Wild Lavender (5 page)

My grief over my father’s death healed slowly, but more from being exhausted by hard work than from acceptance. At night I huddled under my thin blanket, listening to the radiator spit and hiss erratic heat into the air. My hair stank of salt and linseed oil lingered on my fingertips. I scraped the muck from under my nails and combed the dirt out of my hair each night, but the bath I was allowed once a week didn’t rid me of the salt and linseed smells. They seemed to be seeping out of my pores.

There must be more than this, I would tell myself. The few minutes before I drifted into slumber were the only time I had to think and make plans. Aunt Augustine said that I cost her ‘an arm and a leg’ in board and that was why she didn’t pay me anything. I didn’t even have money for soap or to send a letter to my family. It occurred to me that I was under no obligation to stay with Aunt Augustine, except that my mother and aunt had begged me to make the best of it. ‘I’ve heard that terrible things can happen to girls who are alone in Marseilles,’ Aunt Yvette had warned me. ‘Wait until Bernard can send you some money.’

I longed for beauty but all around me was drabness. The first things I saw on awakening each morning were the bars in the window, the cracks creeping down the walls, the stains on the floorboards. On the farm I had opened my eyes to a view of fields and been caressed awake by breezes
scented with wisteria and lavender. In Aunt Augustine’s house, the reek of seawater rose up through the floor so that I sometimes dreamed I was trapped in the hull of a ship. On the farm I had been careless about housework because natural beauty could not be marred by scattered clothes and a lumpily made bed. But in Marseilles my surroundings were so ugly that I became obsessed with order, although my attempts at beautifying the house were frustrated at each turn. It seemed that no matter how much I plumped and straightened, the furniture still looked shabby, and because Aunt Augustine insisted that the shutters remain closed even in winter, everything was depressingly dark. Ghislaine was respectful of my efforts, but even though Monsieur Bellot looked about him in admiration, it didn’t stop him from treading muddy boots on the carpets or Monsieur Roulin from spitting his olive pips onto the steps I had just swept.

In all the weeks I had been with Aunt Augustine, I had not seen the mysterious guest from the fourth floor. I often smelt her: a hint of patchouli in the bathroom; a drift of woody-sweet incense seeping from under her door. And sometimes I heard her: feet tapping across the floorboards when I cleaned Aunt Augustine’s room; the faint strains of a voice crooning from a gramophone, ‘
Je ne peux pas vivre sans amour
’. But I never saw her. She seemed to follow a timetable of her own. When we sat down to lunch, I heard the bathroom taps groan. When I was washing the dishes in the kitchen, her stealthy tread slinked down the stairs and evaporated with the bang of the front door. Sometimes, if I was still awake in the early hours of the morning, I would hear a car pull up outside the house and a chorus of excited voices. Her laughter rose above them all. It was a light, airy laugh that tickled your skin like a spring breeze.

Ghislaine filled me in with what information she could: the boarder’s name was Camille Casal, she was twenty years old and worked as a showgirl in a local music hall. But I failed so many times to catch a glimpse of her that I simply gave up.

S
pring arrived early the next year and by late March the air was already tinged with warmth. I examined the herb and vegetable garden, fingering the tangled tomato vines and pulling up the grass runners that had strangled the lettuce heads. There were twigs of fennel, rosemary and thyme, badly dehydrated but perhaps salvagable. If the leaves turned out to be too tough for eating, I could dry them and make sachets. I tugged a rusty spade from the clutches of the clematis, which had climbed the fence from the garden behind us, and braved the cellar to find a pitchfork. After supper, when the air was cooler, I jabbed at the compacted ground and mixed in vegetable scraps to enrich the soil. Ghislaine brought me seeds for coriander, basil and mint. I sowed them in raised mounds, thinking how my father would have laughed to see his ‘flamingo’ toiling in the dirt. Every morning I watered my garden and remembered one of his favourite sayings: ‘Good things come to those who sow and wait patiently.’

By the end of April it seemed that all my days had rolled into a depressing monotony of cleaning, sweeping, digging and sleeping, until one afternoon when I was rehanging the curtains in the front room after airing them. I was despairing at the moth holes and faded spots in the fabric when I heard a yap and then Aunt Augustine’s shrill scream. I fell off the stool and landed with a thud on my bottom.

‘Who does this monster belong to?’

Whatever Aunt Augustine was referring to, it yapped again. I stood up and righted the stool, then hurried to the
landing to find out what was going on. Someone was laughing. The sound sent pins and needles over my skin and I knew instantly who it was.

‘You grumpy old bag! It’s my puppy,’ Camille said. ‘Monsieur Gosling gave it to me after I received five curtain calls.’

‘For showing off your fanny and titties,’ scowled Aunt Augustine over the yaps. ‘I told you no pets!’

I blushed to hear an old lady use such words. But my embarrassment didn’t curb my curiosity. Prepared to face my aunt’s wrath for eavesdropping, I advanced up the stairs.

‘He’s so small he’s more like a plant than a dog. You’re being a cow because he frightened you.’

‘I don’t want any mess!’

‘You seemed quite content to live with it until your niece came along.’

This was followed by silence and I stopped on the first-floor landing, straining my ears to listen for what would be said next. It occurred to me how bold Camille was to speak to Aunt Augustine like that, and how greedy Aunt Augustine was to keep someone she loathed. But I knew from the ledger book my aunt had left open on her desk one day that Camille paid twice as much board as the others, even though she never took her meals at the house.

‘He won’t make any noise when I’m not here,’ Camille said. ‘That girl of yours can take him for a walk in the evenings. He’ll sleep after that.’

‘She’ll do nothing of the sort! She’s busy enough as it is,’ Aunt Augustine snapped.

‘I’m sure she will…if I pay her. And I’m sure that you will take half of it.’

The conversation paused again. I guessed that Aunt Augustine was thinking the issue over. She’d prefer money over the house being clean. But would she give in to someone she despised? I itched at the idea of getting paid for something, even if Aunt Augustine did take half of it. It seemed to me that some money would herald the beginning of better things. I sucked in a breath and crept up the next
flight of stairs. But the sound of footsteps heading towards me stopped me in my tracks. It wasn’t Aunt Augustine’s clumsy gait but the strut of a lioness. My first instinct was to turn and run. Instead, I found myself with feet as immovable as lead. The most I could do was to stare down at them. The footsteps came to a halt above me.

‘There you are!’

I looked up. For a moment I thought I was experiencing a vision. Leaning over the balustrade of the landing above was the most beautiful woman I had ever seen. Her blonde hair fell in waves across her crown, her eyes were crystal blue and her nose was as sculptured as those of the statues in Palais Longchamp, which I had stopped to admire one day when I passed it on an errand. She looked like a rose in her pale mint dress with a corsage of scarlet petals. Her long fingers held an animal to her throat. From the size of it, I thought it was a honey-coloured rat, but when it turned to me and blinked bulging eyes and stuck out its pink tongue I realised it was the tiniest dog I had ever seen.

Camille stepped down towards me and placed the wriggly animal in my arms. ‘His name is Bonbon. He’s a chihuahua. Which I guess means that he cost a fortune.’

The dog licked my face and wagged his plume-like tail so vigorously that his whole body shook. I stroked his silky coat and let him nibble my fingers, forgetting for a moment that Camille was watching me.

‘And see,’ she said, ‘he likes you better than me already.’

I looked up at her. ‘You want me to take him for walks?’

‘God, yes,’ she replied, stroking her chin and studying me from head to foot. ‘I’m no good with animals.’

I cradled Bonbon in my arms, rolling him onto his back and tickling his tummy. It was then I realised that Bonbon was a girl, not a boy.

Aunt Augustine took half of the fifty
centimes
Camille Casal paid me to walk Bonbon for an hour. But I didn’t care
because of the chance it gave me to be out of the grim house. Each time I stepped out the door and Bonbon pranced ahead of me, leading me through the crooked streets and out on to the quays, I felt that I was living again. We listened to restaurant hawkers plying their dishes and the gypsies playing violins. Bonbon and I strolled along Marseilles’ main boulevard, the Canebière, stopping to sniff the roses bursting from buckets in the doorway of a florist or to ‘window lick’ outside the
chocolaterie
, where we watched pralines being packed into boxes tied with gold bows. Whether we passed the men drinking
apéritifs
in the sidewalk cafés or the women in their hats and pearls, sipping their
cafés crèmes
, they all lifted their eyebrows to see a girl in a faded dress walking a dog with a diamanté collar.

One afternoon when Bonbon and I returned home, the prostitutes from the house next door were standing on their doorstep, waiting for the evening trade. They shrieked when they saw me with Bonbon.

‘What’s that you’ve got on the end of your string? A rat?’ the one closest to us laughed.

Although Aunt Augustine had told me not to speak to our neighbours, I couldn’t help smiling at the women. I picked up Bonbon and held her out to them. They scratched her under the chin and stroked her fur. ‘She’s a cute one. Look at those ears—bigger than she is,’ they said.

It was only close up that I realised the women were much older than they appeared at a distance. Their wrinkles and blotched skin showed through the layers of powder and rouge, and the rose water scent that wafted from their hair and clothes could not hide the musty smell of their skin. Although the women were smiling and laughing, they made me sad. When I looked into their eyes, I saw broken dreams and thwarted chances.

As soon as Bonbon reached the doorstep of Aunt Augustine’s house her tail drooped, and I was sure that if I’d had a tail it would have been drooping too. I bent down and scratched the ruff around her neck and tickled her ears.

‘I’ll have her as a boarder,’ I heard Aunt Augustine say as I stepped into the front room, ‘but I won’t have such a woman wandering about the house or bringing home men.’

I closed the door as quietly as I could. Bonbon’s claws scratched on the floorboards and she plunked herself down, staring at me with her intelligent eyes. I swept her up and tucked her into my pocket, then crept towards the kitchen to hear more of what Aunt Augustine was saying. There was a tilted mirror on the picture rail in the dining room and reflected in it was my aunt sitting at the kitchen table with her feet in a bucket. Ghislaine was cleaning some mussels, tossing the empty shells into a basket. Aunt Augustine lowered her voice and I had to strain my ears to hear her.

‘They wear practically nothing.
Nothing!
’ she hissed. ‘The women stick a piece of material over themselves with spirit gum and the men put padding…well…you know where.’

I clamped my hand over my mouth to suppress a giggle. How did Aunt Augustine know all this?

Ghislaine waited until she had shelled her last mussel before she answered. ‘I don’t think Simone will be corrupted just by walking Camille’s dog.’

Although Marseilles had frightened me at first, I came to like the city on my walks with Bonbon. The Vieux Port was picturesque in the long Provençal twilight. At that time of day there was none of the harried toing and froing that there was at dawn when the fish market opened. The evening walkers promenaded at their leisure. The barkers were out in force, luring people into their restaurants from which the smells of garlic and fish stew wafted in spicy currents. Gypsies gathered on the quays, selling woven baskets and tinware or enticing passers-by to have their palms read and fortunes told. Ghislaine had told me they were arriving from all over Europe for the annual festival
of Les Saintes Maries de la Mer and would spend most of the summer in southern France. The air was alive with violin music and singing. The yellow and red skirts the dancers wore made me think of the wildflowers that dotted the hillsides in Pays de Sault, and reminded me that now I had a bit of money I could reply to Aunt Yvette’s letter and tell her and my mother how I was keeping.

I passed one stall with what I thought were plucked birds strung up between two posts. The meat smelt gamy and I asked the seller what it was. He scratched his head and tried to draw the creature in the air with his finger before he remembered the French term:
le hérisson
. Hedgehog. I recoiled and scurried away. The bodies resembled Bonbon too much for my liking.

A seagull squawked overhead. I followed its path through the sky and watched it land on the dock. At the same time I noticed Camille standing at a fruit wagon on the corner of Rue Breteuil. She held a bunch of irises wrapped in newspaper in one arm, and pointed out some grapes to the grocer with the other. Her blondeness stood out amongst all the dark faces like a streetlamp in a dim alley. She was wearing her green dress with an Indian shawl draped over her shoulders and her hair swept back from her face with a ribbon. After collecting her purchase, she glanced in my direction. But if she saw me, she gave no indication of it and turned in the direction of the Canebière.

She must be on her way to the music hall, I thought. Bonbon wriggled in my arms and I set her down on the ground. She scampered her way through the tangle of legs, running towards Camille and tugging me after her. It was a strange thing for Bonbon to do, for she was much more attached to me than to her mistress. I wondered if she understood how much Camille stimulated my curiosity and was giving me a chance to talk to her away from the house.

The Canebière was crowded at the best of times but it was especially so that night because of the gypsies. For once I was thankful for my unfeminine height because I
could just make out Camille’s blonde head bobbing among the sea of others in front of us. She turned into an avenue shaded by plane trees; Bonbon and I followed behind. The street was crowded with well-turned-out women walking arm in arm with their sophisticated companions. Food vendors lined up their carts against the gutters and ripe melons and peaches scented the air. Bonbon pranced on, ignoring the bejewelled poodles and fox terriers that wagged their tails and sent her longing glances. Had she travelled this way before? I wondered. Was she remembering her way home?

It seemed devious to be following Camille but I couldn’t get close enough to her to call out. At each corner I hoped that she would turn around and see me, but she never did. She marched on, fixed on her destination. After a while, she turned into a narrow street whose houses blocked the last rays of sun. The cobblestones reeked of alcohol and vomit. The façades of the houses—those that weren’t covered with ivy—were eyesores of peeling paint. Prostitutes, much scrawnier than those who lived next door to us, peered from the doorways, beckoning to the groups of sailors loitering on the streets. I picked up Bonbon and glanced over my shoulder, wary of going any further into the side streets but too scared to turn back either.

Camille disappeared around a corner and I broke into a run to keep up with her. I found myself in a square with a fountain in the centre. At the end of it was an enormous stone building with four columns and a carved panel of dancing nymphs on either side of its double doors.
Le Chat Espiègle,
the sign above it read. The building was grand in size but dilapidated in detail. The columns were cracked and stained and the reliefs, probably once white, were black with grime. I reached the fountain in time to see Camille enter an alley at the side of the building. I bolted across the square in pursuit, and was about to call out to her when she ran up some stairs and disappeared through a door. I hesitated a moment, wondering if I should follow
her. I climbed the steps and turned the latch, but the door was locked. The faint strains of piano chords and a
tappety-tap
sound drifted out through an open window on the second floor. Bonbon pricked up her ears and I stopped to listen.

Footsteps echoed on the cobblestones and I jumped down the stairs and hid behind some crates of rubbish. I was just in time to miss being seen by a procession of women coming towards us. They were young and slender with short hair and pretty faces. I eased myself further back into the scrunched newspapers and empty bottles. The air smelt of gin and fish. Bonbon lowered her ears and pressed her head close to my chest.

A redheaded girl strode up the stairs and rapped on the door. The others slouched on the railing or sat down. They wore fashionable dresses, cut just below the knee, but even from where I crouched I could see that the lace was stiff and the dull beads were cheap.

A girl with peroxide-blonde hair took a comb out of her bag and ran it through her fringe. ‘I’m hungry,’ she moaned, bending forward and wrapping one hand around her stomach.