by Julia Stuart
‘That’s better!’ said Guillaume Ladoucette, wriggling his hairy toes in the water. A clump of talc slowly rose to the surface and started to shift gently right with the current.
‘Bliss!’ agreed Stéphane Jollis, raising his right trouser leg slightly higher. ‘Hot, isn’t it?’
‘Scorching,’ replied Guillaume Ladoucette. He peered down between his legs. ‘Plenty down there.’
‘It’s definitely the best spot,’ replied the baker.
They sat in contented silence, freckles of sunlight warming their knees through the leaves, watching the turquoise dragonflies land on the dusty water that slowly creaked by.
‘Remember that trout Yves Lévèque caught?’ asked the baker.
‘I’ve never seen anything that size before.’
‘I couldn’t believe it,’ the baker said.
‘Nor could I.’
‘It was huge.’
‘Massive,’ agreed Guillaume Ladoucette. ‘It was so big he said he couldn’t eat it all in one go.’
‘I’m not surprised. Where did he say he caught it?’ asked the baker.
‘Somewhere near Ribérac.’
There was a pause.
‘I bet he bought it from the ambulant fishmonger’s,’ said Guillaume Ladoucette.
‘I bet he did too,’ Stéphane Jollis agreed.
Silence fell again as both men leant back on their hands. Occasionally, one would lift a foot to change his bait or to pick out a piece of green weed that had slithered between his toes. After a while a male duck started chasing a female across the water. The pair watched as it landed on the back of its target, where it stayed despite the hysterical flapping.
‘That’s rape, that is,’ said Guillaume Ladoucette, horrified.
‘It’s just how ducks do it,’ replied the baker.
‘Do you think we should do something?’
‘You can’t interfere with nature.’
‘But she doesn’t like it. Listen to that racket she’s making.’
‘They could be quacks of ecstasy for all you know.’
‘She wouldn’t be trying to get away if she liked it.’
Stéphane Jollis paused. ‘Well, in the absence of a duck phone to ring the duck police, if you’re really concerned why don’t you swim over and separate them?’ he suggested.
‘Do you think she’ll be all right?’
‘Guillaume! The dragonflies have been doing the same thing ever since we got here. I haven’t seen you rushing valiantly to their defence.’
‘They don’t sound in pain like that poor duck does.’
‘That’s because dragonflies are mute. They’ve probably been emitting silent screams of terror all the time we’ve been here and you just haven’t noticed. You’d better separate them too while you’re out there. I’d be careful of the wings, though, they look a bit on the delicate side.’
Guillaume Ladoucette ignored the baker as he secretly started to panic about the welfare of the dragonflies.
‘Look, she’s flying off now,’ said the baker, pointing to the duck. ‘You worry too much about things.’
‘I don’t,’ replied the barber.
‘You do.’
‘At least I use proper bait.’
‘Everyone’s using bread again these days. Pick up any fishing magazine and there’ll be an article about it. It’s only natural. Fish, like humans, can’t resist the work of a true artisan.’
Silence fell again. Suddenly Guillaume Ladoucette decided that it was time to get the upper hand. ‘I suddenly feel a bit peckish,’ he announced.
‘So do I,’ said Stéphane Jollis, who, unbeknownst to the barber, had spent the whole of the previous evening cooking. They shuffled backwards along the grass on their bottoms towards their respective baskets. Stalling for time, Guillaume Ladoucette pretended to look for his penknife as he waited to see what would appear from the rival basket. He watched as a bunch of tomatoes-on-the-vine surfaced, which were inhaled before being placed on the red tea towel. Next came a jar of cornichons, followed by a bunch of pink radish and another baguette. Then, with what was unmistakably the hint of a sly smile, a large earthenware container was brought out and placed on the grass. Guillaume Ladoucette, who recognized the look, was instantly worried.
‘Bit of pâté from the grocer’s?’ he enquired, unable to stop himself.
‘No, actually,’ replied the baker, tearing off a piece of bread and loading it up. ‘I made it myself. I had a few minutes to spare and already had the duck foie gras so thought why not? The recipe says to add two soupspoons of cognac, but I always use four. I find you get a much richer taste. But they’re right about the truffle juice–you wouldn’t want any more than fifty grams.’
Guillaume Ladoucette watched while Stéphane Jollis opened his mouth at the same time as raising his eyebrows and crammed it in. ‘Oh, delicious,’ came the muffled verdict. ‘Oh, yum! Fancy any?’
‘No thanks, otherwise I won’t manage this!’ he replied, drawing out a large flask from his basket and unscrewing the lid. ‘I tell you, nothing beats vichyssoise glacée soup on a hot day. It’s the leeks from the garden that really makes it, I think. Want to try some?’
‘No thanks, otherwise I won’t manage this!’ replied the baker, carefully lifting out a bowl from his basket with two hands. ‘What I really love about this particular salad is the way you cook the potatoes in their skins. Delicious. Then, of course, ham, red peppers and lobster tail are always such a great combination. It makes all the difference, of course, if you picked the lobster yourself while it was still alive so that you knew you were getting a good one. Let me give you a little taste,’ he said, searching in his basket for his serving spoons.
‘No thanks, otherwise I won’t be able to manage this!’ cried Guillaume Ladoucette triumphantly, holding up a goat’s cheese tart. Stéphane Jollis glanced at it unconcerned and then turned away, plunging a fork into his salad.
‘Can’t wait to try it,’ continued the barber, cutting a slice with his penknife. He paused for dramatic effect and then added before taking a mouthful: ‘I milked the goat myself.’
Stéphane Jollis made what was undeniably a choking sound.
‘I was round at Marcel Coussy’s farm a few months ago and we got milking the goats, and then I thought I may as well help him make the cheese,’ continued the barber before taking another bite. ‘Mmm, really goaty! Fancy some?’
‘No, thanks, otherwise I won’t manage this!’ the baker announced, lifting a walnut and apple cake out of his basket with a flourish. But they both knew it was useless: nothing could have beaten Guillaume Ladoucette’s caprine masterstroke.
As they ate their lunch, the baker started plotting his menu for the next fishing trip while the barber wriggled his hairy toes with delight, until Stéphane Jollis pointed out that he was disturbing the fish.
Emboldened by his victory, Guillaume Ladoucette decided to broach the subject that had been curling around in his mind ever since he lifted his head from the pillow after his six-day repose. ‘Stéphane…’ he began.
‘Yes,’ the baker said, biting into a tomato and squirting his white T-shirt with seeds.
‘You know I’ve closed the barber shop…’
‘Yes,’ he replied, flicking at his chest. ‘I haven’t mentioned it in case you didn’t want to talk about it.’
‘I’ve decided to set myself up as a matchmaker.’
‘A what?’
‘A matchmaker.’
‘A matchmaker?’
‘Yes.’
‘Why a matchmaker?’
‘Well, how many people do you know in the village who are in love?’
Stéphane Jollis momentarily stopped chewing as he considered the question. His friend did indeed have a point. For, despite its name, love was something that Amour-sur-Belle was sorely lacking. The majority of the inhabitants were single, not helped by the number of divorces which had taken place following the famous mini-tornado of 1999, during which infidelities,
crimes and other depravities were drunkenly confessed on the assumption that no one would live to see the morning.
A number of residents weren’t even speaking to each other. Stéphane Jollis himself and Lisette Robert hadn’t passed the time of day since the episode of extreme weather, during which Patrice Baudin wasn’t the only thing to disappear. The tornado had also elevated the entire contents of Lisette Robert’s pond and the resulting shower of frogs landed in the baker’s garden. While it never became clear precisely what had happened to them, it was widely believed that the baker, who smelt fiercely of garlic the following day, and who was spotted by five witnesses buying large quantities of butter in the grocer’s, had eaten the lot. This was despite the man’s vehement protests to the contrary, which included the fact that the only people who ate frogs’ legs were tourists, having fallen for a joke started in 1832 by a mischievous French merchant, while in London, who claimed that it was a national delicacy.
Then there were those who said as little as possible to Denise Vigier the grocer, having never forgotten that her grandmother had been found guilty of horizontal collaboration at a tribunal in 1944 and, after a swastika had been drawn on her forehead, had been given a ‘Number 44’ haircut in front of a spitting crowd in Périgueux. The villagers raised their eyebrows at the tins of frankfurters on Denise Vigier’s shelves, and nudged each other whenever she joined the annual memorial service at the monument to the Three Victims of the Barbarous Germans, Shot on 19 June 1944.
Fabrice Ribou had refused to serve Sandrine Fournier at the Bar Saint-Jus ever since the death of his father. The old man had pestered the assistant ambulant fishmonger so often to tell him where in the woods she found such marvellous ceps that she eventually blurted out ‘by the hunters’ shack’. While the remains of the omelette were rushed to the hospital as quickly as possible, it was not fast enough to identify which poisonous mushroom he had mistakenly consumed. Everyone naturally sided with Sandrine Fournier, for the locations of such prodigious yields were a jealously guarded secret passed down through families, but no one supported her publicly for Fabrice Ribou’s was the only bar for kilometres.
Stéphane Jollis swallowed his mouthful. ‘Brilliant idea, Guillaume,’ he said, pausing before adding: ‘Please don’t take this the wrong way, but you’re not exactly married yourself. And never have been. Some might question what you know about love.’
Guillaume Ladoucette looked at his knees. He and the baker had grown up together after Madame Ladoucette had breast-fed Stéphane Jollis when his own mother’s milk had finally dried up with the arrival of her ninth and last child. The boys’ friendship had been sealed through afternoons spent by the Belle trying to see whose pee could reach the far bank first, a competition eventually won by Stéphane Jollis at the age of six and a half, whose victory was put down to a stolen bottle of lemonade. But despite their bond, the baker knew nothing of the tumultuous state of Guillaume Ladoucette’s heart. The affliction was such that his doctor had taken one look down his ears and gasped at the decades’ worth of unwept tears. He sniffed just below his chest and winced at the smell of rotting flowers coming from his spleen. He shook his head at the man’s freakish flexibility, another tell-tale sign. And he baulked at the surfeit of hormones that had leaked from his japonicas, cascaded down his legs and collected at his toes where they produced such dense hairs he found within them a discarded watermelon pip.
‘Monsieur Ladoucette,’ he began after his patient had dressed again. ‘I think we both know what your problem is. And it is a severe case of lovesickness at that. You may recover. You may not. I’m afraid that there is no medical intervention that can ease your suffering. If it gets any worse–and it may well do–you are, of course, welcome to come back, but really there is nothing that I can do. I’m sorry.’
The barber picked up his coat and shuffled towards the door. Just as he was about to shut it behind him, the doctor called out: ‘Whoever she is, I hope she’s worth it.’
There were many in Amour-sur-Belle who would have thought that Émilie Fraisse was indeed not worth it. It would have been a different matter, of course, during her youth. While not the prettiest in the village–Lisette Robert carried that particular burden–there was certainly no end to the approving glances she received as she was growing up. When still a child, the expertise she had displayed at shooting blackbirds one winter, following an atrocious snowfall which left the village with nothing else to eat, attracted a stream of schoolboy admirers. When she was ten, she started charging them fifty centimes to stroke the butter-coloured hair which so annoyed her, the proceeds of which she spent on gunpowder for her father’s shotgun, which he lent to her when his wife wasn’t looking. When she got older, and attempts were made to touch other parts of her, they were smartly rebuffed. The only boy she let anywhere near her was Guillaume Ladoucette, who had never tried. But their proximity never went further than their heads touching as they gazed in wonder at the still quivering kidneys of a hare they had just caught.
When, at the age of seventeen, Émilie Fraisse left Amour-sur-Belle, she gave Guillaume Ladoucette her Nontron hunting knife with its boxwood handle and ancient pokerwork motifs and asked him to look after it while she was away. He never got to say goodbye because he was helping his father collect firewood and was too embarrassed to explain why he wanted to suddenly leave. When he came back to the village, Émilie Fraisse had gone. Several weeks later, a letter arrived from Bordeaux in which she recounted how much she was enjoying working in her uncle’s butcher’s, asking him not to tell her mother that she was behind the counter rather than on the till as promised. But Guillaume Ladoucette, whose mind was already afflicted, couldn’t think of how to reply. After he read and reread the letter, he simply folded it up, put it inside an empty tin of Docteur L. Guyot throat pastilles and buried it underneath a flowering hellebore in the garden. Such was his regret at not having had the courage to reply, he turned his eyes away each winter when it bloomed.
The girl’s remarkable talent with a knife at first shocked her relatives. But soon they forgot her age and sex, and the girl with the long plait who would sing strange songs as she hacked up ribs of bloodied beef and plunged her hands into bowls of glistening, purple entrails to cure homesickness became a local curiosity.
It wasn’t long before Émilie Fraisse attracted the attention of Serge Pompignac, a local landowner who came into the shop to buy a brace of pheasant. When he asked, as a joke, whether she had shot them herself, the girl replied, ‘Of course,’ as if he had just asked the most foolish question imaginable. By the time he had reached home, he found that his mind still hadn’t left the girl. That evening, he decided against serving the pheasants to his dinner guest. Instead, the following day, he ate them alone in his grand dining room, picking from his tongue the pieces of shot that broke one of his teeth, and placing them around the side of his plate as he chewed. When he had swallowed the final mouthful, he held up each tiny bullet to the light and inspected it carefully. Getting up from his seat, he fetched a small wooden box and dropped them inside one by one. They rolled around as he walked to his writing desk and placed the box in a secret compartment. It was only then that he rang his dentist.
Unable to get the thought of the girl with the long plait and bloodied apron out of his mind, he returned to the butcher’s the following day but found that she was not there. Too embarrassed to ask her whereabouts, he bought a couple more pheasants anyway. Passing by the shop three days later, he caught sight of her thin frame between the coils of black pudding and was inside before he realized he had moved. He hung around the shelves of preserves and mustards, avoiding the other staff until she was free to serve him and then asked for another brace of pheasant. When, as she was wrapping them, he asked where she had shot them, she replied, ‘No,’ as if he had just asked the most foolish question imaginable. When he took the birds home, he left them in the kitchen and forgot about them, until the stench grew so bad even the dogs vomited.
The f
ollowing week, he walked straight up to the counter and ordered everything that was for sale, including all the jars of mustard and preserves. Once all his purchases were eventually loaded into the van waiting outside, he turned to Frédéric Fraisse and said: ‘I presume your niece’s work is over for the day. Do I have your permission to take her out for an afternoon walk?’
Frédéric Fraisse, still astounded by what had just taken place, glanced at his niece and mistook her look of horror for assent. Six months later, exhausted from the disappointment of coming downstairs every morning to find letters only from her mother at her place at the breakfast table, Émilie Fraisse agreed to marry Serge Pompignac.
It wasn’t long after she had left her aunt’s house and moved into her marital home that her husband suggested that she stopped working in the butcher’s. Émilie Fraisse, who had refused to change her name, at first ignored her husband’s repeated requests, which were born of his fear of someone else loving her as much as he did. She finally gave in on the tenth day of him not speaking to her. Her mother thought it was for the best. ‘You don’t need to work in a shop any more,’ she wrote. ‘Not with a husband as rich as he is. You should count yourself lucky.’
Émilie Fraisse spent her early days wandering around the vast house staring at the ugly oil paintings and grotesquely carved furniture, thinking about Amour-sur-Belle. Once, she considered writing again to Guillaume Ladoucette, but took his lack of response to her first letter as a sign of indifference. When, a year later, her mother asked why she still didn’t have any grandchildren, Émilie Fraisse counted the number of times she and her husband had made love and found that she didn’t need more than one hand. She had first suspected that something was wrong when it took almost three months to consummate the marriage. But the problem was never discussed, and the longer it continued, the more Serge Pompignac held it against the woman he had thought would finally be able to cure him.