“Do you know something, Bella, right now I do not care a damn if we have been abandoned here on this barren hill,” said Jean-Louis.
We stopped walking.
“What do you want me to say to that, Jean-Louis?” I asked.
“That you also do not care.”
He did not give me time to reply; he put his arms around me and drew me to him, quite roughly, urgently. And yes, I also did not care if we, he and I, had been abandoned on that barren hill, because I felt an intense desire to remain there, there in his arms. Forever.
The two-storey grey building was a hotel. I was embarrassed we were booking in without luggage.
“For the night?” asked the receptionist, a confident young woman with a look of having-seen-it-before on her face.
Oh Jesus, the technicalities of sex. Had I blushed? I think I had.
We listened to the receptionist’s directions to our room and the time breakfast would be served the following morning. She chose a key from a board behind her and held it up as if she was showing us a trophy. She had a smile from one ear-ringed ear to another. Jean-Louis lifted his right foot from the floor as if he wanted to burst into a sprint. To escape the amused young woman or to get to the room she has chosen for us? I tried to make myself as small as possible behind him.
“Second floor,” said she.
“Thank you, Miss,” said Jean-Louis.
“Leave the key with reception, should you go out, Sir.”
“Thank you, Miss,” he repeated.
He was smiling.
We started climbing the wooden twisting stairs: there was no lift.
Halfway up, Jean-Louis felt for my hand. He had begun to take two steps at a time. I could not keep up with his pace. He let go of my hand. I slipped. He looked back. He was no longer smiling. I, on the contrary, had started to giggle, giggle like a teenage virgin. I was of course neither a teenager nor a virgin. My giggling grew louder. Reaching the corridor, I tried not to giggle anymore. I did not want to alert those behind the closed doors which we were passing of our imminent activity. At our room, Jean-Louis, like an inexperienced and nervous teenager, fumbled with the key, struggling to fit it into the lock. Amused, I watched.
He succeeded in fitting the key into the lock and he pushed open the door. He stepped inside. I followed. The room was small, its double bed almost filling it. A bland smell of detergent filled our nostrils. I closed the door and locked it. A ‘In Case of a Fire’ notice hung behind the door. Also a ‘Do Not Disturb’ notice.
We had come to a halt a few paces towards the bed. I looked at Jean-Louis. He let his white blazer slip from his shoulders, grabbing it before it hit the bare floorboards which were creaking under our weight, to fling it onto an upright chair beside a small table on which stood a platter with an electric kettle and what would be needed for making coffee or tea.
I felt a little faint, faint with the excitement rising in me.
He turned to me.
“Bella …?”
He took my head in his hands and rested his lips against my eyelids, gently, but quickly he dropped his head so that his mouth was parallel to mine and next he pressed his warm and wet lips against mine, pushing hard against my mouth as if he was about to eat me. He was hurting me. I groan of pain escaped me. He released his grip and so suddenly and violently did he do so I almost lost my balance, but quickly he pushed me onto the bed behind us.
“I need the bathroom,” he said. “Just a moment.”
He halted at the window, opened it and reached for the green shutter behind it, which he closed, removing from sight the bare grey hillock where we had a few minutes earlier walked.
“That’s better,” he said.
The room, thus darkened, its ambience was less harsh, more intimate. Even the bland smell of detergent seemed to have gone, or we had become accustomed to it.
I sat on the bed, motionless.
The man about to become my lover disappeared into the bathroom. A couple of minutes later he reappeared. He was naked, his right hand covering his slightly erect manhood. To keep it under control?
Oh no!
From the corridor came footsteps.
I took a sharp breath and held it. Was someone going to knock on the door to offer us a pre-dinner drink?
Jean-Louis too looked towards the door.
The only other light in the room came from underneath it. A shadow passed in the light. There was no knock. The footsteps ambled along the corridor.
Exhaling audibly, Jean-Louis walked over to me and pulled me to my feet by my hands.
“Let me undress you,” he murmured.
He rolled my jacket off my shoulders and chucked it on top of his but it slipped to the floor. We did not pick it up. He rolled my trousers down over my buttocks, his hands lightly touching my skin. I wiggled for the trousers to fall to my ankles and stepped from them. His hands hot and trembling slightly, he turned me around and unhooked my bra.
I, too, had begun to tremble slightly.
“Let me help you, Bella.”
He meant with my panty.
He slipped his hands over my hips and with a hurried movement he rolled my panty down over my legs. Suddenly embarrassed at my nakedness, I raised my arms to my breasts and covered them.
I was feeling breathless.
Jean-Louis knelt on the floor and took hold of my panty to slip it over my naked feet. He looked up at the dark half-moon of pubic hair which hid the only part of me left to be discovered.
“I like that,” he whispered.
He pushed the fingers of one hand through the hair and, spreading his fingers, he moved his hand over my stomach to my belly button. At the same time he brought his head down to my stomach, pressed his lips against my skin, and eased me backwards onto the bed.
He lowered his body onto mine and slivers of light passing through the shutters made him look like some strange creature from outer space, or from the depth of the ocean, about to devour me.
I waited.
Using his legs and his right hand he forced my legs, still hanging over the edge of the bed, apart. With his left hand, pushed under my body, he lifted me, lining me up for the carnal embrace which was to follow. I could feel him inside me and I was surprised by the urgency with which he pumped my body. With his right hand he pulled at my hair, wet with perspiration, and clinging to my face.
Suddenly, he stopped moving.
“A moment please,” he said.
I could feel him slipping from me and next his sperm spurted onto my stomach. His eyes were closed, the veins on his forehead pumped full of blood.
He rolled off me, his features relaxed, his eyes shiny with content.
“Your turn now,” he said.
He began to stroke my legs, his fingers slowly moving to between my thighs. When my features too were relaxed, he playfully bit the tip of my nose.
Holding one another, Jean-Louis and I slept for a while, and on waking, he started to stroke my breasts. First tenderly, next, urgently, and we made love again, not just once but again and again and with less urgency than the first time. Each time he withdrew and spilled his life-giving seed over my thighs.
Neither needed any tricks to arouse or satisfy the other.
He was completely lost in this lady and this lady in him.
“Bella, sweetie, it is going on for nine,” he said finally.
Nine in the morning; not nine at night. Breakfast was served until ten. We gathered up our clothes and tried to straighten out the creases. We were hungry.
After breakfast we drove back to Geneva and Jean-Louis dropped me at my hotel.
“Don’t come in,” I told him. “I need to brush up.”
“If you are sure.”
The rest of that weekend was bliss. Jean-Louis and I went for walks along the lake; we went on one of the lake steamers for a cruise. We dined in a quaint basement room of a restaurant in the old town where a man in green knickerbockers was yodelling as if his life depended on it, an
d on the Saturday night Jean-Louis came up to my room and he phoned down to Room Service for a bottle of Krug and I saw the bill the waiter handed him and I nearly fainted.
“This will feed a family of four for a week,” I protested.
“Listen to me, Bella, I am a poor man’s son and I paid for my studies myself working nights as a dishwasher in a restaurant, so you saying that does not make me feel ashamed,” he replied.
Our lovemaking was a wonderful replay of that of the previous afternoon and night.
-0-
Back in Paris, I telephoned my mother.
“I am with someone, Mom.”
“I hope he is nice, Bella.”
Nice. From the Latin nescius, which originally meant ignorant, silly, foolish, incapable. Today’s meaning: kind, agreeable, pleasant, and delightful.
All that and more. Jean-Louis was all that and more.
I was in love.
-0-
Chapter Twelve
Colin Lerwick is still in the courtyard. He is sitting on one of the benches I have out here. He has put his leather windbreaker back on; it has clouded over and a cool wind has started up.
He gets up when he sees me.
“I’ll be on my way.”
“No! First let us see what the clouds are planning for you.”
I sit down beside him. A blue canopy from which hang yellow tassels shelters us. I saw such a bench on one of Frida Kahlo’s paintings and I searched throughout the region for one and finally found it in the Bazar Hotel de Ville catalogue.
“It rains often here in Normandy, does it not?”asks Colin Lerwick.
“Not more than anywhere else. It’s a myth, really, that it always rains in Normandy and Brittany.”
“What brought you here, if I may be so bold as to ask?”
“Someone had to run the guest house after my mother’s death. My brother did not want to do so. He is a doctor.”
“You too are a doctor, you said.”
“Not a practising one. Not anymore.”
“I see.”
He wants an explanation. I can see it in his eyes.
“Would you like a drink? Something stronger than tea perhaps?” I ask him quickly.
“I would love it. Thank you.”
“Do you have a preference? I have just about anything and everything in the bar.”
“I hate pastis, so if you can discard that one I will give you a free hand, though I ask you not to let it be a heavy hand. I have to get my bike down the hill and perhaps all the way to Avranches.”
I return with two long-stemmed coupes.
“Kir Royale,” I explain.
“I know Kir, but what is a Kir Royale?”
“One uses champagne instead of white wine.”
“My, my, Dr. Wolff, what extravagance!”
“Please, not the doctor bit, I ask you.”
“What - who - shall we drink to?” he asks.
“To Normandy where it hardly ever rains.”
“This really is out of this world!” he says.
He had downed just one mouthful of the drink.
“I made it with Bollinger. It’s best this way.”
“I would have to ride up here tomorrow for another.”
I laugh.
“I drink it - Kir Royale - when I'm happy and when I'm sad. Sometimes I drink it when I'm alone. When I have company I consider it obligatory. I trifle with it if I'm not hungry and I drink it when I am. Otherwise I never touch it, unless I'm thirsty.”
“You do?”
I laugh yet again.
“Sir, I stole that from Mrs Bollinger. She of course said it of her champagne.”
“I was wondering …”
Now, he is laughing too.
It starts to rain; tiny drops so light that the wind flings them in all directions. Above our heads the tassels begin to swing, next, to slap against the canopy. Soon, they are heavy with rainwater and drooping like tulips in a May downpour.
“Shall we run for it?” I ask, my face wet and my feet getting so because the rain has started to come down really hard and puddles have formed on the tiled surface of the courtyard.
“No, let us hold out …”
There is a clap of thunder from the direction of the bay which cannot be seen when one is in the courtyard. There is another, and, as if on cue from someone who is very angry up in heaven, the clouds above us begin to roll. Without a word, Colin Lerwick and I jump up and start running for cover. We almost collide dashing through the kitchen door, and he grabs me at the elbow to stop me from falling down.
We are both laughing. Laughing like two people who have known each other for years. Two friends who have known each other for years.
-0-
When Le Presbytère is closed, I treat myself by sleeping in the biggest of my seven guest bedrooms. The room is on the first floor and directly above the drawing room and it has two bay windows. Always, the last thing that Honorine and Martine do before they clock off until the following Easter is to help me move my things from my usual quarters - the small bedroom beside the ‘Rose Window’ room - and always, the first thing I do on this autumnal migration of mine is to air the en-suite bathroom to rid it of the smell of lavender from the Bien Être eau de cologne, its habitual August occupant, Mrs Mathews from Hull, buys duty-free on the ferry which brings her across the Channel.
“Why do you use this bedroom in particular, Miss, when you can use any of the others?” Honorine once wanted to know.
I do so because this was the bedroom which my mother always allowed Jean-Louis and me to have on our weekends at Le Presbytère.
-0-
I am standing at one of the bay windows and I watch the wind and lashing rain bend the branches of the trees growing in my front garden. I love a storm, and this is a storm, and if I were alone here now I would be out there, standing with my feet pressed into the mud and my face lifted to the angry heaven to receive its caress. My father also loved storms. Once he said to me: “Bella, kleine liebling, for the man, sound in body and serene of mind, there is no such thing as bad weather; every day has its beauty, and storms, which whip the blood, do but make it pulse more vigorously.” He quoted George Gissing as I learnt only later when he was already gone.
Despite that I love storms, could Colin Lerwick ride back to the village or to Avranches in such a raging gale, or would I have to let him stay here for the night? I make sure that Honorine and Martine clean the house up thoroughly before they go off for the winter, so the bedrooms are clean. All I would have to do would be to make a bed for him.
If I do not want him too near to my bedroom, I could put him up in one of the two ground floor bedrooms. They have direct access to the garden, so usually I let a physically handicapped guest, who uses a wheelchair, stay there. One such guest is Tony from Colorado, a former American Air Force fighter pilot who had lost his legs when his plane was shot down over Hanoi, and who, each summer when he comes to stay, tells me war stories. “Mash, the movie - Jesus, Ma’am! Vietnam was worse than that! Those Viets ... what cruel little bastards ..!”
What about food tonight? I would have to give him something to eat. Breakfast tomorrow morning would not be a problem because I always have a bag of croissants in the freezer, but supper tonight will be a problem.
I find him in the drawing room.
He is standing at one of the bay windows and watching the storm as I have been doing upstairs. He turns round when he hears me behind him.
“This is ... just so unfortunate,” I say.
He nods.
“What do you suggest, Miss Wolff?”
I cannot let this man ride down the hill in such rain.
“I could let you have a room for tonight. I mean, you would get drenched riding down to the village now, Sir.”
“I can! Oh, that’s really kind of you, Miss Wolff. Do you have a ... a ... perhaps a small room - like a maid’s room so I would not be putting you out? And please not the ‘sir’; it makes me feel
… ancient.”
“My staff do not live on the premises so I do not have a maid’s room.”
“Oh dear!”
“No, that’s alright. I have two bedrooms on the ground floor. You would want to unload your bike and you would not have to carry everything up the stairs. I am though afraid both rooms are small.”
“Good grief no, the smallest room in the world will be just fine. Excellent! Wonderful! Thank you!”
I lead the way to the room Tony always has and which I think of as the ‘Tony from Colorado’ room.
“I am not going to charge you for tonight. As I said - the room is small ...”
“I will pay you for tonight.”
He is smiling mischievously like a schoolboy who is teasing one of the spotty, skinny or plump girls in his class.
It makes me smile too, but I am sure I am blushing because blushing has always been a problem for me. “Bella, you’re blonde, my girl, so you will be prone to blushing,” my mother used to say.
“I will get some sheets and blankets, Mr Lerwick, and if you would like to bring your stuff in.”
“Will do, but please, if we are going to spend the night together, also do not call me Mr Lerwick. Do please call me Colin.”
He is still smiling that mischievous smile, and I know I am blushing because my face is suddenly hot, hot like it used to become when I was a child and was coming down with a cold and my mother made me bend over the washbasin which was filled with steaming-hot water into which she had infused dried oregano and thyme, a towel over my head.
“I’ll get the sheets.”
I rush from the room.
“Ok. Thanks.”
He spoke to my disappearing back.
-0-
Chapter Thirteen
Gertrude is the only one who ever cooks here at Le Presbytère.
I wish she’s here this evening because I would like to give Colin Lerwick - Colin - something really tasty to eat; when he’s back in England he can tell his friends about the guest house and more holidaymakers will come my way.
Bella...A French Life Page 7
