Madame Barbara
Page 41
This amused Colette and she laughed again, as she responded, ‘You might as well try to stop a steam engine, once he gets started – he was always like that.’ She spoke French, though she could manage English reasonably well. She sighed. ‘My young Louis has the same perseverance – he’ll be a real addition to this place, once he’s graduated.’
‘Oh, aye, he’s a loovely lad,’ Barbara agreed. ‘Michel thinks the world of him.’ Then she added, in defence of her husband, ‘Michel may be quite tough at times, but, if you’ve got a sound reason for something, he’ll always come round. My mam and I tried never to lose our tempers with him – then we knew we’d win!’
Colette laughed out loud. ‘You and Auntie Phyllis were incorrigible,’ she said. ‘I can remember when my mother and I used to come to visit you. We noticed how you both got round him.’
As a smiling Barbara rose stiffly from her chair, Colette thought that Barbara still had the same dignified look and carried herself as well as she had when first she had come with Uncle Michel to Rouen to visit Grand-mère Benion, when Colette was still a girl.
‘You’ve done so well, helpin’ us, like,’ Barbara said. ‘It would’ve bin so disappointing simply to sell up and get out, now we’re wanting to retire. We always wanted you to have it when we’re gone.’
Colette replied with enthusiasm. ‘Auntie Barbie, I simply love working here. It’s what I needed – after all, I’m a trained nurse. And you’ve been so kind.’
She made a wry mouth. ‘I was very lonely in Rouen after I was widowed and the two boys went away to university.’ She paused, to look out at the sea, and then said, ‘In my wildest dreams I never thought of inheriting a business like this – and in England, too!’
‘Certainly, my dear, you’ll never be lonely here in Hôtel Michel, full of dear old souls to look after. Meanwhile, though, we’ll leave you to get on with the job, and there’ll be me and your uncle in the little bungalow at the back, for you to come to if you’re in trouble.’
Barbara gestured toward the rear of the property, where, beyond the hen run, a bungalow was in process of being built; a permit to build it had been hard to obtain, but it was going up at last.
‘You’d never believe it to look at the place now,’ she said reflectively, ‘but, you know, we thought we were finished when the hotel began to fail. In the 1960s and onwards, people went abroad for holidays – and the reps who used to stay with us – they all got cars and drove straight into Liverpool. They didn’t stop here. Phew! It was grim, Colette. We’d had a right royal battle getting a permit to build the extension to make it into a real hotel; we’d put in the lift and another eight rooms – and bathrooms everywhere – and we were in debt like you’d never believe. I’ve never been so scared in me life. And it was about that time that Mother began to fail too, poor dear.
‘What saved us, Colette, was Michel doing so well in the Pure White Poultry Company.’
Her niece asked curiously, ‘Did he care about being insulted because he was French?’ Uncle Léon had once talked about this to her mother.
‘Not much. He knew he understood hens better than any of his colleagues, and once he’d made one or two good English friends at work, he knew better than to take notice of the odd slight; and there was always Bill Spellersby to encourage him and take him out to meet his friends. They all knew the story of him and Bill, and they were proper nice to him; they thought he was a hero. And, Colette, he was.’
She stopped, and then said, with a little laughter in her voice, ‘We’ve had a good life.’
‘He couldn’t have done it without the bed-and-breakfast to start with,’ Colette pointed out.
‘I suppose not, but he put a lot of work into the place from Day One.’
‘You didn’t have any children, Auntie Barbie?’
‘No.’ Barbara sighed. ‘We’d seen too much of war.’
They were not alone; neither Bill Spellersby nor his brother had any children.
On the whole, Barbara did not regret their decision. All her innate motherliness had been expended on Michel himself, and he had thrived on it.
Barbara’s reply about war had sent a cold shudder down Colette’s back. She sometimes feared for her own boys; she could just remember the gaunt ruins that had been Rouen, and pictures of her little cousin, Philippe, on Auntie Anne-Marie’s bedside table.
Colette sat silent for a while, listening to the placid shush-shush of the sea on the beach and the distant click of Michel’s shears.
Barbara tied her new pale blue headscarf more closely under her chin – the wind was getting up. Then she turned back to her niece.
‘You know, Colette, when it was obvious that the hotel was in the wrong place at the wrong time, it was then that we got the idea of advertising it as a high-class retirement home for couples, particularly for the slightly infirm.’ She smiled at the memory. ‘We promised first-class meals, diets if needed, a nurse in attendance, and a doctor nearby. And it worked, because there are a lot of well-to-do old people in England. Now, we’re recommended right and left. It’s so healthy here – they get a new lease on life. I’ve known a few who even started to drive again.’
After a moment’s pause, she brought up another issue. ‘Getting the land lease renewed cost us a heap, it did; I’ll not forget that in a hurry.’
‘Certainement!’ agreed Colette, who had heard the story before.
‘And after we’d won that, Michel built the walled garden,’ continued Barbara, ‘so that the residents could go outside without being buffeted by the wind – and all of them love that, and those in wheelchairs can get round all the little paths. As you know, sometimes the male residents enjoy doing a bit of work in it themselves. And you know how Michel takes them shopping – or wherever else they want to go – in his big Toyota – he’s that proud of it. Or they can even go fishing, or play golf at Hoylake, if they feel strong enough.’
She was quiet for a moment, and then warned, ‘Never forget, Colette, to keep the service first class.’
Something of the strength and energy of Grand-père and Grand-mère Benion was in Colette and in her sons, and she responded quickly, ‘Of course, Auntie.’
She was thankful that her cousin, Annette, when asked if she would like to share the inheritance by working with Colette, had shuddered with horror at the idea of going to live in England.
Michel and Barbara had rewritten their wills. Let the one prepared to do the work get the long-term benefit.
‘And watch the kind of staff you employ. Keep them in line, like your uncle does,’ Barbara continued absently, her mind on the toiler in the garden.
‘Of course,’ Colette smiled. ‘I think I do already.’ Most of the staff were healthily nervous of Himself, as they called Michel. He had an acid tongue, when he cared to use it. She added, ‘When he’s cross, he sounds exactly like Grand-mére Benion, when she used to scold about mice in the bakery – which she did quite often when I was a little girl.’
It was in Barbara’s view, good that there had been mice to fight; Maman had been too quiet, too accepting, as if, having lost her world in the invasion, she was simply waiting to die. Every time she saw her, Barbara cursed the Germans anew. Maman had refused to visit them in England on the grounds that she was too old to travel; getting through each day, thought Barbara, had been challenge enough for her. So Michel – and sometimes Barbara – had gone to her.
When she died, Michel had grieved for a long time. ‘Nobody else can ever understand what we went through together,’ he explained heavily to his patient wife.
As she had done long ago in Bayeux Cathedral, she had held him in her arms and comforted him as he wept out his sorrow. As she did so, she had felt a pang of jealousy; there was a part of Michel which she could never quite reach. Sometimes, she also felt guilty about stealing Maman’s remaining son from her. But Phyllis, who had lived rather longer, had told her sharply that marriage of children had to be faced.
‘And I never grudged you to
Michel, did I, luv?’ Phyllis asked, ignoring the tears she had quietly shed in the first years of her daughter’s marriage, tears of dreadful inner loneliness.
‘No, I don’t think you ever did, Mam.’
Barbara felt that, all things considering, Michel and her mother had got along fairly well; Michel had been unfailingly kind and polite to her, and she had become quite fond of him. Barbara looked back with amusement at the one or two disagreements they had had, usually about spending money.
To Phyllis’s surprise, Michel had always argued against spending a cent that they did not have to; she had expected that he would be a spendthrift, like seamen often were. Weren’t most men like that? ‘Except for your dad, of course – at least, he always wanted to spend on you and me,’ she had added loyally.
Men were not all the same. It took a while to persuade Michel that a commercial dishwasher was a necessity, that flowers in abundance were a good idea in a place like L’Hôtel Michel, that, as he gained promotion, he really must have another suit to wear at the office, and that managers did not smoke Woodbines.
Now, she leaned over the balcony, and shouted to the toiler in the garden, ‘Come in and have a cup of coffee, luvvie.’
He half turned to look up at her, and grinned. She looked lovely up there in the sunshine; the scarf he had bought her as an unexpected present certainly suited her.
He carefully descended the ladder. It was teatime, sacred to the British.
One of the iron rules of L’Hôtel Michel was that Himself never drank tea, even at teatime; he drank only coffee – and it had to be properly brewed from freshly ground beans, or else the cook would hear about it.
Dead cert.
Select Bibliography
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Hastings, Max, Overlord, D-Day and the Battle for Normandy, 1944 (Michael Joseph, London, 1984).
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Acknowledgements
This is a novel, its characters and settings products of my imagination, and, likewise, its situations, the egg hatchery and poulterers, and the Hôtel Michel. Whatever similarity there may be of name, no reference is intended to any person, living or dead, or to any business, past or present.
I am very obliged to Mr John Jammes, Cranfield University, UK, and Mrs Jeanne Pfannmuller of Edmonton, Alberta, who went out of their way to obtain for me information regarding Normandy, and to Mr Peter Stirton of Copy Plus, Victoria, BC, for technical help.
In addition I owe my editors, Mr Nick Sayers and Ms Jane Barringer, much gratitude for patient and thorough editorial advice. I have also received generous support throughout the writing of this book from my son, Robert.
I wish to thank all six of them for being so kind and helpful.
About the Author
Madame Barbara
Helen Forrester was born in Hoylake, Cheshire, the eldest of seven children. For many years, until she married, her home was Liverpool – a city that features prominently in her work. For the past forty years she has lived in Alberta, Canada.
Helen Forrester is the author of four bestselling volumes of autobiography and a number of equally successful novels. In 1988 she was awarded an honorary D. Litt by the University of Liverpool in recognition of her achievements as an author. The University of Alberta conferred on her the same honour in 1993.
Also by Helen Forrester
Fiction
THURSDAY’S CHILD
THE LATCHKEY KID
LIVERPOOL DAISY
THREE WOMEN OF LIVERPOOL
THE MONEYLENDERS OF SHAHPUR
YES, MAMA
THE LEMON TREE
THE LIVERPOOL BASQUE
MOURNING DOVES
Non-fiction
TWOPENCE TO CROSS THE MERSEY
LIVERPOOL MISS
BY THE WATERS OF LIVERPOOL
LIME STREET AT TWO
Copyright
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First published in Great Britain by
HarperCollinsPublishers 1999
Copyright © Helen Forrester 1999
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be identified as the author of this work
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