Bella...A French Life

by Marilyn Z. Tomlins

  In the Latin Quarter a street was never deserted and silent. That night was no different.

  Jean-Louis and I stood at my open living room window. Down on the pavement, a young man was scaring girls with a small grey velvet mouse. He pressed something on the mouse when a girl approached and the mouse jumped from his hand and onto her. The girls he scared thus shrieked and jumped in the air, and patrons sitting on the terrace of a bistro, having watched and waited for the reaction, roared with laughter.

  We sat down: I, on the settee, Jean-Louis in an armchair. He put his still almost full glass down on the coffee table between the settee and the armchair. He looked from the glass to me.

  “Bella, the girls are going through a tough time.”

  “Is it because of Carmen’s diabetes?” I asked.

  He nodded.

  “But not only.”

  “So, what is it, Jean-Louis? Can I help?”

  “I feel responsible.”

  “For the diabetes?”

  “For their unhappiness.”

  I walked to the mantelpiece where he had put the bottle of wine. My glass was empty. I filled it. Jean-Louis had returned to the open window: he stood with his back to me. Laughter, almost hysterical, was still rising from the street below. Few lights were on in the buildings across the street. I sat down on the settee.

  “I feel so guilty, Bella.”

  He still had his back to me.

  “You can’t blame yourself for the diabetes,” I said to his back.

  “This is not about the diabetes, Bella,” he said firmly and emphasised the ‘not’.

  He swung round, but remained at the window, leaning against the wall beside it. His glass was empty.

  “What is this about?” I asked.

  “It is about divorcing the girls’ mother.”

  The patch of sky I could see through my living room window was suddenly starlit.

  I wanted to laugh, dance: he was going to marry me!

  “You have opted for divorce?” I asked.

  “Contemplated it. Thought I should finalise the separation. I spoke to a colleague about alimony. Increasing the allowance I give the girls’ mother already.”

  He fell silent. Walked to the mantelpiece and refilled his glass.

  “Come sit,” I told him.

  Like a child having been ordered to do so by its mother, he sat down, again in the armchair.

  “Bella, I am thinking of going back to live with the girls’ mother.”

  Jesus! He could not even say her name, but he was going to go back to her!

  “Nothing needs to change as far as you and I are concerned,” he said.

  He was looking down to the floor.

  I said nothing. I had been struck dumb: such happiness one second and such a slap in the face the next.

  “I will continue to see you,” he said.

  I still remained silent; still could not speak.

  “It will just be that I will change my address and my telephone number.”

  Outside on the street, a girl shrieked in fear. It is incredible how scared a girl can be of a mouse.

  “Bella, I love you. I did not plan this scenario. I want you to know that. To understand.”

  I was still silent.

  “Bella, say something. For God’s sake, say something.”

  I stood up to pour myself another glass of wine. Sorrow can be alleviated by good sleep, a bath and glass of wine. Who had said this? I had no idea.

  Jean-Louis smoked, but rarely. I watched him take a crumpled packet of cigarettes and a lighter from a pocket of the beige jacket, which was hanging over the back of the armchair. Slowly, he took a cigarette from the packet, tapped it against the back of his hand. He lit it, tilting his head towards the lighter in his hand.

  In the next few seconds, the acrid odour that filled my nostrils was surprisingly stimulating. Once, in my first year at ‘uni’ I had accepted a marijuana cigarette from a fellow student and no sooner than I had inhaled, was I drifting up to the ceiling. The world looked so beautiful from there, a luminous pink glow hung over the room down below, and I was certain I saw a fairy with long transparent wings flying about. But, was my fall from the ceiling a hard one! All of a sudden, the room was pitch-black and a horrible smell, the smell of a cadaver which I had to watch being dissected, clung to everything. Never had I touched the stuff again.

  Would I yet again crash to the ground?

  “Jean-Louis, are you offering me the position of First Mistress?” I asked.

  The room had gone pitch-black. Yes, yet again I had crashed to the ground.

  “Don’t be silly, Bella,” he said, crossing and uncrossing his legs.

  He had looked up at me.

  “So what are you offering me?” I asked. “Stolen nights? No. Full nights? Of course not. Minutes on the rear seat of your car? But no, your car has no rear seat. So what? A few minutes in an elevator? A few minutes on a service staircase? A few minutes on a park bench? Or what?”

  “You are being vulgar, Bella.”

  He slumped back into the armchair.

  “What you have just suggested to me, Jean-Louis, that is what I call vulgar!”

  “Don’t be like that!” he snapped.

  He rose and walked back to the window. He leaned out. The only sound coming from the street was from the moving traffic: the young man must have taken his velvet mouse home, a home which was probably a small attic room.

  “Bella, I will go. We can talk about this tomorrow,” said Jean-Louis.

  He had turned and was looking at me.

  He almost ran to the armchair and grabbed his jacket. Walking to my front door, he pulled the jacket on the ground behind him. At the door he turned round.

  “Bella, see you some time.”

  I remained sitting on the settee. The click of my front door closing, always such a soft sound, was like the detonation of a bomb in my ears.

  I poured what wine was left in the bottle and in our glasses down the kitchen sink.

  Wine is a false friend.

  -0-

  My telephone rung.

  “Bella …?”

  It was Jean-Louis.

  “Jean-Louis. Yes?”

  I wondered who he thought would be answering my phone at that time of the night? A ghost? It was after midnight.

  Several days had gone by since I had last seen him.

  “Bella, I’ve been thinking …”

  “A natural process for mankind, Jean-Louis. So what makes you call me at this time of the night to make the announcement? Do you want me to phone Einstein to tell him? But no, Einstein’s dead.”

  “Bella, don’t be like that, please. Come on girl!”

  He was pleading.

  I said nothing.

  “Bella,” he tried anew, “Listen. You’ve not been out of my mind for a moment since …”

  Since what? When he walked out of here, shooting a glance at me with the words see you some time?

  I had told Marion about it. She was outraged.

  “The son of a bitch, he ends it like that. Just like that. And after he had made you understand he was going to tie the knot with you. What a bastard!”

  I told her he had never spoken to me of marriage, or he had, but not about marrying me, but about his marriage to Colette.

  “All the same. What an arsehole.”

  Such occasions always made Marion manifest her knowledge of insults. Once, she had even called someone an arsehole in front of Father Pierre and I thought I would have to give the priest mouth-to-mouth because he hyperventilated so much.

  “What is it, Jean-Louis?” I asked.

  I tried to sound pleasant.

  “Can we talk, Bella?”

  “We’re talking.”

  “Face to face?”

  “What do you want to say?”

  “I’ve been thinking - and please leave Einstein out of it - I want to see you, I need to talk to you. We need to talk.”

  I let a few s
econds pass.

  “No, you can’t. I’ve just jumped from the window and this is my spirit holding the receiver.”

  “Please, don’t be like that, Bella.”

  I could see his face with the eyes of my memory. He would be looking straight at me, his brown eyes asking … no pleading, for comprehension. He would scratch the tip of his nose as if his nose was itching. Normally I would have pulled that hand away and kissed the palm, the soft and warm palm.

  I waited for him to continue.

  “Bella, I’ve always liked your name. Did I ever tell you?”

  “So you are phoning me to tell me you’ve always liked my name? Great! Will you phone me tomorrow this time and tell me you like nutmeg spread over your cauliflower?”

  “I hate bloody nutmeg and you know it!” he snapped.

  I said nothing.

  “Bella, do please listen, will you girl? I think we ought to meet to talk. I don’t want us to stop seeing each other. Bella, I love you, for God’s sake. I miss you like hell. I can’t stand the thought of never being with you again, of never seeing you again, of never touching you again, of never …”

  “I get the message,” I stopped him.

  “Can I come over?”

  “Now?”

  “If you say I may.”

  “You may not.”

  “Come to my place tomorrow after your work.”

  “No.”

  “Shall I come to your place tomorrow evening?”

  “No.”

  “Come on, Bella. Don’t play hard to get. I love you.”

  “Yes, Jean-Louis, so you have said, and if I remember correctly you offered me the position as First Mistress.”

  “Bella, I moved back in with the girls’ mother. I am trying to be a good father for the girls and this is why I moved back in with their mother. No other reason. I do not love her. I love you. I want to continue seeing you. I have to see you. I cannot live without you.”

  The last sentence sounded as if it had come from deep inside him. My mother would have said men do lay it on thick had she overheard the conversation.

  “Jean-Louis, I am not prepared to be ‘the other woman’,” I said into the receiver.

  “You won’t be. The girls’ mother is and will remain so.”

  “This is not how I understand it.”

  “Are you going to slam the phone down?”

  “I was not planning to, but you’ve given me an idea …”

  “No!” he cried, “do not do that. Please, listen to me. Can I come over? Not now, if you do not want me to, but tomorrow? Please? I love you, Bella. I love you.”

  “It is late.”

  “And?”

  “I have to be at the hospital at five in the morning.”

  “And you need to sleep now, yes, Bella, I understand. So shall I come over tomorrow evening? At seven say?”

  “Jean-Louis, as far as I am concerned, you and I are over. You returned to your wife. You had a choice. You chose.”

  “So it is really over?”

  “I’ve said what I wanted to say.”

  “I am begging you, Bella.”

  “I have no coin, not even a centime, to drop into your paper cup, Jean-Louis.”

  “So, you never loved me?”

  I put the receiver down. I had done so slowly, gently, as if I feared, should I slam it down, it would burst his eardrum, because with such a force would I have thrown it down.

  So, you never loved me, was what he said.

  I loved him. How I had loved him!

  “I still say he is rat,” Marion said to me.

  It was forty-eight hours later and she and I met for lunch.

  “I second that,” said Marius.

  He had joined us for an after lunch coffee.

  We remained sitting in the restaurant, that of Paris’s George V five-star hotel. Marion only ever wanted to go to the top and therefore, most expensive restaurants. All the other patrons had left and all but one of the waiters, a boy hardly out of his teens, had gone off duty. He probably had had no say in the matter of who would remain to tend to us.

  “You must be so angry at this bastard,” said Marion.

  “And I won’t blame you,” added Marius.

  “I’m not angry at him,” I told them. “He loves his daughters and he wants to be with them.”

  “Bullshit,” said Marion.

  The young waiter dropped a spoon on the wooden floor.

  “Apologies …,” he said.

  “Bella, do be careful when you meet a man next. No married ones please. The moment you hear he’s married, get up and walk away,” said Marius.

  My mother was more vocal.

  “I never trusted him. I always thought he was going to do this. I told you he was going to leave you for another woman. I was not wrong. He left you for another woman: his wife. And Bella, you’re in the wrong too. You were an adulteress. So, do not expect me to offer you a shoulder to cry on.”

  I told her: I don’t cry.

  I cried.

  After each new day at Chartreux Hospital, after having put a new born child into its father’s waiting arms, after having seen the love in his eyes for his child, and for the woman who had brought it into the world for him, I went home and I crawled into bed and I pulled the blanket over my head and I cried.

  -0-

  Chapter Thirty

  It is Monday.

  The aroma of coffee wakes me yet again. I am going to become used to this. To a man, this man, making me coffee in the morning.

  Quickly, I dress. I put on a pair of jeans and a red sweater. I bought the sweater in Paris still, in the city’s Chinatown of the thirteen arrondissement. There are silver sequins across the bodice. My mother liked the sweater; Marion does not and uses a variety of adjectives when she speaks of it.

  Colin is in his leather outfit: so he will be going out.

  “I’ve made myself at home again this morning, Bella.”

  He was sitting at the work table when I walked in, but rose.

  “How did you sleep, Colin?”

  “Had a problem going off. Counted a few thousand sheep and then I did drop off. How did you sleep?”

  “Like a baby.”

  “Are babies really masters when it comes to sleeping?”

  “Like with all of us, no two babies are alike. I’ve come across real little horrors. I pitied the parents.”

  “Oh dear!”

  End of this line of conversation … I hope!

  “One day you must tell me about your experiences as a paediatrician, Bella.”

  So … no, it was not.

  “Doctoring stories are boring.”

  Hopefully, I have ended this line of conversation.

  “I’m going to walk around the mount today. Have a look around. Can I bring you anything?”

  Yipee! So I did end that line of conversation!

  “I’ll ask you to come with me, but you probably have lots to do here,” he adds.

  “I … yes … I have. Sorry. Some other day perhaps?”

  I pop three croissants into the oven and I set out two places on the work table.

  “I watered the Peace Lily,” he says. “I hope you do not mind.”

  He is watching me.

  I mind yes, because Fred said the plant ought not be given too much water.

  “I do not mind at all,” I say.

  “Let me do that,” he says.

  He points to the oven.

  “Don’t burn your hands,” I warn. “Put on the oven gloves.”

  The oven door is open and he has grabbed hold of one of the piping-hot croissants.

  “I have a doctor in the house,” he says.

  He is smiling mischievously.

  “But you do not welcome any reference to you having been a doctor, do you Bella?”

  His eyes are questioning me.

  I start buttering one of the croissants which is now lying on the plate in front of me where he has dropped it.

&nb
sp; “Never mind …,” he mutters.

  He sits down opposite me. He spreads his two croissants thickly with Gertrude’s award-winning strawberry jam. Some of the jam gets onto his fingers: he licks them clean. Quite an unbecoming action, but yet one so sexual: red tongue moving with light rapid strokes over first one finger and then another.

  I look away.

  “You are so lucky,” he says. “This is a beautiful house and your Gertrude is a wonderful jam maker, and I do envy you.”

  His fingers, clean, he drops his hands onto the table.

  “I’m lucky, yes.”

  He tells me he does not know what time he will be back from the mount and I need not prepare dinner for him.

  “You are the kind of guest my parents would have adored. You’ve paid for meals you are not having.”

  I tell him about one of our English guests who, each morning, ordered a full English breakfast: fried egg, bacon, sausages, tomato, mushrooms and even baked beans. However, never did he eat the egg: not one morning did he eat the egg and each morning my parents had to throw it away. They asked him why he was ordering an egg every morning when he did not eat it. His reply was that he was entitled to an egg as he was paying for it. For the rest of his stay he insisted on a fried egg ‘with no lace’ on his plate and never did he eat it and each morning my parents threw it out.

  “That’s so uneducated,” says Colin.

  “In fact, he was an educated man. A newspaper editor,” I tell him.

  “Does he still come to stay?”

  “These days, he can’t make it.”

  “Why?”

  “He’s six foot under.”

  The grandfather clock begins to chime. Colin and I look on our watches simultaneously. It is a quarter past nine.

  “I’ll be off,” he says.

  “Have a nice day,” I say.

  I will spend the day walking from room to room.

  No.

  I will go out too.

  -0-

  I drive to Avranches and I go to the town’s LeClerc supermarket. I do not want to buy anything; I do not need anything. I buy a bar of chocolate all the same because I am the type who does not want to leave a shop without buying something. I go to a lingerie shop. Its owner is Amandine’s sister: red-head Louise.

  “Like what are you looking for, Miss?” she asks.