by Julia Stuart
‘Come, come, Monsieur Lévèque…’
‘You can call me Yves, Guillaume, as you have done all your life. We went to the same school, remember?’
‘Yves. The fact that there is currently no one else on our books is a mere formality. It is only a matter of time before things pick up. And, as my first customer, you would, of course, be eligible for a ten per cent discount. Now, I must point out that the Unrivalled Bronze Service is not designed for a man of the world such as yourself. Heavens, no. Naturally, you know how to comport yourself in the company of women. I, myself, have seen you with several over the years and your behaviour appeared entirely proper. Neither are there any nasty habits that I feel need addressing. Your problem, as I see it, is simply lack of opportunity. What have you done to improve your chances of finding love? There must be many suitable women who come into the surgery. You’re the only dentist for kilometres.’
‘Well,’ said Yves Lévèque, looking beyond the matchmaker as he thought. ‘I keep myself clean and tidy, which can’t be said for everyone around here. You’d know all about that, having had to get as close to them as I do. I always flatter them on their brushing technique. But the problem with getting romantically involved with a patient, of course, is that when you eventually split up and they come back for treatment, they assume that whenever you tell them that they need a filling you’re just trying to cause them more pain.’
‘I see,’ said the matchmaker. ‘Is there anything you might have done recently to improve your chances that hasn’t perhaps worked, or, worse still, is hampering your efforts?’
As Yves Lévèque shook his head, the spikes of his pine cone rattled against each other. ‘Nothing I can think of,’ he replied.
‘Something to do with your appearance, perhaps?’
The dentist looked blankly at the matchmaker for several minutes.
‘Well, maybe that’s a little something to think about,’ said Guillaume Ladoucette quickly. ‘So, what will it be, the Unrivalled Bronze Service, the Unrivalled Silver Service or the Unrivalled Gold Service?’
‘I’m still not convinced about any of them.’
‘I suppose you could always carry on as you are, but what you’ve tried so far clearly hasn’t worked, which is a shame because there’s nothing quite like the soft mounds of a woman’s breasts against your back at night, is there?’ said the matchmaker, whose breathtaking salesmanship over the last nineteen years had shifted 15,094 combs, 507 wigs, 144 false moustaches, 312 nasal hair clippers, 256 pairs of false sideburns, 22 pairs of false eyebrows and 3 merkins.
Yves Lévèque remained silent.
‘There’s a woman out there waiting to find you, as you are waiting to find her,’ Guillaume Ladoucette continued. ‘My job is to unite the pair of you before she finds someone else.’
‘But your prices are extraordinary!’ protested the dentist.
Guillaume Ladoucette leant back in his chair and looked out of the window. ‘I bumped into Gilbert Dubuisson on his rounds yesterday,’ he said. ‘He had really bad toothache and said he was going to have to make an appointment to see you.’ The matchmaker paused before adding: ‘Sounded to me like he needs root canal treatment.’
Silence billowed again. Guillaume Ladoucette picked up his rubber and started inspecting it as he waited for a decision. But Yves Lévèque was unable to speak. Yet again he felt the sharp edges of the loneliness that had been rattling around inside his stomach for half a decade. It had caused such chronic constipation that not even a piece of Le Trappe Échourgnac cheese laced with walnut liqueur, made by the sisters of the Notre-Dame de Bonne Espérance Abbey, left on his bed sheet at night was able to entice the blockages out. As he sat rubbing his palms on the stained wooden arms of the chair, slowly the loneliness rose and became wedged in his throat. The more he tried to speak the more it strangled him and his cheeks lit up with the struggle. Gripping the edges of the cushion, he shut his eyes and with one final gulp he swallowed the obstruction back down. But the coppery residue of five loveless years had coated his tongue. When he finally opened his mouth, he let out a squeak like a rusty weathervane, coughed, and whispered: ‘The Unrivalled Silver Service.’
Over an hour later, having divulged more about his ill-fated love life than he even realized he knew, Yves Lévèque got up. Before leaving, he poked his head out of the door to check that no one was around to witness his exit. In his pocket was an elastic band given to him by the elated matchmaker as a goodbye present, which he’d accepted with bewilderment, assuming its relevance would come to him later. Once the dentist had gone, Guillaume Ladoucette put his arsenal back in the narrow drawer with the compartments. After turning over the sign on the door, he locked up and headed home.
The sun had lost the worst of its grip and bobbing in the wake of the perpetual breeze was the scent of wild mint growing along the banks of the Belle. Not that the matchmaker noticed. He had in fact failed to take in anything of the short journey home, for such was the extent of his jubilation at finally having a customer on his books, a sudden onset of delirium had blanked out the curved salmon roof tiles, the ancient stone walls on top of which wild irises grew and the pigeons that had forgotten how to fly and had converted to pedestrianism. In their place was the image of Yves Lévèque sitting on the terrace of one of the exquisite riverside restaurants in Brantôme holding the hand of a woman opposite him. By the time he had reached halfway home, the woman, who had perfect teeth, had fallen for the dentist’s hitherto disguised charms. When the matchmaker turned into his street, the couple was standing before the priest in the Romanesque church with the violent green mould that clawed up to the stations of the cross, he was best man and the groom had finally apologized for returning his box of hairpieces in such a state of turmoil.
Arriving at his house, the matchmaker cupped his hands against the kitchen window and peered inside. Stepping lightly towards the front door, he slid the key silently into the lock and gently turned it. Slowly pushing the door ajar, he then took a small hand mirror from behind the flower box on the windowsill, slid it inside and tilted it in various directions as he tried to see every angle of the kitchen.
‘Good evening, Guillaume! What on earth are you doing?’ came a voice. The matchmaker jumped and turned his head to see Madame Serre holding a watering can with fingers twisted with age.
‘Ah! Good evening, Madame Serre. Err, nothing. That’s what I’m doing, absolutely nothing. Nothing at all. Not a single thing. And if I were doing something, which I’m not, it certainly wouldn’t be what it looks like. Not a bit of it. I’d better go, actually, because I’m not doing anything and it’s about time that I was. Bye!’ replied the matchmaker and closed the door smartly behind him.
Once inside, he poured himself a glass of still mineral water from a bottle in the fridge and sat down at the kitchen table with a nectarine, which he had carefully washed to avoid getting worms. As he cut into it, he wondered what to have for his victory supper. When he had finished the fruit, he dabbed his mouth with his favourite white napkin with his initials embroidered in red in the corner, let the nectarine stone slide off the plate into the bin and put the plate into the sink. He then walked over to the cellar door, turned the handle on which hung a necklace of dried red chillies and slowly descended the stairs.
At the bottom, he pulled a cord which lit up a naked bulb furred with dust. One of his favourite places as a boy, the cellar still held its allure. While the majority of the fruit and vegetable conserves were now his own, there were still a few at the back of the shelves that had been made by his mother, their contents rancid to the point of explosion, which he kept for the comfort of seeing her handwriting on the labels.
There were other treasures down there too, including a large collection of his ancestors’ clogs, their soles shod with what appeared to be tiny horse shoes. As a child, he would put them on and drag them around the bare earth floor with his tiny pink feet, which had not yet gone to seed. His favourite was the ornately carved
pair made of poplar which had belonged to his grandfather, who reserved them for Sundays and funerals. They had fitted Guillaume Ladoucette perfectly for a period of eleven months when he was fourteen. But he had been forbidden from taking them up into the house as his parents couldn’t trust his Bedouin-like tendency for giving away his possessions to whoever expressed a liking for them.
But they were not the only delights. There was also the ‘monk’, a large wooden frame in which a pot of embers would be placed to warm the bed, so called because of a monk’s obligation to lie in the bishop’s bed to warm it up. Then there were the yokes and a pair of enormous bellows used to inflate the skins of calves in order to remove them more easily. Filling the corners were ancient, largely unfathomable, wooden and iron implements laced with cobwebs, the purpose of which no one could deduce. Every now and again, the young Guillaume Ladoucette, convinced that some good should come of them, would take one out into the garden, clean it up and try and find a use for it, which one afternoon led him to trying to fashion a garden sieve out of a chastity belt.
Ignoring the bite of his grandfather’s Sunday clogs, which he still put on when in the cellar despite the aggression of their nip, the matchmaker moved along the shelves of jars, and with the obsessional scrutiny of an alchemist, inspected his bottles of pineau. In various stages of fermentation since the previous year, their contents resembled ghastly specimens of human tissue and bodily fluids. First, he had crushed the grapes in a food mixer and then sieved the results through a pair of tights, the purchase of which had caused numerous smirks in the grocer’s, and which had led to the much-repeated comment by Denise Vigier that if they were for him, he would be much better off with the extra-large size. He had then added enough cognac to create a concoction of 40 per cent alcohol and 60 per cent grape must. He looked with satisfaction at the clarity of the liquid in the top three-quarters of several of the bottles, and calculated that it would only be a matter of weeks before he would try it.
Passing the pickled tomatoes, their flushed cheeks pressed up against the glass, he then turned his attention to the bottles of walnut wine that he had made the previous August. He had spent a happy afternoon picking the green nuts from the tree in the garden, breaking them up, mixing them with eau-de-vie, sugar, the zest of an orange and a cinnamon stick, which was a new addition last year. It had all been filtered with another pair of tights, purchased this time from Brantôme to avoid Denise Vigier’s tongue. He peered at the murky liquid, wondering whether he should have used more cinnamon sticks.
But the biggest change to the cellar since Guillaume Ladoucette had returned to live in his childhood home was the astrological maps and planetary charts that now covered the walls above the wooden shelves. For, as his years advanced, he had followed the inevitable path of a man who had discovered a white hair in his moustache and embraced his potager with the enthusiasm of a new lover, intoxicated by its alluring yields and tormented by its capricious failures in equal measure.
The coloured maps and charts were the cornerstone of his seduction technique. For Guillaume Ladoucette was of the conviction that plants were as responsive to the cycles of the moon as the tides. A high priest in the cult of lunar gardening, he undertook no task in the potager, no matter how small, unless the moon was passing in front of the correct zodiacal constellation. Preparation of the soil, sowing, thinning out and hoeing, for example, were only performed while the moon was passing in front of Capricorn, Taurus and Virgo. The optimal time to concern oneself with leaf crops such as lettuce and spinach was when it was passing in front of Cancer, Pisces or Scorpio. And if the moon was in Gemini, Libra or Aquarius, it was the turn of artichokes, Brussels sprouts and broccoli. He naturally endorsed the teaching that there were four days a month when only a fool would work in his potager: when the moon was closest to the earth, which made stems grow long and skinny like useless adolescents; when it was at its furthest point from the earth, which produced plants that were susceptible to illness; and the twice-monthly occasions when it passed through the plane of the earth’s orbit around the sun, causing such celestial perturbations that seeds would fail to sprout.
Guillaume Ladoucette wasn’t alone in his adherence to this religion, which was practised during daylight hours. Since he had the most detailed and up-to-date maps and charts available–some of which repeated themselves but brought him the comfort of knowing that everything was covered–he was often pestered with zodiacal queries from new disciples who had also been rudely confronted with their middle age by finding a white hair in the least expected of places.
Having checked the position of the moon, the matchmaker struggled out of his grandfather’s clogs and found relief in his supermarket leather sandals. After clicking off the light, he creaked back upstairs and headed towards the back door. Once he had unlocked it, he poked his head round, scanned the top of the garden wall, the lawn and underneath the frilly pink hydrangea and stepped out with confidence towards his potager.
Thwacking his way across the grass, he passed the well with its pointed stone roof and the old white sink with its cheery red geraniums. First he admired his row of garlic, which he had planted four days before a full moon and around which he had loosened the ground when it was passing in front of Capricorn to ensure plump bulbs. He decided not to dwell on his artichokes, which, instead of standing straight as soldiers, had more the air of a group of conscientious objectors about them, despite having been planted when the moon was in Gemini. But their mournful sight, and the nagging regret at not having added more cinnamon sticks to his walnut wine, suddenly reminded the matchmaker of his capacity for failure and his mind turned to Yves Lévèque. As he reached for a weed and tossed it into a basket, he wondered whether he really would be able to find a woman who would overlook the dentist’s much-discussed parsimony, his annoying habit of looking at people’s teeth when spoken to, and his unspeakable efforts at growing cornichons. Bending over to pick some spinach, his heart began to slip. But as he reached for another handful, he was suddenly reminded of his stroke of good fortune when he had pulled apart the large floppy leaves during his cursory search for Patrice Baudin following the famous mini-tornado of 1999. ‘That woman exists and I shall find her,’ he told himself, turning his back on the quicksand of despair and marching back to the house with his pickings to prepare his celebratory supper.
Instead of finding a displaced skinny vegetarian pharmacist lying amongst his spinach, Guillaume Ladoucette had, in fact, discovered an exquisite oil painting of a young woman whose lack of refinement suggested a person of little means. While of no apparent value, its charm was undoubted. It was the rapture expressed by the anonymous artist’s palette that held the eye. There was no mistaking the tenderness in the blush of her cheeks, the adoration that nestled in each of the curls that hung around her shoulders and the devotion which shone from her eyes, which defied nature. Her common white blouse had been afforded the purity of Egyptian cotton, and its cheap buttons the lustre of a Venetian courtesan’s.
Not knowing whom it belonged to, and failing to recognize his own mother, Guillaume Ladoucette brought the portrait inside, carefully removed the soil from the canvas and repaired the damage to the gilt frame. For the next few weeks, he asked everyone he came across whether they had lost an oil painting during the recent severe weather. Unable to find its owner, he eventually hung it in the sitting room to the right of the mantelpiece where he would gaze at it from his armchair wondering who the girl was.
It never occurred to Monsieur Moreau that his painting had taken flight from the wood shed when its roof was blown off during the mini-tornado. He immediately assumed that a thief had stolen it, which had been his constant fear ever since hanging it there almost six decades before. There had never been any question of him bringing it into the house lest his wife recognized the woman who later became her greatest adversary.
Monsieur Moreau’s unrequited devotion had lasted so long its discoloured pages were almost too fragile to turn. He to
o had been sitting in the darkened recesses of the great white circus tent that night and witnessed the devastating spectacle of Florence Fuzeau’s knickers. His ardour had been ignited two years before when the girl suddenly turned to him one afternoon in the school playground and licked him on the cheek. The boy took the gesture as a sign of affection. But it was nothing of the sort: Florence Fuzeau was simply suffering from a chronic lack of salt.
That night, as he sat watching a dwarf cleaning up a steaming pile of llama droppings before the next act, he decided he could wait no longer to make his declaration of love. But when the lights finally went up, he was distracted by the sight of one of the Pyrenean bears; it had escaped back into the ring and was being chased by a man in red velvet slippers, who only minutes before had been kissed by the animal while it was standing on its hind legs. When René Moreau eventually stood up to try and reach her, he found himself thwarted by the boisterous crowd, which didn’t want to leave. And when he finally caught up with her, he discovered to his horror that someone else had got there first.
Blaming what he considered to be his life’s greatest misfortune on failing to pay attention to the task at hand, he devoted the next few years to the study of oil painting to rid himself of the fault in his character. To his utter surprise, the results were remarkable, but he was never able to paint anything other than his lost love. When he married, he put down his brush, believing it to be an infidelity. Retrieving all the portraits from their hiding places, he built a fire at the bottom of the garden and burnt each one apart from his favourite. Unable to part with it, he hung it behind a pile of logs in the wood shed; he stacked them in a fashion that permitted him to gaze at it simply by removing a couple. Each year, he longed for winter and the frequent calls of his wife to fetch more logs for the fire.
The only person to whom he spoke of his secret passion was himself, while walking in the woods. He uttered his longing with such desperation that it frightened the birds and nothing would grow along the pathways of his jumbled meanders. Madame Ladoucette’s obsessional attempts at preventing illnesses from stalking her husband–a regular source of marital conflict–only served to increase Monsieur Moreau’s affection. And when his wife took her very public exception to the woman, he tried everything in his powers to persuade her to let the matter go. He bought her all manner of frivolities as a distraction, including satin ribbons and shiny whistles from the itinerant salesmen, but the only purchase she was interested in was another kilo of ripe tomatoes. In the end he resorted to hiding her ammunition, but she simply bought more. It never dawned on him that his life’s greatest misfortune was not that he had never married Florence Ladoucette, but that he had married the love of his life and never realized it.