“I know, dear Bella, I know,” he murmured.
Like the week before, he planted a kiss of goodbye on each of my cheeks, and I, on his, and he ran down the steps back into the station, but he halted and turned around.
“Thank you, Miss Wolff.”
He waved.
And I waved too.
I quickly turned and set off for my apartment.
-0-
Chapter Ten
“What is it with the French and black coffee?” asks Colin Lerwick.
“I don’t know but I do know I should be cutting down.”
“Did your doctor tell you that, because, I believe, one should not take too much notice of what doctors say?”
“I am a doctor.”
“Oh Lord,” he says, “I will have to apologise for having said that.”
“I am not now working as a doctor.”
We are sitting facing one another at the work table in my kitchen. He’s drunk a first cup of tea and has accepted a second. I put a plate of sablé biscuits dotted with tiny morsels of chocolate on the table and he has already eaten several and has just helped himself to another.
He has a fine forehead; my mother would have said that such a forehead portrayed intelligence. He is looking at me as if waiting for the right moment to make a statement or ask for a favour; his eyes are brown like those of Jean-Louis, and like his, they are most extraordinarily penetrating.
“This is a most beautiful house,” he says.
“Thank you. It is my home and not an investment.”
“Do you need a large staff here?”
“At the height of summer, yes.”
“They did not tell me down in the village - what’s its name? - that you were closed.”
He has told me this already.
“They should have.”
“I am looking for a place to stay for a couple of months. Perhaps longer. I have to finish a book. I write. I am a writer.”
“You said you were a journalist.”
His cheeks are clean shaven and shiny as if he had shaved just a moment earlier.
“Writer. I write. Articles. Books. I am writing a book about Boris Pasternak. The Russian poet.”
“I know who Pasternak was.”
“I’m sorry. I did not mean to imply that you did not.”
“That’s ok.”
“My agent and publisher are waiting for the manuscript. I need total peace and quiet. I can’t write with people around me.”
“So a guest house would not be suitable.”
“A guest house which is closed, yes, that would be.”
“I sing when I put the machine over the floors in the morning.”
“Will you allow me to stay, Miss Wolff? I will pay the bill in advance, of course.”
“And you will not be a nuisance. You will make your own bed, clean your room, bathroom and toilet yourself, and - cross your heart and hope you die.”
He smiles.
“You will not even know I am here, Miss Wolff.”
“My supper is the same every night, Mr Lerwick.”
“I can boil an egg. And I learnt how to make a bed when I did my military service in the R.A.F.”
“We French have a soft spot for the Royal Air Force because of how its young men came to help us during the war, but I’m sorry, I still have to insist that I can’t allow you to stay. I do really close each winter and if I have to make an exception to that rule this winter, next winter more people will arrive wanting to stay.”
The door bell rings again. It will be Samy. I did not hear his van drive up.
“Excuse me. I’ll be right back.”
“Let myself in, Miss. Hope you do not mind,” says Samy.
He is already halfway across the drawing room.
Always impatient, always in a hurry, he says he will go straight down to the boiler room and come and see me afterwards. The pungent odour of a blocked drain clings to him; it always does which might explain why, at twenty, despite that he is good-looking with his curly black hair and blue eyes he does not yet have a girlfriend.
“I will be in the kitchen, Samy,” I tell him.
I find Colin Lerwick in the courtyard.
“I hope you do not mind. I stepped out to admire this splendid corner.”
“It is lovely, is it not?”
“Reminds me of Spain. I lived in Madrid for a couple of years. Was based there for the news agency I was with.”
“I was inspired by Frida Kahlo.”
“Frida Kahlo! Strange. Before I decided on the Pasternak book I was toiling with the idea to write about her. The Trotsky connection - you know. Or to write about Trotsky for that matter.”
“I think you made the right decision to have settled on Pasternak.”
“I was in Peredelkino this past summer - research - and I went to Pasternak’s grave. I will show you the photos I took of the grave - but of course I will not be staying ...”
“I would like to go to Peredelkino one day.”
“You should go by train from Moscow. Pasternak had always taken the train there. I have photos of his dacha too.”
How pleasant to be talking to someone with the same interests.
“How far are you with your book?” I ask.
“I ought to be able to write ‘the end’ by the end of the year. Well … if this is to happen, I ought to be on my way or ...”
Overhead the sky has darkened to the colour of chocolate ice cream.
“Look up,” I interrupt him, “look how dark the sky’s become. It is going to rain.”
Now what made me tell him that?
He groans.
“I do not relish the thought of being on my bike in the rain.”
Should I let him stay?
-0-
“Miss, your friend … one will say he is an English lord,” says Samy.
We are standing beside Samy’s van. I left Colin Lerwick sitting in the kitchen with another cup of tea.
“Thank your boss for me, Samy.”
He is in the blue cotton overalls and blue cap of a French worker.
“The boss will bill you, Miss, and I will come to check that all’s working well just before Christmas.”
He lifts his working man’s blue cap in greeting. Curls fall over his forehead.
He gets into his van and holds the door open with his foot.
“That’s a man you can trust, Miss, if you will allow me to say so.”
He is flipping his head towards the house behind us.
Trust. I wondered whether I could trust Jean-Louis. Trust him, that should I love him, he would not throw that love back into my face.
-0-
Chapter Eleven
Jean-Louis left another message for me on my answerphone.
He said he had a meeting scheduled in Geneva and he wondered whether I would not like to join him there. Seeing it would give you an opportunity to visit Geneva. He would have to leave Paris the following morning - Wednesday - but he would be free from the Thursday evening. We would have the weekend in Switzerland. Let me know. Call. He left his office number and I called and his secretary gave me the name of the Geneva hotel where he would be staying as well as the hotel’s phone number.
“He’s had to leave today already, but I could call him for you and pass on a message if you wish, Dr Wolff,” said the secretary.
“Tell Jean-Louis I will see him in Geneva. I will make my own accommodation arrangement. I will arrive on Friday around noon,” I told her.
I was not a child; I knew what would be happening in Geneva. And I wanted it to happen.
I arrived on the noon high-speed train. I had booked a room in one of the hotels overlooking Cornavin railway station. Jean-Louis was staying in a five-star on the lake front.
I stood for a long time at the window of my room. Long blue trams pulled up at shelters on the square between the grey-stone station building and my modern glass-fronted hotel. People poured from the trams, some, wearily pulli
ng suitcases, disappeared into the station building; others shot across the tram lines, and rushed off, away from the station. The Swiss flag – white cross in a red square - which I had seen till then only on photographs, fluttered from the roof of the station and from the roofs of the other hotels on the square. I took a small bottle of mineral water from the mini bar and drank it down in one gulp. In the bathroom I cleaned my teeth and next I went to ask the concierge which way the lake was.
Lac Léman was still like a spatter of blue paint on an artist’s frock. Genfersee. My father often spoke of the lake and he always called it Genfersee; before the war he studied the humanities at the city’s university. “Humanities. My arse! Fucking Boche!” one of my uncles, misunderstanding what was meant by ‘humanities’, once said and loud enough for all of our guests to hear.
Still in the black trouser suit and flat-heeled black shoes in which I had travelled, I walked along the lake for about half an hour, admired the magnificent glass-fronted hotels, one of them where Jean-Louis was staying, and I admired the blue-rinses of the old Swiss ladies walking their small fluffy dogs along the promenade, and I returned to the hotel and called Jean-Louis.
“What’s your hotel like?” he asked.
“Without doubt, not like yours.”
“Is it bad?”
There was concern in his voice.
“It’s very nice, Jean-Louis. I have a huge window and I can see all of Switzerland from it.”
“I’ve hired a car. I will come pick you up. We will go for tea in Montreux.”
I again cleaned my teeth and I combed my hair and I waited on the pavement.
He drove up and descended from the car - a hired metallic-silver Porsche.
“Glad I am to see you. Thank you for coming,” he said.
We shook hands like two people who did not know each other well.
“Hello, Jean-Louis,” I said. “How are you?”
He gave a little laugh.
“Better, now you are here, thank you.”
He pulled me towards him and his lips rested on my forehead, and it was for more than a fleeting moment. I felt like throwing my arms around him and holding him, but I did not even lift my arms.
“Are you moving on, sir?” asked the hotel’s doorman, dressed theatrically, in a navy blue uniform with red tassels dangling from the tunic’s padded shoulders.
“We’re moving on, yes,” replied Jean-Louis, not a trace of a smile on his face.
We took a narrow side road away from the station and after a few minutes we were on a highway. The Porsche was comfortable; the seats deep and soft, and the engine silent. Jean-Louis said a Porsche was his favourite car.
“Do you need the air con?” he asked.
“I’m ok.”
He was again in jeans and white shirt, but he wore a white blazer, and black leather shoes. He must have felt my eyes on him because he turned towards me and his lips smiled. I could not see his eyes because they were hidden behind square-framed, brown tortoiseshell sunglasses. I looked at his hands on the steering wheel. I have always had something about a man’s hands. The hand has twenty-seven bones of which fourteen are the phalanges of the fingers: I am quoting from an anatomy text book from my first year at ‘uni’. Jean-Louis’ hands were smooth: there were no bulging veins or scars on the top and his nails were cut round and short and shone like those of a baby. They were not a working man’s hands, the hands of a man who toils the soil or lays bricks, no, they were the hands of a surgeon; yes, possibly the hands of a surgeon. I fought the urge to lay one of my own on one of them.
On our right was the lake. Pleasure boats, moored in small marinas, bobbed on the clear water, and a red motorboat pulled a water skier, a young girl - a child still - in a wet suit and crash helmet, behind it. On our left were sloping green pastures where cows, their udders hanging full and low, grazed between rolling green Alpine hills.
Jean-Louis was silent, so I tried to make conversation.
“Looks pleasant.”
We passed a small chalet with a red-tiled roof and red geraniums in yellow window boxes. A woman was hanging wet white sheets on a line in the back garden. Two small blond boys kicked a football out in the front garden.
“Could you live here?” asked Jean-Louis.
“In this chalet?”
“No. Here. Just here.”
“Yes, why not? I could keep a cow and make cheese. Each week I’ll take my cheese to the open-air market. So, yes, I could live here. Happily.”
We drove past a small timber-framed chapel. A bell clanged harshly over the tender hum of the Porsche’s engine.
“Are you religious, Bella?”
“Meaning?”
“Do you believe in God? A God?”
“I believe in ... something ... some power ... some force ...”
“Same here. I have a cousin who is a priest. He is praying for my lost soul.”
We reached Clarens, a village of luxury villas, all with colourful gardens, and within a few minutes, if a sign beside the road was to be believed, we were in the town of Montreux.
We pulled up in front of what could only have been the town’s smartest and most expensive hotel with floors of windows behind wrought-iron balconies which were covered in more red geraniums shaded by reddish-pink tarpaulins.
“We will have tea here,” said Jean-Louis.
A doorman in a red uniform with silver braids told us to leave the car, he would get the car jockey to park it in the car park. A maitre d’ in a well-pressed dark-blue suit escorted us to a table for two on a terrace which overlooked the lake. About a dozen tables were laid for lunch: the table cloths were white, the napkins pink. There was a small glass vase with flowers on each table. The flowers were plastic: once they must have been red but they had faded to orange. The stems and leaves had darkened to brown.
The maitre d’ called over a waiter who was laying tables and taking much care in the task of measuring the distance between a white porcelain plate on a table and the sterling silver cutlery to each side of it. The waiter was dressed in black trousers and long-sleeved white shirt and thin black tie. I noticed his tie clip matched his cufflinks: the hotel’s logo of a small boat with mast and sails on what looked like gold but was probably not. He handed each of us a menu as large as a broadsheet.
I looked at Jean-Louis.
“Are you an habitué?”
“Never been here in my life.”
“So, I can’t allow you to decide what we should order.”
He smacked his lips like a schoolboy on a day’s outing with his class.
“All looks delicious, but shall we say: tea for two and the cake trolley?”
“I am supposed to be on a diet.”
“From where I’m sitting you do not need it. You look ... divine.”
The cakes were French and Swiss: small pastry gondolas filled with cranberries, chocolate mousse in small cups made of dark chocolate, meringues filled with frangipane, tiny croissants and vermicelli boats.
I poured the tea. Jean-Louis watched me closely. He said not a word. I picked up one of the meringues and he chose one of the vermicelli boats.
“Why don’t you say something?” I asked.
“Why would you not accept my offer of a room in my hotel?”
“Because.”
“Oh, come on, Bella. You would have had a room of your own.”
He sounded angry.
“I’m comfortable where I am,” I told him.
“Oh, I don’t know! Hell, you are stubborn!”
He noisily threw his spoon down on the table.
A gull landed on the table beside ours and the waiter rushed over and slapped a white teacloth against the table to chase the bird. It flapped its long white wings as if to fly away but stayed where it was.
“Woosh!Woosh!” hissed the waiter.
The gull turned and fixed one tiny beady eye on Jean-Louis and me and, flapping its wings, flew off.
The waiter returned to his pr
evious spot at the entrance to the terrace, the white teacloth folded and hanging over his left arm.
Jean-Louis stroked my hair.
“Bella ... let me tell you ... let me tell you … I find you ... extremely exciting.”
“Jean-Louis, I find you extremely exciting too,” I confessed.
The hand which had stroked my hair was resting on my shoulder. His touch was light.
“For now, Bella, that will do for me.”
We were no longer the only patrons on the terrace, but we might have been. We only had eyes for one another.
After tea we drove away from the town into the snow-topped peaks of the Alps behind the town. The clock on the dashboard showed it was close to five o’clock. It was getting cool in the car and shadows had started to fall over the lake behind us.
“I can drive like this forever,” said Jean-Louis.
The road had narrowed and the Porsche’s automatic gearbox noiselessly switched to a higher gear. We passed a blue and white road sign. It showed we were driving towards a place named Rochers-de-Naye, which, as I read, was 2045 metres above sea level. I looked at Jean-Louis, asking with my eyes whether that was where we were heading, but he ignored my glance and stepped on the accelerator. Montreux grew tinier behind us and the lake grew larger until it was as huge as an ocean.
Lights had started to go on in Montreux and when we reached Rochers-de-Naye it turned out to be just one two-storey grey stone building. We reached it at the same time as a cogwheel train with no passengers, but which quickly began to fill as waiting backpackers scrambled on for the journey back down the mountain to Montreux.
Jean-Louis parked the car with others in front of the grey building where several people with tanned faces and necks were sitting on a terrace drinking frothy beer from patterned tankards. He asked whether I was thirsty and I said I was not and he suggested we should go for a walk.
“Before night comes.”
He took me by the hand and we walked along a path which led us around the grey building and up a bare hillock of the same grey stone as the hotel and most of the buildings I had seen in Geneva. We walked in silence, his body close to mine and his breath warm and soft in my neck. Behind us the cogwheel train’s engine clanked into motion and the train started its descent.
Bella...A French Life Page 6