'Tears Before Bedtime' and 'Weep No More'

by Barbara Skelton

  The morning Bernard turned up on the terrace, mains water was being installed. A trench was being dug all the way up the hill to contain the pipes and a lorry load of whistling Arabs drove up at seven every morning. When later that day I went out, carrying a trayload of vodka, glasses, lemons and a tin of beef consommé – all the requirements of a bullshot* – followed by Bernard crumpled and unshaven, the Arabs stopped digging and, leaning on their shovels, looked in our direction, as much as to say, ‘There’s a lucky pasha who knows how to get through a hot day with the least possible effort!’ They decided to do the same and, squatting on the grass, brought out luncheon packages of sardines, bars of chocolate and bottles of Coca-Cola. As Bernard swayed across the terrace to get into the car on our way out to lunch, I said, ‘They must be thinking, Where on earth did she pick him up?’ And I went on laughing all the way down the hill, until we reached Grimaud village where Bernard asked me to buy him a box of cigars.

  After mains water, electricity had to be installed. The electricians swarmed all over the house, so that Bernard moved into a beamed cabanon just below the terrace. He would tiptoe up to the house as though he felt in the way. In those days, there was never a cross word.

  Then central heating was installed. I became demented on days the workmen did not turn up because they had been sent to complete some other job. So we decided to take on a budding architect to harry the men in my stead – a frequent custom in the Midi, where the work is generally slipshod.

  Carelli sought out rare objects for those willing to pay for his impeccable taste. His aunt ran the antique shop in Grimaud, where I had bought old glasses, Provençal coffee cups and carafes, one blue and one golden, like the carafe in Degas’s ‘Absinthe’.

  Carelli would come hurtling up the hill in a Deux Chevaux and, leaping out, with an eager smile on his face, would come running across the terrace like some newly appointed lieutenant, exclaiming, ‘How I love this house! The view is so superb.’ He then drew up a plan for converting two barns at the far end of the mas into a kitchen, and another bedroom and bathroom that were to become Bernard’s quarters. Carelli then dismissed my equipe and called in another builder, carpenter and electrician, and gained a commission from each.

  One afternoon, Mell and Folie were lying sprawled out in the sun, when a lorry mounted the hillside, bringing the residue of my furniture that had been shipped over from the States, and Bernard helped me unwrap the china and books that he assiduously arranged in alphabetical order in the new bookshelves in the sitting room.

  ‘I’m not very affectionate, am I?’ I said.

  ‘Oh yes, you are,’ Bernard contradicted. ‘I don’t like cloying women. Anyway, from now on, this is going to be my workroom.’ Alas, not for nothing had I been divorced on grounds of incompatibility. The, sitting room, with its newly built-in bookshelves and Provençal fireplace, black plaque of shepherdesses, sphinx fire-dogs and curtains drawn, as in the best parlour for guests, was going to remain a sitting room.

  Bernard liked to gamble. On some evenings, we would drive into Cannes. My diary records: ‘Lose money gambling in the Casino. Began to feel attached to B.F. My birthday. B.F. gives me one of his old pullovers. Have to support B.F. Blue sky fleeced with rain. Today he was sulky from the start. Would I lend him 200 francs? Am accused of being avare. The plumber and the mason arrive. We all clear out the garage where Bernard’s new room is going to be. The gardener has planted more almond trees. Compressor all day. B. has written to his tailor and to his lawyer, sending money on account. Insulting letters both.

  ‘If you devoted as much time to writing your book,’ I say, ‘there might be some point.’

  Wants to know what his new room will be like. Can he have grey walls? Discuss what’s for dinner. Hear a car, the builders burst in. Very aggressive. B. pretends there’s no drink. Offers them beer. The ugly one says, ‘No whisky or vodka?’ Bernard goes on swilling. I say, ‘You’ve got that idiotic look on your face.’ He says, ‘If you’re going to be disagreeable, I’m off to bed.’ Saturday keeps to his room; when seen slinking in and out, mutters, ‘Bonjour’. Sunday wasn’t much better. Comes upstairs. Sees all the animals on the bed, goes out again. Gigot for lunch.’

  Two tragedies occurred about this time. Mell broke a leg being chased up a tree by the builder’s chien de chasse and Folie disappeared into the forest, never to be seen again – chased and killed by the same dog, I presumed. For dogs are a coati’s worst enemy. And the poor little beast couldn’t climb. I was terribly distressed. So more coatis were flown over from a New York pet shop. I had asked for a couple, hoping they would breed, but they both turned out to be males. One was reddish brown and I called him Nig. The other was sandy coloured. As soon as he was let out of his travelling box, he made a systematic tour of the terrace, grubbing for slugs and snails. He was so auntyish that Bernard named him Tantine. Later, he became so chubby that I called him Fatty Fat Fat. When one picked him up it was like hugging a little bear. All coatis are intrigued by anything scented; he would scuttle into my bathroom, get hold of the soap and scrabble it all over his ringed tail, forming a thick mousse. Both of them ran about free and sometimes they disappeared into the forest for days, causing many sleepless nights. But I would always leave the front door ajar so that I would know when they got back, when they would clamber up the stairs, give my hand a lick and then curl up on the bed.

  *

  From the start, Bernard made it clear that he had other ladies lined up, awaiting his return to Paris. When Sagan drove up unexpectedly one autumn evening and, after comparing the view to that of an Indian jungle, drove away taking Bernard and his four suitcases, I watched them go. Then I polished off the rest of the whisky, drove furiously down the hill and landed in a ditch. The next day, the car had to be hauled out by a crane. On the opposite side of the valley, a track led up to a run-down farmhouse hidden behind a copse of cork oaks, where Thérèse lived with her husband, Joseph, and their four children. Thérèse came from Aix-en-Provence. She had very green eyes and brown, sturdy legs, and she always came to clean wearing a sleeveless print dress, walking down her side of the valley and up to the mas. Thérèse knew how to mend a fuse, remove any stain and foretell the weather from the way Joseph’s hair behaved.

  ‘It’s very bouclé today,’ she’d say. ‘It’s sure to rain.’

  Thérèse never spoke evil of anyone, even when they were caught out gathering her home-grown vegetables. ‘It’s human nature. What do you expect?’ was her philosophy. Thérèse never flinched on entering my bedroom to see the tiles chipped after a hammer had hurtled through the window or the bed collapsed with castors rolling in all directions, her attitude being that so long as there were no broken teeth or bones to be swept up, everything was all right. And once, after a tap had been left running in my bathroom (Bernie’s attempt to drown Mummy, one could say) Thérèse made no comment. She merely hauled a pail up the stairs and spent the afternoon swilling. It was only towards the end of the affair and she arrived to find the dishwasher overturned, and all the crockery in smithereens on the kitchen floor, that she admitted to being scared.

  When not tending thirty hectares of vines for an absentee landlord, Joseph came up and gardened. He always had something cheerful to say.

  ‘Il fait beau aujourd’hui,’ he would say, even if a mistral raged. His laugh was infectious and made you feel that life was worth living. Joseph liked to tipple and, at the end of a day’s gardening, he would come into the kitchen to have a chat and I brought out the bidon of wine.

  When not bottling, cooking or sewing for her family, Thérèse often had relatives to stay. It was a mystery where everyone slept, there being only two bedrooms in their farmhouse. Joseph’s retarded brother slept in the stable with the mule. Should they have an excessive overflow and I was alone, Thérèse and Joseph came over and slept in the mas. I enjoyed their company, even if, like all the locals, they repeated everything four times over and, after their departure, the spare room remained red
olent of copulating beasts. It was, however, preferable to the stench of stale tobacco or face powder. They never left the mattress covered in coffee stains or the walls spattered with mosquitoes, as more sophisticated guests sometimes did. They would arrive early in the evening and, before going to bed, talk in front of the fire, then leave early in the morning, when their alarm bell went. I became very fond of the whole family and often gave them things. Should I, for some reason, walk over to their farm, after visiting their mule, the pigs and the four chained dogs, I would go into their kitchen to find everyone rigged out in one of my discarded garments. The eldest daughter would be wearing my pretty Capri sandals, Joseph that old Isle of Aran pullover and the youngest son, Joel, looked so dashing in my Mexican sombrero that I often felt tempted to ask for it back.

  On a clear day, when Joseph was tilling the vines, one could hear him cursing his mule, and if it wasn’t for the echo of the buzz-saw carving wood, or the children’s voices in autumn as they gathered cèpes or pine cones for a fire, the quiet of the valley might have become unendurable.

  In the early days, when I went to England, they would take care of the cats, until one year Mell ate their pet canary as it flew out of its cage; and though Joseph admired Mell’s ability as a rat catcher, she was never allowed on to the farm again.

  * The perfect hangover cure.

  Chapter XVII

  Life at the Mas

  Soon after Bernard went off with Sagan, I found myself being courted by a Frenchman engaged in the construction of HLMs (Habitations à Loyer Modéré) in Sainte Maxime. Monsieur Boucarat was a sturdy-looking man with a raffish disposition. He had worked for the CIA in Vietnam where, according to him, his wife had fallen in love with Graham Greene. Boucarat would bring his friends over for the weekend. They would clear the gravel off the terrace and play boules. In the evenings, we dined out somewhere on the coast and usually ended up in a nightclub. One Sunday, he came to dinner and left the mas around midnight, claiming that throughout all his years in the Midi, he had never known it to be so cold. Sure enough, early next morning, I opened the front door to find the valley completely enveloped in snow. Icicles hung from the trees and there was not a branch to be seen. It was a beautiful sunny day and the snow glistened. The electricity was cut and the pipes had frozen. In order to make coffee, I went out and scooped up the snow in a saucepan.

  Joseph had built a large cage for the coatis beneath four umbrella pines on the hill behind the mas, but when I went out to rescue them the snow was so deep that it was impossible to wade through it, so I had to climb up to the cage on all fours and carry each coati, Lorenz-style, on my back into the house. And there we remained for days, Mell, Nig, Tantine and myself, reading Balzac with a bottle of whisky beside the bed and sunlight streaming into the bedroom.

  The snow was beginning to thaw when who should come toiling up the hill but Joseph, bringing me a loaf of bread. Soon after, the shepherd appeared, pushing a bicycle. He stood beaming beneath the bedroom window, tenderly holding something wrapped in a dishcloth and shouted up, ‘Look what I’ve brought you, Madame.’ Goodness. I thought, what could it be, his genitals? The shepherd lived down in the valley and often came up with his flock to graze in the meadow or on the hill. In those days, it was the custom, just before Christmas, for him to take each landowner a gigot and that is what he had brought me.

  Diary

  Alone with Nig and Tantine, brun et blonde, and a female Toute Petite, kept in the lavatory; too cold to put her out … Mell is downstairs on the Récamier. Bernard is with Sagan. I have now adapted to being alone. Coatis let out one at a time. They sometimes stay out three days. When they come back they clamber into the niche on the terrace. This morning I could hear Nig scratching, so I knew he was back.

  My day. Wake up at five, turn on the heating, make coffee, feed Mell and Toute Petite. Am reading Cousin Pons; write; go out and shop. Scrutinise my watch a good deal. Afternoons Thérèse comes, I light a fire round five in the evening; take a librium with my mélange of Scotch, lie beside fire and read; eat. This year I am fifty-three; think of that … It’s getting serious. My debts are now all paid.

  *

  One evening, the postman cycled up the hill with a telegram which read: ‘Arrive demain 8 am. Attends votre presence à la gare. T’embrasse. Bernard.’ And off I went, the squaw at dawn to the station.

  We were driving back along the coast, when who should be crossing the street on his way to work but Monsieur Boucarat, who saw me at the wheel of the Mercedes, with Bernard in the passenger seat, and that was the end of him. Months later, on the port of St Tropez, he stuck his head out of a car merely to boast that he was deeply involved with a Countess and drove off, adamantly standoffish.

  When Bernard arrived from Paris, he always went on a régime. In the evenings, we drank one whisky each and a carafe of red wine with our dinner. At drinks time, he’d pace the sitting room, a glass in his hand, his head crowned with my barette, telling me about the women who had been important in his life, while I, seated on the banquette, watched him spellbound. He had a habit of pulling his hair over his brow, going over to the mirror and patting his cheeks with an invisible powder puff, parodying Sagan. Like her, he was very difficult to understand, not because he talked so rapidly but because he mumbled.

  I am not at all nocturnal. Seven am is my finest hour and so much the better if it is still pitch dark outside. Then I go down and prepare coffee, hot milk and buttered toast, which I carry up to bed. Bernard has his breakfast later.

  In the early days, as soon as he awoke, he would come up to my room and ask if I had slept well. I could usually interpret his mood from the pace of his footsteps on the tiles. If he came in full tilt it was to impart discomforting news. The electricity had been left on downstairs all night, or the stray black Tom had leapt through the kitchen window and gone off with the bread. Leaden footsteps meant he had come to tell me how badly he had slept. Then I went down and prepared his breakfast – Lapsang suchong with a biscotte.

  Once his new quarters had been built on at the far end of the mas next to the kitchen he preferred to walk on to the terrace and, the distance being shorter, shout up, ‘Deuxième service, s’il vous plaît!’ Sometimes, it took so long before his shutters opened that I feared he might be ill. For, like Daddy’s, Bernard’s health was an all-absorbing topic.

  In the beginning, it was I who did the shopping. Bernard participated in other ways. In the evenings, he drenched himself hosing the garden. He seemed to enjoy stacking the dishwasher and defrosting the icebox, grilling cutlets on the barbecue and making pressure cooker stews. It was Bernard who prepared the evening drinks and laid the dinner table, and later, when the swimming pool was built, though he was never known to set foot in it, he became the beach boy. Dressed in a blue kaftan, he circled the pool with a net scooping up dead mice and saving the lives of struggling grenouilles. In fact, he could have made a living that way. I liked to shop early, before too many people were about. We shopped in Cogolin, a wealthy little town renowned for hand-spun tapestries and briar pipes, the briar being hacked in the surrounding forest. Only much later, with a socialist mayor and increasing hordes of tourists did the place, lined with giant palms, become a parking lot. Opposite the town hall was a very good butcher. People came in from St Tropez to buy his meat. Should I go in early, I’d come upon the butcher’s son perched on the kerb in squelchy, yellow, plastic sandals, wiping his hands on a bloody, striped apron. Should I say, ‘What is there good today?’ looking down his nose he’d reply coldly, ‘Il y a un peu de tout ici, Madame.’ No matter, I always bought the same thing.

  ‘Deux côtelettes dans le filet, s’il vous plâit.’ The lamb came from Sisteron and was particularly delicious.

  In the Casino, where they bowed you in and out with Bonjour Mesdames Messieurs c’est moi qui vous remercie’ and where everything cost a few cents less than in the other co-ops, the manager would watch every move one made due to shop-lifting. And while piling up y
our carton, the serveuse would go on repeating, ‘Ensuite, Madame. Ensuite.’

  At the entrance to Cogolin was a fishmonger. His fish came from Toulon, so he said. He was a very jolly man and had a habit of swinging a big fish by the tail over his head and slapping it on the slab, with the joyous cry of ‘Ooopla …’

  The shopping over, when getting into the car I was sometimes waylaid by a pair of gipsies, balancing babies, who haunted the place. Grabbing hold of my arm, one would cry, ‘Montre-moi ta main, ma jolie!’ And once addressing the street, she shrieked, ‘Regardez comme elle est belle!’ And with that compliment ringing in my head, without giving a sou, I had crashed into gear and raced off to Grimaud, where we bought the newspapers. The woman who ran the bookshop was a likeable old witch who always had a petticoat strap showing and when she smiled, all one saw were two front teeth with a gap between. The newspapers arrived by bus at the bottom of the hill and she then had to carry them up on her back to the librarie which gave on to the Place Vieille where the villagers played boules. Should I arrive after midday, she might be frying sardines on a gas ring. If there were no English newspapers, she’d say dolefully, as though attending the undertakers, ‘I don’t know what can be keeping them. They haven’t come in yet.’

  When Bernard heard the car charge up the hill, he would come on to the terrace in his dressing gown and say, ‘You haven’t forgotten my Micky? My Craven?’ or whatever it was he awaited, and then he went back to bed taking Mell. Abyssinians are great hunters. Scarcely a day passed when Mell did not bring in a lizard, a mole or a field mouse. She would kill her victim with one paw stroke; all that remained might be a tail or a flurry of feathers on the tiles. Should she bring in a rabbit, I’d skin and cook it for her. In the evenings, when Bernard got up to go into the kitchen, Mell would leap off the banquette, run ahead and stand beside the fridge, her tail quivering with anticipation until he had stacked her dish with Ronron, Whiskas or Mitou. While eating, she had a habit of peering over her shoulder, in case the stray Tom that haunted the terrace suddenly leapt through the window. When not hungry, she flicked her hind paws at the dish in a series of scuffing movements, as though the food were excrement.