Page 8 of Vianne

I didn’t have a sweet tooth as a child. My mother could never afford it.

That didn’t stop me being curious, though.

I saw the advertisements. The displays. The names of sweets and chocolates.

A packet of chocolate raisins. A cup of instant hot chocolate.

The memory of a little bar of Poulain chocolate, handed to me by a stranger in a railway station; the Easter displays in the confiseries , with chocolate hens and ducks and fish nestled amongst gleaming bouquets of cellophane and ribbon.

I used to wonder who bought those things, those plump chocolate hens on their spun-sugar nests for the price of a room in an auberge ; those little packets of toasted pralines for the price of a dozen loaves of bread.

As a result, I’d never learnt to really appreciate chocolate.

To me, it was an indulgence, not worth the time or the money.

And then, when we were in America, the chocolate seemed so different, so greasy-sweet and tasteless that I never really wanted it—

Guy shot me a comical look of horror and indignation. ‘What do you mean, you don’t like chocolate ?’

‘It’s not that I don’t like it,’ I said. ‘But I was never used to it.’

‘We’re going to have to fix that,’ said Guy. ‘Come over to our place tomorrow, and I’ll show you what we do.’

We were approaching La Bonne Mère. Mahmed stopped the van by the side of the kerb, the brakes squealing alarmingly, and as Guy helped me with my basket of fish he handed me a printed card with a name and a street address.

‘A confiserie ?’

‘If only,’ said Mahmed. ‘We might have a chance with a confiserie . Right now, all we have is debts, no cow and a handful of magic beans.’

Guy shook his head. ‘Don’t listen to him. He’s a cynic. Just be there tomorrow, and I’ll show you around. Good luck with the bouillabaisse!’

And then, with a terrible tortured sound of metal and rubber, the old van made a U-turn and set off down the cobbled streets in defiance of the one-way sign, vanishing in a cloud of exhaust back towards the esplanade.

Louis was waiting by the door. Two of his regular customers were already at their tables. I recognized Emile, the painter-decorator with the narrow, angry face, now nursing a café-cognac and a buttered roll. ‘I’m back!’ I said to Louis. ‘I think I managed to get everything.’

Louis frowned at the sight of my basket of fish. ‘What about the tomatoes? The onions? The fennel?’

Damn . Between my hesitation over the fish and meeting Guy and Mahmed, I’d forgotten to detour via the vegetable market.

‘I’ll run to the épicerie ,’ I said. ‘It won’t take me a minute.’

Louis’ frown deepened. ‘The épicerie won’t have the Marmande. You’ll need to go to the market. That’s going to eat up your cooking time. Who was that, in the old grey van?’

‘Some friends,’ I said. ‘They gave me a lift.’

Louis made a sound of disapproval. ‘Planning a meal takes serious thought. It’s not going to work if you waste time hanging out with your friends.’

‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I won’t be long.’

I left the fish in the pantry and ran with my basket to the vegetable market.

Here the wares were labelled, and I managed to find the Marmande tomatoes, as well as the other ingredients; sweet onions; green fennel and fat bulbs of garlic as big as my fist. It was nine-forty when I got back, and Louis was looking sour and stressed.

‘You should have started an hour ago,’ he snapped, as I entered, tired and flushed. ‘You’ll need to hurry up if it’s to be ready on time.’

I nodded and made for the kitchen. The utensils Louis had shown me were on the table, ready.

The chopping-board. The pestle and mortar.

The pans. The knives. The mouli . It all looked suddenly daunting, especially when I unwrapped the fish and saw the amount of cleaning and filleting and gutting I would have to do.

I took a breath. It’s only lunch. How hard can it really be?

The hand-stitched binder of recipes – one could not quite call it a recipe book – was standing propped up on the shelf, showing the topmost recipe – Bouillabaisse – in Marguerite’s earnest writing. Below it, I saw she had written a date: 19 July 1959, and a line of poetry:

Take joy in all flowers, fruits, even leaves

That come from your own garden.

So, Margot was a romantic. She makes the preparation of food into a kind of poetry; I cannot imagine her daunted by kitchen utensils, or ugly fish.

She grew her garden; picked her herbs, took joy in them, one leaf at a time.

I wonder what’s left of her garden now. A glance out of the window shows an overgrown patch of wilderness; a few old roses climbing the wall; a fruit tree; a thicket of rosemary.

But Margot tended her garden then; grew leeks, and onions, and bay.

Margot took joy in all of it, and brought that joy to her kitchen.

I took a deep and calming breath.

First, the aromatics.

Soon the kitchen was filled with the scent of freshly chopped fennel, garlic, herbs, orange peel, thyme, and aniseed. At least it smelt like food now. I felt a little better.

Next, the chopped tomatoes.

The Marmande tomatoes are beefy and large, with flesh that yields mostly texture, and few seeds.

Their scent is deep and fruity, like damsons steeped in rich red wine.

And maybe it is the thought of Margot working in her kitchen, or the scent of those aromatics, but now I am feeling more confident, wielding the utensils, first with care, and then with pleasure; aware that these things all have history, that they all have stories to tell.

So many ingredients to add; so many stages to process.

Does Louis really consider this a simple dish?

Or is this a test of character, to make sure I have the right attitude?

He has deliberately not come into the kitchen to watch.

‘I’ll know when I taste the soup,’ he told me. ‘I don’t need to watch a performance.’

And so I find myself singing as I stir the tomatoes into the pot; as I add the Pernod ; as I fillet the fish.

The sunlight enters through the small window over the sink; I have left it half-open to allow the steam to escape, and I can hear the sounds of the city – the traffic, the horns of delivery vans, the voices of passers-by, the calls of street-vendors, and the drone of an aeroplane overhead – a city sound that is somehow uniquely Marseille, just as the sound of New York was uniquely New York, in spite of the many shared ingredients that make up the recipe.

Margot’s voice is clear on the page; kinder than Louis’, and gentle.

Now layer the fish for the broth base. Be kindest to the ugly ones.

I use a variety of fish, hoping that they are the right ones.

Thanks to Guy, I know their names. Their flesh is still a mystery.

Heads and bones remain for this dish; everything goes into the broth.

Glaze the pot and add water .

It’s working: I can see it in the way the vapour rises. Good . And now I can almost see Margot’s face in the little tendrils of steam; the face of a woman I barely know except through the words of this recipe.

I’ve always been able to do this. My mother had different names for it: scrying , truesight , divination . I thought of it simply as looking through the present into the future. Or in Margot’s case—

The vapour from the pot has thickened as the broth boils.

No subtle bouillon, this, but a murky confusion.

Have I made a mistake? The broth is as opaque as my thoughts.

Colours swirl in the vapour; a painted sign, with letters that I can partly make out – G.

Lacarrière , terie , Xocolatl – but which make no sense to me.

A battered grey van. A river, unimposing and brown, bracketed by wooden-framed houses, warped with age, that lean drunkenly into the slipstream of a handful of colourful narrowboats, with smoke coming out of the chimneys. And then—

There. There she is.

The breath catches in my throat like a fishbone.

A little girl, maybe five or six, with candyfloss hair and a wistful smile.

Oh. My daughter. My summer child. I know it just as I know the feel of my mother’s Tarot cards in my hand.

But the Tarot cards have never shown me anything as clear as this.

My daughter, by this river, in this place I do not recognize, but which I already think of as home.

‘Vianne? Are you listening to me?’ It was Louis’ voice from behind me, sharp now with annoyance. ‘I said you need to hurry up, not go to sleep over the pot!’

I turned down the heat under the stew. ‘I’m sorry. I must have—’

Louis shook his head. ‘There’s still too much for you to do. I will have to take over.’

‘No, don’t do that!’ I protested. ‘Let me do this. I know I can.’

He shrugged. ‘I have a quiche on standby. I’ll serve it with a salad if the soup isn’t ready on time.’

There was no clock in the kitchen, and the last time I wore a watch was before my mother took us to New York. There’s time , I told myself. There’s time. I glanced at Margot’s cookbook. The rouille . You’ll need the pestle and mortar for this.

The pestle and mortar are larger than any I have seen before.

A wedding present, perhaps, or maybe handed down from a relative.

Garlic, egg yolk, and saffron. It smells both rich and harsh, like the accent here; a taste I have yet to acquire.

Add breadcrumbs, cayenne and olive oil to make the paste.

Good. It’s working. Now to strain and thicken the soup. The mouli grins like an evil clown.

‘How do I even assemble this?’ The disc of the food mill is like the teeth of a circular saw: designed to crush and separate the larger bones and the scales, and to grind the smaller ones into something approaching the right texture.

It wasn’t easy: the mouli was old, and the hand-operated grinding mechanism was exhausting to use, apart from which, if I failed to keep the pressure consistent, then the milling disc had the habit of releasing and falling into the stew.

By the time I had strained and puréed the whole, the sun was no longer filtering through the window, and a kind of lull had fallen outside.

Lunchtime .

On the bright side, the broth looked good, and the rich scents of cooked fish and herbs and saffron and wine were deepening.

I added the final layer of fish to poach in the broth, toasted the bread for the cro?tons, transferred the lot to the soup tureen, added rouille to the toasted slices.

Then, I covered the tureen, and carried it into the bistrot.

Nine faces turned to meet me. I saw Louis, Emile and Rodolphe, and some others, whose names I did not yet know. I saw their expressions, smiles and frowns. Used plates stacked up on the trolley. By the clock on the wall by the door I could see that it was one-forty-five.

Louis gave me a dark look. His colours were a gathering storm. I said: ‘I used her recipe. I tried so hard to do everything right. But recipes are like children. You can’t just put someone else in charge and expect them to behave themselves.’

For a moment I saw no change. I stood there, with the heavy tureen getting heavier with every second. Then he shrugged, and I thought his expression softened, just a little.

‘Lunch is over, Vianne,’ he said. ‘But – if anyone wants to try the bouillabaisse, I won’t charge extra.’

If anyone’s curious . That was the point.

Louis wasn’t the only one I had to win over, and his regulars were less easy to read.

There was Emile, watching me with a look that might have been satisfaction; and Rodolphe, pretending not to see, but gazing into his coffee cup; and a man whose name I did not know, feeding sugar to a dog at his feet.

None of them seemed to be curious. None of them seemed to care that I was waiting, the tureen in my hands – and why should they?

Who was I to them? A stranger, a woman who didn’t belong, an intrusion on their routine—

And then I saw her sitting there, at a table by the door. It was the old woman from Rue du Panier, the one who had sold me the pink bootees. She had taken off her straw hat, but I recognized the snapping dark eyes beneath the halo of white hair, and the smile, both wistful and mischievous.

‘You can do better than that,’ she said. ‘Come on, Vianne Rocher, don’t tell me you’re going to let a handful of old men intimidate you. This is your place – if you want it. But don’t expect them to hand it to you.’

What did you call me? I wanted to say. But her words had struck a chord. She was right. It’s only lunch. I’ve been through so much worse than this.

I took a breath and realized that I was trembling with anxiety and exhaustion.

I raised my voice, and addressing the room, said: ‘Well, I don’t blame you for being suspicious.

It’s the first time I’ve made this recipe.

In fact, unless you count making coffee, or adding hot water to instant noodles, it’s the first time I’ve made any recipe.

So try it. Taste it. Say what you think. But don’t just leave me standing here.’

There was a silence, during which my heartbeat seemed to fill the world. All I could do was hold my breath and try to smile, and hope for an end to the silence.

Then—

‘If it’s free, I’ll try it,’ said Emile.

I felt all the breath in my body compress into a kind of ball in my chest. Suddenly, the room was too hot; the colours too bright; the smell of beer and coffee and smoke too strong for me to bear. I looked for the woman from Rue du Panier, but couldn’t see her any more.

I put down the tureen. ‘Thank you.’

And then I passed out cold on the dusty floor of La Bonne Mère.