Bella...A French Life

by Marilyn Z. Tomlins

  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.”

  “Unfortunately, old news keeps on hurting, Colin.”

  He nods.

  “Quite right. Unlike old shoes, it never becomes comfortable.”

  “I think you’re managing alright.”

  “And so are you, Bella.”

  He leans forward and his eyes are again on mine, searching for something in mine as they did a few minutes earlier. Quickly, as if by impulse, he takes my right hand in both his hands, but as quickly, as if he has scorched his skin, he pulls his hands away. He looks away too; he looks to where Fred and Frascot are standing beside the barbeque. He waves to them when they notice him.

  My thoughts in turmoil, I am unable to do or say anything.

  “Miss! Come dance!”

  Honorine, in a knee-length yellow dress with ruffles around the hem, stands behind Colin. I have no idea how long she has been standing here and what she has overheard or seen.

  “Go,” says Colin, looking at me again, his voice hardly above a whisper.

  “Will you be coming too?”

  “In a moment. Give me a moment.”

  Honorine’s dress flaps around her knees as she pulls me into the house, and once in the living room, the plum-coloured polyester rug nowhere in sight, she pulls me against her to waltz with her to the accordion music coming from the turntable. She is leading me anti-clockwise around the room, her left hand on my hip, her right gripping my left elbow. We are waltzing and we are not doing it correctly, but Honorine is left-handed. Disregarding the music’s rhythm she navigates us through gaps between the dancing couples, and I stumble after her. Colin stands in the doorway; he’s trying hard not to laugh at what I am sure must be a spectacle. To make matters worse, I lose my balance, trip and leave one of my shoes standing forlornly on the floor for it to be trampled by dancing feet. The music stops. Benefiting from the lull in the dancing, I hobble to where my shoe is lying and step into it.

  “That looked like fun, Bella.”

  Colin has appeared beside me.

  “It was. Great fun. Honorine and I will be competing in the next ballroom world championships.”

  “Wouldn’t want to miss it!”

  He is laughing now.

  At least, the spectacle my chambermaid and I have just supplied has cheered him.

  Our glasses refilled, we look around for a place to sit, but with a sweating, breathless guest recovering on each of the chairs and five of them squeezed onto a three-seat sofa, we have no choice but to sit down on the floor, our legs pulled up and our backs against the wall.

  “I love Van Gogh,” says Colin.

  He points at the Van Gogh reproduction hanging on the facing wall.

  “So do I. When I was a child I had a small reproduction of his Sunflowers hanging in my bedroom. It wasn’t a reproduction as such; it was a picture I’d torn from a magazine. But it was precious to me. It was real to me.”

  “This may sound weird, but I used to carry a postcard of the Sunflowers around with me. I’d bought it on a trip to Paris when I was a student. Cost ten centimes and that included the stamp which had already been stuck on it, but you have no idea what pleasure it gave me looking at that postcard.”

  “So you no longer have it?”

  “An overzealous customs’ officer at the airport in Moscow confiscated it. Suspected it conveyed some coded message; thought I was a spy. The Cold War thing you know. Do you still have your picture?”

  “No, I do not, but in my case it was an overzealous chambermaid who relieved me of it: she broke it. She was cleaning the glass and knocked the picture down and both the frame and the glass were in pieces, so my mother would not allow me to buy another frame to hang the picture back up. She said it was bound to fall down again and I, or the maid, might cut ourselves very badly. I kept the picture though - in a drawer - and it started to turn yellow, as newsprint does, and when I left for high school in Nantes, I left the picture lying on my bed and on my return it was gone. I told myself I will get another. And one day I will get another. I have sort of told myself that one day, when I am really happy, I will buy another Sunflowers reproduction. A small one. Just for me. To again hang in my bedroom.”

  “I have also been meaning to look for another Sunflowers postcard. Oh, I have seen many of them, but never have I been in the right frame of mind to buy one. Be really happy. Really content. Maybe, in love.”

  “I hope you will be - one day.”

  “Ditto.”

  He clicks his glass against mine.

  -0-

  “Would you like to dance, Bella?”

  I have been wondering whether I should invite him to dance.

  “Would love to. Yes.”

  His shirt is damp and beads of perspiration, shiny like tiny diamonds, cling to his hairline. He again smells of mint. I like it. I hope my First of Van Cleef & Arpels is as agreeable.

  Someone has replaced the accordion music with gentler ballads. A bass guitar pulsates soothingly and the timbre of the sax is mellow as Lionel Richie sings, Hello! Is it me you’re looking for? I can see it in your eyes … I can see it in your smile …

  Colin starts to sing: his singing confirms to me he has a good voice.

  You’re all I have ever wanted, and my arms are open wide … ‘Cause you know just what to say … And you know just what to do …

  “Come …Bella … sing along with me.”

  I shake my head.

  And I want to tell you so much, I love you … I long to see the sunlight in your hair … and tell you time and time again how much I care … Sometimes I feel my heart will overflow … Hello, I have just got to let you know …

  Colin and I are not really dancing. We are just moving slowly to the music. Step right. Step left. Turn. Step left. Step right. Turn. He puts both his hands on my hips, the movement bringing his face close to mine. I lift my arms and join my hands at the back of his neck. In this position our bodies could easily touch, but I keep my arms stretched out to prevent this happening. Colin’s breathing is now coming in brief gasps. I am not fooling myself to believe this is because of the closeness of our bodies. No. It is because the smell of cigarette smoke and sweat is heavy in the room.

  The music stops.

  We keep on moving, he, keeping his hands on my hips, but I drop mine to a spot between two of the buttons of his shirt.

  The music recommences.

  It’s now or never ... Come hold me tight ... Kiss me my darling ... Be mine tonight. Elvis Presley. Baudelaire liked Elvis and with him I once danced this slow. It was at a school picnic on the beach, one Friday evening. Overhead, the moon shone in all of its full-moon magnificence and underneath our feet the sand was cool and damp.

  Elvis’s voice fades out and Honorine and Martine, giggling, rush over to the player, and after a few seconds of discussion with Paula, the accordion music starts up again. Immediately, the dance floor fills up. The frown on Colin’s face tells me we have done our dancing. We seek out Paula and Fred to thank them for a lovely evening.

  -0-

  We reach the Mercedes. The wine has made me just woozy enough to warn me I ought not to be driving a car.

  “You drive, do you, Colin?”

  He nods.

  “Do you want me to drive?”

  “Could you?” I ask.

  “Will you trust me with your life?”

  “I’m offering you the wheel because I’m not sure you can trust me with yours.”

  I pass him the set of car keys. He unlocks the door on the passenger side and waits until I am seated and I have folded my cardigan around me before he walks around the front of the car to the driver’s side.

  “You comfy?” he asks.

  He adjusts the seat to his height.

  Ours is the only car on the road to Le Presbytère.

  Behind us a few of
the village’s lights are still switched on and flickering timidly. The mount is dark but two red lights bobbing on the water in the distance signal the presence of a vessel. I had left one of Le Presbytère’s garden lights on and it too flickers, but ahead of us. Colin’s hands are resting lightly on the steering wheel, his fingers fitting into the wheel’s grooves. A man’s hands. Why do I have this fascination with a man’s hands? He begins to tap out a tune against the wheel with his right hand. It is a tune only he can hear because all I am hearing is the purr of the car’s engine. His left hand is on the wheel. No doubt sensing my eyes on him, he turns his head and looks at me. He smiles. There is something in the smile which signals protection, safety, amity.

  “Sleep,” he says. “Put your head back and close your eyes.”

  Like an obedient child, I put my head back.

  I close my eyes, but sleep escapes me.

  -0-

  “Home,” says Colin.

  Quickly, I open my eyes. I sit up. No, home we are - I am - not yet. Le Presbytère is exactly six-hundred metres away. I know this from walking down to Sainte-Marie-sur-Brecque, a pedometer around one of my ankles. I had an argument with Jean-Louis about my measuring driven distance with a pedometer. “Christ, Bella, a pedometer is for measuring the distance covered in walking, not when you are in a bloody car.”

  Must banish him from my mind.

  “Another six-hundred metres … four-hundred still to go. It was six-hundred back there when you spoke, but now it is four-hundred … rather three-hundred now,” I say.

  “Two-hundred … one-fifty… fifty …,” he counts down.

  Ahead of us, Le Presbytère is black.

  A poem comes to mind.

  Out of the night that covers me… Black as the pit from pole to pole … I thank whatever gods may be … For my unconquerable soul … I am the master of my fate … I am the captain of my soul ….