Page 35 of Vianne

I never said goodbye to Louis. There never seemed to be a good time: what little time we had was taken up with cooking, or dealing with customers.

Nor did I give him his present. I’ll leave it here tomorrow, when Louis leaves me in charge while he goes to the cemetery.

It’s proof of the trust he has in me now, that he will entrust his bistrot to me.

I’m not sure I deserve his trust. I have, after all, betrayed it.

Pinch by pinch, I have altered the flavours of recipes I swore not to change.

The cassoulet. The bouillabaisse. Giving them the quiet call of other places, other loves.

I keep thinking about the priest I met during the rainstorm, the one from that village on the Tannes, too small even to appear on my map.

Now I wish I’d asked his name. You either belong to a place, or you don’t.

I suppose everyone feels the same about somewhere.

Except that I don’t, do I, Maman? You made very certain of that.

Perhaps that’s why I have taken the name of one of those fortified places.

Vianne, that little walled bastide , a fortress with a woman’s name.

What was she like, that other Vianne? Was she also a mother?

I open my little map book again, as if to find the answers.

Of course, in French, the word for ‘map’ – carte – is also the word for ‘card’ as well as the word for ‘menu’.

Carte . Each word implies a spreading out, an exploration, a connection, a coming home.

A welcome. Each one contains magic; mystery; a glimpse of possible futures.

Which one will it be, I wonder Which card holds my story?

The Tarot cards are back in their box, in my travel bag, packed and ready to go.

It seems somehow inevitable that they should have returned to me now.

Normally, on the eve of a journey, I would read them, but this time I don’t have the courage to try.

Instead I look through the vapour that rises from my camomile tea, but all I can see is Marguerite, sitting on the side of the bed, a dish of little sweets at her side – except that when I look closer, I see that they are not sweets at all, but santons , Nativity figurines; tiny ceramic wise men and lambs and angels and shepherds and babies.

Each one a whispered secret, a wish, a prayer, an epiphany.

He keeps them now in a wooden box, not unlike the one in which I keep my mother’s Tarot cards, along with a bundle of letters to him, written in her shapeless hand, and a lock of her silvery-brown hair, and a dried rose from her wedding bouquet, dimly scented at its heart with the fragrance of things past. Tomorrow he will look inside, and take one breath of that fragrance.

Then he will buy a single red rose, which he cannot place on her grave, and head once more to Saint-Pierre.

Except that this time will be different.

This time, he has things to say. This time, after he has passed through the Cathedral of Silence and laid his rose by Rostand’s grave, he will take out a pocket flask, and pour himself a tiny glass of the prunelle he put down the year they were first married, made with the plums from the little tree that grows behind La Bonne Mère.

The plums are out of season now, but when they are fully ripe they are yellow as honeycomb, and as sweet.

He has only one bottle left; and it smells of golden summers, when the world was still gentle, and gilded with possibility.

He will pour the final glass, and drink it there, by the graveside, where her memory is most potent.

He will read a passage by Edmond Rostand, something from Cyrano , perhaps; and then he will empty the dregs on the ground, to honour the spirit of the place.

This is the ritual he performs on the date of this anniversary.

But this time, he will say something else. I can almost hear his words.

Margot , he whispers, in a voice that only she and I can hear. Margot, at last, after all this time, I think perhaps—

I’ve met someone.