Five Quarters of the Orange / Пять четвертинок апельсина - стр. 80

Reine whimpered, hands held out stiffly in front of her, her face twisted with loathing and fear.

My mother’s tone grew dangerous. For a moment her voice sounded waspy, buzzing with menace.

“Go to it,” she said, “or I’ll give you something to whine about,”

and she pushed Reinette hard toward the pile of plums we had collected, a pile of spongy half-fermented fruit volatile with wasps. Reinette found herself in a swarm of insects and screamed, recoiling toward my mother, eyes closed so that she did not see the sudden spasm of rage which crossed Mother’s face. For a moment Mother looked almost blank, then she grabbed Reinette, who was still screaming hysterically, by the arm and marched her quickly, wordlessly toward the house. Cassis and I looked at each other but made no move to follow. We knew better than that. When Reinette began to scream more loudly, each scream punctuated by a sound like the crack of a small air rifle, we simply shrugged and went back to work among the wasps, using the wooden tongs to scoop drifts of spoiled plums into the bins that lined the path.

After what seemed like a long while, the sounds of Reinette being whipped ceased, and she and my mother came out of the house-Mother still holding the piece of washing line she had used-and set to work again in silence, Reinette sniffing occasionally and wiping at her reddened eyes. After a while Mother’s tic began again, and she went to her room, leaving us with terse instructions to finish picking up the windfalls and to put the jam on to boil. She never mentioned the incident later, or seemed even to recall its having happened, though I heard Reinette tossing and whimpering in the night and saw the red weals on her legs as she put on her nightdress.

Unusual though it was, it was far from the last unusual thing Mother was to do that summer, and it was very soon forgotten-except by Reinette, of course. We had other things to think about.

I had seen little of Paul that summer; with Cassis and Reinette out of school he had kept his distance. But by September the new term was close to starting, and Paul began to come round more often. Though I liked Paul well enough, I felt uneasy about him meeting Tomas, so I often avoided him, hiding in the bushes at the side of the river until he’d gone, ignoring his calls or pretending not to notice when he waved at me. After a while he seemed to get the message, because he stopped coming altogether.

It was at this point that Mother began to grow really strange. Since the incident with Reinette we had watched her with the wary caution of primitives at the feet of their god-and indeed, she was a kind of idol to us, a thing of arbitrary favors and punishments, and her smiles and frowns were the vane upon which our emotional weather turned. Now with September on the turn and school starting for the two eldest in a week’s time, she became almost a parody of her former self, enraged at the slightest tiny thing-a dishcloth left beside the sink, a plate on the draining board, a speck of dust on the glass of a framed photograph. Her headaches plagued her almost daily. I almost envied Cassis and Reinette, spending long days in school, but our own primary school had closed since the teacher had moved to Paris, and I would not be old enough to join them in Angers until the following year.