The Little Paris Bookshop (22 page)

Only now came the tremors. They began in his knees and continued upward, sending a sizzling and a quaking through the inside of his tummy and chest, before advancing along his arms and fingers, and taking hold of his lips and eyelids. His circulation was on the point of collapse.

His voice was flat as he whispered, ‘She loved the sound apricots make as you pick them. You need to take them gently between your thumb and two fingers, twist them a little and they go
knck.
Her cat was called Miaow. In winter Miaow would sleep on Manon’s head like a hat. Manon said she had inherited her father’s toes – toes with a shapely waist. Manon loved her father dearly. And she loved pancakes filled with Banon cheese and lavender honey. And she would sometimes laugh in her dreams when she was asleep, Max. She was married to Luc, whereas I was merely her lover. Luc Basset, the vigneron.’

Jean looked up. He set down the wine bottle on the mosaic table with trembling hands. He would have preferred to hurl it against the wall, had it not been for his irrational fear of shattering Manon’s face.

He could barely stand it; he could barely stand
himself
. He was in one of the most picturesque places on earth, with a friend who had become his son and confidant. He had burned his bridges behind him and sailed south on water and tears.

Only to discover that he still wasn’t ready.

In his head he was standing in the hallway of his flat, trapped behind a bookcase.

Had he imagined that simply coming here would miraculously resolve everything? That he could leave his torment behind on the waterways, and trade his unwept tears for a dead woman’s absolution? That he had come far enough to earn redemption?

Yes, he had.

But it wasn’t that easy.

It’s never that easy.
 

He reached out angrily and gave the bottle a violent spin. He didn’t want Manon giving him that look any more. No. He couldn’t face her like this. Not as this non-person whose heart drifted, unmoored, lest he love and lose his beloved again.

When Max slipped a hand into his, Jean clutched it tightly. Very tightly.

The silky southern air streamed through the car. Jean had wound down all the windows of the clapped-out Renault 5. Gérard Bonnet, Brigitte’s husband, had lent him this one after they had dropped off the rental car in Apt.

The right door was blue, the left one red, and the rest of the old banger was a rusty-beige colour. Perdu had set out in this car with a small travel bag. He had driven via Bonnieux to Lourmarin, and then via Pertuis to Aix. From there he had taken the fastest route south to the sea. Marseilles was resplendent and proud, spread out on the bay down below – the great city where Africa, Europe and Asia kissed and did battle. The port lay like a glittering, breathing organism in the summer twilight as he came out of the hills on the motorway near Vitrolles.

To his right the white houses of the city. To his left the blue of sky and water. The view took his breath away.

The sea.
 

How it sparkled.

‘Hello, sea,’ whispered Jean Perdu. The view tugged at him as though the water had pierced his heart with a harpoon and was slowly reeling him in on strong ropes.

The water. The sky. White vapour trails in the blue above, white bow waves on the blue below.

Oh yes, he was going to head into this boundless blue. Along the cliffs, and on and on and on. Until he shook off the trembling that still plagued him. Did it come from abandoning
Lulu
? Did it come from abandoning the hope that he had emerged from the sorrow?

Jean Perdu wanted to carry on driving until he was sure. He wanted to find a place where he could hole up like a wounded animal.

Heal. I have to heal.
He hadn’t known that when he’d left Paris.

 

 

He switched the radio on before he could be overwhelmed by the thought of everything he hadn’t known.

‘If you were to describe one event that made you who you are, what would it be? Give me a call, and tell me and everyone listening in the Var area.’

The woman presenter with the friendly
mousse-au-chocolat
voice gave a phone number, then she put on some music. A slow track. Like rolling waves. The occasional melancholy sigh of an electric guitar. Drums murmuring like surf on the shore. ‘Albatross’ by Fleetwood Mac: a song that made Jean Perdu think of gulls wheeling in the setting sun, and of driftwood fires flickering on a beach at the edge of the world.

As Jean drove along the motorway through the warm summer air above Marseilles, and wondered what his event might have been, ‘Margot from Aubagne’ told listeners about the moment when she began to become herself.

‘It was the birth of my first child, my daughter. She’s called Fleur. Thirty-six hours in labour. Who’d have thought that pain could bring such joy, such peace? I felt an incredible sense of release. All at once everything had a meaning, and I wasn’t scared of dying any more. I had given life, and pain was the path to joy.’

For an instant Jean could understand this Margot from Aubagne. Nonetheless, he was a man. What it felt like to share one’s body with another for nine months remained a mystery to him; he would never be able to understand how part of himself could be passed on to a child and leave him forever.

He entered the long tunnel under Marseilles’ cathedral, but he had radio reception anyway.

The next caller was Gil from Marseilles. He had a rough, hard, working-class accent.

‘I became myself when my son died,’ he said falteringly, ‘because grief showed me what’s important in life. That’s what grief does. In the beginning it’s always there. You wake up and it’s there. It’s with you all day, everywhere you go. It’s with you in the evening; it won’t leave you alone at night. It grabs you by the throat and shakes you. But it keeps you warm. One day it might go, but not forever. It drops by from time to time. And then, eventually … all of a sudden I knew what was important – grief showed me. Love is important. Good food. And standing tall and not saying yes when you should say no.’

More music. Jean left Marseilles behind.

Did I think I was the only one grieving, the only one knocked sideways by it? Oh, Manon. I had no one I could talk to about you.
 

He thought back to the trivial event that had caused him to cast off from Paris: seeing Hesse’s
Stages
made into novelty bookends; that deeply personal poem of human understanding … used for marketing purposes.

He vaguely grasped that he could not afford to skip a stage in his mourning. But which one had he reached? Was he still in the end stage? Had he already reached a new beginning? Or was he falling, losing his footing? He turned the radio off. Soon he saw the exit for Cassis and got in the lane.

He left the motorway, still deep in thought, and reaching Cassis a little later, he wound his way noisily up its steep streets. An abundance of holidaymakers, inflatable plastic animals; elsewhere, ladies in evening dresses and diamond earrings. A large poster in front of an expensive-looking beach restaurant advertised a ‘Bali buffet’.

I don’t belong here.
 

Perdu thought of Eric Lanson, the therapist from Paris’s administrative district who loved reading fantasy novels and had tried to amuse Perdu with a spot of literary psychoanalysis. He could have talked to Lanson about his grief and his fear! The therapist had sent Jean a postcard from Bali once. There, death was the culmination of life; it was celebrated with dancing, gamelan concerts and seafood feasts. Jean found himself wondering what Max would have to say about that kind of festival. Something mildly disrespectful, without doubt; something humorous.

Max had said two things to Jean during their good-byes. First, that one had to gaze upon the dead, cremate them and bury their ashes – and then begin to tell their story.

‘Remain silent about the dead, and they’ll never leave you in peace.’

Second, that he thought the area around Bonnieux was
extremely
beautiful and he was going to stay in the dovecote and write. Jean Perdu guessed that a certain red tractor had played a part in this decision.

But what did it mean – that one had to tell the story of the dead?

Perdu cleared his throat and announced to the empty car: ‘Her words were so natural. Manon showed her feelings, always. She loved the tango. She drank from life as if it were champagne and faced it in the same spirit: she knew that life is special.’

He felt a deep sorrow welling up inside him.

He had wept more in the last two weeks than in the previous twenty years. But the tears were all for Manon, every last one, and he was no longer ashamed of them.

Perdu had raced up the steep streets of Cassis. He left Cap Canaille and its spectacular red cliffs behind to his left, and drove on through small hills and pine forests along the old, windy coastal road from Marseilles to Cannes. Villages merged into one another, rows of houses blurred across town boundaries, palms alternated with pines, flowers and rocks. La Ciotat. Le Liouquet. And then Les Lecques.

Spotting a car park beside a path down to the beach, Jean swung spontaneously out of the smooth stream of vehicles. He was hungry.

The little town’s sweeping waterfront, comprising weather-beaten old villas and pragmatic new hotel complexes, was bustling with families. They were strolling on the beach and the promenade, and eating in restaurants and bistros that had opened their sliding windows wide onto the sea view. A few well-tanned boys were playing Frisbee in the surf, and a flotilla of white one-man training dinghies bobbed up and down beyond the line of yellow marker buoys and the lighthouse.

Jean found a seat at the counter of the L’Équateur beach bar, which was two yards back from the sand and ten yards from the gentle breakers. Large blue parasols fluttered in the wind over shiny tables, which were tightly clustered, as was the case all over Provence in the high season, when restaurants packed diners in like sardines. Perdu enjoyed an unrivalled view from the bar.

He kept his eyes on the sea as he ate mussels in a rich herb and cream sauce from a deep black pot, and washed them down with some mineral water and a glass of dry white Bandol wine. The water was light blue in the late sunshine.

At sunset it elected to turn dark turquoise. The sand went from light blonde to dark flax and then slate grey. The women walking past became more excitable, their skirts shorter, their laughter more expectant. An open-air disco had been set up on the breakwater, and it was there that mixed groups of three or four girls, dressed in skimpy dresses or jean shorts, and guys wearing shirts that rippled on their shiny, tanned shoulders, were heading.

Perdu gazed after the young women and men. In their impatient, hurrying gait he recognised the young’s unbridled lust for new experience, their striving towards places with the whiff of adventure about them. Erotic adventures! Laughter, freedom, dancing into the early hours, barefoot in the cool sand, heat in their loins. And kisses, forever engraved on the memory.

At sunset Saint-Cyr and Les Lecques were transformed into one big party area. Summer life in the south. These were the hours carried over from the hot afternoon, when the blood stood weary and thick in the veins.

 

 

The steep tongue of land dotted with houses and pines to Jean’s left gleamed a rusty gold colour; the horizon was delineated in orange-blue, and the sea swelled sweet and salty.

For a few minutes, as he reached the bottom of his pot of mussels, and sifted idly through the remnants of briny cream sauce and blue-black shimmering shards of mussel shell, sea, sky and land took on the same shade of blue: a cool grey-blue that tinted the air, his wine glass, the white walls and the promenade, and briefly turned people into chattering stone sculptures.

A blond surfer dude cleared away Perdu’s pot and plate of shells, and smoothly set down a bowl of warm water for Perdu to wash his hands in.

‘Would you like dessert?’ It sounded friendly, but there was a hint of ‘if you don’t, then please leave, because we can get another two sittings in.’

It had felt good, nonetheless. He had eaten the sea and drunk it in with his eyes. He had yearned for this, and the trembling inside him had subsided a little.

Perdu left the rest of his wine, tossed a banknote onto the plate with the bill and walked to his patchwork Renault 5. He drove on along the coast road with the taste of creamy salt on his lips.

When he lost sight of the sea, he took the next right off the main road. He soon spotted the water again, a glinting ribbon in the bright moonlight among the pines, cypresses, windswept evergreens and houses, hotels and villas. He drove along empty lanes through a pretty residential area. Colourful, stately villas. He didn’t know where he was, but he knew that this was where he wanted to wake up the next morning and swim. It was time to look for a guesthouse, or a stretch of sand where he could make a campfire and sleep under the stars.

As Perdu was rolling down the Boulevard Frédéric Mistral, the Renault started to make a whistling
woooeeeh
sound. This ended in a hissing bang, and the engine spluttered and died. Channelling the last momentum from the descent, Perdu steered the car to the edge of the road, where the Renault issued its final breath. There was not so much as an electronic click as Jean turned the key in the ignition. The car obviously wanted to stay here too.