Bella... A French Life (25 page)

“The Acts of the Apostles, Chapter 10, Verse 34,” he said. “I will read if any of you want to follow the reading in … huh … your own Bible.”

No one held a Bible.

He began to read
. As Peter said to the people, ‘In truth, I see that God shows no partiality. Rather, in every nation whoever fears him and acts uprightly is acceptable to him. You know the word that he sent to the Israelites as he proclaimed peace through Jesus Christ, who is Lord of all. He commissioned us to preach to the people and testify that he is the one appointed by God as judge of the living and the dead. To him all the prophets bear witness, that everyone who believes in him will receive forgiveness of sins through his name.
 

A honey bee buzzed around his head and Marius stepped forward as if he wanted to chase it, but quickly the bee flew off: he might have decided he did not yet want to die so was not going to sting the priest or any one of us.

The bee’s interference had however resulted in Father Pierre closing his Bible and holding a hand out to my mother. She went to stand beside him.

“So, we are all children of God, and if we remember what Peter had said, God shows no partiality. God has no favourites. God does not say, ‘Come, you who are French, come let me embrace you’, just as God does not say, ‘Away with you who are not French’,” he said.

While saying that he had looked at my mother, but next he swept his eyes over us and finally rested them on one of my uncles, the oldest of my mother’s siblings and considered the head of the Desmarais clan.

“Child of God,” he said, speaking into that uncle’s face. “God is our judge. He is judge of the living and of the dead. We, His children, will receive His forgiveness. And today, here, we are burying one of God’s children: Rodolph Wolff. We are burying one of us. We are burying him as one of us. We are all the same before our God.”

After a short pause, his eyes closed as if in a silent prayer which he did not wish to share with us, he opened his eyes and swept them over us - right, left, and right again - and, his face up to the sky and his eyes yet again closed, he began to pray out loud.

“O God, thou who hast commanded us to love our neighbour, we now ask you to receive, through Your mercy the soul of this man for it to rest in peace in the company of Christ who died and now lives. Unite us, the living, together as a family in Christ, to sing Your praise forever and ever.  Amen.”

His prayer said, with a brief movement of his hands, he motioned to the pallbearers they could lower the coffin into the gravediggers’ new hole. The coffin in the hole, he took my mother by the hand and led her to the grave. Beside the grave stood a bucket filled with red roses. Using his hands, he motioned to my mother that she could take a rose to drop on her husband’s coffin.

For the next few minutes, in silence, each of us - Marius, Marion and I, and the mourners - dropped a rose onto the coffin. Marion also dropped a white handkerchief onto the coffin. Whether it was deliberate or an accident I did not know, but by the stern look Marius shot in her direction, I think it was not deliberate. As the hanky fluttered down to the coffin, I saw it was stained with my sister-in-laws bright red lipstick.

Back at Le Presbytère, Gertrude having been excused from attending the burial, was making a fuss over the lamb stew sizzling on two large three-legged pots set out in the back garden. One of Frascot’s waiters, on loan to the guest house for the day, was filling glasses with champagne.

That was life, I thought: my father was dead and we were drinking to his happiness. Wherever he was.

Plates of stew being handed out, I slipped away to the mount.

-0-

Chapter Twenty-Seven

It is a week ago that I went to sit on ‘my’ rock on the mount.

Colin is not back yet from Paris, but should be here before nightfall. He left a message on Le Presbytère’s answerphone.
Bella, Bonjour. This is Colin. Just calling to say I will be staying in Paris a little longer and won’t be back with you until Friday week. Bye for now. Oh, the weather’s lousy here. See you!
 

Paris in mid-November. The Christmas decorations will be going up or may be hanging already. Avenue des Champs-Élysées will be all tinsel and light, and in the windows of
Galaries Lafayette
glittering pink fairies will descend from the ceiling to snow-covered forests where animated bears and reindeers will be waiting with transparent coaches to take them … take them where? To some magic world perhaps. And over loudspeakers will come the voice of the late Tino Rossi:
Petit papa noël, quand tu descendra du ciel…
 

It has been just like old times at Le Presbytère this past week. By old times I do not mean my childhood when my parents were here, but the years since my mother’s illness and death and I began to close the guest house for winter.

I have been reading.

I phoned Marius and Marion in the evenings.

I watched American sitcoms on television.

Finally, I got down to dusting the library room, and I went driving around. I drove away from the mount to places with names sounding strange to the ears of our foreign guests. Conches-en-Ouche. Ferté-Fresnel. Crévecoeur-en-Auge.  

Fred came round. He thought, Colin being English, he would be a chess player, and they could play a game. Yes, Fred is good at chess. He frowned when he heard Colin has gone to Paris for the week.

“Paris? Why do people go to Paris, Miss, I ask you?”

“Museums, Fred.”

“Why did
he
go to Paris, Miss?”

“Fred, you surely know here at Le Presbytère we do not question our guests,” I told him.

“Miss, I thought …”

He did not finish the sentence and I thought,
Fred don’t think
.

Yesterday, Thursday, I drove down to the village. I contemplated asking Gertrude if she could come up to Le Presbytère to cook Colin something nice on Saturday evening, but as I turned into her street I changed my mind and made a U-turn. He will eat whatever I will concoct with what I have in the freezer. I did however drive on to the bakery and asked Amandine for some dry cookies.

“Why not apple tart, Miss?”

“I need something that will keep. We had your great
amandine
last time so I would like something else this time.”

“Ahh! This time? I say. I say. Sounds promising.”

Amandine grinned from ear to ear and just then Olivier stepped from the back. He too was grinning from ear to ear.

“What do you suggest?” I quickly asked Amandine.

“Let me see. Something that will keep…”

“
Palmiers
,” said Olivier. “I’ve just taken some from the oven.
Palmiers
and … why not
madeleines
?”

“Indeed,” I said, “why not
madeleines
?”

“Would you need jam?” Amandine asked.

I told her I still have a lot of Gertrude’s strawberry jam, but asked what she could suggest.

“Apricot jam,” she said. “It’s homemade too.”

She put half a dozen large glass pots, which had once held mustard or gherkins, on the counter. She unscrewed the top of one, invited me to stick a finger into the deep orange jam to taste it. I duly did. Next, she stuck a spoon into the jam and offered me the halved apricot she had retrieved.

“Well, Miss?” she wanted to know.

‘Very sweet’ I said to myself, and ‘smooth and velvety’ I said to Amandine and Olivier, he standing beside her, the anticipation on his face telling me he had made the jam.

“Miss, forget about carrots, it’s apricots that will keep you from going blind,” said he.

What could I do after such advice?

I bought four pots of the jam.

-0-

Back at Le Presbytère the red light on the answerphone is flickering.

Bonjour, Bella. It’s Colin here
, the by now familiar voice said.

Just to confirm, I will be back tomorrow at the end of the day. Will probably be dark already. By the way, I met someone who knows you. A lawyer. Charming man. So too his wife. Met them at a party. Will tell you all about it tomorrow. Bye for now.

I know just one Paris lawyer and just one Paris lawyer knows me.

Oh my God, what did Jean-Louis tell Colin about me?

-0-

Will we ever understand life’s reasoning?

I sit, in my bedroom, a guest house keeper when I should be in Paris practising as a doctor. From the time when I was still no higher than three apples, as is said here, I wanted to be a doctor. This is to say but for the short period when I wanted to become a monk in order to ring church bells. Passing my school-leaving
baccalauriat
examination was not hard; “She’s a bright girl our Bella,” my father told guests. Neither were my medical studies hard. Not all that hard.

Full of dreams was my head when after having done my internship at Chartreux Hospital they offered me the permanent position as head of their maternity clinic. I received a salary which allowed me to live comfortably, to buy whichever pair of shoes or handbag which caught my fancy and not to have to think whether I could afford it when I invited colleagues for dinner at an expensive restaurant. And here I am, this evening, waiting for La Presbytère’s winter guest to return, he who had spent the week in Paris having done there probably all the magical things I had once done there. I would, if I could, put the clock back and back and back to when I was not a guest house keeper but a young girl with dreams.

I am sitting at the window, yes, quite comfortably, looking into the distance, to the mount at the end of this day, smothered in a grey mist.

Handel’s
I know that my redeemer liveth
drifts from downstairs
.
 

He lives to silence all my fears ... He lives to wipe away my tears ... He lives to calm my troubled heart ... He lives all blessings to impart ...

The chiming stops and four short strikes follow. It is a quarter past something. I turn to look at the alarm clock on the bedside table. It is a quarter past seven. The mount’s last few lights begin to go dark, one after the other.

Colin may like a
palmier
and a
madeleine
with the homemade apricot jam when he comes in. A
palmier
is good with ice cream and I have some in the freezer.

-0-

I hear the growling of a motorcycle’s engine.

I gave Colin a key to the front door. He will be able to let himself in. I hear the click of the front door opening and another click: he is inside now. A clattering noise drifts from downstairs followed by clinking. Colin has walked into the desk in the small front room and has knocked the tin with the pens and pencils off the desk. His footsteps come up the stairs.

“Bella?”

“Colin!”

I step out into the corridor.

“I hope I did not wake you,” he says. “I collided with the desk.”

“I should have left some of the lights on. Did you hurt yourself?”

“Goodness, no, but I did break the inkpot. Fortunately for me it was empty. I hope it was not valuable.”

“It belonged to Goethe …”

“Goethe?”

“Goethe.”

“Oh no! You are going to tell me to leave. It was must have been … more than valuable. Priceless.”

He walks up to me, his arms stretched out as if he wants to put them around me. Comfort me for the loss of Goethe’s inkpot?

I laugh.

“I’m joking, Colin. It was just an inkpot. Any old inkpot.”

He is in his biker’s black leather and his cheeks are red: it must have been cold on the bike riding from Avranches.

“Hello, Bella,” he says. “You gave me a real fright there.”

We shake hands. His are cold despite that he had worn his bikers’ gloves: they now lie on top of his suitcase. Also on top of the suitcase is a wicker basket. It is wrapped in cellophane which is tied with a red ribbon.

“Would you like a cup of tea?” I ask him.

“Only if it is not going to give you work.”

“It won’t. I would like a cup of tea myself.”

“Thank you. A cuppa will be wonderful. The tea in Paris is dreadful.”

“There is a reason for that. Who needs tea when one has all that wine?”

I tell him I will see him in the kitchen.

He says he will not be a minute.

“Just want to have a quick wash down.”

-0-

Chapter Twenty-Eight

I set the tea things out in the drawing room, on a coffee table which stands between the room’s two bay windows. It is cool in the room. In the days when we received guests in winter the fireplace was always lit, Fred having loaded it each morning with logs, but with me alone here in the winter, its role has become merely decorative, its red bricks cold to the touch.

I sit down on an armchair facing the coffee table.

Colin walks in. He has changed into jeans and a black polo-necked sweater. His hair is wet: he would have had a quick shower. He is holding the cellophane-wrapped basket with both hands.

“Bella, I could not resist buying you a small gift. I hope you will like it.”

Hesitatingly, he holds the basket out towards me.

I get up and take the basket from him, the paper crinkling under our hands.

“How wonderful. Thank you, Colin. How kind of you.”

My mother drilled it into Marius and me never to say ‘you should not have’ when given a gift.

“Shall I help you with the wrapping?” asks Colin.

“Please do. Yes. Thank you.”

I put the basket down on another coffee table: the basket will hold fruit or chocolates or perhaps a bottle of champagne.

“Let me,” says Colin.

Our hands touch. Quickly, each draws back.

The pretty red bow is a ready-tied one, an elastic band holding it in place.

“Like a bow tie,” he says. “Not that I wear them. My brother does.”

I take the bow from him and so too the ribbon. All along the ribbon is the name
Fauchon
.