Peaches for Monsieur Le Curé Read Free Page A

timber; crates; shipping containers; metal girders; car parts. The Loire is sandy and treacherous, silver in the sunlight but rank below the surface, riddled with snakes and sandbars. The Garonne is bumpy; irregular; generous in certain parts, so shallow in others that a houseboat – even a small one like ours – would have to be hoisted by mechanical lift from one level to the next, taking time, precious time—
    But none of that happened. We took the train. A better option in so many ways; besides, to move a houseboat on the Seine is no straightforward task. There is paperwork to fill in; permissions to be granted; the mooring to be secured and countless pieces of administration to be seen to. But somehow it makes me uneasy to come back to Lansquenet like this; suitcase in hand, like a refugee, Anouk at my heels like a stray dog.
    Why should I feel this sense of unease? After all, I have nothing to prove. I am no longer the Vianne Rocher who blew into town eight years ago. I have a business now; a home. We are no longer river-rats, moving from village to village in search of mean pickings; itinerant work, digging, planting, harvesting. I am in charge of my destiny. I call the wind. It answers to me.
    Why then – why this urgency? Is it for Armande? For myself? And why is it that the wind, far from easing as we leave Paris, seems to have grown more persistent as we travel south, its voice acquiring a plaintive note – hurry, hurry, hurry ?
    I keep Armande’s letter in the box that I carry with me wherever I go, along with my mother’s Tarot cards and the fragments of my other life. It isn’t much to show for a life; all those years we spent on the road. The places we lived; the people we met; the recipes I collected; all the friends we made and lost. The drawings Anouk made in school. Some photographs; not many. Passports, postcards, birth certificates, identity cards. All those moments, those memories. Everything we are, compressed into just two or three kilos of paper – the weight of a human heart, in fact – that sometimes seems unbearable.
    Hurry. Hurry . That voice again.
    Whose is it? My own? Armande’s? Or is it the voice of the changing wind, which blows so softly that sometimes I can almost believe it has stopped for good?
    Here, along the last stretch of our journey, the roadside is covered with dandelions, most of them now gone to seed, so that the air is filled with bright little particles.
    Hurry. Hurry . Reynaud used to say that if you let dandelions go to seed, the next year they get into everything – roadsides, verges, flowerbeds, vineyards, churchyards, gardens, even the cracks in the pavement – so that in a year’s time, or maybe two, there are nothing but dandelions left, marching across the countryside; hungry, indestructible—
    Francis Reynaud hated weeds. But I always liked the dandelions; their cheery faces, their tasty leaves. Even so, I’ve never seen quite so many growing here. Rosette likes to pick them and blow the seeds into the air. Next year—
    Next year—
    How strange, to be thinking of next year. We are not used to planning ahead. We were always like those dandelion seeds; settle for a season, then blow away. Dandelion roots are strong. They need to be, to find sustenance. But the plant only flowers for a season – even assuming someone like Francis Reynaud hasn’t already uprooted it – and after it has gone to seed, it has to move on with the wind to survive.
    Is that why I find myself drawn so readily back to Lansquenet? Is this a response to some instinct so deep that I am barely conscious of the need to return to the place where once I sowed these stubborn seeds? I wonder what, if anything, has grown there in our absence. I wonder whether our passage has left a mark, however small, on this land. How do folk remember us? With affection? Indifference? Do they remember us at all, or has time erased us from their minds?

CHAPTER FIVE

    Sunday, 15th August
    ANY EXCUSE