The Little Paris Bookshop

by Nina George

  ‘Let’s go,’ said Perdu, his voice rough and dry.

  For the first time in five weeks they withdrew money in Avignon from branches of their banks, though this required dozens of phone calls, faxed signatures for comparison and close examination of their passports. Then they rented a small milk-white car at the train station and set off for the Luberon.

  They took a minor road southeast from Avignon. It was only thirty miles to Bonnieux. Max gazed raptly out of the open windows. To the left and the right fields of sunflowers, lush green carpets of vines and rows of lavender bushes painted the land a mosaic of colours. Yellow, dark-green and purple, spanned by a saturated blue sky dotted with white cushions of cloud.

  Far away on the horizon they could make out the Big Luberon and the Little Luberon – a great, long table mountain with a matching stool to its right.

  The sun was beating down on the land, eating into earth and flesh, flooding the fields and towns with its imperious brilliance.

  ‘We need straw hats,’ Max groaned languidly, ‘and linen trousers.’

  ‘We need deodorant and sun cream,’ Perdu snapped in reply.

  It was obvious that Max was in his element. He slipped into this landscape like the right piece into a jigsaw puzzle. Unlike Jean. Everything he saw seemed strangely remote and foreign to him. He still felt numb.

  Villages were perched like crowns on top of the green hills. Beige sandstone and light roof tiles to ward off the heat. Majestic birds of prey patrolled the air. The roads were narrow and empty.

  Manon had seen these mountains, hills and colourful fields. She had felt this mild air; she had known these hundred-year-old trees in whose dense canopies cicadas crouched, producing a constant clicking that sounded to Jean’s ears like: ‘What? What? What?’

  What are you doing here? What are you looking for here? What do you feel here?

  Nothing.

  This country made no impression on Jean.

  They were already passing Ménerbes with its curry-coloured rocks, and approaching the Calavon valley and Bonnieux among vineyards and farmsteads.

  ‘Bonnieux rises in a stack between the Grand Luberon and the Petit Luberon. Like a five-layered cake,’ Manon had told Perdu. ‘At the very top, the old church and the hundred-year-old cedars and the most scenic cemetery in the Luberon. Down at the bottom, the winegrowers, the fruit farmers and the holiday homes. And between them three layers of houses and restaurants. All connected by steep paths and stairs, which explains why all the village girls have such gorgeous, strong calves.’ She had shown Jean hers, and he had kissed them.

  ‘I think it’s beautiful around here,’ said Max.

  They bumped along dirt tracks, curved around a sunflower field, drove through a vineyard – and were forced to admit that they had absolutely no idea where they were. Jean pulled over onto the verge.

  ‘It should be somewhere near here, Le Petit St Jean,’ muttered Max, staring at the map.

  The cicadas chirped. Now it sounded more like: ‘Hee hee hee hee hee.’ Other than that it was so quiet that only the soft ticking of the cooling engine troubled the deep silence of the countryside.

  Then there was the juddering of a fast-approaching tractor. It emerged from one of the vineyards at speed. They’d never seen a tractor like this before – it was extremely narrow, and its tyres were thin but very tall to allow it to race between the rows of vines.

  Behind the wheel sat a young man in a baseball cap, sunglasses, cutoff jeans and a faded white T-shirt; he acknowledged them with a nod as he rumbled past. Max waved frantically, and the tractor pulled up a few yards further along the track. Max ran over.

  ‘Excuse me, Monsieur!’ Jean heard Max call over the noise of the engine. ‘Where can we find a house called “Le Petit St Jean”, belonging to Brigitte Bonnet?’

  The man cut the engine, took off his baseball cap and sunglasses, and wiped his lower arm across his face as a cascade of long, chocolate-brown hair fell over his shoulders.

  ‘Oh. Pardonnez-moi, pardon me, Mademoiselle. I thought you were a, er … man,’ Jean heard a distraught Max croak.

  ‘I bet you imagine women trussed up in tight dresses, not driving tractors,’ the stranger said coolly, piling her hair back under her cap.

  ‘Or pregnant, barefoot and chained to the stove,’ Max added.

  The stranger hesitated – then broke into peals of laughter.

  As Jean craned his neck to get a better look at the two of them, the young woman had already put her large dark glasses back on and was explaining the way to Max: the Bonnets’ property lay on the far side of the vineyard, and they simply had to drive around it on the right.

  ‘Merci, Mademoiselle.’

  The rest of Max’s words were swallowed up in the howl of the throttle. Perdu could see only the bottom half of her face now – her lips twitched into an amused smile. Then she pressed the accelerator to the floor and rattled away, whipping up a small cloud of dust as she went.

  ‘It’s really beautiful around here,’ said Max as he got back into the car. Jean thought there was a glow about him.

  ‘Something happen?’ he asked.

  ‘With that woman?’ Max said with a laugh that was a little too loud and a little high-pitched. ‘Well, in a nutshell, straight ahead, that’s the way, so … anyway, she looked terrific.’ Max was as happy as a cuddly toy rabbit, Jean thought. ‘Dirty, sweaty, but really cute. Like chocolate on top of the fridge. Other than that, no, otherwise … nothing happened. Nice tractor. Why do you ask?’ Max looked befuddled.

  ‘No reason,’ Jean lied.

  A few minutes later they found Le Petit St Jean, an early-eighteenth-century farmhouse, something out of a picture book: watery-grey stone; tall, narrow windows; a garden in such full and extravagant bloom that it looked as if it had been painted. In an internet café Max had come across www.luberonweb.com, and through it he had found Madame Bonnet, who had one of the last vacancies in the area. She rented out a room in her converted dovecote, her pigeonnier, breakfast included.

  Brigitte Bonnet – a petite crop-haired woman in her late fifties – was waiting for them with a warm smile and a basket full of freshly picked apricots. She was dressed in a man’s vest and light-green Bermuda shorts, her outfit topped off with a floppy hat. Madame Bonnet was tanned as brown as a nut, and her eyes shone a liquid blue.

  Her apricots were covered with sweet, soft fuzz, and her converted dovecote turned out to be a twelve-foot-square hideaway with a washtub, a toilet the size of a cupboard, a few hooks by way of a wardrobe, and an uncomfortably narrow bed.

  ‘Where’s the second bed?’ asked Jean.

  ‘Oh, Messieurs, there’s only one. Aren’t you a couple?’

  ‘I’ll sleep outside,’ Max swiftly suggested.

  The dovecote was small but wonderful, and the view from its high windows stretched as far as the Valensole plateau. The building stood in the middle of a huge fruit and lavender garden with a gravel terrace and a broad stone wall that resembled the remains of a castle. A small, welcoming fountain burbled away next to the dovecote. One could cool a bottle of wine in it and sit on the wall, legs dangling, gazing out over orchards, fields of vegetables and vineyards far down the valley, which seemed devoid of any roads or other farms. The site had been chosen by someone with a keen eye for a view.

  Max jumped up onto the broad wall and looked out over the plain, one hand shielding his eyes from the sun. If he concentrated, he could hear a tractor engine and see a small cloud of dust moving steadily from left to right, and then back from right to left.

  More lavender bushes, roses and fruit trees had been planted around the dovecote’s terrace, and two chairs with comfy, brightly coloured cushions stood at a mosaic table beneath a generous parasol. Here Madame Bonnet served the two men a bulbous, ice-cold bottle of Orangina each and, by way of greeting, some chilled bong veng, as she pronounced bon vin in her Provençal accent – a shimmering pale-yellow wine.

  ‘This is a bong veng
from here, a Luc Basset,’ she chattered. ‘The estate was founded in the seventeenth century. It’s just the other side of the D36, a fifteen-minute walk. Their Manon XVII won a gold medal this year.’

  ‘Excuse me, their what? Manon?’ asked Perdu in shock.

  Max had the presence of mind to intervene and thank their flustered hostess profusely. Max studied the wine label as Brigitte Bonnet sauntered away between the magnificent borders, stopping here and there to pick something. There was a printed drawing of a face above the word ‘Manon’ – a gentle frame of curls, the ghost of a smile and large, intense eyes directed at the viewer.

  ‘That’s your Manon?’ asked Max in astonishment.

  Jean nodded initially, then shook his head. No, of course this wasn’t Manon, much less his Manon. His Manon was dead and lovely, and she lived on only in his dreams. But now, without warning, she was staring out at him from this wine bottle.

  He took the bottle from Max’s hand and ran his finger gently over the drawing of Manon’s face. Her hair. Her cheek. Her chin, mouth, neck. He used to touch her in all those places, but …

  Only now came the tremors. They began in his knees and continued upward, sending a sizzling and a quaking through the inside of his tummy and chest, before advancing along his arms and fingers, and taking hold of his lips and eyelids. His circulation was on the point of collapse.

  His voice was flat as he whispered, ‘She loved the sound apricots make as you pick them. You need to take them gently between your thumb and two fingers, twist them a little and they go knck. Her cat was called Miaow. In winter Miaow would sleep on Manon’s head like a hat. Manon said she had inherited her father’s toes – toes with a shapely waist. Manon loved her father dearly. And she loved pancakes filled with Banon cheese and lavender honey. And she would sometimes laugh in her dreams when she was asleep, Max. She was married to Luc, whereas I was merely her lover. Luc Basset, the vigneron.’

  Jean looked up. He set down the wine bottle on the mosaic table with trembling hands. He would have preferred to hurl it against the wall, had it not been for his irrational fear of shattering Manon’s face.

  He could barely stand it; he could barely stand himself. He was in one of the most picturesque places on earth, with a friend who had become his son and confidant. He had burned his bridges behind him and sailed south on water and tears.

  Only to discover that he still wasn’t ready.

  In his head he was standing in the hallway of his flat, trapped behind a bookcase.

  Had he imagined that simply coming here would miraculously resolve everything? That he could leave his torment behind on the waterways, and trade his unwept tears for a dead woman’s absolution? That he had come far enough to earn redemption?

  Yes, he had.

  But it wasn’t that easy.

  It’s never that easy.

  He reached out angrily and gave the bottle a violent spin. He didn’t want Manon giving him that look any more. No. He couldn’t face her like this. Not as this non-person whose heart drifted, unmoored, lest he love and lose his beloved again.

  When Max slipped a hand into his, Jean clutched it tightly. Very tightly.

  36

  The silky southern air streamed through the car. Jean had wound down all the windows of the clapped-out Renault 5. Gérard Bonnet, Brigitte’s husband, had lent him this one after they had dropped off the rental car in Apt.

  The right door was blue, the left one red, and the rest of the old banger was a rusty-beige colour. Perdu had set out in this car with a small travel bag. He had driven via Bonnieux to Lourmarin, and then via Pertuis to Aix. From there he had taken the fastest route south to the sea. Marseilles was resplendent and proud, spread out on the bay down below – the great city where Africa, Europe and Asia kissed and did battle. The port lay like a glittering, breathing organism in the summer twilight as he came out of the hills on the motorway near Vitrolles.

  To his right the white houses of the city. To his left the blue of sky and water. The view took his breath away.

  The sea.

  How it sparkled.

  ‘Hello, sea,’ whispered Jean Perdu. The view tugged at him as though the water had pierced his heart with a harpoon and was slowly reeling him in on strong ropes.

  The water. The sky. White vapour trails in the blue above, white bow waves on the blue below.

  Oh yes, he was going to head into this boundless blue. Along the cliffs, and on and on and on. Until he shook off the trembling that still plagued him. Did it come from abandoning Lulu? Did it come from abandoning the hope that he had emerged from the sorrow?

  Jean Perdu wanted to carry on driving until he was sure. He wanted to find a place where he could hole up like a wounded animal.

  Heal. I have to heal. He hadn’t known that when he’d left Paris.

  He switched the radio on before he could be overwhelmed by the thought of everything he hadn’t known.

  ‘If you were to describe one event that made you who you are, what would it be? Give me a call, and tell me and everyone listening in the Var area.’

  The woman presenter with the friendly mousse-au-chocolat voice gave a phone number, then she put on some music. A slow track. Like rolling waves. The occasional melancholy sigh of an electric guitar. Drums murmuring like surf on the shore. ‘Albatross’ by Fleetwood Mac: a song that made Jean Perdu think of gulls wheeling in the setting sun, and of driftwood fires flickering on a beach at the edge of the world.

  As Jean drove along the motorway through the warm summer air above Marseilles, and wondered what his event might have been, ‘Margot from Aubagne’ told listeners about the moment when she began to become herself.

  ‘It was the birth of my first child, my daughter. She’s called Fleur. Thirty-six hours in labour. Who’d have thought that pain could bring such joy, such peace? I felt an incredible sense of release. All at once everything had a meaning, and I wasn’t scared of dying any more. I had given life, and pain was the path to joy.’

  For an instant Jean could understand this Margot from Aubagne. Nonetheless, he was a man. What it felt like to share one’s body with another for nine months remained a mystery to him; he would never be able to understand how part of himself could be passed on to a child and leave him forever.

  He entered the long tunnel under Marseilles’ cathedral, but he had radio reception anyway.

  The next caller was Gil from Marseilles. He had a rough, hard, working-class accent.

  ‘I became myself when my son died,’ he said falteringly, ‘because grief showed me what’s important in life. That’s what grief does. In the beginning it’s always there. You wake up and it’s there. It’s with you all day, everywhere you go. It’s with you in the evening; it won’t leave you alone at night. It grabs you by the throat and shakes you. But it keeps you warm. One day it might go, but not forever. It drops by from time to time. And then, eventually … all of a sudden I knew what was important – grief showed me. Love is important. Good food. And standing tall and not saying yes when you should say no.’

  More music. Jean left Marseilles behind.

  Did I think I was the only one grieving, the only one knocked sideways by it? Oh, Manon. I had no one I could talk to about you.

  He thought back to the trivial event that had caused him to cast off from Paris: seeing Hesse’s Stages made into novelty bookends; that deeply personal poem of human understanding … used for marketing purposes.

  He vaguely grasped that he could not afford to skip a stage in his mourning. But which one had he reached? Was he still in the end stage? Had he already reached a new beginning? Or was he falling, losing his footing? He turned the radio off. Soon he saw the exit for Cassis and got in the lane.

  He left the motorway, still deep in thought, and reaching Cassis a little later, he wound his way noisily up its steep streets. An abundance of holidaymakers, inflatable plastic animals; elsewhere, ladies in evening dresses and diamond earrings. A large poster in front of an expensive-lookin
g beach restaurant advertised a ‘Bali buffet’.

  I don’t belong here.

  Perdu thought of Eric Lanson, the therapist from Paris’s administrative district who loved reading fantasy novels and had tried to amuse Perdu with a spot of literary psychoanalysis. He could have talked to Lanson about his grief and his fear! The therapist had sent Jean a postcard from Bali once. There, death was the culmination of life; it was celebrated with dancing, gamelan concerts and seafood feasts. Jean found himself wondering what Max would have to say about that kind of festival. Something mildly disrespectful, without doubt; something humorous.

  Max had said two things to Jean during their good-byes. First, that one had to gaze upon the dead, cremate them and bury their ashes – and then begin to tell their story.