Bella... A French Life (11 page)

“For a few days, in fact.”

I ask him what he would like to drink - tea or coffee.

“A cup of tea would be just the thing. Thank you, Bella.”

I tell him I am going to have a cup of tea too, that I always start the day with a cup of tea.

“At the hospital the nurses always had a cup of tea waiting for the doctors, but as soon as we’d finished our first round of the wards, it was coffee, coffee, coffee. The strongest black coffee possible.”

Oh God, have I said too much?

Chacun garde du fond du coeur un souvenir que ne veut pas mourir
as Guy de Maupassant said, and now, because of what I have said, I might have to tell Colin of the souvenir at the bottom of my heart which also does not want to die: the death of the Brissard twin. Fortunately, he seems not to have heard what I have said.

“When do you think the rain will stop?” he asks, shooting a glance out the window.

“I would not want to guess, but the weather bureau is usually quite accurate. Hopefully the wind will drop.”

My mother was buried on a day when the weather was like this. Marius and Marion and the children came from Paris. I thought a funeral was no place for a child, but Marius said children must know what death was and Marion seconded that. Many villagers attended the funeral and when it was over and the gravediggers started to fill the grave where she lay with my father, the only man she ever loved, the villagers offered us - Marius, Marion and me - their condolences. Two of my uncles - her brothers - were still alive and one of them had been overcome with coughing spasms in the church which I interpreted a result of trying to suppress sobs. I thought, “Good! Choke to death, you bastard!” Then, I remembered the Brissard twin having choked to death because I had not realised he had phlegm lodged in his windpipe, and I collapsed sobbing in a heap on the floor of the church.

Colin is saying something about Avranches and I have to ask him to repeat what he has said.

“If I could stay until the storm has passed. That was, what I was saying. That it would really be so kind of you to allow me to stay.”

“It is such a pity you should see Normandy in this kind of weather.”

I am trying to dodge the issue.

“If I could stay ...?”

“Let’s see what the weather will do.”

The grandfather clock begins to chime.
I know that my redeemer liveth ...
 

Colin lifts up a hand for me not to speak; he is listening to the chiming.

“Beautiful!”

I nod my agreement.

“I did not hear that during the night.”

“I silence the clock during the night.”

“That was Handel.”

“Yes. Handel. The clock … my father brought the clock from Germany. It stood in his childhood home. It had miraculously survived the bombing of Berlin in World War Two when nothing else in the house had.”

“My mother had a small watercolour which hung in her childhood home. The picture had survived several pogroms when just about everything else in the house was smashed or burnt. Tsarist pogroms. My mother was Russian. Polish Russian from the Polish-Russian Union, in fact.”

“So like me, you are not all of one thing?” I ask after a short but heavy silence.

“Quite. My brother - I have just one ... the one sibling - and I did not even know our mother was not ... born in England. I mean she was so
very
English - to us in any case. We discovered this only on her death in 1970 when a brother of hers appeared from nowhere and enlightened us. My brother is a businessman. Manufactures garden gnomes. Of all things - garden gnomes.”

“That’s interesting.”

He says nothing and the look of distress on his face warns me that, as I do, he also has a
raw nerve.
 

“I’ve always disliked garden gnomes. When I was a child they scared me because I thought they were real and they were so very peculiar looking,” I quickly say to change the subject.

“I also dislike garden gnomes, but, alas, for another reason.”

He searches for my eyes with his.

I turn from his gaze and hastily I pop three frozen croissants into the oven, and I plug in the kettle to reheat it.

He points at the three croissants browning behind the oven’s glass window.

“Three? I do not think I could manage three.”

“One is for me. I have a croissant each morning. What will you have now, more tea or some coffee.”

He asks for a cup of coffee.

“It is so peaceful here,” he muses. He walks over to the Peace Lily and brushes a finger over the soil. “What a beautiful flower. I can see you have green thumbs.”

“The garden is Fred’s job. Fred is Le Presbytère’s gardener - the handyman without whom I would not be able to get by.”

“Was that Fred who came to work on the boiler yesterday?”

“No, that was Samy. He’s a plumber down in the village.”

“I am not good with remembering the names of flowers, so what is this one here?”

“It’s a Peace Lily.”

“Appropriate.”

He starts to walk over to where I am standing in front of the stove. He is wearing his motorcycle leather again. He has shaved but he has missed a spot on his left cheek, the cheek nearest to me. An aroma of mint clings to him. Eau de toilet, or aftershave, or toothpaste? Jean-Louis used Hermes’s
Equipage Cologne,
the masculine scent of leather, tobacco and a forest on a frosty morning always clinging to his skin, his hair and his clothes. I adored the smell of him; I had even stupidly bought a flacon of it to spray the bed on those nights which he did not spend with me.

Suddenly, my head begins to spin and I have to lean against the stove to steady myself.
I must stop remembering.
Or is it Colin’s closeness that has upset me? Is unnerving me?

“Sit down,” I tell him, quickly and abruptly. “The croissants are warm now.”

He does not sit down but stays beside me.

“Bella, would you allow me to stay? Until the weather has cleared - of course?”

One will say he is an English lord.

“Yes,” I say. “You can stay till the wind dies down.”

Those words slipped out.

-0-

When Geneva was over and Jean-Louis and I were driving into Paris from the Porte d’Italie on the southern border of the capital, he asked whether I would allow him to stay at my apartment for the night.

“I’ll go straight to the office from there tomorrow morning,” he explained, a hand briefly leaving the steering wheel to touch my face.

I had prepared for such an eventuality and had hurriedly tidied up before I set off for Gare de Lyon to catch the Geneva express.

On that first visit to my apartment, he stood for a long time in front of the photo of my father and mother on the mantelpiece in the sitting room.

“Your father was a handsome man. And look how beautiful your mother is,” he said.

The photo was taken about four years after my birth. I can remember the morning the photographer came to Le Presbytère. I watched him set up his big, black, box-shaped camera in the drawing room. He moved the settee, huffing as he pulled and pushed it to stand between the two bay windows, and explained to us about angles and light and aperture speed, all of which I, and I’m sure my parents too, understood not a word. He told my parents how they were to sit. “Not to cross the legs,” he told my mother, tapping her lightly on her stockinged knee, and he asked my father to fold his arms in front of him,
like great men have the habit of doing for official portraits
. I watched, wide-eyed with interest and hoping he would also be taking my picture. He crawled underneath a piece of black cloth which was hanging over the camera and he pulled a string which set off a very bright flash of blue light. He did not take my picture; my parents had, as they explained to a tearful me, hired him only to take one photo - theirs.

“You should come to Normandy. Come to see my mother. She’s still pretty,” I told Jean-Louis.

The words had hardly been spoken and he had his engagement diary out of his briefcase and checking whether he would be free the following weekend.

“Superb!” he said, his face smiling. “I have nothing scheduled. I can fit in Normandy.”

Fit in Normandy!

-0-

Chapter Fifteen

This morning the sky is the molten orange of an amber stone hundreds of years old.

I stand at my bedroom window, and I know the sun will rise today. The wind has already calmed to a soft caress, the leaves hardly moving, and the sea in the distance is an immobile grey cloth.

I dress quickly; I want to make Colin’s breakfast because he would be eager to set off, to go and find a guest house. In the high season, a guest house keeper, whose place is fully booked, will refer a guest to another guest house or hotel, but I will not be able to recommend another Sainte-Marie-sur-Brecque guest house to Colin this morning because I know none will accept a guest who wants to stay for several months.

He is again already in the kitchen. He is sitting at the work table, looking towards the window, seemingly in deep thought, but a paperback lies open in front of him. I am wearing soft shoes so he has not heard me walk in and for a moment I stand still and silent and I watch him. His face, in profile, is extremely masculine - firm jaw, raised cheekbones, his forehead wide - and I had thought he was ordinary looking. Had I not also thought Jean-Louis was ordinary looking when I first set eyes on him? And look how I fell for him!

“Morning!” I greet Colin.

I tried to sound casual.

“Oh, good morning. I did not hear you walk in.”

“I’m sorry. Did I give you a fright?”

He had looked startled for a moment.

“No, it’s just that - that I thought you were - but no, you did not give me a fright. How did you sleep? Well, I hope?”

“How did
you
sleep? Strange room. Strange bed. I never sleep on a first night in a strange room.”

“I slept well, thank you. I did not wake up at all during the night. Went off the moment my head hit the pillow.”

He is not in his motorcycle leather, but in jeans and a short-sleeved white T-shirt and my heart misses a beat.

Hell, I am being stupid!

“You would have seen the weather has cleared,” I rapidly say, hoping to steady my unsteady heartbeat.

“Bella, I would like not to have to leave today.”

He is looking me straight in the eye.  I think he is holding his breath awaiting my reply. My agreement.

“If you would like to spend another night here, it will not be a problem.”

“No, not just this night. I would like you to reconsider me staying here longer. Like until Christmas - just before Christmas as I take it that you would be joining your family for Christmas, or some of them would probably be coming here.”

“As yet I’ve no plans for Christmas, but let me heat the kettle and get your breakfast.”

“Oh Bella, please … do not go to any trouble. I do not eat in the mornings.”

I sigh with relief: I thought he was going to beg me to stay.

“A cup of tea and a croissant … is what it will be. Like yesterday morning.”

“And it will be terrific. Thank you, Bella.”

-0-

I will wait until I have some strong coffee in me before I decide about having Colin Lerwick stay. I wonder what the legalities are about having a guest when the guest house is officially closed - registered as such at our town hall and at the regional tourist office. I would certainly have to telephone the
gendarmerie
and let Captain Contepomi know that he would have to come check my guest registry next Friday and the Friday after that and each Friday until Christmas. Or until Colin Lerwick leaves.

But have I decided to allow this man to stay?

My father always said decisions were made for us. I said this to Jean-Louis once. “Rubbish!” he snapped. “That is saying that you are not - that I am not - that we are not masters of our life. If I bugger up it is because of a decision I’ve made and not one which has been made for me by some invisible being, some spirit - or spook more likely.”

So what is my decision?

Le Presbytère has ten rooms and one winter I calculated that if I walk through each of them, walk slowly, perhaps pause at a window or in front of a favourite ornament on a shelf or a favourite picture on a wall, I will get rid of between thirty and forty-five minutes of each lonely day. Oh Jesus, do I want another winter of walking through these ten silent rooms pleased that I am killing time?

So come on Bella Wolff, there is no spook to make the decision for you; make it yourself!

Colin is spreading Gertrude’s strawberry jam - jam which won her the first prize of a video recorder at Avranche’s food fair last summer - over one of his heated croissants.

“It’s nice, is it not - the jam?” I ask.

“Delicious. I’m going to eat all of it - the jam - I’m afraid.”

He spreads yet another spoonful of it over his second heated croissant.

“You would not be able to eat it all, not even in two months here, because I have ten large jars of the stuff. Le Presbytère had a bumper strawberry crop this year - thanks to Fred’s green thumbs - and Gertrude was cooking jam almost every day. The entire house had a sweet sticky smell and all the wasps of Normandy came to visit.”

“Two months?” His cup is halfway to his lips. “Do I take it that you are allowing me to stay?”

Am I?

“I would have to let you have a nicer room - a bigger room. You would have to sign the register and ...”

“Pay in advance?”

There is teasing laughter in his voice.

“Pay in advance? Of course not! Don’t be silly!”

Do not be silly
. I said this to him yet I am the silly one. The stupid one. I have a rule - I close in winter - and now I have taken a guest, and this guest is a man I am finding very attractive. Yet, I do not want him to go. Not just yet.

Silly. Silly. Stupid. Stupid.

I have not thought it over. I have not balanced what would not be good about it against what would be.