by Julia Stuart
With no children to look after and her position in the butcher’s long since given to an apprentice, Émilie Fraisse spent her days cleaning the house, locking herself in each room so as not to be disturbed by the maids who had already done them. After dusting the furniture, she would set about polishing it, her efforts all the more determined for her desperate desire to make a difference despite the lack of dirt to begin with. When she had exhausted herself cleaning one room, she would set upon another until she had finished the whole house, and would then begin again. When the maids started complaining that there was never enough polish, Émilie Fraisse started buying her own so as not to raise their suspicions, and burnt the holey dusters in secret. At the dinner table, which had shrunk by three centimetres after years of rabid polishing, Serge Pompignac would look at his wife with her long hair that had turned prematurely grey and try and remember the girl who had fired the shot which he still kept in the tiny wooden box in the secret compartment of his writing desk. And she would try and remember the man who wanted her so badly that he had bought the weight of sixteen people in fresh meat and 2,312 pots of mustard.
It came as a relief when, after almost twenty-six years of marriage, Serge Pompignac handed her more money than the butcher shop could have made in a decade. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I thought it would be different. Please forgive me.’
‘I do,’ she replied.
‘What will you do?’ he asked.
She thought for a moment and then replied: ‘I’m going to buy the château in Amour-sur-Belle. It’s filthy.’
During the years she was away, Guillaume Ladoucette had had a number of romantic liaisons, but nothing had come close to what he felt for Émilie Fraisse. He would catch glimpses of her on the rare occasions she would return to the village for the weekend to see her parents. But he never spoke to her, lacking the courage to approach. Once, when she arrived at the barber’s for a haircut for old time’s sake, she found the door closed with a note on it saying: ‘Back in five minutes. Scissors on the table for those who can’t wait.’
When, a week ago, she returned permanently to Amour-sur-Belle and brought up the château’s drawbridge behind her, whispers started about her long grey hair and lack of children. Versions of how she came to afford the mournful building with its scandalous ramparts were buffeted around Amour-sur-Belle with the perpetual breeze. Guillaume Ladoucette refused to believe the one that blew through his keyhole and simply tried to think of what he would say to his first and only love when he eventually bumped into her.
‘I may very well still be a bachelor, Stéphane,’ conceded Guillaume Ladoucette, staring at the far bank, ‘but it doesn’t disqualify me from being a matchmaker.’
‘Yes, you’re completely right. You’ll be marvellous,’ replied the baker. ‘Any help you need, just ask. Where will it be?’
‘Where the barber shop is.’
‘Splendid.’ They sat in silence as the fish refused to bite and Guillaume Ladoucette wondered what to call his new venture. After a while, Stéphane Jollis, so convinced that his friend’s lunatic plan was doomed to failure, asked for a piece of goat’s cheese tart as a gesture of solidarity.
5
IT WAS MONSIEUR MOREAU WHO FIRST SPOTTED THE STRANGER walking around Amour-sur-Belle one Wednesday morning. The villager was in his usual position on the wooden bench by the fountain said to cure gout absorbed by a procession of ants transporting the horse chestnut tree to his right in forensic portions to a mystery location on his left. He had followed them on numerous occasions, but never once during his years of amateur sleuthing had he been able to discover the whereabouts of what would now constitute 13 medium-sized branches, 323,879 leaves and 112 conkers complete with shells. Despite his advancing years, entire afternoons had been spent on his belly in the dust following his subjects, only for the scent to go cold at a hole alongside the south-facing wall of the home of Sandrine Fournier. The one time he had mustered up the courage to ask if he could inspect her cellar ‘for the presence of a sizeable amount of foliage’, the assistant ambulant fishmonger accused him of having been out in the sun too long and closed the door. When not staring intently at the ground by his feet, Monsieur Moreau, who was used by many as a local landmark when giving directions, could be found slumped on the bench, the back of his head resting against a clump of weeds growing out of the stone wall behind him like a green beard. The old man’s flaky closed eyelids, dry open mouth and stagnant air caused many to assume that he had died, which resulted in the widespread habit of people poking him as they passed in order to be the first with the news of his demise.
On this occasion he didn’t see the stranger’s face, just his highly polished left shoe that was threatening to crush an ant he had named Arabella, which already that morning had survived being almost flattened by two tractors, a bicycle, three cats and a pigeon as it rattled across the street with an outsized piece of twig.
‘Watch where you’re stepping!’ Monsieur Moreau yelped, sticking an arm out in front of him to prevent the carnage. The man quickly stepped aside, turning back several paces later to look at the ground, still unsure of what he had almost stepped on.
The next person who saw him was Denise Vigier the grocer, who was outside her shop arranging some oak-leaf lettuces, her colossal bosom poking out either side of her white apron. ‘Half-price lettuces,’ she lied, when she spotted him approaching. But the offer failed to detain him and the opportunity to find out what he wanted was gone.
Yves Lévèque had just settled himself at a table in the Bar Saint-Jus, rejoicing that a patient had just cancelled, when he looked up from his newspaper across the place du Marché. ‘Good God!’ the dentist exclaimed. ‘It’s the man from the council who carried out the first headcount!’
There was a painful sound of scraping of chairs as the customers abandoned their seats and stood as close to the window as their stomachs would permit.
‘You’re right!’ declared Fabrice Ribou, running a hand through his pine cone. ‘He’s put on a bit of weight, hasn’t he?’
‘Right old porker,’ said Henri Rousseau, his forelock covering one eye.
‘Are you sure that’s him?’ asked Marcel Coussy the farmer.
‘Positive,’ replied Yves Lévèque. ‘He’s still got the same pair of trousers on. I used to have a pair. I’d recognize them anywhere.’
‘I wonder what he’s doing here,’ said Didier Lapierre the carpenter, whose partially flattened pine cone bore the telltale sign of a mid-morning snooze in his van.
‘Whatever it is, he hasn’t come to measure up for a municipal swimming pool, that’s for certain,’ said the dentist. ‘Watch out, he’s coming over!’
By the time the door opened, all that could be heard was a hideous ensemble of exaggerated slurping and Fabrice Ribou’s whistle, which his customers had repeatedly informed him was a unique form of torture.
Fortunately the man walked straight up to the bar, forcing Fabrice Ribou to unpurse his lips and ask him what he wanted to drink. Introducing himself as Jean-François Lafforest from the council, he informed the owner that he had come on official business. Clutching his soft leather briefcase to his stomach, he took a deep breath. It had taken him three weeks to memorize the speech he had to give, on account of the nervous breakdown he had suffered following the wicked taunts of his colleagues when he had returned to the office with his preposterous headcount.
‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ he announced, facing the room. ‘You will all receive the following information in the post within the next few days, but I am here to inform you of the decision myself in the event that there may be some immediate questions. I’d like to make it clear from the start that the following announcement is a council matter and decided by a committee.’ He paused. ‘Not by me,’ he added, looking round quickly.
With a raised hand, Fabrice Ribou, whose mind was never far from his takings, interrupted the man, telling him that if he was about to make a public announcement it was only fair
to round up the other villagers. To his immense satisfaction, after a series of phone calls, his clientele had doubled.
On seeing by how much his audience had swelled, Jean-François Lafforest hugged his briefcase closer towards him until the left buckle was pressing painfully against his umbilicus. ‘As you are no doubt aware, it has not rained for some considerable time, before which the reservoir was already at a worryingly low level,’ he continued. ‘It is my duty to inform you that a municipal shower will shortly be installed in the place du Marché. From that time the taking of baths will not be permitted in Amour-sur-Belle and anyone caught infringing the regulation will be fined. We are well aware of how much water is being consumed at the moment and expect the amount to fall dramatically when our preventative measure has been introduced. I will briefly answer any questions you may have, but it will all be explained in the letter that you will duly receive.’
‘How much is the fine?’ asked Gilbert Dubuisson the postman.
Jean-François Lafforest rubbed his upper lip as he muttered a figure.
‘How much did he say?’ asked a voice from the back.
‘How much did you say?’ asked Lisette Robert.
‘One hundred euros,’ repeated the man from the council.
‘One hundred euros!’ exclaimed Marcel Coussy the farmer.
‘For having a bath in our own homes!’ said Madame Moreau.
‘As I said before, it’s not I who decides these matters,’ said Jean-François Lafforest, wiping a tickle of sweat from the side of his face. ‘If you would like to take the matter further I have a list of names of people you could get in touch with. As you will see, mine isn’t on there.’
‘How will you know if anyone’s had a bath?’ asked Lisette Robert.
‘Spot checks will be carried out,’ replied Jean-François Lafforest, ‘the details of which will be determined. By others. Not me.’
Quite what happened next, Jean-François Lafforest was never certain. All the man from the council knew was that one moment he was in the bar and the next he had been deposited back at the far end of the square, his soft leather briefcase arriving seconds afterwards. When he had recovered sufficiently from the shock to get back on to his feet, he hurried back to his car. But just as he turned the key, the fear in his stomach curdled its contents. Opening the car door, he stuck his head out and showered a patch of nettles with vomit.
Guillaume Ladoucette didn’t attend the meeting, having resisted Fabrice Ribou’s sales tactics with the insistence that he was busy. After putting down the phone, he took the key to the barber shop from its nail by the kitchen mantelpiece, dropped it into his trouser pocket and locked the front door behind him. For several minutes, he stood in silence with his back against the door, his palms feeling the warmth of the wood. Suddenly, without warning, he unlocked it again and burst back in. But the room was still empty.
It was warm inside the barber shop. As he pushed open the door a pile of letters skidded across the floor. He stood looking around, noticing the dust that had flourished on the mirror in just over a week. Below it, in the sink, was a withered lizard still bearing the grimace of a prolonged and painful death from dehydration. The grey nylon gown had slipped from its hook on the wall and lay slumped on the floor like a body felled by a firing squad. When, eventually, he mustered the courage to touch something, he reached out and ran his hand along the back of the black leather chair, sending millions of fragments of hair twisting and sparkling in a sliver of sunlight.
Reminding himself that today was the start of his new life, Guillaume Ladoucette set to work. As he picked up the post and put it in a neat pile by the door to take home, he thought: No more dandruff. As he folded up the cape, he muttered: ‘No more pretending to customers that they’re not going bald.’ As he pulled forward the bench and reached down to pick up two empty packets of Petit Beurre Lu biscuits, he said to himself: ‘No more inhaling trimmings which would eventually have formed a hairball in my stomach and killed me.’ Cheered at the thought of having saved himself from certain death, he dropped all the products that had been for sale into a plastic bag, including the combs in three different colours, the pots of pomade the colour of figs and the bottles of hair tonic bearing a picture of a perfectly groomed gentleman.
Into a box he packed his small, yet curious collection of old barbering utensils, including the shaving bowls, the wooden balls which were placed inside the cheek to facilitate shaving, the sets of little brass moustache tongs and the assortment of cut-throat razors. On top of them he carefully rested the framed original advert for Dr L. Parker’s electricity cure for baldness, bearing a picture of a faithful customer with a treatment cap strapped to his head. He then went to the other side of the room and looked up at his certificate from the Périgord Academy of Master Barbers, but something in his stomach stopped him from taking it down.
When Stéphane Jollis arrived to remove the barber’s chair and sink, Guillaume Ladoucette disappeared into the back garden unable to watch, reminding the baker to turn the water off at the mains. Once the task was done, the two men stood back and contemplated the empty room.
‘Why don’t you just whitewash it?’ suggested the baker.
‘It’s been white for nineteen years. What about pale pink?’
‘Pale pink? What would you want pale pink for?’
‘It’s romantic.’
‘They use it in hospices.’
‘What would you have, then?’
‘White.’
‘I don’t want white,’ said Guillaume. ‘What about blue?’
‘Too cold.’
‘What about cream?’
‘If you’re going to have cream you may as well have white.’
‘What about green? I like green.’
‘It’s the colour of schoolrooms,’ said the baker.
‘What about red, then?’
‘It would look like a bordello. That’s an idea, why don’t you open a bordello?’
‘Stéphane, would you mind concentrating on the issue at hand? I’m running out of colours.’
‘White,’ he replied before leaving to return to the bakery.
The morning Guillaume Ladoucette opened his new business, the sun was firing with such ferocity the pigeons had gone mad. Unable to remember how to fly, they tottered after Madame Ladoucette in a feathery grey shadow, recognizing in her a similar suffering. A number of them, a spark having suddenly fired in a prehistoric part of their brain, thought that they were fish again. Monsieur Moreau found six drowned in the fountain said to cure gout, their pink scaly feet cleansed of droppings. He was dissuaded from giving them to his wife to cook immediately he saw the crazed look in their eyes, which frightened him so much that when night fell he buried the lot in the graveyard as close to the Romanesque church as possible.
In preparation for his grand opening, Guillaume Ladoucette had bathed with a bar of Geo. F. Trumper Milk of Flowers soap, which his favourite shop in Périgueux imported from the famous London barber’s for their special customers, who were, in fact, anyone willing to pay such a price. He had never expected an occasion grand enough to warrant its use, and had spent the last four months simply gazing at his purchase on the bottom shelf above the taps from his recumbent position while being buffeted by the noisy foam of cheap bubble bath. Such was the depth of pleasure it had given him, after washing he lay for thirty-seven minutes in the water fragrant with English wild flowers, the bar sitting in the curious dip in his sternum that his grandfather had told him was an excellent place to keep salt while eating a boiled egg.
As Guillaume Ladoucette approached the shop, he admired once again the fancy lettering of the words ‘Heart’s Desire’ above the door. It had cost him more than he expected, but he was so delighted with the result that he invited the signmaker home for a bowl of cassoulet afterwards. After unlocking the door, he turned round the plastic sign hanging on the inside so that the word ‘Open’ faced the street in swirling red letters. After hanging his new navy
suit jacket on the peg where the grey nylon cape used to be, he gave it an affectionate brush with his hand even though there was not a speck on it. Savouring the moment, he then slowly sat down at the oak desk facing the window. He had bought the desk from the cave in the limestone cliff at Brantôme that sold bric-à-brac. Slightly battered with a prominent ink stain that had secured its free delivery, an afternoon of polishing and buffing had vastly improved its appearance. It wasn’t its pretty brass handles that had seduced Guillaume Ladoucette, however, but the narrow drawer which sat just above his stomach containing numerous compartments for small things as well as long things.
After lacing his fingers on the edge of the desk behind a clean sheet of white paper, he bared his most welcoming of smiles and waited. A few moments later, when nothing had happened, he slowly moved his pen from the right-hand side of the piece of paper to a horizontal position above it. He relaced his fingers and smiled again.
Not long after jaw-ache had set in, he looked down and, feeling a twist of excitement, slowly slid open the narrow drawer. There, each in its own little compartment, was a rubber, a pencil, a stapler, a selection of pens and the contents of a large packet of multi-coloured rubber bands which had been divided between two sections because of their quantity. After moving the stapler to a different compartment, he slowly closed the drawer again.
Guillaume Ladoucette resumed his original pose of unfettered expectation. When, several minutes later, he was still alone, he glanced out of the window to check that no one was looking. He then moved his tie to one side, pulled open his shirt between the second and third button, lowered his head and inhaled deeply, savouring the exquisite blend of musky floral aromas still trapped in his chest hairs. Once his tie was back in position, he dropped a hand down the side of his new swivel chair. As he did so, his fingers brushed against a lever which he lifted. An instant later his curiosity was sated when he found himself plummeting towards the floor like a runaway lift. After several fruitless yanks, followed by a lifting of his bottom, the seat eventually rose to its original height and he cautiously sat back down.