Le Temps des Cerises by Zillah Bethel Page B

had indeed seen no sign of life, only black­ness and stars and in the distance the square-topped belfry of St Jacques.
    â€˜I can offer you a coffee of a sort. A species without milk or sugar, an evolved coffee, Darwin might say. A coffee that has adapted to the environment.’
    She nodded and agreed – so long as it wasn’t made in the vermicelli saucepan. It was a long-standing joke between them. Laurie kept a vermicelli-spattered saucepan on the spirit stove after the fashion of Victor Hugo – though Eveline thought he did it to annoy her and whenever he offered her a drink or a bite to eat she always told him it had better not be in the vermicelli saucepan. She watched him bustle about, his fair hair gleaming in the lamplight and listened to him going on about the war, his nights at the ramparts and the poem he’d just finished which contained the line: Only in the contemplation of flowers and moonlight may all men be equal. She had thought it very fine and told him so. It could only be a matter of time, they both agreed, before his remarkable talent was spotted.
    â€˜And you,’ he enquired gently, bringing over his new species in a cup. ‘How are you? Your legs must be freezing to death!’
    Eveline didn’t want to tell him that her only clean pair of stockings were tied up in knots. ‘Everything goes on much the same,’ she replied. ‘Jacques is Jacques and father is… well, father.’ She turned a little red. ‘I should christen this the Victor Hugo cup for it tastes of vermicelli to me!’
    Laurie smiled. ‘Did you know that when he was writing Leaves of Autumn he walked up to the top of Notre Dame every evening to watch the sunset.’
    â€˜Why ever did he do that?’ cried Eveline. ‘Does it look different from there than it does from the ground?’
    â€˜I imagine so. Else why would he have done it?’
    â€˜Perhaps because he is a madman who keeps pots of vermicelli on his stove!’
    Laurie laughed outright. ‘You caught me that time!’
    They chattered on then for a while about everything and nothing, Eveline settling back with her cup of Victor Hugo. Laurie wanted to know all the details – nothing was too trivial for him – of what she had eaten, where she had been, how she had felt since they last met and she struggled to remember the spaces and moments of her days, the dull and necessary in betweens, the routines and the rubbish. It seemed to her that she simply waited, waited for him to come home and spell out the meaning of her existence, see the poetry beneath the squalor of her life. She didn’t always believe there was any poetry, and it made her fearful sometimes that he was deceived in her. It was then she pretended to be even more what she knew he wanted her to be, taking an interest in his books, his ideas on Darwin and evolution, bending herself to an understanding and appreciation of the planes of reality he lingered on, delved into. At other times, a demon got into her and she wanted to upset the peace and quiet of the little room with its shelves of ordered books and sheaves of white paper by bringing out a string of coarse words or bursting into a bawdy song she’d heard her father sing: like teeth behind lips, the strawberry spreads its sweet breath …
    â€˜Are you well, Evie?’ Laurie’s voice was all concern. ‘You seem a little… strange this evening.’
    â€˜Oh fine,’ she assured him. ‘It’s just that sometimes, I don’t know, I wish that I could do something.’
    â€˜What do you mean, do something?’
    â€˜I don’t know. I just feel so helpless sometimes, sitting around doing nothing.’
    â€˜But you do so much. You look after your father and Jacques.’
    â€˜Oh yes, I do that alright. And I am sick of it. I’m sick of sitting at home and looking after them. Getting no thanks for it. I wish I could go out