by Julia Stuart
Eventually he came to the rue du Château, one of four in the village. Only one, however, led to the castle. The peculiarity had come about following a complaint by Gilbert Dubuisson the postman that some of the street signs had become illegible with age, which was troublesome for his replacement whenever he was on leave. An administrative blunder resulted in a job lot of ‘RUE DU CHTEAU’ signs being sent to Amour-sur-Belle. Well aware that it would take years for the mistake to be admitted and rectified, the residents simply took down the faded old ones and replaced them with the new delivery. To avoid confusion, the three streets that didn’t lead to the château were also known as ‘The Street that Needs Resurfacing’, ‘The Street where Henri Rousseau Drove into the Back of Lisette Robert’s Car’ and ‘The Street that Doesn’t Lead to the Château’. But the system rarely worked as all of the streets needed resurfacing, Henri Rousseau had bumped into Lisette Robert’s car in two of them and all three failed to lead to the château.
As Guillaume Ladoucette continued on his walk, his hands deep in his pockets and his moustache an alarming thirty degrees out of true, his mind was buffeted in one direction after another as he sought a solution to the catastrophe. He had very few savings left, and his mother was certainly in no position to bail him out. He would have to find new employment and fast. But what could he do? His skills lay in executing a magnificent short back and sides, fitting false sideburns and not breathing a word about the adulterous affairs that his customers claimed to be having. While they were all useful skills in their own right, they were hardly transferable.
Turning a corner, he headed past the Romanesque church which had been stripped of all traces of beauty during the Revolution.
‘Morning, Guillaume. Everything all right with you? Haven’t seen you in ages,’ called Marcel Coussy, the old farmer, who was shuffling up the road in his work slippers.
‘Fine, thanks,’ the barber lied.
‘Have you heard about the shower?’ he asked.
‘No,’ Guillaume Ladoucette replied and carried on his way.
As he passed the empty pharmacy the barber’s heart suddenly sprang. ‘That’s it!’ he said out loud, cupping his hands against his temples as he peered into the window at the shelves of exotic-looking bottles covered in a silent shroud of dust. ‘I’ll become a pharmacist!’
The business had remained closed ever since the famous mini-tornado of 1999. Many assumed it had struck Amour-sur-Belle because of its curious weather pattern. But none of the meteorologists who poured into the village from all over France with their foul-smelling waterproofs and smudged spectacles could agree on the cause.
Certainly none of them had predicted it. Or if they had, they hadn’t let on. At first, the villagers assumed that the persistent breeze was just blowing a little stronger that morning. By the afternoon, Guillaume Ladoucette had telephoned his customers who wore hairpieces warning them not to venture outdoors. When evening fell, residents still in the streets, arms stretched out in front of them and unable to move forward, had to be lassoed inside by the nearest homeowner. The curved salmon-coloured roof tiles rattled up and down like pan lids and the wind screeched so loudly the villagers could no longer hear their neighbours’ arguments over what to do. Not expecting to live to see the morning, they descended into their cellars and brought out their best wines, jars of foie gras, wild boar terrines, bottled truffles, preserved duck legs, pickled walnuts, ceps in vinegar and dried venison sausages and confessed their sins between mouthfuls.
No one realized that Patrice Baudin was still out in the worst of it until it was too late. Nor was it clear why he hadn’t sought shelter sooner. Some suggested that with no woman in his life there was no one to urge him to put down his pestle and mortar when it started to look grim. What was certain was that he never made it further than the grocer’s. For, suddenly, the skinny vegetarian was swept clean off his feet into the air, never to be seen again.
The following day, the first everyone realized that they were still alive was the violent twisting of their innards followed by a desperate urge to vomit. After bringing up the pestilent contents, their stomachs twisted again as they remembered the secrets they had divulged. When the sound of retching eventually subsided and the wood pigeons could be heard again, shutters started to open and pale faces appeared. Several more barn roofs were missing, two uprooted oak trees had been thrown against the front door of Yves Lévèque’s house, preventing him from getting out, and the château had lost yet another section of its crenellations.
Patrice Baudin’s absence was first noticed by Lisette Robert when she came to the pharmacy seeking the morning-after pill. When the midwife found the shop shut, she went to the one in Brantôme but was so caught up in her own predicament that she failed to mention his absence. Two days later, when numerous villagers went to the shop in search of relief from chronic constipation, word spread that the pharmacist was missing. Expecting him to have landed somewhere around the village, there was a cursory check of potagers and flowerbeds. At the end of the week, by which time several were in need of prescriptions, a search party was mounted. The surrounding fields were combed, but nothing of note was found except a tin bath, four dead ginger Limousin cows and a walnut-oil press. They then scoured the woods, which a number simply used as an opportunity to collect fallen sweet chestnuts while marvelling at the whole sweet corn kernels in the gigantic wild boar pats. Only then were the police called. But all the officers found were the pharmacist’s cracked gold-rimmed spectacles hanging from the church guttering. Over the following weeks, each time it rained, the villagers looked up to the sky wondering whether he was about to descend. But soon they got used to his absence. And, by the time that thousands of cranes had flapped their way noisily over Amour-sur-Belle signalling the start of winter, they had stopped looking at the clouds expectantly and mothers had started to use his unfortunate disappearance as a warning to children to finish their meat.
Not long after the mini-tornado, Henri Rousseau’s wife, who had a mania for order, demanded that the number of residents on the village sign be reduced to thirty-two. Many believed the suggestion was rooted in spite, as Patrice Baudin had strongly opposed her husband being fitted with a hearing aid when there was no evidence that he was deaf. However, it was decided that the sign be left as it was out of respect for the pharmacist, who had always resisted gossiping about the ailments of his customers, no matter how many drinks he was bought in the Bar Saint-Jus. Modeste Simon, who never spoke again after witnessing his unfortunate disappearance from her bathroom window, kept his broken spectacles in her bedside drawer, along with the photograph she had secretly taken of him the previous year at the Donkey Festival in Brantôme.
But almost as soon as the idea to take over the pharmacy came to Guillaume Ladoucette as he stared inside the darkened shop with its abandoned pestle and mortar, he dismissed it. For while Patrice Baudin’s views on eating meat were unfathomable, he was otherwise highly intelligent and the barber knew only too well that he could never comprehend the mysterious subjects the man had had to study, despite having left the Périgord Academy of Master Barbers with a distinction.
Turning away from the empty shop, he returned his hands to his pockets and continued up the street, the sun starting to warm the folds at the back of his neck. Suddenly, he heard a voice from behind.
‘Hello, Guillaume! Dawdling a bit today, aren’t we?’ asked Sandrine Fournier, the assistant ambulant fishmonger.
The barber turned and stopped. ‘Hello, Sandrine,’ he replied.
‘Hot, isn’t it?’
‘Very,’ replied the barber, who hadn’t noticed.
‘Have you heard about the shower?’
‘No,’ he said, forgetting to say goodbye as he turned the corner.
As he trailed past the monument dedicated to the Three Victims of the Barbarous Germans, Guillaume Ladoucette told himself that there must surely be something that he could do. But he could think of nothing. Amour-sur-Belle already had all t
he tradespeople it could sustain, and they were all reliant on the custom from the surrounding hamlets. There was no role for a man of forty-three who had dedicated his life to conquering the cow’s lick, the double crown and dandruff.
By the time he turned into the rue du Château, the barber’s trousers began to feel loose around his waist as he thought of all the luxuries he would no longer be able to afford. There would be no extra packets of Cabécou when he ran out midweek; no little walnut cakes from the Friday market in Brantôme; no dozen oysters from the man who set up his stall in the village every Saturday morning; and only two bottles of Château La Plante a week. As he imagined the exquisite gentlemen’s soaps he would no longer be able to purchase from his favourite shop in Périgueux, Guillaume Ladoucette was certain his armpits had begun to reek.
As he passed the ancient communal bread oven, Guillaume Ladoucette began to stoop. By the time he had dragged himself over the bridge, he’d envisioned his hair hanging in matted dust-grey clumps down his back, growing from a scab-encrusted scalp. Shuffling along the banks of the Belle through the patches of wild mint, he thought of the repugnant beard he would have to grow to keep him warm, which would stretch to his useless loins and harbour nesting sparrows. As he passed the washing place, a shallow square of water where the women did their laundry until 1967, he imagined his ears so full of hardened wax that he was unable to hear Yves Lévèque shouting from the other side of the bank: ‘Hey, Guillaume! Have you heard about the shower?’
He dragged his way around the outside of the château, his feet unsteady on the crisp pigeon droppings because in the fog of his imagined destitution they had both developed gout. As he passed the doors to the Romanesque church, from which oozed the smell of violent green mould, he found himself hitching up his trousers because his mind told him that they were held up with string that had rotted. He spent the next hour trailing around the village staring at the ditches in which he would undoubtedly end, wondering how long he had left to live and why everyone kept talking to him about showers.
By the time he reached the Bar Saint-Jus he had barely enough energy to take the five paces to the bar and hoist his skeletal frame up on to a stool. Through his overgrown eyebrows he could just about make out Fabrice Ribou behind the bar cleaning between the syrup bottles.
‘Hello, Guillaume!’ said the bar owner. ‘You’re looking well. Nice trousers by the way. Are they new? What can I get you?’
‘A glass of red, please,’ said the barber, who still hadn’t forgiven him for his treachery, despite the fact that he hadn’t charged him for a single drink since his new haircut.
‘On the house,’ said the barman, pushing the glass towards him.
The barber picked it up and brought it to a table by the window. After taking a sip, which he didn’t taste, he looked out at the place du Marché and wondered whether he’d rather be cremated or buried.
‘Hey, Guillaume! Have you heard about the shower?’ asked Denise Vigier, the grocer, stopping at his table.
‘No,’ replied the barber, suddenly remembering his manners and getting up to kiss her on both cheeks.
‘You haven’t?’ she asked, sitting down opposite him.
‘No,’ he replied.
‘The whole village’s talking about it. Where have you been all day? Someone said you didn’t open the shop today.’
‘Oh, I’ve been busy.’
‘You’ll never guess what the council has decided to do,’ she said.
‘What?’ he asked out of politeness.
‘Well, you know how it hasn’t rained for ages?’
‘Yes.’
‘From next month they’re banning everyone from taking a bath and installing a communal shower in the village!’ she said triumphantly.
‘They’re installing a what?’ he asked.
‘A communal shower.’
‘We’ll all have to take a shower together?’ Guillaume Ladoucette asked, horrified.
‘No! One at a time, but they’ll fine anyone who takes a bath.’
‘How on earth are they going to regulate that?’
‘God only knows.’
‘Where else are they doing it?’
‘It’s just here.’
‘Just here?’
‘Apparently they want to see how it works before introducing it elsewhere. Everyone’s saying they picked Amour-sur-Belle because of that headcount business. Apparently they were furious and that first inspector got suspended.’
‘If Yves Lévèque had given me back those wigs and beards immediately after the first headcount as I asked him to, none of this would have happened,’ replied the barber. ‘The box went missing for weeks and when he eventually returned it, they were all twisted into funny shapes. I couldn’t sell them.’
‘Where do you think they’ll put it?’ asked the grocer.
But the barber, too disturbed at the memory of how much money he had lost over the box of hairpieces, didn’t want to speculate about the location of a municipal shower. He drained his glass, forgot to kiss Denise Vigier the grocer goodbye and left. When he returned home, he retired to bed without eating or bathing and remained there for six days, four hours and nineteen seconds. At that point, he raised his head from his pillow, looked out of the window and caught sight of his mother in the distance, recognizable by the tomato splat on the back of her pale-green dress. It was then that Guillaume Ladoucette had his Brilliant Idea.
4
AS HE SAT WAITING IN HIS CAR, GUILLAUME LADOUCETTE PULLED down the sun visor to kill time. Turning his head to the right, and then to the left, he critically surveyed his morning’s handiwork in the mirror. It was indeed a splendid creation, he noted with immense satisfaction. He admired how it stretched out beyond the edges of his mouth, rising at both ends with an elegant lift which he’d fashioned fifteen degrees higher than usual on account of his ebullient mood. A number of white hairs had been skilfully camouflaged with the aid of a black moustache crayon. The fact that it still reeked of duck fat was tempered by the sight of the ends, masterfully twisted to such a fine point they looked as if they could spear cockroaches.
After snapping the visor back up, he looked around the car for something else to do. Licking the end of his thumb, he wiped off a brown smear he suddenly noticed on the dashboard. He then took out a tissue from his pocket and dusted the rim above the radio. Leaning over, he opened the glove compartment and peered inside. Instantly bored by the sight of its contents, he shut it again. After staring blankly in front of him for several minutes, he sighed and looked at his watch for the fifth time.
Despite the time, Guillaume Ladoucette forgave Stéphane Jollis for keeping him waiting. It was a habit the baker had never broken even though the pick-up time for their fishing trips hadn’t changed for more than twenty years. But the barber’s compassion had nothing to do with tolerance, for he regarded tardiness as being almost as shameful as protruding nasal hair. Nor was it simply a matter of lassitude after spending so many years outside the baker’s house, killing time by appraising the contents of his glove compartment. The reason for Guillaume Ladoucette’s ability to pardon his best friend’s abominable time-keeping was sitting on the back seat underneath a white tea towel to shade it from the worst of the heat. For whilst the two men were fiercely competitive when it came to fishing, their unspoken rivalry was not over what one another caught, but the contents of their picnic baskets. And the barber, who had been labouring in the kitchen since five that morning, was convinced that victory would be his.
The passenger door suddenly opened and a strong, hairy arm reached in and placed an equally large basket made from sweet chestnut on the back seat. The limb momentarily disappeared and returned with a red tea towel, which was carefully placed over it. The car suddenly tilted towards the right as the baker held on to the roof with one hand and manoeuvred his substantial frame inside, followed by his head.
‘Hello. Sorry I’m late,’ he said.
Guillaume Ladoucette looked at the baker
. Having showered as he always did on a Sunday lunchtime after shutting the shop for the day, his friend appeared a decade younger owing to the absence of flour in his thick black curls. The barber had been cutting them for years in exchange for a daily loaf. It was a system that worked more in his favour since Stéphane Jollis only bothered to surrender his scalp every few months, by which time the barber could slide a whole finger down the middle of a ringlet, much to his exasperation.
‘Not to worry,’ he said, starting the car. ‘Got everything?’
‘Yep,’ replied the baker, winding down the window.
The pair drove out of the village and turned right at the field with the ginger Limousin cows that winked. After passing a series of maize fields, they slowed down to a precise 49 kph as they trundled through the village of Beauséjour, where the traffic police waited for their prey in collapsible chairs in the sun. Each time the barber changed gear, his knuckles rubbed against Stéphane Jollis’s thigh, which bloomed over the passenger seat as if baked with too much yeast.
‘Bring any lunch with you?’ Guillaume Ladoucette enquired, trying to sound as casual as possible.
‘Just a snack,’ the baker replied, staring straight ahead of him. ‘You?’
‘Just a snack,’ said the barber, wrinkling up his nose dismissively.
When they arrived at Brantôme, the two men, each carrying a family-sized picnic basket, made their way along the bank of the Dronne, which flowed around the town known as the Venice of the Périgord. They passed the metal steps where swimmers clambered out of the slothful water and continued until they reached the No Fishing sign. They then put down their baskets at their usual spot, both filled with the comforting knowledge that a splendid afternoon lay ahead of them.
After Stéphane Jollis had wiped his sweating forehead on both shoulders, he joined the barber sitting on the edge of the bank in the shade of the tree which neither could name. The baker then took out a baguette from his basket, broke off an end, pulled out some of the soft white innards, rolled it into a ball with his artisan fingers and pierced it with his hook. Once the barber had impaled a worm on his, they both took off their shoes and tied their lines around their right ankles. Carefully rolling up both trouser legs to the knee, they plunged their feet into the cool water and felt the weighted lines spiralling down towards the bottom of the river.
