Five Quarters of the Orange / Пять четвертинок апельсина

Харрис Джоанн

Words like spilled cards sliding. I laughed harder. The terror in me grew, but I could not control my laughter, and even when they had gone – the screech of their Mercedes’ tires oddly furtive in the night – I still felt the occasional spasm, souring into half – sobs as the adrenaline fell from me, leaving me feeling shaken and old.

So old.

Pistache was looking at me, her face unreadable. Prune’s face appeared round the bedroom door.

“M'em'ee? What’s wrong?”

“Go to bed, sweetheart.” said Pistache quickly. “It’s all right. It’s nothing.”

Prune looked doubtful.

“Why was M'em'ee shouting?”

“Nothing.” Her voice was sharp now, anxious. “Go to bed!”

Prune turned reluctantly. Pistache closed the door.

We sat in silence.

I knew she’d talk when she was ready, and I knew better than to rush her. She looks sweet enough, but there’s a stubborn streak in her all the same. I know it well; I have it too. Instead I washed the dishes and the cups, dried them and put them away. After that I took out a book and pretended to read.

After a while Pistache spoke.

“What did they mean about a legacy?”

I shrugged. “Nothing. Cassis made out he was a rich man so that they’d look after him in his old age. They should have known better. That’s all.”

I hoped she might leave it at that, but there was a stubborn line between her eyes that promised trouble.

“I never even knew I had an uncle,” she said tonelessly.

“We weren’t close.”

Silence. I could see her going over it in her mind and I wished I could stop the circle of her thoughts, but knew I couldn’t.

“Yannick’s very like him,” I told her, trying for lightness. “Handsome and feckless. And his wife leads him like a dancing bear.”

I demonstrated mincingly, hoping for a smile, but if anything her thoughtful look deepened.

“They seemed to think you’d cheated him somehow,” she said. “Bought him out, when he was ill.”

I forced myself to pause. Anger at this stage would not help anyone.

“Pistache,” I said patiently. “Don’t believe everything those two tell you. Cassis wasn’t ill, at least, not in the way you think. He drank himself into bankruptcy, left his wife and son, sold off the farm to pay his debts…”

She watched me curiously, and I had to make an effort to keep my voice from rising.

“Look, that was all a long time ago. It’s over. My brother’s dead.”

“Laure said there was a sister.”

I nodded. “Reine-Claude.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

I shrugged.

“We weren’t – ”

“Close. I gathered.”

Her voice was small and flat-sounding.

Fear pricked at me again, and I said more sharply than I had intended:

“So? You understand that, don’t you? After all, you and Noisette were never – ”

I bit the words short, but too late. I saw her flinch and cursed myself inwardly.

“No. But at least I tried. For you.”

Damn. I’d forgotten how sensitive she was. All those years I took her for the quiet one, watching my other daughter grow wilder and more willful day by day… Yes, Noisette was always my favorite. But until now I thought I’d hidden it better. If she had been Prune I would have put my arms around her, but to see her now, this calm, close-faced woman with her small, hurt smile and sleepy cat’s eyes… I thought of Noisette, and how, out of pride and stubbornness, I had made her a stranger to me. I tried to explain.

“We were separated a long time ago,” I told her. “After… the war. My mother was… ill… and we went to live with different relatives. We didn’t keep in touch.” It was almost true, at least as close as I could bear to tell her. “Reine went to… work… in Paris. She… fell ill too. She’s in a private hospital near Paris. I visited her once, but…”

How could I explain? The institution-stink of the place, boiled cabbage and laundry and sickness, televisions blaring in soft rooms full of lost people who wept when they didn’t like the stewed apples and who sometimes shouted at one another with unexpected viciousness, flailing their fists helplessly and pushing each other against the pale green walls. There had been a man in a wheelchair-a relatively young man with a face like a scarred fist and rolling, hopeless eyes-who had screamed I don’t like it here! I don’t like it here! during the whole of my visit, until his voice faded into a drone and even I found myself ignoring his distress. One woman stood in a corner with her face to the wall and wept, unheeded. And the woman on the bed-the huge bloated thing with the dyed hair, round white thighs and arms cool and soft as fresh dough, smiling serenely to herself and murmuring… Only the voice was the same, without which I would never have believed it, a little-girl’s voice chiming nonsense syllables, the eyes as blank and round as an owl’s. I made myself touch her.

“Reine. Reinette.”

Again that vapid smile, the little nod, as if in her dreams she were a queen and I her subject. She had forgotten her name, the nurse told me quietly, but she was happy enough; she had her “good days” and she loved the television, especially the cartoons, and to have her hair brushed while the radio played…

“Of course we still have our bad spells,” said the nurse, and I froze at the words, feeling something shrivel in my stomach to a bright hard knot of terror. “We wake in the night”-strange, that pronoun, as if by taking on part of the woman’s identity she might be able to somehow share in the experience of being old and mad-“and sometimes we have our little tantrums, don’t we?” She smiled brightly at me, a young blonde of twenty or so, and I hated her so much in that moment for her youth and cheery ignorance that I almost smiled back.

I felt the same smile on my face as I looked at my daughter, and hated myself for it. I tried again for a lighter note.

“You know what it’s like,” I said apologetically. “Can’t bear old people… hospitals. I sent some money…”

It was the wrong thing to say. Sometimes everything you say is the wrong thing. My mother knew that.

“Money,” said Pistache contemptuously. “Is that all people care about?”

She went to bed soon after, and nothing was right again between us that summer. Near the end of the holidays she left a little earlier than usual, pleading fatigue and the approach of the school term, but I could see something was wrong. I tried to talk about it to her once or twice, but it was no good. She remained distant, her eyes wary. I noticed she was receiving a lot of mail, but I thought nothing of it until much later. My mind was on other things.

2

A few days after the business with Yannick and Laure, the Snack-Wagon arrived. A large trailer-van brought it and parked its load on the grass verge just opposite Cr^epe Framboise. A young man in a red-and-yellow paper hat got out. I was busy with customers at the time and paid little attention, so that when I looked out again later that afternoon I was surprised to see that the van had gone, leaving on the verge a small trailer upon which the words Super-Snaсk were painted in bright red capitals. I came out of the shop to take a closer look. The trailer seemed abandoned, though the shutters that secured it were heavily chained and padlocked. I knocked on the door. There was no answer.