by Jean Teulé
‘But then with your Léon Napo, there – the human coffee grinder – France became very, very great.’
‘He left it smaller than it was when he came to power.’
‘Is France far from here?’
‘We’re in France, Hélène.’
‘No, no, it’s Brittany here. Oh, my poor Monsieur, you’re not very well at all now.’
The old teacher raised the cup to his lips, blew on the steam then took a mouthful. The servant watched, asking, ‘Is it to your liking?’
‘A bit sweet but I was expecting that. Thank you for making it for me.’
‘It’s the least I can do. A small service is never refused.’
‘Delighted to have met you, Hélène.’
‘Likewise.’
‘You’re very good at your job.’
‘Thank you. I don’t often get compliments.’
A fog was spreading over the humble schoolteacher’s eyes; he had been a young man at the time of the French Revolution, with eyes as blue as a summer’s sky.
‘Monsieur Kerallic, may I cut a lock of your hair? I always like to take a keepsake with me when I leave, so I can add it to the previous ones. I’m making them into a garland and keeping it in one of the compartments of my bag.’
The elderly gentleman showed his assent by extending two fingers on the hand holding his cup, then taking another long draught of the coffee while the servant cut one of his white curls. Next she placed the sheet of paper with the name Ankou written on it upright against the old man’s chest. ‘So they’ll know who’s done this to you. Of course your doctor won’t believe it – he’ll think the coffee has burned your stomach. Doctors are asses, easily fooled.’
‘I’m grateful to you, Hélène, because finally I’d had enough of the circus of civilisations and of this life, a dirty business with never-ending cares …’
His breathing was growing laboured and his voice so weak that his words barely reached her ears. Facing Thunderflower, whose eyes showed a rare gentleness, he was smiling, having placed his empty cup on top of the volume of Celtic tales. He called her ‘Maman’ by mistake, and recounted a memory from his early childhood. ‘I was scared of the big shadows. I was scared of the way the sun moved around in the evening. Farewell, you who brought my death into the world.’
‘Kenavo, Monsieur Kerallic.’
‘Well now, Madame Aupy, are we going to eat this soup or what?’
‘It’s sweet.’
‘That’s because it has carrots in it and carrots are a bit sweet. Are you afraid I might poison you? I’m not Léon Napo. Who’s that in the drawing on the wall opposite you?’
‘That’s my son François – he’s a priest in Orléans. I’m so proud of him but I don’t hear from him any more.’
‘He’s got an unusual face and a very big nose, hasn’t he? Eat up, Madame Aupy, another spoonful – for François!’
Lorient
‘Euark! Euark!’
‘Monsieur Matthieu Verron, do you think your wife’s cough sounds like a cock crowing? Because if it is like a cock’s crow – all the medical books say this – then it’s a croup cough, and then, well … But does it sound like one? I can’t quite make up my mind.’
‘Euark, euark!’
In the well-lit dining room, expensively furnished in pear and cherry wood, a woman was lying flat on her back on the rosewood table, arms by her sides. She was dressed in an apron with a large silk embroidered bib, and a neck trimmed with swansdown, and lay with her head resting on a pillow, pale and ill, suffering from acute pains in her chest.
‘Euark, euark!’
‘It’s not exactly “cock-a-doodle-do”,’ said Matthieu hopefully, as he stood next to his wife.
On the other side of the table, the doctor did not know. Monsieur and Madame Verron’s cook, motionless at the dying woman’s feet, ventured no opinion. She was content to admire the husband, seeming to find him as handsome as a pale god with ivory eyes. He, his long light brown hair in a ponytail, registered absent-mindedly that a button had come loose from his blue Glazik waistcoat, two more had fallen off and were lost, and there was a tear in his shirt cuff.
‘These accidents to my wardrobe happened when my wife suddenly clutched me, and cried out, “Matthieu, I love you.”’
At the mention of this cry, the cook bit her lower lip and shook her head, while the doctor wondered aloud as he sounded the sick woman’s chest. ‘What we need to understand before we have any hope of curing her is this: is your wife really coughing or is she trying to vomit? Is the complaint coming from the respiratory system or the digestive system?’
‘Just now, after afternoon tea, she suddenly brought up a small cake.’
‘It would seem to be a stomach problem then. Was the cake bought in town? Perhaps it was bad.’
‘No, carefully prepared by Hélène.’
Hélène. Matthieu Verron had spoken the servant’s name. How sweet it sounded to her ears. She wanted to hear him say it again.
‘Who are you speaking about, Monsieur?’
‘Why, you, Hélène.’
The cook lowered her eyelids with a sigh of pleasure. Meanwhile, Madame Verron was not in a good way at all.
‘Euark!’
‘Oh, now her nose is bleeding,’ said the doctor in concern. ‘It must be the lungs then.’
‘Maybe not,’ her husband cautioned. ‘My wife sometimes has nose bleeds because the scent of flowers is too strong for her. We didn’t have a single one on our wedding day. She’s particularly sensitive to wild flowers, like the ones that grow on the moors round the menhirs. She attributes malign powers to certain flowers, as if they’d made a pact with evil.’
The doctor glanced around to check. ‘I don’t see any flowers in this room.’
‘Quite. We’ve never had a vase in the house.’
Thunderflower turned her head towards a rain-streaked window, and saw a butterfly waiting patiently on a branch. Her heart was heavy. The branch dipped, and the husband said, ‘Strangely, my wife’s nose bleeds began again a few days ago, without her smelling the slightest scent of flowers. It coincided with Hélène’s arrival in our house.’
‘Whose, Monsieur?’ asked the servant.
‘Yours, of course.’
The cook pulled a face, disappointed that her ruse did not work every time.
‘Eu-eu-eu-euark!’
The air was still, and everything seemed to hesitate. Could this cough be compared to the song of a gallinacean or not?
‘Eu-eu-eu … Eueuark!’
‘Co-co-co … Cock-a-doodle-do!’ echoed the doctor. ‘It’s the cock crow,’ he cried, suddenly panicking. ‘The poor lady won’t recover.’
The husband took hold of his wife’s hand and squeezed it. ‘Oh, no, don’t die, my darling. With your last sigh the sun will go out, and the stars will be thrown from their paths. Never could I forget or replace you.’
Thunderflower, lids lowered and breathing fast, drank in the words, apparently imagining they were addressed to her. Her heart was beating like a drum while the wife’s stopped beating altogether. The dead woman’s hand slipped from the widower’s fingers. Matthieu Verron took the band from his ponytail, letting his wonderful hair hang over his shoulders as a sign of mourning. Outside, in the rain, two crooked fingers knocked at the window on to Rue du Lait. They belonged to the two Norman wigmakers. Enquiringly, the tall one-eyed man made scissors movements with two fingers, while the short misshapen one rubbed his thumb against two fingertips on the same hand to signify that they would pay for the lovely head of hair. The doctor’s palm slid over the dead woman’s face, to close her eyes.
‘It was an attack of croup, the most acute I’ve ever seen!’
The widower buried his face in his hands, alone in who knew what depth of sadness.
‘For her funeral I shall have to stipulate “No flowers or wreaths.”’
Thunderflower’s dreaming gaze was lost in the distance.
A few nights l
ater Matthieu Verron was unable to sleep, alone in his marital bed. Face to the wall, curled up like a foetus in his inconsolable widowhood, he had left the candle burning on his bedside table. He thought he could hear the staircase creaking as if someone were coming down it towards his room – then the door opened. Matthieu turned his shoulders and eyes to see a long white wisp, like a woman’s ghost. An apron with a large silk embroidered bib, a neckline trimmed with swansdown … Transfixed by what he saw, Monsieur Verron thought he was dreaming. The creature approaching him was like a fairy descended from the mountains, and would soon take on mythical status. She had hips broader than his wife’s and her heavy breasts emerged, bright as eyes, when she let her clothing slip to the floor. She had blond pubic hair and her nakedness was infectious. Matthieu took off his nightshirt. The newcomer joined him in bed, immersing herself in his shadow. Between the slipping sheets, their feet felt for one another and their hands trembled, knowing each other near. Beneath the stars, it was a curious journey the apparition took to the widower. Was it not also shameful and distressing? The burning candle was like a silent reproach. He tried to put it out but it always came alight again. Joys and mysteries, alternately dim and brilliant waves on their bodies – the night was a confusion of illusion. The pair of them were like two beautiful pink gods dancing naked. Blooming with sensuality and alive (her!), endlessly alive, there she was gliding the tips of her breasts, her parted lips over Matthieu’s chest, down his stomach and further, begging, ‘Please … Give me something to put in my mouth.’ Then there came very great happiness, true intoxication. She knew how to imitate the whirling tongues of the angels. He cried out loudly in gratitude.
At breakfast time, the servant brought him a cup of chocolate and asked, ‘Did you sleep well, Monsieur?’
‘I had a dream, Hélène.’
‘Oh, that’s nice.’
With a simple lace cap on the back of her head, the blonde girl served the widower at table and stood behind him. While waiting for his bath time, she rubbed his hands and feet with a herb that grows at the bottom of springs. ‘That’s what we used to do at Plouhinec to banish heartaches.’ It neither helped nor harmed him. He could feel Thunderflower’s fingers and the satin-soft skin of her palms, and breathed in her vanilla scent, sweet as a secret. All day long she was modesty, calm, respect, silence, attentiveness, quietly doing her humble duty as maid of all work, but come the night …
The door of Monsieur Verron’s bedroom opened. Here was happiness again. Lying on his back, Matthieu turned joyfully towards the naked fairy who was drawing nearer. She straddled him, seating herself on his hips, upright in the saddle. In the handsome widower’s night she opened an escape route towards the ideal. She moved up, and down, and up … His eyes and fingers took their fill to the sound of celestial harmonies. Hearts chimed! Full in the golden glow of the candle, she laughed and bent towards Matthieu’s mouth. Between her lips he could see the pearly tips of her white teeth coming nearer, and drank in her breath; oh, the sweetness, oh, the poison. Even as he filled her with tenderness, so many steamy kisses, suddenly, joining their delirious hands, the pale lovers cried out as one. She flung into his throat dizzying words, risen from the depths of the earth, which turned everything upside down: ‘I love you, Matthieu!’ and in response he called out the name of his dead wife. Raah! Ashamed of his error, he pulled the sheet and coverlet over them both, throwing the fairy, so expert in the wonders of the universe and matters of love, in shadow. You may imagine what pleasant secrets were harboured by the cloth and wool as they moved together like waves. They shared a perfect orgy whose vices would have outraged savages, before a gentle hammering resumed.
‘Did you have a good night, Monsieur?’
‘Lovelier than I’ve ever dreamt of. What about you, Hélène? Did you sleep well?’
‘Monsieur is taking an interest in my dreams now? Might he be considering proposing marriage, thinking me a suitable match?’
‘Would I be making a mistake, Hélène?’
‘Yes, Monsieur.’
That evening, in the attic above Monsieur Verron’s room, Thunderflower was pacing up and down, holding her head in her hands and pleading, ‘No, not him, not Matthieu!’ But squeak, squeak, in spite of her fingers in her ears she could hear the squeaking of an axle, which brought her back into line: ‘Think of your duty! As for that old irony – love – I’d really like you to think no more about it. It’s an illusion.’ With her soul in torment, when night fell she listened to the voice speaking to her from the depths of a horrendous pit, plaguing her so much she was like a desperate woman in her attic room. ‘Not him …’
On the floor below, Monsieur Verron was in bed, eyeing the ceiling and hearing his cook’s buckled shoes trailing over the floor. He tossed and turned, unable to sleep, his heart gripped by anguish, when, with the approach of dawn, his door finally opened. The apparition who brought a touch of the supernatural into the widower’s life had changed from day to night. Her eyes were eyes no longer, but two small white candles burning deep within two big black holes. She was like a shipwrecked woman in a nightmare with no shore, but who had been led to him by some alien force.
‘It’s over. We won’t see each other again.’
She was dressed, and carrying a bag over one shoulder. He got up, naked, to face her. ‘Sweet death, I would have surrendered myself to your arms …’
‘Don’t say anything.’
While she let him slip her camisole off over her shoulders and take down her petticoat, a sigh from the beauty’s lips punctured the silence: ‘You’ll forget me. I will have been only a passing shadow.’
Kneeling opposite him she took a bottle of white powder out of one side of her bag. She appeared to sprinkle it over something. ‘Quench me,’ she demanded, then put it into her mouth whole.
He could see her back view reflected in a mirror hanging on the opposite wall. The sweet thing’s shoulders, her neat waist, her backside, broader because it was resting on her heels, made the shape of a guitar. At the top of this instrument of pleasure, a blonde head was swaying back and forth and he caught hold of the hair to impose a rhythm on it. Handsome conqueror filled with light, pure as an angel; as dawn came a transparent farewell dripped into his mouth. Pale tears with iridescent reflections streamed from feminine orifices.
*
Thunderflower stumbled across the ill defined and badly paved Rue à l’Herbe, both arms wrapped around her stomach. She was pale, choking, vomiting against walls, blaming it all on the arsenic. She was like someone born goodness knows where, who would soon be found lying dead of despair on the ground. The respectable people who passed her felt ill at ease. The servant hoped that one of them would dare to call her names. And not for the first time … But we mustn’t think too highly of Thunderflower. Woe betide all those who would open their doors to her deadly career. In spite of her unsteady state, she walked resolutely towards crime, bag on shoulder, even as she bawled her love sickness. Between the wood and daub houses, which sagged and gaped in the lane where the façades would have merged into one another without the inclusion of horizontal beams, the two Norman wigmakers spotted a triangle of blue sky.
‘Look, it’sh shtopped raining!’
‘As it is, the shower will have lasted for five years. Look how our cart and its load are dripping.’
Tears were streaming from the forty-something cook’s eyes.
‘It’ll pash,’ promised the short wigmaker.
‘It’ll pass, it’ll pass …’ repeated the tall one, doubtfully.
Ploemeur
‘No, Monsieur de Dupuy de Lôme, I am not happy to stay here until the summer. It’s too far to walk to the town of Ploemeur for the provisions. Lorient was where I was taken on. If I had known I was going to end up hanging around a manor house in the depths of a forest I would have turned the job down. I have only one wish, to hand in my apron.’
‘You can’t do that to us, Hélène. Who would make our meals? The time to refuse was
when we informed you we’d be coming here for part of the spring. How do you expect us to find another cook now? It’s true, we did say two weeks and now we’re staying longer but even if it is a long way for you to go for provisions – and I’m very sorry about that – it’s a pretty place. Just listen to the different varieties of birdsong, the buzzing of the bees …’
‘It’s poisonous here, the water is polluted and the air is bad.’
‘What nonsense is this? I was born in this castle twenty-five years ago and I know perfectly well there are no health hazards here.’
‘What’s going on, Stanislas-Charles?’ asked a man coming into the kitchen, alerted by the sound of raised voices.
He had a white beard along his jaw, curly like a sheep’s fleece, spiky hair swept backwards and bushy eyebrows.
His son answered, ‘It’s Hélène making one of her scenes again. Pah, I think it will be easier for me to build the first steam-powered warships and pioneer dirigible airships than ever to exercise authority over that cook. Not content with complaining about how far it is to go shopping, here she is demanding we go back to Lorient because life here is “poisonous”.’
‘It is worth noting,’ the elderly man conceded, ‘that at the beginning of the year our horses did die because of the poor quality of the water.’
‘Ah, what was I saying?’ exclaimed Thunderflower, standing opposite a sulking Stanislas-Charles, while a two-and-a-half-year-old little girl tugged at the servant’s red skirt, asking, ‘Are you cross, Godmother?’
‘Marie, stop calling her Godmother,’ said the young naval engineer in irritation. ‘She’s not your godmother, she’s the cook.’
