‘I HAVEN’T SEEN HER FOR MONTHS,’ SAID JOSÉPHINE LATER IN THE café. ‘Marise doesn’t send her to school any more. It’s a pity. A little girl like that needs friends.’ Jay nodded.
‘She used to go to the village playgroup,’ remembered Joséphine. ‘She must have been three, maybe a little younger. She could still talk a little then, but I don’t think she could hear anything.’
‘Oh?’ Jay was curious. ‘I thought she was born deaf.’
Joséphine shook her head. ‘No. It was some kind of infection. It was the year Tony died. A bad winter. The river flooded again, and half of Marise’s fields were underwater for three months. Plus there was that business with the police…’
Jay looked at her enquiringly.
‘Oh yes. Ever since Tony died Mireille has been trying to pin the blame on Marise. There’d been some kind of a quarrel, she said. Tony would never have killed himself. She tried to make out there was another man, or something, that together they’d conspired to murder Tony.’ She shook her head, frowning. ‘Mireille was half out of her mind,’ she said. ‘I think she would have said anything. Of course, it never came to that. The police came round, asked some questions, went away. I think they had the measure of Mireille by then. But she spent the next three or four years writing letters, campaigning, petitioning. Someone came round once or twice, that’s all. But nothing came of it. She’s been spreading rumours that Marise keeps the child locked up in a back room, or something.’
‘I don’t think that’s true.’ The vivid, dappled child Jay had seen gave no impression of having ever been shut up in a back room.
Joséphine shrugged. ‘No, I don’t think so either,’ she said. ‘But by that time the damage was done. Gangs of people gathering at the gate of the farm and across the river. Do-gooders, for the most part, harmless enough, but Marise wasn’t to know that, holed up in her house, with torches burning outside and people letting off firecrackers and throwing stones at the shutters.’ She shook her head. ‘By the time things settled down it was too late,’ she explained. ‘She was already convinced everyone was against her. And then when Rosa disappeared…’
Joséphine poured a measure of cognac into her coffee. ‘I suppose she thought we were all in it. You can’t hide much in a village, and everybody knew that Mireille had Rosa staying with her. The child was three then, and we all thought they must have made it up between them somehow, and Rosa was there for a visit. Of course, Caro Clairmont knew otherwise, and so did a few others, Joline Drou, who was her best friend at the time, and Cussonnet the doctor. But the rest of us… well, no-one asked. People reckoned that after what had happened perhaps they ought to mind their own business. And no-one really knew Marise, of course.’
‘She doesn’t make it easy,’ observed Jay.
‘Rosa was missing for about three days. Mireille only tried taking her out of the house once. The first day. That didn’t last long. You could hear her screaming right down to Les Marauds. Whatever else was wrong with her, she had a good pair of lungs. Nothing would make her be quiet, not sweets, or presents, or fussing, or shouting. They all tried – Caro, Joline, Toinette – but still the child wouldn’t stop screaming. Finally Mireille got worried and called the doctor. They put their heads together and took her to a specialist in Agen. It just wasn’t normal for a child that age to scream all the time. They thought she was disturbed, that perhaps she’d been mistreated in some way.’ She frowned. ‘Then Marise came to pick up Rosa from the playgroup, and found that the doctor and Mireille had taken her to Agen instead. I’ve never seen anyone so angry. She followed them on her moped, but all she could find out was that Mireille had taken Rosa to some kind of hospital. For tests, she said. I don’t know what they were trying to prove.’
She shrugged again. ‘If she’d been anyone else she could have counted on help from the village,’ she said. ‘But Marise – never says a word unless she has to, never smiles – I suppose people just minded their own business. That’s all it was really; there was no malice in it. She wanted to be left alone, and that’s what people did. Not that anyone really knew where Mireille had taken Rosa – except maybe Caro Clairmont. Oh, we heard all kinds of stories. But that was afterwards. How Marise stamped into Cussonnet’s surgery with a shotgun and marched him out to the car. To hear people talking you’d think half of Lansquenet saw that. It’s always the same, héh! All I can say is, I wasn’t there. And though Rosa was back at home before the end of that week, we never saw her in the village again – not in the school, or even at the firework display on the fourteenth of July, or the chocolate festival at Easter.’ Joséphine drained her coffee abruptly and wiped her hands on her apron. ‘So that was that,’ she concluded with an air of finality. ‘That was the last we saw of Marise and Rosa. I see them from time to time – perhaps once a month or so – on the road to Agen or walking to Narcisse’s nursery, or in the field across the river. But that’s all. She hasn’t forgiven the village for what happened after Tony’s death, or for taking sides, or for turning a blind eye when Rosa disappeared. You can’t tell her it was nothing to do with you; she won’t believe it.’
Jay nodded. It was understandable. ‘It must be a lonely life for them,’ he said. Thinking of Maggie and Gilly, of the way they always managed to make friends wherever they went, trading and fixing and doing odd jobs to make ends meet, always on the move, fielding insults and prejudice with the same cheery defiance. How different was this dour, suspicious woman from Joe’s friends of Nether Edge. And yet the child looked so very like Gilly. He checked for the rucksack on his way back to the farm, but, as he expected, it had already been removed. Only the dragon’s head remained, still lolling its long crêpe tongue, now embellished with a garland of fluttering red ribbons, which sat jauntily on the thick green mane. Coming closer, Jay noticed that the stump of a clay pipe had been carefully positioned between the dragon’s teeth, from which a dandelion clock protruded. And as he passed, hiding a grin, he was almost sure he saw something move in the hedge next to him, a brief flash of orange under the new green, and heard the impudent bleating of a goat in the distance.
38
LATER, OVER HIS FAVOURITE GRAND CRÈME IN THE CAFÉ DES Marauds, he was listening with half an ear to Joséphine as she told him the story of the village’s first chocolate festival and the resistance with which it had been met by the church. The coffee was good, sprinkled with shavings of dark chocolate and with a cinnamon biscuit by the side of the cup. Narcisse was sitting opposite with his usual seed catalogue and a café-cassis. In the afternoons the place was busier, but Jay noticed that the clientele still consisted mainly of old men, playing chess or cards and talking in their low rapid patois. In the evening it would be full of workers back from the fields and the farms. He wondered where the young people went at night.
‘Not many young people stay here,’ Joséphine explained. ‘There isn’t the work, unless you want to go into farming. And most of the farms have been divided so often between all the family’s sons that there isn’t much of a livelihood left for anyone.’
‘Always the sons,’ said Jay. ‘Never the daughters.’
‘There aren’t many women who’d want to run a farm in Lansquenet,’ said Joséphine, shrugging. ‘And some of the growers and distributors don’t like the idea of working for a woman.’
Jay gave a short laugh.
Joséphine looked at him. ‘You don’t believe that?’
He shook his head. ‘It’s hard for me to understand,’ he explained. ‘In London-’