Bella... A French Life (10 page)

“I am not going to charge you for tonight. As I said - the room is small ...”

“I will pay you for tonight.”

He is smiling mischievously like a schoolboy who is teasing one of the spotty, skinny or plump girls in his class.

It makes me smile too, but I am sure I am blushing because blushing has always been a problem for me. “Bella, you’re blonde, my girl, so you will be prone to blushing,” my mother used to say.

“I will get some sheets and blankets, Mr Lerwick, and if you would like to bring your stuff in.”

“Will do, but please, if we are going to spend the night together, also do not call me Mr Lerwick. Do please call me Colin.”

He is still smiling that mischievous smile, and I know I am blushing because my face is suddenly hot, hot like it used to become when I was a child and was coming down with a cold and my mother made me bend over the washbasin which was filled with steaming-hot water into which she had infused dried oregano and thyme, a towel over my head.

“I’ll get the sheets.”

I rush from the room.

“Ok. Thanks.”

He spoke to my disappearing back.

-0-

Chapter Thirteen

Gertrude is the only one who ever cooks here at Le Presbytère.

I wish she’s here this evening because I would like to give Colin Lerwick - Colin - something really tasty to eat; when he’s back in England he can tell his friends about the guest house and more holidaymakers will come my way.

Gertrude could have done one of her specialities:
saumon grillé au beurre d’anchois.
Grilled salmon with anchovy butter. I would have asked her to serve it with another of her specialities:
Pommes Anna
. Anna Potatoes, or as we call them here at the guest house, Gertrude Potatoes - thin slices of firm-fleshed potatoes, salted and peppered and doused with melted butter and baked in the oven until crispy and golden. And a cassis sorbet for dessert. She would have sent Fred to the Janviers’ farm for the blackcurrants and I would have had to tell her to have a light hand with the
crème de cassis
because we were having an English gentleman for dinner and not a French stevedore.

Colin is back in the drawing room. The empty niche has caught his attention. He is standing in front of it and looking closely at it.

He turns: he must have heard me behind him.

“If you do not mind me asking, why is there nothing in here, Miss Wolff?”

“Look closer.”

“May I call you Bella?”

“Of course.”

“Well, Bella, I need not look closer because I’ve already done so and I’ve seen there are tiny holes here which form a crucifix. Did you perhaps have a devout woodworm?”

“Nuns. Not woodworm.”

“Nuns?”

“Yes. Nuns. The house was once a nunnery. Or rather, it was part of a convent. Nuns came up here to rest and recuperate from illness. This was long before my parents’ acquired the property.”

“Interesting ...”

“Perhaps not, because I must warn you that the villagers believe the house is haunted.”

“Because of the nuns?”

“Because of the nuns, yes. The villagers’ story is that the pest had broken out here in the house among the nuns - I’m speaking of the 19
^th
century now - and in order not to alarm the locals the padre had the victims buried secretly in the garden at the back of the house.”

“And it’s those nuns wandering around here?”

“You’ve got it.”

“Do you believe in such things?”

“Ghosts?”

“Ghosts.”

“I am not a believer - period.”

“I thought doctors were. I would have thought the opposite should be true - who needs God when we have science and all that - but a doctor friend of mine has told me that doctors do believe in a higher power and that it guides their hand.”

I must change the subject - quickly!

“I can’t speak for doctors,” I say, not looking at him. “I am a guest house keeper. As such I must apologise to you for the supper I am going to give you this evening. Or rather, for not going to give you a proper supper this evening. I am afraid I have never been into cooking. And Gertrude - Gertrude Duc - our chef, is such an excellent one that there is no need for me to cook. Mind you, Gertrude is adamant she is not another Paul Bocuse and ... but I am rambling on and will shut up now.”

I look up and he is looking at me and his eyes are searching for mine.

“You are charming, Bella. Charming.”

I only notice now that he has changed into jeans and a black sweater, and he is in trainers. A thin gold chain with a small oval medal like those one can buy at the mount’s souvenir shops and which will very quickly turn black with rust in muggy weather, hangs around his neck.

“I am going to go into the kitchen now to see what I can give you to eat this evening,” I say, ignoring what he has said to me and embarrassed he has said it.

“Please, do not go to any trouble, Bella.”

“Even if I wish to do so I would not be able to because I do not have anything which will take more than ten minutes to prepare.”

“I thought women were good at living on their own,” he says.

He pouts his lips.

“That’s sexist.”

“So it is. I’m sorry. And oh, do excuse me my bad manners for saying something so personal. You do probably have someone living here with you. Someone who will be coming home from work.”

“No one will be coming home from work.”

He is fidgeting with the thin gold chain. I believe he is now the embarrassed one, and, because he has touched a raw nerve - my celibacy and my solitude - I think:
serves you right!
 

-0-

Bless Noah for having given the hen shelter in his Arc in order for her to have survived the Great Flood and therefore enabling her to lay eggs for us. I will make us
oeufs pochés au curry
this evening
.
The English like curry, or so my English guests always tell me.

I have watched Gertrude going about the dish’s preparation and cooking. She would always set out the ingredients on the work table: eggs, cup of wine vinegar, small bowl of béchamel sauce, curry powder and bowl of double cream -
crème fraiche.
And she always serves the dish on slices of fried bread which I will do too.

First, I add the vinegar to water and I bring the mixture to the boil. I hope I am not using too much vinegar. I break the eggs into the boiling vinegary mixture. The mixture starts to sizzle. I wait for the eggs to harden. First the whites do so and next, the yolks.

I hear Colin’s footsteps on the marble floor. I hold my breath. I do not want him to come into the kitchen. My movements are clumsy, I know, and will become even more so, should I know that he is watching me. Silly I am, but I want him to think that I am perfect. I give a sigh of relief because the footsteps start to fade; he has returned to the ‘Tony from Colorado’ room.

The béchamel sauce is frozen - Gertrude made quite a lot of it and she has left it in the freezer - and I heat a generous portion in a saucepan. I add the curry powder to it. Bubbles begin to form on the surface of the sauce and I pop one of the bubbles with my pinkie. I lick the finger clean. The sauce is just right; not too spicy. The saucepan still on the stove, but the gas burner turned low, I work the fresh cream into the sauce, turning and turning until there are no bubbles left.

Finally, I begin to fry the slices of
pain de mie
in olive oil. The eggs and sauce I keep warm on a hot plate.

“Colin!”

He will hear me, I know, because the ‘Tony from Colorado’ room is not far from the kitchen.

“Yes, Bella?”

“Supper is served!”

He walks in.

“You do not mind if I join you and if we eat in the kitchen?” I ask.

“I would have been insulted if you had not joined me and - I like your kitchen. I like your house. Very much.”

He sits down at the work table where I have laid two settings; brown plastic cloth and brown paper napkins, but here is a touch of the elegant and expensive too because I have set out my Limoges porcelain with the name Le Presbytère in gilded lettering on each item, and my silver cutlery engraved with the name.

It was here in the kitchen where my parents, Marius and I always ate our meals, the staff always having joined us. Those meals were silent occasions; my mother did not tolerate conversation at table. “Interferes with the digestion,” she stated. We could not even ask someone to pass the salt. Each had to look out for the other, which Honorine and Martine told me was what the nuns at their boarding school insisted upon too.
And in your godliness, brotherly kindness
. Did not one of the Apostles say so? Peter or John or James? Or Judas before he had made the opposite his legacy when he had denounced Jesus, as we had been taught at our Sunday morning Bible studies?

My truth is that when I am not alone at a table, I am no longer one for silence.

“Tell me, Colin, what do you think of French food?”

I have started eating.

“
Coq au vin
, to give you an example, is a bit rich for me. I love duck.
Canard à l’orange. Magret de canard
.”

“
Foie gras
?”

“Too rich for me too, I am afraid. And I do not like the force feeding bit.”

“Like Brigitte Bardot.”

“Good heavens who force fed her?”

His voice was full of childlike mischief and I giggle at his wisecrack and so does he.

He mops up the last of the egg on his plate with a square of fried bread and dips his head to pop it into his mouth, obviously not wanting the egg to drip onto his shirt. It is somehow a very homely gesture and my heart sings because he is a guest and I want my guests to feel at home.

“Coffee?” I offer.

Alone here, I drink instant coffee, but when Gertrude is here Le Presbytère’s
petit noir
is a delight. She grinds the coffee beans herself using a mortar and pestle, both of grey stone, the pestle standing on three short, tubby legs like a dwarfed headless monster. “This is how my gran did it on the farm,” she always tells the admiring guests, they, admiring not only the end product but also the jive of the muscles in her huge upper arms as she crushes and grinds the dark-brown Arabica beans with the cork-shaped mortar.

“Coffee will be wonderful,” Colin replies.

“Cognac with it?”

“Good heavens no! That will keep me awake all night.”

I have not yet made his bed and while he drinks his coffee, remaining sitting at the work table, I go to do so.

I look around the room while I make the bed.

A small open leather suitcase is on the luggage rack. A book lies on top of the clothes in the case. It is Italo Calvino’s
Difficult Loves
in Italian. A blue-grey portable Olivetti typewriter is on the dressing table in front of the bay window. A hundred-sheet pack of A4 white writing paper lies beside the typewriter. A
Hugo
pocket English-Russian/Russian-English dictionary and a copy of
The Statesman’s Year-Book 1984-85
lie on the bedside table.  I should not, but I pick up the year-book -
a quarter of a million facts on the world today
is written on the red cover. On the inside cover of the dictionary it says it will be
a most serviceable pocket reference-book.
 

He must know Italian and maybe Russian too. A polyglot. I suppose he knows French too: we have been speaking in English. My mother knew English and always spoke English to our guests from across the Channel and from the States, and my father always spoke in German to our German guests. “Guests feel so much more welcome when one welcomes them in their own language,” my mother always said, ignoring the fact the only foreign languages she knew were English and German, of the latter only a scattering she had learnt from my father.

Colin appears in the doorway.

“Could I help?”

“Thank you, but the bed’s made now.”

He says he will have an early night and I bid him a good one.

At the door, I turn round.

“The surname - Wolff. My father was German.”

“Your mother?”

“French.”

“My mother was foreign. Not English like my father.”

“That’s interesting!”

The storm has not abated and a clap of thunder right above the house drowns his reply but the look of discontent on his face tells me his mother, having been foreign and not English, is not something that pleases him.
Every family bears a cross,
my mother always said.

“The night is going to be cold,” I tell him.

I will have to set the central heating’s thermostat higher in the morning, I decide.

I go to silence the grandfather clock.

-0-

Chapter Fourteen

It is the hour of sunrise, always a time when the sky is tinged with yellow, and birdsong drifts from the garden, but this morning, the sky is murky and the birds are silent.

Through my bedroom window I can see Colin’s motorcycle. The sheet of canvas over the sidecar is drenched and water runs from the handlebars and seat.

Would I have to allow him to keep the ‘Tony from Colorado’ room for another night? In such a case I will have to let him sign the register because Captain Contepomi, nice man as he is, will not be beyond suspecting I am trying to cheat the Receiver of Revenue by letting rooms without having the guests sign in.

I am surprised to see Colin is already up and sitting at the work table when I walk into the kitchen. Fortunately, I have changed from my nightdress and I am wearing a pretty jersey and not the house one. I have put some make-up on.

“Bella! Good morning. I hope I am not intruding,” he greets me, jovially.

“You should have made yourself a cup of coffee or tea. And good morning to you too. Or rather, the morning does not look so good. The weather - I mean.”

He tells me he listened to the weather forecast on
France Info
on his transistor earlier, and rain is on the menu for the day.