Le Temps des Cerises (34 page)

‘What do you mean?'

She ignored the flash of annoyance in his eyes and went on candidly: ‘All your defeatist talk. You should hear yourself. I thought you believed in the Commune, the revolution. Now I'm not so sure.'

‘Of course I do. What are you saying?' Alphonse's face clouded with anger. ‘Are you calling me a traitor?'

‘More or less,' answered Eveline, aware that she was using his own speech mannerisms and turns of phrase. Is that what you did when you loved someone? Did you emulate them so entirely, so unconsciously? If so she didn't much like it. ‘In word if not in deed. You sit here mourning a load of men who haven't even died yet, a battle that hasn't yet been lost. Why don't you do something about it? Why don't you go and warn Monsieur Saracen or whatever his name is and his crippled wife as you put it. Or that fascinating creature who sleeps on a barge – why don't you wake him up like you did me so that he can go and hide somewhere and maybe one day produce that famous painting… and those useless barricades that I have ripped my hands over – I'm sure we have a few hours to spare before we all get slaughtered so why don't you build them up a little higher? Fetch some more furniture from the old department stores on the Rue de Rivoli. A dining-room table would stop a few bullets I should think. Or take some of father's statues to scare them out of their wits but don't sit here saying it's all finished before we've begun.' He'd got to his feet now and was towering over her in fury but she stood her ground as she always did with her father, completely unafraid of him. ‘You're always preaching from the pulpit, Alphonse, about the moment of transformation. Well, this is it. Right now. Your moment of transformation. Why don't you take it?'

She thought for a moment he was going to strike her but he turned and blundered over to the window, staring out of it for what seemed like an eternity. The rain fell in sullen drops and Eveline stood shaking in her nightgown, wondering if she'd pushed him a little too far. She'd never spoken to Alphonse like that, never spoken to anyone like that for that matter and she wasn't at all sure now if what she'd said was justified. It was just that the sight of him so beaten and vulnerable had annoyed and frightened her all at the same time. She prayed he was back to his old self again, that she had brought him back to his old self again and she stood waiting, heart in mouth, trying to read the signs in the line of his neck, his shoulders, his strong, straight back. In the end she needn't have worried for he turned and smiled the broadest of smiles, his teeth gleaming white against his sunburnt skin.

‘You must like me just a little bit,' he joked gruffly, ‘to remember what I say so perfectly.'

She gave an audible sigh of relief. ‘Just a bit,' she smiled happily. ‘Just a bit!'

‘You're a mouse with a tiger's heart,' he chuckled, stepping forward to kiss her on the cheek. ‘We need a secret weapon like you at the barricades! Maybe not in that nightgown however. I don't know about your father's statues but the sight of you wielding a gun in that flimsy thing would scare us all witless, even the sturdiest Communard.' He added gently, his eyes full of emotion: ‘If you're coming you better hurry up and get dressed hadn't you.'

She sped upstairs two at a time before he could change his mind, her heart swelling with pride and excitement. He had come to her in his darkest hour and she had strengthened his resolve, turned his mood around; and now he was asking her to fight with him at the barricades. She had never felt so powerful, so strong, so assured in her own being. She would fight on an equal footing with the men to defend her home, her father, her own personal freedom. She who had never much cared for these things, now they seemed to her the most important things on earth…. She pulled out the brown and red striped uniform (the one she had taken from the Rue de Turbigo) and dressed in it hurriedly, her mind whirring with apprehension. Would Maria and Elizabeth be at the barricades? Maria with her great thumbs hooked under her belt, Elizabeth with her cat-like tongue. This time they would be aiming at real faces not beer barrels, real men not doodles. Michaels, Antonys, Jeromes in the flesh. Other people's sons, brothers, husbands, fathers… She shivered as she tied up her thick heavy boots and thought of her father in his home-made coffin and Jacques… Jacques? Where was he now? She picked up a pen and scribbled a note as fast as she could, tears spilling out onto the paper.

Dearest Papa
, it read smudgily,
Please stay in until the fighting is over. Do not venture out until there is calm. I do not want to lose a dear father as well as a dear brother.

Then she knelt by the bed and brought the rifle out from its hiding place (the one she had taken from the Rue de Turbigo) and the little pouch of cartridges which she tucked into her pocket. The gun was heavy and well oiled and she slung it over her shoulder, checking its position in the long mirror behind the door. It hung a little low on her side and she adjusted it accordingly.

‘Mouse with a tiger's heart,' she whispered at her reflection. It wasn't a bad thing to be. Better than being one of those shop girls on the Rue Ornano with their crinoline curlers and tearing silk voices. What would they do when the tocsin sounded? Peek from behind their twitching lace curtains…? Eveline rammed the hat down hard on her head, over the short red curls and, taking one last look in the mirror, she leapt down the stairs two at a time before Alphonse could change his mind, the rifle banging sharply and violently against her ribs.

Chapter twenty-seven

It was in the sweet clear calm of a dew-laden dawn that Bernadine decided to leave the convent. In truth she'd decided months ago, ever since Aggie died she'd been toying with the idea – to leave, to run away, to start a new life somewhere – but only now, in the strange serenity after the storm, did her ideas crystallise into a distinct plan of action.

She would make her way to Rhône, the place of her birth and early childhood. Perhaps an elderly relative would take her in if there were any still living. And if not, well, she would take up a position as a seamstress, dressmaker, a governess even. It wasn't too late to start again. She wasn't too old to try her hand at something new.

Her eyes swept the room that had been her home for twenty years: the little bed where the baby slept, tired out at last on sheets of unbleached serge, the old armchair and worktable, the bare walls and rugless floor. The room seemed so sad and empty to her now whereas once upon a time she had revelled in its bleakness, delighting in paring herself down to the bone for the sake of the Lord, for the sake of her vocation.

Was it all a delusion? Had she ever done anything more than hide away in a gloomy prison, fearing to take her place in the world? Even before Ernest had she ever truly believed? It seemed doubtful to her now. Somehow it seemed quite doubtful to her now that she had ever believed with the blind unswerving faith required of a nun; and she fought to remember her days as a novice, at the start of her vocation, but her mind drew a blank apart from one or two fleeting images… the starchy rustle of the Mother Superior and the little piece of paper that protected her finger on the breviary page, the taste of chilled cocoa on feast days, the terrible hunger pangs of Lent, the discipline of lying on hard, bare boards without turning or murmuring, and the sweet release of sleep when it came…

The baby whimpered softly in hers and Bernadine sat very still, hoping against hope that the child wouldn't wake up. She'd only just got her off and the thought of any more singing, soothing, rocking, was almost too much for her tonight. The fruits of sin, as even Bernadine referred to her sometimes, was getting more difficult by the day and the nun was at her wits end with the seemingly incessant crying, the mess, the chaos, the trail of destruction the baby left in her wake. In the early days she'd mainly slept and Bernadine thought how easy it was to look after a child – you fed and watered them, they gurgled and smiled. Now it was a different matter altogether – they wailed and crawled, howled and explored, seeking out the most dangerous of places without the slightest sense of fear, the slightest hesitation. There was a lesson probably in that somewhere. They were the centre of their own little universe, the sun around which you spun; and Bernadine was sick and dizzy with it all. Sometimes she even blamed Agnes for dying and leaving her with this horrifying little burden. Other times she blamed the child for disrupting her existence, for making her feel emotions she didn't want to feel, for creeping in and invading the solitary space of her heart.

The baby rolled in her sleep, almost falling off the bed and Bernadine started up in alarm. You needed eyes in the back of your head to look after a baby. Eyes in the back of your head and twenty pairs of hands. Even the Lord, she thought wryly and a little blasphemously, didn't have enough eyes and hands to keep track of all the mischief a child could get up to. In ten seconds flat. Only yesterday Bernadine had left for what couldn't have been more than a minute or so and returned to find her sewing kit tipped up on the floor, the fruits of sin wallowing gleefully amidst coloured thread, pins and needles, scissors and bobbins and sucking on a silver thimble for all she was worth as if she were sucking on a sugar plum candy; and then when Bernadine, a little vexed, had packed up the sewing kit, the child let out a storm of weeping as if her whole world had split asunder. Her bible too (Bernadine's only other treasured possession) had not gone unscathed. Habakkuk had been masticated to bits, the Book of Job shredded to ribbons and the future of Proverbs was decidedly at risk from the baby's single, serrated, razor-sharp tooth.

She almost suspected the Lord of playing a little joke on her. Providing her with this child when her own was lost to her for good. Not as a reward but as a punishment. Not as compensation but as penance. Her trip to Monsieur Lafayette's had not gone unnoticed, she felt quite sure of that, by the Lord and his spies. He may not have eyes in the back of His head but He was peering round every dark street corner, hiding under the bed, on top of the wardrobe – just like the bogeyman. Ready to pounce when you did something bad. Well, she wasn't taking it any more, she wasn't playing scared any more. She was leaving the lifeless shadow of the convent, stepping into the sunshine and the flowers, and she was taking Aggie with her.

It would be better, she told herself now, when they were far away, in a new place, though a part of her wondered how it would be better, why it would be better… In Rhône there were open fields and ponds full of rushes and ducks, children with skipping ropes, a grocer selling pumpkins like beaming jack o' lanterns or Cinderella carriages, sparrows in the town square at dusk, a carousel on market days and her father's dusty shop full of antiquated clocks all chiming peculiarly out of time – to show off their voices of course. There were grandmother clocks and grandfather clocks, carriage clocks and travelling clocks… brass, silver, gold, ormolu… monogrammed, engraved, jewelled, enamelled…. There were ones that went a little too fast (dust in the innards her father always said) like breathless ladies wanting to catch the omnibus and others that went a little too slow (pendulums awry) like portentous old men who've just had lunch. And there was one kept especially for her, its hands stuck just before midnight to remind her there was always time to escape her own life…. But best of all her father in his oily apron, looking up with a slightly bemused air as if to say ‘where has the time gone'.

Where had the time gone? In the discipline of every minute, every hour, every day, every week, every month, every year? And suddenly two decades had passed right before her eyes. The shop had long gone of course as had her father and mother. It had turned into a tinsmith's, then a shoemaker's and finally a haberdasher's until he too disappeared. Her uncle had written her:
the haberdasher has a vineyard now, in Provence I believe.
As if she needed to know that! As if she wanted to know that! And yet of course she had remembered it. The trivial stupid things you remembered.
The haberdasher has a vineyard now, in Provence I believe
. Maybe it was all changed. Maybe the sparrows no longer collected in the town square at dusk. Maybe the pond had been dug over or drained – children had drowned there once upon a time. Maybe the carousel never came any more. Maybe the place existed in memory only.

She stared around the room again, at the dear and familiar objects and she quavered then at the thought of leaving it. To step out into the big wide world for good with no possibility of returning? What folly was that? To leave a place that had been a home for the past twenty years for a place that might only exist in the memory? And how would she get to Rhône in any case? By train? Did trains run any more under the revolutionary Commune? How would she get a ticket if they did? She had no money. All she had was the locket and ring her father had left her (for such an event as this), her sewing kit and bible, the lay clothes she had come in – a white blouse and grey tunic, a child's uniform really and she wouldn't fit into
that
any more. The obstacles mounted up one by one in her head, stacking against her decision and she lay back on the bed exhausted, her body rigid and stiff beside the sleeping baby's.

How ill equipped she was after all to take her place in the outside world. She didn't even know the geography of France, didn't know if Rhône was East, South, West of Paris. She wouldn't have been able to pick out France on a map, or China, India, Africa, Japan. The only layout she understood was that of the chapel and convent garden. She hadn't stepped foot outside these walls for nearly twenty years, apart from her trips to Monsieur Lafayette's, to fetch Aggie's milk, one or two teaching duties…. How could she possibly be expected to understand the goings on of the modern world? She would be laughed at, ridiculed, vilified – an ex nun who couldn't point France out on a map, with a baby in tow. How could she possibly find work like that? It was far too late to start again. She was far too old to try her hand at something new.