Bella...A French Life

by Marilyn Z. Tomlins

  “Le Presbytère is yours, do with it as you wish,” Marius had said.

  My mother had just died and she, someone who believed in fair play, and, considering it fair and correct to do so, had left the house to both Marius and I, but he, saying he did not want to become a charlady, told me he would register the guest house in my name and if I so wished I could get rid of it - sell it, go on a cruise with the money and see the world, or I could live in warm and sunny California or Florida for a while. I did not wish to sell the house; having no desire to continue doctoring, what else was there for me to do but be a charlady.

  On joining my mother and looking over the accounts, I was surprised at how well the guest house was doing.

  She dismissed my compliments. It was, she said, the beauty of the house which was drawing guests.

  One can see the house from afar, even from the sea beyond the mount, as I know from when I took the ferries to the Channel Isles.

  The house is half-timbered, two-and-a-half storeys high, a ten-metre high Leyland Cyprus hedge, Fred’s pride and joy and which I suspect he may love more than Paula his wife and the five children she brought into the world for him, encircling the property and separating it from the Du Ponts’ house on one side, and on the other, the somewhat worse for wear cottage of a Dutch couple named Amster, who, when they are in residence in the summer, shoot whatever is in flight over our rooftops - robin red breasts, larks, wagtails, finches and even pigeons - with a slingshot, despite that I beg them not to.

  Apart from the holes in the niche, there is more evidence here of the house’s religious past. I am thinking of the rose window in one of the house’s four dormer windows. The rose window depicts a golden-haired, red-robed Christ as a shepherd, a praying angel, in white, floating on each side of his head, and the Magdala in a white and light-green robe, and also in prayer, kneeling at his feet, white lambs and black calves grazing around the two of them.

  This last summer an American guest asked me whether I have ever had the rose window valued.

  “No.”

  “No?”

  “No.”

  “Wow, lady! It must be worth a dollar or two!”

  “Miss, before he leaves tomorrow, make sure the rose window is still here,” had warned Martine.

  Jean-Louis loved the rose window too.

  “Is that a guest room?” he asked.

  It was on that first visit of his to Le Presbytère when he and I walked across the bay with the German frauen.

  “It’s a single room, Jean-Louis.”

  “Can we sleep there?”

  “It has a single bed.”

  “You won’t hear me complaining.”

  Neither did I complain.

  But I must not think of him yet again.

  -0-

  The grandfather clock in the drawing room begins to chime.

  I listen to Handel’s I know that my redeemer liveth.

  The clock came with us from Germany. My father was always the one who did the winding. After his death, it had become my mother’s task, and now, after her death, mine.

  My father had a good singing voice and some days he sang quietly to the chime.

  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 ...

  When I was a child he taught me the words. Not yet have I found solace in them.

  When guests are here, I silence the clock so they are not disturbed, but alone now, I silence it only at night so it does not wake me from the little sleep my insomnia allows me.

  The chiming stops and four short strikes follow. It means it is a quarter past something; past eight, or perhaps only still a quarter past seven.

  Or maybe, it is already a quarter past nine and there is less left of this day than I thought.

  -0-

  Chapter Seven

  Someone, I cannot recall who, said, pray that your loneliness may spur you into finding something to live for, great enough to die for.

  It is the second week of October now and Le Presbytère has been closed for a month.

  Last weekend Marius, Marion and the four children came to visit.

  “Bella, are you not lonely in this big old house?” asked Marion.

  “Come down to Paris,” suggested Marius.

  I lied.

  “I’m going to have the house painted, so I must be here.”

  “You had it painted last year,” Marion chipped in.

  “Two years ago.”

  “So for God’s sake, why do you have to have it painted again?” asked Marius.

  “Because ... you know ...”

  “Oh rubbish, Bella!”

  When he and I were children we used to play a game my parents called because- because: because it is for me to know and for you to find out.

  -0-

  Happy, fulfilled Marion, yes, I am lonely, dear sister-in-law, but I will not admit it. I will not admit it to anyone, not even to myself. When I go to the market on Thursdays just so I will be able to have a chat – a chat with Frascot and Mrs LeGros and Mrs Janvier - I tell myself I have to go to the market because I need to buy food, although I well know my freezer is full and so too my fridge. When I walk from room to room here at Le Presbytère, or rather, when my mind is chasing me from room to room because if I stand or sit down, the walls move in on me, I tell myself I am checking there are no intruders here.

  But, no, no, no, damn it no.

  I will not admit that I am lonely.

  Alone, yes. Sure.

  But only when Le Presbytère is closed, because this is a large house, and in the middle of the night, it seems even larger.

  “Henriette’s Boche must have been helping himself to the fleeing Yids’ money,” said those uncles of mine.

  My parents had just then returned to France and had bought the property.

  What my parents did not tell my uncles was that they bought the house with a loan my Grandfather Desmarais helped them procure from the bank. My grandfather, probably regretting he had been so hard on them when they wanted to get married, threatened the bank manager that, unless he gave the couple the fifteen thousand francs they needed for the house, he would reveal that nasty little secret of his, which he was hiding from the entire world. The nasty little secret was that in 1944 Mr Director had denounced his own wife to the Gestapo for hiding a Special Air Service paratrooper on her father’s farm.

  My mother told me what her father had said to the bank manager.

  “If you want everyone to know that the poor Marguerite was gassed in Auschwitz because you squealed on her, so your strumpet, Rose the Whore, the best cock sucker this side of the Atlantic, could become your wife, you refuse my daughter and son-in-law the loan.”

  Guests describe the house as beautiful. The vast garden is beautiful; the Louis XV furniture in the drawing room is beautiful; the marble floors are beautiful; the stone staircase is beautiful; the wrought-iron balustrade is beautiful; the heavy chintz curtains in the bedrooms are beautiful; the dove-grey tiles in the bathrooms are beautiful.

  Beautiful. Beautiful. Beautiful.

  After I had transformed the courtyard, I still wanted to put more of my own stamp on the house, but I waited until my mother’s passing to decide to replace the house’s Louis XV furniture; I had always found the furniture sombre. So I discussed with Georges, Sainte-Marie-sur-Brecque’s auctioneer, that I may ask him to sell the furniture for me, and I made a trip to Paris and looked at modern furniture in Bazar Hotel de Ville department store. I returned with the store’s catalogue but without having made any purchases. “Miss Bella, what horrible furniture!” exclaimed Fred when he paged through the catalogue. Therefore, I kept the Louis XV, yet at night when the old settees and chaises longues creak as if ghosts are holding a tea party in the drawing room, I regret I did not buy the Bazar Hotel de Ville furniture. Or, for that matter that, when I had come to live here, I had not brought some of the furniture from my Paris
apartment with me. Like the black and white bedroom suite with the king size bed with the white damask headboard and the side storage drawers.

  Jean-Louis liked the bedroom suite. He did not though see it on our first date.

  When I called him back as he requested in the message he left for me at Chartreux Hospital, he invited me for dinner.

  “Doc, if you say you will be washing your hair, I will understand.”

  “I will not be washing my hair. And please not doc or I might just bring my forceps along.”

  He waited for me on the terrace of a bistro on the Latin Quarter’s Place Saint Michel. Having agreed that we would dine informally, he was without a jacket, and I wore a floral summer dress although a cool breeze had risen. He saw me walk up and got to his feet.

  “What was your day like?” he asked.

  “No emergencies. And yours?”

  “One emergency.”

  “Was it solved?”

  “Solved.”

  He grinned with obvious satisfaction.

  A few minutes later, we walked along the narrow, pedestrian Rue Saint Séverin, Greek restaurants lining the street. An overhead loudspeaker bombarded our eardrums with Mikis Theodarikis’s Syrtaki and the Greek expatriates standing outside their restaurants tried to persuade us with Zorba-like leaps and bounds to step inside. We passed a girl in a long white cotton frock, her yellow hair flowing to her waist, her feet in slip-on sandals and her toenails varnished turquoise. Over and above Syrtaki, she was succeeding in singing Joan Baez’ Ballad of Sacco and Vanzetti to her own guitar accompaniment.

  Here's to you Nicola and Bart … Rest forever here in our hearts ... The last and final moment is yours ... That agony is your triumph! …

  A waiter in a navy and white striped sailor’s T-shirt and Maurice Chevalier boater stepped from one of the restaurants and clapped his encouragement. It was to the Syrtaki though.

  We chose a restaurant which Jean-Louis had been to before although the maitre d’ and his staff manifested no recognition.

  “May I be racist?” whispered Jean-Louis.

  “Be racist.”

  “We French all look alike to Greeks.”

  A platter of lobsters on crushed ice which I saw in the restaurant’s window on coming in, looked inviting, but Jean-Louis suggested we have the plat du jour.

  “I hate the waiting in restaurants, Bella.”

  “The plat du jour will be great.”

  Plastic ivy and geraniums hung from a beamed ceiling which was too shiny to be of natural wood, and dusty bottles of Retsina stood at one end of the bar. The maitre d’ pulled a table away from a wall and motioned we were to sit there. A Boxwood Ball plant, as real as the ivy and geraniums, stood on each side of the table.

  “Privacy,” said the maitre d’. He winked.

  The plat du jour was spinach and feta pie.

  “What was the emergency, may I know?” I asked.

  “My wife - ex-wife - no wife, as we are not divorced - not yet anyway - suffers from chronic colitis so she wants me to have the girls for a week so she can go to a health farm.”

  “Colitis? I thought colitis went out of fashion when the Belle Époque ended. One doesn’t even hear of it anymore.”

  “Well, Doctor Wolff,” he said, “now, you have heard of a case.”

  “I thought the emergency was at work. Had I known it was something so personal, I would not have asked,” I apologised.

  “My marriage was work. Hard work.”

  ‘Joan Baez’ appeared at the door and asked the maitre d’ if she could come inside. He said yes. She went to stand at the bar, one sandaled foot on the foot railing and her guitar resting on her raised knee. She began to tune the guitar, turning the tuner clockwise and listening to the sound of the string under her right middle finger, she turned the tuner anti-clockwise, and nodding satisfaction, she tapped a rhythm out on the body of the guitar with the flat of her left hand.

  Jean-Louis refilled our glasses from a carafe filled with Retsina.

  ‘Joan Baez’ began to sing.

  In restless dreams I walked alone Narrow streets of cobblestone ... ‘Neath the halo of a street lamp I turned my collar to the cold and damp ...When my eyes were stabbed by the flash of a neon light ...That split the night ... And touched the sound of silence ...

  The sounds of silence: Simon and Garfunkel.

  Jean-Louis and I listened in a silence of our own.

  Her song sung, ‘Joan Baez’ called out whether there was anyone who would buy her a Coca – a Coca Cola. Jean-Louis signalled to the maitre d’ that he could serve the girl the soft drink. She drank up, flicked her head as a thank you, and left, her guitar banging against her flat bottom.

  “Simon and Garfunkel. I like them,” said Jean-Louis.

  “I like Joan Baez.”

  “I knew a girl like that long ago. Not like Joan Baez of course, but this young singer here. It was in my student days. She was a busker in the Métro.”

  “Not all that long ago surely.”

  “Sufficiently long enough so that I can no longer recall her touch on my body.”

  He leaned over towards me.

  “Was she pretty?” I asked.

  “Not particularly. Not like you.”

  “Pretty? Me?”

  I hoped I was not going to blush.

  “I thought all pretty girls knew they were pretty.”

  I was blushing. I could feel heat sweep over my face.

  “Do you know how beautiful you are, Bella Wolff?”

  Again, he touched my arm the way he had done at Chartreux Hospital.

  “One of my neighbours thinks her bulldog is beautiful,” I told him.

  Our waiter brought us the bill and two wrapped peppermint sweets.

  “Allow me to pay half of this,” I suggested.

  “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 … sinn
ed.

  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.