Bella...A French Life

by Marilyn Z. Tomlins

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  Chapter Three

  It is Thursday.

  I enjoy breakfast in the kitchen these days and have done so since I have started closing the guest house for the winter and do not reopen it until Easter. Breakfast though is too sophisticated a word for what I have: a croissant and a bowl of black coffee. No butter. No jam. Several bowls of coffee. I must cut down on the coffee, but what the hell.

  This morning, I am driving down to the village. I always go there on a Thursday - market day. The first time I did so, in 1976, the year of the Brissard twin’s death and the trial, everyone looked at me. I cried driving back to Le Presbytère. The problem that morning, which is ten years ago, was Miss Bernadette Jambenoire, village spinster, school principal and grapevine, but also World War Two Resistance heroine and concentration camp internee, and, accordingly, untouchable.

  Miss Jambenoire had always hated my parents: my father, because he was a German, and my mother for having betrayed her people by marrying him. She hated me too. To her I was venom from the loins of un sale Boche. A filthy German. She first called me this when I was just six years old. It was my first day at school and she walked into my classroom, her grey hair pulled into two buns which clung to the back of her ears like large warts, and when she and Miss Matigot, my teacher, stopped at my desk, that was what I heard her call me.

  “What’s un sale Boche and what are loins?” I asked my mother.

  “Watch your language, Bella, or I will rinse your mouth with soap?” she warned.

  As my mother threatened me with a soap mouthwash only when I had said something really bad, like merde, I knew what Miss Jambenoire called me must be very bad. I therefore decided I had to know what it meant and I asked one of those uncles of mine who had dragged my mother to the barbershop to have her head shaved, and, smiling mockingly, he enlightened me, and the next day at school I stuck my tongue out at Miss Jambenoire. Behind her back though, so there was no reprisal, but … Jesus, did it make me feel good.

  But that morning, ten years ago, at the market, it was Miss Jambenoire who had the upper hand.

  I was buying quail eggs from a farmer’s wife.

  Miss Jambenoire walked up.

  “I heard you were back.”

  No salutation.

  “Good morning, Miss Jambenoire. Yes, I’m back. I’m going to help my mother with the guest house for a while.”

  I tried to smile.

  She cracked the knuckles of her left hand against the palm of her right hand.

  “Ooh la la! In that case you must watch it with those tiny eggs. We wouldn’t want anyone choking to death at Le Presbytère, do we? And those eggs. So small. They can so easily get caught in the windpipe, non?”

  She had lifted her voice and every eye focused on me.

  I have tried since to ignore this woman, not always, I admit, successfully.

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  It is half past nine.

  I wash the bowl and the cutlery and leaving it to dry on the drying rack, I throw a cardigan around my shoulders, and I head for the parking bay; Le Presbytère’s kitchen opens onto an inner courtyard and the underground parking bay is at the other end of it.

  A change I brought to the guest house on joining my mother was, that I, inspired by Frida Kahlo, had a tile maker from the nearby region of Morbihan, transform what was a bare, cemented courtyard into that of a Mexican hacienda. My mother, I must say, never took to the look of the new courtyard - to the clusters of exotic plants with their colourful flowers, to the mango tree which rapidly grew tall - obviously in search of light and hot air - but which has to this day not offered me its fruit, to the palm tree of which the branches droop in the rain, to the hanging baskets of dark-green ferns, to the red terracotta walls, the blue-tiled floor, and to the yellow-tiled sundial which is draped in a climbing rose, which just does not flower and of which the buds wither each time the palm’s branches begin to droop, as if in commiseration.

  The parking bay is large and looks even larger this morning, because, with no guests in residence, there are only three vehicles parked here. One is the guest house’s yellow Volkswagen Combi in which Fred, my porter, gardener and overall handyman takes guests on excursions, most of these to Saint Michael’s Mount, the mount being just a few kilometres away and this area of Normandy’s main attraction. The second is my mother’s grey Citroën Deux Chevaux, old and dented and rusting, which stands on blocks these days. I should sell the car, or give it away, but I don’t have it in me to do so. I have already stuck ‘for sale’ notices in the display window of several of the village’s shops, but I never go through with a sale because to do so will be like discarding with part of my mother. The third car is my new Mercedes. It is the appetising dark green of a Mediterranean olive.

  It is just a ten-minute drive from Le Presbytère down to Sainte-Marie-sur-Brecque, and often have I jogged the distance, even walked it despite it is uphill on my return, but I will be buying a few things at the open-air market this morning, so I will take the car.

  I run the wipers over the Merc’s windscreen. Because of the mist that rises from the sea down below all the windows up here need a regular wipe.

  While the wipers swirl, I turn the ignition key.

  My father taught me to drive when I was still at ‘uni’. I planned to open a practice somewhere around here and as a country GP I would have needed to be mobile. I remained living in Paris: I loved going to museums and one day I met a man and loved him too, and, all plans of leaving the capital, vanished. Jean-Louis was the man’s name.

  Will I ever get him out of my head?

  I park on narrow, cobbled Rue Charlemagne which runs from Le Square, Sainte-Marie-sur-Brecque’s only square. It is here that the farmers and second-hand dealers set up their stalls.

  This morning, some of the stalls are already under winter canvassing. Thanks to Alphonse Pares, our energetic socialist mayor, strings of coloured lights twining between the stalls throw a rainbow over the carcasses, cauliflowers, camembert cheeses, clothes and bric-a-brac to be sold here today.

  On the eastern side of the square stands our Notre Dame Sainte-Marie church, there where my parents baptised Marius. Tourists always say that the design of the church is most unusual. Built with the grey granite of our surrounding hills, it is circular like the crown of a bowler hat, a triangular wooden bell-tower perching on the top. A red-tiled porch shelters the church’s double wooden doorway, there where our village priest, old Father Pierre, stands on Sundays after early morning mass holding a dented empty petit pois tin which he expects the worshippers to fill, but not with peas, but with shiny five-franc coins. The porch has been here for as long as I can remember, its sole purpose, as far as I can tell, to offer the suppliant priest protection from wind and rain, and the occasional snow.

  A tin sculpture of the Holy Virgin stands in the middle of the square. Everything about Jesus’ mother is peculiarly long and thin: face, torso, limbs, fingers, feet. She was a gift from the children of a late Swedish sculptor who used to holiday in the village each summer, and, as Mayor Pares is forever telling us, one should not look a gift horse in the mouth.

  Jesus’ mother stands on a piece of granite which matches that of the church, and she looks east towards God’s House. Although Father Pierre denies that this is so, we all think that he had a hand in which way she was to face, because her back is turned on the Vaybee; La Viérge-sur-Brecque bar and restaurant. Le Vaybee belongs to the portly Frascot, Fred’s brother, best cook in the whole world of veal à la normande. Father Pierre though is not averse to a free ballon de vin rouge at the counter each noon before Mrs Celeste, his housekeeper, serves him lunch.

  I start my visit to the market at the Vaybee with my third or fourth black coffee of the day: I purposely do not keep track of how many I drink.

  “Quiet up at your place, Miss?” asks Frascot.

  “I’ve already closed, Frascot.”

  “So Fred tells me. Mind you, Miss, it’s gonna be a cold win
ter ‘cause the trawler guys are a-bring’en in a lot of skate, squid and scallops and if that ain’t a sign of one, I am a yokel and I’ve no business being in the resto business.”

  Every autumn, at the start of the skate, squid and scallop season, which is now, Frascot predicts a cold winter.

  Stalls line the square.

  As always, I walk over to the stall of farmer LeGros first. It is one of those already under canvas.

  “Going to be a cold winter, Miss,” greets Mrs LeGros.

  She is wearing a hand-knitted jersey over the red, cotton frock she has worn each summer for at least half a dozen years.

  “I would like to buy some chicken this morning, Mrs LeGros.”

  She points to hens hanging by their long, thin necks to which tuffs of bloodied feathers cling.

  “Must I do the necessary ‘cause you still don’t want the feet and the head, do you, Miss?”

  “Certainly no feet or head, Mrs LeGros.”

  “You don’t know what’s nice.”

  She shifts her weight from one of her legs, covered up to her knee in flesh-coloured stockings, and poles the nearest hen. I watch her sling it down onto a bloodied wooden plank. As always happens during this ritual, I am reminded of the autopsy on the Brissard twin. I close my eyes, and hearing the thump that means that the hen’s head and feet are lying on top of a heap of heads, feet, hairy tails and hairy paws, I open them again. At the end of the day, she will give these bloody and hairy bits to the beggars from the bigger towns, who each Thursday hitch lifts to the village on the farmers’ trucks, with the sole purpose of receiving such alms.

  As it is also the season for pheasant and hare I buy one of each and again I close my eyes while Mrs LeGros chops off the unwanted bits. It is also cauliflower, courgette squash and beet season, and I stop at the stall beside that of the LeGros - that of farmer Janvier - and I hand Mrs Janvier my wicker basket to fill.

  “Frascot tells me you’ve already closed for winter, Miss.”

  “So I did.”

  “Any big plans for the winter?”

  “Neither big nor small.”

  “Ooh la la, you should put something big in your life, if you ask me. You like it big, don’t you, my darling?”

  A large woman, she winks, and her diminutive husband, his waist narrower than one of her upper arms, shakes his head at his wife’s brazenness in referring to my nun-like celibacy.

  My shopping done, I am tempted to return to the Vaybee for another cup of coffee, but through its open door I see the tall, thin, grey figure of Miss Jambenoire at the bar. She has Le Monde open on the zinc-top in front of her. She’s eighty years old, and each Thursday she’s here in the market, to, as she says, stock up with genuine French food and not the foreign rubbish of supermarkets. She never talks to me, just as she had never addressed a word to my father; she did speak to my mother, but always about the weather, and always did she call her, you poor thing.

  I walk around the square. The three and four-storey half-timbered buildings that line it are seemingly on fire, but as I know, it is the noon sun reflecting in the windows. Red, pink and white geraniums and begonias, in window boxes, are in their final flowering before winter’s hiatus. Leaves of a bay tree growing in a white cube container on a balcony are turning yellow. A sure sign that winter is approaching.

  I set off for home.

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  Chapter Four

  The road from Sainte-Marie-sur-Brecque to Le Presbytère is a modest one.

  Leaving Le Square and continuing down Rue Charlemagne, I drive past timbered cottages which have been transformed into bed-and-breakfasts by English expatriates. I pass the primary school where I was a pupil until I went to high school in the town of Nantes. I turn right into wide, tree-lined, tarred Route Avranches which was once the only road to the inland town of Avranches, and after about two hundred metres, there where the council has erected a board to indicate the way to the guest house, but only after my father had given them a bribe of a few thousand francs, I turn right again.

  The road I am on now is narrow but tarred like Route Avranches and winds through cliffs, but after a while, it straightens out. Alongside the car is dark-green pasture land which is this morning, like almost every morning of the year, dotted with ewes, rams and lambs, most of these destined to become our local speciality - agneaux pré-salé. Roasted leg of salt marsh lamb. Our guests loved my mother’s agneaux pré-salé which, in my child mind, was excellent only because I had helped her with the cooking when in reality my only contribution had been that I inserted cloves of garlic into incisions she had already made in the meat. Since her death six years ago, it is Gertrude who does all the cooking at Le Presbytère. Gertrude - Gertrude Duc - Fred and Frascot’s cousin. Like Fred and Le Presbytère’s housemaids, Honorine and Martine, she is off until my Easter re-opening.

  Once through the pastureland, the road starts to climb and becomes somewhat potholed. I look back towards the coast, towards the Bay of Saint-Michel, down below. I open the window on my side by a chink, and a little wind caresses the back of my neck. Some evenings, after Gertrude had finished her shift, I’ll drive her back to her home in the village, and whenever I open a window, she warns me about the dangers of a draught.

  “Bad if you have your menses or if you’re in the other way.”

  The other way: pregnant.

  “Gertrude, I am not pregnant,” I will say.

  In my side mirror, a Brittany Ferries boat is sailing towards Saint-Malo. Its passengers will be gathering together heavy luggage and boisterous children, ready to start another sojourn at the expatriates’ B&Bs. On days when the wind blows hard this way, we, here on land, hear the warnings over the ship’s loudspeakers asking the passengers not to block the doorways. The tourists will be bringing whole nut chocolate bars, lemon cream biscuits and pots of Marmite to their ex-pat hosts. “Allow me to pay you for these,” Mrs Ex-Pat will say, and the holidaymaker will reply: “Not on your nelly, love. Just enjoy the stuff. You must so miss England.”

  The holidaymakers will go to Saint Michael’s Mount, pantingly climb up to the abbey, browse the souvenir shops for fridge magnets and embroidered tea doilies, eat a Mêre Poulard omelette and a crêpe, complain about the fucking French overcharging as always, and complain even more when they pay a franc to spend a penny. But, back in England, they will show relatives and friends the photographs they took. “God, but France is beautiful,” they will say.

  Behind me, the sun, high in the sky, turns the golden statue of Archangel Michael atop the spire of the mount’s abbey into a ball of golden flames. I am reminded of how Joan of Arc had described him to her English judges in 1431.

  Was he naked?

  Do you think that Our Lord had nothing in which to clothe him?

  Did he have hair?

  And why would they have cut it ...? But no, I do not know if he has hair. He had wings on his shoulders, but no crown on his head. I saw him with the eyes of my body, just as I see you... I saw him with my corporal eyes.

  How do you know it was him?

  He told me, “I am Michael, the protector of France”.

  Here, on the spire, he stands with those wings stretched to the sky. But not only his wings, so too his sword, perhaps yet again ready to protect France, perhaps from those English tourists on the ferry.

  The bay’s tide is not yet in and cars and coaches are driving along the causeway linking the mount to the mainland. When I first returned after the Brissard twin’s death, the speed with which the tide rose at the equinoxes used to fascinate me; à la vitesse d’un cheval du gallop - at the speed of a galloping horse - according to Victor Hugo. There are always tourists who try to beat the tide to the mount.

  Jean-Louis and I too once tried to do so.

  It was in a month of June, and it was in the year before the Brissard twin’s death. Jean-Louis and I had been lovers for just a month and he had not yet met my widowed mother and I suggested he should come with me to Le Presbytè
re for the weekend. We drove down in his metallic silver Porsche which he had bought just the month before. It was his first major purchase since he and Colette, his wife, split, and his colleagues at his legal firm teased him about it, about how girls love blokes with fast cars.

  “Et puis alors,” he said when I too teased him about the Porsche.

  How many times have I not heard Jean-Louis say et puis alors? So what then?

  On that June weekend, on that walk, he spoke of how he missed his two little girls who were living with their mother.

  “They would have loved being here today.”

  “Have they seen the mount?”

  “Col - their mother - and I brought them here once, yes, but they were small still ...”

  “So, they would not remember anything of it,” I interrupted.

  “You can be very abrupt if you so wish, you know Bella,” he said.

  He was angry.

  “What would you have wanted me to say, Jean-Louis? You miss your girls, and I feel bad about that.”

  “Mother, I did not break up his marriage,” I had told my mother when I first told her about Jean-Louis.

  “But, Bella, a man with a past. How unfortunate.”

  “We all have pasts, Mother.”

  I had hers in mind, hers and that of my father, and she realised what I meant because we never again spoke of ‘pasts’. Not even when I also had a past; an ex-lover and a child in its grave because of me.

  The walk took us just under two hours. We set off from the beach at the town of Genêts some six kilometres from the mount. Ahead of us Frascot’s teenage boy, Didier, was acting as guide to a group of noisy middle-aged German frauen who wore flowery sleeveless tops and khaki shorts, their hairy arms and legs splattered with sludge. As I knew, they would tip him when they reached the mount and, as I also knew, he would not spend the money but give it to his father to bank for him for the day he would be going to Paris to study medicine at the Sorbonne.