Шоколад / Chocolat - стр. 46

Gently: “Yes. I know.” The clear realization turns quietly between us like a Christmas bauble. “Things can be better,” I told her at last. “Paul-Marie doesn’t rule the world.”

“He might as well,” retorted Josephine mulishly.

I smiled. If that stubbornness of hers could be turned out instead of in, what could she not achieve? I could do it, too. I could feel her thoughts, so close, welcoming me in. It would be so easy to take control… I turned the thought aside impatiently. I had no right to force her to any decision.

“Before, you had no-one to go to,” I said. “Now you do.”

“Do I?”

In her mouth, it was almost an admission of defeat.

I did not reply. Let her answer that for herself.

She looked at me in silence for a while. Her eyes were full of river lights from Les Marauds. Again it struck me, with what small a twist she might become beautiful.

“Goodnight, Josephine.”

I did not turn to look at her, but I know she watched me as I made my way up the hill, and I know she stood watching long after I had rounded the corner and disappeared from sight.

Still more of this interminable rain. It falls like A piece of the sky upended to pour misery onto the aquarium life below. The children, bright plastic ducks in their waterproofs and boots, squawk and waddle across the square, their cries ricocheting off the low clouds. I work in the kitchen with half an eye to the children in the street. This morning I unmade the window display, the witch, the gingerbread house and all the chocolate animals sitting around watching with glossy expectant faces, and Anouk and her friends shared the pieces between excursions into the rainy backwaters of Les Marauds. Jeannot Drou watched me in the kitchen, a piece of gilded pain d’epices in each hand, eyes shining. Anouk stood behind him, the others behind her, a wall of eyes and whisperings.

“What next?” He has the voice of an older boy, an air of casual bravado and a smear of chocolate across the chin. “What are you doing next? For the display?”

I shrugged. “Secret,” I said, stirring creme de cacao into an enamel basin of melted couverture.

“No, really.” He insists. “You ought to make something for Easter. You know. Eggs and stuff: Chocolate hens, rabbits, things like that. Like the shops in Agen.”

I remember them from my childhood; the Paris chocolateries with their baskets of foil-wrapped eggs, shelves of rabbits and hens, bells, marzipan fruits and marrons glaces, amourettes and filigree nests filled with petits fours and caramels and a thousand and one epiphanies of spun-sugar magic-carpet rides more suited to an Arabian harem than the solemnities of the Passion.

“I remember my mother telling me about the Easter chocolates.”

There was never enough money to buy those exquisite things, but I always had my own cornet surprise, a paper cone containing my Easter gifts, coins, paper flowers, hard-boiled eggs painted in bright enamel colours, a box of coloured papier-mache – painted with chickens, bunnies, smiling children amongst the buttercups, the same every year and stored carefully for the next time encasing a tiny packet of chocolate raisins wrapped in Cellophane, each one to be savoured, long and lingeringly, in the lost hours of those strange nights between cities, with the neon glow of hotel signs blink-blinking between the shutters and my mother’s breathing, slow and somehow eternal, in the umbrous silence.