The Little French Bistro

by Nina George

  “You know the tragic thing about long life expectancy?” Paul asked, suddenly turning serious. Everybody looked at him with expectation. “You have more time to be unhappy.”

  “Laurine!” Geneviève Ecollier’s chin jutted out like a ship’s prow. The mug Jean-Rémy had passed her was quivering in Marianne’s hands as the waitress reported hurriedly to the kitchen counter.

  “Don’t stick your bust out like that, child. There’ll be lots of strutting roosters in here today. One day you’ll let one lead you on board his boat, and next year he won’t spare you so much as a glance.”

  Laurine crossed her arms in front of her chest, and two delicate spots of pink appeared on her cheeks. One of the Parisian yacht owners kept asking her onto his boat for a glass of champagne. She didn’t know how she was going to say no after his third invitation, because the man protested that her rejections made him so desperate that he would unfortunately have to go and eat in Rozbras to recover from his grief. And that would be bad for Madame Geneviève, because on the other bank of the Aven was her great rival for the appetites and wallets of the yachtsmen who moored their boats between the two small ports of Kerdruc and Rozbras without ever weighing anchor.

  Laurine didn’t know how to resolve her dilemma. If she went with them, she would quickly earn herself a reputation; if she didn’t, Madame Geneviève and Ar Mor would soon have no customers, because they’d all be sitting in Alain Poitier’s restaurant or the bar tabac eating mussels in cream sauce.

  “Laurine! Stop daydreaming! Today’s special is cotriade, Breton fish stew. Belon oysters, moules marinières, and noix de Saint-Jacques Ar Mor au naturel, scallops in a gratin or with cognac sauce. In short, despite his testosterone imbalance, our chef is back to top form. Write it down, girl, or you’ll forget again.”

  Marianne liked Madame Ecollier’s voice. It was as full and dark as the coffee Jean-Rémy had made to accompany her small breakfast—a delicious cheese omelet.

  Laurine obediently took down her boss’s words on her waiter’s pad. “What’s tes…treso…tostron imbalance?” she asked.

  “A salt addiction,” summed up Madame Geneviève, pointing her arrow-slit eyes at Jean-Rémy. “It would be good if you would finally dismiss that lady from your thoughts!”

  “Which lady?” Jean-Rémy cautiously enquired.

  “The one for whom you empty salt by the packet into the stock!”

  “Jean-Rémy is oversalting because of a lady?” asked Laurine.

  “He’s in love, and when they’re in love, cooks overdo it with the salt.”

  “How about unhappy cooks?”

  “They overdo it with the brandy.”

  “So who is Jean-Rémy in love with?” asked Laurine.

  “Now, if that isn’t an irrelevant question! Allez, allez, get to work, Laurine! Show Madame Marianne the Shell Room in the guesthouse, please.”

  Geneviève Ecollier flashed Marianne a smile. Yes, maybe this woman who’d washed up here at the end of the world was everything she’d been praying for in recent months. Weren’t coincidences sometimes gifts of fate?

  Jean-Rémy pushed a white bundle and a sheet of paper toward Marianne, who stared at it. He pointed to a figure in the middle of the page—892 euros; the number next to it appeared to be her working hours, six hours per day excluding Tuesday and Wednesday. Lodgings were included. He explained in simple French that she was hired to work at Ar Mor. And that she was going to have to learn French and he would teach her. Marianne nodded.

  She took a look at the bundle. Chef’s whites, very similar to the ones she’d worn at housekeeping school. Jean-Rémy’s expression was beseeching.

  Marianne felt grubby and unkempt in her old clothes. The uniform smelled of soap, and she longed to scrub the past few days from her skin and slip into the fresh whites. That was the only reason she signed her name on the dotted line.

  “Great,” Jean-Rémy said with relief, and handed her a beret-shaped chef’s hat.

  Marianne wedged the bundle under her arm and followed Laurine across the small courtyard to the guesthouse. She didn’t notice the ginger cat scamper out of the door after her.

  —

  Jean-Rémy arranged his pickings from the Concarneau fish market and packed the rays, dabs and tunas into polystyrene crates filled with crushed ice. The crabs scrabbled with their little legs. Madame Geneviève checked the bills.

  “What would you think if I opened the hotel again, chef?” she asked with deliberate nonchalance.

  “Good idea,” he replied, “but why are you asking now?”

  Geneviève Ecollier let out a loud sigh, then answered quietly, “That woman from the sea, Marianne. You know whom she reminds me of? Of myself. Of me when I’m scared.”

  Jean-Rémy nodded. Sometimes he saw his own dreams and doubts reflected in the faces of strangers. He set down a plate in front of Geneviève. He had decorated the omelet with red basil in the shape of a heart.

  “Golly, Jean-Rémy. Are you trying to tell me something?”

  “Indeed I am. Bon appétit!”

  She ate in silence and then carried the plate into the scullery. “Whatever you say. Just don’t ruin my stock again, you hear?”

  Stock, and life too: it was so easy to ruin everything.

  The young chef tried not to think of Laurine, but it was as hard as if he’d decided not to breathe. Breathe in: Laurine. Breathe out: Laurine. Whenever she was nearby, he couldn’t tell a spoon from a knife and completely lost his wits. He was never going to be able to bewitch her as he could other women, gradually enticing them into his bed with addictive little appetizers: a bite of crabmeat in a cream of asparagus sauce here, the world’s best foie gras on toast there. For Jean-Rémy, a scallop served in its shell with a teaspoonful of velvety cognac and some exquisite whipped cream was more romantic than all the roses in the world. He knew why it was different with Laurine than it had been with every other woman he’d met: he had fallen in love, and his feelings were true and deep and pure. Well, not absolutely pure: of course he wanted to sleep with Laurine. But he mainly wanted to be with her, every day and every night.

  It was a mystery to Jean-Rémy how he could have lived side by side with Laurine for two years without ever having kissed her.

  Laurine escorted Marianne through the guesthouse. A red carpet wound up the staircase, the walls were covered with fine, light fabric and there was a sea view from every window.

  Marianne observed Laurine’s graceful movements and understood why some men were magically attracted to a suffering woman, especially when she was grieving over another man. Yes, there was virtually nothing more erotic for certain men than trying to cure a woman of a rival. It was a selfish, masochistic, sadistic enterprise, and it was blind to how lovesickness truly felt.

  No man ever wanted to comfort me like that, she thought. On the one hand, that was a shame; on the other, Lothar hadn’t even comforted Marianne when a lump had been detected in her breast and it had taken some time to determine whether it was benign or malign. Her fear had scared Lothar, and she wouldn’t mention it so as not to worry him. “I want to live, do you understand?” he’d shouted at her. “But this is just dragging me down!”

  Shortly afterward, Lothar’s lover Sybille had woken her from the wonderful illusion that a marriage, a house at the end of a turning bay and an indoor fountain were all a woman needed.

  Lothar had been determined to return to their normal daily routine as soon as possible after his affair with Sybille. “I’ve told you I’m sorry. What more am I supposed to do?” And with that the matter was closed.

  After a few years, her pain had subsided. Time had brought solace to Marianne, as had Lothar’s secrecy about his other affairs, at least until it became too hard for him to keep lying. He started to leave a trail of clues in the hope that Marianne would make a scene and deliver him, but she had refused to do him that favor.

  —

  Three steps at the end of the third-floor passageway led up to a s
mall landing, from which a door on the right opened into a large white-and-blue-tiled bathroom containing a bathtub with lion-claw feet and a gold-framed mirror.

  Then Laurine opened the last door, which was decorated with a scallop shell. As the door swung open, Marianne blinked in surprise: the June sun was shining directly into her eyes.

  Laurine smiled as Marianne stepped into the room, her mouth wide: that was exactly how Laurine felt each time she saw the Shell Room, under the eaves. It was the smallest room in the hotel, but it was also the most beautiful. Polished ship’s floorboards, soft, bright rugs, a stained wooden chest at the foot of a double bed, a large round mirror on one wall and a rustic wardrobe in a corner under a painted ceiling. A delicate screen concealed a mirrored dresser with a velvet-covered stool beside it. The cat slunk past the women and jumped onto the bed.

  The most beguiling thing about the room, however, was the view stretching out to sea from the high casement window. Marianne had to sit down on the bed for a moment. A whole room, all to myself?

  Laurine opened the window wide, allowing sunshine to stream in, and then went back downstairs.

  Marianne let herself fall onto the bed. It was neither too soft nor too hard, and the sheets were white and cool against her skin. Lying there, she took the tile from her handbag. She placed it on the white-lacquered bedside cupboard so she could gaze back and forth between the painted Kerdruc on the tile and the unpainted, real-life version outside. The artist must have stood exactly here. She couldn’t decide which Kerdruc was more charming and bewitching.

  She felt as if she had been presented with a gift, though she didn’t know why, or whether she should accept it. The cat snuggled into the crook of her arm. It was silent in the guesthouse, but not the morbid silence by which she had often felt threatened at home. This silence was alive.

  She recalled the various women she had met up to this point, and how they had tried to explain life to her. They had said a lot when they weren’t speaking; it was the silences between their words that had touched Marianne.

  I know nothing about love, she thought. I don’t know the highest price one should be prepared to pay for it. Or what men actually think about it—about love or about communication. Lothar had categorically refused to engage in true communication.

  She spied a cobweb above the mirrored dresser. She thought of her neighbor Grete Köster and her unrequited love for the local hairdresser. One hot August day twelve years ago, Grete had remarked to Marianne over a glass of sherry they’d allowed themselves in Grete’s cellar: “How hypocritical life is! When we were young, we had to keep our legs shut so people didn’t think we were ‘that kind of girl.’ Our husbands got suspicious if we enjoyed ourselves too much, and then all of a sudden, at barely forty, we were too old. Is there a right age for women and what they have down below? I don’t want cobwebs to set in!”

  Marianne hadn’t known how to answer. She’d never looked between her legs and therefore couldn’t say much about cobwebs. Lothar hadn’t been particularly interested either. “Down below” was uncharted territory, as unexercised as her heart.

  —

  Marianne stood up and went into the bathroom to take a hot shower. Afterward she wound the soft bathrobe around her body, left the room under the eaves and strode barefoot across the guesthouse’s dusty carpets.

  She counted twenty-five rooms on the three floors, every one with sheets over the furniture. Many beds were four-posters with romantic canopies. Every room had a door leading onto the wooden balcony that ran around the outside of the building. It was a gorgeous hotel that seemed to have been designed for lovers.

  A sign in several languages was hanging on the toilet door. “We kindly ask our guests not to throw cigarettes down the toilet.”

  A large door at the end of a wide hallway led into an old restaurant. Opening it, Marianne suddenly found herself standing across from a painting. The view included men and women on the beach: some of them leaning into the wind, others letting it push them along. She twirled on the spot to study the endless picture. A stout church directly by the sea, and several women harvesting seaweed. She had stepped back into a time before Marianne Lanz existed, a time when her grandmother would still have been a child and had as yet no idea that she would one day meet a man who would bequeath his speckled irises to Marianne; a man whose name her grandmother never revealed. All Marianne knew was that her father’s father had borne the same birthmark she did—three flames interlinked to form a Catherine wheel over the heart.

  As she was climbing the stairs again, she noticed a concealed door on an intermediate floor. She opened it and peered into a dark room. Only gradually did silhouettes emerge. Dresses: summer dresses, evening dresses, dresses a woman wore when she was going to meet a man. Each dress a memory of the evenings it had been worn—in love, in discord, in pleasure. Now they hung in an ebony chest. Marianne started as she sniffed the sleeve of a magnificent red dress. It was freshly washed.

  She continued on her way upstairs and perched restlessly on the bed, gazing around the room. She wished she had been a woman who could live alone and console herself when the lumps in her life—and her breast—got the better of her. But she hadn’t been such a woman. Kerdruc had lifted her spirits, but she knew it was temporary. Tomorrow she would continue with her plan. The impulse remained deep within her.

  A whole room to myself. But just for one night, just one. For one night she would see what it was like to be a woman who had a room all to herself.

  She put on the chef’s uniform and hesitantly placed the white hat on her head. She was only a little anxious about cooking at Ar Mor. She and the kitchen were roughly the same age: they would get on well.

  Jean-Rémy was standing at the stove in Ar Mor’s kitchens, his injured hand hooked into the waistband of his jeans. He passed Marianne a bowl of milky coffee and a croissant, and she followed his lead, dunking the pastry while bending over the bowl and paying no attention to any crumbs that fell into the coffee. The radio was playing songs that she had heard spilling from passing cars back in the seventies—“Born to Be Wild,” “These Boots Are Made for Walking”—and Jean-Rémy was wiggling his hips as he washed vegetables at great speed despite his injured hand.

  Marianne had never seen a man dance like this before. She hoped he wouldn’t ask her to join in.

  “I’ve thought of a trick to teach you vocabulary, Madame Marianne,” Jean-Rémy announced as he shimmied back and forth. “You have to learn the French and Breton words for all the…trucs.”

  “Troocks?”

  “Oui, les trucs. This is a truc and so is that,” he said, indicating the table, the knife, a head of lettuce. Everything was a troock.

  “A thing?”

  Jean-Rémy nodded. “Yes.” He pointed to an unused order pad and made a scribbling gesture. Marianne grabbed a pen and began to tear off the perforated sheets as she followed him around the kitchen.

  Jean-Rémy called out words to her, and she wrote them down exactly as she heard them: freego, fennetrr, table. At the end of their tour, she stuck the notes on all the troocks until the whole kitchen was plastered with slips of orange paper. Then they dealt with the larder and the fish.

  Jean-Rémy switched to Breton. He loved this guttural language, which sounded very similar to Gaelic. Kig—meat. Piz bihan—peas. Brezel—mackerel. Konikl—rabbit. Triñschin—sorrel. Tomm-tomm—careful, red-hot! Marianne wrote and wrote; Jean-Rémy smiled. His thoughts turned less often to Laurine now that he was so busy with Marianne.

  She had a hunger inside her, he thought. Everything fell into her as if into a deep lake. She wanted to touch and smell everything. The way she’d touched the foodstuffs in the larder! She didn’t maul them; she lifted them up like delicate flowers to catch their fragrance, and her fingers seemed to delve into their soul. When Jean-Rémy looked at Marianne and her heart-shaped face with its large eyes, he was flooded with light, driving out the emptiness that swamped him with despondency when he thought o
f his boundless admiration for the young waitress. A sense of optimism coursed through him, and he longed to start making plans.

  He had lectured Marianne on the importance of food and its effects on the soul, even though he knew that she barely understood a word. He talked about how he loved to go shopping, and how true gastronomy began with hunting down the freshest, choicest produce. He spent his days off in low season visiting distilleries and mussel farms, or strolling along the Aven and Belon rivers or around the Bay of Morbihan to find patient retired anglers reeling in wild fish. These men still understood the rhythms of Brittany’s coastline. They knew that they had to be there at the right time, according to the dictates of moon and tides. High and low tide arrived a little earlier every day—two to four minutes earlier—and so they needed to be as swift and stealthy as foxes to catch the best moment for the fish to bite.

  As the first steak orders began to come in, Jean-Rémy beckoned Marianne to his side. “No sear marks in my kitchen! That’s the kind of torture housewives and barbecuing husbands inflict on steak. It’s barbaric! Watch me. An oval pan. A little amann—butter. Medium heat, not too much tomm-tomm. That way, the butter stays close to the steak instead of spreading out, messing around with the shallots and getting burnt. Do you understand?”

  Marianne watched him with fascination. He didn’t wear the meat out; he caressed it. Soon he lifted the steak out of the pan onto a hot plate and pushed it under a three-level grill set to eighty degrees. He left it there to cook a little longer and then gave it another minute on the warm plate before arranging the trimmings around it. “Voilà! Any other way of cooking and the steak curls up and dies. So if all you’ve ever done until now is toss meat onto the grill, forget it. Try it even once, and I’ll kill you.” He drew his hand across his throat like a blade. Marianne blushed.

  He fetched a chopping board with squid tentacles on it and set it down among the shadows near the doorway. Seconds later, the orange-white cat emerged from its hiding place near the herbs. It waggled its backside in the sun as it gnawed away at this little delicacy.