Bella... A French Life (20 page)

Awake, my heart pounding, I lie very still: I can still hear music. Have I forgotten to silence the clock? But no: Colin either has a radio on or he is playing a CD. I have pins and needles in my right leg, but I do not want to move my legs in case the bed creaks and will reveal to him that I am awake. That his music, has woken me up.

He is listening to Dvorak’s
New World Symphony
. Not very loud, but Le Presbytère’s walls are not thick.

My father always said we do not have to make decisions; they will be made for us.

I want to get to know this man who listens to Dvorak in the middle of the night.

I will go to Paula’s birthday party.

-0-

Chapter Twenty-Three

It is the hour of the evening when colour starts to disappear so that sea, sky and land are all a murky brown.

I am driving to Sainte-Marie-sur-Brecque to Paula’s birthday party. Colin sits beside me. Fred was delighted when I told him on the telephone I will be honoured to be part of their party.

“Miss, Amandine’s baked Paula a most beautiful birthday cake, but it’s a secret, she’s not to know.”

He sounded as excited as a child.

Colin, when I told him that, as I will be attending the party, I could give him a lift, showed little interest in my offer, saying he would hate himself if I were to put myself out further on his behalf. He appeared more concerned about what gift he should buy Paula.

“Would it be in order if I take her some chocolate?”

“That’s a wonderful idea,” I replied.

I was going to give her perfume.

Colin is sitting with his arms folded over his chest, his eyes on the road ahead of us. He looks uncomfortable, even a little apprehensive. Could it be because he does not trust my driving skill or is it because of the party, having to be with people who would be speaking French all evening? I cannot tell.

We reach the village. It is dark, the world no longer brown, but black. After my years living in Paris, it took me a little time to get accustomed to how black a night is up here in Normandy - in the countryside this is; a Paris night is never really dark and unless one’s curtains are thick, it is necessary to close the shutters for real blackness.

Fred and Paula’s house is on the northern edge of the village, on Rue Carolles, a short street of white-washed cottages with grey-slated roofs standing in the middle of immaculately-mowed lawns so green one doubts their authenticity. It is here on this street where the village’s bourgeoisie live, and if ever I doubt my generosity as far as the wages of Le Presbytère’s staff is concerned, I take comfort in the fact if my gardener can live here, I am paying him well. Shooting a glance at Colin I can see astonishment on his face, and he looks down at the box of chocolates he has bought for Paula at a confectionery in Avranches as if he is doubting its suitability.

“Are you sure we’ve come to the right house, Bella?”

He fingers the box on his lap as if he is contemplating leaving it in the car.

“Yes, this is Fred’s house, and Paula will love those.”

I point to the box.

Fred is at the front door.

“Miss!”

“Good evening, Fred.”

“
Monsieur
,” he greets Colin, the comradeship of the day of the gardening gone, but only for a moment, because suddenly, with a bellow of a laugh, he throws his arms around Colin.

“Mate,” murmurs Colin, obviously embarrassed at the enthusiastic welcome. Maybe also fearing Fred’s going to grab him round the shoulders and plant a kiss on each of his cheeks.

Paula is out in the back garden as her voice, always high-pitched and with amazing potency, reveals. Fred calls her and she runs into the house and her greeting of a kiss on each of my cheeks is respectfully subdued.

“Happy birthday, Paula. May you have many more with your family around you.”

I always add this bit about having the family around when I wish someone a happy birthday. Or rather, I have been doing so since my mother’s death: her dying, in a way, having robbed me of a family, because Marius, married and a father, has his own family.

I push my gift of perfume into Paula’s hands, calloused from years of working in the village’s drycleaners.

Fred introduces her to Colin.

“How do you do, Mr Colin,” she says.

She offers him a limp hand to shake: her handshake always in total contrast to her voice.

Clumsily, he hands her the box of chocolates.

“Oh my! Thank you! But a gift is not necessary.”

Yet, again, she offers him a limp hand to shake.

Fred and Paula’s house is surprisingly small for its appearance of luxury, the purpose of each room clearly defined by furniture and decoration. In the dining room prints of fruit and vegetable still lifes hang on the walls and on a sideboard - covered in a white crocheted cloth - stand a bowl of plastic fruit and two red glass vases in which pink plastic roses are arranged, the taller of these at the back, green plastic sprigs between them. The pictures on the living room walls are
Impressionist
reproductions painted in oil on canvas and which look very real. Monet’s
Irises
hangs on one wall and, as if in competition, Van Gogh’s hangs on the facing wall. A white Chinese paper ball lamp hangs from the ceiling in the middle of the room, throwing a circle of light over the shimmering, plum-coloured, polyester rug on the floor. I know the house’s three bedrooms are all pink and yellow and fluffy, and the kitchen is a copy of that of Le Presbytère - Fred’s handiwork - but on a much smaller and less expensive scale.

Fred and Paula lead the way to the back garden. Coals are smouldering in a stone and brick barbeque, also a copy of the one at Le Presbytère, and which I know is also Fred’s handiwork, him having nearly set himself alight when he lit the fire for the first time.

All the members of my staff are out in the garden. All greet me with a wave of the hand. Gertrude does so by engulfing me in her muscled arms as if I am drowning and she has to pull me out of the water, and she plants not just one kiss on each of my cheeks, but two.

All study Colin with respectful interest. No doubt, Fred has told them about him; I would like to know what he said.

Plates of sausages, some of these short and fat, others long and thin, made of pork, beef, veal, rabbit or chicken and flavoured with basil, fennel, thyme and even lavender, grown by Fred in their back garden and dried by Paula on sheets of newspaper in an airing cupboard, as well as red spicy
Merguez
glistening in their intestine casings, are laid out in rows on grills which are to be put over the coals once all the guests have arrived; about forty are expected. When Fred first planted the lavender none of us gave it much chance of growing in the Normandy climate, so much cooler and wetter than lavender’s natural habitat of southern France, but we did not reckon with Fred’s green thumbs. Now, the lavender bush, almost as tall as Fred himself, stands out in the front garden and all who pass by admire it, and to Fred’s chagrin, they often steal a sprig.

The conversation is of insignificant things; it flies over our heads like the aromatic smoke from the barbeque because the grills with the sausages have been put on the coals.

Accordion music and hand clapping start to drift from the drawing room and Colin, who has been keeping to my side like a frightened child, frowns.

“This is accordion country,” I whisper.

“Oh lordie!”

Colour is creeping over his face.

“It’s alright. The young people will be doing the dancing.”

The young people
. Did I really say this?

-0-

As the late October night is cool rather than cold, we can either eat outside or inside; the choice is ours. The look of persuasion both Fred and Frascot gives me - he is doing the grilling of the sausages - tells me the intention is that guests are to eat outside. I am wearing jeans and a thick sweater, so, protected against the cool evening air, I suggest to Colin we take our plates and we sit on Fred’s small, but well-tended patch of lawn. Colin too is in jeans and sweater but he says he is going to need the windbreaker he has brought along. He asks whether my car is locked because he has left it on the rear seat.

Frascot walks over to me.

“Miss, you did not tell us what a good-looking devil your guest is.” he reprimands me.

“So he is, Frascot, yes.”

I would never have agreed with Frascot if Colin was not out of earshot, but, not to give Frascot food for thought, I did use a tone as if I were agreeing about something banal, like the timetable for the Nantes-Paris train.

“Bring him down to the Vaybee, Miss. Does he eat snails?” asks Frascot.

“I’ve no idea whether he eats snails or not, but here he comes, so you can ask him yourself.”

Colin joins us.

“Do you eat snails, Mr Colin
?
” asks Frascot.

“Love them. Why?”

“Oh good! Excellent! Miss Bella must therefore bring you down to the Vaybee - that’s my bar here in the village - and the two of you can have some.”

“Great idea. Will do,” agrees Colin.

Several open bottles of
Sylvaner
stand on ice in buckets the size of a dustbin and placed alongside a makeshift bar of planks on chairs. In charge of the bar is Frascot’s current girlfriend, Alice, long dyed-yellow hair falling over her heavily-made up face. Frascot, unlike his brother Fred who cannot be more a part of his wife if she were his Siamese twin, is a lady’s man. Having divorced when still in his twenties, and not having remarried, he says he is making the best of a bad hand he has been dealt.

“Shall I fetch us a glass each?” Colin asks.

He points towards the bar.

“Good idea.”

He returns with two fat glasses with short green stems: I recognise them from the Vaybee. Pools of light from overhanging lanterns reflect in the light-yellow wine.

“This is the life, Bella,” says Colin, sitting down on the lawn beside me.

He clinks his glass against mine.

“Colin, who shall we drink to? Or to what?”

“Le Presbytère?”

I nod.

“
Santé
, Bella!”

“My father always said
Gesundheit
.”

“You said your father was from Germany?” he asks.

“He was German, yes.”

“Did it ...?” He stops. “No, never mind ...”

The top of Colin’s head and his shoulders are lit by a streak of bright white light from an uncovered ceiling light in the kitchen behind us, but his face is in darkness and this makes it impossible for me to see the expression in his eyes, but I detected a tone of empathy in his voice.

“What were you going to say?” I ask.

“I was ... I wanted to ask whether your father’s nationality was a problem?”

He is nursing his glass in his hands, and, as he has turned his head, I can see his face and I can see his eyes are searching mine. Searching for something in mine. The coward I am, I quickly look down, but the desire to share this burden of my family background with someone, with this man in particular, is too great, and I look up.

“It was an insurmountable problem, yes. My father was not just German, he was a soldier, one of Hitler’s soldiers. He was a Third Reich soldier. My mother was a horizontal collaborator. This was what a woman who slept with a German soldier was called. At the Germans’ surrender, the head of such a woman was shaved. It was what happened to my mother, but my uncles - her brothers - had had the sense, if one can call it this, to get their cousin, a barber, to shave her head in private at his salon. In private and gently. This did not happen here in the village, but the villagers all know about it. I must say that today ... that no one has thrown it in my face for some years, but it was something which did happen when I was a child. And a teenager. When I was a student in Paris too. It was always
there
. It was like a terrible facial deformity.”

The words just spurted from my mouth, spurted like vomit: I wanted to stop talking, fall silent, but once I had begun I could not stop. While I was speaking visions of my classmates - Marie Dumay, Vincent Lebac, Anselme Mathiot, Nestor Toussant, Florence Dubois - appeared in the light behind Colin. They were laughing, laughing at me. Baudelaire joined them, and so did Miss Jambenoire. They too were laughing at me.

“Well ... so ... it’s old news ... so why go on about it?” I say.

I said this almost apologetically as if I were trying to make light of my terrible confession to this stranger sitting on the lawn opposite me, his glass of wine, halfway to his lips.

“I know,” he says, “I understand exactly what you went through. My brother and I - please don’t think I am making light of your experience - went through something similar. There were uncles and aunts - my father’s brothers and sisters - and cousins and friends, even our neighbours, who made remarks about the fact that Tim and I - my brother and I - did not go to church on Sundays, and that, in fact, there was no religion at our house.  On Sundays, when all along the street put on their best clothes and climbed into their cars to drive to the church two blocks away, Tim and I had to remain indoors. We protested. We did not understand why we could not also go to church. And then there was the Christmas school play. Each year as the Festive Season was approaching my mother gave us a letter to hand to our teacher to request that Tim and I should not participate in the play. So the two of us, along with the Muslim and Jewish pupils, had to stand in the corridor outside the school hall while the others were in there practising for the play. We used to go home crying. That was when we were still small. Later, as teenagers, we just felt very awkward at being cast aside - at being outsiders. We did not know why we were because we were neither Muslim nor Jewish. And then my mother died and her brother turned up and we discovered what it was all about.”

“What was it all about?”

“My mother was a Russian Jewess. Oh, I know that today ... today it’s of little importance, but class, class and origin and accent, were important when Tim and I were children, and, considered ‘wogs’, the two of us were outcast. I did though learn on enrolling at public school we were not quite the heathens we were thought to be because our one hundred percent English nanny had taken us to the vicarage to be baptised. But ... its old news ... as you’ve just said.”