Farewell My French Love

by Nadine Williams

  ‘I don’t drink, but would you like a glass of wine?’ Muriel asks.

  ‘I’m very happy with a pot of tea.’

  It doesn’t seem like France at all as we sip tea, sharing our life histories. She tells me that she had been a gynaecologist before her marriage to another gynaecologist and her husband is still in practice.

  ‘When the first of our four daughters arrived, I didn’t return to work. I didn’t think it would work with both parents working as gynaecologists in such stressful, responsible jobs—and I think I was right,’ she says.

  I enquire about the Lyceum Clubs in France. And I tell her how Adelaide’s Lyceum had played a part in my recovery after Olivier died.

  ‘I think I was seeking the company of women,’ I say. ‘When the last of my children, my son Tyson, moved interstate taking his family with him, I felt desperately alone. A friend gave a gentle nudge, and I joined.’

  ‘It’s fortunate that we met you,’ she says.

  ‘Very fortunate for me, too. Tomorrow I leave to spend a few days with Dany in Brittany, and I think she is the president there, isn’t she?’ I ask.

  ‘She is the past president. You’ll love Brittany. I have a holiday house in Brittany, near St-Malo.’

  ‘Oh I know Brittany well. Olivier took me there every year. He loved it, but I think the cold would freeze my bones after hot South Australia.’

  At 4.30 pm we are back on the community bus that becomes something of a human pantomime. A woman aged around forty boards the bus, her ample breasts bulging out of her red T-shirt. To complete her pick-me-up look, she wears a tight-waisted short black skirt, slit at the back, and red, grey and black striped stockings. There she stands teetering on red high heels in the doorway of the bus talking to the bus driver.

  Muriel, whose youthful, flawless skin mocks her grey wavy hair, says with a playful lilt, ‘Quite a fashion look.’

  Almost immediately, the bus is held up by a taxi that has stopped in our path. A frail, elderly woman with a stick stumbles out the taxi’s rear door, regains her posture and totters off. She wears makeup, white gloves and a smart brown pantsuit with a crisp white shirt, which has concealed buttons. A mix of cultured pearls and gold dangling necklaces reflect the refined Chanel look. In contrast to the gaudy bus passenger, her shoes are expensive fawn leather flatties trimmed in black and she carries a matching designer bag.

  ‘That lady would be eighty-plus, but look at her, still presenting herself in the height of fashion,’ I comment.

  ‘She is the epitome of style. It is born in some women, but most French women must acquire it,’ adds Muriel. ‘She has arrived in a taxi, so I don’t think she belongs in Montmartre.’

  To me, she mirrors the ‘manicured bourgeoisie’ of Paris. The old lady’s style reminds me of a comment by Lucy Wadham in The Secret Life of France, that French women live in ‘a culture embedded in image and appearance’. Yet, Wadham, an English woman who lived in France for twenty years, admits that she slowly converted to the French culture of impeccable appearance.

  I’m relieved there are no prostitutes on Boulevard Barbes when we return. I bid her farewell with a renewed commitment: ‘Let’s hope the next time we meet, I can speak French with you.’

  As I walk up the stairs, I reflect how that spontaneous decision to attend the Lyceum’s international congress in Perth in 2013 has delivered a handful of my own friends in France. This is my new life in the company of women and it has taken shape in Paris.

  Jane has a sheepish look on her face when I enter our room.

  ‘I have had quite an adventure today,’ she says in a soft, grave voice. ‘I got lost.’

  ‘Well you must have been found because here you are. So what happened?’

  ‘Well, I caught a bus and I thought they would all come along Boulevard Barbes and I remembered the big intersection where those four prostitutes were last night, so I was sure I would recognise it in daylight. But the bus went entirely the wrong way and so I stayed on the bus until the terminus.’

  I’m wide-eyed. ‘So?’

  ‘I sat there and the driver started talking in French, obviously asking me to get off. But I didn’t understand him, so I wrote down “Best Western Hotel Boulevard Barbes”. And he said “Oh-la-la!” He pointed across the road, grabbed the piece of paper and wrote down the number of the bus I should take …’

  Jane is enjoying relating her adventure.

  ‘Then I remembered my map and got him to put a dot for the hotel’s location. I figured his dot wasn’t too far and so I walked and walked. It only took an hour. I can tell you Nadine, this isn’t the Paris I expected.’

  ‘So, you are disappointed?’

  ‘Heavens no! I had a real adventure and I have dinner-party conversation for ten years just from today!’

  It is almost 6 pm and we have changed clothes and applied fresh makeup. We walk arm-in-arm towards the bus stop and spontaneously choose the first corner hotel. We are too tired to explore further. Pub food in the real village of Montmartre is bound to be more authentic than the restaurants on La Butte.

  We survey the small menu in silence. They are typical French meals without translation.

  ‘I’m going to buy you a glass of French champagne for what has been the holiday of a lifetime,’ says Jane.

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Absolutely, darling,’ she says. ‘It’s wonderful that we’re still friends.’ She smiles warmly. ‘I’ve known people who have travelled overseas together and when they’ve returned home, they have never spoken again.’

  ‘We’ve had our moments, but I think we have grown together through them.’

  ‘I’m a little sad to be going.’

  ‘That’s the best compliment.’ I’m relieved. Dealing with our differences has shifted my thinking from being consumed with memories of Olivier to dealing with the here and now—la vie quotidienne. Daily life.

  ‘Well, let’s celebrate all of that. Let’s order. Poulet aux champignons avec une sauce au vin blanc—that has my name on it,’ I say. ‘But I think I will also have a small bowl of French onion soup. I didn’t have any lunch today really.’ As an afterthought, thinking that our food differences are behind us, I add, ‘Have some soup, Jane.’

  ‘No, I think I will have the Niçoise salad,’ says Jane in a tired voice.

  When le garçon arrives with two glasses of champagne, he asks for our orders. Jane tells him in English that she wants an entrée serve of Niçoise salad. ‘But please bring it out with the main course,’ she adds.

  The poor fellow excuses himself and returns with the manager, a rotund man trying hard to hide his frustration.

  ‘Please explain your problem,’ he says.

  ‘There is no problem. I simply want to have an entrée serve of Niçoise salad brought out at the same time as my friend’s main course.’

  He flashes a pained expression at me, so I attempt it in French.

  ‘Mon amie veut juste une petite salade Niçoise en entrée … que vous pourrez servir en même temps que mon plat principal,’ I explain slowly. (My friend simply wants a small entrée of Niçoise salad … that you are able to serve at the same time as my main course).

  My goodness! I have explained a difficult matter in French. This is such an achievement for me, after ten years struggling to learn. What’s more, I add: ‘Je veux le poulet aux champignons, s’il vous plaît.’ I want to order the chicken with mushrooms, please.

  He understands. He smiles. ‘D’accord Madame.’ Okay Madam.

  My tasty soup arrives with its floating islands of melted cheese on bread rounds, while Jane contemplates the parade of pedestrians outside the open window. In due course, my main course arrives with sliced chicken slathered in a smooth brown mushroom sauce and sprinkled with parsley.

  But when the waiter places a bowl of Niçoise salad in front of Jane, she calls out. ‘Non!’

  The waiter looks aggrieved.

  ‘I said I wanted entrée serve. This is a full size. You ha
ve brought it out at the right time, but it is the wrong size. Please take it back.’

  ‘Petit, petit,’ (small, small!) she adds and I think she is doing very well with a few French words.

  I say nothing!

  The manager returns with the Niçoise salad and ignoring Jane looks at me and snaps.

  ‘Quel est le problème?’ What is the problem?

  ‘C’est la grande taille. Mon amie veut la petite taille seulement, s’il vous plaît.’ It’s the big size. My friend wants the small size only, please. The sentence really did slip off my tongue. It is easy when I know the words.

  ‘Demi?’ Half?

  ‘Oui.’

  As he walks off, I say to Jane, ‘You’re getting half.’

  ‘Good! Now let’s drink to our twenty-year friendship and hope for another twenty years,’ says Jane, chinking my glass of champagne.

  ‘I will be an old woman by then.’

  ‘And so will I. We should be so lucky.’

  Lying in bed an hour later, I ask Jane for her iPad and look up the word ‘friendship’.

  When I was twelve years old and in my first week at senior school, I had a little autograph book and my new-found friends wrote messages. One friend wrote: True friends are like diamonds—precious and rare. False friends are like autumn leaves, found everywhere. I must have sensed its importance in the art of happiness. I memorised it because it’s the only one I can recall fifty years later.

  But I don’t need the internet to understand the richness of friendship. My dearest friend, Jenny, has been my rock in terrible times. The day after Olivier’s death, I was in a wretched state, wrapped up in my bed. I could hear those daily noises of my children in the other rooms, but I could not join them, so great was my anguish. They may have phoned Jenny because unexpectedly she knocked on the bedroom door, entered and soon asked if I would like a shower ‘to freshen up’. I had no idea of the time; perhaps late morning, but did wonder why she was there as she always went to the movies on Saturdays. I don’t think I said a word, but I got up and obeyed her. When I left the bathroom, back in my pyjamas, she had made my bed.

  ‘What did you do that for?’ I was really distressed. ‘I want to go straight back to bed!’

  ‘No you don’t. We’re going to have a cup of tea with the family.’

  And my tiny, gentle friend of forty years sat on the side of the bed with her arms folded. And then, a little gentler, she suggested I ‘slip something on’. ‘You’ll get cold standing there in your pyjamas.’

  The tables had turned as they so often do in friendship. Many years ago I had been there for her when her adult son died and her beloved husband died three months later. It was an unbelievable double tragedy. I wrote and delivered the eulogies for the two men in her life.

  On the day of Olivier’s funeral, she accompanied me in the funeral director’s car and had convinced me not to wear the black hat I had bought. ‘Your hair looks lovely, Nadine.’

  Tears are coming as I remember my despair and her kindness.

  The richness of friendship is like a multi-cut diamond that brings sparkle to our life in happy times, too. It’s crucial to finding pleasure, other than sex, in the company of others.

  Over these three weeks with Jane, I have learnt another critical element of friendship—to accept difference. When the ship of our friendship looked like being wrecked on rocks, our affection for each other shone like a beacon to guide us through the rough waters.

  Then comes the moment of farewell as my taxi is waiting outside on Boulevard Barbes to take me to Gare Montparnasse.

  We fall into each other’s arms and hug each other tightly. I smile warmly at her and kiss her on each cheek. And she responds, too, in the French manner.

  ‘You have a whole day to enjoy Paris,’ I say.

  ‘I promise you, I won’t take buses, I’ll take taxis,’ she assures me.

  And we laugh easily in unison. Then, at the door, I wave her goodbye and call out: ‘À bientôt en Australie.’ Until we meet again in Australia.

  THIRTEEN

  MYSTERIOUS BRITTANY

  ‘One has to live, you know. You can’t just die from grief or anything. You don’t die. You might as well eat well, have a good glass of wine, a good tomato.’ M.F.K. Fisher

  I leave plenty of time to catch the train to St-Malo to meet Danièle, who stayed in my home in Adelaide earlier this year. Despite our language difficulties, we liked each other instantly. And before she left for the Lyceum Clubs’ triennial congress in Perth, Danièle made a reciprocal offer, in strained English, to stay with her and her husband in Brittany, France.

  As the train slows into the St-Malo gare I wrestle with a wave of doubt that perhaps I had been too spontaneous in accepting Danièle’s invitation. Surely, the whole notion of travelling by train alone to stay with people I hardly know in a foreign country, who don’t speak my language, should have warned me off. I shudder. What madness to do this!

  But then I’m on the platform and a strange fellow is heading towards me smiling like a Cheshire cat. I stare at him momentarily before I notice the bespeckled, slim woman with the light brown wavy hair behind him. This must be Louis. And I smile just as broadly.

  As I hug Danièle, I intuit I’m going to have the time of my life. Then Louis steps forward, tipping his head towards me to give me cheek kisses. ‘I will take your luggage, Nahdeen,’ he says in slow English.

  I could almost skip to the car. I feel so happy.

  Danièle speaks in French and luckily I sense the gist of her conversation. We are going to visit St-Malo. She then speaks once more, faster this time and I grab at the word ‘Paris’ and, even more of a miracle, my basic French words fall into little sentences. I tell her about my last days in Paris and my ‘après-midi avec Muriel’ (afternoon with Muriel). Thankfully the conversation drops away until we park the car.

  It’s only the third week into autumn, but it’s chilly and bulbous black clouds hang ominously overhead to reflect the many misty days I have spent in Brittany. Oli loved this part of France and yet, we never visited the top end of Bretagne that abuts Mont St-Michel. So today I’m forging my own pathway in France.

  We walk around the cobbled streets of St-Malo, a town huddled behind huge granite walls as if to keep itself safe. When we climb onto the ramparts of the historic fortified port, I think I will turn into a block of ice. I have my flimsy navy cardigan on and am dressed for the bright sunny days of Paris. Below us, a snarling steel-grey sea hurls itself against the harbour walls.

  ‘St-Malo has a colourful history of “good” pirates,’ says Louis, who can speak some English. He explains that theoretically we are overlooking the English Channel, but Bretons call it the Bretagne Sea.

  Louis tells me that eighty per cent of the city was badly bombed by the Allies during World War II. But those hardy Bretons rebuilt it in the 1950s in the region’s grey granite as a replica of the town of 1661. It was burnt to the ground that year and rebuilt as a strong defensive medieval fort. ‘So St-Malo has been destroyed twice,’ says Louis.

  My hosts take me into a typically Breton crêperie where we enjoy the signature dish of the region—crêpes with confiture and crème fraîche. It is such a unique smooth, sweet taste I almost ‘lick my chops’, a favourite expression of my English-born dad, at the thought of jam and fresh cream.

  Danièle has a lovely lyrical personal style and she tells me lightheartedly that she has planned une vacance extraordinaire en Bretagne, an extraordinary holiday in Brittany for me.

  ‘J’ai chaque minute pour notre program touristique.’ I have each minute filled with our tourist program. She glows with excitement, which makes me feel welcome.

  Back in the car once more, I warm up again as Louis drives along the coast into Dinard, which he says is the most British of France’s resort towns. He parks the car in the centre of the town where we walk across the road to the picturesque Plage de l’Écluse. Classes of French schoolchildren are playing team sports on the
beach. The idyllic scenario is immortalised by the gifted Spanish artist Pablo Picasso in his Baigneuses sur la Plage (Bathers on the Beach).

  Louis explains that the Festival du Film Anglais is held each October in the festival hall next to the Grand Casino on the promenade.

  ‘French film stars and wealthy British and American business people live here, so it’s an expensive resort town,’ Louis says in hesitant English. But he reverts to French when he drives past the clifftop mansions, les Villas de Dinard. Facades bloom in a mix of ornate rococo and fancy neo-Norman and neo-Gothic architecture.

  ‘It is very much like La Baule,’ I comment, thinking how those early years at The Advertiser as property editor instilled an abiding interest in housing style.

  ‘Oui, et la ville a le même caractère nouveau riche,’ he responds. Yes, and the town has the same character of the newly rich. He seems to be playing language pingpong when he adds, ‘Now for something very different.’

  Soon he is telling the story of Dinan, reminiscent of a British village. ‘It is a gem in Bretagne,’ he says, explaining that at around 500 AD Bretagne was settled by a group of Celts who fled across the Channel from invading armies and named the peninsula Petite Bretagne. ‘Here we have a splendid medieval village because it escaped the bombings of World War II,’ Louis states like a tour guide.

  The small fishing village of Binic, which is their hometown, is different again. My host tells me that once it was a big, protected port and in 1845 Binic was bustling with a population of 1700 fishermen crewing thirty-seven ships. But World War I changed it all, and the fishing industry declined.

  ‘Instead of 150 ships a year calling into the Binic port, now we have thousands of tourists in summer.’

  Their triple-storey house is surrounded by a pretty, established garden and trees. It’s so nice to arrive and blossom in their hospitality. Danièle ushers me up the spiral staircase and into the living room telling me to sit down. ‘I make you tea.’

  Her absence gives me a moment to observe the inviting lounge. Paintings decorate each wall and the juxtaposition of occasional antique furniture, soft furnishings and objets d’art reflect a charming Frenchness. When she returns, setting down a tray of tea and biscuits, I enquire about her life and she modestly reveals a successful career as a professional artist and arts educator for thirty-seven years.