“Sit down,” I tell him, quickly and abruptly. “The croissants are warm now.”
He does not sit down but stays beside me.
“Bella, would you allow me to stay? Until the weather has cleared - of course?”
One will say he is an English lord.
“Yes,” I say. “You can stay till the wind dies down.”
Those words slipped out.
-0-
When Geneva was over and Jean-Louis and I were driving into Paris from the Porte d’Italie on the southern border of the capital, he asked whether I would allow him to stay at my apartment for the night.
“I’ll go straight to the office from there tomorrow morning,” he explained, a hand briefly leaving the steering wheel to touch my face.
I had prepared for such an eventuality and had hurriedly tidied up before I set off for Gare de Lyon to catch the Geneva express.
On that first visit to my apartment, he stood for a long time in front of the photo of my father and mother on the mantelpiece in the sitting room.
“Your father was a handsome man. And look how beautiful your mother is,” he said.
The photo was taken about four years after my birth. I can remember the morning the photographer came to Le Presbytère. I watched him set up his big, black, box-shaped camera in the drawing room. He moved the settee, huffing as he pulled and pushed it to stand between the two bay windows, and explained to us about angles and light and aperture speed, all of which I, and I’m sure my parents too, understood not a word. He told my parents how they were to sit. “Not to cross the legs,” he told my mother, tapping her lightly on her stockinged knee, and he asked my father to fold his arms in front of him, like great men have the habit of doing for official portraits. I watched, wide-eyed with interest and hoping he would also be taking my picture. He crawled underneath a piece of black cloth which was hanging over the camera and he pulled a string which set off a very bright flash of blue light. He did not take my picture; my parents had, as they explained to a tearful me, hired him only to take one photo - theirs.
“You should come to Normandy. Come to see my mother. She’s still pretty,” I told Jean-Louis.
The words had hardly been spoken and he had his engagement diary out of his briefcase and checking whether he would be free the following weekend.
“Superb!” he said, his face smiling. “I have nothing scheduled. I can fit in Normandy.”
Fit in Normandy!
-0-
Chapter Fifteen
This morning the sky is the molten orange of an amber stone hundreds of years old.
I stand at my bedroom window, and I know the sun will rise today. The wind has already calmed to a soft caress, the leaves hardly moving, and the sea in the distance is an immobile grey cloth.
I dress quickly; I want to make Colin’s breakfast because he would be eager to set off, to go and find a guest house. In the high season, a guest house keeper, whose place is fully booked, will refer a guest to another guest house or hotel, but I will not be able to recommend another Sainte-Marie-sur-Brecque guest house to Colin this morning because I know none will accept a guest who wants to stay for several months.
He is again already in the kitchen. He is sitting at the work table, looking towards the window, seemingly in deep thought, but a paperback lies open in front of him. I am wearing soft shoes so he has not heard me walk in and for a moment I stand still and silent and I watch him. His face, in profile, is extremely masculine - firm jaw, raised cheekbones, his forehead wide - and I had thought he was ordinary looking. Had I not also thought Jean-Louis was ordinary looking when I first set eyes on him? And look how I fell for him!
“Morning!” I greet Colin.
I tried to sound casual.
“Oh, good morning. I did not hear you walk in.”
“I’m sorry. Did I give you a fright?”
He had looked startled for a moment.
“No, it’s just that - that I thought you were - but no, you did not give me a fright. How did you sleep? Well, I hope?”
“How did you sleep? Strange room. Strange bed. I never sleep on a first night in a strange room.”
“I slept well, thank you. I did not wake up at all during the night. Went off the moment my head hit the pillow.”
He is not in his motorcycle leather, but in jeans and a short-sleeved white T-shirt and my heart misses a beat.
Hell, I am being stupid!
“You would have seen the weather has cleared,” I rapidly say, hoping to steady my unsteady heartbeat.
“Bella, I would like not to have to leave today.”
He is looking me straight in the eye. I think he is holding his breath awaiting my reply. My agreement.
“If you would like to spend another night here, it will not be a problem.”
“No, not just this night. I would like you to reconsider me staying here longer. Like until Christmas - just before Christmas as I take it that you would be joining your family for Christmas, or some of them would probably be coming here.”
“As yet I’ve no plans for Christmas, but let me heat the kettle and get your breakfast.”
“Oh Bella, please … do not go to any trouble. I do not eat in the mornings.”
I sigh with relief: I thought he was going to beg me to stay.
“A cup of tea and a croissant … is what it will be. Like yesterday morning.”
“And it will be terrific. Thank you, Bella.”
-0-
I will wait until I have some strong coffee in me before I decide about having Colin Lerwick stay. I wonder what the legalities are about having a guest when the guest house is officially closed - registered as such at our town hall and at the regional tourist office. I would certainly have to telephone the gendarmerie and let Captain Contepomi know that he would have to come check my guest registry next Friday and the Friday after that and each Friday until Christmas. Or until Colin Lerwick leaves.
But have I decided to allow this man to stay?
My father always said decisions were made for us. I said this to Jean-Louis once. “Rubbish!” he snapped. “That is saying that you are not - that I am not - that we are not masters of our life. If I bugger up it is because of a decision I’ve made and not one which has been made for me by some invisible being, some spirit - or spook more likely.”
So what is my decision?
Le Presbytère has ten rooms and one winter I calculated that if I walk through each of them, walk slowly, perhaps pause at a window or in front of a favourite ornament on a shelf or a favourite picture on a wall, I will get rid of between thirty and forty-five minutes of each lonely day. Oh Jesus, do I want another winter of walking through these ten silent rooms pleased that I am killing time?
So come on Bella Wolff, there is no spook to make the decision for you; make it yourself!
Colin is spreading Gertrude’s strawberry jam - jam which won her the first prize of a video recorder at Avranche’s food fair last summer - over one of his heated croissants.
“It’s nice, is it not - the jam?” I ask.
“Delicious. I’m going to eat all of it - the jam - I’m afraid.”
He spreads yet another spoonful of it over his second heated croissant.
“You would not be able to eat it all, not even in two months here, because I have ten large jars of the stuff. Le Presbytère had a bumper strawberry crop this year - thanks to Fred’s green thumbs - and Gertrude was cooking jam almost every day. The entire house had a sweet sticky smell and all the wasps of Normandy came to visit.”
“Two months?” His cup is halfway to his lips. “Do I take it that you are allowing me to stay?”
Am I?
“I would have to let you have a nicer room - a bigger room. You would have to sign the register and ...”
“Pay in advance?”
There is teasing laughter in his voice.
“Pay in advance? Of course not! Don’t be silly!”
Do not be silly. I said this
to him yet I am the silly one. The stupid one. I have a rule - I close in winter - and now I have taken a guest, and this guest is a man I am finding very attractive. Yet, I do not want him to go. Not just yet.
Silly. Silly. Stupid. Stupid.
I have not thought it over. I have not balanced what would not be good about it against what would be.
Would there be anything good about it?
-0-
“I think I am falling in love with you, Bella,” Jean-Louis said after we had been seeing each other for six weeks, and were spending a second weekend at Le Presbytère.
“Fair enough, Jean-Louis, you’re not on your knees pledging undying love to me to only change your mind the moment we are on the highway driving back to the reality which is Paris,” I replied.
“And what is the reality which is Paris?”
“The Paris air is polluted,” I replied flatly, deliberately not wanting to admit to him -and to me - he is not a free man, free to go down on his knees to ask me to marry him.
“Come on, Bella, be serious. Do you at least fancy me?” he asked.
“A little.”
I had tried to sound casual about it.
“Fair enough,” he said, echoing my words of a moment earlier.
“I’m being silly, Jean-Louis, don’t take notice of what I say,” I apologised.
“I love it when you are being silly, Bella. There is so much promise in your silliness. So, you fancy me a little, as you say. Perhaps it is a fancy which will deepen, deepen to really like and then to crazy about and then to ...”
“Ok! That’s enough!” I interrupted him.
“Now you are angry!”
“Nope.”
“Bella, my dear Bella,” he said, “I know I am not free - not for the going on my knees stuff.”
“So let us change the subject,” I snapped.
I threw my hands, palms facing him, up in the air and he shook his head.
“Bella, changing the subject will be dodging the subject. What I want to say is this: I do plan to get a divorce but - but there is the future of the girls I must think of. I can’t imagine ... losing them, not that I will, I suppose, but they may just hate me should their mother and I finalise our separation, if you follow what I am trying to say. Bella, I do sincerely wish us to have a future, to be committed to one another. This - you and me - is not just a fling as far as I am concerned. I do not know: is it just a fling for you? I do not know.”
“I suggested we change the subject, Jean-Louis,” I snapped yet again.
“So this is just a fling?”
I shook my head.
“I do not indulge in flings.”
He was then the one who threw his arms up in the air.
“Oh forget this! I am going to walk down to the village. Are you coming with me?”
I did not go with him. He stayed in the village for several hours and when he returned my mother pointed out to me that she could smell wine on his breath.
“A man who drinks at the least little differences, Bella, is a man you give the boot to.”
“What difference are you talking of, Mother?” I asked her.
“Differences. Plural. His wife. His children. He might have removed his wedding band - I know he was wearing one until quite recently because the mark is still on his finger - but, as sure as the fact that I am standing in front of you here now, is the fact that he is still bound to them. The wedding band’s gone, yes, but it has been replaced with a mental shackle. This is always what happens when marriages break up.”
“Bella, was that our first argument?” asked Jean-Louis.
Our weekend over, we had driven back to Paris and to my apartment.
“I do not know what you are talking about,” I replied.
“Oh, sure you do,” he said, his face flushed with anger.
He did not stay with me that night, and he slammed the door on leaving, and I was angry with myself.
Hell, I am a silly cow, I said to myself.
-0-
Chapter Sixteen
I choose the White Room for Colin. It is two rooms from mine and like mine it has a bay window overlooking the front garden.
“You ought to be comfortable in here.”
He stands in the doorway, his briefcase on the floor behind him.
“I would have been equally comfortable in the ‘Tony from Colorado’ room, but thank you, Bella.”
The White Room is, as its name implies, all in white; walls, bedspread, sheets, pillowcases, cushions, curtains. The other bedrooms have other colour schemes - pink, yellow, lilac - but I cannot picture this man in a room with pink, lilac or yellow walls and bedspread. And sleeping between pink sheets. Sometimes, I give this room to a young couple, and always to a honeymoon couple, but it is not a bridal room, because the elderly and old like it as much as the young ones.
I start making the queen-sized bed. I have silk sheets for the bed, but these I always reserve for the honeymooners. Knowing a man often cuts his face when shaving and wishing to protect my white towels, I hang navy-blue ones in the en-suite bathroom. I set out a range of Yves Rocher men’s toiletries on the bathroom shelf: Aztec after-shave balm, anti-perspirant deodorant and eau de toilet. I accidentally press the spray dispenser on the eau de toilet container and a mist of the scent of cedar and ginseng envelopes me.
Through the window I can see Colin has started to unload the sidecar. I have been curious about the sidecar’s contents and now I see he is carrying Tesco plastic shopping bags, all filled with books and cassettes, into the house. He takes a cassette player and a recorder from the sidecar. It would be interesting to know what music he likes, presuming these are music cassettes. Jean-Louis liked - I suppose he still does - women singers: Tina Turner, Whitney Houston, Madonna. “How can you possibly like James Brown?” he used to ask me when I always asked him to put James Brown’s Sex Machine on the player when driving back to Paris from a weekend in Normandy.
I hear Colin come upstairs; light, rhythmic footsteps.
“Here!”
He stops at the door.
“I am giving you so much trouble, Bella.” He walks towards the bathroom and looks into it. “I could not have asked for a nicer set-up. Mind you I like the ‘Tony from Colorado’ room downstairs too.”
“You will be better off here.”
“Thank you, dear Bella!”
He walks over to me as if he wants to touch me, but he abruptly comes to a halt as if he is on his motorcycle and has run into a red light.
I step back and out of his reach should he change his mind.
“When you have moved all your things up here, come down and sign the registry please.”
He says he will.
-0-
It is Thursday and therefore market day.
I leave Colin to allow him to settle into the White Room and I go and change because I will be driving down to Sainte-Marie-sur-Brecque to shop. I have made a mental list of what I will be buying for his - our - meals. I may even call in on Gertrude to ask her if she could not perhaps one evening come up to Le Presbytère to cook something really nice, something special, for him - for us.
I slip into one of my sleeveless cotton summer frocks: the rain, gone, and the wind, calmed, the air has warmed up somewhat. For a change I wear heels, a pair of open-toed sandals I had bought when I was still at Chartreux Hospital but have not worn for a while.
What about some jewellery? I would not want to look like a Christmas tree, no, but a bracelet would not be out of place, and I ought also wear something around my neck because the frock is rather low-cut and I wish to cover the cleavage. For the first time in a while I search through my jewellery box. Lifting the lid When the Saints Come Marching In starts to play. I hope Colin will not hear the music because he may wonder what I am up to. I choose a bracelet and necklace set of large pink plastic beads made by hand by some unprivileged women somewhere in Mexico and which I bought in Paris on the Butte Montmartre. The full-length mirror i
n my wardrobe tells me the necklace indeed covers a large section of the bare skin of my throat and the cleavage and this pleases me.
On my way out, I stop outside the White Room.
“Colin, I’m driving down to the village for some provisions.”
He is standing at the dressing table in front of the bay window, his back to the door.
He turns round.
“I will guard the fort in your absence, General.”
He raises his right hand, his fingers together, his thumb tugged against the hollow of his hand, his forearm straight and horizontal to the floor, and with the tip of his forefinger he touches the outer edge of his right eyebrow. He is saluting me.
He has again put his typewriter on the dressing table. When I get back I will suggest we put a writing desk in the room. There is one in the packing room down in the basement which we can carry upstairs.
My Frida Kahlo courtyard is wet after the rain and I make sure not to step into a puddle of water or to let water from the hanging baskets of ferns drip onto me. I do though walk right into one of the palm trees and I become entangled in its dripping wet drooping branches.
“Bugger!” I swear out loud.
Feeling ridiculous and fearing I also look it, I swing round to see whether Colin is at the window and watching. Indeed, he is still standing at the window, a smile across his face. Or rather, he is suppressing laughter. He salutes me yet again; the same gesture as before.
He must have looked gorgeous in the dark-blue uniform of the R.A.F.
I wonder if he piloted planes. Bombers? Would he have agreed to bomb Hiroshima?
Oh shit Bella Wolff, pull yourself together.
-0-
It is a fine morning. It seems the storm, like a laxative, one of those chocolate-flavoured ones we gave patients at Chartreux Hospital to clear their stomachs, has cleared the air. The pré-salé pasture land is vividly green, the sky and the sea both sapphire blue in the brilliant sunshine. Having neither my period nor am I pregnant, I dismiss Gertrude’s warning about the dangers of a draught and I turn the Merc’s front windows down. I wonder if Colin is watching the road from the White Room’s window. I know guests do always find the view from Le Presbytère irresistible and spend long minutes just standing by a window looking out. Should he be doing so, he will see the Merc, so I stick my left hand out the window and I wave like someone waving the checkered flag at the start of a Formula One race. Should he be watching and mentions the waving, I can always say I had seen a farmer and waved to him.
Bella...A French Life Page 9