The Catalans. Patrick O’Brian

notice this change, but after some days it was borne in upon him that he no longer had a devoted follower, and that the stream of rousquilles had dried up, apparently for ever. He was puzzled, worried, at a loss to understand. He could not say how it had happened, nor when it had begun: and then there was no reason; he had not been unkind to her for weeks. After some thought he began to make advances. He left the school quickly and lurked about until she appeared, but when he said that she could walk with him if she liked, she ran fast away to go hand in hand with Carmen and Denise, and he was left sad and foolish behind.

      Two days later he bought two croissants and gave her one at break: he waited until she had finished her own before he offered it, and she was glad to take it. In an access of reconciliation he said that he had a dried sea horse for her in the boat, and they shared his second croissant.

      It is true that he soon recovered the upper hand, but it was a more even friendship now, and so it continued. In the village school of Saint-Féliu such things could be; elsewhere they might have been mocked and laughed to scorn, but not here. They continued, consecrated now by habit, rising form after form, reaching decimals and long division; they learned the Merovingian kings and passed the gap-toothed stage; by the time they reached the Revolution Francisco was already talking gruff.

      It was toward this time that Dominique, Madeleine’s mother, began to look pensive when she saw the two walk down the narrow street together. For a long, long while Madeleine and her sweetheart had been a joke with the street, and Dominique had laughed as much as any. She had called her daughter a hussy, a one for the men, and so on: she had often and often called Francisco into the shop to give him his pick of the squashed peaches, or a caramel or a piece of gingerbread. She was a fat, jolly woman in those days, and she liked to see children pleased and happy around her. In this she was in no way exceptional, in Saint-Féliu or anywhere else, but she was exceptional for Saint-Féliu in that she succeeded – succeeded, that is, in making them pleased and happy when they were with her. It was not that she was clever – far from that. She was rather a stupid woman, and given to long spells of absence, during which she would stare in front of her like a glazed cow, thinking of nothing at all; but by some gift of being she was better at the management of a child than any woman in the quarter. It may have been her plumpness, for fat people are said to be calm of spirit, or it may have been some natural sweetness, but whatever the cause, the house never knew those screaming, tearing scenes that broke out three or four times a day somewhere along the street, those horribly commonplace rows in which a woman, dark with hatred and anger, may be seen dragging a child by the arm, flailing at its head, and screaming, screaming, screaming a great piercing flood of abuse, sarcasm, and loathing right into its convulsed and wretched little face. These scenes were so ordinary in Saint-Féliu that anyone turning to stare would be known at once for a foreigner.

      It was not that these things shocked Dominique. And it is possible that the rare foreigner who did stop in dismay made too much of them: after all, the town had been brought up that way, and every mother in her time had been alternately slapped and kissed, spoiled and cowed. Everything was covered by the expression ‘It is stronger than me,’ delivered with a little self-satisfied smirk, or ‘It makes my hand itch.’ No further excuse to public opinion was necessary, and none to themselves: and in fact, though the children screamed, and though some of them grew up rather queer, not many died of their raising. On the other hand, outsiders could say, and say truly, that whereas in some foreign countries parricide is a monstrous crime, scarcely appearing once or twice in a hundred years, a thing to be spoken of with horror, remembered and shuddered upon for generations, yet here, in the local paper, it would not be worth a banner headline: a parricide would be found on an inner page, squeezed between the daily recipe and a piece on the control of insect pests.

      Dominique could not be shocked by what she had seen for all her life – could not react from the normal – but she was exceptional, and she remained exceptional. She did not batter her little girl about, she did not pull her hair, she did not slap her legs and shriek abuse at her – her voice did not even possess the bitter scolding note of the daily shrew. This was something so rare that it would have earned her the dislike of the street (no people are quicker to resent an implied criticism) if it had not been for the fact that Madeleine was, in general, somewhat less irritating than the other children: therefore, of course, there was no virtue in Dominique’s not beating her. Not that Madeleine was what could by any distortion of the term be called a good child, whatever the neighbors might say: she was dirty (when she was a little girl), untruthful, and dishonest. But being less battered, she was less dirty, untruthful, and dishonest than the rest. Certainly she was less irritating, for not only was she endowed with a happy, affectionate nature, but also with a mother who was protected from the smaller vexations of the world by well-ordered nerves and a high degree of mental calm: for in the matter of irritation, it is essential that there should be two people present; the worst-bred ape of a child cannot be irritating alone in a howling wilderness, and Madeleine, even at her worst, could not provoke a mother removed by a boundless expanse of absence, sitting at her counter or leaning on it, with her eyes round, wide open, and fixed upon nothing, nothing whatever.

      But still, kind though Dominique was, her kindness recognized a vast difference between those who belonged to her family and those who did not; and now that Madeleine was growing older – old enough now that no one could possibly mistake her for a boy – she looked at Francisco, and wished that her daughter had chosen some other man’s son to appropriate.

      The thought was no sooner clear in her mind than she spoke it: this was her way, and unless she were in one of her moods of abstraction it was rare that she let out a breath without some words upon it. It was her comfort to talk: the greater part of her life was passed in a haze of words, and if she had been prevented from talking with her customers, with her neighbors if there were nobody in the shop, or with herself if she were kept in alone by her duties, if she had been cut off from that delight, she would have pined clean away. Without her little gossip, she owned, she would never get through her day; and the life of a small shopkeeper in Saint-Féliu was no slight affair: she was up before it was light in the winter to meet the lorry that brought the milk, and already there would be customers waiting; then from that time she would not shut the door until ten o’clock on an early evening or eleven on a late one. This she did seven days a week for the whole year round. In some manner, too, between opening and closing the door, she fed her family and did her housework, besides selling salt cod, chick-peas, haricots, chicory, wreaths of garlic, bowls, glasses, soap, oil, wine, cheese, peaches, apricots, persimmons, melons, figs, medlars, all the fruit of their garden, all their vegetables, and brooms, sulphur candles, votive candles, ordinary candles, and a hundred other things beyond the list. This was in addition to collecting, arranging, and weighing every scrap of information about the private lives of all the families in the town, collating it with former knowledge and passing it on in a better form.

      She had a little help from her husband in the evenings with the accounts, but he worked nearly as many hours as she did, with the market-garden, the two vineyards, and the insurance-collecting that kept him so much from home, and she could be said to run the shop singlehanded. There was, of course, her sister-in-law next door, who had not half the custom, nor a quarter, and who would spend the most part of her day as often as not in measuring out the rice or sugar, or in preparing the lunch while Dominique satisfied the customers. There was also Mimi from the tobacco shop down on the corner of the street; when her husband was not at sea she would leave the shop in his charge and come to help at the busy time of day, for the shop, Dominique’s shop, was the ancestral place of trade, and they all felt a particular loyalty toward it.

      But this is not directly concerned with her thought about Francisco. The only person in the shop at the time of Dominique’s thought was an old woman who came down from Ayguafret in the mountains and carried back her provisions in a donkey cart.

      ‘It will be all right when he goes away for his military service,’ said Dominique.

      The old woman was deaf; she replied that she would have no honey that year. The bees were all dying.

      ‘When he goes away for his military service it will be all right,’ repeated Dominique, in a stronger voice.

      ‘Who?’

      ‘Francisco.’