‘I’ll be back in an hour to explain your duties,’ said Aunt Augustine, closing the door behind her. She was not like a relative at all. She was nothing more than an employer.
On the back of the door was a list of chores. The paper it was scribbled on had turned yellow with age. Clean tiles with linseed oil and beeswax. Beat bed linen. Mop floor…I wondered how long it had been since anyone had done those things or a maid had occupied this dingy room. I lowered myself into the chair and stared out the window, tears rolling down my cheeks when I compared the warmth of my father to the coldness of my great-aunt. I glanced at the sagging mattress. The simple bed I’d had at home suddenly seemed like a divan fit for a queen. I closed my eyes and imagined myself lying in it, curling my knees to my chest and disappearing into a foetal ball.
The first meal I had to prepare was lunch the following day. The kitchen was as depressing as my bedroom. The flagstones and the walls held in the chill, which was made worse by the draught blowing through a cracked window pane. Aunt Augustine squeezed herself into a straw chair to supervise me, her swollen feet submerged in a pail of warm water. I poured in a few drops of lavender oil, telling her that it would soothe the inflammation. The scent wafted up and fought against the mouldy dishcloth stink of the kitchen. I imagined the lavender fields rippling in the breeze, their layers of purple swishing in the dappled sunlight. I could hear my father softly singing ‘Se Canto’, and was about to join him for the chorus when Aunt Augustine broke the spell: ‘Pay attention, girl!’
I lifted a pan off its hook. The handle was greasy and inside the bottom was encrusted with food. I swiped it with the dishcloth when Aunt Augustine wasn’t looking. I’d hated it when she’d sent me to the cellar earlier to fetch some wine. The door to the cave creaked open and all I could see was a web with a black spider hanging in it. I removed the spider with a broom and crept into the airless space with only a lamp to guide me. The cellar reeked of mud and there were rat droppings on the floor. My skin crawled and I jumped from imagined nips. I was terrified of being bitten by a rat because Marseilles was legendary for its diseases, a hazard for any port city since the days of the plague. I had grabbed the first two dusty bottles I saw without even bothering to check the contents.
I collected water from the pump outside the kitchen door then peered into the basket of vegetables on the bench. I was surprised by the quality of the produce. The tomatoes were still firm and red for so late in the season, the aubergines were weighty in my hands, the leeks were fresh and the black olives looked succulent. In the dirty kitchen, the fragrance of good produce was as welcome as an oasis in a desert.
Aunt Augustine sensed my admiration. ‘We have always eaten well here. I was famous for it. Of course, I am not the cook I once was,’ she said, holding up her clawed hands.
I studied her, trying to find the woman behind that grim face, the fiery young girl who had disobeyed her parents and run away with a sailor. It lingered in the set of her broad shoulders and her manly chin, but in her eyes I saw only bitterness.
Once I had assembled the ingredients, Aunt Augustine shouted her instructions above the sounds of the steaming pots and hissing pans. At each step I had to bring the food to her for inspection: the fish to show her that the skin was cleanly off; the potatoes to prove that I had mashed them properly; the olives to demonstrate that they had been finely chopped despite the bluntness of the knife; even the garlic to show that it had been crushed to her specifications.
As the cooking progressed, Aunt Augustine’s face became flushed. At first I thought it was because nothing I did seemed right. Take that back, you’ve shredded those leaves just like a peasant. Too much oil, go and wipe it for goodness sake. How much mint did you put in this? Did you think I was asking you to make mouthwash? I thought it was a lot of fuss from a woman who couldn’t be bothered to serve fresh tea. But as the temperature of the room rose, and her instructions became more frenzied, I saw that the blush in her cheeks was the inner passion I had searched for earlier. She was a conductor whipping her notes of fried fish, butter and rosemary into a gastronomic symphony. And the aromatic vapours seemed to draw the lodgers from their rooms. I heard voices and footsteps coming down the stairs almost half an hour earlier than the specified time for lunch.
When the table was set there were five of us in all. Besides Aunt Augustine and myself there was Ghislaine, a middle-aged woman who worked as a fish vendor, and two male boarders: Monsieur Roulin, a retired sailor; and Monsieur Bellot, a junior teacher at the boys’ lycée. Monsieur Roulin had a gap where his two front teeth should have been, his hair had retreated to a few wisps on the back of his sunspotted neck and his left forearm was missing, sliced off at the elbow joint. He waved the puckered end of his stump, speaking in a voice that sounded like an engine in need of oil. ‘It’s nice to have a young lady at the table. She is as dark as a berry, but pretty nonetheless.’
I smiled politely, understanding from my position at the lower corner of the table, near the kitchen door, that I was a servant and should not put myself forward in the conversation.
Monsieur Bellot pulled at his earlobe and said nothing beyond ‘please’ and ‘thank you’. During the meal, which Monsieur Roulin declared was the best they had eaten in months, Monsieur Bellot’s face changed from puzzled to dreamy to stern, as if he were carrying on some animated inner dialogue. Whatever Monsieur Roulin lacked, Monsieur Bellot seemed to have double in quantity: his teeth were long like a donkey’s, his hair was a wild halo around his head, and his limbs were so long that he didn’t need to stretch to pick up the water jug even when it was at my end of the table.
Ghislaine was seated next to me. I was surprised that someone who worked at the fish markets could smell so clean. Her skin gave off the mild scent of a fresh peach and her hair smelt like the rich olive oil used in Marseilles soap. Her eyes crinkled into a smile when Monsieur Roulin caught me looking at his stump and cried out, ‘A shark as big as a cruise ship off the coast of Madagascar!’
I sensed from the laughter and exchanged glances of the others at the table that the story wasn’t true. The angle of the amputation was too clean and had either been the result of an accident with a machine or surgery performed by a doctor. I hadn’t been looking at his stump with repugnance, just interest. The gnarled scar of my father’s eye had taught me that a warm heart was not changed by outer disfigurement.
After I had washed the dishes Aunt Augustine set me to the other daily chores, including emptying the bucket upstairs with the lid on it into the lavatory in the courtyard. Then she ran her finger along the sideboard in the dining room and examined the streak of dust collected on the tip. ‘Dust from the ground floor up,’ she said, as if I were somehow to blame for the slovenly state of the house. ‘Do Monsieur Bellot’s room first, then sweep Ghislaine’s floor once she leaves for work. Monsieur Roulin’s room is cleaned by his daughter. Don’t worry about the fourth floor. She doesn’t want her things “interfered with”.’
She? So I could put a sex to the mysterious being on the fourth floor, the mere mention of whom seemed to cause Aunt Augustine discomfort, although she didn’t mind taking her money for rent.
‘I rest in the afternoons but I’ll be back down to supervise supper,’ Aunt Augustine said, grabbing the banister and inching her way up the stairs.
The kitchen floor was gritty under my feet when I went to fetch the broom. I cringed at the thought of cooking another meal in that unsanitary room. Despite Aunt Augustine’s instructions to start with the dusting, I cleaned the kitchen first. I filled a bucket with water and heated it over the stove, then scrubbed the table and benches with soapy water, trying to picture the secret guest upstairs as I worked. At first I imagined a shrivelled woman my aunt’s age, bedridden and with a hollow, ailing face. She was a former rival, either in love or gastronomy, who had fallen on bad times and Aunt Augustine was leaving her to languish in dirt and starvation. As I progressed to cleaning the floor, the old woman’s face softened
and the wrinkles disappeared. One of her legs withered and she transformed into a crippled woman from a rich family who was ashamed of her affliction and paid Aunt Augustine to keep her. My mind ticked over. Perhaps she was a relative—an unknown Fleurier—whom Aunt Augustine kept hidden away and refused to acknowledge as her own flesh and blood.
I was so rapt in my fanciful scenarios and the chhh! chhh! chhh! sound my scrubbing brush made on the flagstones that at first I didn’t register a door creaking open, then slamming shut. Then I heard someone humming. My hand stopped mid-motion and I looked up. The voice was light and hopped from note to note like a butterfly flitting from flower to flower. It was the kind of rolling tune that an accordion man would play at a fair. In rhythm with the humming, footsteps skipped down the stairs. Tap! Click! Tap! Click! The steps of a woman but too light to be Aunt Augustine or Ghislaine. The footsteps reached the landing. I could make out the tinkle of jewels and a rattle like rice being shaken in a canister.
I leapt up and brushed down my hair and skirt. My apron and hem were soaked through, but I couldn’t resist the chance to see who it was. I squeezed the water out of my apron and wiped my shoes on the rag that I had been using to mop up, and ran towards the front room. But as I crossed the dining room my heel snagged on the carpet. I tripped and crashed into the sideboard, scattering the cups and saucers but luckily not breaking any. I righted myself and straightened the china, but reached the parlour a second too late. All I caught was a glimpse of an ivory beaded dress swinging out the door. A hint of ylang-ylang lingered in the air.
The breeze off the ocean was reddening raw in December, as were my fingers from sloughing the layers of dust and grime off the shelves, cupboards and floorboards of Aunt Augustine’s house. My muscles were stiff and my shoulders ached from dragging heavy furniture to reach dust balls and swiping at cobwebs that had hung from the cornices for years. Ghislaine nodded her approval at the polished parlour and the gleaming bathroom tiles, still reeking of the bleach I had used to kill the mildew wedged in the grout. Aunt Augustine merely jutted out her chin and said, ‘The door knobs are tarnished and I can still see the scum stain in the bath.’ I tugged up the frayed cuffs of my winter dress and knelt to scrub, polish and soap all over again, too afraid of my aunt to tell her that parts of her house were so dilapidated that no amount of sponging and sprucing could fix them up.
My grief over my father’s death healed slowly, but more from being exhausted by hard work than from acceptance. At night I huddled under my thin blanket, listening to the radiator spit and hiss erratic heat into the air. My hair stank of salt and linseed oil lingered on my fingertips. I scraped the muck from under my nails and combed the dirt out of my hair each night, but the bath I was allowed once a week didn’t rid me of the salt and linseed smells. They seemed to be seeping out of my pores.
There must be more than this, I would tell myself. The few minutes before I drifted into slumber were the only time I had to think and make plans. Aunt Augustine said that I cost her ‘an arm and a leg’ in board and that was why she didn’t pay me anything. I didn’t even have money for soap or to send a letter to my family. It occurred to me that I was under no obligation to stay with Aunt Augustine, except that my mother and aunt had begged me to make the best of it. ‘I’ve heard that terrible things can happen to girls who are alone in Marseilles,’ Aunt Yvette had warned me. ‘Wait until Bernard can send you some money.’
I longed for beauty but all around me was drabness. The first things I saw on awakening each morning were the bars in the window, the cracks creeping down the walls, the stains on the floorboards. On the farm I had opened my eyes to a view of fields and been caressed awake by breezes scented with wisteria and lavender. In Aunt Augustine’s house, the reek of seawater rose up through the floor so that I sometimes dreamed I was trapped in the hull of a ship. On the farm I had been careless about housework because natural beauty could not be marred by scattered clothes and a lumpily made bed. But in Marseilles my surroundings were so ugly that I became obsessed with order, although my attempts at beautifying the house were frustrated at each turn. It seemed that no matter how much I plumped and straightened, the furniture still looked shabby, and because Aunt Augustine insisted that the shutters remain closed even in winter, everything was depressingly dark. Ghislaine was respectful of my efforts, but even though Monsieur Bellot looked about him in admiration, it didn’t stop him from treading muddy boots on the carpets or Monsieur Roulin from spitting his olive pips onto the steps I had just swept.
In all the weeks I had been with Aunt Augustine, I had not seen the mysterious guest from the fourth floor. I often smelt her: a hint of patchouli in the bathroom; a drift of woody-sweet incense seeping from under her door. And sometimes I heard her: feet tapping across the floorboards when I cleaned Aunt Augustine’s room; the faint strains of a voice crooning from a gramophone, ‘Je ne peux pas vivre sans amour’. But I never saw her. She seemed to follow a timetable of her own. When we sat down to lunch, I heard the bathroom taps groan. When I was washing the dishes in the kitchen, her stealthy tread slinked down the stairs and evaporated with the bang of the front door. Sometimes, if I was still awake in the early hours of the morning, I would hear a car pull up outside the house and a chorus of excited voices. Her laughter rose above them all. It was a light, airy laugh that tickled your skin like a spring breeze.
Ghislaine filled me in with what information she could: the boarder’s name was Camille Casal, she was twenty years old and worked as a showgirl in a local music hall. But I failed so many times to catch a glimpse of her that I simply gave up.
THREE
Spring arrived early the next year and by late March the air was already tinged with warmth. I examined the herb and vegetable garden, fingering the tangled tomato vines and pulling up the grass runners that had strangled the lettuce heads. There were twigs of fennel, rosemary and thyme, badly dehydrated but perhaps salvagable. If the leaves turned out to be too tough for eating, I could dry them and make sachets. I tugged a rusty spade from the clutches of the clematis, which had climbed the fence from the garden behind us, and braved the cellar to find a pitchfork. After supper, when the air was cooler, I jabbed at the compacted ground and mixed in vegetable scraps to enrich the soil. Ghislaine brought me seeds for coriander, basil and mint. I sowed them in raised mounds, thinking how my father would have laughed to see his ‘flamingo’ toiling in the dirt. Every morning I watered my garden and remembered one of his favourite sayings: ‘Good things come to those who sow and wait patiently.’
By the end of April it seemed that all my days had rolled into a depressing monotony of cleaning, sweeping, digging and sleeping, until one afternoon when I was rehanging the curtains in the front room after airing them. I was despairing at the moth holes and faded spots in the fabric when I heard a yap and then Aunt Augustine’s shrill scream. I fell off the stool and landed with a thud on my bottom.
‘Who does this monster belong to?’
Whatever Aunt Augustine was referring to, it yapped again. I stood up and righted the stool, then hurried to the landing to find out what was going on. Someone was laughing. The sound sent pins and needles over my skin and I knew instantly who it was.
‘You grumpy old bag! It’s my puppy,’ Camille said. ‘Monsieur Gosling gave it to me after I received five curtain calls.’
‘For showing off your fanny and titties,’ scowled Aunt Augustine over the yaps. ‘I told you no pets!’
I blushed to hear an old lady use such words. But my embarrassment didn’t curb my curiosity. Prepared to face my aunt’s wrath for eavesdropping, I advanced up the stairs.
‘He’s so small he’s more like a plant than a dog. You’re being a cow because he frightened you.’
‘I don’t want any mess!’
‘You seemed quite content to live with it until your niece came along.’
This was followed by silence and I stopped on the first-floor landing, straining my ears to listen for what would be said
next. It occurred to me how bold Camille was to speak to Aunt Augustine like that, and how greedy Aunt Augustine was to keep someone she loathed. But I knew from the ledger book my aunt had left open on her desk one day that Camille paid twice as much board as the others, even though she never took her meals at the house.
‘He won’t make any noise when I’m not here,’ Camille said. ‘That girl of yours can take him for a walk in the evenings. He’ll sleep after that.’
‘She’ll do nothing of the sort! She’s busy enough as it is,’ Aunt Augustine snapped.
‘I’m sure she will…if I pay her. And I’m sure that you will take half of it.’
The conversation paused again. I guessed that Aunt Augustine was thinking the issue over. She’d prefer money over the house being clean. But would she give in to someone she despised? I itched at the idea of getting paid for something, even if Aunt Augustine did take half of it. It seemed to me that some money would herald the beginning of better things. I sucked in a breath and crept up the next flight of stairs. But the sound of footsteps heading towards me stopped me in my tracks. It wasn’t Aunt Augustine’s clumsy gait but the strut of a lioness. My first instinct was to turn and run. Instead, I found myself with feet as immovable as lead. The most I could do was to stare down at them. The footsteps came to a halt above me.
‘There you are!’
I looked up. For a moment I thought I was experiencing a vision. Leaning over the balustrade of the landing above was the most beautiful woman I had ever seen. Her blonde hair fell in waves across her crown, her eyes were crystal blue and her nose was as sculptured as those of the statues in Palais Longchamp, which I had stopped to admire one day when I passed it on an errand. She looked like a rose in her pale mint dress with a corsage of scarlet petals. Her long fingers held an animal to her throat. From the size of it, I thought it was a honey-coloured rat, but when it turned to me and blinked bulging eyes and stuck out its pink tongue I realised it was the tiniest dog I had ever seen.
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