Bella...A French Life

by Marilyn Z. Tomlins

  ”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 no
t 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.

  A woman in a long white dress, her hair under a black turban, walked up to our table. She slapped a deck of tarot cards down in front of me and asked me to draw a card so she could tell me what the future held for me. She wore a death-head silver ring; the eyes were red stones.

  It was strange but before the woman walked up to us, sitting there opposite Jean-Louis at Chez Eugène, I wondered what the future held for him and me, indeed whether we had one - as a couple.

  When I was at the high school in Nantes I had dabbled with mysticism. My mother nearly fainted when I started to speak of guardian angels, spirit guides and the beyond. I was doing that because there was this girl in my class whose mother was a medium and one weekend when I stayed over at their house her mother had held a séance. My classmate, her mother, I and some neighbours of theirs sat at a table holding hands and suddenly a man’s voice came from what sounded like underneath the table. The man spoke in a drowsy, heavily-accented voice. He said he was Bella’s grandfather. He said his name was Johann Wolff. He wanted me to listen to what he had to tell me. It was that Adolf Hitler was a good man. My grandfather had been a Brown Shirt during - no - before World War Two had broken out even, but as it was something which was never mentioned at home, there was no way my classmate’s mother could have known that or anything else about my grandfather. I had told my mother what my Grandfather Wolff had told me and she had very nearly fainted again. “Bella, all I need in my life is for you to go believe in such crap!” she shouted. I do not know whether she had told my father what his deceased father was seemingly up to.

  My classmate’s name was Flora and she was as dainty as her name implied and she telephones me occasionally to offer me guidance because she claims to possess the power to speak to the deceased as her mother had done. I, however, no longer believe in such things. Not after I had kept my eyes closed for hours on end trying to get my guardian angel to speak to me, to tell me which questions I would be asked in my baccalaureat school-leaving examination, and to give me the answers into the bargain so I would not have to do any revision, but no one had replied.

  I smiled at the tarot reader.

  “No thank you.”

  “Pity,” she said, “because my spirit guide tells me you will very soon be very happy.”

  “I hope you do not believe in nonsense like this, Bella,” said Jean-Louis.

  He motioned to the woman to leave me alone, and she, her black turban having slipped over her eyes and temporarily blinded, stumbled as she walked away.

  I felt sorry for her.

  -0-

  “Why are you single, Bella?”

  We’d finished our first course of avocado and were cutting our way around the leg of the duck of our main course - a confit de canard - and at a nearby table, the tarot reader, having pushed the turban away from her face, was telling the future of the lady who had had her portrait painted earlier.

  “Of course you reply only if you want to,” said Jean-Louis.

  I put my knife and fork down.

  “I’ve never loved a man enough to marry him.”

  “How much must you love a man for that?”

  “I must believe that without him the sun will never shine again.”

  I had replied without hesitation.

  He swivelled the wine in his glass.

  “Could you love a man like that?”

  He’d been looking down at his wine glass, but he looked up and straight into my eyes.

  Quickly, I looked down, swivelled the wine in my glass and suddenly the wine looked as red as freshly spilled blood. The thought of spilled blood, so much part of my life, made me shiver slightly.

  “I do not know if I could, Jean-Louis.”

  “Come on, look at me,” he urged.

  He took the glass from me and put it down on the table.

  I looked up.

  “Jean-Louis, I do know my mother loved my father like that. He was a Wehrmacht soldier. She had become a horizontal collaborator for her love of him.”

  He put his glass down beside mine. The wine in it also looked as red as freshly spilled blood.

  Again, I shivered.

  He sighed.

  “Bella, love is not ideal,” he said. “It is a road covered in potholes.”

  What to say?

  A woman in platform heels and lacquered chignon, her eyebrows thin black arches, walked over and stopping at our table she began to belt out Edith Piaf’s Non, Je ne regrette rien to the accompaniment of an accordion played by a man in baggy grey flannels, black hair greased back and greying sideburns.

  Non, rien de rien ... Non, je ne regrette rien … Ni le bien qu'on m'a fait … Ni le mal; tout ça m'est bien égal … Non, rien de rien … Non, je ne regrette rien … Car ma vie, car mes joies … Aujourd'hui, ça commence avec toi …

  She had the pronounced guttural r of Provence just as Piaf used to have.

  “Beautiful,” said Jean-Louis. “I adore the late Piaf.”

  The waiter with the crooked bow tie rushed up and appeared to enjoy the performance as well but after the woman’s final aujourd’hui, ça commence avec toi, which had drowned all conversation at the tables, he whispered something to her and she and the accordionist walked away, her platforms noisy on the cobblestones.

  “Too much disturbance here tonight. I apologise,” said the waiter to no one in particular.

  “We enjoyed that,” Jean-Louis told him.

  “Sorry …,” said the waiter, “but the boss does not want the guests to be disturbed.”

  Some new arrivals sat down at the table next to ours and a red-faced man took a packet of still sealed Gitanes from his pocket. He ripped open the blue packet and lit up, and turning to face our table, he blew white rings of smoke into our faces.

  “Now, t
his is disturbance,” I said.

  Jean-Louis asked the waiter for the bill.

  “And no halving, Bella.”

  It was close to midnight and Place du Tertre’s artists had already packed up their easels and had wandered off, and the tourists had also begun to leave and the waiters were clearing the tables and chatting and laughing at whatever they were talking about.

  Jean-Louis pointed in the direction of Sacré-Coeur Basilica. Only the spire of its tallest bulbous white dome could be seen over the rooftops.

  “Let’s walk that way, Bella.”

  Overhead clouds had gathered and at the foot of the Montmartre hill Paris was shrouded in a dark veil like a woman, her religion obliging her to cover herself from the world.

  The funicular from the hill down to the cobbled streets of the Butte had already stopped running for the night and Jean-Louis and I descended by the steps to red-light Pigalle where the p’tites femmes were still plying their trade, their mascara-lined eyes red with too many pastis or perhaps only with exhaustion after having had to satisfy too many men for one night.

  “I’ll go home now,” I told Jean-Louis.

  “So will I.”

  I still did not know where he lived.

  “Where is your apartment?”

  “Eiffel Tower. Bordering the Seine.”

  It was a long Métro ride from Pigalle and a noisy drunk made conversation impossible. We reached Concorde station where both of us were to change to different lines but Jean-Louis said he will escort me to Saint-Michel station, there where I had bid him goodnight a week earlier. At the station we both descended.

  “Shall we do this again?” Jean-Louis asked.

  We were standing on the same spot where we had stood the week before.

  “That would be nice,” I replied.

  “If this were a Claude Lelouch film this is where we kiss, Bella.”

  Above our heads the moon had crept from behind a white cloud.

  “But life is not a Claude Lelouch film, Jean-Louis.”