Englishwoman in France (9 page)

N
ext morning I wake up as usual with Siri in my head and this gnawing, terrible space in my stomach. But then this strand of wonder creeps into my mind that Madame Patrice might be there at the café and I get out of bed.

I open my window to the explosive chirruping and dive-bombing of the swifts, as they greet the day outside the window of my eyrie. I straighten my couch and make straight piles of the notes on my table. I pick up my little clock and shake it. It's only eight o'clock. So I find myself getting up when the house is still full of people. I make my way down the wooden stairs. Philip, filling the dishwasher, smiles across at me. ‘You coming with us, Estella? We're going to Vias Plage. Good chance to try out the surfboards.'

‘We've got surfboards,' said Olga, eyeing me carefully through her red-rimmed glasses. ‘Auntie Starr. We've got surfboards and we're going to try them out. Did you know that? Then, guess what? We are going on bicycles.'

I take a breath. ‘Sorry, Olga. I've got this work to do, see? And after that I'll have to go along to the library and send it away to London on the Internet.' Look at me: I'm talking directly to a child for the first time in nearly four years. But I'm no less raw inside. Olga stares at me for a moment, frowning. Then she turns to her mother and asks if there will be ice cream.

Now I want them all to go, to get out of the house. I want to have my own breakfast and make my way back to the Plazza to see if I can catch Madame Patrice before she goes to do her marketing. The three of them joke about and talk too long, so I just go off on my own, leave them to it. Mae and Philip exchange glances but make no attempt to follow me.

I see Madame Patrice's bicycle outside the café tied to its bollard. But the café is packed. It's Thursday, market day, and even now the Plazza is a kaleidoscope of people. The sun is glittering on the bright awnings and glancing off brown limbs.

Madame Patrice is at the same table at the back. Before her on the round table are a small cup of coffee and a cognac. She gestures towards me, says something to Misou, who is sitting at her feet, then pushes back a wicker chair for me. ‘
Bonjour
Madame Starr!' she says cheerfully. ‘You are well, today?'

‘Very well, Madame.' I sit down and Misou puts up his snubby snout for a rub.
Very well!
That's the truth today, and that's the difference. Being
alive
is well, compared to being a block of wood. I have been a block of wood for such a long time.

Madame glances across at the waitress and she brings across a small coffee, the same as yesterday. ‘And how are you, Madame?' I say politely.

She beams. ‘I am well as always, my dear. And today is good, as I have a visitor for tea. I will buy small cakes and set my table with lace. So rare these day to have a visitor.' She sips the cognac and sets it down again beside her coffee cup. ‘And you, Madame Starr, what do you do today? Are you here for the market?' She waves a hand at the market stalls which now stretch right down from the library in the square called Jeu de Ballon, around the fountain here in the square, right along the
promenade
and round the old battlements, nearly down again to the river. The place is heaving with people, a swirl of colour in the bright sunshine.

I shake my head. ‘No. I'm on my way to the library.' I take my USB stick from my pocket and put it on the table. ‘I use the Internet to send some work to London.'

She frowns. ‘That small thing?'

‘Sometimes I bring my laptop, but today just this. It's like a letter going through space.'

She sighs and flutters a hand in the air. ‘Computers! One must just accept such things on faith these days.' Another sip of cognac. ‘And your work, my dear. What
is
that?'

I try to explain about the astrology and the newspapers.

She nods. ‘Ah, we have these things here also. They can make one smile,
absolument
. And you live by this? This star-telling?'

‘I do. It's convenient. It's truly interesting. I can work at it at home.'

‘But you have insight, true insight?' she says, her voice suddenly quite sharp.

I don't know quite what to say. ‘Well it's very technical, there are many programmes you can follow. But yes, I couldn't do it without some kind of insight. But more than that, you need imagination, language. That's what they pay me for.'

Beside us a woman wrapped in an orange
hijab
pushes a buggy with two babies in it up into the old town. I need to change the subject. ‘Do you live here in the centre, Madame?'

‘Just a little way from here, near the quayside
.
' She sees my questioning look. ‘The quayside this side of the river, where the fishermen have always unloaded their catch. Further along the harbour they used to ship fine goods from the east. But no longer.' She looks into the distance for a second.

‘And you live in a house down there near the harbour?'

Her laughter tinkles like a bell. ‘It is not a boat, Madame Starr, though sometimes I wish it were. I so loved the boat of Etienne that brought us here to this wonderful place. Where I live
was
a house. Now it is a house of many homes. Etienne and I once had an apartment there. Now I have a little studio by the front door, just for me and Misou. I have a passage where lives my
bicyclette
. It is convenient and cheap. The rue de la Poissonnerie is not expensive. Through many years there have been big floods down there and people will not buy the house, even these foreigners who are sweeping through the south these days.' She glances at me. ‘Sorry, Madame Starr, I do not put you among these people.

‘So the poor gather down on rue de la Poissonnerie. And I am one of them. Bad things are said of them but they are wonderful people. And they look after their children, you know. That is always a good sign.' She sounds tranquil, not bested by her circumstances.

She drinks off her cognac, little finger in the air, and moves on to her coffee. ‘And after the library, my dear? What then?'

I answer without thinking. ‘I will walk by the canal.'

‘Ah.
Bon!
It is good down there. The creatures in the water. The flowers. The birds. You will hear so many birds down there. Even nightingales. Those magical birds.'

‘Nightingales?'

‘I don't really know whether they are nightingales, but Etienne always insisted they were. They sing at night and in the early morning. Perhaps this gives them magic. They make songs when all around them is in the dusk.' She pauses. ‘Sometimes I think there are people who do that thing? Make songs in the dusk?'

‘Perhaps you are like that yourself, Madame?' I don't know where that came from.

The clumsy compliment seems to fluster her. She drinks up her coffee and pulls on her lace gloves. We talk a little more about her journey, sailing by boat to Agde all those decades ago with two companions, but then she seems eager to get away. ‘
Bonne journée
, Madame Starr. Enjoy the water. It will be a good day for you.'

Today it takes me longer to make my way to the canal without Philip at my elbow hurrying me on. I take my time, walking through the old town, across the wide bridge, down by the little
canalet
that leads to the circular lock and on to the main canal. Then I make my way along the canal path down under the railway bridge where the cars wait obediently while the double-decker TGV charges on like a dragon, swinging through on its way to Nîmes, or Carcassonne. Then on the
aucluse
, the circular lock where boats are also standing in line, waiting to go through the lock.

I remember Madame Patrice's tale of traversing lock after lock through France as – steered by herself and her two young men – their boat forged its way to the Mediterranean. Now her voice chirrups in my ears as I bring to mind our earlier conversation
.
‘And then, dear, we found Agde! We'd run out of cooking oil so I jumped on my bike and cycled up into town. And here it was, a city buried in time! Unchanged since hundreds of years. The land that time forgot. My dear, I was so very excited that I cried, there in the street.' That was when her voice became more English. ‘I raced back to tell the boys about it and Etienne raced back with me. He loved this city in a moment. Wanted to stay here forever and this was what he did, Madame Starr. Etienne was a scholar and here became a
professeur
. And I found our apartment on la rue de la Poissonnerie.' She laughed. ‘And now I am back there although the room I live in is much smaller than our apartment.'

‘And the other one? The one who came with you?' I sensed the three of them had been
very
together, very intimate on their journey. ‘The other boy?'

‘Auguste?' she frowned slightly. ‘Ah, Auguste, being such a modern boy, he did not love the city. He thought it old and called it a rubbish dump. He picked up a new crew in a café at la Place de la Marine, and sailed on to the Camargue. So then it was just Etienne and me.' She smiled. ‘
C'était très sympathique
.'

Sitting there with her yesterday I had seen very clearly the slight young girl with the fair pony tail and rope sandals, embarking on this life, so full of the past, present and the future.

But today I make my way alone along the narrow pathway beside the canal. For a second the water soaks up all the sound around me, but then the silence is broken by a muscular man with a strimmer, scything down the grasses on the banks where yesterday they had been nodding their feathery heads in the sun. I feel thankful that the man leaves the bamboo to survive, rustling in the slight breeze off the water, a screen against the
bru-umm
of traffic above.

I know that yesterday I wouldn't have felt this, not have noticed any of this. I wouldn't have noticed the way the grey-green water laps up against the winding roots of the trees, I wouldn't have seen the squawking duck scattering the pigeons hovering over the water, sending them up to roost in a forty-foot plane tree.

I walk carefully along the narrow path, watching out for the ribbed roots of the trees that offer the canal its dappling shade. Then I jump at a muttering sound behind me as a young man – first a silhouette, then a figure in the light beside me – draws abreast of me, talking to himself. He's tall and bearded and sports dreadlocks in his rusty blond hair. Hung about with a sagging rucksack, he carries a bulging supermarket carrier in each hand. A dog is tethered to him by a loop round his belt. As he passes me he ducks his head. ‘'
Jour, 'dame
,' he says politely. His dog looks up at me and the man pulls him on, away from me. The pair of them are soon out of sight.

I watch him go ten paces, then I set away again, glancing down at the water, now a sheet of silver in the sun. And now, swimming right down the centre of the canal just below the surface, I see this green turtle. His movement is lazy, unhurried, as though he has a thousand years to make his way. I trip on a root and look down. When I look up again he's gone. For a second I feel bereft, cursing the root that had lost him to me. Of course, feeling bereft is my default state. I'm used to it.

Then a bolt of electricity charges through me and I lift my eyes to the opposite bank to see the red-haired boy, standing astride his mountain bike. He's grinning and waving his arms above his head, making sure I notice him. Today his hair is tied back with black tape and I can see his wide eyes, his high, hard cheekbones, his less cherubic demeanour. He looks older.

Then I blink and the boy is gone. But suddenly I know I don't have to worry. I know I'll see him again. I feel certain. I
will
see him again.

My legs are tired with all this walking so I find a bollard that doesn't have a boat tied to it and sit down. I look at the rows of boats tied up here on both banks and let the sounds filter through. Now the silence, just marked by the twitter of birds and the roar of the distant train, is supplemented by the sound of bilges pumping and people murmuring. One woman swills a deck; another brushes down an awning. A man in a business suit jumps off his small boat and goes to a modest car. The churring and chirruping of the birds escalates, attracted as they are by the cool water and the insects whirling in the trees and feasting near the ground among the grasses. Across from me a clump of yellow flag iris celebrate the sun and wish me
bonne journée
. I remember how the wash from the boat the other day swamped irises further along the banks.

My cup runneth over
. This intense surge of sound is piercing my skin, invading my pores – the tiniest splash of a waterfowl is expanded a thousand times. My senses are in overdrive. I am hot. My heart is thumping. My head is spinning.

‘
You have to arrive rather earlier to catch the nightingales
.'

From behind me the deep voice, slightly accented, nearly blasts me off my bollard. I look up into the face of the man from the boat: the one with the boy. But he too looks older today. His thick black hair is threaded with streaks of iron grey.

‘Nightingales?' I splutter, going even redder.

‘One needs to get here before nine. When the day is getting underway.'

I remember Madame Patrice. ‘How do you know they're nightingales?'

He nods. ‘They are nightingales. Believe me, Madame. Listen! It is a long, sweet song.' He smiles and his face is younger again. ‘So you returned home safely despite the rain?'

‘So you
were
on the boat?'

He lifts his shoulders. ‘You saw me there. On the boat.'

‘With the boy?'

He shrugs again. ‘There was a boy there.'

‘Look!' The heat inside me is beginning to fade. ‘I've just seen that boy. On the other bank. He looks different.' I examine him closely. ‘And so do you.'

‘It's some time since we saw you last,' he says carefully.