Bella... A French Life (6 page)

“No question of it, but I can see you are going to be stubbornly independent.”

He pulled his gold credit card from his wallet.

Back on the street he asked whether I would like something else to drink.

“I will be totally dependent and allow you to decide,” I replied, demurely.

“Ok. Close your eyes and take my hand.”

His wedding band on the ring finger of his left hand was cold against my skin.

“I can’t see a thing, Jean-Louis,” I told him.

He moved my hand to his arm.

“People are looking at us with such pity. The beautiful young woman and her guide dog.”

I giggled.

“Now, you are confusing them.”

He led me, stumbling beside him on my sling-backs, to a small, dark bar on the river bank beside Notre Dame Cathedral. A black musician in a white silk suit and red tie had just finished at an upright piano and was acknowledging the patrons’ applause.

“That’s Harry. He’s from New Orleans.”

“I can see you retraced an old route tonight.”

Jean-Louis pondered for a moment.

“But … I’ve found you at long last.”

My apartment was close to where we were.

“I’m walking home, but how will you get home, Jean-Louis?” I asked.

“Métro.”

“I’ll walk with you to the station.”

Some hippies, the young men in fraying multi-coloured Bermuda shorts and dreadlocks, and the young girls, their unwashed hair in side ponytails, their lips purple and their skirts flowing to their bare feet, were chanting
Hare Krishsna Hare Krishna Krishna Krishna Hare Hare Hare Rama Hare Rama Rama Rama Hare Hare
outside Saint-Michel Métro Station.

“I’m sorry,” said Jean-Louis.

We were standing at the steps leading down to the station.

“For what?” I asked.

“For not being able to say I have never done this before.”

I folded my hands in mock prayer and began to chant to the hippies’
Hare Krishna.
 

Bless me, Holy Father, for I, Jean-Louis, Paris lawyer, have sinned, have sinned … sinned.

Jean-Louis planted a kiss of goodbye on my cheek, and I on his.

“
Ciao
!” he said.

“
Ciao
!” I said.

I walked back to my apartment.

-0-

Chapter Eight

The blustery autumn wind is turning the sea choppy and dark this morning.

I am standing in the drawing room again, at the bay window beneath the empty niche. I am already on my third bowl of black coffee.

A silver-grey motorcycle is on the road down below and it turns onto Le Presbytère’s driveway. Marius has a motorcycle. I wonder if it could be him paying me a surprise visit. But no, the motorcycle has a sidecar which Marius’s does not have; when Marion goes riding with him, which is not that often because she says the crash helmet which the law obliges her to wear, flattens her hundred and fifty-franc blow waves, she is a pillion passenger. The sidecar is loaded high and whatever is being transported up here to the house, is covered in a sheet of canvas; one end of the canvas is flapping in the wind. I fear the wind might rip it off altogether in which case it could become entangled in the motorcycle’s wheels.

Samy, the lad who looks after my wood-fired boiler which supplies the house not only with hot water but also central heating, is due this morning at eleven for his annual one-hundred-franc overhaul. It could be him on the motorcycle, but, he has a small white van, so why would he be on a motorcycle?

I go into the kitchen; I reheat the kettle for yet another bowl of coffee.

The soil under Fred’s Peace Lily is damp. Fred - dear Fred - will also be coming to Le Presbytère any day now to clean up in the garden. He will sweep up the fallen leaves and make a bonfire and he will ask whether I would like him to grill me a piece of meat seeing the fire’s burning so nicely. He will cover some of our delicate plants with sheets of plastic for the winter and bring the most delicate indoors until the warmer weather returns. And he will tell me how exhausted he is, and because I did not accept his offer of a grilled piece of meat, he will ask whether I am cooking anything nice for dinner.

”The usual fare of pizza or quiche, Fred.”

“No problem with that, Miss.”

He will stay for dinner.

Perhaps it is Fred on the motorcycle; maybe he has bought himself one. We all have dreams, do we not? His is to win the national
loto
one Saturday evening when he will buy himself a Harley Davidson. Until now the nearest he has got to a Harley Davidson was three correct numbers out of the
lotos’
five, and riding pillion down to Sainte-Marie-sur-Brecque on Marius’s bike.

Le Presbytère’s front door bell rings. Fred has a key and would not have to ring. Samy does not have a key and he will have to ring.

“The door is locked,” says the stranger at the door.

The man is dressed in black and beige leather; trousers tucked into high boots, shirt and waistcoat under a windbreaker. Black leather gloves. Marius dresses like this too when he is on his bike.

“I saw you on the road riding this way, sir. Are you lost?”

The biker is also wearing a black crash helmet and he takes it off and puts it down on the crazy paving of the porch at the front door. His hair is greying; once it was black.  The helmet rolls over with a clank. He picks it up and pushes it under his left arm. I see he is also wearing a thin leather tie. Marion who shops on Paris’ chic and expensive Faubourg-Saint-Honoré will describe him as nattily dressed.

“Did I come to the wrong place? I’m looking for Le Presbytère. My apologies if I am disturbing you.”

I nod.

“This is Le Presbytère, yes, and please do not apologise. I am the one who has to apologise because I must appear very unwelcoming making you stand here.”

He smiles.

He has a dimple in his chin. “How do you shave in there?” Audrey Hepburn had asked Cary Grant in
Charade.
Just a few nights ago one of our French television networks reran the 1960s-something film.

“Having established that this is Le Presbytère, may I come in?”

“I’m closed.”

His motorcycle with the sidecar is parked under a copse of trees. In the summer I set tables and chairs out there and the students I employ as seasonal restaurant staff serve my guests snacks and drinks. Some nights the students get their friends to come and make music and the guests dance.

“Closed, for the moment, or, closed for good?” asks the biker.

“For the winter. I will reopen at Easter.”

“They did not tell me down in the village - what’s its name?”

“Sainte-Marie-sur-Brecque.” 

“Sainte-Marie-sur-Brecque, yes. I spent the night in Avranches and I would not want to have to ride all the way back there right away.”

A gust of wind scatters leaves from the garden onto the tiled porch and somewhere in the house a door slams.

“You better come in,” I say.

“Are you sure?”

He looks at his dusty boots and at the spotless marble floor behind me. When I took over the guest house on my mother’s passing, I had the floorboards pulled up and replaced with marble flooring. I had this done for Honorine and Martine because they made such a palaver each Monday morning which was the day the wooden floor was always polished.

I nod.

“Don’t worry about the floor.”

“You’re kind.”

“Would you like a coffee or a cup of tea perhaps?”

“If it’s not too much trouble, a cup of tea would be great.”

“So come through to the kitchen.”

I watch him looking around, his lips stretched to an inquisitive smile.

Coming in from the front garden one is in a small windowless room. What my parents never told guests, and which I also never tell them, is this small windowless room used to be the nuns’ confessional. As the old man who sold the house to my parents told them, it was here, in this room, where, once a week, the nuns confessed their mortal sins to the priest who rode Jesus-style on the back of an ass, all the way from the village to the house. The only item of furniture in the room - the only item there is space for - is a French
secrétaire
desk on which lies the register guests are obliged by law to fill in and sign, and which tall, slim and dapper Captain Contepomi of the
gendarmerie
comes to check each Friday.  Like all such desks mine too has a secret drawer concealed under its concertina lid. My father kept his will in the secret drawer, and so too did my mother, and, as I discovered on her death when I went to retrieve her will, she hid other papers - newspaper clippings - in the secret drawer too. She had, despite her apparent lack of interest in what the papers were reporting about the Brissard twin’s death and my trial, bought the Paris tabloid,
Le Parisien libéré,
every day to read about it.

In the kitchen, the biker pays no attention to the pretty yellow tiles of the walls, the gleaming, spotlessly-clean steel of the stove and the oven, and to the large oak work table around which a dozen people can sit. It is the window which grabs his attention. Or rather, the courtyard behind it - my Frida Kahlo courtyard.

I point to one of the chairs around the work table.

“Do sit down.”

“My name is Colin Lerwick.”

Do I introduce myself too? Or is it enough that he should know this is the guest house, Le Presbytère?

“This is my guest house,” I say.

“Are you Mrs Wolff? They told me down in the village - what’s its name? - that the guest house belongs to Mrs Wolff.”

“It’s Sainte-Marie-sur-Brecque. The village. And I am Bella Wolff. And yes I am the owner of the guest house. Of the property. And there is no Mr. Wolff here because my father passed away a few years ago. My parents were the owners here before me.”

“You will make an excellent journalist, Miss Wolff.”

“How come?”

“You supplied enough information in one breath for an intro.”

“Intro?”

“The start of an article.”

“Are you a journalist?”

“Yes.”

The kettle whistles.

“Thank you, Miss Wolff,” he says pointing at the kettle, “a cuppa is just what I need.”

Jean-Louis said
thank you Miss Wolff
to me once.

-0-

Chapter Nine

Forgetting is not easy. It takes a long time and it is a painful process. There is of course the possibility that one is not able to forget, that the pain goes on and on.

After our Greek dinner Jean-Louis gave no sign of life for a week. Then, to my surprise, he called to my apartment after work.

“I’ve been in Geneva. A client. Have you ever been there?”

“No.”

I was truthful.

“It’s a beautiful city. Small for a city, but to me that is its charm.”

“It sounds as if the Swiss tourist office is one of your clients.”

He laughed. It was a laugh which I could not interpret. I wondered what would Sigmund Freud’s analyses have been? Would he have called the laugh a snicker or a chuckle or a cackle? Would he have said the laugh had been spontaneous, or that it manifested superiority because the one who laughed had been to Geneva and the listener not? Or would Freud have said that Jean-Louis had laughed to hide or disguise his embarrassment for a silence of a week and for having offered me a frivolous excuse.

I gave up on Freud.

“Jean-Louis, why did you phone?”

“I am calling to invite you for dinner. This time I will let you choose the restaurant. I am thinking of tomorrow evening.”

“I am not a habitué of any Paris restaurant.”

“In that case,” he said, “will you allow me to choose the restaurant?”

“Yes.”

“And I take this as a ‘yes’ we can have dinner tomorrow evening?”

“Yes.”

He left a message on my answerphone that he has chosen a restaurant in Montmartre. He said he would meet me there at seven thirty unless I wanted him to pick me up at my apartment in which case I had to call him to give him the address. I did not call.

La Butte Montmartre on a warm night!

-0-

We were to meet on Place du Tertre.

I doubted the wisdom of meeting on the square because of its popularity with tourists, and I was right, there was something like a crowd mulling around.

I spotted Jean-Louis in conversation with two couples of the well-to-do tourist kind; the women had designer bags slung over their bony shoulders, and between the men’s fat index and middle fingers hung burning cigars.

Seeing Jean-Louis I felt a flush of excitement rising from my chest: I’d forgotten how good-looking he was. He wore jeans, white shirt and a navy blazer and pointed black shoes. Marion would have described him as ‘smart casual’. To me he was simply gorgeous.

He put both his hands on my shoulders and kissed me in greeting on both my cheeks.

“You look great, Bella.”

I wore beige slacks, a black blouse and a black velvet poncho which I’d bought when at a medical conference in Milan, and yes, I had tried to look good - good for him.

The tourist menus of the restaurants that lined the square offered things like an
assiette de charcuteries
or a
petit pâté chaud de lapin
which they suggested should be followed by a main course of
suprême de poulet
or a
rôti de veau forestière.
Starters, main course and dessert cost the meagre sum of twelve francs.

A waiter with a black bow tie which needed straightening directed Jean-Louis and me to one of Chez Eugène’s red-checkered tables set out in a marquee on the square.

“I am not a habitué - I want you to know,” said Jean-Louis.

Shards of coloured light from overhead decorations illuminated the façades of the three- or four-storey buildings which bordered the square. A bearded artist in a navy-blue artist’s blouse came to our table and offered to do a sketch of me for fifty francs. I said no and he approached another table where, having received the solicited agreement, he sat down on a folding stool which had been slung over his shoulder. He opened an easel which had been flung over his other shoulder.  His model sat in solemn pose while he produced with nimble strokes a perfect duplication of her heavy-jawed, double-chinned, middle-aged face with a stick of charcoal on a white sheet of paper.