed another week, then left with Ricot and Prune, and I could see in her eyes that she felt I was unreasonable, but I could not find enough warmth in me to tell her what I felt. There was a cold hard place where my love for her should have been, a hard dry place like the stone in a fruit.

I held her briefly as we said good-bye, and turned away dry-eyed. Prune gave me a bunch of flowers she had picked in the fields, and for a moment a sudden terror overwhelmed me. I was behaving like my mother, I told myself. Stern and impassive, but secretly filled with fears and insecurities. I wanted to reach out to my daughter, to explain that it wasn’t anything she had done-but somehow I couldn’t. We were always raised to keep things to ourselves. It isn’t a habit that can be easily broken.

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4

And so the weeks passed. I spoke to Luc again on several occasions, but met with nothing but his ironic civility. I could not shake the thought that he was familiar somehow, but could not place where I might have seen him before. I tried to find out his surname in the hope that it might give me a clue, but he paid cash at La Mauvaise Réputation and when I went there the café seemed full of the out-of-towners who haunted the Snack-Wagon. There were a few locals too: Mirielle Dupré and the two Lelac boys with Alain Lecoz, but mostly they were out-of-towners, pert-looking girls with their designer jeans and halters, young men in cycle leathers or Lycra shorts. I noticed that young Brassaud had added a jukebox and a pool table to his assortment of shabby slot machines-it seemed that not all trade had been bad in Les Laveuses.

Perhaps that was why support for my campaign was so halfhearted. Crêpe Framboise is at the far side of the village, on the Angers road. The farm was always isolated from the others, and there are no other houses for half a kilometer into the village. Only the church and the post office are within any kind of hearing distance, and you can guess that Luc kept his silence when there was a service. Even Lise, who knew what it was doing to our business, could make excuses for him. I complained to Louis Ramondin twice more, but I might as well have spoken to the cat, for all the use he was to me.

The man really wasn’t hurting anyone, he said firmly. If he broke the law, then perhaps something could be done. Otherwise, I was to let the man get on with running his business. Did I understand?

It was then the other affair began. Little things at first. One night it was fireworks going off somewhere in the street. Then motorcycles revving up outside my door at two in the morning. Litter tipped onto my doorstep during the night. A pane of my glass door broken. One night a motorcyclist rode about in my big field and made figure eights and skid marks and crazy loops all through my ripening wheat. Little things. Nuisances. Nothing you could tie down to him, or even to the out-of-towners he brought in his wake. Then someone opened the door of the henhouse and a fox got in and killed every one of those nice brown Polands of mine. Ten pullets, good layers all of them, all gone in a single night. I told Louis-he was supposed to deal with thieves and trespassers-but he practically accused me of forgetting the door myself.

“Don’t you think perhaps it might have just… swung open in the night?”

He gave me his big friendly countryman’s smile, as if maybe he could smile my poor hens back to life. I gave him a sharp look.

“Locked doors don’t just swing open,” I told him tartly. “And it takes a clever fox to cut open a padlock. Someone mean did that on purpose, Louis Ramondin, and you’re paid to find out who.”

Louis looked shifty and muttered something under his breath.

“What did you say?” I asked sharply. “There’s nothing wrong with my ears, young Louis, and you’d better believe it. Why, I remember when-”

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I bit off the end of the sentence in a hurry. I’d been about to say that I remembered his old granddaddy snoring in church, drunk as a lord and with piss down his pants, hidden inside the confessional during the Easter service, but that was nothing la veuve Simon would ever have known about, and I felt cold to think that I might have given myself away with a piece of stupid gossip. You understand now why I didn’t have more to do with the Families than I could help.