The Matchmaker of Perigord

by Julia Stuart

  It was while they were on their ninth bottle of champagne that they both noticed that only one little cake remained. The baker naturally offered the Paris-Brest to Lisette Robert, who in turn suggested that they share it. She scooped up some of the cream with her finger, held it to the baker’s lips, and watched as he licked it off. He then scooped some up with his finger, held it up to her lips and watched as she licked it off. Within minutes Stéphane Jollis had lifted Lisette Robert on to the counter next to the till. Her legs still wrapped around him, he carried her to the table covered in flour at the back of the bakery where racks of little cakes were in easy reach. He then carried her upstairs and continued to knead her for the rest of the night and such was the height of their ecstasy they thought they had finally reached heaven.

  Lisette Robert slipped away the following morning when she was finally able to stand, and discovered that, despite her suspicions, she was not in the land of the living dead after all. After ridding herself of crème pâtissière, she drove to Brantôme on discovering that the pharmacy in Amour-sur-Belle was shut and purchased the morning-after pill. Such was the depth of her embarrassment, she was unable to speak to the baker again. He assumed her silence was as a result of the rumours circulating that he had eaten her frogs. Assuming she had started them, the baker then refused to speak to her as his gastronomic honour had been slighted, and before long their only communication was silence. But whenever the villagers shuddered at the memory of the night of the mini-tornado, Stéphane Jollis shuddered with delight.

  It was then that Lisette Robert told Guillaume Ladoucette the reason why, despite having had such a marvellous time with the baker, she was unable to pursue a romance with him. ‘I love another,’ she said.

  ‘Another? So why did you agree to go on these dates?’ the matchmaker asked.

  ‘Because I kept hoping it would be him,’ she replied meekly.

  ‘Who is it?’

  ‘The man from the council.’

  After insisting on signing up there and then for the Unrivalled Gold Service, the midwife got up from the cushion with the hand-embroidered radish and left. But a new customer gave the matchmaker no pleasure, for all he could think of during his walk home was how he was going to break the news to his best friend, particularly after he had cleaned his shoes so thoroughly. Guillaume Ladoucette went straight back to bed hoping slumber would offer an escape from reality. Still awake several hours later, he prayed for sleep–accompanied by the postman if that was what it took–but it failed to show itself. It wasn’t until night had faded with the first flushes of morning that he finally sailed away. But less than an hour later, he was battered awake by waves of anxiety. Convinced that he was going to die in his sleep of a broken heart, he went downstairs and for the first time set the table for breakfast as his mother had always done once the family was in bed to encourage their safe passage through the night. But it did nothing to calm him. For, as soon as he went back upstairs and returned to his raft, which was salty with worry, the matchmaker finally remembered the name of the flowering plant the postman had given him: love-lies-bleeding.

  14

  ÉMILIE FRAISSE WOKE UP IN HER FOUR-POSTER RENAISSANCE BED feeling the natural joy of having slept alone and immediately wondered what the cold, hard object pressing into her ribs was. Reaching down, she pulled it up towards her and instantly recognized the plate still covered with the smears of sautéed kidneys. It wasn’t hunger that had driven her naked down the cold stairs with the lamentable repairs to the kitchen in the early hours of the morning, but her excitement over Gilbert Dubuisson coming to dinner, which at such an hour could only be dampened with offal.

  Lying in the middle of the ancient white sheet, her hair coursing over the pillow like molten silver, she remembered the marvellous time they had had at the floralies and the pleasure it had been to spend time with a man who actually liked to talk. Again, she relived all the courtesies he had shown her: opening the car door, insisting on paying their entrance fees and above all not mentioning the reason why he offered her his arm as they crossed the bridge, whose cobbles they both knew would have felled her in an instant on account of her ridiculous seventeenth-century shoes. Her mind then turned to the wine he had treated them to, which pleased her because she liked a man who appreciated his palate; and she thought of his passion for his window boxes, for which she was grateful as it diverted his attention from such heinous pastimes as watching football. While his baldness had at first surprised her, she reasoned that if he could accept the fact that despair had turned her hair prematurely grey, then she could accept that age had stolen most of his. And she then considered his job as a postman, which was an entirely suitable profession for a future husband. Not only did it serve as a vital community function, but it also kept him moving and less likely to cultivate a stomach the shape of a pumpkin that so many husbands wore as a badge of honour, but which left their wives dead in their beds with disinterest.

  It wasn’t long, however, before the smell of stale buttered kidneys drove the châtelaine from her sheets, and she padded down the stone spiral steps with the lamentable repairs in her bare feet to the front door. Peering round it hoping not to be caught in a state of undress by an early-morning tourist, she then shot across the courtyard thick with the aroma of fresh bat droppings. As she showered with the garden hosepipe, she debated again whether to stew or bake the eel which had been writhing around inside her bath long enough to have lost its brackishness. And, as she washed her hair, she thought of the poor man from the council who had admired her find, and hoped that he had enjoyed his jar of black radish jam.

  Once dressed, she stripped the thick white monogrammed sheets from her bed and replaced them with fresh ones. While she had no intention of allowing Gilbert Dubuisson to slip between them at this early stage, he would undoubtedly want a tour of the château and she wanted everything to look its best. But, despite having rejected the notion, the thought of sharing her bed with a man after so many arid years with her husband remained thrashing around inside her head, thrilling and terrifying her in equal measure. With no more offal in the fridge to calm her, she resorted to her compulsion for cleaning.

  After flinging open the heavy shutters on the inside of the windows normally kept closed to protect the few genuine antiques from the bloodsucking sun, she prepared a battalion of cleaning materials and advanced her way with ruthless determination through the rooms. After scrubbing what didn’t need scrubbing, she polished what didn’t need polishing and then dusted what didn’t need dusting. And when she stood back to survey her efforts, what already shone, shone and what already gleamed, gleamed.

  When her slender arms ached as if they had been punched, and her knees were the shade of an obstinate raspberry stain, she untied the cord that the previous owner had put across a Regency tapestry armchair to prevent visitors from sitting on it. As she rested, Émilie Fraisse wondered whether she should go and speak to the matchmaker to calm her nerves. She then thought how ironic it was that Guillaume Ladoucette, whom she had grown up assuming she would marry but who hadn’t replied to her letter, had introduced her to a man who had spent his life delivering them. Her mind turned to the last time they had seen each other the day before she moved away, and she remembered giving him her precious Nontron hunting knife with its boxwood handle and ancient pokerwork motifs while they were in the woods. And she wondered whether he had kept it.

  When her energy returned, she sank her bare feet into an old pair of wellington boots, which were several sizes too big, to protect her legs from the brambles, and slopped her way across the courtyard to the garden. After filling her basket with apricot roses that had been rambling for centuries, she went back inside and arranged them in the vases in the dining room that had once been filled with frightful red and pink plastic flowers. After consulting her recipe book, she returned to the garden to pick the herbs she would need later for supper, and, before closing the door bleached fossil grey by the sun, bent down to rub the leaves of
a geranium in a tub by the step. She then smelt her fingers and inhaled the scent of carrots.

  On her way to the vaulted kitchen, she stopped in the corridor to admire the florid yellow mould long thought extinct which was slowly turning violet. Like the other patches around the château, its incredible beauty had prevented her cleaning it off. She then sat down on the ancient seat which slid open to hide the salt from the tax collector and thought about how she was going to despatch her eel.

  When Guillaume Ladoucette’s alarm went off, it wasn’t the insufferable noise that brought him to his senses, but the shock that he was still alive. Hauling himself out of bed, he made his way to the bathroom, looked at his reflection in the mirror above the sink and failed to see the slightest hint of a Living Example of either a former barber or a matchmaker. He hoisted the tips of his moustache to a cursory 180 degrees and when they immediately returned to their crumpled position he left them as they were, since he no longer cared. Out of habit, he started performing his morning stretches, but as he did so, suddenly noticed to his horror that his freakish flexibility was such that his elbows now reached the floor. Remembering the words of the doctor who had warned him that his symptoms might become more acute, he immediately wondered whether the undergrowth rampaging across his toes had also worsened, but was too fearful to look. Lacking the will to brave the torturous temperature of the municipal shower, which still hadn’t been fixed, he went to get dressed but found himself reaching for the previous day’s clothes. As he sat on his bed aiming his arm into a shirt already limp from wear, he remembered the last time he had lost the spirit to put on fresh clothes: the day he had realized he would have to shut his beloved barber shop. And what had he achieved since? Yes, he had set up the matchmaking business and even had some clients. But the only match that had worked so far involved the one woman he wanted for himself.

  Guillaume Ladoucette went to work that morning simply because it was easier than having to explain why he hadn’t opened. He brought a coffee to his desk with the ink stain and, after drinking it, picked up the plant with the tiny pink heart-shaped flowers that the postman had given him and put it out of sight on the table at the back of the room next to the percolator. Just as he returned to his swivel chair, the door opened. It was Yves Lévèque.

  Fortunately for the dentist, the matchmaker didn’t have the will to upbraid him again. He had already admonished him once that week when he came to tell him about the odious time he had spent with Sandrine Fournier on the troglodyte tour, and was forced to confess that he had failed to pay for the assistant ambulant fishmonger’s entrance fee after Guillaume Ladoucette had threatened to ring the abbey to find out the truth. Such was the matchmaker’s infuriation, he had insisted that Yves Lévèque came into Heart’s Desire just before he went to meet his next match.

  ‘Are you all right?’ enquired the dentist, sitting down. ‘You look a little…how can I put it? Shipwrecked…’

  ‘I’m fine. Just feeling a little off colour,’ Guillaume Ladoucette replied.

  ‘Don’t I get offered a cup of coffee this time?’

  ‘Sorry, do excuse me. My mind was elsewhere. Actually, what time is it? I’ve forgotten my watch.’

  ‘Twenty-seven minutes past nine,’ replied the dentist, wondering what on earth had befallen Guillaume Ladoucette’s moustache.

  ‘Bugger coffee,’ said the matchmaker, pulling open the bottom left-hand drawer of the desk and taking out a bottle of Pécharmant and two glasses. He filled them both and handed one to his client.

  ‘Walnut?’ he asked, offering him a bowl.

  ‘No thanks,’ replied the dentist, who had his own to get rid of.

  ‘That’s better,’ said the matchmaker after taking a sip. ‘Now, listen carefully. Which two words are not to come from your lips today?’

  ‘Halvies-halves,’ replied the dentist.

  ‘Correct. Or any derivatives thereof. What do you do when standing at a ticket kiosk?’

  ‘Buy a ticket.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘Buy the woman one as well.’

  ‘Correct. What are the other two words you are not permitted to say this afternoon?’

  ‘Dental floss.’

  ‘Correct. Also banned are any dental procedures you think your companion might be in need of. Now, why do you compliment a woman on her dress?’

  ‘Because you’re more likely to get it off ?’

  ‘No! No! No! Because she has spent hours shopping for it, hours standing in front of the mirror in it and then hours wishing she’d bought the other one.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘Now, can you think of anything that I could do to help your appearance before you go?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Nothing at all?’

  ‘Can’t think of anything.’

  ‘Sure?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Positive?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Right then. She’ll be waiting in the square in front of the château in Jumilhac-le-Grand at ten-forty-five. You’d better get a move on. I’ve told her you plan to take her gold-panning and she said she’d always wanted a man with a sense of adventure, so you’re well ahead already. It’ll be so much nicer being out in the sunshine this time, rather than in some musty old caves. I have great hopes for you both. Now, remember to treat her as you would a good cassoulet: ignore the rancid parts, delight in the duck leg and shrug your shoulders at the little green button. Good luck.’

  Yves Lévèque emptied his glass, shook the matchmaker’s hand and got up from the chair with the peeling marquetry. He walked home as quickly as he could without breaking into a sweat so as not to spoil his freshly ironed shirt. Before starting the car, he checked his reflection in the mirror, and, after failing to find the slightest trace of allure, comforted himself by baring his teeth. As he turned right at the field with the ginger Limousin cows that winked, he tried to imagine the woman he was about to meet, and wondered whether she would be the one to finally release his cemented innards.

  The dentist enjoyed the drive to Jumilhac-le-Grand as he wound through the mottled shadows of oaks and pines which offered a moment’s relief from the sun’s vicious assault. He hadn’t been entirely truthful when he explained to Guillaume Ladoucette why he wanted to take his new match gold-panning. While it would indeed demonstrate that he had initiative, a characteristic he knew to be greatly admired by women, the real reason was that if she turned out to be as abhorrent as the mushroom poisoner, there was always a chance of recovering the sixteen euros the activity would cost him if he happened upon a little gold nugget.

  Arriving at the square in front of the wondrous château, he parked underneath a plane tree and got out to admire the fairytale skyline of pointed roofs and watch towers surmounted by bizarre figurines. Just as he had recognized Justice armed with a tiny sword and scales, and was trying to work out what sort of weapon Authority was holding, he sensed someone standing behind him. He turned round to find that it was Denise Vigier, the grocer.

  The dentist had put up with a lot from the matchmaker over the years. There was the time when Guillaume Ladoucette bored a hole into their teacher’s gros pain, squeezed a toad inside and then blamed him; the occasion when he convinced him that false sideburns were all the rage and sold him a pair which he had never worn, having come to his senses as soon as he left the shop; there was the filling in 1987 that he still hadn’t paid for; there were the complaints he still made about the state of his box of hairpieces after the community headcount; there was his unwanted advice about his cornichons; and then, of course, there was the business of matching him up with the monstrous assistant ambulant fishmonger. And if all that wasn’t enough, he had now set him up with the abhorrent grocer.

  After greeting Denise Vigier, who appeared equally taken aback, Yves Lévèque complimented her on her blue-and-purple-patterned dress, which made him shudder.

  ‘It’s so much nicer than the other one,’ he added.

  ‘Which o
ther one?’ asked Denise Vigier.

  ‘The one you wished you’d bought instead.’

  ‘There wasn’t one I wish I’d bought instead,’ she replied, confused.

  Silently cursing Guillaume Ladoucette, and wanting to get the agony over as quickly as possible, Yves Lévèque suggested that they made their way immediately to the nearby village of Le Chalard where the gold-panning was to take place. When the grocer suggested going in one car instead of two, the dentist strongly opposed the idea as he was hoping to lose her along the country lanes. But each time he looked in his mirror, he was tormented by the sight of the abhorrent woman crouched over her steering wheel.

  When they arrived at the village, Denise Vigier thanked God that the café was open and quickly disappeared inside to use the lavatory. And the dentist, who was waiting on the terrace, cursed Him when he came face to face with the instructor holding his cash box. The dentist’s long, pale instruments of torture reluctantly found their way into his pocket and pulled out enough money for both of them.

  After the instructor’s demonstration in the dancing waters of the river Isle, Yves Lévèque immediately grabbed a sieve and pan and waded away from the group. After a spurt of furious panning, he cast a look at Denise Vigier, whom Guillaume Ladoucette had described as an ‘astute businesswoman with a zest for life’, who was still on the riverbank tucking the sides of her purple-and-blue-patterned frock under her knicker elastic to make it shorter. Her dress was an abomination, he thought again, and did nothing to help disguise her colossal bosom, the weight of which made her stand as if pitched against permanently driving rain.