Bella... A French Life (17 page)

Frascot says he is glad to see me.

“You should come in every day, Miss.”

“Do you want to drive me to drink, Frascot?”

“He’s homo,” whispers Larissa to me, her eyes looking up from the handwritten menu.

“Frascot?”

“Noooooooo! Jonny?”

Homo – homosexual.

“I’ve guessed as much, Larissa.”

“And such a nice guy too.”

“Sure. Why shouldn’t he be?”

“His parents do not know.”

“So, he ought to tell them.”

“They wouldn’t understand. Deeply religious. Has own pew next door and every Sunday they are there, kissing the Bible and what not.”

Next door
- Notre Dame Sainte-Marie church.

We order Frascot’s rabbit with three mustard sauces and he serves it in a large copper pot we are to keep sizzling hot on an open flame.

The rabbit is delicious as always and next we order apple pie with whipped cream.

“I think I will go down to the beach now, Larissa,” I say.

“Oh my goodness, Doctor Wolff. Your hair!”

She throws her ringed hands up in the air.

“I hope the shampoo and dyes won’t damage those baubles of yours, Larissa.”

I know the stones in the baubles are not really precious stones: she claims they are.

“Just glass,” she admits for the first time and winks.

“Well, I never!”

“Not to tell anyone though, Doctor Wolff.”

She winks yet again.

I drive a short distance along the coast and away from the mount to the cove where Baudelaire and I used to go. He used to dive from one of the jutting rocks while I played in the sand like a child, but with the very grown-up thoughts of the day he and I will be loving parents to our own little Baudelaire.

I pull up on a grassy knoll and walk down to the beach. The sand is warm between my toes. I sit down on the very rock from which Baudelaire used to dive. I stretch my legs out in front of me so I am able to dip my feet into the clear blue sea. The water is icy, and quickly, with a shiver, I pull my legs back up and hold my feet up towards the sun to dry. I know should I fall into the sea, I, unable to swim, will drown.

Someone told me Baudelaire did not marry Anne but a diplomatic corps interpreter. I wonder if they have a son named Baudelaire.

-0-

Back at Le Presbytère there is no sign of Colin, but I remember I did not give him a key to the front door, so had he decided to return before nightfall, he would not have been able to get in and might have set off again.

Ought I give him a key?

If I do, might I not be making him feel too much at home?
But is this not what I want?
Just to make sure it is not, that I did not let Larissa make me look good in order to please Colin, I pick up my hairbrush and I brush her blow wave right out.

At midnight, I go to bed.

Soon, I hear the drone of Colin’s motorcycle.

I wait for the click which means he is in the house and he is locking the front door. He goes straight to his room. Steady were his footsteps: so, he has not been drinking. Here at Le Presbytère we always listen for the footsteps to know whether to expect a problem from a guest who has had too many.

I hear the click of another door.

Colin has closed his bedroom door. 

I hope to fall asleep quickly.

-0-

Chapter Twenty-Two

It is Wednesday and Fred is here to do the gardening.

“Miss, it was a good rain that fell,” he says.

“Good, yes, Fred.”

We are in the kitchen.

“Fred, I’ve broken our rule this winter. Le Presbytère has a guest.”

I wait for his reaction, his reply.

“So I’ve heard. Frascot told me. ”

Curiosity is written all over his face.

“Make yourself a bowl of coffee, Fred.”

Colin has been at Le Presbytère for ten days now. He appears in the kitchen’s doorway and Fred gasps for breath. Why? I can only guess he is struck by the good looks of Le Presbytère’s guest.

“Good morning, Mr Fred. I am Colin.”

Fred is wearing green Wellingtons to which dried mud clings and a green plastic apron over white overalls, so obviously he is the gardener I told Colin about.

Fred asks Colin whether he would like a bowl of coffee.

Eagerly, Colin accepts.

“Not a bowl though, Mr Fred. Just a small cup, please.”

The two go out into the Frida Kahlo courtyard and, sipping their coffee, they walk from one exotic plant to another, Fred telling Colin whatever he knows about each plant. Colin is listening with genuine interest and asking questions. The two men are from such different worlds, yet they appear to be getting on well. It did not escape me that Fred did not like Jean-Louis and that the sentiment was mutual.

Fred brings the two emptied coffee cups to the kitchen.

“Miss, Mr Colin is going to help with the gardening today.”

“Really? He’s a man from the city, Fred, so I would say what he knows about gardening is dangerous.”

“He climbs mountains, Miss.”

“Mountains?” I ask. “Are you sure?”

“He climbed the Eiger, Miss. Told me.”

“The Eiger?”

“Yes, Miss. He said it is in Switzerland, Miss.”

A moment ago I was astonished. Now, I am angry, but not at Fred, but at myself. I have not managed to pierce Colin’s reserve, but my gardener, a man with little education, has done so within minutes of meeting him. What does this make me? A woman with no social skills? A tongue-tied moron?

“People do. Climb mountains. Climb the Eiger. So what, Fred!” I say.

I can see Colin through the window. He is yet again saluting me. This time he is doing so with a gleeful, playful, boyish smile. He must have guessed Fred was telling me about the Eiger and he must have seen the surprise on my face.

I turn my back to the window.

“I’ll leave the two of you to it, Fred. I will drive down to the village. Buy a few things.”

Walking across the courtyard to the parking bay, I return Colin’s salute. My salute, unlike those he offered me, is clumsy, my forefinger almost in my right eye. The gesture spreads a smile right across his face, his eyes becoming tiny buttons within a few thin lines.

“Please do see to it that Mr Colin does not fall from a tree because Le Presbytère’s insurance does not cover such an eventuality,” I call out to Fred, looking back.

I run down the steps to the parking bay.

I do not look back.

-0-

So Colin climbs mountains. My father also climbed mountains. He was good at skiing too; he was an excellent skier. That this was so led to one of the most painful episodes of my childhood.

One winter, Miss Jambenoire decided the school would go skiing on the Christmas break. She needed an experienced skier to accompany the children as their instructor. No volunteers came forward: Normans are good at swimming and not at skiing.

My father was able to ski almost before he was able to walk steadily. His family - Berliners - had each winter taken the train the seven-hundred or so kilometres south to the Bavarian ski resort of Mittenwald. The family owned a house there on the town’s main street - I still have a photo of the house, a white two-storey with a grey slate roof that slanted almost to the ground on one side. In 1941 when Hitler’s
Gebirgsjäger
mountain infantry was formed, my grandfather Johann suggested to my father, then already in France, that, because he was such an excellent skier, he should request to be transferred to the troop, considered an elite one. By then my father had met my mother and not having wanted to leave her, he ignored his father’s suggestion. Strangely, never did my father ski again. Miss Jambenoire having been in search of a skiing instructor, my mother asked my father whether he would not like to go with the children.

“Henriette, what gives you the idea I would want to?” he asked.

His eyes sparkled: he obviously had already thought of it.

“If you do it, Bella and Marius can go along. I wouldn’t want them to go with just anyone,” she told him.

That night when I went to the kitchen to fetch a glass of milk, I heard them discuss it when I passed their bedroom. They were speaking in whispers, but a child hears whispering more clearly than the loudest scream.

The following morning my father put on his best suit for calling in on Miss Jambenoire, the woman who had until then refused to speak to him. She did so again. She told her secretary to tell my father to wait outside on the corridor because she was busy. My father stood out in that corridor for forty-five minutes just like an errant schoolboy waiting to be whipped. It amused the children; walking along the corridor on their way to the playground for their mid-morning break, they mimed a whipping. I must however in all honesty say it was not a gesture of malice on their part, but one of empathy; it was something we all did when one of our mates was sent to the headmistress’s office for punishment.

Miss Jambenoire did not break her vow of silence towards my father. After having made him wait, she sent her secretary out to the corridor to tell him she did not speak to Nazis. That night I again heard my parents whisper to each other; on that occasion I went to stand outside their bedroom, hoping they would discuss what had happened at the school. Not long was I standing there, trembling in fear they might open the door, when they started to whisper.

“I thought the war is over,” I heard my father say.

“Rody, it is,” my mother replied.

“Not here, not here in the village, it is not,” he said, his voice trembling with emotion.

He suggested we ought consider leaving for Germany.

“And leave behind Le Presbytère for which we have worked so hard. No, Rody, we must stand and fight,” was what I heard my mother tell him.

“Henriette, they will never allow me to forget.”

“But
we
love you. I love you, and our Bella and Marius love you,” she argued.

I ran back to my room because what started in that bedroom then was not for little ears to hear.

A few days later a letter arrived at Le Presbytère which was signed
Bernadette Jambenoire (Miss), Head, Sainte-Marie-sur-Brecque Primary School.
 

The woman wrote that because of a most unfortunate incident she has been compelled to cancel the children’s skiing trip in the Alps. She did not supply further details, but she and her secretary did not fail to spread the news around the village that the Nazi Rodolph Wolff through his actions had made it impossible for the trip to continue.

“Say, Bella, are you a Nazi too like your father?” Marie Dumay whispered to me from her side of the bench she and I shared.

By then there was not a soul in the village who had not heard the story and Vincent Lebar told me that although he would not have been able to ski because of the polio, he looked forward to the trip.

“The doctor told my mom the fresh mountain air will do my weak lungs a world of good. I may now die because my lungs will pack it in, and Bella, it will all be your father’s fault!”

Vincent Lebar did not die because my father stopped him from going to the Alps that Christmas: he lives in Paris, a married man with four children. He comes to the village often to put flowers on his parents’ grave; he used to greet me when we passed in the village - said, “Hello, and how are you, Bella?” - but he no longer does so.

-0-

In Sainte-Marie-sur-Brecque I call in at the bakery, suitably named
Amandine
after Amandine, wife of the baker, Olivier Richer, but also after the
amandine,
the French almond cake, one of Olivier’s specialities. Knowing Fred is always hungry when he comes gardening and that he will be so again today, I am looking for something to buy for lunch.

I point to a quiche on a refrigerated shelf.

“This looks just what I am after.”

“It’s for six, Miss,” warns Amandine.

“Thanks, Amandine. A quiche big enough for six is just what I want.”

Yellow curls fall over her face, which is always red from the heat from the back room, where I can see Olivier and an assistant using long flat boards dusted with flour to scoop baked
baguettes
from a wood-burning oven. I buy all Le Presbytères’ bread and pastries from the Richers because baking over wood and not over gas or electricity, as is the norm these days here in France, gives their bread a crispy yellowish crust and a light interior much appreciated by my guests.

I can see Amandine is waiting for an explanation why I would want such a big quiche. I do not enlighten her.

“If you are having lunch guests, what about an
amandine,
Miss?” asks Olivier.

He has stepped from the backroom, and looking like a ghost with his face, hair, hands and arms covered in flour.

“Yes, why not? It will be nice with coffee afterwards.”

After what
asks Amandine’s face while she transforms a piece of cardboard into a pretty box for the
amandine
which she ties with a pink string.

“Hold it by the string. It won’t snap,” she tells me.

The quiche too she puts in a box, but not a pretty pink one, and I put both boxes on the Merc’s rear seat for the drive back to Le Presbytère.

-0-

The two men are in the front garden. Colin is also now wearing a green plastic apron - must be one of the spare ones Fred keeps in his neat gardening shed at the bottom of my back garden. Both were down on all fours when I drove through the gate, but they rise to their feet as I drive by. Fred never wears a hat, but Colin is wearing a baseball cap with the words
Big Apple
across the front; must be his own because Fred would not even know a baseball cap exists. I am happy to see Colin is not wearing his back to front as the youths do these days.

I park the Mercedes, next I go tell the men I have something for their lunch.

Fred smacks his lips.

“Thank you very much, Miss, feeling a bit peckish I must admit.”

Colin stands with his feet a little apart, looking at me. He looks so assured, so confident what he was doing, when I arrived, was done well. He has a heap of dead leaves at his feet. He is wearing Wellingtons like Fred. They must be his own because I know Fred has just the one pair.