Bella... A French Life (3 page)

“Quiet up at your place, Miss?” asks Frascot.

“I’ve already closed, Frascot.”

“So Fred tells me. Mind you, Miss, it’s gonna be a cold winter ‘cause the trawler guys are a-bring’en in a lot of skate, squid and scallops and if that ain’t a sign of one, I am a yokel and I’ve no business being in the resto business.”

Every autumn, at the start of the skate, squid and scallop season, which is now, Frascot predicts a cold winter.

Stalls line the square.

As always, I walk over to the stall of farmer LeGros first. It is one of those already under canvas.

“Going to be a cold winter, Miss,” greets Mrs LeGros.

She is wearing a hand-knitted jersey over the red, cotton frock she has worn each summer for at least half a dozen years.

“I would like to buy some chicken this morning, Mrs LeGros.”

She points to hens hanging by their long, thin necks to which tuffs of bloodied feathers cling.

“Must I do the necessary ‘cause you still don’t want the feet and the head, do you, Miss?”

“Certainly no feet or head, Mrs LeGros.”

“You don’t know what’s nice.”

She shifts her weight from one of her legs, covered up to her knee in flesh-coloured stockings, and poles the nearest hen. I watch her sling it down onto a bloodied wooden plank. As always happens during this ritual, I am reminded of the autopsy on the Brissard twin. I close my eyes, and hearing the thump that means that the hen’s head and feet are lying on top of a heap of heads, feet, hairy tails and hairy paws, I open them again. At the end of the day, she will give these bloody and hairy bits to the beggars from the bigger towns, who each Thursday hitch lifts to the village on the farmers’ trucks, with the sole purpose of receiving such alms.

As it is also the season for pheasant and hare I buy one of each and again I close my eyes while Mrs LeGros chops off the unwanted bits. It is also cauliflower, courgette squash and beet season, and I stop at the stall beside that of the LeGros - that of farmer Janvier - and I hand Mrs Janvier my wicker basket to fill.

“Frascot tells me you’ve already closed for winter, Miss.”

“So I did.”

“Any big plans for the winter?”

“Neither big nor small.”

“
Ooh la la
, you should put something big in your life, if you ask me. You like it big, don’t you, my darling?”

A large woman, she winks, and her diminutive husband, his waist narrower than one of her upper arms, shakes his head at his wife’s brazenness in referring to my nun-like celibacy.

My shopping done, I am tempted to return to the Vaybee for another cup of coffee, but through its open door I see the tall, thin, grey figure of Miss Jambenoire at the bar. She has
Le Monde
open on the zinc-top in front of her. She’s eighty years old, and each Thursday she’s here in the market, to, as she says, stock up with genuine French food and not the foreign rubbish of supermarkets. She never talks to me, just as she had never addressed a word to my father; she did speak to my mother, but always about the weather, and always did she call her,
you poor thing
.

I walk around the square. The three and four-storey half-timbered buildings that line it are seemingly on fire, but as I know, it is the noon sun reflecting in the windows.  Red, pink and white geraniums and begonias, in window boxes, are in their final flowering before winter’s hiatus. Leaves of a bay tree growing in a white cube container on a balcony are turning yellow. A sure sign that winter is approaching.

I set off for home.

-0-

Chapter Four

The road from Sainte-Marie-sur-Brecque to Le Presbytère is a modest one.

Leaving Le Square and continuing down Rue Charlemagne, I drive past timbered cottages which have been transformed into bed-and-breakfasts by English expatriates. I pass the primary school where I was a pupil until I went to high school in the town of Nantes. I turn right into wide, tree-lined, tarred Route Avranches which was once the only road to the inland town of Avranches, and after about two hundred metres, there where the council has erected a board to indicate the way to the guest house, but only after my father had given them a bribe of a few thousand francs, I turn right again.

The road I am on now is narrow but tarred like Route Avranches and winds through cliffs, but after a while, it straightens out. Alongside the car is dark-green pasture land which is this morning, like almost every morning of the year, dotted with ewes, rams and lambs, most of these destined to become our local speciality -
agneaux pré-salé.
Roasted leg of salt marsh lamb. Our guests loved my mother’s
agneaux pré-salé
which, in my child mind, was excellent only because I had helped her with the cooking when in reality my only contribution had been that I inserted cloves of garlic into incisions she had already made in the meat. Since her death six years ago, it is Gertrude who does all the cooking at Le Presbytère. Gertrude - Gertrude Duc - Fred and Frascot’s cousin.   Like Fred and Le Presbytère’s housemaids, Honorine and Martine, she is off until my Easter re-opening.

Once through the pastureland, the road starts to climb and becomes somewhat potholed. I look back towards the coast, towards the Bay of Saint-Michel, down below. I open the window on my side by a chink, and a little wind caresses the back of my neck. Some evenings, after Gertrude had finished her shift, I’ll drive her back to her home in the village, and whenever I open a window, she warns me about the dangers of a draught.

“Bad if you have your menses or if you’re in the other way.”

The other way:
pregnant
.

“Gertrude, I am not pregnant,” I will say.

In my side mirror, a Brittany Ferries boat is sailing towards Saint-Malo. Its passengers will be gathering together heavy luggage and boisterous children, ready to start another sojourn at the expatriates’ B&Bs. On days when the wind blows hard this way, we, here on land, hear the warnings over the ship’s loudspeakers asking the passengers not to block the doorways. The tourists will be bringing whole nut chocolate bars, lemon cream biscuits and pots of
Marmite
to their ex-pat hosts. “Allow me to pay you for these,” Mrs Ex-Pat will say, and the holidaymaker will reply: “Not on your nelly, love. Just enjoy the stuff. You must so miss England.”

The holidaymakers will go to Saint Michael’s Mount, pantingly climb up to the abbey, browse the souvenir shops for fridge magnets and embroidered tea doilies, eat a
Mêre Poulard
omelette and a
crêpe
, complain about the fucking French overcharging as always, and complain even more when they pay a franc to spend a penny. But, back in England, they will show relatives and friends the photographs they took. “God, but France is beautiful,” they will say.

Behind me, the sun, high in the sky, turns the golden statue of Archangel Michael atop the spire of the mount’s abbey into a ball of golden flames. I am reminded of how Joan of Arc had described him to her English judges in 1431.

Was he naked?

Do you think that Our Lord had nothing in which to clothe him?

Did he have hair?

And why would they have cut it ...? But no, I do not know if he has hair. He had wings on his shoulders, but no crown on his head. I saw him with the eyes of my body, just as I see you... I saw him with my corporal eyes.
 

How do you know it was him?

He told me, “I am Michael, the protector of France”.

Here, on the spire, he stands with those wings stretched to the sky. But not only his wings, so too his sword, perhaps yet again ready to protect France, perhaps from those English tourists on the ferry.

The bay’s tide is not yet in and cars and coaches are driving along the causeway linking the mount to the mainland. When I first returned after the Brissard twin’s death, the speed with which the tide rose at the equinoxes used to fascinate me;
à la vitesse d’un cheval du gallop
- at the speed of a galloping horse - according to Victor Hugo. There are always tourists who try to beat the tide to the mount.

Jean-Louis and I too once tried to do so.

It was in a month of June, and it was in the year before the Brissard twin’s death. Jean-Louis and I had been lovers for just a month and he had not yet met my widowed mother and I suggested he should come with me to Le Presbytère for the weekend. We drove down in his metallic silver Porsche which he had bought just the month before. It was his first major purchase since he and Colette, his wife, split, and his colleagues at his legal firm teased him about it, about how girls love blokes with fast cars.

“
Et puis alors,
” he said when I too teased him about the Porsche.

How many times have I not heard Jean-Louis say
et puis alors
? So what then?

On that June weekend, on that walk, he spoke of how he missed his two little girls who were living with their mother.

“They would have loved being here today.”

“Have they seen the mount?”

“Col - their mother - and I brought them here once, yes, but they were small still ...”

“So, they would not remember anything of it,” I interrupted.

“You can be very abrupt if you so wish, you know Bella,” he said.

He was angry.

“What would you have wanted me to say, Jean-Louis? You miss your girls, and I feel bad about that.”

“Mother, I did not break up his marriage,” I had told my mother when I first told her about Jean-Louis.

“But, Bella, a man with a past. How unfortunate.”

“We all have pasts, Mother.”

I had hers in mind, hers and that of my father, and she realised what I meant because we never again spoke of ‘pasts’. Not even when I also had a past; an ex-lover and a child in its grave because of me.

The walk took us just under two hours. We set off from the beach at the town of Genêts some six kilometres from the mount. Ahead of us Frascot’s teenage boy, Didier, was acting as guide to a group of noisy middle-aged German
frauen
who wore flowery sleeveless tops and khaki shorts, their hairy arms and legs splattered with sludge. As I knew, they would tip him when they reached the mount and, as I also knew, he would not spend the money but give it to his father to bank for him for the day he would be going to Paris to study medicine at the Sorbonne.

On the mount, Jean-Louis and I, the two of us, like the German women, dressed in shorts and tops, and our laced sandals dangling from around our necks, went for a coffee at one of the cafés on cobbled, twisting, climbing Grande Rue, the mount’s only street.

Again, he spoke of his girls.

“Carmen has done well at school, but Charissa has received a bad report. Col - their mother - and I are really worried about her.”

Never could he say his wife’s name. One of my colleagues at Chartreux Hospital even thought that his wife’s name was Col. “What an odd name,” she had said.

“Have you been to speak to the girl’s teacher?” I asked Jean-Louis.

“We will do so in September when schools reopen after the summer holiday.”

Not Col, but
we.
 

But on that day he and she were no longer a
we
. He and I were the
we
.

“Bella, my dear child, what did you expect?” my mother asked when Jean-Louis and I were no longer a couple.

“I don’t know what you mean, Mother.”

“The way you get them is the way you lose them, Bella.”

“Mother, I did not break up his marriage. Anyway, he is back with her, so no harm done,” I replied.

After the coffee, Jean-Louis and I hitched a ride on a tourist coach back to Genêts where the Porsche was parked. He allowed me to drive back to Le Presbytère, and, on this road, and about where I am now, I stepped on the accelerator and he grabbed the dashboard as if fearing we were going to plunge off the road, yet, he did not tell me to slow down. His face was flushed with excitement.

At the end of the day we drove back to Paris and he was behind the wheel.

Dropping me off at my apartment in the Latin Quarter he did not get out of the car but leaned over me to open the door on my side for me.

“Bella, why does your mother think you broke up my marriage?” he asked.

“She also thinks you will drop me for another woman.”

“
Et puis alors,
” he said. 

-0-

Chapter Five

Getting back from the village, a moment ago, I parked the Mercedes between the
Deux Chevaux
and the
Combi
, and here I stand in the kitchen.

I ought to unpack my market purchases. The pheasant and the hare need to go into the freezer. The chicken I will roast today; it will be food for me for at least three meals.

Oh, I will do it in a moment!

I walk to the window to feel the soil of a Peace Lily in a terracotta pot placed on the sill. The plant, already potted, was a gift from Fred this past summer.

“Not too much water, Miss, but don’t let the soil dry out either,” he cautioned.

One of its white lilies has started to turn green at the edges as Fred said it would at the end of the current flowering cycle.

I touch the flower’s spadix. Its yellow powder sticks to my fingers. I wonder whether the powder is poisonous; Fred did not say and usually he points out what is poisonous.

The plant’s long, curly, pointed leaves are covered in a thin layer of dust. I spray them with tap water and they are shiny again.

I remain at the window; it looks out onto my Frida Kahlo courtyard.  My mother asked me who Frida Kahlo was. My father would have known. In those first years after the war, he, dabbling with Communism, was an admirer of Frida’s husband, Diego Rivera.

“First a Hitlerite, now a Stalinist. What will he become next? A Jehova Witness?” my uncles commented among themselves.

-0-

My parents kept the guest house open all year round. Even my mother, after my father’s death twelve years ago, did so. When I joined her here and suggested that we close for the cold months, she fervidly refused.