onto her knees, purring. Armande scratched its head and it buzzed and butted at her chin with small playful gestures.
“Lariflete,” said Armande. After a moment I realized that was the cat’s name. “I’ve had her nineteen years. That makes her nearly my age, in cat time.” She made a small clucking sound at the cat, which purred louder. “I’m supposed to be allergic,” said Armande. “Asthma or something. I told them that I’d rather choke than get rid of my cats. Though there are some humans I could give up without a second thought.”
Lariflete whisker-twitched lazily. I looked across at the water and saw Anouk playing under the jetty with two black-haired river children. From what I could hear Anouk, the youngest of the three, seemed to be directing operations.
“Stay and have some coffee,” suggested Armande. “I was going to make some when you came along, anyway. I’ve got some lemonade for Anouk, too.”
I made the coffee myself in Armande’s curious, small kitchen with its cast-iron range and low ceiling. Everything is clean there, but the one tiny window looks onto the river, giving the light a greenish underwater look. Hanging from the dark unpainted beams are bunches of dry herbs in their muslin sachets. On the whitewashed walls copper pans hang from hooks. The door – like all the doors in the house – has a hole cut into the base to allow free passage to her cats. Another cat watched me curiously from a high ledge as I made the coffee in an enamelled tin pot. The lemonade, I noticed, was sugar-free, and the sweetener in the basin was some kind of sugar substitute. In spite of her bravado, it seems as if she does take some precautions after all.
“Foul stuff,” she commented without rancour, sipping the drink from one of her hand-painted cups. “They say you can’t taste the difference. But you can.” She made a wry face… “Caro brings it when she comes. Goes through my cupboards. I suppose she means well. Can’t help being a ninny.”
I told her she ought to take more care. Armande snorted.
“When you get to my age,” she told me, “things start to break down. If it isn’t one thing, then it’s another. It’s a fact of life.” She took another sip of the bitter coffee. “When he was sixteen Rimbaud said he wanted to experience as much as possible with the greatest possible intensity. Well, I’m going on eighty now, and I’m beginning to think he was right.”
She grinned, and I was again struck by the youthfulness of her face, a quality that has less to do with colouring or bone structure than with a kind of inner brightness and anticipation, the look of someone who has hardly begun to discover what life has to offer.
“I think you’re probably too old to join the Foreign Legion,” I told her with a smile. “And didn’t Rimbaud’s experiences run rather to excess at times?”
Armande shot me an impish look.
“That’s right,” she replied. “I could do with a bit more excess. From now on I’m going to be immoderate – and volatile – I shall enjoy loud music and lurid poetry. I shall be rampant,” she declared with satisfaction.
I laughed.
“You are quite absurd,” I said with mock severity. “No wonder your family despairs of you.”
But even though she laughed with me, rocking with merriment in her chair, what I recall now is not her laughter but what I glimpsed behind the laughter; that look of giddy abandon, desperate glee.
And it was only later, late into the night when I awoke sweating from some dark half-forgotten nightmare, that I remembered where I had seen that look before.
How about Florida, sweetheart? The Everglades? The Keys? How about Disneyland, cherie, or New York, Chicago, the Grand Canyon, Chinatown, New Mexico, the Rocky Mountains?
But with Armande there was none of my mother’s fear, none of her delicate parrying and wrangling with death, none of her mad hit-and-run flights of fantasy into the unknown. With Armande there was only the hunger, the desire, the terrible awareness of time.
I wonder what the doctor said to her this morning, and how much she really understands. I lay awake for a long time wondering, and when I finally slept, I dreamed of myself and Armande walking through Disneyland with Reynaud and Caro hand-in-hand as the Red Queen and the White Rabbit from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, with big, white, cartoon gloves on their hands. Caro had a red crown on her giant head, and Armande had a stick of candyfloss in each fist.
Somewhere in the distance I could hear the sounds of New York traffic, the blaring of horns getting closer.
“Oh my, oh don’t eat that, it’s poison,” squeaked Reynaud shrilly, but Armande went on gobbling candyfloss with both hands, her face glossy and self-possessed. I tried to warn her about the cab, but she looked at me and said in my mother’s voice, “Life’s a carnival, cherie, more people die every year crossing the road, it’s a statistical fact,” and went on eating in that terrible voracious way, and Reynaud turned towards me and squeaked, in a voice made all the more menacing for its lack of resonance, “This is all your fault, you and your chocolate festival, everything was all right until you came along and now everyone’s dying DYING DYING DYING?”
I held my hands out protectively. “It isn’t me,” I whispered. “It’s you, it’s supposed to be you, you’re the Black Man, you’re – ” Then I was falling backwards through the looking glass with cards spraying out in all directions around me, nine of Swords, DEATH. Three of Swords, DEATH. The Tower, DEATH. The Chariot, DEATH.
I awoke screaming, with Anouk standing above me, her dark face blurry with sleep and anxiety.
“Maman, what is it?”
Her arms are warm around my neck. She smells of chocolate and vanilla and peaceful untroubled sleep.
“Nothing. A dream. Nothing.”
She croons to me in her small soft voice, and I have an unnerving impression of the world reversed, of myself melting into her like a nautilus into its spiral, round-around-around, of her hand cool on my forehead, her mouth against my hair.
“Out-out-out,” she murmurs automatically. “Evil spirits, get thee hence. It’s OK now, Maman. All gone.”
I don’t know where she picks these things up from. My mother used to say that, but I don’t remember ever teaching Anouk. And yet she uses it like an old familiar formula. I cling to her for a moment, paralysed by love.
“It’s going to be OK, isn’t it, Anouk?”
“Of course.” Her voice is clear and adult and self-assured. “Of course it is.” She puts her head on my shoulder and curls sleepily into the circle of my arms. “I love you too, Maman.”
Outside the dawn is a moonshimmer away on the greying horizon. I hold my daughter tightly as she drifts back again into sleep, her curls tickling my face. Is this what my mother feared? I wonder as I listen to the birds – a single craw craw at first then a full congregation of them – was this what she fled? Not her own death, but the thousands of tiny intersections of her life with others, the broken connections, the links in spite of themselves, the responsibilities? Did we spend all those years running from our loves, our friendships, the casual words uttered in passing that can alter the course of a lifetime?
I try to recall my dream, the face of Reynaud – his lost expression of dismay, I’m late, I’m late – he, too, running from or into some unimaginable fate of which I am an unwitting part. But the dream has fragmented, its pieces scattered like cards in a high wind. Difficult to remember whether the Black Man pursues or is pursued. Difficult now to be sure whether he is the Black Man. Instead the face of the White Rabbit returns, like that of a frightened child on a carnival-wheel, desperate to get off.
“Who rings the changes?”
In my confusion I take the voice for someone else’s; a second later I understand I have spoken aloud. But as I sink back towards sleep I am almost sure I hear another voice reply, a voice which sounds something like Armande’s, something like my mother’s.
You