Bella...A French Life

by Marilyn Z. Tomlins

  “Apricot jam,” she said. “It’s homemade too.”

  She put half a dozen large glass pots, which had once held mustard or gherkins, on the counter. She unscrewed the top of one, invited me to stick a finger into the deep orange jam to taste it. I duly did. Next, she stuck a spoon into the jam and offered me the halved apricot she had retrieved.

  “Well, Miss?” she wanted to know.

  ‘Very sweet’ I said to myself, and ‘smooth and velvety’ I said to Amandine and Olivier, he standing beside her, the anticipation on his face telling me he had made the jam.

  “Miss, forget about carrots, it’s apricots that will keep you from going blind,” said he.

  What could I do after such advice?

  I bought four pots of the jam.

  -0-

  Back at Le Presbytère the red light on the answerphone is flickering.

  Bonjour, Bella. It’s Colin here, the by now familiar voice said.

  Just to confirm, I will be back tomorrow at the end of the day. Will probably be dark already. By the way, I met someone who knows you. A lawyer. Charming man. So too his wife. Met them at a party. Will tell you all about it tomorrow. Bye for now.

  I know just one Paris lawyer and just one Paris lawyer knows me.

  Oh my God, what did Jean-Louis tell Colin about me?

  -0-

  Will we ever understand life’s reasoning?

  I sit, in my bedroom, a guest house keeper when I should be in Paris practising as a doctor. From the time when I was still no higher than three apples, as is said here, I wanted to be a doctor. This is to say but for the short period when I wanted to become a monk in order to ring church bells. Passing my school-leaving baccalauriat examination was not hard; “She’s a bright girl our Bella,” my father told guests. Neither were my medical studies hard. Not all that hard.

  Full of dreams was my head when after having done my internship at Chartreux Hospital they offered me the permanent position as head of their maternity clinic. I received a salary which allowed me to live comfortably, to buy whichever pair of shoes or handbag which caught my fancy and not to have to think whether I could afford it when I invited colleagues for dinner at an expensive restaurant. And here I am, this evening, waiting for La Presbytère’s winter guest to return, he who had spent the week in Paris having done there probably all the magical things I had once done there. I would, if I could, put the clock back and back and back to when I was not a guest house keeper but a young girl with dreams.

  I am sitting at the window, yes, quite comfortably, looking into the distance, to the mount at the end of this day, smothered in a grey mist.

  Handel’s I know that my redeemer liveth drifts from downstairs.

  He lives to silence all my fears ... He lives to wipe away my tears ... He lives to calm my troubled heart ... He lives all blessings to impart ...

  The chiming stops and four short strikes follow. It is a quarter past something. I turn to look at the alarm clock on the bedside table. It is a quarter past seven. The mount’s last few lights begin to go dark, one after the other.

  Colin may like a palmier and a madeleine with the homemade apricot jam when he comes in. A palmier is good with ice cream and I have some in the freezer.

  -0-

  I hear the growling of a motorcycle’s engine.

  I gave Colin a key to the front door. He will be able to let himself in. I hear the click of the front door opening and another click: he is inside now. A clattering noise drifts from downstairs followed by clinking. Colin has walked into the desk in the small front room and has knocked the tin with the pens and pencils off the desk. His footsteps come up the stairs.

  “Bella?”

  “Colin!”

  I step out into the corridor.

  “I hope I did not wake you,” he says. “I collided with the desk.”

  “I should have left some of the lights on. Did you hurt yourself?”

  “Goodness, no, but I did break the inkpot. Fortunately for me it was empty. I hope it was not valuable.”

  “It belonged to Goethe …”

  “Goethe?”

  “Goethe.”

  “Oh no! You are going to tell me to leave. It was must have been … more than valuable. Priceless.”

  He walks up to me, his arms stretched out as if he wants to put them around me. Comfort me for the loss of Goethe’s inkpot?

  I laugh.

  “I’m joking, Colin. It was just an inkpot. Any old inkpot.”

  He is in his biker’s black leather and his cheeks are red: it must have been cold on the bike riding from Avranches.

  “Hello, Bella,” he says. “You gave me a real fright there.”

  We shake hands. His are cold despite that he had worn his bikers’ gloves: they now lie on top of his suitcase. Also on top of the suitcase is a wicker basket. It is wrapped in cellophane which is tied with a red ribbon.

  “Would you like a cup of tea?” I ask him.

  “Only if it is not going to give you work.”

  “It won’t. I would like a cup of tea myself.”

  “Thank you. A cuppa will be wonderful. The tea in Paris is dreadful.”

  “There is a reason for that. Who needs tea when one has all that wine?”

  I tell him I will see him in the kitchen.

  He says he will not be a minute.

  “Just want to have a quick wash down.”

  -0-

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  I set the tea things out in the drawing room, on a coffee table which stands between the room’s two bay windows. It is cool in the room. In the days when we received guests in winter the fireplace was always lit, Fred having loaded it each morning with logs, but with me alone here in the winter, its role has become merely decorative, its red bricks cold to the touch.

  I sit down on an armchair facing the coffee table.

  Colin walks in. He has changed into jeans and a black polo-necked sweater. His hair is wet: he would have had a quick shower. He is holding the cellophane-wrapped basket with both hands.

  “Bella, I could not resist buying you a small gift. I hope you will like it.”

  Hesitatingly, he holds the basket out towards me.

  I get up and take the basket from him, the paper crinkling under our hands.

  “How wonderful. Thank you, Colin. How kind of you.”

  My mother drilled it into Marius and me never to say ‘you should not have’ when given a gift.

  “Shall I help you with the wrapping?” asks Colin.

  “Please do. Yes. Thank you.”

  I put the basket down on another coffee table: the basket will hold fruit or chocolates or perhaps a bottle of champagne.

  “Let me,” says Colin.

  Our hands touch. Quickly, each draws back.

  The pretty red bow is a ready-tied one, an elastic band holding it in place.

  “Like a bow tie,” he says. “Not that I wear them. My brother does.”

  I take the bow from him and so too the ribbon. All along the ribbon is the name Fauchon.

  “I know a little girl who would want these for dressing up her dolls,” I say.

  I lied: I want to keep the bow and the ribbon as a remembrance of this man. These will go into the box where I keep other such knick-knacks in remembrance of things past: sugar lump wrappers from when Jean-Louis and I had coffee after dinner in restaurants; pine cones and conkers from when Jean-Louis and I took autumnal walks in the Tuileries Gardens. A booklet of matches from the hotel where he and I had stayed in Rochers-de-Naye.

  Colin’s gift is a selection of exotic fruit: a still-life of yellow, green, orange and red fruits I have never seen before.

  “May I?” Colin asks.

  He takes the smallest item from the basket, a tiny, crispy, bell-shaped fruit, and carefully, as if it is fragile, places it onto the palm of my right hand.

  “What is it?” I ask.

  “Come,” he says, “it can be sticky, so I will open it for you.”
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  He loosens the outer part of the fruit, a husk as thin and crispy as paper, and he holds up a perfectly round yellow berry.

  “Come,” he says again.

  Holding the fruit by the tiny stem underneath it, he brings his hand up to my mouth. Keeping my eyes down and on his hand, like a baby who has seen its mother’s nipple, I open my mouth.

  His fingers brush against my lips.

  “Oops, sorry.”

  He lets go of the berry and it drops onto my tongue.

  With my tongue, I roll the berry around in my mouth and, next, I bite into it. I chew slowly, my eyes on Colin’s: they are anxious, waiting for my response. The taste on my tongue is not one of sweetness but acidity. Refreshing mellow acidity.

  Somewhere in the night, an owl hoots.

  He flicks his head towards the bay window behind us.

  “A storm is on its way.”

  We are only a few centimetres apart: I am still holding the hand with which he had fed me the berry. Quickly, I let go of the hand.

  “Delicious,” I say of the berry.

  I give a step away from him.

  “It is a gooseberry.”

  “So, that’s a gooseberry! My mother used to tell my brother and I about the gooseberry tree which stood in the garden of their home when they were children. She used to tell us what a little hardy tree it was. They never watered it or trimmed it and each summer it produced the sweetest berries. My father said in Germany it was called a Stachelbeere. The thorn berry. There were a few people in his life who were thorn berries.”

  “Stachelbeere? Stachelbeere? Good name.”

  “I too have … had them in my life,” I say.

  “I too have had them.”

  “But no longer?”

  He shakes his head.

  “They are still there but I’ve come to ignore their existence.”

  “Lucky man. I cannot ignore my thorn berries.”

  “Bella, I hope my presence here … here at Le Presbytère is not a thorn berry. Will not be a thorn berry.”

  His eyes are bearing a strange look. I cannot interpret it. Or can I and I do not want to acknowledge its message?

  “Let’s have our tea, Colin,” I say.

  “Sure,” he says. “Let’s.”

  -0-

  There is the patter of rain on the tiles of the porch outside.

  Colin is spreading apricot jam over a madeleine. I am glad I bought not only the palmiers but also madeleines as this is his third.

  “I found Paris somewhat noisy this visit. Don’t get me wrong, I adore the place, but it has become noisy,” he says.

  “If you are not used to noise …”

  “But, oh, let me tell you about your friend,” he interrupts me.

  “Friend?”

  “I said on the phone I met a friend of yours …”

  “Oh yes. A lawyer, I think you said? A lawyer and his wife.”

  “Jean-Louis Gasquet. Jean-Louis and Colette Gasquet.”

  Colette. This name Jean-Louis could never say. Did not say, until at the end, when she had walked back into his life, and he into hers, and out of mine.

  Cool night air is blowing into the room from somewhere: badly fitting windows have always been a problem here at Le Presbytère. I begin to shiver. What did Jean-Louis tell Colin? How much does Colin know?

  “How did you meet?” I dare ask.

  “A lawyer friend asked me along to a dinner at the Gasquets. There were eight of us. It was all rather grand.”

  “In an apartment in Paris?”

  “No. The Gasquets’ house in Fontainebleau. It was Colette’s mother’s house. The old lady passed away a year ago so the couple had some work done to the house, had it modernised and spruced up, and it’s really beautiful. Close to the chateau it is.”

  “Oh.”

  “Anyway, when Jean-Louis heard I was staying in … the village … what’s its name … he said he knew it well, that he had stayed at a guest house above the village quite a few times …”

  “At Le Presbytère?”

  He nods.

  “Do you remember him?”

  I shake my head.

  “Not really. Guests come and guests go.”

  “I think he stayed here when your mother was still alive. He didn’t know she had passed away, but he did say he had heard that her daughter, Bella Wolff, had left Paris and was running the guest house.”

  “I can’t remember … meeting him here.”

  “No, he said he had met you in Paris at the hospital where you had worked …”

  “Chartreux. I worked at Chartreux Hospital,” I say unnecessarily.

  “That is it, yes. He said you were in charge of the maternity section at the hospital and his sister gave birth to her first child there. That was when he met you.”

  “That means there is even a smaller chance of me remembering him because babies were born there every day.”

  “Of course.”

  Shall I dare ask him what Jean-Louis had said about me? And what Colette had said about me?

  “What more did he say?” I ask.

  “He said you were charming. I agreed. Of course. And he said Le Presbytère is the best guest house he has ever stayed in; the reception he received was wonderful, the scenery from its windows exquisite. I agreed. Of course. His wife told me she had not met you. The name, she said, rang a bell though.”

  “Thank you for the compliment, Colin,” I say.

  Overhead a plane passes.

  I have never had time for a man who kisses and then tells.

  -0-

  In my room I switch on only the bedside lamp. Its shade is pink and decorated with the sequined outline of the face of Marilyn Monroe. I had still bought the lamp in Paris, so it also stood on my bedside table in my Latin Quarter apartment. Jean-Louis, on first seeing it, thought it the most inelegant thing he had ever seen, and my reply was that he was the most elegant thing I have ever seen.

  I loved that man. Oh God, how I loved that man.

  -0-

  I think of something. There are books in my library room which were gifts from Jean-Louis, and books I gave him and which he left here. We wrote silly little notes to one another in these books and as Colin said that he would like to go over the books in the library room, I need to remove all books which will reveal I did indeed know Jean-Louis and the nature of our relationship.

  Like a thief, I tip-toe to the library room.

  Again I switch on only a lamp, the one that stands on the desk in the room. Its light forms a pinkish circle over the desk. I know the titles of the books I will have to remove, and as quiet as I can be, I take them from the shelves and drop them into an overnight bag I have brought from the bedroom.

  What memories there are in a few lines scribbled in a book.

  Bean brain, here’s a book which will teach you that an Einstein is not a grand piano. Stupid as you are, I love you all the same, very much and for always. Jean-Louis

  -0-

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  One remembers beginnings. And one remembers endings. My father always said what one must remember is what had been between the two. “Beginnings become endings, Bella, if it were not so, life would be too good. Remember that.”

  My mother used to contradict him. She used to say there was no such thing as endings. She said each ending was a beginning of something else.

  On the day of my father’s funeral, getting back to Le Presbytère from ‘my’ rock, the mourners, having eaten and drunk their fill, and only dirty plates and empty bottles standing on the tables which Honorine and Martine had set out in the garden, I wanted to ask her whether she still believed this, but I recalled her eyes when she dropped the red rose onto my father’s coffin. They told me she had come to realise an ending was just that: an end.

  The ending of Jean-Louis and I began with chickenpox.

  -0-

  It was one of those days at Chartreux Hospital when all births had gone well. It was seven
o’clock and I was off duty, but sitting in the staff room chatting to our nurses. The telephone rang: reception had transferred a call to the staff room. Nurse Bonnec took the call and passed the receiver to me.

  “Darling,” said the voice of Jean-Louis, “What do you know. Both the girls have chickenpox, so I am calling to cancel our outing for this weekend.”

  He told me he had to lend a hand with the girls.

  “Be careful, that virus is contagious,” I told him.

  “For God’s sake, Bella, what do you expect me to do? My daughters are ill. They need me.”

  He and I were going to spend the weekend in Nice. We were going to drive down in the Porsche after work to return on Sunday evening.

  “Jean-Louis, I will phone the hotel and cancel.”

  “I’ve done so.”

  “You might have checked with me. I might have gone down to Nice all the same.”

  “With who?”

  “That,” I told him, “is for me to know and for you to find out.”

  I had taken Monday off, so I decided to fly to London, see the sights, eat some fish and chips, have a bacon-and-egg breakfast each morning at a café in the park on Russell Square, near to the hotel where I always stayed. I went to London and I watched the squirrels play on the lawn in that park and I took a few photos and I returned to my hotel and sat at the window and told myself I did not need Jean-Louis, I did not need a Jean-Louis in my life.

  On the Tuesday, back in Paris, and at the hospital, I all the same waited for a call from him, but it did not come, and I did not hear from him until it was weekend again.

  He phoned.

  “Darling,” he said, “the girls are better.”

  “That’s good.”

  It was Saturday morning and I had just come in from a solitary walk along the Seine. It was autumn, but still warm, and young boys and girls in swimwear lay on their backs, tanning, on the banks of the river.

  “Bella, I will see you tonight? Around seven. Is that alright?” Jean-Louis asked.